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Rating: 
Summary: OK book
Review: A draft of this book was assigned in my ancient chinese history class 2 years ago, so I don't know how much it has changed since then, but the book was a fairly straightforward (and very condensed) account of the first 2000+ years of Chinese history. It pays particular attention to the Han, Tang, and Sung periods, and its main focus is trying to portray China as a vibrant and open society, with many different ethnic groups, religions, languages and travelers, which was pretty interesting considering most other texts on China always inevitable treat it as a enigma and something mysterious and difficult to understand. Other than that, there's nothing really shocking about it. It's a pretty decent textbook account of Chinese history up to 1600 - after that, go to Jonathan Spence.
Rating: 
Summary: dont' buy this book!
Review: I think this book is clearly written and is easy to read
and presents some good examples of archaeological finds
and artifacts and their analyses. But I didn't like this book. The book has a lot of author's own opinions and points of view that often contradict with and deviate from the conventional Chinese history. It seems to me that in the book she is somewhat biased and too opiniated and often tries to convice the readers with such strong word as "... we must therefore conclude that..." to make her own opinions and points of view of history look like proven facts without very persuasive arguments to
support her own assertions. It think that it is very critical that the author makes very good and persuasive reasonings to support his/her own interpretations and opinions, especially when they contradict and deviate from the conventional ones but in this book, however, the author often fails to do so. It seemed to me when I first read it that she tries to show the readers that she is trying to base her own historical analyses solely based on reliable historical sources such as archaeological finds but it also seemed to me that she also does so to support her own biased opinions about Chinese history. The only reason I give this book a rating of two instead of
one is that it is clearly written. If you really want to
learn about Chinese history, I suggest to use other books
because this book just gives its readers a distorted view of
Chinese history based on what the author thinks is right.
Rating: 
Summary: a guessing game
Review: Ms. Hansen holds a view and will make the evidence fit her view. Just because this is a 'popular' book doesn't mean the author can wing it. After nearly reading the first chapter and leafing through the book a little I can already give you the following five representative examples (among so many others): Example 1 --
On page 8, in regard to those who would object to her using uncorroborated fiction as source material she says, "These critics argue, as a matter of faith, . . . " that literature is not necessarily reality. It seems clear she's the one with faith, allowing fiction, without any support, to stand as history. And while I agree with her when, on page 9, she says that TV scripts would make different historical material than "The Congressional Record" (though not because the latter is factual), that does not make the former necessarily a valid source by itself. Example 2 --
On page 27, referring to a single tortoise shell -- out of she says over 200,000, though all other Chinese and English sources I've read use the figure of more than 100,000 -- with both positive and negative inscriptions she concludes "that oracle bones may not have been edited as much as some analysts feared. The largely positive nature of the oracle bone texts, which usually record good weather or victories, suggests that even the oracle bones may have been censored, with the result that only those recording positive outcomes were kept. But this important text [that one shell!] shows that the Shang recorded failed prognostications in addition to their successes." No, unless she can say that she or someone has found a significant number of negative shells (surely more than one), then her comments are groundless speculation. Example 3 --
On page 109, in chapter 3, after granting that Qin Shihuang did order all but a small number of approved books burned/banned, she works as his apologist saying that since much of that was an oral tradition, the banning "would not have had much effect." Gee, then I wonder why they bothered to write them down in the first place or why Qin needed to destroy and ban the books if everyone had them in their heads as oral tradition or why there have been different versions of the classics or why archaeologists have found different versions of the classics or why there's been endless debate to this very day about which versions of the classics are authentic? In fact, since it was written down, then we cannot simply say it was by that time purely an oral tradition. Example 4 --
The caption for the picture on page 255 for the rules for a women's association says, "The scribe who drew up the document used colloquial language, which the women may have dictated directly, . . . " They may have, but they may not have. Hansen's accompanying text does not tell us either. Example 5 --
Then on page 111, in talking about some Qin legal code, we get this wonderful sentence: "Because these are the only sections of the Qin code to survive today, they allow us to judge whether Qin law was as brutal as later historians suggested." No, I think that very fact means we don't have enough information to "judge", but merely to speculate. The 15th amendment of the US Constitution gave all persons, regardless of race, the right to vote in 1870. But as we all know, the southern half of the country did not comply with this until the Voting Rights Act in 1965. If a future historian writes about US law based only on the Constitution (which is so well protected in it's 'tomb' it will survive long after most other written records of the US Government are gone) what would they speculate? Granted, I didn't get that far into the book, but at this point, do I want to continue reading? I might learn something from this book. But I would have zero confidence in what I learned. I would constantly be rereading passages sorting out her unsubstantiated guesses from what is known. I can recommend Jacques Gernet's "A History of Chinese Civilization" which covers the same time period, in the same introductory manner though with different emphases, with at least as many words -- and it's history.
Rating: 
Summary: History at its best
Review: The Open Empire is a wonderful introduction to Chinese history to the beginning of the Ming Dynasty. A special strength of the book is that the author pays particular attention to contributions made by non-Chinese to Chinese history and gives details about gender that I haven't encountered in other sources. Exceptionally well-written, the book presents a clear, coherent narrative of political, social, and cultural developments interspersed with accounts of historical figures, some of great importance and some unnamed.
In addition, pictures, descriptions of archaeological findings, and a clever use of primary sources give an unusual feeling of immediacy to distant history. For instance, a father during the Ming Dynasty remembers his daughter lost to smallpox:"When you were born I was not pleased. A man over thirty wanted a son, not a daughter. But you won me over before you had completed your first year. ..You often knocked on the door and then quickly went inside and asked: 'Who is there?'...Who would have believed that not quite half a month later you would breathe your last?" The quote is successful in illustrating general trends [i.e., the preference for sons] while showing a more complex reality at the individual level. At the same time, I can picture the little girl playing hide-and-seek with her father -- the tenderness in language collapses the hundreds of years between the contemporary reader and the anguished father. For me, this is history at its best. We also see a diagram of a bound foot, a document from a 10th century women's association, and pictures of the remains of rice and lentils in a tomb from 168 BC. A good introductory chapter lays out the main events, and there are helpful suggestions for further reading at the end.
Rating: 
Summary: A nice book to have
Review: This book is wonderful to have for people who don't have knowledge in Chinese History. The author categorized the subjects neatly. However, I am pretty dissapointed with this book because the author focus more on the literature and philosophy then the history itself.
Rating:
Summary: dont' buy this book!
Review: This is a great book for any sinophile. While the great bulk of it is familiar to anyone who's read Chinese history with any attention, it also includes material due to recent archaeological work, for example the tomb of a Qin dynasty official. The Qin dynasty has been excoriated for millenia because of its harsh treatment of the Confucians and their books. But the laws found in this official's tomb show that, at least on paper, the Qin's laws were not appreciably harsher than those of subsequent dynasties. It reminds you of the famous dictum that history is written by the winners, in this case the succeeding Han dynasty. The discussion of the painting of Yang Guifei's sisters is a priceless little vignette of its own. Every one who's read Chinese history or poetry has heard of Yang Guifei, China's Helen of Troy. But this painting of her sisters conveys a great deal of information about Yang and about Chinese women in general. I can't help wondering if this book's title is a reference to Peyrefitte's book "The Immobile Empire", an account of George MacCartney's mission to China in 1790.
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