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Chinese History: Find Books

use this guide to research the history of Imperial and Modern China

Featured Titles

ILL (for Books) and WorldCat

Use Interlibrary Loan (ILL) to request books and book chapters not held by our library. Chapters typically arrive within hours. Physical books take days.

WorldCat is a "union catalog" of millions of records for books held by thousands of libraries. Search WorldCat to find more books about your topic.


Identify e-books available to read or borrow immediately by conducting an Advanced search. Look for the Library Code box toward the bottom of the page. Enter one of the following library codes:

  • INARC (e-books from Internet Archive)
  • HATHI (e-books from HathiTrust)
  • NJT (books/e-books from our Gitenstein Library)
  • OAPEN (open access e-books)

Find Books: Chinese History and Historiography

Use the search box on the Gitenstein Library homepage to find books about Chinese history. I recommend titles assigned to the Library of Congress Subject Headings (or LCSH) listed below. LCSH, typically just called subject headings, are essentially tags assigned by librarians to the records (or descriptions) of books in the library.

Unlike social media hashtags, LCSH are both precise and consistently applied. Librarians do not make up their own subject headings. Headings are instead chosen from a pre-approved list, carefully (by consensus) curated by professional catalogers. LCSH communicate to researchers what a book is about (e.g., Cultural Revolution) and the type of work it represents (e.g., encyclopedia, bibliography, or primary source, among many others).

Try persons or groups as subjects:

Use the search box on the Gitenstein Library homepage to find books about Chinese history. I recommend titles assigned to the Library of Congress Subject Headings (or LCSH) listed below. LCSH, typically just called subject headings, are essentially tags assigned by librarians to the records (or descriptions) of books in the library.

Unlike social media hashtags, LCSH are both precise and consistently applied. Librarians do not make up their own subject headings. Headings are instead chosen from a pre-approved list, carefully (by consensus) curated by professional catalogers. LCSH communicate to researchers what a book is about (e.g., Han Dynasty) and the type of work it represents (e.g., encyclopedia, bibliography, or primary source, among many others).

Try historical persons as subjects:

The term historiography implies a concern for the examination of all aspects of historical scholarship including especially the writing of history and the methods of historical research. It can refer to a single work or body of historical literature (e.g., the historiography of the Cultural Revolution).

Historiographical works, typically book essays and journal articles, help researchers to identify influential historians, the important books they published, and how those scholars have interpreted the available evidence over time. Historiographical essays, in other words, summarize debates that have shaped scholars' understanding of the past.

Top recommendation:

Also great:

The following titles are about one of the most important historians of all time, Sima Qian (c. 145-86 BCE).