Lady Business

I’m occasionally asked to recommend some books about Chinese history to people with very little knowledge of Chinese history. So I thought it would be nice to write up a rec list with a bunch of different places to start.

I’m not an expert on Chinese history and I have no formal training, but I do read a lot of academic history about China for fun. This started about four years ago, after I got very into historical Chinese dramas. Some of what I read is for fic research but a lot of it is just for fun (thought the fun stuff sometimes inspires fic).

I read history in a similar way to how I read SFF, slowly piecing things together as I learn more and more. I like the feeling of building up a picture and deepening my understanding as I go along. This does mean that I just read books about specialized topics that interest me without necessarily reading more broad overviews. (If you do want an overview of Chinese history, I’ve heard that The Open Empire: A History of China Through 1600 by Valerie Hansen is good, though I haven’t read it myself.) I’m sadly monolingual and can only read sources in English.

For this list I wanted to pick books and papers that will make sense to someone with very little background in Chinese history. I also tried to pick things with more accessible, less jargony prose. And of course this list is influenced by my own interests, which are material culture (basically any type of stuff that is useful or meaningful to people), gender and sexuality, Daoism and the Tang Dynasty. I tried to offer a nice variety of topics and time periods to help give you lots of possible starting places and create a sense of the vast amount of history out there.

One of my struggles with finding sources for Chinese history is that there's a lot of orientalism and frequently Chinese nationalism in texts in English. Sometimes both at once! Both Chinese nationalism and orientalism over-emphasize continuity with the past. So I’ve become very wary of anything that talks about “5000 years of Chinese history” —actually it's a lot more complicated than that, and I think it obfuscates the imperialism of various Chinese dynasties by making “reunification” aka conquest seem inevitable and desirable. It certainly wasn’t inevitable and whether it was desirable really depends on your point of view.

I've included both book-length works and academic papers in this rec list. For papers, where possible I’ve linked to the academic database JSTOR. Anyone can make a free account on the site and access (but not download) up to 100 papers a month. For books I’ve tried to keep to the cheaper end of academic publications, but I always recommend checking your library or looking for used copies.

For want of any obvious order these are listed alphabetically by author.

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