less to us than the discovery of the great forces that underlie these features and govern the human element.  Only when we have knowledge of those forces and counter-forces can we realize the significance of the great personalities who have emerged in China; and only then will the history of China become intelligible even to those who have little knowledge of the Far East and can make nothing of a mere enumeration of dynasties and campaigns.

Views on China’s history have radically changed in recent years.  Until about thirty years ago our knowledge of the earliest times in China depended entirely on Chinese documents of much later date; now we are able to rely on many excavations which enable us to check the written sources.  Ethnological, anthropological, and sociological research has begun for China and her neighbours; thus we are in a position to write with some confidence about the making of China, and about her ethnical development, where formerly we could only grope in the dark.  The claim that “the Chinese race” produced the high Chinese civilization entirely by its own efforts, thanks to its special gifts, has become just as untenable as the other theory that immigrants from the West, some conceivably from Europe, carried civilization to the Far East.  We know now that in early times there was no “Chinese race”, there were not even “Chinese”, just as there were no “French” and no “Swiss” two thousand years ago.  The “Chinese” resulted from the amalgamation of many separate peoples of different races in an enormously complicated and long-drawn-out process, as with all the other high civilizations of the world.

The picture of ancient and medieval China has also been entirely changed since it has been realized that the sources on which reliance has always been placed were not objective, but deliberately and emphatically represented a particular philosophy.  The reports on the emperors and ministers of the earliest period are not historical at all, but served as examples of ideas of social policy or as glorifications of particular noble families.  Myths such as we find to this day among China’s neighbours were made into history; gods were made men and linked together by long family trees.  We have been able to touch on all these things only briefly, and have had to dispense with any account of the complicated processes that have taken place here.

The official dynastic histories apply to the course of Chinese history the criterion of Confucian ethics; for them history is a textbook of ethics, designed to show by means of examples how the man of high character should behave or not behave.  We have to go deeper, and try to extract the historic truth from these records.  Many specialized studies by Chinese, Japanese, and Western scholars on problems of Chinese history are now available and of assistance in this task.  However, some Chinese writers still imagine that they are serving their country by yet again dishing up