214 CultureShock! China
A character-based system is different. Of course, grammar
shifts over time, nuances of words evolve, and popular
word choices come and go. But the basic meaning of most
characters remains pretty much unchanged through the
centuries. And of course, many texts still require special
study. Anything dating from before the 20th century will
be written in the dense grammar of Classical Chinese; even
native speakers of modern Chinese must read closely and
carefully to understand these earlier texts, and in many cases
will need special training. For Western language students,
Classical Chinese presents an even higher wall to scale than
do modern texts. But with relatively little help, any reasonably
well-educated native speaker of Chinese is able to read
many ancient texts in the original. This provides a degree of
connection to the ancient past almost unimaginable in the
West. It would be like a smart high school student in England
being able to pick up and read—incompletely perhaps,
haltingly certainly, but read—a text from centuries before
Beowulf, perhaps from ancient Greece, or Mesopotamia.
For instance, spoken Chinese has changed drastically since
the Tang Dynasty (AD 618–906). The justly famous poetry of
the Tang was, in Tang times, pronounced far differently from
today. Ezra Pound and other Western poets, not realising this,
looked to Tang poetry as an early model for free verse. The
irony is that when pronounced in Middle Chinese, as they
would have been when they were written, the Tang poems
not only rhyme, but generally follow rhythmic schemes at
least as strict as any sonnet.
But here’s the thing: while modern Chinese readers likely
won’t know how the Tang poems were originally pronounced,
they can, by and large, still read them. Many famous Tang
poems are memorised in their original written form by
elementary school students across Greater China. That would
be like modern American third-graders memorising, in their
original, odes by late Roman poets written shortly after the
fall of Rome.
In fact, this connection goes beyond the texts of Chinese
history to the texts and peoples of all the nations which
in ancient times adapted the Chinese character system as