China: The Asian Civilization - The Wise World Traveler: Becoming a Part of All that You Meet - page 229

16. China: The Asian Civilization
China? There lies a sleeping giant. Let him sleep!
For when he wakes he will move the world.
— Napoleon
TRADITIONAL CHINA: 2000 BCE TO 1912 CE
China easily overwhelms the wise traveler. Its size is vast, about 3.7 million square miles
(third in size, behind Canada and Russia). Its population is the world's largest (over 1.3 billi-
on). Its climate ranges from subtropical to Siberian. Its agricultural zones range from deserts
adjoining Pakistan and the Caucasus, to the wheat and barley fields in the north, to the trop-
ical fruits and wet-rice fields in the areas adjacent to the Pacific Ocean. [193] China's two ma-
jor rivers, the Yellow and the Yangtze, are among the longest in the world, and its mountains
in Tibet are among the world's highest.
An eminent student of China has remarked that western civilization has been moving
westward for 2,500 years: from Athens to Rome, to western Europe, and to North America.
But the center of Asian civilization has stayed in China for the same 2,500 years. [194] China
is not only the world's oldest continuing culture, but its written language (still in daily use)
is the world's oldest. It is the unusual design of the language that first confronts the wise
traveler from the West. China's written language dates back at least 3,500 years. Writings on
divination (“oracle”) bones used in the Shang Dynasty (1500-100 BCE) can be read and un-
derstood today. Of course, the pronunciation of words has changed enormously over the cen-
turies. [195] More important, given China's vast size, the Chinese have always spoken many
different languages and dialects. But the written language is remarkably unchanged. In the
blink of an eye (and a flick of the brain), literate readers can turn from today's newspapers
to the thoughts and musings of Confucius (551-479 BCE).
The reason, but not the accomplishment, is simple. Unlike western languages whose
written words convey sounds, Chinese writing is divorced from sound. It uses ideographs
(picture symbols) to convey meaning. Accordingly, China's written language mystifies the
wise traveler. In tourist centers many signs are transliterated into the western (Roman) alpha-
bet. But even these can be daunting, especially to English speakers. Two late nineteenth-cen-
tury British scholars, Thomas Wade and Francis Giles, devised a system for “Romanizing”
ideographs. Revised by Giles in 1912, Wade-Giles became for most Westerners the standard
way of transliterating Chinese characters. But in 1979 the Chinese government, motivated
in part by national pride, replaced Wade-Giles with a new transliteration, Pinyin , based on
Mandarin (China's official spoken language). In Pinyin, for example, the sounds ch and ch'i