This volume poses a question: Who are the true Asians?
The answer to this question will not come from a genetic test, a passport, or a map indicating where an ethnicity supposedly originates. Asia has been invaded, formalized, and redrawn so many times that such an answer could not exist.
If the question were about ancestry, it would have no stable answer, as every population tracked here has mixed, moved, and absorbed newcomers longer than any nation outside Africa has existed.
The question being asked actually concerns the persistence of over seventy thousand years of migration, invention, invasion, and empire. Which aspects of a people represent them most accurately?
If this is your first foray into our series on literal human history, then you must know that we, humanity, speak loudly and clearly, with our chosen human codes.
Our codes manifest in actions over more than 300,000 years, which, when viewed with unbiased human eyes or, as I like to say, human-centered eyes, clearly reveal who we have chosen to be.
We have chosen to be human, not animal.
We have decided to focus not only on today but also on tomorrow, for those who follow.
We have chosen consideration over reaction and participation over exploitation.
In short, we choose the enlightening paths of respect and love for life - instead of the negative pressure of conflict and control.
The fact that we are still here, despite countless near-extinction disasters, many of which we caused ourselves, testifies that our codes have granted us the grace not only to survive in a hostile world but to thrive.
For most of this history, it was never a conscious choice available to a single person. It was simply what a people built and passed down over centuries, without comparing it to what another people on the other side of the world had built instead.
That has changed. For the first time, an individual can learn what almost every culture on Earth has preserved, tested, and transmitted, and choose which of these codes they wish to carry themselves.
So, on our journey through Asia, we will seek these precious pearls of human insight and ethics, generation after generation, through every invasion, every fall, and every rebuilding.
To begin this search, we must return to the source of us all.
外文書商品之書封，為出版社提供之樣本。實際出貨商品，以出版社所提供之現有版本為主。部份書籍，因出版社供應狀況特殊，匯率將依實際狀況做調整。
無庫存之商品，在您完成訂單程序之後，將以空運的方式為你下單調貨。為了縮短等待的時間，建議您將外文書與其他商品分開下單，以獲得最快的取貨速度，平均調貨時間為1~2個月。
為了保護您的權益，「三民網路書店」提供會員七日商品鑑賞期(收到商品為起始日)。
若要辦理退貨，請在商品鑑賞期內寄回，且商品必須是全新狀態與完整包裝(商品、附件、發票、隨貨贈品等)否則恕不接受退貨。
