The Wide Awake Dragon Is No longer Asleep

The name "China," as it is commonly used in the West, can be traced back to the Qin dynasty (221-206 BCE).  This is also when the idea of a unified China was starting to become more real.  In any case, China is the world's most populated country.  It is also the third largest geographically after Russia and Canada.  China has the the longest continuously recorded history too.  It has given the human race some of its most significant scientific and technological inventions known.

In Tiantan, the Temple of Heaven in Beijing, a marble altar signifies the center of the known ancient world.  It was a place that only the emperor could dare to enter.  According to the world-view of ancient China, the Middle Kingdom lay precisely at the center of the firmament.  The further one was from the emperor's throne, the lower one was in the cosmic hierarchy of the universe.  The very unfortunate people and cultures which lived in the dark parts of the earth, especially to the gloomy north and arid west, and to Europe beyond, were considered to be barbaric and un-civilized.

For many centuries, Europeans thought of China in a similar way.  It was considered to exist at the very edge of the known world.  It is without a doubt today that the Middle Kingdom is an empire of magnificence and rich in cultural interest.  In the past Europeans thought that China had little importance to the world scheme.  Later on, Western analysts often referred to China as a sleeping giant... or, more appropriate to Chinese culture, a "sleeping dragon" or "sleeping tiger."  Modern China is now wide-awake in the world and is a dominant global power helping to shape the new millennium!

Harlan Urwiler

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