Sixty-Six People

The Sixty-Six People is neither a collection of biographies of famous emperors and ministers, nor a comprehensive history of China arranged by dynasty. It focuses on sixty-six people who stood at crucial turning points in history. Some established order, while others shattered it. Some held the world in their hands, while others were merely ordinary names ground down by their era. They may not all have been "the most important people," but each faced a real choice at some moment in time. From the Duke of Zhou to Lin Zexu, and from the enfeoffment system, commandery-county system, aristocratic clans, equal-field system, and fubing militia system to the Two-Tax Law, civil official politics, steppe empires, gentry society, and Qing rule, this book keeps returning to the same question: What held such a vast China together? And why did the balance between power, land, armies, taxes, and population take shape again and again, fail, and then reemerge in new forms? So this three-thousand-year history is not a list of dynasties rising and falling. It is the choices made by generation after generation within the rules of their time, and the consequences those choices accumulated. Sixty-six people, sixty-six windows into human destiny. Read three thousand years of Chinese history through the lives of its people.