Why read The World of a Tiny Insect?

Book cover of The World of a Tiny Insect: A Memoir of the Taiping Rebellion and Its Aftermath

Book description

"From the cry of a tiny insect, one can hear the sound of a vast world..." So begins Zhang Daye's preface to The World of a Tiny Insect, his haunting memoir of war and its aftermath. In 1861, when China's devastating Taiping rebellion began, Zhang was seven years old. The…

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Why read it?

1 author picked The World of a Tiny Insect as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Henrietta Harrison

Author

I loved this little book because, in just a short space, it takes you into what it was like to live through the Taiping Rebellion, one of the most important events in China’s nineteenth century, and it does it through the eyes of a child. It’s an amazing viewpoint, and the stories are dramatic.

The introduction, which explains all the background, and translation by Xiaofei Tian, who is a well-known poet in Chinese as well as a professor at Harvard, is also beautifully written.

From Henrietta's list on Qing Dynasty China from an Oxford historian.