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.