Voices From the Ming-Qing Cataclysm by Lynn A. Struve

This fascinating book presents eyewitness accounts of a turbulent period in Chinese history: the fall of the Ming dynasty and the conquest of China by the Manchus in the mid-seventeenth century. Lynn A. Struve has translated, introduced, and annotated absorbing testimonies from a wide range of individuals in different social stations―Chinese and Europeans, missionaries and viceroys, artists and merchants, Ming loyalists and Qing collaborators, maidservants and eunuchs―all telling stories of hardship and challenge in the midst of cataclysmic change.