1923. A city snakes under the Mexicali soil. There, Pi Ying, an old Chinese opium and alcohol trafficker, has kept a closely-guarded secret ever since his flight from Shanghai many years ago, when he was just a boy. The secret brings a number of peculiar characters to the border town: an ambitious hunter of exotic animals obsessively on the trail of a powerful beast, a widowed vet and his son who sell miracle tonics as they flee from the Revolution and the memories it brings with it, and a spy for Kaiser Wilhelm II who fails in his attempt to contact Pancho Villa to propose a military alliance with Germany.

Hunters of Sudanese elephants and exotic beasts, fossil collectors from the Old West and characters such as the circus businessman P.T. Barnum, the wild animal trafficker Carl Hagenback and President Abelardo L. Rodriguez all appear in a story that begins on the banks of Lake Bangweulu in the Congo and reaches a catastrophic climax in  northern Mexico.