INTRODUCTION

There are indeed enough Histories of China already: why yet another one?
Because the time has come for new departures; because we need to clear
away the false notions with which the general public is constantly being
fed by one author after another; because from time to time syntheses
become necessary for the presentation of the stage reached by research.

Histories of China fall, with few exceptions, into one or the other of
two groups, pro-Chinese and anti-Chinese: the latter used to
predominate, but today the former type is much more frequently found. We
have no desire to show that China’s history is the most glorious or her
civilization the oldest in the world. A claim to the longest history
does not establish the greatness of a civilization; the importance of a
civilization becomes apparent in its achievements. A thousand years ago
China’s civilization towered over those of the peoples of Europe. Today
the West is leading; tomorrow China may lead again. We need to realize
how China became what she is, and to note the paths pursued by the
Chinese in human thought and action. The lives of emperors, the great
battles, this or the other famous deed, matter less to us than the
discovery of the great forces that underlie these features and govern
the human element. Only when we have knowledge of those forces and
counter-forces can we realize the significance of the great
personalities who have emerged in China; and only then will the history
of China become intelligible even to those who have little knowledge of
the Far East and can make nothing of a mere enumeration of dynasties and
campaigns.

Views on China’s history have radically changed in recent years. Until
about thirty years ago our knowledge of the earliest times in China
depended entirely on Chinese documents of much later date; now we are
able to rely on many excavations which enable us to check the written
sources. Ethnological, anthropological, and sociological research has
begun for China and her neighbours; thus we are in a position to write
with some confidence about the making of China, and about her ethnical
development, where formerly we could only grope in the dark. The claim
that "the Chinese race" produced the high Chinese civilization entirely
by its own efforts, thanks to its special gifts, has become just as
untenable as the other theory that immigrants from the West, some
conceivably from Europe, carried civilization to the Far East. We know
now that in early times there was no "Chinese race", there were not even
"Chinese", just as there were no "French" and no "Swiss" two thousand
years ago. The "Chinese" resulted from the amalgamation of many separate
peoples of different races in an enormously complicated and
long-drawn-out process, as with all the other high civilizations of the
world.

The picture of ancient and medieval China has also been entirely changed
since it has been realized that the sources on which reliance has always
been placed were not objective, but deliberately and emphatically
represented a particular philosophy. The reports on the emperors and
ministers of the earliest period are not historical at all, but served
as examples of ideas of social policy or as glorifications of particular
noble families. Myths such as we find to this day among China’s
neighbours were made into history; gods were made men and linked
together by long family trees. We have been able to touch on all these
things only briefly, and have had to dispense with any account of the
complicated processes that have taken place here.

The official dynastic histories apply to the course of Chinese history
the criterion of Confucian ethics; for them history is a textbook of
ethics, designed to show by means of examples how the man of high
character should behave or not behave. We have to go deeper, and try to
extract the historic truth from these records. Many specialized studies
by Chinese, Japanese, and Western scholars on problems of Chinese
history are now available and of assistance in this task. However, some
Chinese writers still imagine that they are serving their country by yet
again dishing up the old fables for the foreigner as history; and some
Europeans, knowing no better or aiming at setting alongside the
unedifying history of Europe the shining example of the conventional
story of China, continue in the old groove. To this day, of course, we
are far from having really worked through every period of Chinese
history; there are long periods on which scarcely any work has yet been
done. Thus the picture we are able to give today has no finality about
it and will need many modifications. But the time has come for a new
synthesis, so that criticism may proceed along the broadest possible
front and push our knowledge further forward.

The present work is intended for the general reader and not for the
specialist, who will devote his attention to particular studies and to
the original texts. In view of the wide scope of the work, I have had to
confine myself to placing certain lines of thought in the foreground and
paying less attention to others. I have devoted myself mainly to showing
the main lines of China’s social and cultural development down to the
present day. But I have also been concerned not to leave out of account
China’s relations with her neighbours. Now that we have a better
knowledge of China’s neighbours, the Turks, Mongols, Tibetans, Tunguses,
Tai, not confined to the narratives of Chinese, who always speak only of
"barbarians", we are better able to realize how closely China has been
associated with her neighbours from the first day of her history to the
present time; how greatly she is indebted to them, and how much she has
given them. We no longer see China as a great civilization surrounded by
barbarians, but we study the Chinese coming to terms with their
neighbours, who had civilizations of quite different types but
nevertheless developed ones.

It is usual to split up Chinese history under the various dynasties that
have ruled China or parts thereof. The beginning or end of a dynasty
does not always indicate the beginning or the end of a definite period
of China’s social or cultural development. We have tried to break
China’s history down into the three large periods–"Antiquity", "The
Middle Ages", and "Modern Times". This does not mean that we compare
these periods with periods of the same name in Western history although,
naturally, we find some similarities with the development of society and
culture in the West. Every attempt towards periodization is to some
degree arbitrary: the beginning and end of the Middle Ages, for
instance, cannot be fixed to a year, because development is a continuous
process. To some degree any periodization is a matter of convenience,
and it should be accepted as such.

The account of Chinese history here given is based on a study of the
original documents and excavations, and on a study of recent research
done by Chinese, Japanese and Western scholars, including my own
research. In many cases, these recent studies produced new data or
arranged new data in a new way without an attempt to draw general
conclusions. By putting such studies together, by fitting them into the
pattern that already existed, new insights into social and cultural
processes have been gained. The specialist in the field will, I hope,
easily recognize the sources, primary or secondary, on which such new
insights represented in this book are based. Brief notes are appended
for each chapter; they indicate the most important works in English and
provide the general reader with an opportunity of finding further
information on the problems touched on. For the specialist brief hints
to international research are given, mainly in cases in which different
interpretations have been proposed.

Chinese words are transcribed according to the Wade-Giles system with
the exception of names for which already a popular way of transcription
exists (such as Peking). Place names are written without hyphen, if they
remain readable.