Chinese History: A New Manual

Chinese History: A New Manual (Chinese: 中國歷史新手册; pinyin: Zhōngguó lìshǐ xīn shǒucè), seventh edition (2025) by Endymion Wilkinson, is an encyclopedic guide to Sinology and Chinese history. The Manual evaluates published, excavated, artifactual, and archival sources from Chinese pre-history to the twenty-first century, selects up-to-date scholarship and research tools in Chinese, Japanese, and Western languages, and outlines the 31 ancillary disciplines that Chinese historians use. Introductions to each of the chapters and short essays give often witty summaries of major topics for specialists and general readers, as well as directives on the uses of history and avoidance of error in thought and analysis.

Since the appearance of a preliminary version in 1973, the Manual has been continuously updated and enlarged from a research guide of 70,000 words to a reference work of 1.5 million words (the equivalent of 15 monographs). The Third edition won the 2014 Prix Stanislas Julien, the top international prize in Sinology awarded by the French Academy. In 2016, Peking University Press published a three-volume Chinese-language translation of the fourth edition which sold 13,000 copies. The seventh edition (2025) has been thoroughly updated and is for the first time published not in print but as a standalone ebook for use on smartphones, laptops, tablets, and desktops.