The culmination of a lifetime's field work and research, William Lindesay selects fifty artefacts from around the world to tell the story of the Great Wall from the second century BC to the late-twentieth century. Abraham Ortelius' pioneering world atlas, the unexpected origins of 'wolf smoke', the pr... read more

An evocative account of the infamous nightlife district of pre-communist Beijing, from the internationally acclaimed author of the book Midnight in Peking. The Badlands, a warren of narrow hutongs in the eastern district of pre-communist Peking, had its heyday in the 1930s. Home to the city's drifters... read more

Shanghai: a global city in the midst of a renaissance, where dreamers arrive each day to partake in a mad torrent of capital, ideas and opportunity. Rob Schmitz is one of them. He immerses himself in his neighbourhood, forging relation... read more

'The room was filled with a blinding light. She was paralysed by fear, fixed still in her chair for a long moment. Everything fell.'2015 is the 70th anniversary of Hiroshima, when, on 6 August at 8.15am, an atomic bomb was dropped, killing one hundred thousand men, women and children in its white fury... read more

"In the summer of 2009, the leader of the dreaded Tamil Tiger guerrillas was killed, bringing to a bloody end the stubborn and complicated civil war in Sri Lanka. For nearly thirty years, the war's fingers had reached everywhere: into the bustle of Col... read more

The first Westerner to meet Mao Tse-tung and the Chinese Communist leaders in 1936, Edgar Snow came away with the first authorised account of Mao's life, as well as a history of the famous Long March and the men and women who were... read more

From the bestselling author of Wild Swans and Mao- The Unknown Story In this groundbreaking biography, Jung Chang vividly describes how Empress Dowager Cixi - the most important woman in Chinese history - brought a medieval empire into the modern age. Under her, the ancient country attained virtually... read more

In 1850, China was the "sick man of Asia." Now it is set to become the most powerful nation on earth. The Penguin History of Modern China shows how turbulent that journey has been. For 150 years China has endur... read more

'This is the finest single-volume history of Vietnam in English. It challenges myths, and raises questions about the socialist republic's political future' Guardian 'Powerful and compelling. Vietnam will be of growing importance in the twenty-first-century world,... read more

The city of Jakarta, today the capital of Indonesia, has had other incarnations and other names, most notably as the regional headquarters of the Dutch East Indies when it was known around the world as Batavia. As the capital of the Netherlands highly u... read more

To this day, Japan's modern ascendancy challenges many assumptions about world history, particularly theories regarding the rise of the west and why the modern world looks the way it does. In this engaging new history, Brett L. Walker tackles key themes regarding Japan's re... read more

A Buddhist monk takes up arms to resist the Chinese invasion of Tibet - then spends the rest of his life trying to atone for the violence by hand printing the best prayer flags in India. A Jain nun tests her powers of detachment as she watches her best friend ritually starve herself to death. Nine peo... read more