The Cambridge History of China, Vol. 5 Part One: The Five Dynasties and Sung China And Its Precursors, 907-1279 AD

i am very satisfied with this purchase

This book is one of a kind, and has been at least thirty years in the making. As the editors mention in their foreword, most of the chapters were commissioned when the authors were newly minted Ph.D.'s in the early 1980's. You can tell from the references and bibliography that there has been considerable effort to bring the chapters up to date, but it's impossible for an ordinary reader to tell how thoroughly anything was revised before publication. There must also have been some rethinking of the table of contents over the years, because some of the authors couldn't have been part of the original plan (such as Ari D. Levine). Doubtless a must-have for any historian of China.The production is abysmal, however, and Cambridge University Press should be ashamed of themselves. The whole thing looks like a bad photocopy from somebody's graduate seminar, and they're not exactly charging bottom-dollar for this volume. It's so bad that often you can't even make out Chinese characters in titles in the bibliography. By far the ugliest volume yet, uglier even than the old Taiwanese reprints of earlier volumes in the series.