🧲 Books like this
1434: The Year a Magnificent Chinese Fleet Sailed to Italy and Ignited the Renaissance
Gavin Menzies · back to the book
What’s in it
Tap a tag: ❤ = this matters to me · tap again ✕ = don’t care · again to reset. The list below updates each time.
24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorKublai Khan: The Mongol King Who Remade China
John Man · 389 pages
The Travels
Marco Polo · 480 pages
"Marco Polo was the most famous traveller of his time. His voyages began in 1271 with a visit to China, after which he served the Kublai Khan on numerous diplomatic missions. On his return to the West he was made a prisoner of war and met Rustichello of Pisa, with whom he collaborated on this book. His account of his travels offers a fascinating glimpse of what he encountered abroad: unfamiliar re
The Chinese Opium Wars
Jack Beeching · 376 pages
An enlightening account of a notorious period in nineteenth-century imperialism, when an effort by the Chinese government to stamp out the country's profitable opium trade resulted in a series of conflicts known as the Opium Wars. Index; illustrations and map.
The Man Who Loved China: The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom
Simon Winchester · 316 pages
In sumptuous and illuminating detail, Simon Winchester, the bestselling author of The Professor and the Madman ("Elegant and scrupulous"—New York Times Book Review) and Krakatoa ("A mesmerizing page-turner"—Time) brings to life the extraordinary story of Joseph Needham, the brilliant Cambridge scientist who unlocked the most closely held secrets of China, long the world's most technologically adva
The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams, and the Making of Modern China
Julia Lovell · 458 pages
This title tells a story of drugs, distrust, greed and rebellion. 'On the outside, [the foreigners] seem intractable, but inside they are cowardly...Although there have been a few ups-and-downs, the situation as a whole is under control.' In October 1839, a few months after the Chinese Imperial Commissioner, Lin Zexu, dispatched these confident words to his emperor, a Cabinet meeting in Windsor vo
1587: A Year of No Significance: The Ming Dynasty in Decline
Ray Huang, Huang Ren Yu · 280 pages
Color: A Natural History of the Palette
Victoria Finlay · 448 pages
The Boxer Rebellion: The Dramatic Story of China's War on Foreigners that Shook the World in the Summer of 1900
Diana Preston · 436 pages
"The Boxer Rebellion is a panoramic chronicle of the uprising and ensuing two-month siege of the eleven foreign ministries in Peking (now Beijing), and of the foreign community in Tientsin (now Tianjin), during the summer of 1900 - the repercussions of which have echoed throughout the intervening century. It left tens of thousands of Chinese dead, precipitated the end of dynastic rule in China, an
China: A New History
John King Fairbank, Merle Goldman · 552 pages
John King Fairbank was the West's doyen on China, and this book is the full and final expression of his lifelong engagement with this vast ancient civilization. It remains a masterwork without parallel. The distinguished historian Merle Goldman brings the book up to date, covering reforms in the post-Mao period through the early years of the twenty-first century, including the leadership of Hu Jin
Dragon Lady: The Life and Legend of the Last Empress of China
Sterling Seagrave · 601 pages
The author of *The Soong Dynasty* gives us our most vivid and reliable biography yet of the Dowager Empress Tzu Hsi, remembered through the exaggeration and falsehood of legend as the ruthless Manchu concubine who seduced and murdered her way to the Chinese throne in 1861.
The Last Manchu: The Autobiography of Henry Pu Yi, Last Emperor of China
Pu Yi, Henry Pu Yi, Paul M. Kramer · 318 pages
Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War
Stephen R. Platt · 385 pages
Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China
Jung Chang · 544 pages
"Jung Chang vividly evokes China's sights, sounds, and smells to create what must be one of the grimmest, yet most perceptive accounts of growing up middle-class in the maelstrom that has swept China since the 1920s." - Back cover.
The Chinese Opium Question in British Opinion and Action
Wenzao Wu · 196 pages
The Devil Soldier
Caleb Carr · 366 pages
A courageous leader who became the first American mandarin, Frederick Townsend Ward won crucial victories for the Emperor of China during the Taiping Rebellion, history's bloodiest civil war. Carr's skills as historian and storyteller come to the fore in this thrilling account of the kind of adventurer the world no longer sees.
The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean
David Abulafia · 783 pages
Holy War: How Vasco da Gama's Epic Voyages Turned the Tide in a Centuries-Old Clash of Civilizations
Nigel Cliff · 547 pages
A new interpretation of Vasco da Gama's revolutionary voyages, which were seen as a turning point in the struggle between Christianity and Islam, explores the tragic collision of cultures resulting from his journeys to the Indies.
City of Fortune: How Venice Won and Lost a Naval Empire
Roger Crowley · 405 pages
A magisterial work of gripping history, City of Fortune tells the story of the Venetian ascent from lagoon dwellers to the greatest power in the Mediterranean - an epic five hundred year voyage that encompassed crusade and trade, plague, sea battles and colonial adventure.
The Face Of Battle: A Study Of Agincourt, Waterloo And The Somme
John Keegan · 354 pages
*The Face of Battle* is military history from the battlefield: a look at the direct experience of individuals at 'the point of maximum danger'. It examines the physical conditions of fighting, the particular emotions and behaviour generated by battle, as well as the motives that impel soldiers to stand and fight rather than run away. And in his scrupulous reassessment of three battles, John Keegan
The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia—and How It Died
Philip Jenkins · 318 pages
In this groundbreaking book, renowned religion scholar Philip Jenkins offers a lost history, revealing that, for centuries, Christianity's center was actually in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa, with significant communities extending as far as China. The Lost History of Christianity unveils a vast and forgotten network of the world's largest and most influential Christian churches that existed t
A Child's History of England
Charles Dickens · 392 pages
IF you look at a Map of the World, you will see, in the left-hand upper corner of the Eastern Hemisphere, two Islands lying in the sea. They are England and Scotland, and Ireland. England and Scotland form the greater part of these Islands. Ireland is the next in size. The little neighbouring islands, which are so small upon the Map as to be mere dots, are chiefly little bits of Scotland, - broken