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Reviewed by:
  • Chinese History: A Manual
  • Ronald Suleski (bio)
Endymion Wilkinson. Chinese History: A Manual. Harvard-Yenching Institute Monograph, 46. Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 1998. xxvi, 1,068 pp. 27 tables. Hardcover $65.00, ISBN 0-674-12377-8. Paperback $19.95, ISBN 0-674-12378-6.

When I first began to study China, well over thirty years ago, I was quickly confronted by the enormous treasurehouse of information that the Chinese people had created about themselves in the long course of building their civilization. Most of these materials were recorded in wenyanwen, a form of written Chinese almost never used these days, people told me, and filled with literary or historical allusions that only a fully educated Chinese scholar could understand. A number of these titles had been singled out as standard works or classical texts. The scholar in traditional China first studied these texts by memorizing them, before wading into the ocean of other written works that awaited.

And it did seem like an ocean to me, containing more highly specific and detailed information than I could ever hope to master. All of this information was immensely compelling and intellectually deeply stimulating. It seemed so finely crafted and intricate, and it all fit together in a scrollwork of ornately complex yet clearly identifiable patterns that, when taken together, came to comprise China's astoundingly rich culture.

One problem with an ocean, of course, is that it has a power of its own. It possesses a force that makes any single individual insignificant. As a way of summoning up the courage to forge ahead in my study of China, I told myself that even in the vast ocean human beings do not always succumb. The same waves that so easily overwhelm and threaten to drown a person also, conversely, contain the life-saving buoyancy that can keep a body afloat effortlessly. I decided that I would consider the glittering gems of China's priceless historical record as waves roiling and glistening in a vast ocean that would actually preserve me on my course. I could never know all of the waves or how they formed or changed, but I could know some of them, and through persistent study I could increase the volume of my knowledge. More importantly, all the while I would be in the ocean itself, as much a part of it, even when floundering, as any other scholar of China.

Endymion Wilkinson has created an extremely useful navigational guide in English to the vast ocean of China's long traditional civilization. Because of its many strong points it can be considered one of a kind, a unique work that at some point every serious scholar of China whose native language is English will want to consult—though I hasten to add that its value extends to scholars of China working in other languages as well. This is the most comprehensive work of its type that has yet appeared in English. [End Page 240]

Wilkinson devotes the first three hundred or more pages in section 1 to the Basics, and perhaps nothing is more basic to Chinese civilization than written Chinese characters, a topic that appears very early in the volume. When archaeological excavations reveal implements of long-ago human communities, our ability to infer meaning from these finds increases many-fold when they contain writing, especially because so many of the earliest written symbols in China can be linked to written characters still in use. Before describing the earliest dictionaries in China, such as the Shuowen jiezi, completed by a Han dynasty scholar about A.D. 100, Wilkinson discusses how the Chinese written language evolved through time, how characters came to embrace multiple meanings, how new words were created, and even how loan words—for example, from the nomadic peoples along China's early frontier regions or from the refined philosophical thinking of Buddhism as expressed through Sanskrit—entered the Chinese language to become part of the vocabulary still in use today.

The section on basics also explains how the early Chinese conceived of their world, how they told time by making reference to the sun and stars and seasons, and how they used night...

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