Classical China

Description

»Ancient China is more profoundly alien to us than any of the other great classical civilizations of Eurasia. Vast distances separated the cradle of Chinese civilization in the Yellow River valley from centers of high culture in western Asia and Europe; and whatever influences traveled across those distances always remained comparatively slight. Indeed, it is not entirely misleading to think of ancient Near Eastern, Mediterranean, and Indian high culture as variants on a common theme, each tied to the others by continual, however tenuous, contact. By contrast, China stood alone, remote and radically different. This situation presents the Western historian with special difficulties in undertaking the study of ancient China. We are at the mercy of translators; and translators, in turn, face quite extraordinary problems, since the grammar, vocabulary, and ideographic script of the classical Chinese language differ fundamentally from our own patterns of speech and writing. The meaning of certain passages from ancient Chinese literature is sometimes unclear even to modern Chinese scholars. How much more difficult, then, to find any kind of adequate equivalents for Chinese ideas in English.« William Hardy McNeill was a historian and author, noted for his argument that contact and exchange among civilizations is what drives human history forward, first postulated in The Rise of the West (1963). He was the Robert A. Milikan Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Chicago, where he taught from 1947 until his retirement in 1987.