Chinese History Starter Pack
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ladybusinessI’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.
Tea in China: A Religious and Cultural History by James A. Benn—This is conveniently first alphabetically and it is also the first academic monograph about Chinese history that I read, so I can say with some confidence that it's a good starting place! There’s lots of books about the history of tea, but most of them devote significant space to tea outside of China while this book focuses on Chinese tea drinking. Benn is a religious studies scholar so one of the things that the book explores is the impact of Buddhism on tea culture. I also liked learning about the way tea was prepared in different time periods!
“On the Very Idea of Religions (In the Modern West and in Early Medieval China)” by Robert Ford Campany —This paper is super helpful for understanding how people in middle period China understood what we would call their religion. (Because “religion” as a thing is made up!) It’s a bit heavy on the jargon, but it’s super interesting, and very useful for understanding historical Daoist practices.
Empire of Style: Silk and Fashion in Tang China by Buyun Chen—I love this book so much! I’m not someone who enjoys history with a lot of names and dates, they don’t tend to stay in my head without a lot of context to hold them in place. And this book is basically all context. This gives such a fuller picture of life in Tang times, with its focus on textiles and economics. When this book started to explain the An Lushan rebellion it clicked right away, even though I’d tried to understand before and gotten confused. I also appreciate that this book talks about the Tang Empire as an empire out there doing imperialism, in a way that's really clear-eyed and straightforward.
Fruitful Sites: Garden Culture in Ming Dynasty China by Craig Clunas—This book is about how gardening changed over the course of the Ming Dynasty. I love how the introduction talks about how the idea of an unchanging Chinese garden is actually orientalist.. I also love all the details about gardens, especially about what plants people grew and what they used those plants for.
“How the Residents of Turfan used Textiles as Money, 273-796 CE” by Valerie Hansen and Xinjiang Rong—This is a paper that’s more a collection of interesting incidents than it is an argument, and I often find those frustrating. But in this case the details are so interesting! Also textiles are one of my favorite types of material culture, and I enjoyed learning about how they were used in other contexts than clothing.
The Yellow River: A Natural and Unnatural History by Ruth Mostern—I think this could be a good introductory text because it covers a big sweeping time period, but still has a central focus. Having the Yellow River as focus lets this book discuss agriculture, administration and so much more. This is also one of the more quantitative things on this list with lots of charts and maps, so if you struggle with history because it doesn’t feel concrete enough, this could be a good place to start.
Sui-Tang China and Its Turko-Mongol Neighbors: Culture, Power, and Connections, 580-800 by Jonathan Karam Skaff—I’m always interested in books that deconstruct the idea of China as isolated and self-contained, and this is an important example of that. Skaff discusses the cultural, political, and material contentions of Sui-Tang China and its Turko-Mongol neighbors in extensive detail, while providing enough background information to be accessible. I especially enjoyed the sections of fictive kinship and horse trading.
Forgotten Disease: Illnesses Transformed in Chinese Medicine by Hilary A. Smith—This book is such a tour de force of the history of Chinese medical thought (not calling it traditional chinese medicine (TCM) because as this book points out, that means something very specific). The book focuses on a disease, or set of diseases, known as foot qi, and how the concept of that disease changed over time. It’s really a history of how people understood their bodies and diseases. I found the writing in this book especially accessible, and just raced through the whole thing.
The King’s Road: Diplomacy and the Remaking of the Silk Road by Xin Wen—You might have seen me raving about this book somewhere else because it's so good and so unique! This book is about the nitty-gritty of diplomatic travel in Central Asia between 850-1000 CE, and it centers the city of Dunhuang, which was during this period sometimes part of various imperial states in the region but mostly an independent city state. This is very cool because historians of China tend to focus on areas within imperial boundaries, and this focus also helps us see that what was and wasn’t considered China has always been shifting.
A significant source of information for this book is the documents found in the library cave at Dunhuang, an important source for this time period in general. Wen provides a whole chapter on these documents, as well as a chapter laying out the regional geopolitics. All that background information makes this a good starting place.
Wen is a meticulous scholar, who reads multiple historical languages, and his fine-grained analysis here is excellent. I especially liked the parts about who traveled and why, and about what diplomatic travelers ate.
“‘What Do Barbarians Know of Gratitude?’ - The Stereotype of Barbarian Perfidy and Its Uses in Tang Foreign Policy Rhetoric” by Shao-yun Yang—The Tang Dynasty is known for being peaceful, cosmopolitan and multicultural, but the Tang court’s use of stereotypes about barbarians complicates that image. I have a personal dislike of the second Tang emperor, Tang Taizong (personal name Li Shimin), who is often held up as a model emperor. So I especially appreciate the way this paper brings into focus Taizong’s hypocrisy and warmongering.
I hope you found something here that sparked your interest! I have loved learning more about Chinese history and I hope you will too!
If you read some of these works and are interested in more, there are a couple of ways to use what you've read to find more that might interest you. You can look for other works by the same authors, you can look at the works cited, or you can use a database like Google Scholar or Web of Science to look for works that cite the work you are interested in. Once you get started it's easy to fall down rabbit holes!
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.
Tea in China: A Religious and Cultural History by James A. Benn—This is conveniently first alphabetically and it is also the first academic monograph about Chinese history that I read, so I can say with some confidence that it's a good starting place! There’s lots of books about the history of tea, but most of them devote significant space to tea outside of China while this book focuses on Chinese tea drinking. Benn is a religious studies scholar so one of the things that the book explores is the impact of Buddhism on tea culture. I also liked learning about the way tea was prepared in different time periods!
