Chinese History: A New Manual, 7th Edition

"A monument of scholarship, one of the great works on China published in English (or any other language) in the last hundred years." Lee Moore in China Books Review.

Former EU Ambassador to China and Sinologist, Endymion Wilkinson’s "Manual" covers all of Chinese history from early man to the end of the 20th century, introduces the two dozen ancillary disciplines that Chinese historians use, discusses leading historical hypotheses and controversies, and along the way now curates over 15,000 primary and secondary sources. The text is enlivened with 468 sidebars and tables with topics ranging from the size of steppe armies to the author’s 50-year friendship with the “father of pinyin,” Zhou Youguang. Earlier print editions of this massive work (at over 1.5 million words, the length of 15 monographs) won the Stanislas Julien Prize, and in 2016, Peking University published a three-volume Chinese translation.

For the 7th edition, Ambassador Wilkinson wrote many new sections and updated old ones, expanded the chapters on 20th century China, added 1,541 new citations, and doubled the coverage of digital resources (there are now 9,647 clickable links—449 to global digital tools and 9,198 cross-references).