Books like The China Memoirs of Thomas Rowley — picked by fans

I’ve long been interested in China’s Taiping Rebellion (1850-64), the bloodiest civil war in history, with an estimated 20 to 100 million casualties.

Lofthouse’s substantial novel is one of the few in English to take on this topic and successfully forge a love story out of it, and a shocking one at that. Englishman Robert Hart, a real historical figure who would later become inspector-general of China's Imperial Maritime Custom Service and a Qing Dynasty official, is known to have purchased young concubines for sexual purposes.

Lofthouse builds on this to create the most fraught, tortuous, and fascinating love triangle I’ve ever encountered in literature, as Hart is caught in a tug of war between the jealous desires of sixteen-year-old Ayaou, her fourteen-year-old sister Shao-mei, and his own Victorian morality. 

Also set during the Taiping Rebellion, Lande’s engrossing story begins as a sea adventure which drew me in like a Chinese version of Moby Dick, with swashbuckling characters who yell and curse in the eloquent twang of Shakespearean lowlifes.

The action shifts inland along the Yangtze River as protagonist Fletcher Thorson Wood (based on historical figure Frederick Townsend Ward) organizes a mercenary force with Western weaponry to fight off the Taiping.

There is no love story—the central characters are too busy for that—but it’s the texture of the prose, the sheer scintillating, rhythmic mastery of language, and the huge panoply of disparate voices, all superbly wrought by the author, that kept me gripping the helm of this epic narrative.

I adored this partly fictionalized, richly realized novel, which fleshes out the life of China’s greatest female painter, Pan Yuliang (1895–1977).

Rescued from a brothel by a wealthy government official, she fled to where the action was—1920s Paris—after graduating from art school in Shanghai. Boldly specializing in paintings of female nudes, including of herself, Pan was invited by high-profile artists to return to Shanghai and display her art, only to become embroiled in a series of widely publicized scandals over her nudes, leading her to quit China for good and resettle in Paris.

Her uncompromising devotion to her independence and her art marginalized her into a life of poverty and posthumous fame. It’s precisely these noble qualities that endeared me to Epstein’s treatment of the artist.

Hong Ying’s first novel, Summer of Love, was banned for depicting a sex orgy amidst the backdrop of the Tiananmen Square protests. Almost as provocative, to me, is K: The Art of Love, which plays on the old theme of a wealthy man’s spurned wife, Lin Cheng, with the twist that it’s not the young lover she takes on who liberates her but Lin herself, steeped in Taoist sexual practices, who liberates him with her ferocious passion.

Her lover happens to be historical Julian Bell, son of Vanessa Bell, the sister of Virginia Woolf and member of the polyamorous Bloomsbury Group; Lin is modeled after Julian’s real Chinese lover, Ling Shuhua. What I find most refreshing about Hong Ying’s novels is her frank and fearless sexuality, clearly stemming from her own experiences, thinly disguised.

To understand where China is now, and where it has been travelling from since 1949 when the People’s Republic was established, you need to grapple with the complex history that preceded that. German sinologist Klaus Muhlhahn expertly does this, succinctly drawing out the key theme of institution-building and showing how this provides the link between the final imperial period of the Qing to its collapse in 1911, and then the slow rise to power of the Communists over the 1920s to the 1940s when China was fragmented and beset by war. Accessible, authoritative, and ambitious.

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.

I think this is the best up-to-date history of the Qing dynasty. I use it for teaching because it’s completely reliable, covers everything you might need to know, and lays it all out clearly.

It also has a really good balance between the history of major events like the Opium Wars and the Taiping Rebellion and the social history and context. And I like the fact that it explains the big debates that scholars are having in clear and simple terms.

Few include the White Lotus War in their discussion of nineteenth-century rebellions. Yet, in many ways, it provides the perfect starting point. Lasting over eight years, plowing a path of destruction across five central Chinese provinces, and emphatically marking the end to nearly a century of peace and commercial prosperity, the White Lotus War is an ominous harbinger of what was to follow. Chinese historian Yingcong Dai highlights the many disparate factors – from bureaucratic negligence and administrative apathy to the rise of secret societies and charismatic religious leaders – that transformed otherwise weakly connected local protests into a massive revolt that threatened to upend the Qing imperial state (1644-1911). As a specialist on Chinese warfare and imperial governance, the author pulls back the curtain on a rarely told tale that brings turn-of-the-18th-century China to life.

While Stephen Platt offers a brilliant starting point for those interested in the Taiping Rebellion, Professor of Chinese history Tobie Meyer-Fong reveals the terrible realities of the war from the perspective of the survivors. Shifting her focus to the individual trauma caused by the rebellion, the author details the harrowing personal losses of the Taiping Rebellion. Meyer-Fong’s explicit and straightforward account of the hacking, slicing, and burning of both the Taiping and imperial soldiers accentuates the long-lasting psychological scars caused by the uprising that lingered on into the early twentieth century. What Remains pushes the reader to move beyond military campaigns and the lofty (but often impractical) ideology in order to better contemplate the long-term consequences of the violence it wrought on an empire already reeling from debilitating demographic pressures.

If the Opium War represents the greatest threat to China’s global stature, the Taiping Rebellion certainly posed the greatest domestic challenge to the ruling dynasty. On the surface, the bare facts of the rebellion defy belief. Its leader, Hong Xiuquan, after failing the imperial civil service examination, came to believe that he was the younger brother of Jesus Christ and embarks on establishing a kingdom that upends thousands of years of beliefs by instituting a wide array of socially progressive ideas. Using both Chinese and Western sources, Chinese historian Stephen Platt breathes new life into both the extraordinary rise of Hong’s Taiping Kingdom and the imperial state’s ultimately successful response. Beautifully written, Platt’s account offers a captivating account of both the revolutionary ideology of the Taipings and the Chinese Confucian response.