Here are 100 books that Sources of Chinese Tradition fans have personally recommended if you like
Sources of Chinese Tradition.
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I’m a historian, educator, and author with an abiding interest in stories that help bridge cultural divides. I first encountered tales of China as an elementary school student in Singapore. Years later, I studied Chinese and backpacked through China, after which I earned my M.A. in Asian Studies. I would go on to become a high school instructor, and this experience helped me teach AP World History ™ and IB (International Baccalaureate) History. I began writing my Jackie Tempo series as a way of providing accessible content in the classroom. Historical fiction has always helped provide deeper context for me and my students.
I’ve always turned to historical fiction to deepen my understanding of an era and help spark my imagination for class prep.
This book, set in late nineteenth-century China, helped me better contextualize the challenges confronting Chinese women at that time—and how they overcame, or at least endured them. I recently had the privilege of hearing Lisa See speak on her research and writing—she was quite engaging and shared much about her process.
She’s a passionate, dedicated, and disciplined scholar. This shines through in all her work, especially this bittersweet tale of friendship, love, and heartbreak.
Lily is the daughter of a humble farmer, and to her family she is just another expensive mouth to feed. Then the local matchmaker delivers startling news: if Lily's feet are bound properly, they will be flawless. In nineteenth-century China, where a woman's eligibility is judged by the shape and size of her feet, this is extraordinary good luck. Lily now has the power to make a good marriage and change the fortunes of her family. To prepare for her new life, she must undergo the agonies of footbinding, learn nu shu, the famed secret women's writing, and make a…
I’m a historian, educator, and author with an abiding interest in stories that help bridge cultural divides. I first encountered tales of China as an elementary school student in Singapore. Years later, I studied Chinese and backpacked through China, after which I earned my M.A. in Asian Studies. I would go on to become a high school instructor, and this experience helped me teach AP World History ™ and IB (International Baccalaureate) History. I began writing my Jackie Tempo series as a way of providing accessible content in the classroom. Historical fiction has always helped provide deeper context for me and my students.
I was fortunate to have met Da Chen when he was keynote speaker for our high school’s annual teen writer’s conference. I had read and recommended to my AP World History students his riveting Colors of the Mountain.
He was warm with students and staff, regaling my class with stories of life in post-Mao China. Da Chen’s interest in people is evident in his engaging Colors of the Mountain. A tale of triumph against all odds, Da Chen’s memoir chronicles how he and his family survived China’s Cultural Revolution (1966-1976).
Despite the harshness of the times, Da Chen tells his story with uncommon grace and humor. I return to his work time and again, not just for preparation in teaching 20th-century China, but also for personal inspiration.
Colors of the Mountain is a classic story of triumph over adversity, a memoir of a boyhood full of spunk, mischief, and love, and a welcome introduction to an amazing young writer.
Da Chen was born in 1962, in the Year of Great Starvation. Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution engulfed millions of Chinese citizens, and the Red Guard enforced Mao's brutal communist regime. Chen’s family belonged to the despised landlord class, and his father and grandfather were routinely beaten and sent to labor camps, the family of eight left without a breadwinner. Despite this background of poverty and danger, and Da…
I’m a historian, educator, and author with an abiding interest in stories that help bridge cultural divides. I first encountered tales of China as an elementary school student in Singapore. Years later, I studied Chinese and backpacked through China, after which I earned my M.A. in Asian Studies. I would go on to become a high school instructor, and this experience helped me teach AP World History ™ and IB (International Baccalaureate) History. I began writing my Jackie Tempo series as a way of providing accessible content in the classroom. Historical fiction has always helped provide deeper context for me and my students.
The late and highly regarded scholar Jonathon Spence, prolific author of ground-breaking texts, takes on one of nineteenth-century China’s strangest political mysteries.
In God’s Chinese Son, he asks: how did Hong Xiuquan, the so-called Chinese younger brother of Jesus Christ, manage to gain thousands of followers—and nearly topple Qing dynasty(1644-1912)?
As an educator, I needed more than a pat answer regarding how the Taiping Rebellion endured for decades and upended Qing norms. Spence provides this depth.
Prior to reading this, I had no real concept of the disaster that was the Taiping Rebellion. Spence’s compelling and deeply researched tale of a failed scholar’s vision—and the disaster that followed—is a riveting ride through China’s traumatic nineteenth century, and a glimpse of what would come.
