Oracle Bones (He Wei Works 02, Revised Third Edition)

Oracle Bones: A Journey Through Time In China

【Newly Revised Edition 2025】
【Witness China's Changes, the Vicissitudes of History】
If you could only choose one work to understand 1990s China,
it would be Peter Hessler's ── "Oracle Bones"
Looking back at China's changes and constants, the most objective and moving documentary writing!


◎ Time Magazine Best Books of the Year
◎ National Book Award for Nonfiction (Finalist)
◎ New York Times, Washington Post, Christian Science Monitor Best Books of the Year

"Oracle Bones" is Peter Hessler's classic non-fiction work, the result of a decade spent exploring China, documenting the dramatic changes in China in the 1990s. In 1996, he came to Fuling, Sichuan, as a Peace Corps volunteer to teach, later becoming a Beijing correspondent for The New Yorker, and completed this book in a nameless alley apartment in Beijing.

In the book, Hessler not only records his personal observations but also traces hundreds of years of historical events, from the bronzes of Yinxu and the masks of Sanxingdui to the tragedy of ancient script scholar Chen Mengjia; from the reform of Chinese pinyinization to the debate over traditional and simplified Chinese characters, weaving historical China and contemporary China together. Hessler's journey in China not only has a practical dimension but also historical and metaphorical layers, which intersect and interweave like the cracks on an oracle bone.

The reform and opening-up allowed Chinese people to migrate freely for the first time. Hessler encountered marginalized groups who previously "had no history," such as a North Korean defector who stole his wallet on the Yalu River at the Sino-Korean border, a Uyghur intellectual who frequented Beijing's black market, director Jiang Wen filming "Devils on the Doorstep" in Xinjiang, and a Sichuanese girl who moved to Shenzhen for work. He also depicted the "hide-and-seek" between Falun Gong practitioners and police in Tiananmen Square, and the Taiwan election scene with Chen Wen-chi.

These stories span Beijing, Henan, the Northeast, Xinjiang, Wenzhou, Shenzhen, and even Taiwan, presenting a fascinating and lost, chaotic yet hopeful picture of China. Hessler is both an observer and a friend, genuinely interacting with farmers, female laborers, small business owners, and vendors, shedding any exoticizing gaze, allowing readers to see a real and human China—a China more real than reality itself.

"I was the last clipping clerk in The Wall Street Journal's Beijing bureau. The bureau was cramped, with only two offices and a converted kitchen. The staff included two foreign correspondents, a secretary, a driver, and me." ── Peter Hessler

"That was the Chinese sense of time. Before coming to China, I thought the past was over, and history was just a linear progression of cause and effect. Historians select important events, place them in the correct sequence, and then adjust them. But the longer I stayed in China, the less I found things to be linear. Because of the reform and opening-up, people could move more freely, so you had the opportunity to meet those who had previously lived on the margins of existence, to write about those 'without history'." ── Peter Hessler


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Today’s China seems to exist for Peter Hessler’s writing. If you don’t believe it, read "Oracle Bones." ── The New York Times

At times moving, at times humorous, it is like an insightful X-ray into the Chinese zeitgeist. ── South China Morning Post

This book solidified Hessler’s place as one of the most profound Western writers on contemporary China. ── The Wall Street Journal

Deeply moving and intellectually rich, it achieves a narrative tension usually found only in novels. Hessler paints vivid and complex pictures of China, a country in rapid transformation. ── The Guardian

Every reader in the Western world should read this work. Hessler tells stories no one else has told and organizes them within his personal reflections on China. ── Publishers Weekly

2026-03-01

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