A brief historical introduction.

above the millennia, billions of Chinese have done a allotment of remembering. And in a civilization that, since ancient times, has exalted writing and rever knowledge of the past, self-conscious remembrance has perennially occupied the literate elites--both Han Chinese and others who assimilated to their culture--who have shaped and borne forward the textual traditions. (1) by the agency of no means has even a small portion of all that remembering been traumatic. Recorded memories in the immense extant corpus of Chinese writings race the gamut of qualities that single expects to find in any maturely