China: Empire of Living Symbols [Hardcover]

Cecilia Lindqvist (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0201570092 | ISBN-13: 978-0201570090 | Publication Date: August 1991 | Edition: First Edition

Stone Age dwellers along the Yellow River inscribed images of men, dragons, deer, sun and moon onto bone or pottery long ago. These same pictures live on the the characters used by the Chinese today. Cecilia Lindqvist traces the evolution and enduring history of Chinese characters, providing insight into their culture.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Many of the 50,000 Chinese characters in use today can be traced back to ancient, inscribed oracle bones and bronzes. Drawing on archeological finds of recent decades, Lindqvist, a Swedish scholar who studied Chinese writing in Beijing, tells the fascinating stories behind the meaning and evolution of scores of Chinese characters. She notes that the original character for "hand" may well have been a picture of a hand with five fingers; neolithic jars were prototypes for the character for "wine"; the character for "speak or word" has a basic meaning, "large flute." Other characters relate to everyday life (houses, carts, clothes) or to the countryside, plants and animals. A testament to the continuity of Chinese culture, this beautiful book is illustrated with ancient inscriptions, 18th-century woodcuts and photographs of contemporary life demonstrating how ideogrammatic images recur as archetypes through the centuries.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

Guardian 7/5/08
“An evocative, compelling celebration of language as a carrier of culture.”

Toronto Globe & Mail 7/5/08
“[A] delightful cultural and linguistic history.”

Boston Globe
“Deserve[s] special mention…Lavishly illustrated.”

London Review of Books, 2008
“A fascinating introduction to Chinese language and culture. Beautifully designed and illustrated with photographs, calligraphy and drawings.”

Shelf Awareness’s “Top Ten of 2009,” 12/15/2009
“For those of us fascinated by Chinese, this offers detailed histories of many basic characters, showing their earliest forms, which often were representational, and their stylized modern versions.”

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 423 pages
• Publisher: Addison-Wesley; First Edition edition (August 1991)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0201570092
• ISBN-13: 978-0201570090
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 8.1 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #659,795 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

29 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A superb beautifully illustrated introduction to China., June 27, 2001

By 

tepi "tepi" - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: China: Empire of Living Symbols (Hardcover)

CHINA : Empire of Living Symbols. By Cecilia Lindqvist. Translated from the Swedish by Joan Tate. 424 pp. New York : Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Inc., 1991 (1989). ISBN 0-201-57009-2 (hbk.)

Although Cecilia Lindqvist is a professional scholar of Chinese and was in fact a pupil of Bernhard Karlgren, one of the greatest sinologists of the 20th century, she is one of those rare scholars who, instead of devoting herself exclusively to academic publications, has not been afraid to produce a book designed for the general reader.

Her book, though founded in a specialist knowledge of both Chinese and China, where she lived for many years, is written with a light and engaging touch, is magnificently illustrated with numerous photographs, both black-and-white and color, line drawings, maps, Chinese characters, etc., and is so beautifully produced that it could be read or browsed with interest by anyone.

Her book attempts so many things, and succeeds so well in them all, that it would be difficult to overpraise it. It introduces us to the pictorial element of the Chinese script in a more engaging way than has ever been done before, and becomes in fact a painless way of acquiring a vocabulary of the basic building blocks which go to make up Chinese characters.

It relates these basic pictograms to a wide range of topics in Chinese cultural history in a sumptuously illustrated series of chapters dealing with - Oracle Bones and Bronzes; Man, Mankind; Water and Mountains ; Wild Animals; Domestic Animals; Carts, Roads, and Boats; Farming; Wine and Jars; Hemp and Silk; Bamboo and Tree; Tools and Weapons; Roofs and Houses; Books and Musical Instruments; Numbers and Other Abstract Characters. It also includes a chapter on Meaning and Sound which traces the development of Chinese writing from the early pictographs through to phonetic compounds.

The book is rounded out with a gallery of superb color photographs; a section on Character Stroke Order; a really excellent Bibliography of both Western and Chinese books (which unfortunately gives only the pinyin and lacks the sinographs for the latter); a table of Dynasties and Periods; and a full Index.

The book is a curious size, having been made 8.5 by 8.5 inches to accomodate its many photographs, is bound in full linen, stitched, and beautifully printed on a very strong smooth ivory-tinted paper.

Anyone who, after reading the book, would like to learn more about China's culture or writing system, will find that the fully annotated Bibliography with its extensive list of interesting works for further reading will provide many leads. These range from general books on the science and civilization of China up to such things as specialist Chinese dictionaries of the ancient bone and bronze forms of the characters.

Lindqvist's love of China, its people, language, and culture shines through on every page, and her book is clearly a labor of love. It can be recommended without reservation as a marvelous introduction to one of the richest and most fascinating cultures on earth.

25 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This book took the author 35 years to write, February 22, 2007

By 

Harald Groven "Harald Groven" (Tromsø, Norway) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: China: Empire of Living Symbols (Hardcover)

When I was a kid I though that the Chinese written language was impossible to learn (unless you were born there) and that the signs were just a bunch of arbitrary strokes impossible to remember.

All this changed when I picked up this book in the 1990s. I then discovered the connection between the Chinese culture and history, and the written Chinese language. It is thick with carefully chosen and categorized stories, often experienced by the author herself, about how a Chinese character reveals something about Chinese history, thinking, or everyday life in ancient times. The Chinese themselves are often strangely unaware about the etymology of their Hànzi characters, since the school system encourages rote learning. Its richly illustrated by drawings and photographs that shows similarities between something and the character representing it. E.g. how the character for "well" resembles the ancient Chinese way of constructing wells, quite different from western ones.

What this book is not:
- Its very, far from anything like a textbook in Chinese writing. But it may be the best soft introduction to such a topic. Its well suited for people that want to know something about the Chinese language, but don't want to spend time studying it.
- Its not a dictionary. It covers 500 characters in 350 pages. The characters are not selected because of word frequency, or usefulness in everyday life etc. Many characters covered are really rare.
- It doesn't say anything about how the signs are pronounced. It is strictly about how the Chinese culture embedded in the written language.
- If you stop reading before the last chapter you will believe that the Chinese language are mostly made up of ideographs or pictograms (a picture of something in the real world). In fact more than 90% of Characters are made up of Radical-Phonetic signs (explained in the final chapter) and character do not resemble anything "in real life". To "unlearn" this misunderstanding I will recommend J. DeFrancis: "The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy"

Because of this book, I moved to China and studied there in 2005. Without getting inspiration from this book a few years ago, I would never have thought it was worth even trying to understand the Chinese language.

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of the best introductions to Chinese culture available!, September 21, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: China: Empire of Living Symbols (Hardcover)

If you only have time or money to get one book as an introduction to Chinese culture--try this! Cecilia Lindqvist shows the reader how Chinese characters are derived from reality. As she does so, Lindqvist describes Chinese history, geography, art, music, customs. The book includes excellent reproductions of Chinese art and pictures of everyday life. Reading this book feels like touring China with a knowing and chatty guide. She takes you not only around an enormous territory, but through 6,000 years of civilization.