All Under Heaven: The Growth of Culture and Society

Ian Rae and Morgen Witzel

Chapter 3 in Singular and Different, 2004, pp 21-34 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract The past is often present in China. You can see it in ancient irrigation systems or the dams and dykes holding back great rivers, the terraced padi fields on hillsides and the cultivated loess plateaux. There are also man-made artefacts such as the Great Wall, though few ancient buildings remain as the Chinese almost always built in wood. Present-day China has largely been re-built, and with the odd exception you will see little typically Chinese architecture apart from peasant homes. The place where the past largely dwells is in the people’s minds; the past is an integral part of Chinese culture, and so of Chinese society. This is by no means a backward-looking denial of the present, but rather an acknowledgement of a tradition, a literature, a history, adumbrated by a code of conduct regulated by philosophers that has lasted well over 2000 years. So a young Chinese, Western-dressed, speaking English, working with computer technology, will probably know about Cao Cao, a hero of the Three Kingdoms circa AD 200, who was always so quick off the mark that he would arrive anywhere before you could say ‘knife’. To this young person, Cao Cao and his men are just as real as Mao and his men on the Long March of 1934–5, or the actors he may watch in a television soap opera. China’s past is taught in all schools, not just as history but as part of being Chinese.

Keywords: Loess Plateau; Confucian Ethic; State Religion; Yellow Emperor; Middle Kingdom (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2004
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:palchp:978-0-230-51279-5_3

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DOI: 10.1057/9780230512795_3

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