• Complain

Peter Hessler - Oracle Bones: A Journey Through Time in China

Here you can read online Peter Hessler - Oracle Bones: A Journey Through Time in China full text of the book (entire story) in english for free. Download pdf and epub, get meaning, cover and reviews about this ebook. year: 2007, publisher: Harper Perennial, genre: Detective and thriller. Description of the work, (preface) as well as reviews are available. Best literature library LitArk.com created for fans of good reading and offers a wide selection of genres:

Romance novel Science fiction Adventure Detective Science History Home and family Prose Art Politics Computer Non-fiction Religion Business Children Humor

Choose a favorite category and find really read worthwhile books. Enjoy immersion in the world of imagination, feel the emotions of the characters or learn something new for yourself, make an fascinating discovery.

Peter Hessler Oracle Bones: A Journey Through Time in China

Oracle Bones: A Journey Through Time in China: summary, description and annotation

We offer to read an annotation, description, summary or preface (depends on what the author of the book "Oracle Bones: A Journey Through Time in China" wrote himself). If you haven't found the necessary information about the book — write in the comments, we will try to find it.

A century ago, outsiders saw China as a place where nothing ever changes. Today the country has become one of the most dynamic regions on earth. In Oracle Bones, Peter Hessler explores the human side of Chinas transformation, viewing modern-day China and its growing links to the Western world through the lives of a handful of ordinary people. In a narrative that gracefully moves between the ancient and the present, the East and the West, Hessler captures the soul of a country that is undergoing a momentous change before our eyes.

Peter Hessler: author's other books


Who wrote Oracle Bones: A Journey Through Time in China? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.

Oracle Bones: A Journey Through Time in China — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "Oracle Bones: A Journey Through Time in China" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make

ORACLE BONES A Journey Between Chinas Past and Present PETER HESSLER - photo 1

ORACLE BONES


A Journey Between Chinas Past and Present


PETER HESSLER


for my sisters Amy Angela and Birgitta Contents Authors Note - photo 2


for my sisters:


Amy


Angela


and Birgitta


Contents


Authors Note


Map


PART ONE


Artifact A: T HE U NDERGROUND C ITY


1 The Middleman

Artifact B: T HE W RITTEN W ORLD


2 The Voice of America
3 The Broken Bridge

Artifact C: T HE W ALL


4 The Overnight City

PART TWO


5 Starch
6 Hollywood

Artifact D: T HE V OICE OF THE T URTLE


7 At Night Youre Not Lonely
8 Immigration
9 The Courtyard

Artifact E: T HE B RONZE H EAD


10 Anniversary
11 Sichuanese

PART THREE


Artifact F: T HE B OOK


12 Asylum

Artifact G: T HE U NCRACKED B ONE


13 The Games
14 Sand

Artifact H: T HE W ORD


15 Translation
16 Flags
17 Straight to Video

Artifact I: T HE H ORSE


18 Wonton Western
19 Election

PART FOUR


20 Chinatown

Artifact J: T HE C RITICISM


21 State Visit

Artifact K: T HE L OST A LPHABETS


22 Encapsulate Prime

Artifact L: T HE M ISPRINTED C HARACTER


23 Pattons Tomb

Artifact Z: T HE S OLD W ORDS


24 Tea

Sources


Ac knowledgments


Searchable Terms


About the Author


Other Books by Peter Hessler


Credits


Cover


Copyright


About the Publisher


Authors Note


THIS IS A WORK OF NONFICTION, AND I HAVE USED REAL NAMES WITH one exception: Polat. The pseudonym is used at his request, because of political sensitivities in the Peoples Republic of China.

This book was researched from 1999 to 2004, a period whose events are still resonating. I expect that in the future we will learn more about these occurrences, and my depiction is not intended to be comprehensive or definitive. My goal has been to follow certain individuals across this period, recording how their lives were shaped by a changing world.

These people led me to many placessome in China, some in the United States, and others, such as Xinjiang and Taiwan, that are in dispute. Boundaries and definitions often seemed fluid, and so did time itself. The main chapters of this book are arranged chronologically, but the short sections labeled artifacts are not. They reflect a deeper sense of timethe ways in which people make sense of history after it has receded farther into the past.

Polat means steel in the Uighur language, and he chose that name because of the qualities that he believed are necessary for anybody far from home.


