China between Empires: The Northern and Southern Dynasties (History of Imperial China)

I am engineer by profession and passionate for history in my day to day life, especially, that history that can explain why humanity and the society where we are born was shaped by our past. Then "China between Empires" gives us an explanation of how China was crossing the road from the dissolution of the Han empire until the dawn of reunification with the Tang empire, describing the geography of north and south China , the enthronement of Buddhism, the habits of the common man and the literati. There is not superficial presentation of facts, but neither reaches a profundazacion of events that take us away from the objective of knowing how a people was forging its destiny othe moment they needed the domain and administration of agriculture and water. An excellent book.

This is a broad overview of the political and cultural changes in the period. The book is clearly and well written, with good maps and useful illustrations. The reviewer who says there is nothing new here is off the mark, at least for the non-specialist.

As the other reviewer has already remarked, this is the only volume devoted exclusively to the Six Dynasties period. Cambridge University Press has yet to produce their volume on this period. The author does such a presentable job that I can hardly wait to read his works on other, more thoroughly covered periods. Just one highlight is his coverage of the great poet Tao Yuanming / Tao Qian.

One of the few well-written sources of ancient Chinese history in English.

The Northern and Southern Dynasties period is understood to be a key formative period in the history of China; many of the structures that informed the subsequent Tang period originated in this age. So this book is valuable because it provides an overview of the period; the corresponding volume of the Cambridge history has not yet been published.However, this work is weak in structure and seems to lack a unifying vision. Very often it reads like a sequence of abstracts of primary research strung together; in general, it fails to articulate a clear and compelling vision of how society changed in this period and what drove the changes. The maps are too approximate to help any real understanding of the places mentioned in the text, even to someone who is quite familiar with the modern geography of China.This was a time of very substantial changes: just to mention two aspects, non-Han people took military and political control of North China, and eventually formed a mixed-race ruling elite; and massive population movements took place between North and South, but also between urban and rural areas. The similarities and differences with the history of the Western part of Eurasia at the same time are fascinating, but the author hardly even mentions them; nor is there any real effort to tackle the "why" of such massive change: why did the non-Han gain the upper hand? why did the economy change? how did economic change affect political change? It is almost as if the author tried to avoid any Marxist interpretation of history, and in doing so precluded himself from shedding any light on the connection between economic and political structures.I am not a specialist, but I cannot believe that these questions have never been addressed. The bibliography is very rich, running to over 10 pages, and I plan to use it as the springboard into a deeper investigation of the period.

Nice

This is the second volume Mark Lewis has contributed to Harvard’s History of Imperial China. It spans from the fall of the Han dynasty to the rise of the Tang. The period (220-618 AD) is not developed chronologically or comprehensively. It studies major themes and is organized topically, covering four centuries and dozens of dynasties in 350 pages. The entire six volume series is over 2000 pages, and is a fascinating account of the civilization during more than 2000 years. It is not written for history specialists, but may be best for those with more than a general interest.The essays focus on changes that occurred after a vast population migration from the Yellow to the Yangtze river basins. Geography, climate and agriculture in the south were factors for refugees from political upheavals in the north. Landed families and disenfranchised bureaucrats who allied against the emperor and his court eunuchs were most able to relocate. Power struggles following the collapse of the empire created military dynasties and warring princes. Nomadic warriors would replace the Han, and displaced elites would gradually diverge from the customs of the north.In the south, poetry, landscape painting and garden design flourished. City planning progressed from fortified cities and hunting parks to public temples, urban gardens and country estates. Ancient animism cults were co-opted by Taoism and Buddhism. Family life metamorphosed from matriarchy to patriarchy. The Tang dynasty would revert to unified imperial rule, but retain many of the institutions and practices of the expatriates and their native neighbors. This is a good overview on a broad range of topics. Thankfully it is not a blow by blow account of dynastic reigns and campaigns.

A very interesting history of China in a fascinating period of its history, between the end of the Han Dynasty and the rise of the Sui. This is perhaps not a book for the general reader, but anyone who is interested in China apart from a cursory overview will find it invaluable.

In this second volume of a six volume series on the history of imperial China the roughly 400 years between the decline of the Han dynasty and the emergence of the Tang dynasty are covered. Politically, these were rather turbulent times, during which China was divided into various kingdoms, which themselves were governed by successive regimes. In the Northern part of China, most of these regimes were coming from non-Han groups, which assimilated into the Han main culture in different degrees, which is complicating the political and cultural history even further.For this book Mark E. Lewis has chosen the same structure as in his other two contributions to the series - The Early Chinese Empires: Qin and Han (History of Imperial China) and China's Cosmopolitan Empire: The Tang Dynasty (History of Imperial China), i.e. he is only giving a rather short narrative of the political history, and then covers the development of various aspects like urban and rural society, religion, literature and family during the period in question. Due to the complexity of the political history with its many short-lived states and governments, however, this set-up of the book does not work as well as in the other books. Consequently, for me a lot of re-checking with the time table in the attachments was required in order to keep on track while reading the various chapters.Nevertheless, the book is still (comparatively) nice to read and informative, and it shows how certain differences between Northern and Southern China started to develop. Under consideration that there is hardly any other work on this period available, the book still fully deserves four stars.

Very good.