Chinese history
Sir: It's good to see Auberon Waugh (Another voice, 19 November) taking an interest in Chinese affairs, but I'm sorry that he has swallowed the guff about '5,000 years of history'.
The first event in China for which we have an accurate date is the sack of the capital by Northern barbarians in 840 BC. Connected chronicles begin from 722 BC. There exist a small number of ancient texts dealing with earlier periods, but they are about as historical as the Book of Genesis, and must less coherent. Even if one falls back on archaeology, the earliest person whose name we know and who probably existed and who was probably Chinese is
LETTERS
Tang the Completer, founder of the Shang dynasty, floruit no earlier than 1800 BC. That gives 2828 years or 3800, depending on your definition of 'history'. The rest is myth.
The Chinese have never shown any very intense dedication to numerical exactitude. I have on my shelf a classic anthology with the title 'Nineteen Ancient Poems'. It contains 21.
Giles Mathews
148 East 46th Street, New York, New York 10017, USA
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