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A survey of Chinese imperial history from the Shang dynasty to 1600, this work departs from strict adherence to the dynastic model of Chinese history. Moving chronologically, Valerie Hansen focuses on social history, highlighting those periods when China was most open to exchanges with new culture.
best overview yet
| Customer Rating:  | As more and more people discover that China is going to be part of their future, a book like this becomes all the more precious. In my 15 years of groping to understand Chinese civilization, this is the single most insightful work of general history I have found. Valerie Hansen has a genius for condensing large subjects in deft strokes. In the process she answers in advance the kinds of questions I as a Western reader want to raise myself, whether the subject be oracle-bone divination or foot-binding.
The work of synthesis here is impressive for the consistency with which it improves on the clichés of Chinese historiography by incorporating the latest findings. Also she makes sure to include snapshots of the life of families and the place of women, long ignored in standard histories. For example, when she wants to shows how some oracle bone inscriptions from the Shang Dynasty record negative outcomes, she chooses the birth of a daughter to Lady Hao, explicitly identified in the original divination record as unfavorable. That allows us to see in passing that the Chinese preference for sons has been in place for at least 3000 years.
In addition the author improves on conventional histories by focusing attention on the "interregnum" periods between major dynasties. Her point is well taken that these periods, though they do not produce major monuments, contribute importantly to the way the Chinese way of life evolved.
Professional sinologists may well complain that she simplifies matters that are still open to dispute among experts, but a well informed overview of Chinese history is justified in making reasonable guesses concerning elements still under dispute. An example concerns the Song Dynasty scroll called "Springtime on the River" (Qing Ming Shang He Tu). Art historians are still arguing about when it dates from between the late 11th and late 12th centuries. Valerie Hansen places it near the end of this range, at around 1186, suggesting that this visual celebration of Kaifeng city life was painted about half a century after this capital city was destroyed by barbarian invasion in 1127, hence that be read as nostalgia than as "realism." In the long run, she could be shown to be wrong, but this fresh reading deserves to be taken into account.
A less contentious example involves her pages on the origins of foot-binding. These are the best I have ever read for succinctness and suggestive placement in the larger context of Chinese life around the year 1000. Valerie Hansen offers the Western reader a way of understanding now only how it worked, but how such a cruel custom could grow under the conditions of Song China when well-brought-up women were newly obliged to compete with courtesans and prostitutes for the attention and affection of men.
I would be delighted if Valerie Hansen would extend her work of synthesis to include China since 1600, a period with so many confusing assessments in circulation that her genius for credible overview would be most welcome. That may be unlikely given that her research concentrates on earlier China, but no other book of 400 pages does so well in summing up 3000 years of Chinese history to 1600. |
Curious Reader
| Customer Rating: | | I highly recommend reading this book for one reason: it is not the standard view that has been presented in most Chinese History textbooks. Thinking about the differences and reflecting upon them could be a valuable use of time. Often textbooks on history are written from a certain perspective without considering many other views. Hansen has given us many ideas to discuss. I do not suggest reading this book quickly. Comparing it to a standard text on Chinese History would also benefit the reader. Hansen asks lots of questions and raises many issues. When dynasties fall and new ones rise, new books on the past history are commissioned. How objective or complete are they? Thank you, Professor Hansen. I will be buying your next publication for sure not because I want to learn "the truth" but because I want to question my perception of the truth that has been given to me. |
History at its best
| Customer Rating: | The Open Empire is a wonderful introduction to Chinese history to the beginning of the Ming Dynasty. A special strength of the book is that the author pays particular attention to contributions made by non-Chinese to Chinese history and gives details about gender that I haven't encountered in other sources. Exceptionally well-written, the book presents a clear, coherent narrative of political, social, and cultural developments interspersed with accounts of historical figures, some of great importance and some unnamed.
