Preface xv
undeniable that the Chinese have long shown a keen interest, and great
skill, in organizing people for specialized tasks on a large scale, whether
for wet rice cultivation, bronze or pottery making, or the building of
roads, dams, canals, and defensive walls.
Another strong continuity in Chinese civilization has been a respect
for ancestors and an emphasis on family life organized in a patriarchal
fashion, that is, with descent traced through the male line, the senior
male assuming authority over everyone else, and males alone inheriting
property. Royal tombs from as early as 1200 bce reveal that ancestor
worship was a key social practice at least among the political and social
elite. When Confucius in the fi fth century bce praised fi lial piety as
the foundation of all moral virtues, he was affi rming values that were
already centuries old.
A fi nal distinctive trait that has been evident throughout the last
four millennia in China is a tendency toward what I might call an opti-
mistic humanism. Chinese thinkers have generally seen the universe as
a friendly place and human beings as capable of steady moral improve-
ment if not perfection. They have also generally seen all of human life
and the entire cosmos as one interrelated whole where every single
entity is ultimately related to every other entity. This holistic worldview
is evident in most Chinese approaches to ethics, cosmology, society,
government, economics, medicine, and history.
Cultural continuity will thus be a major theme in the history that
follows. But cultural continuity is only one side of the coin in China’s
long history. Change is the other equally important factor. We should
keep in mind, for example, that the geographical parameters of today’s
China did not take shape until the eighteenth century, less than 250
years ago. China’s geographical boundaries throughout its history were
constantly shifting, sometimes expanding and sometimes contracting.
And contrary to the popular stereotype of China as isolated and unaf-
fected by the outside world, China was frequently infl uenced in pro-
found ways by the peoples and cultures beyond its borders, whether
by armed nomads to the north and west, Arab traders traveling by the
Silk Route or by sea from the Middle East, Indian traders and Buddhist
missionaries from South Asia, non-Chinese peoples including Koreans
and Japanese in the Northeast, Vietnamese in the Southeast, Tibetans
in the Southwest, and hundreds of hill tribes in what today is south and
southwest China.
I cannot give a detailed picture of every phase of Chinese history
in this short book, but I will try to cover the essential developments in
each period, with special attention to the ways the Chinese people lived