The Awakening of China

In 1848, America had been a nation for barely seventy years, and W.A.P. Martin had already spent a decade living among four hundred million Chinese. This book is his extraordinary front-row account of an empire in crisis, watching as China grapples with the shock of Western contact and the desperate, often contradictory impulses toward self-strengthening. Martin witnessed the first fumbling attempts at reform: military modernization, education for women, the tension between embracing foreign knowledge and resisting foreign domination. He writes as both sympathetic observer and committed Christian missionary, which makes his account a fascinating artifact of cultural encounter, full of contradictions that mirror the complexities of empire itself. The real power of this book lies in its timing. Martin captures China at a hinge moment, before the Taiping Rebellion, before the fall of the Qing, when the ancient empire still believed it could transform itself without breaking. He shows us a nation stumbling toward modernity, and in doing so, inadvertently documents the beginning of a transformation that would reshape the entire twentieth century.