The Mandate of Heaven

For four thousand years, one civilization endured while all its rivals rose and fell and vanished. From the first farmers who planted millet in the yellow earth of the Loess Plateau, through the oracle bones of the Shang and the Mandate of Heaven of the Zhou, the unification under the First Emperor and the synthesis of the Han, the golden age of the Tang and the commercial revolution of the Song, the conquests of Mongols and Manchus, down to the winter morning in 1912 when a six-year-old emperor signed away the oldest throne on earth - this is the whole arc of ancient China, told as a single continuous narrative.
E. B Cohen carries the reader across the entire span of Chinese history, threading the story through a handful of durable ideas: the Mandate of Heaven that made and unmade rulers; the dynastic cycle of vigor, splendor, and collapse; the long struggle with the steppe; the rise of the scholar-official; and China's astonishing run of inventions - paper, printing, gunpowder, and the compass - that would remake the world.
Here are the sage-kings and tyrants, the philosophers and generals, the poets and rebels, the empresses and inventors of the world's oldest continuous civilization. From the sacrificial pits of the Bronze Age to the serene face of the great Buddha of Longmen, from the Terracotta Army to the treasure fleets of Zheng He, this is the epic story of how China became China - and of the extraordinary endurance that let it outlast every dynasty that ever ruled it.