Coming from the banking and trading city of Venice, he admired the wide use of paper money in China. They still had much the same attitude as Marco Polo, who, in the thirteenth century, had told the people of Italy that China under the rule of the Mongols had a much more centralized and efficient system of government than European countries had. Until the Opium War of 1840–42 the European merchants and voyagers who reached the distant land of China had looked upon the Chinese with a good deal of awe as a people of superior culture. It is wholesome to realize, however, that this attitude of superiority on the part of Western nations has existed for only about a hundred years. There are reasons for this temporary backwardness which we will take up later. We are likely - today to think of the Chinese as a “backward” people who are less civilized than we are, and it is true that in what we carelessly speak of as civilization-mechanization and the fruits of scientific discovery-they have, in the last hundred years, lagged behind the procession and are only beginning to catch up. There is nothing like a brief look at Chinese history to give one a new and wholesome respect for the Chinese people.

In material culture, though we think of the roots of our own civilization as being almost entirely European, we have also received much from Asia-paper, gunpowder, the compass, silk, tea, and porcelain. In art and philosophy, many people think, no culture has ever surpassed that of China in its great creative periods.

But taken in another way, Chinese history can be made to throw sharp lights and revealing shadows on the story of all mankind-from its most primitive beginnings, some of which were in Asia, to its highest point of development in philosophy and religion, literature and art. And even 3,500 years ago China’s civilization was old! This in itself is discouraging to the student, particularly if we think of history as a baffling catalogue of who begat somebody, who succeeded somebody, who slew somebody, with only an occasional concubine thrown in for human interest. An old missionary student of China once remarked that Chinese history is “remote, monotonous, obscure, and-worst of all-there is too much of it.” China has the longest continuous history of any country in the world-3,500 years of written history.

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