É. Apor (ed.): Jubilee Volume of the Oriental Collection, 1951–1976. Papers Presented on the Occasion of the 25th Anniversary of the Oriental Collection of the Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
I. ECSEDY: Historical Time and Mythical History in Ancient China
61 I. ECSEDY HISTORICAL TIME AND MYTHICAL HISTORY IN ANCIENT CHINA Contrary to general belief, the long and continuous history of Chinese writing and literacy has not provided the reader with an uninterrupted flow of contemporary historical records from China, the least so with regard to the perception and description of time as a unidirectional and unbroken line, a continuous concatenation of events. It is precisely for this reason that the most diverse views of the duration of the period of mythical ancient times came to be formulated. It also explains the existence of different but parallel chronologies of this period in historical accounts of the state unity of the imperial age in the Han-era (206 B.C. to 220 A.D.), and in several later versions and "amendments". This is partly because there was no reliable historical starting point of time or a continuous chronology of practical purpose in China or in its neighbourhood. Europe read and misunderstood the well-intentioned historian's apologia for past Chinese civilisation in which he attempted to show mythical tradition as history through a created framework of time in a period of European expansion and conquest in time and space, a period which also marked the beginning of Oriental studies and colonization; and Chinese history was misunderstood because traditional Chinese dates were measured by a European concept of time.Since then, one of the characteristic myths of China' s lovers with a bad conscience and a wealth of misinformation is the splendour of a mythical Chinese "golden age" projected back to an irreally old or non-existent past. At the same time, it is not easy to appreciate from the lengthy records which have yet to be investigated properly that the first written notes do not herald the beginning of continuous records, that these records do not give any information about the most important historical events, that the recorder was not bound by a continuous line of proportioned time, and that researcher should also break away from European time concepts, especially in respect of the beginnings of history. The first records can be dated to the 16th century B.C. , but a more or less continuous line of records can be seen in the sources from the 9th century B.C. , and written records relating to the whole territory and history of historical China were regularly collected only during the imperial era (from 221 B.C. )and after.The historical records collected for the greater glory of a dynasty, invariably began
