With his linen suits, his polished British accent, his easy charm and his penchant for yachts and Jaguar cars, Neil Heywood seemed every inch the Englishman abroad.
A traditionalist and aesthete who, in conversation, would staunchly defend the Queen and Britain's institutions, Heywood, 41, would not have seemed out of place in the pages of Somerset Maugham.
Instead, Heywood was unwittingly cast in a leading role in China's biggest political drama for a generation, when he was apparently poisoned and left to die in a hotel room in Chongqing in November.
In the past week, the lonely death of an Englishman in a country far from his birthplace has sent shockwaves across China's political landscape, triggering the downfall of the Communist Party princeling Bo Xilai and the arrest of Bo's wife, Gu Kailai , for Heywood's murder.
The story of how this unlikely outsider found himself at the heart of one of China's most high-profile and volatile political dynasties is as intriguing and unlikely as his death and hasty cremation in Chongqing five months ago.
Heywood's relationship with Bo Xilai and his family began a decade and a half ago in the mid-1990s, when Bo was the mayor of Dalian in the northeast and a rising party star and Heywood was reportedly scraping a living teaching English in the northeastern city.