“On the Very Idea of Religions (In the Modern West and in Early Medieval China)” by Robert Ford Campany —This paper is super helpful for understanding how people in middle period China understood what we would call their religion. (Because “religion” as a thing is made up!) It’s a bit heavy on the jargon, but it’s super interesting, and very useful for understanding historical Daoist practices.
Empire of Style: Silk and Fashion in Tang China by Buyun Chen—I love this book so much! I’m not someone who enjoys history with a lot of names and dates, they don’t tend to stay in my head without a lot of context to hold them in place. And this book is basically all context. This gives such a fuller picture of life in Tang times, with its focus on textiles and economics. When this book started to explain the An Lushan rebellion it clicked right away, even though I’d tried to understand before and gotten confused. I also appreciate that this book talks about the Tang Empire as an empire out there doing imperialism, in a way that's really clear-eyed and straightforward.
Fruitful Sites: Garden Culture in Ming Dynasty China by Craig Clunas—This book is about how gardening changed over the course of the Ming Dynasty. I love how the introduction talks about how the idea of an unchanging Chinese garden is actually orientalist.. I also love all the details about gardens, especially about what plants people grew and what they used those plants for.
“How the Residents of Turfan used Textiles as Money, 273-796 CE” by Valerie Hansen and Xinjiang Rong—This is a paper that’s more a collection of interesting incidents than it is an argument, and I often find those frustrating. But in this case the details are so interesting! Also textiles are one of my favorite types of material culture, and I enjoyed learning about how they were used in other contexts than clothing.
The Yellow River: A Natural and Unnatural History by Ruth Mostern—I think this could be a good introductory text because it covers a big sweeping time period, but still has a central focus. Having the Yellow River as focus lets this book discuss agriculture, administration and so much more. This is also one of the more quantitative things on this list with lots of charts and maps, so if you struggle with history because it doesn’t feel concrete enough, this could be a good place to start.
Sui-Tang China and Its Turko-Mongol Neighbors: Culture, Power, and Connections, 580-800 by Jonathan Karam Skaff—I’m always interested in books that deconstruct the idea of China as isolated and self-contained, and this is an important example of that. Skaff discusses the cultural, political, and material contentions of Sui-Tang China and its Turko-Mongol neighbors in extensive detail, while providing enough background information to be accessible. I especially enjoyed the sections of fictive kinship and horse trading.
Forgotten Disease: Illnesses Transformed in Chinese Medicine by Hilary A. Smith—This book is such a tour de force of the history of Chinese medical thought (not calling it traditional chinese medicine (TCM) because as this book points out, that means something very specific). The book focuses on a disease, or set of diseases, known as foot qi, and how the concept of that disease changed over time. It’s really a history of how people understood their bodies and diseases. I found the writing in this book especially accessible, and just raced through the whole thing.
The King’s Road: Diplomacy and the Remaking of the Silk Road by Xin Wen—You might have seen me raving about this book somewhere else because it's so good and so unique! This book is about the nitty-gritty of diplomatic travel in Central Asia between 850-1000 CE, and it centers the city of Dunhuang, which was during this period sometimes part of various imperial states in the region but mostly an independent city state. This is very cool because historians of China tend to focus on areas within imperial boundaries, and this focus also helps us see that what was and wasn’t considered China has always been shifting.
A significant source of information for this book is the documents found in the library cave at Dunhuang, an important source for this time period in general. Wen provides a whole chapter on these documents, as well as a chapter laying out the regional geopolitics. All that background information makes this a good starting place.
Wen is a meticulous scholar, who reads multiple historical languages, and his fine-grained analysis here is excellent. I especially liked the parts about who traveled and why, and about what diplomatic travelers ate.
“‘What Do Barbarians Know of Gratitude?’ - The Stereotype of Barbarian Perfidy and Its Uses in Tang Foreign Policy Rhetoric” by Shao-yun Yang—The Tang Dynasty is known for being peaceful, cosmopolitan and multicultural, but the Tang court’s use of stereotypes about barbarians complicates that image. I have a personal dislike of the second Tang emperor, Tang Taizong (personal name Li Shimin), who is often held up as a model emperor. So I especially appreciate the way this paper brings into focus Taizong’s hypocrisy and warmongering.
I hope you found something here that sparked your interest! I have loved learning more about Chinese history and I hope you will too!
If you read some of these works and are interested in more, there are a couple of ways to use what you've read to find more that might interest you. You can look for other works by the same authors, you can look at the works cited, or you can use a database like Google Scholar or Web of Science to look for works that cite the work you are interested in. Once you get started it's easy to fall down rabbit holes!
no subject
Date: 2024-07-28 07:48 pm (UTC)The Chinese overt sense of nationalism is something I noticed. They seem to want to cover up the less than nice parts of their history. Not a fan of taizong either.
no subject
Date: 2024-07-28 08:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-07-29 12:26 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-07-29 04:09 pm (UTC)He seemed to continue a policy of war and conquest during his reign. Depends on one's point of view if he's really a model emperor.
no subject
Date: 2024-07-28 11:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-07-28 07:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-07-28 11:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-07-29 03:38 am (UTC)I did notice that the link for "Empire of Style" doesn't lead to the book though.
no subject
Date: 2024-07-29 08:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-07-29 06:40 am (UTC)(And also thanks for the note about being able to access articles on JSTOR -- I used to read articles there all the time when I was a student, but I thought if you weren't affiliated with a university you had to pay for access. Did not realize you can get a non-paid account and still read articles!)
no subject
Date: 2024-07-29 08:51 pm (UTC)(And happy to help with the JSTOR stuff, they don't make it super obvious)
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Date: 2024-07-29 04:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-07-29 08:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-07-29 09:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-07-30 01:19 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-07-30 07:57 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-07-30 03:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-08-03 12:12 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-08-04 11:25 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-08-05 04:50 pm (UTC)