Over the course of the nineteenth century, the Qing dynasty faced one setback after another and its place in the world plummeted. At the beginning of the century, the memory of Qianlong's reign was still strong and Chinese goods such as tea and porcelain were in high demand around the world. The growth of its population since the beginning of the dynasty was taken as proof of success. Within a few decades, however, signs of serious problems were apparent to all. The most dramatic were the huge rebellions in the 1850s and 1860s, which caused massive destruction and loss of life. Added to this were progressively more damaging conflicts with foreign powers. Although China did not suffer outright colonization or dismemberment, after its defeat by the British in the Opium War of 1840 to 1842, foreign armies repeatedly proved themselves superior to the Qing's and the government had to make concession after concession. By the end of the century, Japan, too, having embraced Western technology and political practices, had become a dangerous adversary. Local elites took measures to protect their own communities and leading officials set out to reform military forces and introduce modern industries, but solutions proved elusive. Many began to question whether key elements of inherited culture and political practice would have to be abandoned.

Population growth and environmental degradation

Since the Tang period, China was almost always the world's most populous country. Indeed, China regularly had a greater population than all of the countries of Europe put together. Until 1700, population growth was slow everywhere in the world, never exceeding half a per cent per year for any lengthy period. Thereafter, populations through much of Eurasia began growing at more rapid rates, increasing 50 per cent or more during the course of the eighteenth century, probably as a result of a combination of such developments as global warming that lengthened the growing season, new crops increasing food supply, a reduction of disease after a period when increased global traffic had spread new diseases, and advances in state organization improving the delivery of relief in times of famine. In a small part of the world – western Europe – increased rates of growth were soon moderated by changed family practices, primarily later marriage and increased rates of celibacy.

North and south China were reunited at the end of the sixth century under the short-lived Sui dynasty (581–617) and fashioned into an expansive, dynamic, cosmopolitan empire by its successor, the Tang dynasty (618–907). The reunification of north and south, the opening of the Grand Canal linking them, the creation of two huge capitals, and the expansion of interregional and international trade all stimulated economic growth. The Tang capital, Chang’an, grew to be the largest city in the world, housing perhaps a million people and attracting traders, students, and pilgrims from all over Asia. Especially before the massive Rebellion of An Lushan (755–63) brought to an end this era of expansion, the Chinese of the Tang showed themselves remarkably open to what other cultures had to offer. Music and art in particular absorbed considerable foreign influence, and Buddhism continued to be enriched by doctrines and rituals introduced from beyond Tang's borders.

Empire-building

The recreation of a huge Chinese empire in the late sixth century was not inevitable. By then the Chinese subcontinent had been divided into separate northern and southern states for over two centuries, each of which considered itself the true heir to the Zhou and Han dynasties. Given the geographical differences between north and south China, this situation might well have become a permanent one, like the division into eastern and western Roman empires in the West; the north and south could each have developed its own version of Chinese civilization.

However, the union of the north and south did occur, and the long-term consequences for Chinese civilization were profound. The centralized bureaucratic monarchy was refashioned on an even stronger basis than in the Han. This reunification and the resultant peace ushered in three centuries of cultural flowering. From then on those who thought about history had two examples from ‘modern’ times (the Han and Tang) that could be added to the three ancient dynasties (Xia, Shang, and Zhou) to prove the rightness of the unity of the Chinese world. Permanent division into independent states seemed less and less a natural, reasonable, or desirable state of affairs.

The half century from 1900 to 1949 was a period of intense effort on the part of an increasingly diverse elite to refashion China into a powerful, modern state. Centre stage was taken by energetic men and women who felt compelled to act: to promote new ideas, start new enterprises, build new institutions, organize the oppressed, fight corruption, and defeat aggressors. Patriots wanted to reconstitute China as a nation of the Chinese people and make it strong enough to stand up to foreign threats. Intellectuals and artists wanted to create a new culture that would be both Chinese and modern.

Revolutionaries succeeded in toppling the Qing dynasty in 1911, but their initial efforts to replace it with a republican government foundered, with the revolutionary Sun Yatsen losing out to the general Yuan Shikai. From 1916 to 1927, China was politically fragmented as local warlords competed for supremacy and imperialist powers extended their domination. At the same time, young people got caught up in new cultural and political ideas.

With the help of the Communist International (Comintern), a fledging Communist Party was formed and for a few years was allied with the Nationalists to reunite the country. The Northern Expedition succeeded in eliminating warlords or reducing their power, but when it reached Shanghai, the Nationalists turned on the Communists, who were driven underground and outside the major cities.

