Start with one volume
China: A History · John Keay (2009)
The whole span, Shang bronzes to the present, in a single readable volume by a writer who knows he is compressing and tells you where. Keay is good on the thing Western readers most need: why dynastic cycles are not just a list of names, and what actually held the thing together between them.
Then the modern collision
The Search for Modern China · Jonathan Spence (1990)
From the late Ming to the late twentieth century, and the standard account for good reason. Spence writes narrative history with a novelist's eye for the telling detail, and he takes Chinese sources seriously rather than telling the story as a series of things done to China by foreigners.
Wild Swans · Jung Chang (1991)
Three generations of women, grandmother to author, from warlord concubinage through the Cultural Revolution. Memoir rather than history, and the single most effective book for making the twentieth century in China land as something that happened to people. Banned on the mainland, which is its own data point.
Mao's Great Famine · Frank Dikötter (2010)
The Great Leap Forward reconstructed from provincial archives, and unsparing. Contested by some historians on its numbers and its framing; read it knowing that, because the archival work underneath is real and the event is not optional if you want to understand the period.
Then the founding voices
Records of the Grand Historian · Sima Qian (c. 94 BC)
China's Herodotus, though the comparison flatters Herodotus on structure. Sima Qian invented the form Chinese history would use for two thousand years, and he wrote it after being castrated for defending a disgraced general, which he mentions. Burton Watson's selected translation is the way in.
The Analects · Confucius (c. 5th century BC)
Not a history book, and the reason half of Chinese history looks the way it does. Short, fragmentary, and much stranger than the fortune-cookie reputation suggests. See also Taoism vs. Confucianism, the argument that runs underneath most of the imperial era.
Tao Te Ching · Lao Tzu (c. 4th century BC)
The other pole of Chinese thought, and the one that keeps declining to govern. Eighty-one short chapters, endlessly retranslated. Our translation comparison covers which edition to buy, and who Lao Tzu was covers whether he existed.
Fitting China into a real life
Four thousand years does not fit in a fortnight. 365 Days of World History (ours, flagged) runs one day in history per day with China in the rotation, and 365 Days of Tao takes the Tao Te Ching one verse a day across a year, which is the only pace at which that book behaves. For the neighbours, see the Japanese history shelf.
Common questions
What is the best book on Chinese history for beginners?
John Keay's China: A History for the full sweep in one volume. If you only care about the modern era, start with Jonathan Spence's The Search for Modern China instead.
What should I read to understand modern China?
Spence for the structure, Jung Chang's Wild Swans for what it felt like, and Dikötter's Mao's Great Famine for the archival record of the worst of it.
Do I need to read Confucius and Lao Tzu to understand Chinese history?
Not to follow the events, but you will misread the politics without them. The Analects and the Tao Te Ching are both short; a week with each pays for itself.
Is Wild Swans history or memoir?
Memoir, told across three generations, with the history arriving through what happened to one family. It is not a substitute for a survey and it is better than one at making the period real.