This volume, first published in 1925, presents a clear background to the then-contemporary political situation in China, and in doing so sheds much light on the history of Chinese politics. In focusing on the political organization it generates an insightful study of Chinese government.

This book, first published in 1928, examines the first diplomatic contacts between China and the West. China had not always been isolated from the Western world, as travellers had visited China in the Middle Ages, but it was not until the end of the eighteenth century that efforts were first made to establish regular relations with China. This book traces the development of diplomatic relations from the Treaty of Nanking in 1842 to the start of the twentieth century.

This work, first published in 1897, is neither more nor less than the history of China as it has been written during successive ages by the authorized historians of the Empire. The documents on which the work is based, together with the writings of Confucius and Mencius, are the only truly authentic sources from which the story of the long-lived nation can be obtained. Commencing with the mythical and legendary periods, the work moves on through successive dynasties until that of the Ts’ing concluding its account in the early years of the twentieth century.

This book, first published in 1956, contains the stuff of other people’s memories. Thus you will read of magicians and immortals; of dragons and pills of eternal life; of generals and eunuchs; of emperors and poets; of palaces and concubines. The author has made nothing up; if there are liars along the route, they were there before he came along. The study of stories and ballads from deep in a country’s past can tell a reader much about the present-day culture of a society; this is surely true with these tales from China’s history.

This 11-volume set gathers together some key older titles on China’s history. Encompassing China’s political, economic, and cultural development, the books gathered here also deal with contacts with the West both ancient and modern.

This study, first published in 1940, examines in detail the suppression of piracy in China. From a starting point of the considering the influence of the Admiralty on the development of British foreign policy in the nineteenth century, it studies the actions of the China Station and in particular its undertakings to suppress piracy in the Far East.

This book, first published in 1974, was the only one to treat China’s foreign policy in its entirety, both as the subject of historically documented narrative (before and since the Liberation of 1949) and as the product of ideas themselves requiring analysis. It is also unique in approaching these ideas by the route they took into the Chinese consciousness: for Mao the young Chinese republic was a ‘semi-colony’ over which the imperialists were falling out. His revolution would float like a boat on top of their ‘contradictions’.

This penetrating study of China’s social and cultural contacts with the West, first published in 1979, analyses the early images that China and the West had of one another, and the illusions and misconceptions that arose from these images. The book centres on the question, why did China fail to become modernised through contact with the West before the 1930s? The author examines the roles played by the agents of change – emigrants, missionaries, traders, scholars and diplomats – and the political, economic, social and cultural developments which the transmission of their...

This book, first published in 1974, studies the historical development of China during the Western Han dynasty (202 BC-AD 9), a time of great intellectual, religious and political change. The struggle between Reformists and Modernists is analysed using texts contemporary to the time, and this struggle was a key point in Chinese history, leading as it did to enormous change, including to economics and foreign policy.

This book, first published in 1875 and reissued in 1973, analyses the limited evidence from the works of early Chinese historians that explorers from China had discovered a country they called Fusang – possibly western America, and in all probability Mexico. The original document on which Chinese historians based their accounts of Fusang was the report of a Buddhist monk called Hoei-shin, who, in the year 499 AD, returned from a long journey to the east.