I’m a historian of modern China in the department of Chinese at the University of Oxford. I started off working on the twentieth century but have been drawn back into the Qing dynasty. It’s such an interesting and important period and one that British students often don’t know much about!
I wrote
The Perils of Interpreting: The Extraordinary Lives of Two Translators between Qing China and the British Empire
I loved this book because the story of the Zhang family brings the history of the Qing dynasty alive as real women experienced it. Qing dynasty people can seem very different from us, and it’s often hard to get a sense of their characters, but Mann does this by taking us right into their homes and making this a story of the three women who were also writers, poets, and teachers.
We hear about their studies, their loves, and their families’ grief when they died, and just when we’ve really got to know them, we find that they were also living through and writing about some of the great events of the nineteenth century like the Opium Wars and the Taiping Rebellion. It’s also beautifully researched by a great scholar.
The history of China in the nineteenth century usually features men as the dominant figures in a chronicle of warfare, rebellion, and dynastic decline. This book challenges that model and provides a different account of the era, history as seen through the eyes of women. Basing her remarkable study on the poetry and memoirs of three generations of literary women of the Zhang family - Tang Yaoqing, her eldest daughter, and her eldest granddaughter - Susan Mann illuminates a China that has been largely invisible. Drawing on a stunning array of primary materials - published poetry, gazetteer articles, memorabilia -…
I think this is the best up-to-date history of the Qing dynasty. I use it for teaching because it’s completely reliable, covers everything you might need to know, and lays it all out clearly.
It also has a really good balance between the history of major events like the Opium Wars and the Taiping Rebellion and the social history and context. And I like the fact that it explains the big debates that scholars are having in clear and simple terms.
In a brisk revisionist history, William Rowe challenges the standard narrative of Qing China as a decadent, inward-looking state that failed to keep pace with the modern West. The Great Qing was the second major Chinese empire ruled by foreigners. Three strong Manchu emperors worked diligently to secure an alliance with the conquered Ming gentry, though many of their social edicts - especially the requirement that ethnic Han men wear queues - were fiercely resisted. As advocates of a 'universal' empire, Qing rulers also achieved an enormous expansion of the Chinese realm over the course of three centuries, including the…
I loved this little book because, in just a short space, it takes you into what it was like to live through the Taiping Rebellion, one of the most important events in China’s nineteenth century, and it does it through the eyes of a child. It’s an amazing viewpoint, and the stories are dramatic.
The introduction, which explains all the background, and translation by Xiaofei Tian, who is a well-known poet in Chinese as well as a professor at Harvard, is also beautifully written.
"From the cry of a tiny insect, one can hear the sound of a vast world..." So begins Zhang Daye's preface to The World of a Tiny Insect, his haunting memoir of war and its aftermath. In 1861, when China's devastating Taiping rebellion began, Zhang was seven years old. The Taiping rebel army occupied Shaoxing, his hometown, and for the next two years, he hid from Taiping soldiers, local bandits, and imperial troops and witnessed gruesome scenes of violence and death. He lost friends and family and nearly died himself from starvation, illness, and encounters with soldiers on a rampage.…
I loved this book because I learned so much new about the Qianlong emperor and his relations with Tibet, how the eighteenth-century Qing state went about actually influencing the appointment of the incarnate lamas (like the Dalai Lama) who ruled Tibet.
Of course, all this has huge implications for Tibet now, but unlike the other books on this list, which I’ve recommended because I found them useful or a pleasure to read, this one is here because it is an exciting new scholarship.
In 1995, the People's Republic of China resurrected a Qing-era law mandating that the reincarnations of prominent Tibetan Buddhist monks be identified by drawing lots from a golden urn. The Chinese Communist Party hoped to limit the ability of the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan government-in-exile to independently identify reincarnations. In so doing, they elevated a long-forgotten ceremony into a controversial symbol of Chinese sovereignty in Tibet.
In Forging the Golden Urn, Max Oidtmann ventures into the polyglot world of the Qing empire in search of the origins of the golden urn tradition. He seeks to understand the relationship between…
"Spence shows himself at once historian, detective, and artist. . . . He makes history howl." (The New Republic)
Award-winning author Jonathan D. Spence paints a vivid picture of an obscure place and time: provincial China in the seventeenth century. Life in the northeastern county of T'an-ch'eng emerges here as an endless cycle of floods, plagues, crop failures, banditry, and heavy taxation. Against this turbulent background a tenacious tax collector, an irascible farmer, and an unhappy wife act out a poignant drama at whose climax the wife, having run away from her husband, returns to him, only to die at…
This book tells the story of the interpreters for the first British embassy to China: Li Zibiao, who came from China’s northwest but had studied in Italy, and George Thomas Staunton, who was just 11 years old and went on to a career as in interpreter in the nineteenth century Canton trade in tea and opium. This became increasingly risky as British naval power reached the South China coast in the Napoleonic wars.
The story also tells us about China’s early relations with Britain and how important and dangerous it was to be an interpreter with the rise of British imperialism and the deterioration of relations between the two countries.
I’ve always been fascinated by group dynamics, large and small. Why things functioned well, why they didn’t. It’s possible my ability to empathize and use humor as a consensus-builder is the reason I was elected president of a homeowners association, a music production association, and even an agricultural group. Books were not particularly involved in this fascination! But in recent years, experiencing the breakdown of civility and trust in our political and cultural discourse, I’ve taken a more analytical view of the dynamics. These books, in their very different ways, have taught me lessons about life, understanding those with different beliefs, and finding ways to connect and move forward.
We’ve all experienced the overwhelming level of political and social divisiveness in our country. This invisible “virus” of negativity is, in part, the result of the name-calling and heated rhetoric that has become commonplace among commentators and elected leaders alike.
My book provides a clear perspective on the historical and modern-day causes of our nation's divisive state. It then proposes easy-to-understand solutions—an action plan for our elected leaders and citizens as well. Rather than a scholarly treatment of a complex topic, the book challenges us to take the obvious steps required of those living in a free democracy. And it…
Uniting the States of America: A Self-Care Plan for a Wounded Nation
Lyle Greenfield's "Uniting the States of America―A Self-Care Plan for a Wounded Nation" is a work of nonfiction and opinion. Incorporating the lessons of history and the ideas and wisdom of many, it is intended as both an educational resource and a call-to-action for citizens concerned about the politically and culturally divided state of our Union. A situation that has raised alarm for the very future of our democracy.
First, the book clearly identifies the causes of what has become a national crisis of belief in and love for our country. How the divisiveness and hostility rampant in our political…