In these circumstances Mao Zedong emerged as the leader of the Communist Party, which had to retreat to the Yan’an region where it strengthened party discipline and gained experience in mobilizing peasants. War with Japan frustrated the efforts of the Nationalists under Chiang Kaishek to modernize and forced the government to retreat far inland. After the war with Japan, civil war between the Nationalists and the Communists ended with the victory of the Communist Party.

Undermining the Qing dynasty

During the first decade of the twentieth century, the Qing dynasty was undermined on nearly every front. Its moral authority had been weakened by the defeat by Japan in 1895, the Empress Dowager's coup against the emperor in 1898, and the imperialists’ intervention into the Boxer Rebellion in 1900.

During the four decades after the death of Mao in 1976, the Chinese party-state pursued a reform programme intended to correct errors of Mao's later years, rebuild the Communist Party, and improve people's lives. Much was accomplished at remarkable speed. As the economy expanded, millions of people left the countryside for the rapidly growing cities. Poverty was drastically reduced. The intrusion of the government and party into daily life abated, leaving people more leeway to get on with their lives in their own ways. Skyscrapers redrew the skyline of cities across the country. Major cities built multi-line underground systems and were linked to each other by newly built highways and ultra-fast trains as China became a world leader in infrastructure development. In the twentyfirst century, China became the world's largest exporter, its second-largest economy, and a major investor in other countries.

The Communist Party took credit for this remarkable economic transformation. Still it was on the alert for any sign of unrest, especially after the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the breakup of the Soviet Union during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Periods of relative opening up to foreign influence were followed by periods of tighter control. Maintaining control of information became more difficult in the face of evolving communication technologies – first shortwave radios and telephones, then satellite television and fax machines, and then mobile phones and the internet. To gain popular support, the party focused on the need for stability and encouraged nationalistic pride in China's rise. By the second decade of the twenty-first century, China's Belt and Road initiative and Confucius Institutes were prominent features of its new more assertive stance in the international arena. In other ways as well, China was promoting its model of development and drawing attention to its new military might.

The reform programme from Deng Xiaoping to Xi Jinping

In the immediate aftermath of Mao's death in September 1976, the relatively obscure compromise candidate he had selected, Hua Guofeng, took over as head of the Communist Party. After a month of national mourning for Mao, Hua and members of the military staged a political coup, arresting Mao's widow Jiang Qing and three of her closest associates.

The intellectual foundations of Chinese civilization were established during the Eastern Zhou dynasty (770–256 BCE), a period of political fragmentation and moral crisis. The first half of this era is commonly called the Spring and Autumn period, after the name of a chronicle covering the years 722 to 481 BCE. This was a highly aristocratic period, and the Zhou kings continued to reign in Luoyang during these centuries, but regional lords had much of the power and competed against each other, making and breaking alliances, exchanging hostages, and sporadically taking up arms. Over time, military conflict became more frequent and more deadly, and the second half of this period is conventionally called the Warring States period (403–221 BCE). By then the Zhou king was no longer a major player and one by one the smaller states were conquered and absorbed by the seven largest ones.

The ruthlessness of the competition among the regional powers, although uniformly lamented, nevertheless served to foster social, technological, and economic advances. These included the introduction of iron casting, infantry armies, coinage, private ownership of land, and social mobility. New ideas also emerged in profusion on topics ranging from the natural order to ethics, war, and government. The ideas of the most reflective thinkers began to be written down, and the circulation of these texts further stimulated intellectual debate. Recently excavated texts both confirm much of what was known about this period from received texts and point us in new directions.

Rival states

The political system of the Western Zhou had from the beginning carried within it the danger of the regional lords becoming so powerful that they would no longer respond to the commands of the king. As generations passed and ties of loyalty and kinship grew more distant, this indeed happened. In 771 BCE, the Zhou king was killed by an alliance of Rong tribesmen and Zhou nobles. One of his sons was put on the throne, and then for safety's sake the capital was moved east out of the Wei River valley to modern Luoyang, located just south of the Yellow River in the central plains. The revived Zhou never fully regained control over its lords, and China entered a prolonged period without a strong central authority.

