The Cambridge History of China, Volume 5, Part Two: Sung China, 960–1279 ed. by John W. Chaffee and Denis Twitchett (review)

Abstract

In 1966, John King Fairbank and Denis Twitchett agreed to become the general editors of a Cambridge History of China. They planned “to provide a substantial account of the history of China as a bench mark for the Western history-reading public: an account of the current state of knowledge in six volumes.”1 By extending the prestigious Cambridge History series to China they intended to demonstrate that “Chinese history belongs to the world, not only as a right and necessity, but also as a subject of compelling interest.”2 Their design for a concise series, however, was soon overwhelmed by “the out-pouring of current research, the application of new methods, and the extension of scholarship into new fields,” forcing them to adjust the projected number of volumes to fourteen in 1976, and to sixteen or eighteen by 1982.3 In his memoir, Chinabound: A Fifty-Year Memoir, Fairbank describes the dilemma raised by the rapid growth of the number and the size of the emerging volumes: “the more massive our history becomes, the fewer its readers may be.”4 The general public could still read the individual articles “for the story they tell,” but the series would also aid professional historians by offering an increased apparatus of notes and bibliographies.5 In his preface to the second, final part of the Cambridge History of the Song dynasty, editor John Chaffee writes that its earliest essays date to the