Perhaps because of the long history and richness of China’s civilization as well as the diversity and complexity of its culture, many find the country a tough place to get a handle on. As is so often the case, the understanding of China is reduced to oversimplification, aphorism and, sometimes, just one magical word such as face, guanxi (關係) or wuxia (武俠). The truth, however, is there’s no open sesame for entering the Chinese mind. Understanding China is, at root, understanding its people and culture, history and geography. There are as many knowledgeable books as one can count on Chinese history and culture, written by academics who’ve spent their lifetimes studying particular topics that concern or interest them. This isn’t one of these books. This is a book for the general reader who is often puzzled and fascinated by the richness and complexity of Chinese culture in equal measure. By merging an insider’s deep understanding of Chinese history with the intellectual curiosity of a perceptive outsider, this author wrestles with questions that have the potential to overturn the conventional wisdom about how China is perceived. My underlying belief is that the most mundane observations are vulnerable to the kind of drilling down that might yield some surprising, counter-intuitive conclusions about a country that so many think they know.

Generations of Chinese scholars have made China synonymous with the Great Wall and presented its civilization as fundamentally land-bound. This volume challenges this perspective, demonstrating that China was not a “Walled Kingdom”, certainly not since the Yongjia Disturbance in 311. China reached out to the maritime world far more actively than historians have acknowledged, while the seas and what came from the seas—from Islam, fragrances and Jesuits to maize, opium and clocks—significantly changed the course of history, and have been of inestimable importance to China since the Ming. This book integrates the maritime history of China, especially the Qing period, a subject which has hitherto languished on the periphery of scholarly analysis, into the mainstream of current historical narrative. It was the seas that made Tang China a “Cosmopolitan Empire” (Mark Lewis), the Song dynasty China’s “Greatest Age” (John Fairbank), China at 1600 “the largest and most sophisticated of all unified realms on earth” (Jonathan Spence), and the reign of the three Qing emperors (Kangxi, Yongzheng and Qianlong) China’s “last golden age” (Charles Hucker).

A review of available literature has revealed information on the location of springs, the temperature of the water, the rate of flow, the chemical character of the water and evolved gases, and the uses made of the water. For each country or geographic area there is a brief description of the geology and map showing the location of the springs.