The Chinese Century: A Photographic History of the Last Hundred Years
Jonathan Spence, a distinguished historian of China, and his wife Annping Chin, both teachers at Yale, have compiled an extraordinary collection of rare historic photographs documenting Chinese history through the century. The book has intimate portraits and large crowd shots, scenes of routine daily life and of dramatic events, famous people and anonymous citizens. The story of China in this century is a dramatic one--from waning imperial power through the Nationalist republic to the Communist revolution and the rise of the People's Republic and its gigantic swings in ideology. The pictures chosen for this collection tell part of that story on a human level, and the authors provide a supplementary text that illuminates the photographic history.