For two years, Princess Der Ling was the favorite lady-in-waiting to the Empress Dowager Cixi in the imperial palace in Beijing. This book provides a unique and surprisingly intimate portrait of the Dragon Lady, who ruled China for 47 years, and brought the country to the brink of destruction. Der Ling refers to the larger political context on many occasions. But the best parts of the book are the small details. What emerges is an intimate portrait of the life and personality of the Empress Dowager, and a sense of the inner workings of the highly secretive world of the imperial palace.

This book, written in the early 1950s by a former Chinese ambassador to London, is a cultured and entertaining view of the gastronomic side of Chinese life. F.T. Cheng sets out to show Westerners that there was a lot more to Chinese food culture than chop suey. It is a wonderful reminder of the richness and depth of Chinese culture from a man who also completely understood the West.

Isabella Bird was one of the greatest travelers and travel writers of all time, and this is her last major book, a sympathetic look at inland China and beyond into Tibet at the end of the 19th century. In describing the journey, Isabella provides a rich mix of observations and describes two occasions when she is almost killed by anti-foreign mobs. It many ways, Isabella created the model for travel writing today, and this one of her greatest works.

This book, first published in 1911, is one of the most important and best written travel books from old China. Edwin Dingle recounts his adventures as he travels up the Yangtze River from Shanghai and then by foot southwest across some of China's most wild and woolly territory to Burma. Along the way, Dingle absorbed an enormous amount of about life and society in southwest China, and describes what he sees in a readable and sensitive way.

This wonderful book is written as the diary of a one-year-old baby in an American expat household in Shanghai in the early 1920s. The world of old Shanghai, the life of expats in Asia - it is all reflected here through the eyes of the baby. Elsie McCormick, an American resident of Shanghai, nails the feel of the times with humor and insight.

Unexpectedly in 1958, an irreverent British journalist and Australian cartoonist duo were granted visas to visit Communist China at its most closed and inscrutable. Emerging from the writings of Kirwan Ward and the drawings of Paul Rigby is a picture of China at a key moment in its historystill feeding off the exhilaration of the creation of People s China in 1949 and full of optimism and blind idealism. A rich collection of insights and observations tinged with skepticism and good humor, this record offers a western perspective of China during Mao Tse-tung's leadership."

The old Shanghai was a rich and cosmopolitan mixture of East and West and this engaging book offers a glimpse into that world through an assortment of photographs, newspaper clippings, cartoons, stamps, and other collectibles. Evoking different eras, this record also contains vintage advertisements, excerpts from travel guides, flyers handed out to ex-pats highlighting Shanghai s international atmosphere, and often hilarious firsthand accounts from those who had the opportunity to live in or pass through this bustling trade port. The scrapbook format allows readers to either read from the...