About This Book

🌍 East Asia has a rich and complex history, from ancient civilizations to modern superpowers. 📚 China, with its advanced economy and inventions, was historically one of the wealthiest countries in the world. 🌐 East Asia has a shared cultural heritage, including the use of the Chinese writing system and the influence of Confucianism. 🗺️ The region has experienced significant change and development over time, with each country having its own unique history and culture. 💡 East Asia's economic success and global significance make it an important region in the modern world.

Top Highlights

• Certainly there were humans on the Japanese islands from very early times. Japan is notable, in fact, for having produced some of the earliest known pottery on earth, from around 11,000 BCE. Yet the population of Japan in the late Stone Age always remained sparse – probably never numbering more than roughly a quarter million people throughout the i...
• Spoken Chinese is also notably different from Japanese (and English) in being a tonal language; that is, in speech (but not in writing), the pitch or tone with which a particular syllable is pronounced determines the word. Modern Mandarin, the standard dialect, has four tones and an additional neutral tone. Some dialects have more. There are multip...
• Meanwhile, Hakka is also spoken in other places on the Chinese mainland, and Taiwanese remains at least very similar to the language spoken directly across the straits in its place of origin in Fujian Province on the mainland. Fujian dialects are also widespread among the overseas Chinese communities living scattered throughout Southeast Asia, whil...
• It has been said that nowhere else in the entire premodern world “has there ever been a linguistic unity like that of North China.”9 Some three-quarters of all Chinese people, especially in the north and west, are native speakers of a relatively uniform version of the language that we call Mandarin (in English; in Chinese it is generally referred t...
• All the various local versions of Chinese are then, more broadly, sometimes said to belong to a larger Sino-Tibetan language family, which distantly links the Chinese languages to Tibetan, Burmese, and certain other languages extending beyond East Asia. Within East Asia, the major contrast with this Sino-Tibetan language family is presented by Japa...