In addition, pictures, descriptions of archaeological findings, and a clever use of primary sources give an unusual feeling of immediacy to distant history. For instance, a father during the Ming Dynasty remembers his daughter lost to smallpox:"When you were born I was not pleased. A man over thirty wanted a son, not a daughter. But you won me over before you had completed your first year. ..You often knocked on the door and then quickly went inside and asked: 'Who is there?'...Who would have believed that not quite half a month later you would breathe your last?" The quote is successful in illustrating general trends [i.e., the preference for sons] while showing a more complex reality at the individual level. At the same time, I can picture the little girl playing hide-and-seek with her father -- the tenderness in language collapses the hundreds of years between the contemporary reader and the anguished father. For me, this is history at its best. We also see a diagram of a bound foot, a document from a 10th century women's association, and pictures of the remains of rice and lentils in a tomb from 168 BC. A good introductory chapter lays out the main events, and there are helpful suggestions for further reading at the end.
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a guessing game
| Customer Rating:  | Ms. Hansen holds a view and will make the evidence fit her view. Just because this is a 'popular' book doesn't mean the author can wing it. After nearly reading the first chapter and leafing through the book a little I can already give you the following five representative examples (among so many others):
Example 1 --
On page 8, in regard to those who would object to her using uncorroborated fiction as source material she says, "These critics argue, as a matter of faith, . . . " that literature is not necessarily reality. It seems clear she's the one with faith, allowing fiction, without any support, to stand as history. And while I agree with her when, on page 9, she says that TV scripts would make different historical material than "The Congressional Record" (though not because the latter is factual), that does not make the former necessarily a valid source by itself.
Example 2 --
On page 27, referring to a single tortoise shell -- out of she says over 200,000, though noe of the other Chinese and English sources I've read use a figure of more than 150,000 -- with both positive and negative inscriptions she concludes "that oracle bones may not have been edited as much as some analysts feared. The largely positive nature of the oracle bone texts, which usually record good weather or victories, suggests that even the oracle bones may have been censored, with the result that only those recording positive outcomes were kept. But this important text shows that the Shang recorded failed prognostications in addition to their successes." No, unless she can say that she or someone has found a significant number of negative shells (surely more than one), then her comments are groundless speculation.
Example 3 --
On page 109, in chapter 3, after granting that Qin Shihuang did order all but a small number of approved books burned/banned, she works as his apologist saying that since much of that was an oral tradition, the banning "would not have had much effect." Gee, then I wonder why they bothered to write them down in the first place or why Qin needed to destroy and ban the books if everyone had them in their heads as oral tradition or why there have been different versions of the classics or why archaeologists have found different versions of the classics or why there's been endless debate to this very day about which versions of the classics are authentic? In fact, since it was written down, then we cannot simply say it was by that time purely an oral tradition. Just in the past few decades we've gone from (as some will characterize them) Confucian Wang Bi to Legalist Ma Wangdui to Guodian (oldest yet found) for the ever-popular Dao De Jing.
Example 4 --
The caption for the picture on page 255 for the rules for a women's association says, "The scribe who drew up the document used colloquial language, which the women may have dictated directly, . . . " They may have, but they may not have. Hansen's accompanying text does not tell us either.
Example 5 --
Then on page 111, in talking about some Qin legal code, we get this wonderful sentence: "Because these are the only sections of the Qin code to survive today, they allow us to judge whether Qin law was as brutal as later historians suggested." No, I think that very fact means we don't have enough information to "judge", but merely to speculate. The 15th amendment of the US Constitution gave all persons, regardless of race, the right to vote in 1870. But as we all know, the southern half of the country did not comply with this until the Voting Rights Act in 1965. If a future historian writes about US law based only on the Constitution (which is so well protected in it's 'tomb' it will survive long after most other written records of the US Government are gone) what would they speculate?
I agree with the author that the fact that our primary sources for so much of ancient Chinese history are from official histories written by the following dynasties (replete with the good first, bad last motif) means we should highly suspect what is there written. I wish more historians, Chinese and Western, would keep this in mind. BUT that doesn't mean we can willy-nilly make up or discard what we want to on a whim.
Granted, I didn't get that far into the book, but at this point, do I want to continue reading? I might learn something from this book. But I would have zero confidence in what I learned. I would constantly be rereading passages sorting out her unsubstantiated guesses from what is known.
I can recommend Jacques Gernet's "A History of Chinese Civilization" which covers the same time period (plus later periods), in the same introductory manner though with different emphases, with at least as many words -- and it's history.
(July 23, 2006 - this review was fixed and reposted after Amazon's computer ate the original) |
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