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Prologue
American architect Ralph Adams Cram (1863–1942) once said, “We must return for the fire to other centuries, since a night intervened between our fathers’ time and ours wherein the light was not.”1 The intellectual and material worlds throughout history have been divided at various times. There are those who enthusiastically welcome the ideal of progress, happily dismantling the “oppressive” and “funereal” vestiges of the past. Such a view, although not without some occasionally less pejorative reflections on the past, is expressed well in the final chapter of Edward Gibbon’s (1737–1794) The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, where he asserted, “All that is human must retrograde if it do not advance.”2 Others, like Cram, lamented the present for having strayed too far from its origins; modernity is as a plant cut off at its base, no longer organically growing from its former roots. The recording of Chinese history in its early stages, perhaps the writing of history over the course of time, is marked by an impulse to hearken to the “light” of our “fathers’ time” and the necessity to “advance.” Worldviews also influence the historian’s pen, that is, his or her beliefs and ideals color how the past is judged and how that past will be colored in the present.