Scattered across the maps and paintings that Brook invokes, his 13 encounters take in pirates, merchants, soldiers, traders, explorers, emperors and spiritual leaders – characters in China’s complex trade, military, spiritual and political relationships down the centuries. Brook unravels the threads of these relationships across a canvas of war, friendship, savage struggles for power, lethal epidemic disease, triumph and calamity. It is a dizzying and exhilarating journey.

Mr. Brook...has written a work that is less a history of China than a kaleidoscope of fragmentary images conjured from equally fragmentary historical sources.

...excellent.

These days, historians of China and foreign correspondents usually focus on a particular period or a single figure. What a pleasure to read a significant, original book that covers millennia of Chinese history in an informal, often chatty, but always learned style.

Brook...has an impressive grasp of the sources, and he is at his best when delivering intermittent side swipes at popular misconceptions of Chinese history and China’s recent foreign policy.

Demand evokes supply, and Timothy Brook has supplied his Great State, in which his solid Sinological scholarship is complemented by a very effective use of maps...to illustrate his uncontroversial depiction of China as entangled in world affairs since early antiquity, but also his unconventional view of the true origins of today’s Chinese state.

In this academic yet mostly accessible work, Brook makes two significant revisionist arguments about China and its history.