The excavation of early Chinese manuscripts written on bamboo, wood or silk (from the late Warring States to the Three Kingdoms) is upending previous accounts of early Chinese history. The Cang Jie Pian is one of them, developed as a primer to teach standardized forms of Chinese characters, and impart simple knowledge written in four-character rhyming lines. The bamboo scrolls at Peking University (dated to about 100 BCE) are the most complete version discovered to date. It provides the thrill of being able to read the ancestor of Chinese primers and dictionaries for the next 2,000 years. Like most printed publications of ancient Chinese manuscripts this edition provides everything you need to be able to read it: actual-size color photos of the 30cm long bamboo slips, supplemented with magnified and infrared images of unclear characters, as well as transcriptions, annotations and scholarly analysis.

Many Chinese architects in the 20th century set themselves the impossibly difficult task of retaining elements of traditional Chinese architectural style (mostly single-story dwellings using wood, stone, clay tiles and rammed earth) while designing multi-story buildings (built with reinforced concrete, steel and glass). One short-lived solution, in the 1940s and 50s, was to build Western-style buildings with the new materials, capped with Chinese tiles and eaves to decorate the roof (“matching a Western suit with a Chinese skullcap”). Things have moved rapidly since then as architects have experimented with subtle international styles or with no evocations of the past at all. The strength of this coffee-table book is the photographs of 212 Chinese buildings that Steinhardt features. I found in it new things about familiar buildings, and discovered architectural wonders that I never knew existed. But beware the historical background notes: elementary mistakes are as thick as the leaves of Vallombrosa.

The author, a Hungarian-born Jesuit China-watcher, authored this book on his retirement from editing China News Analysis from 1953-1982, a newsletter that he based on his close reading of official PRC news and photos. Here is a typical Ladanyi quip: “Zhou Enlai was one of those men who never tell the truth and never tell a lie. For them there is no distinction between the two.” Simon Leys (as featured in my next pick) summed up Ladanyi’s work neatly in a 1990 NYRB essay that characterizes CCP dialectics as “the jolly art that enables the Supreme Leader never to make mistakes — for even if he did the wrong thing, he did it at the right time, which makes it right for him to have been wrong, whereas the Enemy, even if he did the right thing, did it at the wrong time, which makes it wrong for him to have been right.” Both the book and the review make fascinating reading on the Chinese Communist Party in its first 60 years.

Pierre Ryckmans adopted the pen name Simon Leys for this and subsequent books so as to avoid problems getting a China visa. Before making his name as a Sinologist, he worked in the Belgian consulate in Hong Kong monitoring the Chinese press during the Cultural Revolution. The Chairman’s New Clothes has the distinction of being the first work to declare that the Cultural Revolution was a chaotic power grab with “nothing revolutionary about it except the name, and nothing cultural about it except the initial tactical pretext.” It was exceedingly unpopular among Maoists, especially in Paris, and of course it was never published in China. Although French is his first language, Leys was famous for his mordant wit in English. Various of his essays were also reprinted in The Hall of Uselessness: Collected Essays (2011).

Modern Chinese is packed with neologisms, and there are plenty of specialized dictionaries to help keep up with them. In this analytic study of classical rhythms (such as wuyan 五言) in everyday speech and political slogans, Link goes a step further, describing the characteristics of political language before and after the rise of the internet. There is as yet no detailed study in any language of the development from the numbered sets of the Confucian, Daoist and Buddhist traditions (the Three Bonds, Four Greats and Three Treasures respectively) to the political slogans of today, also expressed in numbered sets (the Four Modernizations, Three Represents, Four Comprehensives). Yet Link is suggestive of it, and Yin Xiaolin (尹小林), while still a youthful artillery officer, has also compiled a dictionary of 2,760 classical Chinese mnemonic number sets, Hanyu Shumai Cidian 汉语数目词辞典 (Zhonghua Shudian, 1993). ∎