A History of China | Page 3

Aborigines of South China, of the "Black Miao" tribe, at a festival.
China-ink drawing of the eighteenth century. _Collection of the
Museum für Völkerkunde, Berlin. No. 1D 8756, 68_.
15 Pavilion on the "Coal Hill" at Peking, in which the last Ming
emperor committed suicide. Photo Eberhard.

16 The imperial summer palace of the Manchu rulers, at Jehol. _Photo
H. Hammer-Morrisson_.
17 Tower on the city wall of Peking. _Photo H. Hammer-Morrisson_.

MAPS
1 Regions of the principal local cultures in prehistoric times
2 The principal feudal States in the feudal epoch (roughly 722-481
B.C.)
3 China in the struggle with the Huns or Hsiung-nu (roughly 128-100
B.C.)
4 The Toba empire (about A.D. 500)
5 The T'ang realm (about A.D. 750)
6 The State of the Later T'ang dynasty (923-935)
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