Whether read for its powerful account of the largest uprising in human history, or for its foreshadowing of the terrible convulsions suffered by twentieth-century China, or for the narrative power of a great historian at his best, God's Chinese Son must be read. At the center of this history of China's Taiping rebellion (1845-64) stands Hong Xiuquan, a failed student of Confucian doctrine who ascends to heaven in a dream and meets his heavenly family: God, Mary, and his older brother, Jesus. He returns to earth charged to eradicate the "demon-devils," the alien Manchu rulers of China. His success carries…
I’m a historian, educator, and author with an abiding interest in stories that help bridge cultural divides. I first encountered tales of China as an elementary school student in Singapore. Years later, I studied Chinese and backpacked through China, after which I earned my M.A. in Asian Studies. I would go on to become a high school instructor, and this experience helped me teach AP World History ™ and IB (International Baccalaureate) History. I began writing my Jackie Tempo series as a way of providing accessible content in the classroom. Historical fiction has always helped provide deeper context for me and my students.
My future husband and I read excerpts of this book as undergraduates—great preparation for our post-graduation trek into China. We were determined to track down his great-aunt in Chengdu—no mean feat in the late 80s, given the absence of cellphones and internet.
A cover blurb notes this book is in the “tradition of Orwell and Solzhenitsyn” but I’d point instead to Heller (Catch-22) for context on China’s Cultural Revolution. “Chairman Mao is a Rotten Egg,” for example, reveals strategies that made sense when we met my then-fiancé’s great aunt. She shared how her husband was thrown in jail given his training as a doctor, and how she responded to the Red Guards who had come for him: “Good! Take him away,” she feigned bravery, “he’s a pain.” They brought him back two days later.
". . . in the great tradition of Orwell and Solzhenitsyn; its true subject is the survival-and sometimes the defeat-of the human spirit in its lonely quest for integrity." -Time
"The almost childlike directness of Chen's tales. . . is captured in the very lightly revised translations of this new edition. . . Highly recommended." -Choice
A classic of modern world literature, this collection of stories provides a vivid and poignant eyewitness view of everyday life in China during the Cultural Revolution. For this edition, Howard Goldblatt has thoroughly revised the text and updated it…
When I was a teenager, I thought we could create a perfect world—or if not quite perfect, at least much, much better than the one we are currently destroying. Actually, I still think it’s possible, just a lot harder and a lot more dangerous than I originally thought. I’ve been interested in all the efforts to imagine and create utopias, which sometimes produce hells instead of heavens, ever since. I have evolved (I think it’s progress) from being a high school Maoist to something more mature while watching China’s attempts to improve the lives of its citizens with respect and sympathy.
What the Manuels did for the West, Bauer did for China. Sometimes we think of the Chinese as eminently practical people, but they had their dreams of perfect worlds as well. And these dreams were not necessarily kept to the world of sleep but found expression in the lives of individuals and communities. The Manuels confronted the fact that dreams fade with a touch of cynicism, Bauer with a touch of melancholy.
I am a Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Riverside. I was brought up in the family of a Chinese poetry scholar. Arriving in the States for my graduate studies at Harvard in 1982, I have engaged myself in academia here ever since. Acutely aware of, and deeply fascinated by, the cultural similarities and differences of China and the West, I have continued my learning experience, in my thirty years of college teaching, often from direct exchanges with my students. The books on my list of recommendations include both required texts chosen for my courses, and those I want to share with what Virginia Woolf called the Common Reader.
Enriched by more than 200 pictures, mostly in color, as well as maps and line drawings, it is an illuminating and succinct account of Chines civilization from prehistoric times through the rise of the “Three Teachings” (Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism) to the modern communist state. As someone who taught a popular undergraduate college course on Chinese civilization for many years, I can testify that the overall length (384 pages) of the book and its structure of 12 chapters plus an epilogue make it a perfect choice of required texts.
More populous than any other country on earth, China also occupies a unique place in our modern world for the continuity of its history and culture. In this sumptuously illustrated single-volume history, now in its second edition, noted historian Patricia Buckley Ebrey traces the origins of Chinese culture from prehistoric times to the present. She follows its development from the rise of Confucianism, Buddhism, and the great imperial dynasties to the Mongol, Manchu, and Western intrusions and the modern communist state. Her scope is phenomenal - embracing Chinese arts, culture, economics, society and its treatment of women, foreign policy, emigration,…
I chose the dramatic backdrop of the Tiananmen massacre because after my first trip to China in the 1980’s I became a host family for mainland students studying at UCLA where I was Medical Director of Student Health. During those weeks in 1989 many students communicated with friends and family back in China using our fax machine. From their perspective, the conflict was a generational struggle between the very old leaders, many of whom marched with Mao and who were desperate to hang onto power (and therefore for my plot would want to get their hands on an elixir to double their lifespan), and the younger generation anxious for reforms.
