Destination China
China is the third largest country in the world and with more than a billion people it is the home of 20% of the world's population. Travelers Justine Shapiro and Megan McCormick journey though this beautiful, crowded country.

China's Lost Girls
Due to cultural, social, and economic factors traditional Chinese preference leans toward boys so girls are often hidden, aborted or abandoned. As a result tens of thousands of girls end up in orphanages across China. Today more than one quarter of all babies adopted from abroad by American families come from China.

Riding the Iron Rooster: By Train through China by Paul Theroux
Paul Theroux, the author of the train travel classics The Great Railway Bazaar and The Old Patagonian Express, takes to the rails once again in this account of his epic journey through China.

River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze by Peter Hessler
Poignant, thoughtful, funny, and enormously compelling, River Town is an unforgettable portrait of a city that is seeking to understand both what it was and what it someday will be.

Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China's Past and Present by Peter Hessler
From the acclaimed author of River Town (above) comes a rare portrait, both intimate and epic, of twenty-first-century China as it opens its doors to the outside world.

China: People/Place/Culture/History by Alison Bailey
An exploration of the country's long, rich history paired with information on its complex present makes "China" a one-of-a-kind reference that offers an eye-opening, thought-provoking, and authoritative visual guide to one of the world's great nations. A beautiful book.

Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China by Jung Chang
Combines the intimacy of a memoir with the epic sweep of a great novel. Chang tells the story of three women--the author, her mother, and her grandmother--whose fortunes mirror the tumultuous history of 20th-century China.

Mao: the Unknown Story by Jung Chang
Based on a decade of research and on interviews with many of Mao's close circle in China who have never talked before--and with virtually everyone outside China who had significant dealings with him--this is the most authoritative life of Mao ever written.

Cloud Mountain by Aimee Liu
Hope, an English tutor, meets Liang Poyu, a Chinese student, in Berkeley, and although Hope is engaged to someone else, she decides to marry Liang even though mixed marriage is illegal at the beginning of the 20th century.

Empress: a novel by Sa Shan
Empress Wu, China's only female emperor, rises from a humble clan and position of concubine to brave the intrigues, betrayal, and violence of the court to become the first Empress of China during the great Tang dynasty in seventh-century China.

Empress Orchid by Anchee Min
A fictional portrait of the last empress of China follows Orchid, a beautiful teenager from an aristocratic family, who is chosen to become a low-ranking concubine of the emperor and rises to a position of power in the Chinese court.

Tree of Heaven by R. C. Binstock
In 1938, while Japanese troops rape and murder the conquered Chinese, the soldier Kuroda falls in love with Li, a Chinese woman who has Japanese blood.