Society & Everyday Life
Village Life in China: A Study in Sociology
Arthur H. Smith · 1899
Arthur Smith spent more than twenty years among the villages of Shandong. He writes not about the court but about the village: how it came by its name……
China through the world's eyes — a country of many faces
Observations, stories and reflections across the centuries. Complete texts, free to read.
136titles98authors1600s–1940speriod
This library gathers books written about China by people who went there — missionaries and diplomats, customs officers and merchants, sinologists, journalists, travellers, soldiers and novelists — from the first Jesuit accounts to the middle of the twentieth century. Every title is in the public domain and is given here in full, free to read.
They are not gathered at random. Taken together they form a record of how one civilisation was observed by others over three centuries: what each generation of visitors thought worth writing down, what they misread, and how the picture shifted as their own countries' interests did. Some of the judgements here are generous, some are condescending, a few are simply wrong. They are kept as they were written.
Every book in this library has also been translated into Chinese, and each page links to its Chinese edition.
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136 titles online, more added as they are prepared
Writers of Note on China
On a Chinese Screen
W. Somerset Maugham · 1922
Maugham went up the Yangtze in 1919 and turned the people he met into fifty-eight sketches ……
Writers of Note on China
The Problem of China
Bertrand Russell · 1922
Bertrand Russell taught in Peking for a year from 1920. He reads China against Japan ……
Travel & Observation
The Yangtze Valley and Beyond
Isabella Bird Bishop · 1899
Isabella Bird was past sixty when she went up the Yangtze and on into the Tibetan marches of western Sichuan. Thirty-nine chapters carry her from the ……
About Boduo Books
Boduo is my cat, and also the pen name I borrowed for these translations. Boduo kept me company while this house was built.
Like Boduo, I am curious about the world, and I like to look for books that are seldom seen and yet deserve to be read.
This library sets out from books about China written in many countries, and shares, in Chinese — in words and read aloud — other people's experience, observation and reflection. It is an attempt to open new windows, for Chinese readers and for anyone elsewhere who wants to understand China, and to let a familiar world be seen anew.
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Any mistake in a translation, any book worth adding, or simply what you made of one — letters are welcome, and every one is read.
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Everything here — finding the books, translating them into Chinese, checking the translations against the originals, the cover art, the site itself — is the work of one person. If you would like to support it, a cup of tea is very welcome.