---
title: History of China
description: China's history spans dynasties, philosophies and revolutions. You will learn the imperial eras, Confucian statecraft, the century of humiliation, the Communist revolution and the reform era.
category: humanities
subcategory: history
difficulty: beginner, intermediate, advanced
url: /subject/history-of-china
---

# History of China

China's history spans dynasties, philosophies and revolutions. You will learn the imperial eras, Confucian statecraft, the century of humiliation, the Communist revolution and the reform era.

## Available Resources

4 Books • 1 Courses • 2 Websites

## Websites

### 1. 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.

**Difficulty:** Intermediate | **Language:** English | **Price:** Free

**Link:** https://visualizingcultures.mit.edu/home/vis_menu.html

**Tags:** chinese-history, primary-sources, visual-culture, opium-wars, east-asian-studies

### 2. Asia for Educators: Primary Sources with DBQs - China

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.

**Difficulty:** Intermediate | **Language:** English | **Price:** Free

**Link:** https://afe.easia.columbia.edu/main_pop/ps/ps_china.htm

**Tags:** chinese-history, primary-sources, document-based-questions, east-asian-studies

## Courses

### 1. ChinaX: China's Past, Present and Future

**Author:** Peter K. Bol and William C. Kirby

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.

**Difficulty:** Beginner | **Language:** English | **Price:** Free

**Link:** https://www.edx.org/chinax-chinas-past-present-future

**Tags:** chinese-history, east-asian-studies, mooc, chinese-culture

## Books

### 1. China Under Mao: A Revolution Derailed

**Author:** Andrew G. Walder

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.

**Difficulty:** Advanced | **Language:** English | **Price:** Paid

**Link:** https://www.amazon.com/dp/0674975499?tag=edmonddante07-20

**Tags:** chinese-history, maoism, cultural-revolution, communist-china

### 2. China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia

**Author:** Peter C. Perdue

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.

**Difficulty:** Advanced | **Language:** English | **Price:** Paid

**Link:** https://www.amazon.com/dp/0674057430?tag=edmonddante07-20

**Tags:** chinese-history, qing-dynasty, central-asia, empire, xinjiang

### 3. The Search for Modern China (3rd Edition)

**Author:** Jonathan D. Spence

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.

**Difficulty:** Intermediate | **Language:** English | **Price:** Paid

**Link:** https://www.amazon.com/dp/0393934519?tag=edmonddante07-20

**Tags:** chinese-history, modern-china, qing-dynasty, survey-text

### 4. The Cambridge Illustrated History of China (2nd Edition)

**Author:** Patricia Buckley Ebrey

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.

**Difficulty:** Beginner | **Language:** English | **Price:** Paid

**Link:** https://www.amazon.com/dp/0521124336?tag=edmonddante07-20

**Tags:** chinese-history, dynastic-china, world-history, survey-text, material-culture

---

*This content is part of Dantes.io - Your Treasure Map to Knowledge*

*Curated by humans at Dantes.io. Personal study use welcome; republishing this curation requires permission (team@dantes.io).*

View this page online: https://dantes.io/subject/history-of-china