The language and culture of China: over 3,000 years of history, more than a billion inhabitants, and a country that stretches from the tundra to the tropics. Surely it would take years of study to even scratch the surface of this subject. Wrong!
Collins Chinese Language and Culture is a sharp and informative introduction to the complex subject of China’s language, history, culture and customs. You’ll learn essential phrases, discover the origins of the Chinese writing system, and find out what constitutes a beautiful name in China. Alongside chapters on modern China’s historical roots or the importance of certain numbers in Chinese culture, there are lessons about Chinese etiquette, how to haggle your way down a street market, and what to do in a restaurant.
So whether as an accompaniment to studies or as a stand-alone guide, Collins Chinese Language and Culture gives you access to the life and language of this ancient empire and modern superpower in the making.
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Even when one does not live in China one sometimes thinks of her as an old, great, big country which remains aloof from the world and does not quite belong to it.
Lin Yutang
China, for so long the symbol of the ‘unfathomable’ East, is no longer as mysterious as it once was. People from all over the world now travel, do business, or live in China. As China slowly emerges as a superpower, it increasingly finds itself the focus of Western news reports, books, and other media.
Yet despite this flurry of interest, China’s language and culture still form a barrier to inter-cultural understanding. Its written language is almost impossible to grasp without years of study, and its spoken language is marked by a diversity of dialects that seem for all the world like different languages. Even if the language barrier is overcome, China’s culture offers up an embarrassment of riches to the interested observer, many of its traditions dating back thousands of years. China is the oldest living nation with a continuous culture, and it is also the most populous country in the world. Once one of the world’s largest empires, China also gave us some of mankind’s greatest inventions, such as gunpowder and the compass, before falling far behind the pace in the latter half of the last millennium.
China is a country that defies categorization, and often explanation. Its sheer size means that what holds true in one corner of the country is often the exact opposite of the case in another. Hainan province in the south lies within the tropical belt, while Heilongjiang in the north is subarctic, with temperatures that reach 40 degrees below zero in winter. Only a powerful bureaucracy and a common culture prevented the country from breaking up into separate nations throughout its several thousand years of history.
The land
Considering its immense size, China has been fairly well isolated by its geographical barriers, which may have led to its relatively insular nature. To the east lies the Pacific Ocean, while steep gorges run along the Burmese border to the southwest, and the towering Tibetan plateau rises up as if to block the western border. The dry, sparse lands of Central Asia and Mongolia lie to the north. There is little doubt that these geographical factors helped China to develop her own distinctive culture, with very little foreign interference.
, perhaps the ultimate symbol of Chinese civilization, is 2,700 miles in length, flowing east from the Tibetan plateau, looping around the Ordos desert, before finally flowing out into the Bohai Sea between the provinces of Liaoning and Shandong.