With Qin's victories over all of its rivals, China became a great agrarian empire. The centralized bureaucratic monarchy, the form of government that was to characterize most of the rest of Chinese history, was created by the Qin (ruled in all of China 221–206 BCE) and entrenched during the much longer Former and Later Han dynasties (202 BCE–220 CE). It was in this period too that the geographic scope of China proper – the region in which Chinese were to become the dominant ethnic group – was staked out as the government extended overlordship across vast regions as far south as Vietnam. The ideology of the new state incorporated elements of Legalist, Daoist, and Confucian origin, with correlative cosmology becoming pervasive as a mode of explaining the world and taking ritual action in it. The officials who administered the state came to be identified more and more with Confucian learning. Over time local elites were drawn both to Confucian learning and to government service, and the Han government came very much to depend on cooperation between local officials and local elites. The lives of ordinary people centred more on family and religious life, but they too were tied to the state through taxes, labour service, and conscription.

Unification by Qin

Qin, the westernmost of the Zhou states, had begun as a royal domain assigned the task of raising horses and defending against the barbarians. After the Zhou royal house fled the Wei River valley to resettle at Luoyang in 770 BCE, Qin was able to expand its territory and become the main power in the west. Not as urban or as culturally advanced as the eastern states, Qin seemed in early and mid Zhou times a rough and crude place, not that far removed from the nearby Rong, Qiang, and Di tribes with which it regularly fought.

To help them strengthen their state, the Qin rulers of late Zhou times recruited advisors, strategists, and diplomats from the territories of their rivals. Lord Shang arrived in Qin in 361 BCE and soon launched a series of Legalist measures to strengthen the power of the ruler (see pages 55–58, Chapter 2).

In what has to be one of the most rapid transformations in world history – just seven years from 1949 to 1956 – the Communist Party transformed China from a weak, fractious country into a tightly centralized one with a substantially expanded industrial base, achieving many of the goals that had proved elusive for the Nationalists. Criminal gangs were suppressed, inflation was tamed, everyone was put to work, and the country fought the United States and allied forces to a standstill in Korea. Xinjiang and Tibet, regions that had been part of the Qing empire, were brought under the control of the central government.

As the Communist Party imposed control of cities, it borrowed from the playbook of the Soviet Union, instituting central planning and tight integration of the party and the state. With Soviet assistance, massive modernization projects were begun and soon new factories, railroads, schools, hospitals, and reservoirs were transforming the landscape. Mao's radical Great Leap Forward of 1958 mobilized the country to speed up industrialization but resulted in a human-made famine of tragic proportions. The raucous and exhilarating Cultural Revolution that Mao launched in 1966 came close to destroying the party-state he had been identified with for so long. It unfolded in unintended ways and left many feeling victimized.

For ordinary people, life during the Mao period was highly politicized. New values were heralded: people were taught that struggle and revolution were good while compromise, deference, and tradition were bad. What farmers would produce, where and how their children would be educated, what they might read in books and newspapers, where they could live or travel, all came increasingly under political control. At the same time, literacy and life expectancy greatly improved as schools and public health measures reached more deeply into the countryside.

During Mao's lifetime, the outside world's knowledge of what was happening in China was severely limited. The state controlled the media and allowed publication only of approved messages. Scholars could analyze what the public was told, but had little to go on for other important issues, such as how policies were determined, how uniformly they were enforced, or what ordinary people actually thought.

The rapid evolution of Inner Asian statecraft in the tenth to thirteenth centuries allowed four states formed north of China proper to support formidable armies. Their military strength offset China's advantages in wealth and population and allowed expansion into lands settled largely by Han Chinese. The Tanguts’ Xi Xia dynasty (1038–1227) was a multi-ethnic regional state with a relatively small Chinese population, but the other three ruled over large Chinese populations and have traditionally been considered part of the sequence of Chinese dynasties. Liao (907–1125), Jin (1115–1234), and Yuan (1215/1276–1368) each built on the achievements of its predecessor to gain greater dominance over Chinese populations. The Khitans’ Liao dynasty did not merely extort material benefits (as the Uyghurs had in late Tang) but also occupied a strip of territory south of the Great Wall, populated primarily by Han Chinese. The Jurchens’ Jin dynasty, once it defeated the Liao, expanded the occupied zone to include all of north China. The Mongols’ Yuan dynasty, after defeating the Jin and much of Eurasia, built up the machinery needed to conquer south China, the first Inner Asian state to rule south of the Yangzi River. Even though all four of these states developed writing systems, the great bulk of the surviving documents are in Chinese, making it easier to discern how the Chinese perceived their rule and adapted to it than to discern the values of the Inner Asian peoples themselves. These dynasties all were patrons of Buddhism and adopted some Chinese practices, such as building capital cities, collecting taxes, and compiling law codes, but they also preserved their distinct ethnic identities and privileges. Equally worthy of attention are the ways the Chinese subjects adapted to their rule.

