A welcome addition to our sources for the study of Chinese history, this book explores the diversity and complexity of life in China over a 2,700-year period and puts a human face on the processes and conflict of history. The subjects are well-chosen and unusually balanced with regard to class, gender, and occupation and include central as well as marginal figures. This will make a fine textbook and will also be a pleasure to read.

Suzanne Cahill, University of California, San Diego

In this unique presentation of the Chinese past, ten distinguished younger historians turn their hand to biography and reconstruct the lives of one woman and nine men dispersed across almost three millennia of recorded history. Each biography is wonderfully different from the next, both in content and in style. Place them side by side and they become a mural on which individuals, facing a world never of their own making, have been able to fashion lives of meaning.

Timothy Brook, University of Toronto, author of The Confusions of Pleasure

Professor Kenneth Hammond has assembled a marvelous kaleidoscope of Chinese elite personalities of the imperial period in The Human Tradition in Premodern China. These vivid essays, by a talented group of young experts, bring to life the variety of experiences to be found in China's great historical storehouse of humanity. Written and edited at a consistently high scholarly standard, this collection will introduce college students as well as general readers to some unforgettable personages.

Philip A. Kuhn, Harvard University