The Cambridge Illustrated History of China

Nearly thirty years have passed since I was asked to write a single-volume illustrated history of China aimed at the Western general public with little knowledge of China or its history. What persuaded me to take it on was the hope that I could help these readers understand Chinese ways of thinking and get them as interested in China's past as its present. I thought the scholarship of my generation of Chinese historians working in the West would enable me to tell a lively and compelling story, one that would not focus primarily on political history and states but tell intertwining stories of the development of ideas and cultural practices, ways of forming families and making a living, of material culture and art, all the while drawing attention to change over time, both long-term trends and important turning points. There were challenges, I knew. Could I tell a compelling story of the modern period when my own research had been on earlier periods? Could I write something that makes sense to a modern Western audience when the authors of my sources saw the world so differently? To give an example, could I give women and gender a larger part in the story when most of the surviving sources written by Chinese male literati did not? Much the same could be said of others who wrote little, such as military men, merchants, and non-Chinese. But I was attracted to the idea of lots of pictures and eagerly began searching for visual images that would help convey what I wanted to get across.

When the Cambridge Illustrated History of China came out in 1996, I was quite pleased with the quality of the illustrations and the book's physical appearance. It was graced with a generous foreword by Kwang-Ching Liu, a scholar a generation older than me whose Chinese origins and specialization in nineteenth-century political history probably helped reassure readers that my overview of Chinese history could be trusted. The book found many readers and was translated into several languages, including Chinese. A second edition in 2010 brought the story forward a decade, but did not involve rewriting of earlier chapters.

Why do a full revision of the Illustrated History? The most obvious reason is that China has changed so much in the decades since the first edition.