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Sharon: The Life of a Leader
By Gilad Sharon. 2011
Drawn from extensive personal archives and filled withstartling revelations, the definitive biography of Ariel Sharon illuminates hislife and work from…
the penetrating perspective of his youngest son, Gilad Sharon—one of his father’s closest confidants.Readers of George W. Bush’s Decision Points, Tony Blair’s A Journey,Yitzhak Rabin’s The Rabin Memoirs, and Moshe Dayan’s Story of My Life,as well as Benjamin Netanyahu’s A Durable Peace, will be fascinated by Gilad Sharon’s piercing, authoritative, and intimateportrait of Ariel Sharon the Prime Minister, the father, and the military hero,in a narrative that traces his evolution into a powerful and influential forceat the center of Middle Eastern and world politics.The Last Wild Men of Borneo: A True Story of Death and Treasure
By Carl Hoffman. 2018
A 2019 EDGAR AWARDS NOMINEE (BEST FACT CRIME) • A BANFF MOUNTAIN BOOK AWARDS FINALISTTwo modern adventurers sought a treasure possessed by…
the legendary “Wild Men of Borneo.” One found riches. The other vanished forever into an endless jungle. Had he shed civilization—or lost his mind? Global headlines suspected murder. Lured by these mysteries, New York Times bestselling author Carl Hoffman journeyed to find the truth, discovering that nothing is as it seems in the world’s last Eden, where the lines between sinner and saint blur into one.In 1984, Swiss traveler Bruno Manser joined an expedition to the Mulu caves on Borneo, the planet’s third largest island. There he slipped into the forest interior to make contact with the Penan, an indigenous tribe of peace-loving nomads living among the Dayak people, the fabled “Headhunters of Borneo.” Bruno lived for years with the Penan, gaining acceptance as a member of the tribe. However, when commercial logging began devouring the Penan’s homeland, Bruno led the tribe against these outside forces, earning him status as an enemy of the state, but also worldwide fame as an environmental hero. He escaped captivity under gunfire twice, but the strain took a psychological toll. Then, in 2000, Bruno disappeared without a trace. Had he become a madman, a hermit, or a martyr?American Michael Palmieri is, in many ways, Bruno’s opposite. Evading the Vietnam War, the Californian wandered the world, finally settling in Bali in the 1970s. From there, he staged expeditions into the Bornean jungle to acquire astonishing art and artifacts from the Dayaks. He would become one of the world’s most successful tribal-art field collectors, supplying sacred works to prestigious museums and wealthy private collectors. And yet suspicion shadowed this self-styled buccaneer who made his living extracting the treasure of the Dayak: Was he preserving or exploiting native culture?As Carl Hoffman unravels the deepening riddle of Bruno’s disappearance and seeks answers to the questions surrounding both men, it becomes clear saint and sinner are not so easily defined and Michael and Bruno are, in a sense, two parts of one whole: each spent his life in pursuit of the sacred fire of indigenous people. The Last Wild Men of Borneo is the product of Hoffman’s extensive travels to the region, guided by Penan through jungle paths traveled by Bruno and by Palmieri himself up rivers to remote villages. Hoffman also draws on exclusive interviews with Manser’s family and colleagues, and rare access to his letters and journals. Here is a peerless adventure propelled by the entwined lives of two singular, enigmatic men whose stories reveal both the grandeur and the precarious fate of the wildest place on earth.Ghosts Of Gold Mountain: The Epic Story of the Chinese Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad
By Gordon H. Chang. 2019
&“Gripping . . . Chang has accomplished the seemingly impossible . . . He has written a remarkably rich, human,…
and compelling story of the railroad Chinese.&” — Peter Cozzens, Wall Street JournalWINNER OF THE ASIAN/PACIFIC AMERICAN AWARD FOR LITERATURE WINNER OF THE CHINESE AMERICAN LIBRARIANS ASSOCIATION BEST BOOK AWARDA groundbreaking, breathtaking history of the Chinese workers who built the Transcontinental Railroad, helping to forge modern America only to disappear into the shadows of history until now From across the sea, they came by the thousands, escaping war and poverty in southern China to seek their fortunes in America. Converging on the enormous western worksite of the Transcontinental Railroad, the migrants spent years dynamiting tunnels through the snow-packed cliffs of the Sierra Nevada and laying tracks across the burning Utah desert. Their sweat and blood fueled the ascent of an interlinked, industrial United States. But those of them who survived this perilous effort would suffer a different kind of death: a historical one, as they were pushed first to the margins of American life and then to the fringes of public memory. In this groundbreaking account, award-winning scholar Gordon H. Chang draws on unprecedented research to recover the Chinese railroad workers&’ stories and celebrate their role in remaking America. An invaluable correction of a great historical injustice, The Ghosts of Gold Mountain returns these &“silent spikes&” to their rightful place in our national saga.&“The lived experience of the Railroad Chinese has long been elusive . . . Chang&’s book is a moving effort to recover their stories and honor their indispensable contribution to the building of modern America.&” — New York TimesGreat State: China and the World
