HISTORY
East Asian History
11 books
Eleven books covering the history of China, Japan, and Korea — three civilizations that together represent the longest continuous literary and political traditions on earth and that produced the most dramatic economic transformation in human history over the past century. The list covers the ancient foundations, the feudal era that Westerners know primarily through samurai films, the 20th-century upheavals that included two of the most consequential revolutions in modern history, and the specific collision between East Asian and Western power that defined the 19th and 20th centuries. The geographic scope is large and the list is necessarily selective — each entry was chosen for the quality of the narrative and the importance of the subject, not as a representative sample.
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Wild Swans
Jung Chang
Chang traces three generations of her family across the full arc of twentieth-century China — her grandmother, a warlord's concubine in the final years of imperial China; her mother, a Communist Party official who gave everything to the revolution; and herself, coming of age as a Red Guard during the Cultural Revolution before becoming one of its targets. The Cultural Revolution chapters — where teenage zealots destroyed everything the civilization had built and turned children against parents as a matter of revolutionary duty — are among the most disturbing things on this entire project. Chang writes it as personal history rather than political analysis and the effect is more devastating for it. The book that belongs here rather than the Cold War list because it covers the full Chinese human experience, not just the superpower competition.
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Country Driving
Peter Hessler
Hessler spent a decade as the New Yorker's China correspondent and wrote the essential account of what the fastest economic transformation in human history actually looks like from the inside. Three acts: driving the length of the Great Wall following a newly paved road, renting a farmhouse in a village north of Beijing and watching it transform as the economy arrives, and embedding in a factory town in Zhejiang province watching young women from rural Sichuan become industrial workers. The Wall sections give this historical depth that complements the dedicated Great Wall entry elsewhere on this list. For the reader who wants China's business disaster comedy alongside the transformation story, Tim Clissold's Mr. China covers losing $400 million in the emerging economy of the 1990s with the darkest possible humor.
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The Chrysanthemum and the Sword
Ruth Benedict
The US government commissioned this in 1946 to help Americans understand the culture they had just defeated — a culture whose soldiers fought with a ferocity that baffled commanders who had faced every other enemy in the war. Benedict was an anthropologist who had never visited Japan and worked entirely from interviews, documents, and films. The result is the most penetrating account of Japanese culture ever written by an outsider: the distinction between shame culture and guilt culture, the specific Japanese relationship with obligation and hierarchy, the way Bushido was adapted into industrial militarism, and why the same civilization that produced kamikazes also produced the disciplined postwar reconstruction that followed. Written without condescension and without the exoticizing that ruins most Western accounts of Japan. Still the essential book for understanding what the Meiji transformation built and what it eventually became.
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The Great Wall
John Man
The wall tourists visit today was built by the Ming dynasty in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries — a different structure from the earthwork barriers the Qin and Han dynasties built two thousand years earlier, and almost certainly not visible from space. Man covers the full history of wall-building in China across multiple dynasties: what each version was actually trying to accomplish, how effective it was as a defensive barrier, and the specific paradox of a civilization that spent centuries building the largest structure in human history against nomadic peoples it could never quite defeat. Country Driving, elsewhere on this list, opens with Hessler following a road that traces the Ming Wall and gives the modern ground-level view. Man gives you the full 2,000-year story that explains what Hessler is looking at.
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Samurai William
Giles Milton
In 1600 an English navigator named William Adams became the first Westerner to reach Japan and the first foreigner ever granted the rank of samurai. Tokugawa Ieyasu — in the process of unifying Japan and becoming its shogun — used Adams as a naval advisor and shipbuilder, refused to let him leave for a decade, and gave him a feudal estate and a Japanese wife. Milton covers the collision of Elizabethan England and samurai Japan, the texture of a feudal military culture seen through genuinely foreign eyes, and the question of what happens to a man when the world he was born into becomes permanently unreachable. Around 320 pages and reads like a thriller. James Clavell fictionalized the same story in Shogun if you want 1,200 pages of it; Milton's true account is more interesting.
