A History of China., [3d Ed. Rev. and Enl.]

Long before China became a superpower, it was a civilization that baffled and awed outsiders for millennia. Wolfram Eberhard's influential history rewrites the story the West thought it knew. Rather than beginning with emperors and dynasties, Eberhard starts where all Chinese history actually begins: in the remote prehistoric cultures of the Yang-shao and Lung-shan peoples, in the caves where Peking Man once lived, in the agricultural revolutions that predated written records by thousands of years. Drawing on archaeological discoveries that were still fresh when Eberhard first wrote in the mid-twentieth century, this book dismantles the ancient but flawed narratives that Eurocentric scholars had imposed on Chinese history. What emerges is a picture of staggering complexity: a civilization that did not merely borrow or borrow from others but developed in dialogue with its own geography, its own rivers, its own internal tensions between unity and regional diversity. The book spans from these primal origins through the imperial dynasties and into the upheavals of modernity. Eberhard wrote for a Western audience still learning that Chinese civilization was not a single static thing, but a living process that had to be understood on its own terms. This revised and enlarged edition preserves that corrective urgency while incorporating decades of new scholarship. For anyone who wants to understand how China became China, this remains a serious, rigorous, and revelatory place to begin.