The book has done a meticulous work to answer these questions which often occurred to foreigners as well as modern Chinese themselves at the thought of the old China and its experience in modern times. What is Chinese civilization? How could it exist for several millennia with and spread that far? Is there anything inherent in this civilization resulting in the modern crisis?



From the standpoint of an "outsider" to this civilization, the author incorporates various elements, such as geographic factors, language, thoughts, with the recurrent themes along the two thousand some years and changes throughout, rather than simply following a lineal progression. His historiographical approach, the methodology of eclectic common sense, as he termed it, is a new try in this field and will present a brand new perspective for both readers and researchers in that field.