Asia for Educators: Primary Sources with DBQs - China
Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University
Columbia University archive of translated Chinese primary sources arranged across nine periods from Shang oracle bones to 1989, each document carrying a scholarly introduction, timeline placement and discussion questions written for classroom use. Reading Lin Zexu's letter to Queen Victoria or the Qianlong edicts to Macartney directly is what separates understanding the century of humiliation from memorizing it. This is the only free English-language collection that pairs the documents with enough context to use them unsupervised.
More resources on History of China
MIT Visualizing Cultures
MIT image-driven scholarship project presenting prints, photographs, trade paintings and cartoons alongside peer-reviewed essays on the Canton trade system, both Opium Wars, the Boxer Uprising and Shanghai. Also carries Japanese units. Fills the gap the books leave: how the Canton trade, the Opium Wars and the Boxer Uprising were actually seen by Chinese and Western observers at the time.
ChinaX: China's Past, Present and Future
Ten-part Harvard course sequence of 52 units covering roughly six thousand years, from Shang oracle bones and Confucian statecraft through the Republic, Mao and reform. Uses Harvard collections, rare books and interactive maps.
China Under Mao: A Revolution Derailed
History of the People's Republic from 1949 to 1976, tracing land reform, the Great Leap Forward famine and the Cultural Revolution through party institutions, cadre incentives and quantitative evidence rather than Mao's biography alone. Covers the Communist revolution and its collapse into the reform era.
China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia
Archival study of the Qing conquest of Zungharia between roughly 1600 and 1800, treating Qing, Russian and Mongol states as competing expansionist empires and explaining how China's western frontiers, including Xinjiang, were absorbed. It replaces the tidy 'China as static continental civilization' story with a documented account of Qing expansion, which is the piece that makes present-day Xinjiang, Mongolia and Tibet legible.
The Search for Modern China (3rd Edition)
Standard university survey running from the late Ming around 1600 through the Qing collapse, the Republican era, Mao's revolution and the reform decades. Grew out of Spence's long-running Yale lecture course on modern China.
The Cambridge Illustrated History of China (2nd Edition)
Single-volume survey of Chinese civilization from Neolithic origins through the Communist era, organized by dynastic period and illustrated with art, artifacts and maps. The illustration program does real explanatory work for readers with no prior visual vocabulary for Chinese material culture. The second edition adds a chapter on China's post-1989 global role.