By Timothy Brook. 2019
The world-renowned scholar and author of Vermeer’s Hat does for China what Mary Beard did for Rome in SPQR: Timothy…
Brook analyzes the last eight centuries of China’s relationship with the world in this magnificent history that brings together accounts from civil servants, horse traders, spiritual leaders, explorers, pirates, emperors, migrant workers, invaders, visionaries, and traitors—creating a multifaceted portrait of this highly misunderstood nation.China is one of the oldest states in the world. It achieved its approximate current borders with the Ascendancy of the Yuan dynasty in the thirteenth century, and despite the passing of one Imperial dynasty to the next, has maintained them for the eight centuries since. China remained China through the Ming, the Qing, the Republic, the Occupation, and Communism. But despite the desires of some of the most powerful people in the Great State through the ages, China has never been alone in the world. It has had to contend with invaders as well as foreign traders and imperialists. Its rulers for the majority of the last eight centuries have not been Chinese.China became a mega-state not by conquering others, Timothy Brook contends, but rather by being conquered by others and then claiming right of succession to the empires of those Great States. What the Mongols and Manchu ruling families wrought, the Chinese ruling families of the Ming, the Republic, and the People’s Republic, have perpetuated. Yet a contemporary Chinese idea of a ‘fatherland’ that is, and always has been, completely and naturally Chinese persists. Brook argues that China, like everywhere, is the outcome of history, and like every state, rests on its capacities to conquer and suppress.In The Great State, Brook examines China’s relationship with the world at large for the first time, from the Yuan through to the present, by following the stories of ordinary and extraordinary people navigating the spaces where China met, and continues to meet, the world. The Great State includes black-and-white photos throughout.The Gaidinliu Uprising in British India: Encountering the Millenarian
By Sajal Nag. 2024
This book studies the Gaidinliu uprising led by Rani Gaidinliu, a spiritual and political leader from Northeast India. It follows…
the journey of Gaidinliu, who was at the forefront of the revolt which turned into a political movement seeking to drive out the British from Manipur and the surrounding Naga areas. The book looks at the Gaidinliu movement as one of many tribal responses to colonial transformation, deprivation, alienation, and extreme oppression of the tribal formations in India. It also critically analyses the diverse colonial modes of tackling the different types of opposition to its rule and examines how the State devised to permanently erase the idea of rebellion from the minds of its subjects as a future strategy.A unique contribution, the book will be indispensable to political science, modern history, gender studies, subaltern studies, political theory, tribal studies, political sociology, political history, colonialism, post-colonial studies, and South Asia studies, particularly those interested in Northeast India.The Fox Spirit, the Stone Maiden, and Other Transgender Histories from Late Imperial China
By Matthew H. Sommer. 2024
In imperial China, people moved away from the gender they were assigned at birth in different ways and for many…
reasons. Eunuchs, boy actresses, and clergy left behind normative gender roles defined by family and procreation. “Stone maidens”—women deemed physically incapable of vaginal intercourse—might depart from families or marriages to become Buddhist or Daoist nuns. Anatomical males who presented as women sometimes took a conventionally female occupation such as midwife, faith healer, or even medium to a fox spirit. Yet they were often punished harshly for the crime of “masquerading in women’s attire,” suspected of sexual predation, even when they had lived peacefully in their communities for many years.Exploring these histories and many more, this book is a groundbreaking study of transgender lives and practices in late imperial China. Through close readings of court cases, as well as Ming and Qing fiction and nineteenth-century newspaper accounts, Matthew H. Sommer examines the social, legal, and cultural histories of gender crossing. He considers a range of transgender experiences, illuminating how certain forms of gender transgression were sanctioned in particular social contexts and penalized in others. Sommer scrutinizes the ways Qing legal authorities and literati writers represented and understood gender-nonconforming people and practices, contrasting official ideology with popular mentalities. An unprecedented account of China’s transgender histories, this book also sheds new light on a range of themes in Ming and Qing law, religion, medicine, literature, and culture.What roles did Americans play in the expanding global empires of the nineteenth century? Thomas M. Larkin examines the Hong…
