Preface

M

y purpose in this book is to narrate the long history of China
within the larger context of world history. At each step along
the way, I will try to address these questions: How has the
development of Chinese civilization compared with contemporaneous
civilizations elsewhere in the world? What has China shared with other
civilizations, and what are the unique or distinctive traits of Chinese
civilization? What is the history of China’s relations with cultures and
peoples beyond its borders? How have foreign peoples—merchants,
diplomats, missionaries, and soldiers—affected the development of
Chinese civilization? What have been the most important changes and
continuities in China’s long history?
Today we think of China as the world’s oldest continuous civili-
zation. An identifi able and sophisticated Chinese culture emerged by
1500 bce and has shown remarkable continuity in its language, cul-
tural values, and social and political organization over the past three
and a half millennia. A major question in the study of China is how
such remarkable linguistic, political, and cultural continuity could be
maintained for so long over such a large area. Why was China, alone
among the early human civilizations, able to sustain political, cultural,
and linguistic unity and continuity over an entire subcontinent through
a period of three thousand years without the benefi t of modern indus-
trial technology?
Jared Diamond has noted that all the great civilizations except Chi-
na’s have been melting pots of many divergent peoples, languages, and
cultures. And he insightfully adds that China began its early history as
“an ancient melting pot.”^1 That is, the area that defi nes China today
began with a multiplicity of peoples, languages, cultures, and ethnici-
ties, which, beginning in the second millennium bce, came to be con-
quered, dominated, absorbed, marginalized, or pushed away by the Han
Chinese people, who around 1500 bce formed a sophisticated civiliza-
tion with Chinese writing, bronze technology, an effi cient and produc-
tive agriculture supporting large walled cities and towns, and powerful
armies with crossbows, bronze spears, and horse-drawn chariots.
The distinctive patterns of Chinese social, economic, and cultural life
have been profoundly infl uenced by the geographical setting of the East