The Chan's Great Continent

I have every book Jonathan Spence has written, and just finished reading another, the Chan's Great Continent.  If you want to learn about China, this Yale professor is about your best guide.  In this book Spence surveys Western views of China since Marco Polo, who may or may not have actually gone to China.

Spence is too good of a scholar to ever draw on the fable of the blind men touching the elephant at different places and all coming up with a different description of "elephant."  It is far more interesting than that.  Contact with China was always politico-economic, and views of China very much serve the purposes of interested parties.

Westerners description of China tell us at least as much about the west at the time the description was being made as it does about China, so this becomes a survey of western civ, 1200 to the present.

Marco Polo is an obvious source, but what the scholars know, and we never hear, about Polo is fascinating in its own right.  Spence then proceeds to introduce a surprising array of China observers, none less than Mark Twain.  At googlebooks you can google an author, such as Spence, click on a title, then over at the left is "find a library."  You put in your zip, and up comes a list of libraries closest to you that carries that book.  If you are interested in China, or history, or wonderful story-telling, then read everything by Spence.

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