Praise for The Gate of Heavenly Peace "Absolutely first rate; it is adventurous in form, scrupulous in content, passionate in its revelation of complex human drama."
–Saturday Review "[Jonathan Spence] has woven a magical symphony that tells us as no conventional history could of the agony of a nation in awesome labor."
–Harrison E. Salisbury, Chicago Tribune Book World "With a novelist's flair for life and a historian's grounding in fact . . . there is no other work to match this in sweep, vivacity, and humanity."
–Library Journal