Top Highlights

• At times energetic rulers were able to play off various cliques against each other, and so to acquire personal power; but the weaker emperors found themselves entirely in the hands of cliques.
• Histories of China fall, with few exceptions, into one or the other of two groups, pro-Chinese and anti-Chinese:
• the importance of a civilization becomes apparent in its achievements.
• We need to realize how China became what she is, and to note the paths pursued by the Chinese in human thought and action.
• 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.