Kong–based Augustine Heard & Company, the most prominent American trading firm in treaty-port China, to explore the ways American elites at once made and were made by British colonial society. Following the Heard brothers throughout their firm’s rise and decline, The China Firm reveals how nineteenth-century China’s American elite adapted to colonial culture, helped entrench social and racial hierarchies, and exploited the British imperial project for their own profit as they became increasingly invested in its political affairs and commercial networks.Through the central narrative of Augustine Heard & Co., Larkin disentangles the ties that bound the United States to China and the British Empire in the nineteenth century. Drawing on a vast range of archival material from Hong Kong, China, Boston, and London, he weaves the local and the global together to trace how Americans gained acceptance into and contributed to the making of colonial societies and world-spanning empires. Uncovering the transimperial lives of these American traders and the complex ways extraimperial communities interacted with British colonialism, The China Firm makes a vital contribution to global histories of nineteenth-century Asia and provides an alternative narrative of British empire.Japan's Holocaust: History of Imperial Japan's Mass Murder and Rape During World War II
By Bryan Mark Rigg. 2024
Japan&’s Holocaust is a comprehensive exploration of Japan&’s mass murder and sexual crimes during the Pacific and Asian Wars from…
1927 to 1945.Japan&’s Holocaust combines research conducted in over eighteen research facilities in five nations to explore Imperial Japan&’s atrocities from 1927 to 1945 during its military expansions and reckless campaigns throughout Asia and the Pacific. This book brings together the most recent scholarship and new primary research to ascertain that Japan claimed a minimum of thirty million lives, slaughtering far more than Hitler&’s Nazi Germany. Japan&’s Holocaust shows that Emperor Hirohito not only knew about the atrocities his legions committed, but actually ordered them. He did nothing to stop them when they exceeded even the most depraved person&’s imagination, as illustrated during the Rape of Nanking as well as many other events. Japan&’s Holocaust will document in painful detail that the Rape of Nanking was not an isolated event during the Asian War but rather representative of how Japan behaved for all its campaigns throughout Asia and the Pacific from 1927 to 1945.Mass murder, rape, and economic exploitation was Japan&’s modus operandi during this time period, and whereas Hitler&’s SS Death&’s Head outfits attempted to hide their atrocities, Hirohito&’s legions committed their atrocities out in the open with fanfare and enthusiasm. Moreover, whereas Germany has done much since World War II to atone for its crimes and to document them, Japan has been absolutely disgraceful with its reparations for its crimes and in its efforts to educate its population about its wartime past. Shockingly, Japan continues, in general, to glorify is criminals and its wartime past.Contemporary developments in communications technologies have overturned key aspects of the global political system and transformed the media landscape. Yet…
interlocking technological, informational, and political revolutions have occurred many times in the past. In China, radio first arrived in the winter of 1922-23, bursting into a world where communication was slow, disjointed, or non-existent. Less than ten percent of the population ever read newspapers. Just fifty years later, at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, news broadcasts reached hundreds of millions of people instantaneously, every day. How did Chinese citizens experience the rapid changes in information practices and political organization that occurred in this period? What was it like to live through a news revolution? John Alekna traces the history of news in twentieth-century China to demonstrate how large structural changes in technology and politics were heard and felt. Scrutinizing the flow of news can reveal much about society and politics—illustrating who has power and why, and uncovering the connections between different regions, peoples, and social classes. Taking an innovative, holistic view of information practices, Alekna weaves together both rural and urban history to tell the story of the rise of mass society through the lens of communication techniques and technology, showing how the news revolution fundamentally reordered the political geography of China.Made in China: When US-China Interests Converged to Transform Global Trade
By Elizabeth O’Brien Ingleson. 2024
The surprising story of how Cold War foes found common cause in transforming China’s economy into a source of cheap…
