A Short History of the Chinese People [antikvár]

Preface to the J^irst Edition The history of the Chinese people cannot often enough be told. Old as it is, new light is being shed on it every year. Meanwhile the Chinese are malcing history before our eyes. We need, as never before, to understand how they have come in our time to maice such a sacrificial defense of a way of life that is theirs as much as it is our own. The Chinese are different from usj at the same time they are more like us than the people of India, of Annam, or of Japan. At the conclusion of the last war, the writer served for a time with a Chinese labor battalion attached to United States forces in France. Again and again, puzzled American corporals and sergeants helping to direct the battalion remarked to him on the innate likenesses between themselves and the Chinese, despite the barrier of language and difference of custom. They wanted this phenomenon explained} so have others. It is worth while therefore to examine the record, and see how the Chinese people have traveled down the corridors of time from the Old Stone Age to the present. Another good reason for a study of Chinese history is to make it serve as a foil for our own. Semi-detached from some of the other great civilizations of the world, the Chinese have yet evolved in some ways like ourselves, in some ways not. They have a great historical tradition. So had the Romans} but the Hindus have not. Why? The Chinese learned a great deal about the stars, devised a workable calendar, and made several praiseworthy achievements in mathematics, medicine, engineering, ar- ix