including headings China's unbroken story, The Shang dynasty, Sacrifice, silk and bronze, The roots of Chinese culture, The Zhou dynasty, ...
Poems ranging in date from 1100 to 600 BC are collected in the earliest work of Chinese literature, the Shijing or 'Classic of Poetry'. Most of them are lyrical and often wistful - as, for example, in the poignant...
The longest consistent civilization in the human story so far is that of China. This vast eastern empire seems set apart from the rest of the world, fiercely proud of its own traditions, resisting foreign influences. Its...
Of various creation stories which evolve in China, the most striking is that of P'an Ku. He is hatched from a cosmic egg. Half the shell is above him as the sky, the other half below him as the earth. He grows taller eac...
The greatest extent of Chinese trade is achieved in the early 15th century when Zheng He, a Muslim eunuch, sails far and wide with a fleet of large junks. At various times between 1405 and 1433 he reaches the Persian Gul...
The Chinese (the greatest early builders of canals) undertake several major projects from the 3rd century BC onwards. These waterways combine the functions of irrigation and transport. O...
In the 7th and 8th centuries, under Srong-btsan sgam-po and his successors, Tibet is a unified kingdom exercising power over an area well beyond the Tibetan plateau, including important regions on the Silk Road such as K...
Japanese admiration for all things Chinese results in a long sequence of missions to the T'ang capital at Xi'an. The first ambassador sails from Japan in 607, returning the following year with a Chinese envoy. The twelft...
Cultural influence in southeast Asia comes at first either from India or China. In the 1st century BC Indian traders penetrate Burma. Further east, in Vietnam, Bronze Age culture infiltrates gradually from China at some...
Marco spends seventeen years in China, fulfilling a wide variety of tasks in Kublai Khan's administration. He is in effect a member of an occupying force, speaking Mongolian but not Chinese, so his understanding of the p...
Paper money is first experimented with in China in about910, during the Five Dynasties period. It is a familiar currency by the end of the century under the Song dynasty. Another three centuries later it is one of the th...
By one of the strange coincidences of history, the idea of coinage occurs at the same period in two far separated parts of the world. While the craftsmen of Ephesus are striking coins in Asia Minor, the skilled casters o...
A tentative trade route is becoming established along a string of oases north of the Himalayas. They are very exposed to the broad expanse of steppes - from which marauding bands of nomadic tribesmen are liable to descen...
After six years' work, a Buddhist monk by the name of Su Song completes a great tower, some thirty feet high, which is designed to reveal the movement of the stars and the hours of the day. Figures pop out of doors and s...
The extent of the imperial Chinese bureaucracy under the T'ang dynasty makes possible an unusually thorough scientific project (echoing, for a different purpose, the brave amateur experiment of Eratosthenes 1000 years ea...