labor, creating the economic interdependence that characterizes our world today.For centuries, the vastness of the Chinese market tempted foreign companies in search of customers. But in the 1970s, when the United States and China ended two decades of Cold War isolation, China’s trade relations veered in a very different direction. Elizabeth Ingleson shows how the interests of US business and the Chinese state aligned to reframe the China market: the old dream of plentiful customers gave way to a new vision of low-cost workers by the hundreds of millions. In the process, the world’s largest communist state became an indispensable component of global capitalism.Drawing on Chinese- and English-language sources, including previously unexplored corporate papers, Ingleson traces this transformation to the actions of Chinese policymakers, US diplomats, maverick entrepreneurs, Chinese American traders, and executives from major US corporations including Boeing, Westinghouse, J. C. Penney, and Chase Manhattan Bank. Long before Walmart and Apple came to China, businesspeople such as Veronica Yhap, Han Fanyu, Suzanne Reynolds, and David Rockefeller instigated a trade revolution with lasting consequences. And while China’s economic reorganization was essential to these connections, Ingleson also highlights an underappreciated but crucial element of the convergence: the US corporate push for deindustrialization and its embrace by politicians.Reexamining two of the most significant transformations of the 1970s—US-China rapprochement and deindustrialization in the United States—Made in China takes bilateral trade back to its faltering, uncertain beginnings, identifying the tectonic shifts in diplomacy, labor, business, and politics in both countries that laid the foundations of today’s globalized economy.Israel's Black Panthers: The Radicals Who Punctured a Nation's Founding Myth
By Asaf Elia-Shalev. 2024
The powerful story of an activist movement that challenged the racial inequities of Israel. Israel's Black Panthers tells the story…
of the young and impoverished Moroccan Israeli Jews who challenged their country's political status quo and rebelled against the ethnic hierarchy of Israeli life in the 1970s. Inspired by the American group of the same name, the Black Panthers mounted protests and a yearslong political campaign for the rights of Mizrahim, or Jews of Middle Eastern ancestry. They managed to rattle the country's establishment and change the course of Israel's history through the mass mobilization of a Jewish underclass. This book draws on archival documents and interviews with elderly activists to capture the movement's history and reveal little-known stories from within the group. Asaf Elia-Shalev explores the parallels between the Israeli and American Black Panthers, offering a unique perspective on the global struggle against racism and oppression. In twenty short and captivating chapters, Israel's Black Panthers provides a textured and novel account of the movement and reflects on the role that Mizrahim can play in the future of Israel.This book focuses on the war in Afghanistan. In 2010 and 2011, the author took a leave from her faculty…
position at the University of California, Irvine to train and then deploy as a cultural advisor with two U.S. Army combat units in Afghanistan. Her account begins with the U.S. Army’s four-month training program for cultural advisors, follows her deployment, much of it on missions to remote and volatile areas far from brigade headquarters, and concludes with her uneasy return home.She examines the everyday lives of Americans sent to conduct a war of counterinsurgency, including their sexual exploits on base, their superstitions, even the heroic accounts that military contractors recount in their personal stories of past wars, stories that are sometimes a little too good to be true. In turn, she explores the views of ordinary Afghans to this American occupation.Rescue at Los Baños: The Most Daring Prison Camp Raid of World War II
By Bruce Henderson. 2015
From the New York Times bestselling author of Sons and Soldiers comes the incredible true story of one of the…
greatest military rescues of all time, the 1945 World War II prison camp raid at Los Baños in the Philippines—a tale of daring, courage, and heroism that joins the ranks of Ghost Soldiers, Unbroken, and The Boys of Pointe du Hoc.In February 1945, as the U.S. victory in the Pacific drew nearer, the Japanese army grew desperate, and its soldiers guarding U.S. and Allied POWs more sadistic. Starved, shot and beaten, many of the 2,146 prisoners of the Los Baños prison camp in the Philippines—most of them American men, women and children—would not survive much longer unless rescued soon.Deeply concerned about the half-starved and ill-treated prisoners, General Douglas MacArthur assigned to the 11th Airborne Division a dangerous rescue mission deep behind enemy lines that became a deadly race against the clock. The Los Baños raid would become one of the greatest triumphs of that war or any war; hailed years later by Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Colin Powell: “I doubt that any airborne unit in the world will ever be able to rival the Los Baños prison raid. It is the textbook operation for all ages and all armies.”Combining personal interviews, diaries, correspondence, memoirs, and archival research, Rescue at Los Baños tells the story of a remarkable group of prisoners—whose courage and fortitude helped them overcome hardship, deprivation, and cruelty—and of the young American soldiers and Filipino guerrillas who risked their lives to save them.Like Dreamers: The Story of the Israeli Paratroopers Who Reunited Jerusalem and Divided a Nation
