Author: Endymion Wilkinson
Publication year: 2026
Abstract:
Former EU Ambassador to China and Sinologist, Endymion Wilkinson’s "Manual" covers all of Chinese history from early man to the end of the 20th century, introduces the two dozen ancillary disciplines that Chinese historians use, discusses leading historical hypotheses and controversies, and along the way now curates over 15,000 primary and secondary sources. The text is enlivened with 468 sidebars and tables with topics ranging from the size of steppe armies to the author’s 50-year friendship with the “father of pinyin,” Zhou Youguang. Earlier print editions of this massive work (at over 1.5 million words, the length of 15 monographs) won the Stanislas Julien Prize, and in 2016, Peking University published a three-volume Chinese translation.
Former EU Ambassador to China and Sinologist, Endymion Wilkinson’s "Manual" covers all of Chinese history from early man to the end of the 20th century, introduces the two dozen ancillary disciplines that Chinese historians use, discusses leading historical hypotheses and controversies, and along the way now curates over 15,000 primary and secondary sources. The text is enlivened with 468 sidebars and tables with topics ranging from the size of steppe armies to the author’s 50-year friendship with the “father of pinyin,” Zhou Youguang. Earlier print editions of this massive work (at over 1.5 million words, the length of 15 monographs) won the Stanislas Julien Prize, and in 2016, Peking University published a three-volume Chinese translation.
The 8th edition of the Manual has many new sections on a wide variety of subjects—modern architecture, musing amidst the ruins, industrial coops, “brainwashing,” thought reform, translating Maoxuan 毛選, cadre perks, CCP nomenklatura, printing the People's Daily, CCP communications, censorship, web directories, Sinologist spies, non-Sinologist spies, other outstanding foreigners who lived in Mao-era China , Fangyan 方言, the imperial workload, dynasties, literacy and literacies, the Bureau of casting and printing, book titles, piracy on the high seas, Grand Council and Grand Secretariat staffing, village documents, Liang Qichao as a teenager, Margary’s death, and many more.
In addition, Ambassador Wilkinson has included portraits of some of the extraordinary people he encountered while working and studying in Mao-era China (1964–66) and also updated, expanded, corrected, and rearranged hundreds of sections that appeared in the 7th edition. Adding new sections and updating old ones has required citing over 800 new works (and deleting a couple of hundred old ones). In all, the 8th edition contains 1,700,000 words (equivalent to 5,000 print pages or 15 monographs). It is organized in two ways—by subject (three-quarters of the text) and by period (one quarter of the text). The 20th century now gets the most detailed treatment. The chronological chapters complement the subject chapters and are linked to them with over 10,000 clickable cross-references.
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