China

Robert Bickers looks at an emerging archive of British photo albums that record both the drama of the 1911 revolution and the surprisingly untroubled daily lives of those who witnessed it.

Russel Tarr compares and contrasts the rise to power of two Communist leaders.

In the late 1890s Herbert Hoover, the future 31st President of the United States, took his new bride to Tianjin in north China to pursue his career as a geologist. Hal Wert describes how the couple became embroiled in the violent uprising that broke out in the summer of 1900.

The historical roots of the dispute between China and Japan over control of the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands reveal a great deal about the two countries’ current global standing, says Joyman Lee.

As China reclaims its central role in the world, Robert Bickers appeals to Britons and others in the West to take account of the legacy left by the country’s difficult 19th century.

On a research trip to Moscow in the late 1990s, Deborah Kaple was given a package of papers by a former Gulag official who believed its contents would be of great interest to a western audience.

Frank Dikötter looks at how historians’ understanding of China has changed in recent years with the gradual opening of party archives that reveal the full horror of the Maoist era.

Though they originated in China, it was in the capitals of early modern Europe that fireworks flourished. They united art and science in awesome displays of poltical might, as Simon Werrett explains.

Richard Cavendish commemorates the traumatic but ultimately victorious march of Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communists.

This year sees a remarkable coincidence of anniversaries that tell the history of modern China. Some will be celebrated by the authorities on a grand scale, others will be wilfully ignored, but all reveal important aspects of the country’s past, as Jonathan Fenby explains.

The Dowager Empress of China, Tzu-hsi, died on November 15th, 1908, after ruling China for almost fifty years.

The Mongolian past has been drawn by both sides into twentieth-century disputes between Russia and China, writes J.J. Saunders.