The Sextants of Beijing

"This book carries on the same theme as Robert Ramsey’s but deals more with history. It’s important for people to know that China has long been connected in very integral ways to the rest of the world. Influences from Central Asia, India and Southeast Asia have long been accommodated or assimilated into Chinese culture. Most people know about the encounter with the West that started in the 17th and 18th centuries and ramped up in the 19th and early 20th century. But China had an earlier journey to the West, particularly around the time of the Tang dynasty – from the seventh to 10th centuries – when India became an important cultural force in China. Buddhism came to China around this time, and for the first time China had to confront psychologically, intellectually and culturally a civilisation that it could not dismiss as barbaric and assert the superiority of Chinese culture over. In Buddhism, the Chinese found a highly complex and attractive philosophical, religious and psychological system that dealt with questions which native traditions like Confucianism and Daoism did not deal with. It dealt with metaphysical questions, questions of suffering, and existential questions. What does it mean to exist in the world? Why do we suffer? How do we overcome suffering? How do we think about the experiences that we are having in the world? Waley-Cohen’s book is a very accessible introduction to this history. It focuses mostly on the Macartney mission onwards, looking at the Jesuits and the Opium Wars for the most part. But it also suggests that during the Tang dynasty there was an incredible cosmopolitanism in Chinese culture. And going back even further into the archaeological evidence, increasingly scholars are coming to understand that Chinese civilisation does not originate from a single point. There are at least four or five different cultural regions that are identified as proto-Chinese. What we now identify as Chinese culture really comes out of the long history of these multiple traditions, unravelling over centuries and indeed millennia. Whether you’re an outside observer or a Chinese historian, you may at times try to define something that is uniquely or purely Chinese. But the more you look at Chinese history, the more you realise that the definition of what China is evolves over time. That definition is never completely pure – it’s always brought together from a mixture of different cultures. I love books that problematise the notion of what it means to be Chinese, or what we mean when we say China. It’s a relatively short book and very accessible, but it looks at the grand sweep of history from the origins of Chinese civilisation to the post-Mao era. Just like what it means to be American or Japanese or French, there are multiple answers and definitions. But it’s clear that throughout history territories which were once not considered Chinese – whose people were seen as barbarian – became Chinese over time, by adopting the Chinese language, dress, customs, philosophies and so on. Being Chinese meant being able to use chopsticks, speak Chinese, wear the proper clothes and talk about Confucianism. In that sense, people who were not racially or ethnically Chinese could in time become Chinese. This is quite unique. In Japan and Korea, ethnic and racial definitions of what it means to be Japanese or Korean are very strong. But China has such huge diversity, and is such a huge swath of territory, that to become Chinese really means to adopt Chinese culture."