Foundations of Chinese Civilization: The Yellow Emperor to the Han Dynasty (2697 BCE – 220 CE) (Understanding China Through Comics)

The Chinese civilization has survived for over five thousand years. This book gives an incredibly abbreviated history, presented in comic book format for easy digestion. It works well. The book is incredibly informative and gives you a great overview of China. There is a mix of wars, governments, political systems, historical records, racial groups, philosophies, agriculture, and many other aspects. This book does a good job of covering what it talks about. Of course it feels disjointed, because it jumps around a lot and skips so much – but this is understandable as it covers such a great amount of time in such a small volume. The comic format is helpful and interesting; there are diagrams and charts, drawings of rulers and others, maps and engaging illustrations. Incredibly destructive transitions between dynasties, for example, are graphically shown in a table of pie charts that illustrate the population totals before and after a dynastic collapse. The Han dynasty transition showed a decrease of seventy-one percent of the population! Another illustration shows the dynastic cycle in pictorial form. Such facts are fascinating and in aggregate they give an interesting overview of historical China that most in the West have probably never seen.