PREFACE
- Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New
York: Norton, 1999), 324. - Karl A. Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1963). - Victor Mair, ed., Contact and Exchange in the Ancient World (Honolulu:
University of Hawai‘i Press, 2006), 3–5.
CHAPTER 1
- Because only male descendants of a king could succeed him, it was important for
a king to have many sons, and many consorts (i.e., secondary wives) helped make
that possible. - I take this term from Valerie Hanson, The Open Empire: A History of China to
1600 (New York: Norton, 2000), 35, 52. - Arthur Waley, trans., The Book of Songs (1937; reprint, New York: Grove Press,
1960), 34. - Sun Tzu, Art of War, trans. Ralph Sawyer (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1994), 167.
- Confucius was born as Kong Qiu and came to be known to his disciples as Kongzi
(Master Kong) or Kong Fuzi (Venerable Master Kong). When Jesuit missionaries from
Europe went to China in the sixteenth century, they began to study and to translate
the writings attributed to Kong Fuzi into European languages. To make these writings
more accessible to their European readers, they Latinized Kong Fuzi into Confucius. - Simon Leys, trans., The Analects of Confucius (New York: Norton, 1997), ch. 15,
verse 13, p. 76. - The ideograph for ren is 仁, combining an element on the left meaning person and
the two lines on the right that indicate two. Thus, the ideograph carries the built-in
implication of people in relationship. - Mencius is the Latin-sounding name Jesuit missionaries in China assigned to
Mengzi in the sixteenth century. These are the only two Chinese philosophers who
have come to be known in the West by their Latinized names. - Mencius, rev. ed., trans. D. C. Lau (London: Penguin Books, 2003), 106.
10.Tao Te Ching, trans. D. C. Lau (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1963), 57.
11.The Book of Chuang Tzu, trans. Martin Palmer (London: Penguin Books, 2006), 78.
CHAPTER 2
- These were walls of rammed earth, not to be confused with the later brick walls
of the Ming dynasty that form the prototype of today’s tourist sites. - Mark Edward Lewis, The Early Chinese Empires: Qin and Han (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007), 152–54. - Burton Watson, Ssu-ma Ch’ien, Grand Historian of China (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1958), 67.