Books with title An ancient Chinese town

How did the people of Ancient China live? What were their social, economic, political, and cultural lives like? How did their values and attitudes help shape our world? This title answers these questions and more with informative text, colorful photographs and original source materials, and clear maps and diagrams to show readers what life was like in ancient civilizations.

ancient Chinese myths were not recorded in a systematic way in any work, and, as a result, only fragments of them are extant today. As for the causes, Lu Xun says in A Short History of Chinese Fiction:Two causes have been given for the fact that only fragments of Chinese mythology have been preserved. First, the Chinese people who lived in the Yellow River valley in those early days were not favoured by good natural conditions, and had to work hard to keep alive. They tended to be practical rather than fanciful and were therefore unable to collect ancient legends and produce a great work. Second, after Confucius, who taught people to do practical things like cultivating one’s moral character, regulating one’s family, bringing order to one’s state, and unifying the whole country, and who would not talk about ghosts or gods, the imaginary tales of the remote past were never taken up by Confucian scholars. Thus ancient mythology, instead of being developed, suffered from further losses. A careful study of the causes, however, would show that greater harm was done by lack of distinction between gods and ghosts.