Choate Summer Program in China

Suggested Readings

Suggested History Readings:

Hansen, Valerie, TheOpen Empire: A History of China to 1600, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc, New York/London, 2000. ISBN 0-393-97374-3

Utilizing a great amount of recent archeological evidence, and a lively narrative, Valerie Hansen reshapes and reinterprets the themes and concepts of Chinese history to 1600.

Ebrey, Patricia Buckley, Cambridge Illustrated History: China, Cambridge University Press, London/New York, 1996. ISBN 0-521-66991-X

A spectacular blend of art work, photographs and careful, informative writing on the span of Chinese history from mythical times to the present.

Schell Orville, Mandate of Heaven: The Legacy of Tiananmen Square and the Next Generation of China’s Leaders, Simon and Schuster (Touchstone Book), New York, 1995. ISBN: 0-684-80447-6

One of America’s foremost China specialists, Schell brilliantly documents the economic initiatives and cultural changes that have emerged in China since the Tiananmen demonstrations.

Spence, Jonathan, The Search for Modern China ,2nd edition, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., New York/London,1990. ISBN 0-393-97351-4

For both the beginner and the experienced student of Chinese culture, Spence’s overview spans from the fall of the Ming Dynasty to the death of Deng Xiaoping. Written in a precise, informative style.

Spence, Jonathan, The Gate of Heavenly Peace: The Chinese and Their Revolution, 1895-1980, The Viking Press, New York, 1981. ISBN 0-670-29247-8

Spence invokes the literary and philosophical voices of the intellectuals of this period to show how China’s intelligentsia was affected by, and made sense of this tumultuous century of revolutions.

Terrill, Ross, Mao: A Biography, Simon and Schuster (Touchstone Book), New York, 1993. ISBN: 0-671-79803-0

This work is an extraordinary narrative interpretation of the experiences, motivations and major acts of China’s greatest revolutionary.

Waley-Cohen, Joanna, The Sextants of Beijing, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., New York/London, 2000. ISBN 0-393-32051-0

Joanna Waley-Cohen, a recent guest speaker at Choate, offers a refutation of the traditionally accepted Western view that China was largely resistant to external ideas and foreign contacts.

Web-sites:

China Travel Guide

This site provides useful travel information for American tourist.

ChinaNow.com

This user-friendly site offers advice on how to get by in china's most popular cities, including Beijing, Shanghai, Nanjing and more.

The Chinese national Tourism Administration

It provides a lot of tourist information on this easy-to-navigate and highly interactive site.

Travelogs

Ma Jian Red Dust: A Path Through China. Anchor: Doubleday. 2001 336p

ISBN 0-385-72023

In the early 1980's, ma, a writer, poet,painter, and photographer, became dispirited with his life in Beijing and set out on a three-year voyages across some of China's most remote areas in an attempt to learn about himself by learning more about his homeland. This memoir portrays post-Mao China and is as much a spiritual as a geographical journey.

Theroux, Paul. Riding the Iron Rooster: By Train Through China. Ivy 1990.452p.

ISBN 0-8041-0454-9

Theroux, one of America's greatest contemporary travel writers, journeyed in the mid 1980s from London to china by train. This insightful and witty account tells of his numerous adventures. Although a bit dated, it fully captures the spirit of post-Cultural Revolution China.

Hessler, Peter. River Town : Two Years on the Yangtze. 2001

0-06-019544-4

Peter Hessler went to China as a PeaceCorps volunteer in 1996 and stayed for two years teaching English in a small town called Fu Ling on the bank of Yangtze river. As he puts it, “ This isn’t a book about china. It’s about a certain small part of China at a certain brief period in time, and my hope has been to capture the richness of both the moment and the place.”