This is the second book by Peter Hessler that I have read (River Town was the first). Having visited China several times since the 1980s, when the country was first open to visitors from the West to my more recent trips, I have seen so much change. What I like about this book is how Hessler, a reporter who has lived and taught English in China, tries to describe and explain these changes.
Peter Hessler's previous book River Town was a prize-winning, poignant and deeply compelling portrait of China. Now, in Oracle Bones, Hessler returns to the country, excavating its long history and immersing himself in the lives of young Chinese as they migrate from the traditional Chinese countryside to the booming ever-changing cities and try to cope with their society's modern transformation.
Yuan, born in a small town in Inner Mongolia, is a researcher and PhD candidate at Rutgers University. He is an expert on Chinese and East Asian studies. Yuan's research interests include Chinese foreign and domestic policy, Sino-US relations, and how the country utilizes its influence and fosters relationships. He received his MS in International Relations from Northeastern University and BA from Centre College. Yuan has written extensively on China and Chinese foreign policy.
This fascinating book explains China from a historical perspective. It presents a detailed look at how China has transformed from its past to today, from the Middle Kingdom to Red Communist. 4,000 years of history is almost impossible to fit in a single-volume book, yet this book did its best and successfully summarized the most fundamental parts of the country’s history, introducing one of the oldest civilizations alive on earth to those who wish to learn more about China.
A single volume history of China, offering a look into the past of the global superpower and its significance today.
Michael Wood has travelled the length and breadth of China, the world’s oldest civilization and longest lasting state, to tell a thrilling story of intense drama, fabulous creativity, and deep humanity that stretches back thousands of years.
After a century and a half of foreign invasion, civil war, and revolution, China has once again returned to center stage as a global superpower and the world’s second largest economy. But how did it become so dominant? Wood argues that in order…
Tamim Ansary is the son of an Afghan father and an American mother. As a writer, growing up in Afghanistan and growing old in America has drawn him to issues that arise from cultural confusion in zones where civilizations overlap. His books include histories and memoirs, which he considers two sides of the same coin: a memoir is history seen up close, history is memoir seen from a distance. Much of his work explores how perspective shapes perceptions of reality—a central theme of his best-known book, Destiny Disrupted, A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes.
Culture is how we group ourselves. Culture is how we see. To make ourselves understood by people of other cultures, we have to lend them our eyes. That’s hard, but Yu Hua meets that challenge for me. His book China in Ten Words offers ten essays about China, each with a one-word title: Revolution. Reading. Copycat. Words like that. Each essay surrounds its title-word with content until one understands what the word means, not to oneself, but to Hua. The essays work like a fusion of memoir and history. They draw the reader into one man’s experience; and at the same time they illuminate a broad patch of history—Maoist and post-Maoist China.
People. Leader. Reading. Writing. Revolution. Grassroots. Through these and other common vernacular words and phrases, Yu Hua - widely regarded as one of China's greatest living writers - frames powerful personal stories of the Chinese experience from the Cultural Revolution to the 2010s. With wit, insight and courage, he presents a refreshingly candid vision of the 'Chinese miracle' and its consequences, and reveals a unique perspective on the world's most populous yet misunderstood nation.
I became interested in East Asia through studying Kung Fu when I was in high school. Through this I began reading translation of Chinese and Japanese philosophical texts. I initially majored in philosophy but eventually also became interested in situating ideas in broader historical contexts. For this reason, I shifted to intellectual history. However, my passion for philosophy and arguments for the validity of ideas remains. For this reason, my work combines both intellectual history and the history of philosophy.
Wang Hui changed the way I look at Chinese intellectual history and the above book is a translation of the introduction to his magnum opus,The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought. The book argues for an indigenous proto or early modernity emerging during the Song Dynasty or the tenth century in China. He shows how Chinese thinkers expressed ideas of equality and had fairly sophisticated bureaucracies by the tenth century. Moreover, through his analysis, he challenges the distinction between the nation-state and empire. Normally, we think of modernity as connected to premodernity and the nation connected to the modern. However, looking at the Chinese context, Wang shows that although the Song had certain characteristics of a nation-state, the Yuan was an empire, followed by the Ming, which again resembled a nation, but this was followed by the Qing, which was another multi-ethnic empire. Moreover, each of these dynasties continued…
This translation of the introduction to Wang Hui's Rise of Modern Chinese Thought (2004) makes part of his four-volume masterwork available to English readers for the first time. A leading public intellectual in China, Wang charts the historical currents that have shaped Chinese modernity from the Song Dynasty to the present day, and along the way challenges the West to rethink some of its most basic assumptions about what it means to be modern.
China from Empire to Nation-State exposes oversimplifications and distortions implicit in Western critiques of Chinese history, which long held that China was culturally resistant to modernization,…
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