The Birth of China Seen Through Poetry

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The book introduces Chinese culture to readers of English, using poetry from the various periods rendered into English verse to bring back to life past Chinese society as it developed from about 1000 B.C to the form we see today. With China's increasing importance on the world stage today, many readers, no doubt, would want to learn more about its ancient culture. However, to learn about a culture from its history alone, especially one as long as that of China, is time-consuming and requires a historian's expert skill. This book offers the general reader a direct glimpse into the human core of it via the universally accessible channel of poetry. It provides an outline of Chinese history from prehistoric times to the present printed mostly on left-hand pages, accompanied on the right by a selection of Chinese poems of the corresponding periods translated into English verse by the author. The poems total about eighty in number and come mostly from the classical phase dating from around 1000 B.C. to 1200 A.D.

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Though a devoted lover of poetry and history all his life, Professor Chan Hong-Mo is by profession a scientist specialized in theoretical particle physics. Thus, his poetry, gathered at odd moments over a lifetime, is to him but an amateur's private affair, and only the hope now of helping to promote intercultural understanding gives him the incentive and daring to publish some of it. Born in Guangzhou, China, to Chinese parents, brought up mostly in Hong Kong, then having lived and worked since in various places around the world, he has naturally a particular interest in how cultures mix.