Introduction to non-western history

History books here are way too focused on Europe, Middle East and North Africa (and America of course, once you get past the Rennaissance), and not much about the rest. I thought it would be interesting to gain some more knowledge about other regions of the world, and I was wondering if anyone could recommend good sources for the region I intend to start with: East Asia. I'm interested in both very rough chronology/timeline links for overview, and more in-depth descriptions. Primarily everything up to around 1900 would be interesting, with the greatest focus on all periods before and up to around 1700.

There are two sources I recommend for some nations of East Asia:

www.kongming.net (For the Three Kingdoms Period, which started after the fall of the Han Dynasty.)

www.http://samurai-archives.com (All the info you need about samurai history, you just have too look.)

I hope this is what you wanted.

At the moment I'm following a lecture series about the rise of the West in the nineteenth century, and a lot of time is spent on the rest of the world to compare developments and look for causes. We're reading a lot of comparative studies also often focusing on neglected economic aspects (over standard dated theories) so I'll get a list together which may be of interest to you.

Thanks!

To add a note of cynicism to this thread, the samurai and the Three Kingdoms period are real standard and mainstream fare for Westerners when "studying" East Asia... you could call that Eurocentrism too ~;) ~;p