Jonathan D. Spence

Covering more than four centuries of Chinese history, this work chronicles the various dynasties, the ideas of reformist Confucian scholars, and China's poets, novelists, artists, students, and leaders

The Search for Modern China

Death of Woman Wang, The

Recounts the activities in China of the late-sixteenth-century Jesuit missionary, Matteo Ricci, and examines the cultural and historical contexts of those activities

The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci

Mao Zedong (A Penguin Life)

Recounts the extraordinary experiences in early eighteenth-century France of a Chinese peasant taken there by Jesuit priests, imprisoned in an asylum, and finally returned to China

The Question of Hu

SPENCE

The vastness of China and the antquity of its culture have both fascinated and troubled the West since their earliest contacts. This text explores Western attitudes as they developed over trade, conflict and sometimes edgy co-existence. The account ranges from the travels of Marco Polo to China's modern place in the literature, diplomacy and daydreams of the West.

China in Western Minds

The Chan's Great Continent

Margaret Atwood

Ian Morris

Christine Marion Korsgaard

Richard Seaford

The author of the best-selling Why the West Rules—for Now theorizes on the effect that the evolution of human values has had on democracy and gender equality in the 10,000 years prior to the nineteenth century.

How Human Values Evolve

Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels

Pei-kai Cheng

Michael Elliot Lestz

This collection of primary source documents--many translated into English for the first time and available only in this book--gather proclamations, treaties, laws, and other public acts with pieces reflecting everyday life, family, social networks, and culture.

A Documentary Collection

"A magnificent tapestry . . . a story that reaches beyond China into our world and time: a story of faith, hope, passion, and a fatal grandiosity."--Washington Post Book World 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 him and his followers to the heavenly capital at Nanjing, where they rule a large part of south China for more than a decade. Their decline and fall, wrought by internal division and the unrelenting military pressures of the Manchus and the Western powers, carry them to a hell on earth. Twenty million Chinese are left dead.

God's Chinese Son: The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiuquan

Chronicles the history of the Chinese Revolution, focusing on the people and events of modern Chinese history, the writings of modern Chinese authors, the issues facing the People's Republic, and more

The Chinese and Their Revolution, 1895-1980

The Gate of Heavenly Peace

For more than three hundred years Western teachers, missionaries, doctors, and soldiers tried, unsuccessfully, to change China, which stubbornly retained its culture and traditions

Western Advisers in China, 1620-1960

To Change China

婦人王氏之死

The writer and historian Zhang Dai is recognized as one of the intellectual heavyweights of China's Ming dynasty. When he was born into a wealthy family in 1597, the Ming dynasty had been in place for 229 years. Zhang Dai lived the first part of his life in a climate of political stability and cultural creativity: for China's late Ming period was a golden age - a time of wide-scale philanthropy, of significant achievements in the visual arts, literature and music, and of energetic inquiry in the fields of medicine and science.When the Ming were overthrown by the Manchu invasion of 1644, however, Zhang Dai's family lost its fortune and way of life. Zhang Dai fled to the countryside, where, as a writer of skill and acuity and passion, he spent his final 40 years recounting his previous way of life as a way of leaving a legacy to his children and rebuilding a spirit shattered by the violent upheaval he had witnessed.The distinguished China scholar Jonathan Spence has pored over Zhang Dai's extraordinary documents, and in Return to Dragon Mountain he brings 17th-century China vividly to life. Absorbing, subtle, and beautifully observed, Return to Dragon Mountain illuminates a complex and sophisticated society at a moment of profound cultural transformation. And in doing so, it reveals the ways in which China's history continues to affect its place in the world today.

Memories of a Late Ming Man

Return to Dragon Mountain

John Elliot Wills

The collapse of the Ming dynasty and the takeover of China by Manchu rulers in the 1640s were of crucial importance in the late history of China. But because traditional Chinese sources arbitrarily divide the century at the change of dynasty in 1644, it has been difficult to form a clear picture of the transition. The nine essays in this book will contribute significantly toward understanding the complexity of change and continuity over the span of time leading up to and resulting from the tumult of the mid-1600s. "The fullest introduction in English to the Ming-Ch'ing transition."--Tom Fisher, Pacific Affairs "No other recent work compares with its scope, and no older work can stand up to the introduction of its new materials and perspectives."--Library Journal " This book] makes a valuable contribution to Ming-Ch'ing studies and should be required reading for anyone interested in the two dynasties."--James B. Parsons, American Historical Review

Conquest, Region, and Continuity in Seventeenth-century China

From Ming to Ch'ing

Kangxi (Emperador de la Xina)

Self-portrait of K'ang-hsi

Emperor of China

In The Death of Woman Wang the award-winning historian Jonathan Spence paints a vivid picture of an obscure time and place: provincial China in the late 17th century. Drawing on a range of sources, including local Chinese histories, the memoirs of scholars and other contemporary writings, Spence reconstructs an extraordinary tale of rural tragedy in a remote corner of the northeastern Chinese province of Shantung. Life in the county of T'an-ch'eng emerges 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 his hands. The Death of Woman Wang not only magnificently evokes the China of the late Ming period, but also deepens our understanding of the China we know today.

The Death of Woman Wang

This intimate portrait of Mao Zedong, one of the most formidable and elusive rulers in modern history, introduces the essential background about the Chinese leader, including his relations with family, friends, and confidential assistants, as well as hisyouthful writings, poems, letters, and drafts of speeches. Drawing from his expertise in Chinese politics & culture, the author penetrates Mao's rhetoric & infamous self-will to distill an intimate portrait of a man as withdrawn & mysterious as the emperors he disdained. The author superbly illuminates Mao, a leader who, at a watershed moment in history, turned the classic Chinese concept of reform through reversal into an endless adventure in upheaval. The complex persona of Chairman Mao-remembered withhate, awe, and even reverence-calls for what the Boston Globe has termed "Jonathan Spence's engaging blend of history, literature, and biography." Spence superbly illuminates Mao, a leader who, at a watershed moment in history, turned the classic Chineseconcept of reform through reversal into an endless adventure in upheaval. Mao examines a chilling enigma for historians, students of human nature, and Americans fascinated more than ever by China.

Jonathan D. Spence

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