PART ONE ARTIFACT A The Underground City FROM BEIJING TO - photo 3


PART ONE ARTIFACT A The Underground City FROM BEIJING TO - photo 4


PART ONE


ARTIFACT A


The Underground City


Picture 5


FROM BEIJING TO ANYANGFROM THE MODERN CAPITAL TO THE CITY known as a cradle of ancient Chinese civilizationit takes six hours by train. Sitting by the window, there are moments when a numbness sets in, and the scenery seems as patterned as wallpaper: a peasant, a field, a road, a village; a peasant, a field, a road, a village. This sense of repetition is not new. In 1981, David N. Keightley, an American professor of history, took the train to Anyang. Afterward, he wrote in a letter to his family: The land is generally flat, monotonous, one village much like another. Where are the gentry estates, the mansions, the great houses of England and France? What was it about this society that failed to produce such monuments to civilized aristocratic living?

Move back in time, and its the same: a peasant, a field, a road, a village. In the 1930s, a foreign resident named Richard Dobson wrote: There is no history in Honan. Today, that seems an unlikely remark, because this region is known as the archives and the grave of the Shang dynasty. The Shang produced the earliest known writing in East Asia, inscribed into bones and shellsthe oracle bones, as they are called in the West. If one defines history as written records, this part of Henan is where it all began for China.

But visitors have often wondered about something other than origins. Move back in time once more, to the 1880s, when an American named James Harrison Wilson wrote: They have stood absolutely still in knowledge since the middle ages. He explained, The essence of their history can be told in a few short chapters. It has to do with trajectory, progressexpectations of the West. In the traditional view of the Chinese past, there is no equivalent of the fall of Rome, no Renaissance, no Enlightenment. Instead, emperor succeeds emperor, and dynasty follows dynasty. History as wallpaper. In A Truthful Impression of the Country, an analysis of Western travel writing about China, Nicholas R. Clifford describes this nineteenth-century foreign perspective: China had a far longer past than the Westno one would think of denying thatbut the past and history are not the same thing. Here in Chinas past there was no narrative but only stories.


IN ANYANG, AT an archaeological site called Huanbei, a small group of men work in a field, mapping an underground city. The city dates to the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries B . C ., when the Shang culture was probably approaching its peak. Nowadays, the Shang ruins lie far beneath the soil, usually at a depth of five to eight feet. Peasants have planted crops for centuries without realizing that an entire city waited beneath them.

The layers of earth accumulated over time. This site is bordered by the Huan River, and periodic floods have deposited alluvial soil onto the field. There is also loess: thin, dry particles that originated from the Gobi and other deserts of the northwest. Loess is easily windborne, and over the centuries, layers of it have been blown south and then redeposited in places like Anyang. In northern China, the yellow earth can be as deep as six hundred feet.

Elsewhere in the world, archaeologists search for ridges and mounds, visible signs of buried structures. But here the naked eye isnt adequate; a two-dimensional view of Anyang reveals only flatness. The men in the field work under the direction of a young archaeologist named Jing Zhichun, who explains the challenges of research in a place like this.

You have to look at the landscape in a dynamic way, he says. You have to see the landscape evolving. It might be completely different from what it was three thousand years ago. Were looking at human society in three dimensions; its not just the surface that matters. We had to add another dimension: the time dimension. You can look all around here and see nothing, but in fact this was the first city in the area. If you dont add time, youll find nothing.

The workers are local peasants, and they dig with Luoyang spadesthe characteristic tool of Chinese archaeology. In Luoyang, one of Chinas many former capital cities, generations of grave robbers practiced their craft to the point of technical innovation: a tubular blade, cut in half like a scoop and then attached to a long pole. If you pound the blade straight into the earth and twist it slightly, you extract a core of soil about half a foot long and less than two inches in diameter. Do it again and againdozens of timesand the hole becomes a tiny shaft that penetrates six or more feet, bringing up deeper cores. When the shaft is deep enough, the dirt samples might contain bits of pottery or bone or bronze, or perhaps the hard tamped earth that was traditionally used to construct buildings.

Next page
Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «Oracle Bones: A Journey Through Time in China»

Look at similar books to Oracle Bones: A Journey Through Time in China. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.


Reviews about «Oracle Bones: A Journey Through Time in China»

Discussion, reviews of the book Oracle Bones: A Journey Through Time in China and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.