Sources

 I thought it might be worthwhile to mention some of the sources I've used for the Chinese books I've written. When I started to research and write Storybook of China (and later books), I used about 4-5 books together as well as some online sources:

A Storied History of China, compiled by Lu Qianfei, 1988, Tourism Education Press, printed in Beijing, China. This book has lots of details, some maps and pictures, and stories. This book would be super hard to find; I found it when I lived in China and it's no longer in print. 

A Short History of The Chinese People by L. Carrington Goodrich, 1963 by Harper and Row. Something that was interesting about this book is that the Terra Cotta soldiers (the clay soldiers that were buried underground close to Xi'an, China) weren't discovered yet so they are not in this book. 

Chinese History Stories, Volume I and Volume II. Volume one is Stories From The Zhou Dynasty and volume two is Stories From The Imperial Era. These are a few stories from a different book that have been translated into English by Renee Ting. Published 2009 by Shen's Books. These books are also really hard to find and out of print (as far as I know). They are based on a Chinese book (also Volume I and Volume II). My husband helped me track down and find one of the Chinese books for this (中国历史故事). There's a 下 and a 上 part of it (Part 1 and Part 2).  We were only able to find the 下 part. The Chinese books were published in 2007. They have a lot more than the English versions.

There's another series of Chinese history books in Chinese that I had back in China but weren't able to bring them with me when we moved.

Wikipedia was also one of my sources. 

Something to keep in mind is that over history, several emperors tried to burn all the history scrolls to make it seem like their dynasty was the first one. They wanted to, essentially, wipe out all of Chinese history to that point. There's one school of thought that says that most of ancient Chinese history (before the Xin Dynasty, the same dynasty that put together the Great Wall, unified the country, and made the Terra Cotta clay army) is different than what people are taught today. Also, many of the stories from ancient China have been passed down through oral retellings so it's sometimes hard to tell how accurate they are. In modern Chinese history sometimes people want to emphasize some parts while completely ignoring or purposely forgetting other parts. 

My books about China are available here.