Award-winning author Jonathan D. Spence paints a vivid picture of an obscure place and time: provincial China in the seventeenth century. Life in the northeastern county of T'an-ch'eng emerges here as an endless cycle of floods, plagues, crop failures, banditry, and heavy taxation. Against this turb[...]

In 1577, the Jesuit Priest Matteo Ricci set out from Italy to bring Christian faith and Western thought to Ming dynasty China. To capture the complex emotional and religious drama of Ricci's extraordinary life, Jonathan Spence relates his subject's experiences with several images that Ricci himself [...]

"Splendid . . . One could not imagine a better subject than Zhan Dai for Spence." ("The New Republic")
Celebrated China scholar Jonathan Spence vividly brings to life seventeenth-century China through this biography of Zhang Dai, recognized as one of the finest historians and essayists of the M[...]

Over 25 years, Jonathan Spence has established himself as an interpreter of modern Chinese history. In these essays, Spence engages the great themes of modern Chinese history and assesses his field with a critical eye. John Spence also wrote "The Search for Modern China", published in 1990.[...]

Explores the West's views of China over the course of seven centuries, from Marco Polo's depiction to that of Franz Kafka[...]

A remarkable re-creation of the life of K'ang-hsi, emperor of the Manchu dynasty from 1661-1772, assembled from documents that survived his reign. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.[...]