Geography of China

Preface
... the world's oldest living civilization, in terms of a continuity of culture, yet its past has been endlessly re-edited rather than actually preserved. ... few ancient monuments or buildings...

Nor are there many original Chinese documents. Mostly there are only copies of copies. (And this is sometimes true even of paintings.) Chinese archives seem to have been kept no longer than was necessary; then essential items were excerpted and abstracted, and the rest destroyed. And paper...lacked durability...

As regards the earliest times, the last two generations have seen exciting developments. The thin stock of inscriptions on bronze, that were previously our only wholly authentic records, has been supplemented by the excavation of oracles scratched on bone or shell, a handful of silk manuscripts, some of the wooden strips that formed the earliest Chinese books, and many often visually dazzling artifacts. ...archaic China is visible now with a clarity that would hardly have been thinkable a lifetime ago.

It is paradoxical that the very continuity of Chinese history has often served to obscure their own past to the Chinese. Thus ancien Chinese texts, perpetually reinterpreted, have been only too easy to understand in the terms provided by the present. Until not many decades ago, for example, the love songs in the Scripture of Poetry, a product of the first half of the first millennium BC, were conventionally understood by Chinese scholars as allegories referring to the relathinship of ruler and minister.

In general, the awareness of the different character of remote times has been muted in China compared with the West. There have been few sharp divides, of which people have remained conscious, comparable with the coming of an all-pervading Christianity or Islam, with the arrival or departure of empires such as Rome's, or with the total forgetting of the meaning of scripts such as the Egyptian hieroglyphs that remained for millennia as a visible reminder to later generations of other ideas and values, of another inner world.

Perhaps this is where the Western scholar has a useful role to play. Far less well attuned than his Chinese colleagues to nuances of meaning, he is freer from the taboos, inhibitions, and assumptions of the Chinese present. In some ways it is psychologically easier for him to respond to the otherness of the Chinese past, for historically continuity has not meant that - cumulatively - there have not been great changes. There have, and at all times.

A sharply focused understanding of China's past is essential for making sense of China's complex present. We have made every effort to avoid the distortions arising from emotional and ideological bias (of all kinds) that have disfigured much recent writing on the country, It is important, for example, not to allow admiration for the greatness of China's civilization, not sympathy with her humiliations between 1840 and 1950, or the difficulties of her present situation, economic, cultural and political, to prevent a realistic appraisal of her as being, over the longer run, a highly successful imperializing and colonializing power.

Part One
Space
The Land and Its Peoples
Inner and Outer China
The most fundamental distinction of all is that between the two regions that may be called Inner and Outer China. The boundary between them is defined in terms of the contrast between a settled, and frequently irrigated, intensive farming, and a pastoral economy, sometimes combined with marinal dry-farming, or with complementray agricultural enclaves like the oases of the northwestern deserts.

Until the present century Manchuria is best thought of as having been a part of Outer China, except for a small area along the lower reaches of the Liao River.
This change of status is reflected in the present Chinese preference for the name "The Three Northeastern Provinces" instead of the historically more appropriate "Manchuria."

The two basic regions are of roughly comparable area, but hardly more than 5 per cent of the population live in Outer China. empty - spectacular, if often inhospitable, scenery - world's highest mountain - Mount Everest, second lowest place on dry land - Turfan Depression, fiercest deserts, Gobi and the Takla Makan - huge swampslike those of the Qaidam basin, virgin forest and endless, grass-covered steppes.
Inner China, by way of contrast, is a gentler land of alluvial plains, river valleys and rolling hills, but worn bare by centuries of human occupancy, and so monotonous with its browns and greens and grays that the eye develops a hunger for bright colors.

Much of the "outback" that constitutes Outer China is a region of inland drainage. In essence this is the result of the upthrusting of central Asia caused by the collision about 15 million years ago of the crustal plate carrying India with the southern edge of Tibet. Around the edges the rivers flow away from China.
For these reasons Outer China was cut off from the extensive system of inland waterways that underpinned the high level of premodern economic integration achieved in much of Inner China. The one great route across Outer China was of course the so-called Silk Road which once took Chinese silks to the Roman empire. It ran northwest along the Gansu corridor and through the Jade Gates pass, beyond which - in Chinese folklore - spring was said never to go.