China Empire

Americans are accustomed to thinking that World War II ended on August 14, 1945, when the Japanese surrendered unconditionally. Yet on the mainland of Asia, in the vast arc stretching from Manchuria to Burma, peace was a brief, fretful interlude. In some parts of Asia, such as Java and Southern Indonesia, only a few weeks passed before new fighting broke out between nationalist forces and the former colonial powers.

After months of forced labour, a Roman emperor's guards escape from a Persian mine. They meet a mysterious, exiled Chinese Prince, Dan Qing, and agree to safeguard his journey home. Thus begins the adventures of the Romans and the Prince as they journey to China. There the Westerners will discover that they aren't the first of their kind to arrive in China - they were preceded centuries before by the survivors of the "lost legion".

The Mongolian Empire was not to be trifled with! Genghis Khan and his followers conquered a vast part of Asia, Europe, and beyond. There aren’t many people who haven’t heard of these conquerors and their achievement. How did the Mongol Empire grow so big? How did they treat their enemies? And how come Mongolia is an area with such a small population now? These questions, and many others, will be answered in this historical guide. Their dominance, their attitude, and their culture will be explained, as well as their practices of war, and various other parts of their society.

Black Dragon River is a personal journey down one of Asia's great rivers. The world's ninth largest river, the Amur serves as a large part of the border between Russia and China. As a crossroads for the great empires of Asia, this area offers journalist Dominic Ziegler a lens with which to examine the societies at Europe's only borderland with East Asia.

More than fifty years on, the Cultural Revolution's scar runs through the heart of Chinese society, and through the souls of its citizens. Stationed in Beijing for the Guardian, Tania Branigan came to realise that this brutal and turbulent decade continues to propel and shape China to this day. Yet official suppression and personal trauma have conspired in national amnesia: it exists, for the most part, as an absence.

Around the year 1162, near the modern capital of Mongolia, a baby boy was born into a fractious and violent world. The birth of this child must have caused quite a stir among the members of the nomadic tribe that he had been born into. Word soon traveled that the son of Yesügei, the Borjigin tribal leader, had been born clutching a blood clot in his tiny hand.

China loomed large on the world stage. Wealth, power, and hundreds of years of rule by the Manchus of the Qing Dynasty catapulted them to new heights, but with power and prestige came those who would do anything to usurp their authority and undermine their sense of stability. The British Empire and its faithful allies devised a masterful plan and executed it with stark precision. Vicious lies, cheating, and stealing were only the beginning of what they had in store for the nation.

Genghis Khan was the Mongol emperor who has expanded his region to the biggest empire on the face of the Earth ever. His empire stretched from East Asia all the way to various European countries, the Middle East, and beyond. You will learn more about his early life, his relationships, marriage, families and children, his attacks, his unification of the Mongolian Federations, his death, succession, and the continuing of the Mongolian Empire after his death.