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The Presidential Address: The Chinese Civilization: A Search for the Roots of Its Longevity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 March 2011

Ping-Ti Ho
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Extract

The longevity of Chinese civilization is generally conceded to be a unique phenomenon in world history; as such it has evoked explanations ranging from the plausible to the esoteric. A search for the roots of its longevity is now feasible, thanks to the massive archaeological and scientific data pouring out of China since 1949. A preliminary integration of such multifarious new data with rich archaic Chinese literary records has enabled me to reach the conclusion that the trait-complex of each of the major Chinese cultural elements—field agriculture, animal husbandry, pottery, metallurgy, script, language, religion including the system of divination, social and political thought—is marked at once by a regionally distinctive Sinitic character and by a pattern of centrifugal geographic spread from the southeastern portion of the loess highlands of North China. The detailed evidence and argument that the Chinese civilization, in spite of its later coalescence and articulation, was just as pristine as the Mesopotamian, have been presented in my recent book, The Cradle of the East: An Inquiry into the Indigenous Origins of Techniques and Ideas of Neolithic and Early Historic China, 5000–1000 B.C. In the course of my research I have uncovered three basic factors that may provide a fresh interpretation as to why the Chinese civilization is the only major civilization of ancient origin that is still distinctive and vital today.

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Articles
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The Journal of Asian Studies , Volume 35 , Issue 4 , August 1976 , pp. 547 - 554
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Asian Studies, Inc. 1976

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References

1 The Chinese University of Hong Kong and the University of Chicago Press, 1975.

2 Pumpelly, Raphael (ed.), Explorations in Tur- (Washington, D.C., 1908), I, p. 7.Google Scholarkestan: Prehistoric Civilizations of Anau (2 vols.)

3 Chou-li chu-shu (Ssu-pu pei-yao ed.), ch. 10, p. 9a.

4 Jacobson, Thorkild and Adams, Robert M., ”Salt and Silt in Ancient Mesopotamian Agriculture,” Science, CXXVIII, No. 3334 (1958)Google Scholar, abstract.

5 Fairservis, Walter A. Jr., The Origin, Character, and Decline of an Early Civilization (American Museum Novitates, No. 2303, 1967), p. 42.Google Scholar

6 Both sayings are in The Analects; these versions are taken from Yu-lan, Fung, A History of Chinese Philosophy, I, trans, by Derk Bodde (Peiping, 1937), p. 58.Google Scholar

7 Hsün-tzu (Ssu-pu pei-yao ed.), ch. 13, pp. 14b–16a.

8 For changes in the family and kinship system in the entire imperial age, see Ho, Ping-ti, ”An Historian's View of the Chinese Family System,” in Farber, S. M., Mustacchi, P., and Wilson, R. H. J. (eds.), Man and Civilization: The Family's Search for Survival (New York, 1965), pp. 15–30.Google Scholar

9 Hsi-an Pan-p'o (Peking, 1963), pp. 196–98; and plates 169–71.

10 For detailed discussion, see Ho, The Cradle of the East, pp. 223–35, and Appendix IV, pp. 393–405.

11 Archaic Chinese mathematical notations and the place-value system are discussed in Ho, The Cradle of the East, pp. 233–35, and in Needham, Joseph, Science and Civilization in China, III, Mathematics and the Sciences of the Heaven and the Earth (Cambridge, 1959), pp. 13–14.Google Scholar

12 This saying, which is no doubt based on very old oral traditions, is so iconoclastic that for ages it has baffled Chinese classical commentators and also a modern Western translator; James Legge (tr.), The Chinese Classics,II, The Works of Mencius (Taipei reprint of the original Hong Kong ed.), p. 316, rendered the sentence as follows: “Shun … was a man near the wild tribes of the east…. King Wen was … a man near the wild tribes of the west.”