From the edge of Eurasia

The authors of the titles in the Cambridge Illustrated History series are not given the same task, despite superficial similarities of format and layout. The history of Germany and that of China are not commensurate, either in the size and diversity of territories and populations they cover, or in the amount of source material on which they depend, or in the nature of the cues which might be expected to be already familiar to the target audience.

In the present volume, which covers a vast chronological span and a range of material from the ritual jade implements of the Neolithic period to the statistics of private car ownership in 1993, Patricia Buckley Ebrey makes the most recent attempt at getting the history of China into one volume for the English-language reader. It is also the most successful, and can be recommended almost without reservation to college and school libraries, or to anyone who wants to know how the Chinese past looks to a leading American scholar of the present.

More accurately, it shows how it looks to an assembled array of the leading American and (a few) British scholars, since Ebrey is scrupulous in pointing out that no single author could command a knowledge of all the work necessary to write this book. One of the most helpful features will be the extensive guide to further reading, which is up-to-date and suitably wide-ranging, though it covers only books, omitting journal articles.

Ebrey's academic reputation rests on her innovative and important work on the history of women and the family in imperial China, but she is a seasoned teacher of great experience, responsible for a major collection of translated primary sources on Chinese civilisation. This gives her an insight into which topics need to be addressed by the beginning student.

She has chosen to down play the succession of dynasties and rulers in favour of the topics favoured by the social historian of the long duration; the shift of population from the north to the south, and the growth of that population, the changing material basis of elite life, and the slow mutation of an elite based on birth to one whose access to power was through the examination system. Just occasionally I felt that this broad sweep, entirely convincing and lucidly explained though it is, could have been more firmly anchored with dates. There is a one-page chronology, surprisingly unappealing visually given the sumptuous appearance of the rest of the book, but dates, which at least some students new to Chinese history crave as secure points of reference, are often scarce in the text.

The calligrapher Wang Xizhi, the painter Gu Kaizhi and the poets Wang Wei, Li Bai and Du Fu are all referred to in the text without their dates. These may be names every schoolchild knows (in China), but it would be rash to assume many of the readers of this book will ever have heard of them.

If there is a theme to the volume it is the homogeneity and coherence of the Chinese past. While well aware of diversity in cultural and religious practice, Ebrey makes a case for history "viewed from the eastern edge of Eurasia" as being more accurately captured by metaphors of the family (stressing succession), than by metaphors of the single human life (stressing flourishing and decline). She is acutely aware that we cannot study the past separately from the way it has been written about, and that the representations of the past in the enormous Chinese historiographical record are themselves a body of social facts with which the historian, even the beginner, must engage. This approach, privileging questions of interpretation as it does, could be the source of much fruitful discussion. Currently fashionable boxed features on discrete topics like "Rice", "The Great Wall" and "Crime and Punishment" are useful and informative.

This is an illustrated history, and the 120 colour plates, 80 black-and-white plates and 16 maps are an important component of its appeal. The pictures are uniformly well chosen, unhackneyed and well reproduced, and I would congratulate those unsung heroes, the picture researchers. We see ninth-century imperial gifts to a Buddhist monastery, excavated very recently, and Ming dynasty examination candidates peering at the list of posted results. We see a photograph of Mao Zedong and Stalin in which the former's body language says everything about their relationship.

We see the man defying the tank in Tiananmen Square. An art historian might occasionally demur at the way these pictures and objects, especially the early ones are used as illustrations, with little attention given to their status as representations or to the conventions which govern their appearance. But that is a characteristic of the format, not of this volume.

The text is not entirely free of errors, which for some reason are concentrated in the maps (the one on page 98 manages to spell the names of two different pilgrimage sites wrongly).

A more serious complaint, directed at the publisher and not the author, is the index, which is frankly rather weak. The invention of paper, for which an enquiring student might legitimately search, is in the text and the chronology, but not in the index. Occasionally the same Chinese book is called by two translated names, only one of which is indexed, while the muddle over the various dynasties called Zhou suggests the entry was prepared by someone who read the words but did not know the material. Some of the boxed features are not indexed at all. Either excessive haste, or a corner-cutting exercise by the publisher, must be suspected. This is a real pity, for in a book destined to be consulted as much as read at a sitting (though I would stress it can be read with pleasure), the way into the information is as important as what is found when you get there.

Craig Clunas is reader in history of art, University of Sussex.