Andrew Thomson, the co-creator of the cesspool rose garden which opens this book, was forced to leave China as a prisoner of war in 1942 by the Japanese. Yet his roses survived the violence and turmoil of those years. New China under Mao’s rule tore down the city wall and the church buildings, and the stinking cesspool was replaced by a small, clear pool of water, surrounded by a park where the thriving Thomson roses were still perfuming the air.1 Amid the ruins of the past, can the scents of the roses bear, in Proust’s words, ‘in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection’?2 If they can, then the most enduring of memories must be of their faithful companion: the reeking breath of the cesspool. Inspired by the peculiar mix of odours, this book has tracked a chaotic assemblage of olfactory vestiges of recent Chinese history. Let us conclude the book by returning to the questions posed at the outset: could the sweet scent of the Irish roses offset the effluvia from the indigenous cesspool? Or did the latter overpower the effect of the former? Answers vary, reflecting the strands of thinking this book has explored.