THE IMPERIAL CAPITALS OF CHINA and the History of Beijing

As the world watches the Beijng Olympics this week, history buffs will want to look in to the history of that city for a true understanding of China today. Arthur Cottrell's The Imperial Cities of China, just released this month, offers an intriguing study of the characters, political and ideological tensions, and technological genius that defined the imperial cities of China. And Cottrell's closing chapter, "The Last Imperial Capital," offers a riveting short history of Qing Beijing.

THE IMPERIAL CAPITALS OF CHINA Reviewed in Publishers Weekly

Publishers Weekly takes notice of The Imperial Capitals of China:A Dynastic History of the Celestial Empire, by Arthur Cotterell, coming from Overlook in June 2008: "China’s cities, notes Cotterell (China: A Cultural History), played an important role in symbolizing the legitimacy of a new regime; upstart emperors spent untold treasure and lives on building magnificent capitals, carefully laid out on principles of cosmology and feng shui, to demonstrate their assumption of the Mandate of Heaven. These cities furnish the author with splendid panoramas of 2,300 years of Chinese civilization. Working with maps, photos, reproductions of Chinese art and literary
accounts, he recreates the cosmopolitanism of medieval Chang’an, the commercial bustle of Song dynasty Hangzhou and the sublime architecture of Beijing’s Forbidden City. These set pieces frame a sprightly history of China up to the founding of the republic. Cotterell elucidates large-scale themes—the long seesaw battle between China and its nomadic neighbors, the Confucian scholar-bureaucracy’s struggle to control the state, and the cycle of imperial despotism and peasant revolt—while sketching a picaresque chronicle of dynastic succession and court intrigue, complete with overmighty eunuchs and scheming concubines. The result is a fine evocation of China as both a place and a story."