Published: 23 Dec 2025
China: A History
- Release date: 2008
- Genre: Non-fiction, History
- Themes/Moods: Slow-paced, Informative
- Rating: 3.5/5
- Originally written: ~2022
While trying to condense the history of China into one single book is a fools errand, this book does a sterling job here in this book, despite admitting how much of a fools errand it is. For someone who knew very little about China beyond some of the more obvious stuff, John Keay provides a great introduction, starting from the very beginning and giving the reader a nice primer both geographically and linguistically, providing maps, explaining key ideas, giving timelines and diagrams to follow dynasties and their rulers which would otherwise be impossible. Another theme in this book that is constant references to the past and seeing the rich history of China as being fairly cyclical during the dynastic period, such as unification and growth, turning slowly to stagnation and decline, punctuated by divided warring states and eras, only to be unified once again in some form.
Time is also spent exploring the vast array of existing texts, influences of religion such as Confucianism and Buddhism, and explaining how some of the key “schools of thought” came to be, and each successive dynasties want to create a functioning centralised meritocratic beauraracry to run the country, all with varying success and so on and so forth. It explores both individual dynasties but also periods of war, strife and internal conflict and demonstrates how the Mandate of Heaven could both legitimise and discredit a dynasties right to rule, a definite sharp contrast to Divine Right.
It does a lot which the few pages it has given the number of years to cover, and while the post-Imperial section of history does get pretty shortchanged, it still covers an awful lot in just good enough detail to continue to pique interest.
