between 2004 and 2005. While his primary focus was on Qing dynasty China, he also wrote a biography of Mao Zedong and The Gate of Heavenly Peace, a study of twentieth-century intellectuals and their relation to revolution. He retired from Yale in 2008. His book The Search for Modern China was a New York Times best seller and documented the evolution of China starting from the decline of the Ming dynasty in the early 1600s to the pro-democracy movement of 1989, while his book Treason by the Book (2001) documented the story of a scholar who took on the third Manchu Emperor in the 1700s. Honors Spence received eight honorary degrees in the United States as well as from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and (in 2003) from Oxford University. He was invited to become a visiting professor at Peking University and an honorary professor at Nanjing University. He was named Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George in 2001, and in 2006, he was elected an Honorary Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge. He received the William C. DeVane Medal of the Yale Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa (1952); a Guggenheim Fellowship (1979); the Los Angeles Times History Prize (1982), and the Vursel Prize of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (1983). He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1985), named a MacArthur Fellow (1988), appointed to the Council of Scholars of the Library of Congress (1988), elected a member of the American Philosophical Society (1993), and named a corresponding fellow of the British Academy (1997). In May and June 2008, he gave the 60th anniversary Reith Lectures, which were broadcast on BBC Radio 4. In 2010, Spence was appointed to deliver the annual Jefferson Lecture at the Library of Congress, the US federal government's highest honour for achievement in the humanities. Personal life Spence's name in Chinese, (pinyin: Shǐ Jǐngqiān), was given to him by Fang Chao-ying to reflect his love of history and admiration for the Han dynasty historian Sima Qian. He chose the surname 史 (Shǐ; literally "history") and personal name (Jǐngqiān), where (jǐng) means admire (as in ) and (qiān) was taken from the personal name of Sima Qian (). Spence became a U.S. citizen in 2000. Spence's wife Annping Chin was a senior lecturer in history at Yale with a PhD in Chinese thought