By Yossi Klein Halevi. 2013
Winner of the Everett Family Jewish Book of the Year Award (a National Jewish Book Award) and the RUSA Sophie…
Brody Medal.In Like Dreamers, acclaimed journalist Yossi Klein Halevi interweaves the stories of a group of 1967 paratroopers who reunited Jerusalem, tracing the history of Israel and the divergent ideologies shaping it from the Six-Day War to the present.Following the lives of seven young members from the 55th Paratroopers Reserve Brigade, the unit responsible for restoring Jewish sovereignty to Jerusalem, Halevi reveals how this band of brothers played pivotal roles in shaping Israel’s destiny long after their historic victory. While they worked together to reunite their country in 1967, these men harbored drastically different visions for Israel’s future.One emerges at the forefront of the religious settlement movement, while another is instrumental in the 2005 unilateral withdrawal from Gaza. One becomes a driving force in the growth of Israel’s capitalist economy, while another ardently defends the socialist kibbutzim. One is a leading peace activist, while another helps create an anti-Zionist terror underground in Damascus.Featuring an eight pages of black-and-white photos and maps, Like Dreamers is a nuanced, in-depth look at these diverse men and the conflicting beliefs that have helped to define modern Israel and the Middle East.Asian Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India, and Japan
By Brahma Chellaney. 2010
In Asian Juggernaut, the revelatory and important International Bestseller by Brahma Chellaney, a renowned authority on Asia’s political and economic…
development offers an incisive and insightful analysis of the region’s pivotal role on the world stage. Examining the rise of China, India, and Japan as preeminent powers and their key position in the global future, Asian Juggernaut is a book that must be read by anyone interested in the shape of tomorrow’s world.Gujarat Beyond Gandhi: Identity, Society and Conflict (Routledge South Asian History and Culture Series)
By Nalin Mehta, Mona G. Mehta. 2011
The birthplace of Mahatma Gandhi and the land that produced Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, Gujarat has been…
at the centre-stage of South Asia’s political iconography for more than a century. As Gujarat, created as a separate state in 1960, celebrates its golden jubilee this collection of essays critically explores the many paradoxes and complexities of modernity and politics in the state. The contributors provide much-needed insights into the dominant impulses of identity formation, cultural change, political mobilisation, religious movements and modes of communication that define modern Gujarat. This book touches upon a fascinating range of topics – the identity debates at the heart of the idea of modern Gujarat; the trajectory of Gujarati politics from the 1950s to the present day; bootlegging, the practice of corruption and public power; vegetarianism and violence; urban planning and the enabling infrastructure of antagonism; global diasporas and provincial politics – providing new insights into understanding the enigma of Gujarat. Going well beyond the boundaries of Gujarat and engaging with larger questions about democracy and diversity in India, this book will appeal to those interested in South Asian Studies, politics, sociology, history as well as the general reader. This book was published as a special issue of South Asian History and Culture.Religious Cultures in Early Modern India: New Perspectives (Routledge South Asian History and Culture Series)
By Rosalind O’Hanlon and David Washbrook. 2012
Religious authority and political power have existed in complex relationships throughout India’s history. The centuries of the ‘early modern’ in…
South Asia saw particularly dynamic developments in this relationship. Regional as well as imperial states of the period expanded their religious patronage, while new sectarian centres of doctrinal and spiritual authority emerged beyond the confines of the state. Royal and merchant patronage stimulated the growth of new classes of mobile intellectuals deeply committed to the reappraisal of many aspects of religious law and doctrine. Supra-regional institutions and networks of many other kinds - sect-based religious maths, pilgrimage centres and their guardians, sants and sufi orders - flourished, offering greater mobility to wider communities of the pious. This was also a period of growing vigour in the development of vernacular religious literatures of different kinds, and often of new genres blending elements of older devotional, juridical and historical literatures. Oral and manuscript literatures too gained more rapid circulation, although the meaning and canonical status of texts frequently changed as they circulated more widely and reached larger lay audiences.Through explorations of these developments, the essays in this collection make a distinctive contribution to a critical formative period in the making of India’s modern religious cultures.This book was published as a special issue of South Asian History and Culture.Kang Youwei Engages India: His Travel Narratives (1901–1902) and Predicaments of Civilization and Nation
