Lao She’s greatest work, ‘Rickshaw Boy’
Vivid descriptions of Republican-era Beijing meld with a timeless story about the vicissitudes of a worker's life.
Paul French
Paul French studied history, economics, and Mandarin at university and has an MPhil in economics from the University of Glasgow. He is the author of a number of books, including the New York Times bestselling and Edgar Award–winning Midnight in Peking, Carl Crow: A Tough Old China Hand, and Through the Looking Glass: China’s Foreign Journalists from Opium Wars to Mao.
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The rising and falling fortunes of golf in China
In the early 2000s, golf’s popularity soared in China, embraced by even the country’s highest leaders. During this boom, Dan Washburn wrote "The Forbidden Game," which is as much about the momentous changes happening in China at that time as it is about the sport.
When Yao Ming was the most famous Chinese person on Earth
In the early 2000s, the 7-foot-6 Houston Rockets center was an NBA All-Star and multimillionaire, and the face of China in the U.S. But where did he come from? How did he rise to such prominence, emerging from the dying days of the Maoist sports program?
What’s the problem with Chinese soccer? Rowan Simons knows.
Rowan Simons became a household name among Chinese soccer fans for his TV commentary on English football. His efforts to promote grassroots soccer within China proved much more difficult.
The lessons to be learned from Edgar Snow’s ‘Red Star Over China’
"Red Star Over China" was a massive coup for the young American journalist Edgar Snow. The book is still a gripping read, but it is also an abject lesson in the pitfalls of access in China.
A Chinese foreign correspondent in Europe during World War II
From war in London to persecution in China, Xiao Qian experienced it all — and wrote about it in his classic memoir, Traveller Without a Map.
‘Thunder Out of China’: One of the most popular WWII books of all time
Annalee Jacoby and Teddy White were in their early twenties — yet already accomplished war correspondents — when they arrived in Chongqing. Their reportage from China's wartime capital was immediately popular with the reading public, and has largely withstood the test of time.
Every Ultimate China Bookshelf needs Peter Hessler’s ‘River Town’
"River Town," since its publication in 2001, has been much imitated but rarely bettered. It is a classic in the memoir genre, about life in a rural town that was changing, inalterably, for better or for worse.
All the traditions lost after the Communists entered Beijing
"Houses and people and tables and chairs move and change of themselves, following destinies that cannot be altered. When things change into other things or lose themselves or destroy themselves, there is nothing we can do but let them go."
A hedonistic portrait of Old Beijing
British scholar John Blofeld arrived in Beijing in 1934, in his early twenties, seeking aesthetic and sensual pleasures. Nearly three decades later, he wrote "City of Lingering Splendour," recounting an "Old Peking" saturated in the final vestiges of its luxurious imperial past.