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or the artisan. And even The Water Margin 水滸傳, an omnibus of tales about a large band of outlaws, tells us next to nothing about the life of ordinary men and women. drama, poetry and documentary writings.
So it was, also, with
Early travellers, missionaries, traders and diplomats from other cultures were not tied in the same way to one social class in China. They do show in many cases a marked preference for chronicling the deeds and circumstances of the elite, but in their writings they roam over all aspects of Chinese life because they could take no knowledge on the part of their readers for granted. By the time that Chinese scholars and Western sociologists came to be interested in popular culture and the workings of everyday life. China was in the throes of modernisation and encroaching foreign influences, and the old accounts of China as seen through the observant and frequently bigoted eyes of early Western writers came into their own again. Here lay a mass of material on what life was like before the -isms and schisms of the twentieth century began to warp it in strange ways.
now.
What has been happening in recent years has been a dovetailing of the study of old China with the study of China We can very well use scientific analysis to show how contemporary people behave, but we cannot necessarily use it to discover why they hold a particular set of beliefs and prejudices. Here the study of Chinese history and traditional culture can help us to achieve an understanding. On the other hand we have no good information on how the common people of imperial China behaved, but we can track back from what we know of how contemporary people behave to gain a greater understanding of what those earlier times must have been like. One China did not cease in 1911 or 1949 and another different China take its place: there is a meaningful continuity over time. Here lies the justification for the Ancestral Images approach, and I do not find it surprising that at the time of writing this a Chinese translation of the books is about to go to press why shouldn't the Chinese want to explore the cultural links with their past, even if through the dim eyes of a foreign observer?
How good, then is this list of books I have quoted from? Is it a representative sample of what is available? Are all the