"David Wingrove - Chung Kuo 4 - The Stone Within" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wingrove David)

Chung Kuo. The words mean "Middle Kingdom, "and since 221 B.C., when the first emperor, Ch'in Shih Huang Ti,
unifieH the seven Warring States, it is what the "black-haired people," the Han, or Chinese, have called their great
country. The Middle KingdomтАФfor them it was the whole world; a world bounded by great mountain chains to the
north and west, by the sea to east and south. Beyond was only desert and barbarism. So it was for two thousand years
and through sixteen great dynasties. Chung Kuo was the Middle Kingdom, the very center of the human world, and its
emperor the "Son of Heaven," the "One Man." But in the eighteenth century that world was invaded by the young
and aggressive Western powers with their superior weaponry and their unshakable belief in progress. It was, to the
surprise of the Han, an unequal contest, and China's myth of supreme strength and self-sufficiency was shattered. By
the early twentieth century ChinaтАФChung KuoтАФwas the sick old man of the East: "a carefully preserved mummy in a
hermetically sealed coffin," as Karl Marx called it. But from the disastrous ravages of that century grew a giant of a
nation, capable of competing with the West and with its own Eastern rivals, Japan and Korea, from a position of
incomparable strength. The twenty-first century, "the Pacific Century," as it was known even before it began, saw
China become once more a world unto itself, but this time its only boundary was space.




CHUNG KUO
by DAVID WINGROVE

BOOK 4:
THE STONE WITHIN

A DELL TRADE PAPERBACK


A DELL TRADE PAPERBACK
Published by Dell Publishing

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If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as "unsold and
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Copyright ┬й 1993 by David Wingrove

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