the old fables for the foreigner as history; and some Europeans, knowing no better or aiming at setting alongside the unedifying history of Europe the shining example of the conventional story of China, continue in the old groove.  To this day, of course, we are far from having really worked through every period of Chinese history; there are long periods on which scarcely any work has yet been done.  Thus the picture we are able to give today has no finality about it and will need many modifications.  But the time has come for a new synthesis, so that criticism may proceed along the broadest possible front and push our knowledge further forward.

The present work is intended for the general reader and not for the specialist, who will devote his attention to particular studies and to the original texts.  In view of the wide scope of the work, I have had to confine myself to placing certain lines of thought in the foreground and paying less attention to others.  I have devoted myself mainly to showing the main lines of China’s social and cultural development down to the present day.  But I have also been concerned not to leave out of account China’s relations with her neighbours.  Now that we have a better knowledge of China’s neighbours, the Turks, Mongols, Tibetans, Tunguses, Tai, not confined to the narratives of Chinese, who always speak only of “barbarians”, we are better able to realize how closely China has been associated with her neighbours from the first day of her history to the present time; how greatly she is indebted to them, and how much she has given them.  We no longer see China as a great civilization surrounded by barbarians, but we study the Chinese coming to terms with their neighbours, who had civilizations of quite different types but nevertheless developed ones.

It is usual to split up Chinese history under the various dynasties that have ruled China or parts thereof.  The beginning or end of a dynasty does not always indicate the beginning or the end of a definite period of China’s social or cultural development.  We have tried to break China’s history down into the three large periods—­“Antiquity”, “The Middle Ages”, and “Modern Times”.  This does not mean that we compare these periods with periods of the same name in Western history although, naturally, we find some similarities with the development of society and culture in the West.  Every attempt towards periodization is to some degree arbitrary:  the beginning and end of the Middle Ages, for instance, cannot be fixed to a year, because development is a continuous process.  To some degree any periodization is a matter of convenience, and it should be accepted as such.