The Mongols’ extraordinary war machine led to a pan-Eurasian Mongol empire that facilitated communication across the continent. Foreigners from west Asia and Europe visited China in unprecedented numbers. Chinese inventions – such as printing and gunpowder – spread westward, as did demand for Chinese goods such as porcelain. The cultural flow the other way was more limited, but would include a larger place for Islam.

Nearly thirty years have passed since I was asked to write a single-volume illustrated history of China aimed at the Western general public with little knowledge of China or its history. What persuaded me to take it on was the hope that I could help these readers understand Chinese ways of thinking and get them as interested in China's past as its present. I thought the scholarship of my generation of Chinese historians working in the West would enable me to tell a lively and compelling story, one that would not focus primarily on political history and states but tell intertwining stories of the development of ideas and cultural practices, ways of forming families and making a living, of material culture and art, all the while drawing attention to change over time, both long-term trends and important turning points. There were challenges, I knew. Could I tell a compelling story of the modern period when my own research had been on earlier periods? Could I write something that makes sense to a modern Western audience when the authors of my sources saw the world so differently? To give an example, could I give women and gender a larger part in the story when most of the surviving sources written by Chinese male literati did not? Much the same could be said of others who wrote little, such as military men, merchants, and non-Chinese. But I was attracted to the idea of lots of pictures and eagerly began searching for visual images that would help convey what I wanted to get across.

When the Cambridge Illustrated History of China came out in 1996, I was quite pleased with the quality of the illustrations and the book's physical appearance. It was graced with a generous foreword by Kwang-Ching Liu, a scholar a generation older than me whose Chinese origins and specialization in nineteenth-century political history probably helped reassure readers that my overview of Chinese history could be trusted. The book found many readers and was translated into several languages, including Chinese. A second edition in 2010 brought the story forward a decade, but did not involve rewriting of earlier chapters.

Why do a full revision of the Illustrated History? The most obvious reason is that China has changed so much in the decades since the first edition.

The pace of change in Chinese society began to increase in the late Tang period. By early Song times (960–1276), advances in agriculture and industry were contributing to dizzying economic growth. The pace of migration south accelerated, and the Yangzi valley finally became as central to the Chinese economy and to Chinese culture as the Yellow River regions in the north. The civil service examination system came to dominate the lives of the elite, and Confucianism was reinvigorated. Despite these signs of vitality, the Song dynasty was never able to establish dominance of East Asia the way the Han and Tang dynasties had. Advances in Inner Asian statecraft meant Song had powerful northern neighbours that had to be treated as equals, not vassals. Limiting the military threat they posed became a major preoccupation of both the state and the intellectual elite. Success was only partial; in 1127 the Song lost most of north China to the Jurchen's state of Jin, thus dividing the Song into two periods, the Northern Song when the capital was at Kaifeng and the Southern Song when the capital was relocated to Hangzhou.

War and peace in a multistate context

During the chaotic century from 860 to 960 following the disintegration of the Tang dynasty, political and military power devolved to the local level. Any strongman able to organize defence against rebels and bandits could become a local warlord and declare himself king, and many of the kings of this period rose from very lowly beginnings; one had even been a merchant's slave.

In the south, no self-proclaimed king ever consolidated much more than the equivalent of a modern province or two, and historians generally refer to the regional states in the south as the ‘Ten Kingdoms’. Political fragmentation in the south did not impair the economy there; on the contrary, rulers of the regional states, eager to expand their tax bases, successfully promoted trade.

The effects of fragmentation were less benign in the north. Many of the regional warlords there were not Chinese but Shatuo Turks from the garrison armies. Both Chang’an and Luoyang had been ravaged by the wars of the late Tang period, and Kaifeng, located in Henan province near the Grand Canal, came to be viewed as the central city in north China.

The Ming dynasty (1368–1644), founded by a poor peasant who joined the rebellions against Mongol rule, was an era of great changes in society, political dynamics, ethnic composition, foreign relations, and culture. The founder's armies managed to secure all of China proper and even to attract some Mongol nobles as allies and supporters. The early Ming emperors continued some of the institutions the Mongols had used, such as hereditary military households, but also returned to long-standing traditions of governance, such as careful census and registration of the population and land. Although the early emperors used terror to keep officials in line, competition to join officialdom quickly reached and exceeded Song levels. Literati culture was especially vibrant in the Lower Yangzi region, where urbanization reached high levels and the publishing industry grew rapidly. One reason for the prosperity of this region was a burgeoning of trade, including international maritime trade. Piracy became a major problem until the government relaxed its prohibitions on private trade. In the early seventeenth century, global cooling added to farmers’ hardships and the government's problems.

