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PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION Over the years I have had the pleasure of meeting and talking with many students and teachers who used Chinese Civilization and Society: A Sourcebook in their classes. Repeatedly they told me that what they liked most about it was its liveliness—the variety in the kinds of sources, the abundance of ones about ordinary life, the sprinkling of humor and glimpses of personal life. For their sakes I have long been thinking I should update it to bring it up to the 1990s and take into account reevaluations of the Mao years. When I finally found the time to tackle revisions, I decided to do a more thorough rethinking of the overall purposes of this sourcebook and how it actually gets used. My original goal fifteen years ago was to get into print lots of new translations of the sorts of documents that had been neglected in other sourcebooks: popular stories, descriptions of local customs, texts like tenancy contracts, essays that would reveal how relatively ordinary people thought, and so on. There were already many good translations of philosophical and religious texts, of standard historical accounts of great events, and of China’s relations with foreign peoples, so I did not give these topics as much space as texts about daily life or the mental world of ordinary people. From my conversations with colleagues around the country who have been assigning this book to their students, I have come to realize that few of them assign any other sourcebook or any other original texts. Chinese history is commonly taught in a rapid survey lasting only one or two semesters, with never enough time to read widely in the available translations. The Sourcebook would better meet classroom needs, I now realized, if it gave balanced coverage to all aspects of Chinese civilization, regardless of whether a source had also been translated elsewhere. Consequently I have made revisions throughout this book. The selection of sources for China since 1949 has been extensively revised and the coverage of the earliest periods expanded. Sometimes I have substituted an earlier piece for a later one on the same subject; for instance, I added a selection from the Tang code in place of one from the Ming code and some fourth-century ghost stories instead of some seventeenth-century ones. I have also expanded coverage of philosophy and religion in general, with new selections on Confucianism, Taoism, Legalism, and Buddhism. In addition, I have added

quite a few pieces that relate to political ideas and practices and to China’s contacts with foreign peoples. Altogether there are thirty-nine new selections, bringing the total to one hundred. To make room for these new pieces, I have had to make cuts, sometimes shortening pieces, sometimes eliminating ones that seemed, on balance, to contribute less to the overall understanding of Chinese civilization. Although the final selection is still rich in sources for social and cultural history, I now believe that it is sufficiently well rounded to serve as the sole sourcebook in a course on Chinese history or civilization. To bring attention to the change in the focus of this book, I decided to change the title as well, to Chinese Civilization: A Sourcebook. Several people have helped me prepare this new edition. My colleagues Kai- wing Chow, Peter Gregory, and Kenneth Klinker offered advice on new selections. Chiu-yueh Lai did the conversions from Wade-Giles to pinyin romanization. She and Chunyu Wang each translated one of the new pieces. Susan Harum helped with the final preparation of the manuscript. Two scholars at other universities generously provided translations in areas of their expertise, David Keightley of the University of California at Berkeley and Ruth Dunnell of Kenyon College. The remainder of the new translations I did myself. P.B.E.