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.