Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Preface
Introduction

Part I: The Classical Legacy, 1000–1350
Chapter 1 Song: The Great Divide
Chapter 2 The Barbarian Ascendancy
Chapter 3 The Imperial Myth: The Mandate Of Heaven
Part II: The Imperial Way, 1350–1650
Chapter 4 The Rise of the Ming
Chapter 5 Autocrat, Bureaucrat, Empress, Eunuch
Chapter 6 The Ming and the World
Chapter 7 Luan: Disintegration of Order
Part III: The High Qing, 1650–1800
Chapter 8 The Manchu Revolution
Chapter 9 Style and Substance: Imperial Culture
Chapter 10 Imperial Absolutism: The Monarch and the Minister
Part IV: Ming and Qing Foundations, 1368–1900
Chapter 11 The Good Earth
Chapter 12 Merchants and Markets
Chapter 13 Official Life and literati Culture
Chapter 14 Images in the Heavens, Pattern on the Earth
Chapter 15 The Spiritual World
Chapter 16 The Relevance of Confucius
Part V: When Worlds Collide, 1500–1870
Chapter 17 The Empire and the Garden
Chapter 18 Opium
Chapter 19 The Heavenly Kingdom
Part VI: Continuity in Change, 1870–1890
Chapter 20 Self-strengthening and its Fate
Epilogue The Twilight of Imperial China

Selected Bibliography
Index
About the Author

About the Author

Jonathan Porter is professor emeritus of history at the University of New Mexico. His books include Tseng Kuo-fan's Private Bureaucracy, All Under Heaven: The Chinese World, and Macau: The Imaginary City. Culture and Society, 1557 to the Present.

Reviews

Porter capitalizes on four decades of teaching Chinese history to produce this work on China's last two dynasties. He emphasizes the mega trends and offers vignettes that will ingratiate the work to readers. These vignettes consist principally of biographies of leading figures and ordinary individuals whose lives reflect developments in the Imperial period. The book deviates from the usual interpretations of Chinese history that cover from the 17th century on as a response to the West. Instead, Porter emphasizes the domestic events and concerns that shaped the Qing dynasty’s (1644–1911) responses. Porter does not ignore the West's impact, but he places it in the context of indigenous developments that Chinese and Manchu policy makers faced. Another valuable distinction is Porter’s treatment of the Qing as a Manchu dynasty influenced by Chinese civilization. Until recently, conventional wisdom was that the Manchu rulers had rapidly become Sinicized and that the dynasty scarcely differed from traditional Chinese ones. Incorporating the insights of the New Qing historians, Porter examines the Qing as a multiethnic empire under Manchu leadership. The writing is clear and free of jargon, the book is well organized, and the maps are unfussy and fit in with the text.

Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.
*CHOICE*

Professor Porter has produced the ideal textbook for a late Imperial China course. I read the book with growing admiration and enthusiasm. There is, simply put, an enormous amount of wisdom and pedagogical experience embedded in this book, more than enough to guide undergraduate students for years to come. The content is balanced, with the story told in twenty disciplined chapters. The writing is clear and judicious and avoids pitfalls in a way that only an experienced teacher could.
*R. Kent Guy, University of Washington*

Reading Jonathan Porter’s Imperial China feels as comfortable as an old shoe and as clear as a new pair of glasses. Deftly incorporating a generation of Western scholarship on late Imperial China, Porter tells the story with a judicious use of the classical referents through which Chinese understand their own past. The product of four decades of teaching, this text should find a place in courses seeking to understand the last centuries of imperial rule and the background to China’s modern transformation.
*Joseph Esherick, emeritus, University of California, San Diego*

China's late Imperial period from the thirteenth to the nineteenth centuries is complex but essential to understanding the path to the modern world. Jonathan Porter’s new history of the period is conceptually compact while enlivened by vivid detail and consistent contact with the original documents. A wide range of readers will appreciate its unusual clarity, nuance, and focus.
*Pamela Kyle Crossley, Dartmouth College*