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Korea: A Walk Through the Land of Miracles
Simon Winchester
Winchester walks the length of the Korean peninsula in 1988, just before the Seoul Olympics, using the journey to cover Korean history from the Three Kingdoms period through the Japanese occupation and the division. The medieval sections — the Goryeo dynasty that gave Korea its name, the Korean genius for ceramics and printing technology, and the Joseon dynasty's 500-year run as one of the most stable governments in Asian history — are the least covered material in English-language popular history and Winchester handles them with the care of a man who knows he is filling a genuine gap. The Cold War list carries the Korean War story through Halberstam's The Coldest Winter; this list carries everything that came before it and made that war matter.
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When China Ruled the Seas
Louise Levathes
Between 1405 and 1433 the Ming dynasty sent seven massive treasure fleets into the Indian Ocean under Zheng He, a Muslim eunuch admiral whose flagship was four times the size of anything Columbus sailed. The fleets reached East Africa, traded with Arabia, and established Chinese diplomatic presence across Southeast Asia — then the Ming court reversed course, banned oceangoing ships, and burned the records. China deliberately chose isolation at the precise moment Europe was beginning its age of exploration, and the question Levathes raises — what if it hadn't — is one of the most compelling counterfactuals in world history. Around 250 pages, genuinely propulsive, and the best argument this list makes for the specific contingency of Western dominance. The Ming dynasty's full story continues in Country Driving's account of what that civilization eventually became.
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Angkor and the Khmer Civilization
Michael Coe
The Khmer Empire built Angkor Wat — the largest religious monument ever constructed, a stone temple complex covering 400 acres in the Cambodian jungle — and then disappeared so completely that nineteenth-century European explorers refused to believe Cambodians could have built it. Coe is an archaeologist who covers the full arc of Khmer civilization: the hydraulic engineering that fed a city of a million people, the Hindu-Buddhist religious synthesis expressed in the architecture, the military campaigns that extended the empire across Southeast Asia, and the specific mystery of the collapse in the fifteenth century that archaeologists are still arguing about. Written for general readers rather than specialists and exactly the lost-civilization material that makes history lists worth building. Jon Swain's River of Time covers the ruins as a journalist witnessed them falling to the Khmer Rouge if you want the modern companion.
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Records of the Grand Historian
Sima Qian, trans. Burton Watson
Sima Qian was China's Herodotus — the court historian who wrote the definitive account of Chinese history from the Yellow Emperor through the Han dynasty around 100 BCE, covering the Warring States period, the First Emperor who ended it, and the full sweep of the civilization that followed. He wrote part of it after the emperor had him castrated for defending a general who surrendered to the Xiongnu — a detail that tells you everything about both men. The Burton Watson translation is the one to get: Watson was a literary translator first, a sinologist second, and the English reads cleanly rather than like a scholarly exercise. The Chinese names require some patience, but Watson minimizes the problem more than anyone else who has attempted this text.
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Hokkaido Highway Blues
Will Ferguson
Canadian writer Will Ferguson hitchhikes the length of Japan following the cherry blossom front from the southern tip of Kyushu to the northern tip of Hokkaido — a journey of several months through a country whose hitchhiking culture consists entirely of people who cannot believe anyone is hitchhiking. Ferguson is funny in the way that produces insight rather than condescension, and the Japan he encounters — the obsessive politeness, the vending machines selling things that have no business being in vending machines, the salarymen who pour their entire identity into a company that regards them as interchangeable — is the real Japan seen through genuinely curious foreign eyes. The best humor entry point to Japanese culture available, and the right note to end a list that has covered 2,500 years of East Asian history.
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The Art of War / The Book of Five Rings
Sun Tzu / Miyamoto Musashi
The Art of War remains the classic text on strategic warfare. Written in the 6th century, it’s been influencing military leaders, as well as businessmen and politicians among others, ever since. Its themes and ideas have been studied and re-studied over many centuries, and it would do a man well in all facets of life to read through the book’s proverbs every now and then as a refresher on tactical prowess.