`An excellent book that reduces a vast mass of complex data and specialist scholarship to manageable proportions. Professor Dillon has written a lucid and penetrating history of China that achieves both breadth and depth. Students will benefit from the author's clear-headed approach and plain yet eloquent style. This is one of the best single texts on modern Chinese history yet to appear.' Gregor Benton, Professor of Chinese History, Cardiff University --

For nearly two thousand years the Chinese Emporer, self-proclaimed ruler of `All under Heaven', demanded the obedience not only of his subjects within China but also of peoples throughout the known world. Maps played a crucial role in the administration of this vast system of states. Charts of foreign lands and images of the `barbarians' that populated them presented the world as the Chinese wanted it to be seen: with the Middle Kingdom as lord and other states as vassals paying tribute to it. In this richly illustrated history, Richard J. Smithshows how the Chinese depicted foreign lands and peoples in maps and encyclopedias through the centuries. He discusses the debates surrounding the production of maps, as well as their technical aspects and political, military and administrative uses. Reproductions of many of the most beautiful and noteworthy maps of the Chinese world accompany the text. More than simple refelections of the lands and peoples they depict, these maps and illustrations are documents that reveal the evolving values of the grand and powerful society that produced them

This lavishly illustrated volume explores the history of China during a period of dramatic shifts and surprising transformations, from the founding of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1912) through to the present day. The Oxford Illustrated History of Modern China promises to be essential reading for anyone who wants to understand this rising superpower on the verge of what promises to be the 'Chinese century', introducing readers to important but often overlooked events in China's past, such as the bloody Taiping Civil War (1850-1864), which had a death toll far higher than the roughly contemporaneous American Civil War. It also helps readers see more familiar landmarks in Chinese history in new ways, such as the Opium War (1839-1842), the Boxer Uprising of 1900, the rise to power of the Chinese Communist Party in 1949, and the Tiananmen protests and Beijing Massacre of 1989. This is one of the first major efforts -- and in many ways the most ambitious to date -- to come to terms with the broad sweep of modern Chinese history, taking readers from the origins of modern China right up through the dramatic events of the last few years (the Beijing Games, the financial crisis, and China's rise to global economic pre-eminence) which have so fundamentally altered Western views of China and China's place in the world.

From the founding of the Qin dynasty in 221 BCE to the present, the Chinese have been preoccupied with the notion of ordering their world. Efforts to create and maintain order are expressed not only in China’s bureaucratic institutions and methods of social and economic organization but also in Chinese philosophy, religious and secular ritual, and comprehensive systems of classifying all natural and supernatural phenomena. Mapping China and Managing the World focuses on Chinese constructions of order (zhi) and examines the most important ways in which elites in late imperial China sought to order their vast and variegated world. This book begins by exploring the role of ancient texts and maps as the two prominent symbolic devices that the Chinese used to construct cultural meaning, and looks at how changing conceptions of ‘the world’ shaped Chinese cartography, whilst both shifting and enduring cartographic practices affected how the Chinese regarded the wider world. Richard J. Smith goes on to examine the significance of ritual in overcoming disorder, and by focusing on the importance of divination shows how Chinese at all levels of society sought to manage the future, as well as the past and the present. Finally, the book concludes by emphasizing the enduring relevance of the Yijing (Classic of Changes) in Chinese intellectual and cultural life as well as its place in the history of Sino-foreign interactions. Bringing together a selection of essays by Richard J. Smith, one of the foremost scholars of Chinese intellectual and cultural history, this book will be welcomed by Chinese and East Asian historians, as well as those interested more broadly in the culture of China and East Asia.

Klaus Mühlhahn situates modern China in the nation's long, dynamic tradition of overcoming adversity and weakness through creative adaptation--a legacy of crisis and recovery that is apparent today in China's triumphs but also in its most worrisome trends. Mühlhahn's panoramic survey rewrites the history of modern China for a new generation.