Six hundred and fifty years before Chu Pin, an American-born Chinese boy, arrived in Peking to attend school, another traveler, a Venetian merchant named Marco Polo, visited that beautiful city. It was a new city then, the vast, magnificent capital of Kubla Khan, the Mongol emperor who ruled all Asia from Persia to the Pacific. But even then China itself was old. Its great classical period—the age of Confucius, Laotse, and the flowering of Chinese thought that in many respects set the basic pattern of Chinese life—had occurred about the time Socrates lived.

Three thousand years of civilization! And as Chu Pin began to learn about China—its vast land, its people, its written language and literature, its way of life—he was filled with pride. For the Chinese, geographically isolated for centuries from other great civilizations, had developed a unique, completely independent culture unlike any other in the world.

Recent years have brought drastic changes to the traditional Chinese way of life, but few cultures have personified respect for beauty, scholarship, and a profound humanism as consistently as the Chinese. This sensitive, intimate introduction to that way of life, written by a well-known Chinese scholar and writer, movingly re-creates a highly civilized world.

From the dust jacket