Our China

Our China is a collection of thematic essays written over more than ten years by Li Ling, professor at Peking University, published in 2016 by SDX Joint Publishing Company in a four-volume hardcover slipcase, full color, totaling about 860,000 characters and illustrated with nearly 400 photographs and maps. Reading historical sources while repeatedly conducting field surveys of important ancient city sites, battlefields, sacrificial sites, and monuments in the history of thought since China's high antiquity, the author combines library research with fieldwork, in a style that blends treatise, scholarly essay, and survey notes. Each of the four volumes has its own focus: the first, Vast Traces of Yu—China's Two Great Unifications, takes the "Tribute of Yu" in the Book of Documents as its outline, interpreting the "traces of Yu" and the Nine Provinces, discussing the meaning of the two "great unifications"—Western Zhou feudalism and the Qin-Han empire—and sketching the formation of the concept of "China"; the second, Traveling the World—From Confucius to the First Emperor and Emperor Wu, follows the itineraries of three ancient "great travelers," Confucius, Qin Shi Huang, and Han Wudi, surveying pre-Qin and Qin-Han sites and distinguishing the traditions of official travel and royal inspection tours; the third, Essays of the Earth—Walking and Reading, is a record of mountain and river surveys and also a "hometown archaeology," describing the past and present of the Taihang Mountains, Shangdang in Shanxi, the Hutuo River, northern Shaanxi, and Yongzhou; the fourth, Map of Thought—The Grand Perspective of Chinese Geography, discusses from the perspective of human geography the orientation of early maps, the sacred mountains and waterways, the intellectual map of the pre-Qin thinkers, and extends to Chinese cities and the geography of twentieth-century revolution. The book uses the metaphor that "China is a vortex of civilization" to explain how great unification accumulated layer by layer through convergence and radiation, adding a "dimension on the earth" to China's humanistic and spiritual world since high antiquity.