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CHINA
China is not so much another country as another world.
Cut off from the rest of Eurasia
by the Himalayas to the south and the Siberian steppe to the north, it
has grown up alone and aloof. The only foreigners it saw were visiting
merchants from far-flung shores or uncivilized nomads from the wild
steppe: peripheral, unimportant and unreal. Apart from a few ruling
elites of Mongol and Manchu origin, who quickly became assimilated,
China did not experience a
significant influx of foreigners until
the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries,
something which still colours
the experience of today's
visitors to China.
While empires, languages, nations and entire peoples
in the rest of the world have risen and blossomed - then disappeared
without trace - China has spent the past two millennia largely recycling
itself.
The ferocious dragons and lions of Chinese statuary have been
produced by Chinese craftsmen,
with the same essentially Chinese characteristics, for 25 centuries or
more, and the script still used today reached perfection at the time of
the Han dynasty, two thousand years ago. It is as though the
Roman empire had survived intact
into the twenty-first century, with a billion people speaking a language
as old as classical Latin. |
