The Story of China Quotes

“Meanwhile, new ideas crept like a damp stain into the very fabric of Tang culture, casting a shadow across the world of the old aristocratic clans that had survived.”
― Michael Wood, The Story of China: A portrait of a civilisation and its people

“that was widely believed to support the Boxers and their slogan ‘Support the Qing,”
― Michael Wood, The Story of China: The Epic History of a World Power from the Middle Kingdom to Mao and the China Dream

“the empress dowager changed her views on the Boxers and issued an edict”
― Michael Wood, The Story of China: The Epic History of a World Power from the Middle Kingdom to Mao and the China Dream

“Finally, on 21 June, the empress dowager declared war on the eight foreign powers and fled the capital.”
― Michael Wood, The Story of China: The Epic History of a World Power from the Middle Kingdom to Mao and the China Dream

“the emperor embodied Chinese ideas about order and rulership that had developed since the fourth millennium BCE,”
― Michael Wood, The Story of China: The Epic History of a World Power from the Middle Kingdom to Mao and the China Dream

“In his use of certain words – heaven (tian), ‘the Way’ (dao), monarch (wang)”
― Michael Wood, The Story of China: The Epic History of a World Power from the Middle Kingdom to Mao and the China Dream

“the incantations, the burnt offerings and the bovine sacrifices, went back more than 3,000 years”
― Michael Wood, The Story of China: The Epic History of a World Power from the Middle Kingdom to Mao and the China Dream

“is that if he is not filled with pious thoughts, the spirits of the unseen will not come to the sacrifice’.”
― Michael Wood, The Story of China: The Epic History of a World Power from the Middle Kingdom to Mao and the China Dream

“Xi: the literature is truly enormous, no less than for Aristotle. Crucial”
― Michael Wood, The Story of China: The Epic History of a World Power from the Middle Kingdom to Mao and the China Dream

“The rebel groups were loosely coordinated, inspired by millenarian hopes for the coming of the Maitreya Buddha and Manichaean-tinged beliefs about the imminent arrival of a saviour, a prince of light, who would defeat the powers of darkness.”
― Michael Wood, The Story of China: A portrait of a civilisation and its people

“In the third millennium BCE, modern archaeology has shown that there were indeed thousands of villages and dozens of small ‘states’ dotted across the river valleys of central China, rectangular walled towns of rammed earth, each with its own ruler. And in that period our narrative begins.”
― Michael Wood, The Story of China: A portrait of a civilisation and its people

“So the Yellow River is a constant, unpredictable and often terrifying character in the story of China, nothing like the benign life-bearing flood of the Egyptian Nile, whose rising was celebrated each year with unerring predictability on 15 August, or the Tigris in Mesopotamia, whose summer rising was greeted into the twentieth century with liturgies and food offerings, even in Muslim households.”
― Michael Wood, The Story of China: A portrait of a civilisation and its people