Book 1 of the series of 2. It covers from the pre-history times to just before the Sui dynasty's reunification of North and South China in ~580CE. A no frill, detailed and comprehensive 'textbook', covering political, military, social, economic, cultural history of China. Compared to the other more recent history books that try to add too much colour and use too much fancy populist language, this is a good book to plow through to get your chinese history basics. Written in the last millenium, it still retains some of the revolutionary rhetoric here and there, commenting about 'struggle of the classes', 'reactionary feudal forces'...etc... It uses a good amount of quoted text from the historic annals of chinese history and so allows the reader to feel part of the connection with the past thousands of years of history writing.