Men of history sometimes make history. The distinguished career of C. Martin Wilbur, who spent twenty-nine years as Professor of Chinese History at Columbia University, illustrates this point. Based on journals, letters, and other records, and richly illustrated with photographs from the author's private collection, China in My Life is the autobiographical account of a scholar-teacher who devoted his career to the study of Chinese history and the promotion of Asian studies in America.

Over the course of sixty years, starting with his early years in China in the 1920s and 1930s, Wilbur reflects on and details the growth of an academic discipline in this country as well as vast changes in the Asian historical landscape, including developments in Japan and Taiwan over a thirty-five-year period, conditions in Korea, Hong Kong, India, Burma, and Thailand in the 1950s, and the situation in the People's Republic of China in the 1980s. During his career, Wilbur was also the curator of Chinese Archaeology and Ethnology at Chicago's Field Museum, a member of the Office of Strategic Services in Washington, and an adviser in war-torn China.

China in My Life is that rare event in which the autobiographical words of a distinguished scholar lend immediacy to the great historical events of his lifetime.