A king once lit his nation's emergency beacons—not to warn of invasion, but to make his favorite concubine laugh. When the real enemies arrived, no one came to help.That moment helped bring down one of the greatest dynasties in ancient China. And it's only one of the stories waiting inside this book.The Origins of Chinese Civilization: A History of China tells the story of China's earliest age the way it was meant to be told—through the myths, heroes, disasters, and strange h...

The story of Cinderella is possibly the world's most popular folk tale. The earliest known version is from Greece around two thousand years ago, and over the next thousand years, it traveled to France, Italy and Germany, and eventually to the Walt Disney studio in America.But as the Cinderella story traveled from Greece to Western Europe, it was also carried eastward to Asia along the Silk Road and other ancient trade routes. The story of Ye Xian in this book is the oldest known As...

A young boy finds himself alone in a ship in a terrible storm. All the other passengers and crew are dead. Suddenly he sees a bright yellow ball of fire on the mast...This is a short story in Simplified Chinese, pinyin and English, excerpted from the short story collection "Learn to Read Chinese, Book 1" by Jeff Pepper and Xiao Hui Wang. It's based on stories told by Norman Hinsdale Pitman in "A Chinese Wonder Book" originally published in 1918.Folk tales are immen...

The royal banquet ends in darkness, black water, and a question no city is permitted to ask: what if an ancient king's return is not a miracle, but a system waking beneath the stones?Namsin, a young scribe trained to trust clay more than memory, escapes the ruined banquet hall with a damaged record fragment and half of the stolen seventh seal. What he has seen cannot be written safely. What he carries cannot be surrendered. Beside him, Cassandra reads the city through gates, pressur...

The Yuan Dynasty: China Under Foreign Rule tells the dramatic story of China during the century when it was ruled by the Mongols. It is the 5th book in the Dynasties of Ancient China series of graded readers, written for English-speaking readers who are learning Chinese.Beginning with a divided China and the rise of the Mongols, the book describes the country's conquest by Kublai Khan, the founding of the new dynasty, and the challenges of foreign rule. Readers wil...

The An Lushan Rebellion had failed to destroy the Tang dynasty—but surviving the catastrophe created a new problem: who actually controlled the empire afterward?The Sui, Tang, Five Dynasties: A History of China — Part Three follows the Tang dynasty from Emperor Daizong's accession in 762 CE through the increasingly unstable world of the late ninth century. Imperial rulers struggle with powerful eunuchs and increasingly autonomous jiedushi military governor...

A struggling provincial officer, short on food and long on enemies, is asked to marry for politics, gamble on impossible battles, and trust men who may betray him tomorrow. He hesitates, he compromises, and then—almost quietly—he becomes the man who will rebuild an empire.This book tells the rise of Liu Xiu, the future Emperor Guangwu, not as a distant legend but as a sequence of sharp, human choices. You watch him bargain away personal happiness to secure an alliance, burn evidence...

A starving general begs for a single bowl of porridge… a fortune-teller crowns himself emperor… and a hunted man, fleeing like a fugitive, somehow becomes the founder of a new dynasty. This is not legend. This is history—just far stranger than most people realize.This volume brings the final, turbulent years of the Western Han Dynasty to life with the pace and drama of a novel. You'll meet unforgettable figures: Wang Zhengjun, whose rise from overlooked palace maid to empress begins...

In the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, the Jurchen-led Jin Dynasty ruled much of northern China while facing one difficult question after another: how could a conquering warrior state govern the Central Plains, preserve its own identity, manage the Southern Song, and survive the arrival of an even more dangerous power from the Mongolian steppe?The Jin Dynasty: A History of China — Part Two follows that story through rulers including Wanyan Liang, Emperor Shizong, E...

Before Genghis Khan ruled an empire, he was Temüjin: the son of Yesügei and Hoelun, heir to a battered Mongol lineage, and a boy growing up in a Mongolian steppe divided among rival clans and powerful neighbors.Genghis Khan: A History of China, Part One follows the rise of Temüjin from the legendary origins of the Borjigin "Golden Lineage" through the violent tribal world that shaped him. The story moves between the Mongols and the Jurchen Jin dynasty, the long feud with t...

In 888 AD, Emperor Zhaozong inherited a Tang dynasty that still ruled China in name but was losing control of the forces that mattered most: armies, provinces, and the imperial court itself.The Sui, Tang, Five Dynasties: A History of China — Part Four follows the final struggle of the Tang and the extraordinary political world that emerged from its collapse. At the center are emperors, eunuchs, jiedushi military governors, Shatuo commanders, and regional warlords—...

The Northern and Southern Jin Dynasties: A History of China, PART TWO, takes you through three centuries of chaos, courage, and ambition — when China was torn apart yet never stopped searching for unity. As the author, I wanted to write this not as a list of kings and battles, but as a living story of people — men and women who risked everything to build or break empires. From the fall of the Jin to the rise of the Sui, every page is alive with power struggles, revenge, an...