Any author attempting a single volume history of China has a gargantuan task. Not only is trying to pin down the history of possibly the longest continuous civilization on earth a tall order, new discoveries are being uncovered all the time and any book that goes to print is outdated before it even hits the shelves. In the face of such obstacles one almost wonders why historians keep trying it.

All of the preamble to say, books claiming to cover the whole history of China are trying something truly difficult so it’s very impressive when the resulting volume is good. Keay largely succeeds in his goal of covering the broad strokes of Chinese history. The narrative he spends is appropriately informative though necessarily of a summary nature. Really my only complaint with this book was that I’ve read another on the same topic which I think fulfilled the assignment better, Michael Wood’s The Story of China. Wood somewhat balanced the occasionally dry and sometimes cursory nature of his chapters by including translations of primary sources from the times he was covering. These lent an air of detail and humanity to something that might otherwise seem impossibly distant and academic, such as the Western Zhou dynasty.

All things considered this was an informative and relatively approachable history book.