Chinese Civilization - From The Ming Revival To Chairman Mao

A mere four centuries of Chinese history in one volume – because who doesn’t like their dynasties, revolutions and ideological rebranding in a handy single dose?

Chinese Civilization – From the Ming Revival to Chairman Mao (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1977) by Yong Yap and Arthur Cotterell is your guided sprint from late imperial grandeur to full-on revolutionary makeover. We start with the Ming, those overachievers in porcelain, bureaucracy and defensive wall-building, and end up with Mao, who looked at several thousand years of tradition and essentially said, “Nice try, let’s start again.”

This is not a dainty little “China-in-17-haiku” sort of book. It’s more like:

• Ming dynasty: “We’re back, we’re organised, and we’ve got opinions on everything from tax to tiles.”

• Qing dynasty: “We’re foreign, we’re fabulous, and yes, you may absolutely underestimate us right up until the opium arrives.”

• Republic and warlord era: “What if politics were mostly chaos with uniforms?”

• Mao: “No more emperors, but do please enjoy the cult of personality.”

Yap and Cotterell do that very 1970s thing of trying to be briskly scholarly while secretly fascinated by the sheer drama of it all – court intrigue, eunuchs with agendas, Confucian exams ruining promising lives, foreign invasions, internal rebellions, and the occasional attempt to modernise without collapsing too much furniture.

This particular copy comes to you via Crappy Old Books, proudly graded Condition: Good, which in our very scientific taxonomy means:

• The dust jacket (if still present) shows the sort of gentle edgewear you’d expect from a book that’s crossed several ideological shifts and at least one alarming attic.

• The boards are solid, doing their best “Great Wall but in cardboard” impression.

• The pages have mellowed to that soft off-white tone that says, “I was printed when people still said ‘Peking’ unironically.”

• Expect minor bumps, rubbing, perhaps a previous owner’s name discreetly applied in biro – all part of the authentic used-book cultural layer.

ISBN: 0297773046, for the cataloguer who likes their upheavals properly numbered.

Recommended if:

• You like your history with big arcs: empire, decline, reform, revolution, repeat.

• You’re dimly aware that Chinese history is more than “some emperors, some silk, then Communism happened”, and would like to close that knowledge gap without enrolling in a degree.

• You enjoy books where footnotes and battles coexist peacefully with maps, timelines and the occasional “and then it all went wrong” chapter.

Chinese Civilization – From the Ming Revival to Chairman Mao: an illustrated whistle-stop tour through mandarins, Manchus, missionaries, Marxists and more, now gently worn, structurally sound, and ready to sit on your shelf like a small, rectangular reminder that history is never as simple as “then the new regime arrived and everything made sense.”

Keep browsing: See more History books Other books by Yong Yap and Arthur Cotterell