Your first book is Susan Mann’s The Talented Women of the Zhang Family. What’s it about, and what period is it set in?

It’s set in the Qing dynasty, mostly in the 19th century, and it tries to bring to life the experiences of the women of a single family. One of the challenges of biographies of women in different settings is the limited records that are left of their lives. But with these particular women, they wrote a lot of poetry, and Mann uses that to great effect. She also experiments with the form of writing. She’s doing something that in Chinese would be called waishi, which means ‘unconventional history’. As Mann describes it, it records things that might have happened, based on invented or unauthenticated sources or on gossip. So she takes what these women wrote, and then she tries to weave fully textured lives around them, drawing on everything that could possibly help to illuminate their lives. These were elite women – but the fact that they were women also makes them one of the groups that gets left out of the historical record.

Do you feel the history of China is particularly male dominated?

Not particularly. But there was a tendency until recently for historical writing about most parts of the world to focus largely on male experiences. I think that with China there’s a special challenge, in that a lot of the general works don’t capture how variegated the lives were of women of different social groups, different classes, even different periods. There’s a tendency to think about an unchanging oppression of Chinese women. But one of the things this book captures is the degree to which women of elite groups, and in particular parts of the country, would be much more literate, much more engaged with the life of the mind than is sometimes imagined when there’s this focus purely on the patriarchal structures that kept women down.

Your description reminds me of a book which I’m reading now, and which isn’t on your list – Jonathan Spence’s The Death of Woman Wang.

There are a lot of similarities. The Death of Woman Wang is a book which I frequently teach, and it was one of the first books I read as a student when it first came out in the late 1970s. It’s one of the books that inspired me to become a Chinese historian, and it’s a lovely work. Spence takes a woman who only shows up in the record through one incident – a crime – so he has to take much greater liberties than Susan Mann, who’s dealing with women who left more traces of themselves to be used as building blocks. But there’s definitely a kinship between the books.

Mann’s book also draws on China’s long and well-established tradition of biographical writing. One way she tries to bring the reader into China is not just through Chinese lives, but also by adapting some of the forms of Chinese biographical and historical writing. It’s a tradition that goes back to Sima Qian in the first century BC, who is sometimes spoken of as the Chinese Herodotus or the Chinese Thucydides, and who interspersed accounts of great events with accounts of individuals.

It’s cruel of us to allow you only five books. Let’s move on to your second, James Carter’s The Life of Tanxu. Who is Tanxu, and what times did he live through?

He’s a man who, after a fairly ordinary family life, went through a process of religious discovery which led him to become an itinerant monk, establishing Buddhist temples across China. He also lived through many of the most important events of the 20th century. Part of the conceit of the book is to cast familiar events – such as the Japanese invasion of China in the 1930s – in a new light, by keeping the focus on an individual’s life, and then telling the story of a nation’s transformations around that.

The last century was such a violent period of China’s history. The choice of a Buddhist monk as the individual through which to relate it seems quite unique.

That’s a good point. In the book there’s a lot of juxtaposition between the quiet contemplation of life in a temple and Tanxu’s engagement with what’s going on around him. But what is striking – and we don’t think of these as going hand in hand – is that Tanxu has to be seen as a nationalist as well as a spiritual seeker. Carter argues that what he was doing was one way to strengthen China – to strengthen its soul as part of the effort to strengthen it as a polity.

Your third choice is by Jonathan Spence, whose The Death of Woman Wang we already touched on.