El. knyga: Birth of China Seen Through Poetry [World Scientific e-book]

The book introduces Chinese culture to readers of English, using poetry from the various periods rendered into English verse to bring back to life past Chinese society as it developed from about 1000 B.C to the form we see today. With China's increasing importance on the world stage today, many readers, no doubt, would want to learn more about its ancient culture. However, to learn about a culture from its history alone, especially one as long as that of China, is time-consuming and requires a historian's expert skill. This book offers the general reader a direct glimpse into the human core of it via the universally accessible channel of poetry. It provides an outline of Chinese history from prehistoric times to the present printed mostly on left-hand pages, accompanied on the right by a selection of Chinese poems of the corresponding periods translated into English verse by the author. The poems total about eighty in number and come mostly from the classical phase dating from around 1000 B.C. to 1200 A.D.