By Kamal Sheel, Ranjana Sheel. 2024
This book is the first annotated translation of the travelogues of Kang Youwei, one of the most famous intellectuals and…
modernisers of late 19th-century China. These travelogues offer insights into Kang’s perceptions of India, which influenced modern intellectual discourse on India in China. These perceptions not only had a great impact on the thinking of other intellectuals but were also responsible for the larger construct that China developed about India during the republican and post-liberation period. The texts provide meaning to many dilemmas and predicaments that enshrouded the concept of civilisation and its linkages with the modern concepts of nationalism and modernity in Asian countries such as China and India. They are a valuable prism in gauging the early 20th-century intellectual and Chinese moderniser mind as it grappled with the challenges and uncertainties of those times. An important contribution to the study of Sino-Indian interactions, the book will be an indispensable resource for students and researchers of nation, nationalism, civilisation, empire, modern history, translation studies, Chinese Studies, and Asian studies.The Loom of Time: Between Empire and Anarchy, from the Mediterranean to China
By Robert D. Kaplan. 2023
A stunning exploration of the Greater Middle East, where lasting stability has often seemed just out of reach but may…
hold the key to the shifting world order of the twenty-first century&“Engaging . . . Even those who resist Kaplan&’s tragic sensibility have much to learn from his look at the emerging Middle East and its recent history.&”—National Review The Greater Middle East, which Robert D. Kaplan defines as the vast region between the Mediterranean and China, encompassing much of the Arab world, parts of northern Africa, and Asia, existed for millennia as the crossroads of empire: Macedonian, Roman, Persian, Mongol, Ottoman, British, Soviet, American. But with the dissolution of empires in the twentieth century, postcolonial states have endeavored to maintain stability in the face of power struggles between factions, leadership vacuums, and the arbitrary borders drawn by exiting imperial rulers with little regard for geography or political groups on the ground. In the Loom of Time, Kaplan explores this broad, fraught space through reporting and travel writing to reveal deeper truths about the impacts of history on the present and how the requirements of stability over anarchy are often in conflict with the ideals of democratic governance. In The Loom of Time, Kaplan makes the case for realism as an approach to the Greater Middle East. Just as Western attempts at democracy promotion across the Middle East have failed, a new form of economic imperialism is emerging today as China's ambitions fall squarely within the region as the key link between Europe and East Asia. As in the past, the Greater Middle East will be a register of future great power struggles across the globe. And like in the past, thousands of years of imperial rule will continue to cast a long shadow on politics as it is practiced today. To piece together the history of this remarkable place and what it suggests for the future, Kaplan weaves together classic texts, immersive travel writing, and a great variety of voices from every country that all compel the reader to look closely at the realities on the ground and to prioritize these facts over ideals on paper. The Loom of Time is a challenging, clear-eyed book that promises to reframe our vision of the global twenty-first century.Life And Afterlife In Ancient China
By Jessica Rawson. 2023
The three millennia up to the establishment of the first imperial Qin dynasty in 221 BC cemented many of the…
distinctive elements of Chinese civilization still in place today: an extraordinarily challenging geography and environment; formidable infrastructure; a society based on the strict hierarchy of the family; a shared written script of characters; a cuisine founded on rice and millet; a material culture of ceramics, bronze, silk, and jade; and a unique concept of the universe, in which ancestors continue to exist alongside the living. Records of these early achievements and their diverse expressions often lie not in written history but in how people marked the end of their lives: their dwellings for the afterlife. Tombs and the treasures within them are almost the only artifacts to survive from Ancient China; their scale and sophistication rivals their equivalents in Ancient Egypt. Jessica Rawson, one of the most eminent Western scholars of China, explores twelve grand tombs―each from a specific historical moment and place―showing how they reveal wider political, dynastic, and cultural developments, culminating in the lavish ambition of the First Emperor's monument, guarded by his army of terracotta warriors. Beautifully illustrated and drawing on the latest archaeological discoveries, Life and Afterlife in Ancient China illuminates a constellation of beliefs about life and death and provides a remarkable new perspective on one of the oldest civilizations in the world.