Ming Taizu and his successors

Seldom has the course of Chinese history been as influenced by a single personality as it was by the founder of the Ming dynasty, Zhu Yuanzhang (1328–1398), better known by his imperial temple name, Taizu, and the name of his reign period, Hongwu. The first commoner to become emperor in 1,500 years, Taizu proved shrewd, hardworking, and ruthless. He knew poverty firsthand. His destitute parents frequently had to move to look for work or escape rent collectors; they even had to give away several of their children because they could not afford to rear them. When Zhu Yuanzhang was sixteen years old, a shift in the route of the Yellow River brought floods, famine, and disease to his region and took the lives of both his parents. Taizu, unable even to buy coffins in which to bury them, presented himself to a Buddhist monastery; but the monastery, hard-pressed itself, soon sent out the novices to beg. After several years wandering across east-central China, Taizu returned to the monastery for three or four years until it was burned to the ground by the Yuan militia attempting to suppress local rebellions.

From early times, Chinese myths about their origins focused not on gods but on a series of extraordinarily brilliant human beings who invented writing, agriculture, states, and the other key elements of their culture and society. Modern scholars, drawing on knowledge of geology, palaeoanthropology, and archaeology, not surprisingly construct very different stories of the origins of Chinese civilization. Their accounts do not slight agriculture, writing, bronze technology, and state formation, but usually differ from the traditional story in giving more weight to the role of ritual and religion in shaping the significant characteristics of Chinese culture and more attention to the physical environment. Equally important, they do not see Chinese history as a single-stranded story, centred on a royal line, but as a many-stranded one in which a great many distinguishable cultures interacted, some perhaps colonies of the more central state, others probably enemies. As more archaeological sites are excavated, the distortions of the single-stranded story become more apparent. Archaeology has also added greatly to our understanding of the early states in central China and what gave them advantages.

Origin myths

Through most of the imperial period, literate Chinese had a ‘great man’ theory of how their civilization developed. Unlike other peoples who pointed to gods as their creators or progenitors, the Chinese attributed the inventions that step by step transformed the Chinese from a primitive people to a highly civilized one to a series of extraordinarily brilliant human beings. Fu Xi, the Ox-tamer, domesticated animals and invented the family. Shen Nong, the Divine Farmer, invented the plough and hoe. Huang Di, the Yellow Emperor, invented the bow and arrow, boats, carts, ceramics, and silk. He also fought a great battle against alien tribes, thus securing the Yellow River plain for his people. In China's earliest history, he was labelled the first of the five great pre-dynastic rulers, the last two of whom were Yao and Shun. Yao was credited with devising the calendar and rituals. Rather than hand over power to his own less worthy son, he selected Shun as his successor, a poor peasant whose filial piety had been demonstrated by his devoted service to his blind father and evil stepmother.

The centuries that separated the Han and Tang dynasties were marked by multiple regimes, incessant warfare, and governments that struggled to gain firm control of their territories. After several decades of rivalry among three contenders (the Three Kingdoms, 220–265), the Western Jin (265–316) briefly rejoined the regions. After the Jin fell to internal squabbling, non-Chinese peoples entered the fray, and China entered a prolonged period when the north was under the control of foreign rulers and the south ruled by Chinese courts. Each was prey to its own internal conflicts and the border between them regularly shifted in accordance with the fortunes of war. The governments of this period had little success in curbing tendencies toward social inequality, and during these centuries aristocratic tendencies developed at the top of society and personal bondage expanded at the bottom. Confucianism lost some of its hold and people in all walks of life found hope in religions promising salvation and transcendence, above all the newly introduced Buddhist religion, which vastly expanded China's intellectual and religious imagination.

The Three Kingdoms period and the Jin dynasty

During the period between the Han and Tang dynasties, short-lived courts were the norm, making the political history of these three-and-a-half centuries one of the most complex in Chinese history. It began when the generals assigned by the Han government to put down the rebellion of the Yellow Turbans became stronger than the throne and fought among themselves for supremacy. By 205 the poet-general Cao Cao had made himself dictator of north China. Instead of trying to curb the growth of hardto- tax local magnates, Cao Cao developed alternative ways to supply his armies. He carved out huge state farms from land laid waste by war and settled captured rebels and landless poor to work them and thus made the state the greatest of all landlords. He also established military colonies for hereditary military households whose men would both farm and fight. For his cavalry, Cao Cao recruited Xiongnu tribesmen in large numbers, settling many in southern Shanxi.