I skipped right to chapters 6 and 7, which deal with the 20th century. Almost right away, I found out why Paris has such a large Chinese population. And interestingly enough, that both Chou Enlai and Deng Xiau Ping were in Paris as students. I read the first page of this book out loud to my seven-year old. He liked hearing about the daring pirates of the early fifth century.
China is a huge country with a long history.
What's amazing is how much Joanna Waley-Cohen packs into just 250 pages. If you have ever been interested in China, you definitely ought to consider reading Sextants of Beijing . It's a book designed for the general reader, not the specialist, and the design succeeds. It helped me to understand and interpret the importance of China, and I learned 4 or 5 really interesting things on practically every page. All Rights Reserved.