Fans pick 100 books like The Golden Ghetto

I love a good adventure tale, and this one is set on the high seas and spans countries and cultures. I’ll never forget the character of Kalua, an untouchable man of enormous size and strength who saves a woman from horrible abuse at the hands of her own family. It’s just one example of a rich cast of characters who held my rapt attention.

The Opium Wars never reduced Chinese people to pathetic victimization. 

Sinn spotlights the agency of brokerage and the circulatory migration of Chinese laborers and merchants, from different regions within China, as they underwent passage to-and-fro the Pacific Ocean with the United States. 

This is also the story of Hong Kong’s rise as an influential hub of exchange with merchants brokering flows of capital and economic power beyond state control. 

In tracing circuits of travel and brokerage, Sinn animates various cultural senses of being Chinese, Hong Kong, and American, embracing legacies of familial adaptability and endurance. 

She conveys the diversity within Chinese-American communities while framing the Chinese diaspora in transnationally nuanced senses of home and family that defy simple categorization based on the strict legality of citizenship.

Lamas’s work offers a deep dive into the life of the young American woman Harriett Low who lived in Macau from 1829 to 1833. 

Harriett accompanied her aunt and her uncle, who supervised trade of Russell & Company up the Pearl River in Canton. Although the Qing-era regulations forbade foreign (Western) women from traveling beyond Macau, Harriett broke this law. 

In Macao, she wrote about her daily life, of falling in love, and having the British painter George Chinnery render her portrait. Most importantly for readers today, she wrote about her life (and reading) in diary letters that she sent to her sister back in the US. 

Lamas engaging account draws on Arthur W. Hummel and Nan P. Hodges’s masterful publication of Low’s diaries. As Lamas notes, Harriett’s life after her residence in Macao was underwhelming. However, the Low family fortune echoed across the century. 

Harriett’s nephew Seth Low served… show more.

What Pan Ling does for the Chinese side of the story, Grescoe does for the Western expats living in 1930s Shanghai. I stayed in the Cathay in the 1980s long after it had been renamed Peace Hotel. 

But the old glamour shined through and I wondered what incredible things the building had seen. Grescoe’s book took me back to its glory days and introduced me to the people—and some of their more notorious doings—who frequented its salons, bars, and restaurants.   

A brilliant account of the two Opium Wars showing how they have been remembered in particular ways in order to make modern political points. Lovell shows us how political operators on both sides used the question of the opium trade to further their own interests. It exposes the nasty business of imperialism but also takes down a lot of myths about the wars. The book allows us to see the conflicts both in terms of what happened at the time, and how views over those events changed over the following century and a half. She explores the international history of opium and how it became linked with racist representations of Chinese overseas and how this continues to affect relations between peoples and governments today.

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.

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.

This novelized biography of a poet some consider China’s greatest pleases me over and over again. Rendering Li Po (sometimes Li Bai) as a libertine living on a barge, drinking too much and partaking with gusto in the pleasures of the flesh at the red-candle district near which he moors, really helps bring alive the great man’s life and work. There’s also a bit about his relationship with Du Fu, more of a straight arrow. Those two, along with Wang Wei really offer a picture of the Daoist life I so adore and the feeling of watching the world spin out of control in war but also the peace and solitude of a mountain retreat.

The ascent to power of Xi Jinxing in China in 2013 heralded a new era in China’s overseas engagements and in its domestic politics and economic policy; what Elizabeth Economy has called the “third revolution.” This fascinating book by Large brings the story of China’s engagements in Africa up to date. It is packed with fascinating details and analysis and shows how China’s interests on the continent are shifting from being primarily economic to being more geopolitical. It is a detailed and nuanced analysis of the changed nature of relations. 

There is an argument to be made that Jin Yong (aka Louis Cha) is modern China’s version of William Shakespeare. From Cha’s unimaginably rich and bottomless imagination come unforgettable stories and characters that have had a huge impact on not only contemporary China but the rest of the world. Writing in the category of wuxia (martial arts fiction) he sold 100 million copies of his books, making him China’s most famous author. Countless films and TV shows have been based on his stories, that typically portray the under classes struggling against overlords. One of my favorite memories of travels in China was sitting at the tea house inside Hong Kong’s Peninsula hotel and spending the day reading this book and munching on dim sum. If I’d stepped out and been hit by a bus, I would have died a happy monk.