"David Wingrove - Chung Kuo 2 - The Broken Wheel" - 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, unified the seven Warring States, it is what the "black-haired people," the Han, or
Chinese, have called their great country. The Middle Kingdom—for 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, China—Chung Kuo—was 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 2:

THE BROKEN WHEEL
JEFFERSON PARISH LIBRARY ! METAIRIE, LA.



published by

delacorte press

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Copyright © 1991 by David Wingrove

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