A Qing dynasty failson’s memoir of genteel poverty, parties and potting soil was rediscovered in a Suzhou book stall in 1874 and remains one of...

Over a century after it came out, Maugham's travelogue of his trip to China in 1919–20 reveals less about China itself, more about the foreigners...

The memoirs of Li Zhisui, Mao Zedong’s personal physician, tell a life of fatty pork and Daoist sex magic — and explain how to embalm...

Historical witnessing or salacious slash fiction? The memoirs of an English eccentric in Beijing during the last days of the Qing remain controversial, but are...

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...