Before he became an award-winning novelist, the Indian writer Vikram Seth was an exchange student in China. In the 1980s, he traveled overland from Nanjing...

History is supposedly written by the victors. Sima Qian, author of China's original historical classic, showed it could also be written by the condemned.

A clever skewering of British colonials in pre-handover Hong Kong became a best-seller for its portrait of imperial ruin and class jockeying.

The autopsy of an American automaker’s failed dream of making and selling jeeps in China reveals much about the delusional thinking of joint ventures in...

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...