The Cambridge History of China, Vol. 9: The Ch'ing Dynasty, Part 1: To 1800

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GENERAL EDITORS’ PREFACE
When The Cambridge History of China was first planned, more than three
decades ago, it was naturally intended that it should begin with the very earliest periods of Chinese history. However, the production of the series has
taken place over a period of years when our knowledge both of Chinese prehistory and of much of the first millennium bc has been transformed by the
spate of archeological discoveries that began in the 1920s and has been gathering increasing momentum since the early 1970s. This flood of new information has changed our view of early history repeatedly, and there is not yet
any generally accepted synthesis of this new evidence and the traditional
written record. In spite of repeated efforts to plan and produce a volume or
volumes that would summarize the present state of our knowledge of early
China, it has so far proved impossible to do so. It may well be another decade
before it will prove practical to undertake a synthesis of all these new discoveries that is likely to have some enduring value. Reluctantly, therefore,
we begin the coverage of The Cambridge History of China with the establishment of the first imperial regimes, those of Ch’in and Han. We are conscious
that this leaves a millennium or more of the recorded past to be dealt with
elsewhere and at another time. We are equally conscious of the fact that the
events and developments of the first millennium bc laid the foundations for
the Chinese society and its ideas and institutions that we are about to
describe. The institutions, the literary and artistic culture, the social forms,
and the systems of ideas and beliefs of Ch’in and Han were firmly rooted in
the past, and cannot be understood without some knowledge of this earlier
history. As the modern world grows more interconnected, historical understanding of it becomes ever more necessary and the historian’s task ever more
complex. Fact and theory affect each other even as sources proliferate and
knowledge increases. Merely to summarize what is known becomes an
awesome task, yet a factual basis of knowledge is increasingly essential for
historical thinking.
Since the beginning of the century, the Cambridge histories have set a
pattern in the English-reading world for multivolume series containing
chapters written by specialists under the guidance of volume editors. The

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