Volume 29, Number 5 · April 1, 1982
China: Mulberries and Famine
By Jonathan D. Spence
China's Silk Trade: Traditional Industry in the Modern World, 1842-1937 University Press
by Lillian M. Li
Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard; distributed by Harvard, 288 pp., $20.00
Bureaucratie et famine en Chine au 18e siècle
by Pierre-Etienne Will
Mouton, 312 pp., $38.00
China
by Keith Buchanan, by Charles P. FitzGerald, by Colin A. Ronan, with a foreward by Joseph Needham
Crown, 519, with over 600 illustrations pp., $40.00
A History of Chinese Civilization
by Jacques Gernet, translated by J.R. Foster
Cambridge University Press, 757 pp., $27.50
Chinese Civilization and Society: A Sourcebook
edited by Patricia Buckley Ebrey
The Free Press, 429 pp., $19.95; $10.95 (paper)
Near the beginning of the Chinese 'Classic of Historical Documents' (the Shujing), where the doings of early mythic rulers are being described, there is a brief passage that stands out among the others for its precision and clarity. The focus of this part of the text is on a minister named Yu who, around the year 2000 BC, was aiding the emperor Shun in his attempts to control the great floods that were ravaging the north China plain. Yu's actions are described as follows:
Review, 2989 words
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