Division to Unification in Imperial China: The Three Kingdoms to the Tang Dynasty (220 907) (Understanding China Through Comics Book 2) Kindle Edition

I recommend to anyone wanting an encapsulated overview of Chinese history. Entertaining and informative with excellent visuals. Highly recommended. Fab.

Jing Liu in his Understanding China Through Comics makes learning Chinese history more fun than catching up on great books in the Classics Illustrated comic series. In  Division to Unification in Imperial China: The Three Kingdoms to the Tang Dynasty (220-907) (Understanding China Through Comics)  we get the second volume in the series. Covering almost 700 years, Liu starts with what he calls "The Age of Division", a particularly fractious time that includes the 3 kingdoms and 6 dynasties, and then moves on to the Sui and Tang dynasties. In addition to the various rulers, wars and rebellions, Liu treats us to various cultural insights surrounding the rise of Buddhism, Taoist thought, the aristocracy and rank, as well as governing styles.The power and pleasure of this book is that Liu makes fantastic use of his illustrations to both underscore points and deliver nuggets of information which would have taken pages of text. He is dealing with a complex subject, which most Americans are totally unfamiliar with. Realizing that, he has parsed China's history into bite size nuggets that reduce the complexity and helps the reader learn.For anyone who is interested in understanding China, without knowing the history, that is an impossible task. Through Liu's book, we can easily learn about the history without feeling overwhelmed. This book is great of children and adults.

This is a fantastic book series based on a great idea. While the idea of turning history into a "comic-book" like format is not novel, the execution and subject matter choice here make it a singular achievement. Through a series of volumes, the author Jing Liu covers various parts of Chinese History.They recommend this for children in grades 6-12, yet I feel like just about anybody could learn a lot from reading these books. Because volume two covers a particularly complicated period of Chinese history it can at times be a little bit difficult to follow. The author has designed this text so that each section includes an overview before key historical figures are put into that context. So even if you don't get it all the first go, you can always refer back to his timelines and overviews to get a sense of the context of what you are reading.The art is in black and white and is not meant to be flashy. It is designed to keep your interest, which I think it does incredibly well.CONCLUSIONThis book has really inspired me to learn more about Chinese history. I think it will do the same for all readers, and is a fantastic aid for teachers and parents trying to get younger people interested in the topic.

Cool and innovative way to teach history and culture. The comic book is a great medium to have little people be engaged with history of the Chinese People. The book has some great pictures with important comparisons in a comic book form. it is all black and white, so that is one note, but it reads well and still generated interest among both of my kids. The style and length of the comic book style writing leads more to short samples of reading instead of a sit down for a day and read the whole thing. This aok because there are many stopping points where kids can engage , pause, re-engage and keep learning at their own pace or interest. For example, the Chinese new year generated a lot of interest and the kids picked it back up after a couple of weeks and dove back into it ....A great alternative to just pretty pictures and a standard history book, with great symbols and a more accessible style for younger readers.

I read this to my 9-year old daughter although there might be too much mayhem to be age appropriate. Well over 50 million people are violently killed in the course of the era described in the book—some more personally than most. So, it's hard to pick out the few people who would be moral by modern standards—so this is not some cute children's story. But I did want my daughter to have some knowledge of the history of her ancestors, and the book is reasonably circumspect when it comes to depicting the bloody business.I'd say the artwork is creative enough. Sometimes it's whimsical, at other times straightforward, sometimes the speech bubbles dominate the page, and sometimes there is just a bit of explanatory text. I'm sure it takes effort to maintain a narrative when no one character keeps around for more than five pages. Certainly the characters blur together.In the end, I feel I have more of a feeling for the tearing apart and reassembling that makes up this era and for the forces of ambition and conflicts between religious impulses that led to such horrible outcomes. And, I will incorporate this into my internal model of how the human world works, making me a better citizen. I'm not going to be able to cite the names of emperors or the precepts of Chan Buddhism; this format doesn't lend itself to that kind of memorization, at least not for me.

This series is a solid take on history, and in a medium I did not expect to be so thorough. Currently, you can preview the majority to all of the book here; just go to the pictures and scroll through the book. That will allow you to see everything this includes, as well as how this is presented. You have complete timelines, maps, and interesting take on how battles should be portrayed, betrayal, retaliation, and more. Considering the size of the book, I did not expect there to be so much in it, and this made me go in and check out the rest of these offerings. I also enjoyed the art style and how you have some comedy melding with serious topics, making this an age-appropriate glance at history.