Jonathan D. Spence, an eminent scholar of China and its vast history who in books like “God’s Chinese Son: The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiuquan” (1996) and “The Search for Modern China” (1990) excavated that country’s past and illuminated its present, died on Saturday at his home in West Haven, Conn. He was 85.

       His wife, Annping Chin, said the cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease.

       Professor Spence, who taught for more than 40 years at Yale University, where his lecture classes were always in great demand, found the big picture of Chinese history in small details. His books, deeply researched, probed individual lives and odd moments that were representative of larger cultural forces, wrapping it all together with vivid storytelling.

       “This is a delicate spider’s web of a book, deft, fascinating and precise as Chinese calligraphy,” Diana Preston wrote in The Los Angeles Times in a review of his “Treason by the Book” (2001), about a scholar who challenged the third Manchu emperor in the early 1700s. “It is also unnerving because it conjures so much that still resonates.”

       Among Professor Spence’s most ambitious books was “The Search for Modern China,” which made The New York Times’s best-seller list and is now a standard text. It took an 876-page view of China’s history from the decline of the Ming dynasty in the 1600s to the democracy movement of 1989.

       “Other books have attempted to cover the political and social history of China from imperial to Communist times,” Vera Schwarcz wrote in her review in The Times. “But they lack the narrative technique, the wealth of illustrations and the thematic focus of this work.”

       Professor Spence wrote more than a dozen books in all, beginning in 1966 with “Ts’ao Yin and the K’ang-hsi Emperor: Bondservant and Master,” based on his dissertation about a minor historical figure in the late 1600s and early 1700s.

       “No great claims need be made with regard to Ts’ao Yin’s personal importance,” he wrote in the preface. “He was not one of the great officials of the Ch’ing dynasty, nor even a major figure in the K’ang-hsi reign. His importance lies rather in what the course of his life can tell us about the society in which he lived and the institutional framework within which he operated.”

       That approach would guide many of Professor Spence’s subsequent works as well. The book, Pamela Kyle Crossley, a China scholar at Dartmouth College, said by email, “transformed the field, and its powering of a new movement for narrative in history echoed through many other specializations.”

       In “Emperor of China: Self-Portrait of K’ang-hsi” (1974), Professor Spence brought that emperor to life with an unusual technique.

       “Jonathan gave us the monarch in his own words,” Frederic E. Wakeman Jr., an East Asia scholar, said in a 2004 address (reproduced in 2010 in Humanities magazine) delivered when Professor Spence became president of the American Historical Association. “Kangxi spoke directly to the reader — or so it seemed. The book was controversial, because the emperor’s speech was a collage from myriad sources in different contexts. But Kangxi’s voice was vivid and compelling, and the book broke out of the confines of a conventional audience of Chinese specialists to reach a much larger public.”

       Emily Hahn, reviewing that book in The Times, said, “Jonathan Spence has punctured the translators’ balloon and let out all the gas.”

       A number of Professor Spence’s other books crossed over to a general audience as well.

       “In the 1970s and 1980s he almost single-handedly made Chinese history of vivid and immediate interest to a general reading public,” Professor Crossley said. “It is unusual for a writer with that kind of popular impact to also be at the forefront of scholarly influence and credibility, but Jonathan was.”

       A complete obituary will be published shortly.