China: A History
by John Keay
HarperPress, HK$400
Scholars may disagree on exactly how far back China's history stretches, but what makes it different is its general continuity and written record. It would be difficult, for example, to look at Iraq today and immediately identify what remains of the empires of Mesopotamia. Egypt is the same.
For China, there are objects, traditions and writings that have come down through thousands of years that are recognisably 'Chinese'. Writing a history of this long legacy is therefore not for the faint-hearted.
For more than 2,000 years there were bureaucrats whose job it was to write down everything that happened at court on a daily basis during the reigning dynasty. Theoretically, the emperors were not allowed to interfere and these notes would be used by the following dynasty to write the 'official' history of the previous one. Although we can be fairly certain that things did not quite go according to plan, we still have an enormous amount of official documentation from which to gain an understanding of what did happen. (Needless to say, there is a tremendous amount of non-official documentation as well.) Some of this refers to astronomical events, so for example we can read about a sighting two millennia ago of what we call Halley's comet.
It seems clear enough that there are two kinds of people who will write books on Chinese history: the professional sinologists who have access to these primary texts in Chinese and 'the rest', usually journalists or former journalists such as John Keay (although he did read history at Oxford University). Most specialists avoid the kind of sweeping book that this by definition is, because they are forced to simplify too much. When you specialise, let's say, in all the detail and ramifications of the Taiping Rebellion, you do not want to have to reduce it to a few pages.