Life and Afterlife in Ancient China

Time and time again, Jessica Rawson has demonstrated her extraordinary ability to explain the unfamiliar in terms that everyone can understand. Life and Afterlife in Ancient China is a perfect book for someone new to China. Unusually, it is also ideal for the more knowledgeable because it offers such an up-to-date portrayal of the complex relations between the ancient Chinese and their neighbors

Valerie Hansen, author of The Year 1000: When Explorers Connected the World—and Globalization Began

The story of China is written in the objects buried in its tombs over many millennia, but for most of us they are as hard to read as Chinese characters. Jessica Rawson is the master-interpreter. In a dozen tombs she tells the story of China across thousands of years, pointing out again and again the profound ways in which the Chinese are not like us. If you want to understand China today, start by visiting these twelve tombs in the enlightening company of Jessica Rawson. A dozen tombs - an underground journey to the heart of China.

Neil MacGregor

No book better attests to the most basic point of history - and not just China's - that we are profoundly shaped by our cultural heritages. Rawson's lucid and intimate account of the extraordinary contents of twelve ancient tombs stretching four millennia into the past brings readers inside Chinese culture and mentality in ways that instruct, surprise, and delight. A masterwork

Timothy Brook, author of Vermeer's Hat and Great State

Jessica Rawson understands the long history of China through a lifetime's engagement with its ancient sites and artefacts. Her book evokes both the internal dynamics and external influences of China's deep past with great clarity, allowing us to appreciate their continuing force and importance to the present

Chris Gosden, Professor of European Archaeology, University of Oxford

A distinguished art historian ... Rawson succeeds in distilling and animating a great deal of dry scholarship ... impressive and engaging.

Robert Bickers, Literary Review

insightful ... Jessica Rawson has the ability to bring an unfamiliar subject to life ... rich ... an invaluable book for anyone wishing to learn more about the future of China by exploring its diversity and glorious ancient past.

James Lin, BBC

majestic history

Andrew Robinson, nature

This engaging book by Jessica Rawson provides a highly readable yet thoroughly referenced overview of the heterogeneous societies that existed in areas of East Asia (now part of China) during the millennia before the imperial conquest by the Qin state in 221 BC ... a thoroughly enjoyable read and appropriate for readers who seek a broad overview of Ancient China, a multifaceted introduction to archaeological examples of burial practices in this era and those who wish to engage with the scholarship of an unparalleled figure in the study of the Chinese Bronze Age.

Rowan Flad, Antiquity