In 1897, Lucy Christina Murray left Canada, the land to which her Scottish ancestors had emigrated nearly a century earlier, to sail overseas with her new husband. William Pollock Ker was a British consular official in China and, in 1900, they were posted to Peking and found themselves besieged in the Legation Quarters during the Boxer Rebellion. As the wife of a consular official who spent over thirty years in Asia, Lucy’s life was always challenging. On the domestic front, she had to be ready to pack up a household at very short notice and to adjust to arbitrary and frequent new postings. On the public front, she crossed paths with numerous historically interesting figures, both Chinese and European and witnessed, firsthand, the end of the Qing dynasty and the emergence of the Republic of China.