This Is China
This Is China—probably the shortest survey of Chinese history, geography, and culture that exists—was made possible by a much longer work, the 2,754-page Berkshire Encyclopedia of China: Modern and Historic Views of the World’s Newest and Oldest Global Power. In Chinese terms, even that is a short work: the Yongle dadian, or Great Compendium of the Yongle Reign (1408) had 22,877 chapters in 11,095 volumes. It was our longer encyclopedic work that made this brief history possible.
Chinese people, of course, understand the importance of brevity. And their society, as readers new to Chinese history will learn, has been one of many “firsts.” The Laozi 老子, one of China’s most renowned philosophical works, famously declared that a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. This Is China, for those of us who are learning about the country, provides an easy way to take that first, single step through thousands of years of history and across the vast territory that is China today.
This history opens a window on contemporary China—with balanced, nonpolitical coverage—by providing our readers with details about Chinese governance, society, and culture through the ages. Even our cover design reflects the modern and the ancient. By choosing a scene cropped from a 2008 photograph of the Wuyang River in Zhenyuan, Guizhou Province, where a fisherman casts his line into the water, we evoke images depicted in thousands of traditional Chinese paintings. The cover also shows lines from a sacred Buddhist scroll called the Diamond Sutra. A copy dated 868 ce was discovered in western China’s Dunhuang caves in 1907, which makes it the oldest extant printed book (and a natural fascination for a publisher). The caves, located in an oasis along the old Silk Roads, are among the most magical of sites to visit in China today. Both Zhenyuan and Dunhuang remind us that historic China lives on.
The Chinese title of this book is not an exact translation of the English, but instead is based on the advice of LE La (乐 拉), a young Beijing-based friend. When we explained the concept of the book to her one summer morning in Easthampton, New York, she suggested we take a more colloquial approach—“Look! This is China” (瞧！这是中国). For our readers who are studying the Chinese language we include pinyin transliterations and characters for many Chinese words and terms. Perhaps even general readers will make use of Chinese words with nuanced meanings that are impossible to translate in a single English word—like guanxi, a fluctuating network of relationships.
We hope that our Chinese friends will enjoy how we have presented their country to the world. We urge them, as well as all our readers, to share the book, to discuss the “thought experiments,” and to send us corrections and ideas for future editions and for other China-focused publications.
Karen Christensen 沈凯伦
Founder and CEO, Berkshire Publishing Group 宝库山, Great Barrington, Massachusetts, March 2010