Spanning more than two thousand years, from the first emperor, buried with his terra-cotta army in the third century BC, to Puyi, the four-year-old last emperor, here is the entire history of China told through the stories of its all-powerful rulers.
126 color, 242 b&w illustrations
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Well-presented but sloppy on content,
A blooper on page 10 says it all: the Sui Dynasty is inexplicably represented by the character ‘Qi’. Paludan’s book is well-intentioned and nicely-illustrated, but her grasp of the Chinese language and experience in historical research are clearly not up to the daunting task of presenting a comprehensive account of imperial Chinese history. As her bibliography shows, she has had to rely on several dated works in English, as well as more recent and authoritative ones like the massive Cambridge History of China. However, she flounders badly in the second section (“Confusion, Reunification and Golden Age”, AD 220-907) and never makes it out of the confusion. The text in this section is peppered with factual inaccuracies and errors in translation that can only be blamed on general ignorance. While struggling with the emperors of the Southern Dynasties, she ignores those of the concurrent Northern Dynasties, sparing only two pages to comment on socio-economic developments in the North. The rulers of the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms receive equally sparse attention. The superficial quotations that she has selected from Western sources betray the same lack of depth in examining the historical record.
It would be unfair to single out Ann Paludan for lack of scholarship, however, because the ages of fragmentation from AD 189-589 and 907-979 suffer from a miserable dearth of research among Western historians of China. Paludan apparently had only three sources in English to go upon, none published within the last 20 years. Sadly, one of them is the famous but thoroughly mythologised “Romance of the Three Kingdoms”, the author of which she characteristically names as Zhong Luo Guan rather than Luo Guanzhong. She parrots that novel’s popular perception of the Three Kingdoms as “the golden age of chivalry and romance”, without any attempt to compare this with historical reality.
From here, everything goes downhill, because the Cambridge History volume on the 220-589 period has yet to be published. Paludan, probably referring to the primary sources, fails completely to get her facts and names right, translating “Prince of Yingyang” as “Sun King of Ying”, for example, and referring to his replacement by an “older” half-brother when that brother was in fact younger. For that matter, Paludan bothers to give us the Chinese characters for the temple names and reign titles of the various emperors, but not their actual names (not even in romanized form, in many cases). One would think the reader is just as much interested to know the name an emperor was born with.
The later chapters from Tang to Qing are rather more credible, but readers would do better to read the (still incomplete) Cambridge History and F.W. Mote’s “Imperial China 900-1800″ for the same information in greater detail and accuracy. Sadly, a proper history of the chaotic period from AD 189 to 589, imperial China’s longest ever period of inter-regional war, has yet to be written for English-speaking readers (David A. Graff’s recent “Medieval Chinese Warfare, 300-900 AD” has gone some way towards filling that gap in the political and military aspects). Beyond brief excursions into the then-rising religions of Buddhism and Daoism, Ann Paludan does not even begin to do justice to its fascinating complexities.
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|Good, but somewhat disapointing,
Having read two others in this series (Roman Emperors and Russian Tzars), I was somewhat disapoionted by this book in the series. Prehaps it has to do with the complexity of the subject matter and the politics of the Chinese Imperial Court itself but I found the book jumping from reign to reign describing many of the emperors with only a sentence or two. Also, it seemed like the book spent more time talking about the other players in court life rather than the emperor himself. Also, while the book has numerous pictures only a few of the emperors have a picture in the book. I would have liked to see pictures of all the emperors if possible. My final complaint with the book is that it would talk about other players in court life or politics without introducing them or putting their role in context.
For example, the book often says something such as “following the death of Emperor X, Mr. Y was able to place the infant son of so-and-so on the throne where thereafter Mr. Y dominated Chinese government for the next 50 years” but then say nothing more about the emperor or Mr. Y and the book would just jump to the next emperor.
I can understand that it is beyond the scope of the book, but over and over the author points out that often the power behind the throne was a woman but then never really descibes the woman or how she came to exert such influnce.
Overall I enjoyed the book very much, but the text seemed to raise many questions and skip around. As a result, after I finished the book I felt I knew less about the Chinese Emperors than I did the Roman Emperors or Russian Tzars after reading those books.
In spite of the faults I found with the book, it was still an enjoyable book to read and the pictures were interesting. I would recomend this book to the general reader or somebody who is just starting to learn Chinese History.
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|An excellent narrative of Imperial China,
I have always wanted a book of Imperial China to keep as a reference and I have found it. It gives a good account of the subject from a primarily historical point of view and is free from any critical viewpoint. The author has also included changes in the social makeup as well as advances in the arts which added to the pleasure of reading. But more important is gives a very good description of each emperor and their achievements or failures. It does not analyse each reign in detail, it fact it is quite superficial, but I do not think it weakens the book. It fact I think it one of the strengths of the book that it is easy to read ands a good starting point for someone who is interested in Imperial China.
I am now looking for a similar book to cover the period from the mythical emperors to the first Qin Emperor.
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