THE DOCTORS
Joyful Patrick Turner: Raised in the Chinese trading colony of Canton, until age sixteen when he was sent home to New York to become a physician.  When the story opens he is thirty and has been a ship’s doctor for six years.
Andrew Turner: A hero of the Revolution, a doctor and a surgeon.  Andrew is Joyful’s cousin, and was his patron when he first came to New York from China.

THE CANTON TRADERS
Gornt Blakeman: A man in his prime at forty-some, and one who lusts to be a king.
Lansing “Bastard” Devrey:  Once enormously wealthy he has squandered much of his fortune, and put the rest in thrall to the speculators of Wall Street.  Nonetheless, he believes himself  a prince among men.
John Jacob Astor: The young nation’s first tycoon and its richest man, he has recently built himself a palace in the rural reaches of Broadway between Vesey and Barclay Streets.  Could he not then become an emperor? 

THE WOMEN
Manon Vionne: Daughter of one of the many Protestant Huguenot families who came to America to escape persecution in Catholic France, Manon is lovely, but she is also smarter than most men and unable to hide it.  Some think that’s why she is unmarried and unpromised at twenty-two.
Eugenie LaMont Fischer: A twenty-four-year-old widow struggling to maintain a fine household on Chatham Street, while she searches for a husband who can take over her debts and support her in style.
Delight Higgins:  Still a beauty, though she admits to twenty-nine and may be older.  Delight runs a gambling club and discreet parlor-house, i.e. a bordello, known as the Dancing Knave.
Holy Hannah: An ageless creature living in a shack in the no-man's-land between the city and the heavily wooded Manhattan wilderness to the north. 

THE JEWEL MERCHANTS:
Maurice Vionne: Father of Manon, and the most respected of the cluster of mostly Huguenot gold and silver smiths and jewel traders to be found in the vicinity of Maiden Lane.
Mordecai Frank: Also a goldsmith, and a member of the tiny but well established Jewish community who have been in the city since it was Peter Stuyvesant's Nieuw Amsterdam.  He is as well an elder of the Shearith Israel synagogue on Mill Street.

THE OPIUM DEALERS
Jonathan Devrey: Owner of the elegant apothecary shop in Hanover Square, where perfumes and handmade soaps are sold along with herbal simples and curatives such as a secret elixir that is almost pure laudanum, an opium derivative made from the seeds of ripe poppies.
Thumbless Wu: A Cantonese stowaway with an incredible agenda of his own.
Ah Wong: Jacob Astor's butler, and head of the family of Chinese Astor has brought over to be servants in his fabulous Broadway mansion. 

THE PEOPLE OF NEW YORK CITY—INCLUDING MEMBERS OF THE PROFESSIONS, POLITICIANS, MECHANICS, WAGE-EARNERS, AND SEAFARERS
Will Farrell: A twelve year old boy employed as a lookout for Devrey Shipping
Peggety Jack: A one-legged former tar in charge of Devrey Shipping’s dock workers.
Captain Finbar O’Toole:   An Irishman who came to America at the age of ten, and later became a merchant sea captain.
Barnaby Carter: The owner of a workshop for producing stage-coach bodies.
Lucretia Hingham Carter: Wife of Barnaby and one of the town's numerous abortionists.
Henry Astor: A butcher and cattle trader and Jacob’s elder brother.  He owns the Bull’s Head Tavern, and the adjoining abattoir and stockyards located on the Bowery just above Chatham Square.
Francis Xavier Gallagher: Another butcher, but one who has as well a different trade: organizing (and exploiting) newly arrived Irishmen who think because the man known as F. X. also happens to be Irish, he can be trusted.
Tintin: A shadowy figure recently arrived in the city and rumored to be one of Jean Laffite’s pirate captains.
Jesse Edwards: An eleven-year-old powder monkey on the brig Lawrence during the 1813 Battle of Lake Erie. 
Tammy Tompkins: A tar who served on the Lawrence in 1813. 
Samson Simson: The first Jewish member of the bar, he studied law at Columbia under Aaron Burr.  Like Frank, an elder of the Shearith Israel synagogue.
Reverend Zachary Fish, Absalom, Joshua, et al: Members of the African American Methodist Episcopal Zion Church—called by all Mother Zion—located in the notorious Five Points section of the city.
Patrick Aloysius Burney: An Irish laborer who also lives in Five Points.
Slyly Silas Danforth: A scrivener, and perhaps the most clever forger in New York City.
Adele Tremont: A Huguenot widow who works as a mantua-maker and dresses the most fashionable women of the city.
Vinegar Clifford: A chucker-out—the bouncer of the period—who retired as the city's public whipper shortly before the story opens, when New York abolished flogging as an official criminal punishment.

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