China Books Review

Emily Hahn: China to Me

Emily Hahn: China to Me

In her memoir of 1930s and 40s China, the New Yorker correspondent brought the country to life while coming down from opium binges in Shanghai and hiding in bomb shelters in Chongqing.

Philip Kuhn: Sorcery and Bureaucracy in Qing China

Philip Kuhn: Sorcery and Bureaucracy in Qing China

A supernatural crisis pits an anxious autocrat against his own functionaries when a hunt for soul-stealing sorcerers turns into a political witch-hunt among 18th-century China’s “deep state.”

Peter Goullart: Forgotten Kingdom

Peter Goullart: Forgotten Kingdom

20 years after “Shangri-La” was coined in the Western imagination, a Russian adventurer published a memoir from the valley of Lijiang, southwest China, that is strikingly similar yet a world apart.

Ellen La Motte: An American Nurse in Peking

Ellen La Motte: An American Nurse in Peking

In 1916, an American activist and writer traveled to China from the frontlines of World War I. What she saw in the city delighted her; what she saw in the opium trade appalled her.