ABSTRACT
China looms large in the world of art, and ever larger. This should be no surprise to anyone. The reasons are fundamental. China not only represents around a quarter of the world’s population today, it has always been a sizeable fraction of the total. China occupies some of the world’s best and most fertile land and has cultivated much of it densely since early times. There are also great natural and positional disadvantages. Parts of China are prone to devastating earthquakes. Large-scale droughts are not uncommon. Most serious are the great floods that can inundate huge areas of the country. Chinese civilization first developed in and around the Huanghe River basin in the north. This river and its tributaries have caused massive floods. It has even changed course twice and entered the sea in a different place. Apart from great internal political upheavals, China has, until recent centuries, also been highly vulnerable to land attack by ‘barbarians’ on its long northern border.
