There are many Lhasas. One is a grid of uniform boulevards lined with plush hotels, all-night bars, and blue-glass-fronted offices. Another is a warren of alleyways that surround a seventh-century temple built to pin down a supine demoness. A web of Stalinist, rectangular blocks houses the new nomenklatura. Crumbling mansions, once home to noble ministers, famous lovers, nationalist spies, and covert revolutionaries, now serve as shopping malls and faux-antique hotels. Ea...

The most authoritative life of the Chinese leader every written, Mao: The Unknown Story is based on a decade of research, and on interviews with many of Mao’s close circle in China who have never talked before — and with virtually everyone outside China who had significant dealings with him. It is full of startling revelations, exploding the myth of the Long March, and showing a completely unknown Mao: he was not driven by idealism or ideology; his intimate and intricate relations...

A history of the Chinese experience in WWII, named a Book of the Year by both the Economist and the Financial Times: "Superb" ( The New York Times Book Review).In 1937, two years before Hitler invaded Poland, Chinese troops clashed with Japanese occupiers in the first battle of World War II. Joining with the United States, the Soviet Union, and Great Britain, China became the fourth great ally in a devastating struggle for its very surviv...

A gripping account of China’s nineteenth-century Taiping Rebellion, one of the largest civil wars in history. Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom brims with unforgettable characters and vivid re-creations of massive and often gruesome battles—a sweeping yet intimate portrait of the conflict that shaped the fate of modern China.The story begins in the early 1850s, the waning years of the Qing dynasty, when word spread of a major revolution brewing in the provinces, led by a fail...

"A historical classic" that brings Mao Tse-tung, the Long March, and the Chinese revolution to vivid life ( Foreign Affairs).Journalist Edgar Snow was the first Westerner to meet Mao Tse-tung and the Chinese Communist leaders in 1936—and out of his up-close experience came this historical account, one of the most important books about the remarkable events that would shape not only the future of Asia, but also the future of the world.This edition o...

How the global tea industry influenced the international economy and the rise of mass consumerismTea has been one of the most popular commodities in the world. Over centuries, profits from its growth and sales funded wars and fueled colonization, and its cultivation brought about massive changes—in land use, labor systems, market practices, and social hierarchies—the effects of which are with us even today. A Thirst for Empire takes a vast and in depth his...

Red at Heart conjures a tale of cross-cultural romance from a topic that is normally seen in geopolitical or ideological terms--and thereby offers a new interpretation of twentieth century communism's most crucial alliance. This is the multigenerational history of people who experienced Sino-Soviet affairs most intimately: prominent Chinese revolutionaries who traveled to Russia in their youths to study, often falling in love and having children there. Their deeply personal memoir...

Follow this distinguished author down the rabbit hole as she discovers the barbaric realities of the Japanese occupation of China in the late 1930s.  A war that would eventually merge with World War Two is painted with the lyrical prose that only Robin Hyde could deliver. Hyde is a lone female journalist desperately evading the Japanese censors to send her accounts to Woman To-Day. She was the very first female journalist to visit these parts of China during this time. She encounters ...

The second volume in this fun, comic-style series that explores China's transition from the Three Kingdoms to the Tang Dynasty.Who founded China? Are Chinese people religious? What is Chinese culture and how has it changed over time? The Understanding China Through Comics series answers these questions and more.Division to Unification in Imperial China is series volume two. It explores one of China's more chaotic periods when Chinese culture flouri...

The Chinese Revolution changed the face of the twentieth century, and the politics that issued from it—often referred to as “Maoism”—resonated with colonized and oppressed people from the 1970s down to the anticapitalist movements of today. But how did these politics first emerge? And what do they offer activists today, who seek to transform capitalist society at its very foundations?Maoism and the Chinese Revolution offers the novice reader a sweeping overview of five dec...

Some of the most creative of human expression has originated in the collision of cultures. So it is with this extraordinary archive. The Corporal and the Celestials publishes for the first time a truly absorbing collection of photographs of China in the early years of the twentieth century, taken by a young corporal of the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers, James Hutchinson, when stationed there from 1909. His battalion was guarding the British Legation in Peking and Concession in Tientsin in t...

"The Scourge of God" tells the tale of the terrible Tartar invasion of Hungary during the reign of Bela IV. (1235-1270), when the Mongol hordes devastated Magyarland from end to end. Baron Miklos Josika (1796–1865), the Walter Scott of Hungary, was born at Torda, in Transylvania, on April 28th, 1796. While a child, he lost both his parents, and was brought up at the house and under the care of his grandmother, Anna Bornemissza, a descendant of Jokai's heroine of the sam...