A 1930s novel of manners with evocative descriptions of Old Beijing offers surprisingly timeless observations about what it means to be an expat in China.

In 1935, the Chinese author Lin Yutang offered Westerners an insider’s guide to China's society. It endures today despite his own cultural contradictions.

A Scotsman’s memoir of tutoring Puyi, China’s “last emperor,” is more than just court gossip — it’s a tantalizing portrait of China’s imperial trappings.

An American writer’s memoir of World War II China remains a timely diagnosis of the pathologies of U.S. foreign policy in the wake of the...

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...

In 1900, the wife of an American envoy to China was caught up in the infamous siege of Beijing. The letters she wrote at the...

The left-wing journalist’s 1937 account of meeting Mao influenced a generation who saw China through rose-tinted glasses as late as the 1970s — until the...

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...

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;...

‘The Travels of Marco Polo’ is often held up as the earliest Western account of China and Asia. What’s actually inside the covers might surprise...