Tales of history get a dash of modern color

By placing these complicated dynasties, events and figures from Chinese history in a context that is familiar to contemporary readers in English, the authors, Beck from the US and his Chinese colleagues Sun and Yang, have created a book of Chinese history that is fun to read and rich in information.

Rana Mitter, director of the University China Center and professor of the history and politics of modern China at the University of Oxford, says that, "you'll enjoy yourself so much you might not realize how much you're learning".

Together with China Simplified: Language Empowerment, the series of books by Beck and his Chinese collaborators are the latest publications from a new project at Shanghai Translation Publishing House aiming to promote Chinese culture to the international market. The books are supported by the National Publication Foundation of China.

The other book of the series, Language Empowerment was praised by David Brooks, chairman of Coco-Cola in the Greater China region and South Korea, to be "a lively and original approach to navigating the bottomless mysteries of Chinese language and culture".

Michael Volz, the Chinese program coordinator at the University of Missouri, says that: "With humor and clarity, Language Empowerment weaves together rich cultural and linguistic background information of the Chinese language with practical implications for daily communication."

In Language Empowerment, the authors Beck and Lu Haiyan didn't only present colorful Chinese expressions in different dialects and cultural context, idioms, quotes and puns, they even made a diagram that helps language learners to understand the nuanced ambiguity in Chinese from buzenmeyang (not so good) to taibangle (great).