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Ancient China: Chinese Civilization from Its Origins to the Tang Dynasty. By MAURIZIO SCARPARI. New York: BARNES AND NOBLE BOOKS, 2000. Pp. 292, illus. Translated by "A. B. A."
This book appears simultaneously in Italian1 and English. In both versions it has the same number of pages, the same number of illustrations, and the same graphic design. Rather than an illustrated text, it is better defined as a book of illustrations (more than four hundred) accompanied by a text of less than fifty pages in all (were they full pages), distributed among the illustrations.
It is a daunting task to deal with so many centuries of Chinese civilization, from the origins to the end of the Tang dynasty (which ended in 907 A.D.), in a so limited space, but Scarpari boldly attempts all the same to give an overview that aims at covering various aspects of Chinese civilization, including history, culture, art, and archaeology, during this long period. The result can hardly be defined as successful: we have only sparse hints of these aspects with a loose connection among them, archaeological information being in some way privileged. There is no way, then, to learn anything of economic and social history, no space for the history of ideas and political thought. The period witnessed numerous important technical and scientific innovations, but except for wrong (as in the case of paper) or fleeting (as in the case of gunpowder) references to some of them, we look in vain here for others (stirrups, gimbals, astronomical clock, etc.) or for the names of the great men who contributed to the progress of technique and science like Shi Shen and Gan De (4th-c. B.C.), Li Bing (309-240 B.C.), Liu An (2nd-c. B.C.), Du Shi (1st-c. A.D.), Cai Lun (d. 121), Wei Boyang (c. 140 A.D.), Tao Hongjing (456-536), Sun Simiao (d. 682), Yixing (673-727), etc. The engineer and architect Yuwen Kai (555-612) is mentioned because of a rotating pavilion (p. 141) and not because he built the new Sui capital. I will not, therefore, discuss these and other important issues that are absent from this book, but will only remain within the limits of the information provided therein. Besides the text proper,...