College Board - AP English Language Sample Pa**age III lyrics

Throughout her history China had believed herself the center of civilization, surrounded by barbarians. She was the Middle Kingdom, the center of the universe, whose Emperor was the Son of Heaven, ruling by the Mandate of Heaven. Convinced of their superior values, the Chinese considered that China's greatness was owed to principles of social order over a harmonious whole. All outsiders whose misfortune was to live beyond her borders were “barbarians'' and necessarily inferiors who were expected, and indeed required, to make their approach, if they insisted on coming, bearing tribute and performing the kowtow in token of humble submission. From the time of Marco Polo to the eighteenth century, visiting Westerners, amazed and admiring, were inclined to take China at her own valuation. Her recorded history began in the third millennium b.c., her bronzes were as old as the pyramids, her cla**ical age was contemporary with that of Greece, her Confucian canon of ethics predated the New Testament if not the Old. She was the inventor of paper, porcelain, silk, gunpowder, the clock and movable type, the builder of the Great Wall, one of the wonders of the world, the creator of fabrics and ceramics of exquisite beauty and of an art of painting that was sophisticated and expressive when Europe's was still primitive and flat.... When at the end of the eighteenth century Western ships and merchants surged against China's shores, eager for tea and silk and cotton, they found no reciprocal enthusiasm. Enclosed in the isolation of superiority, Imperial China wanted no influx of strangers from primitive islands called Britain or France or Holland who came to live off the riches of the Middle Kingdom bearing only worthless articles for exchange. They had ugly noses and coarse manners and wore ridiculous clothes with constricting sleeves and trousers, tight collars and coats that had tails down the back but failed to close in front. These were not the garments of reasonable men. A past-oriented society, safe only in seclusion, sensed a threat from the importunate West. The Imperial Government raised every barrier possible by refusals, evasions, postponements, and prohibitions to foreign entry or settlement or the opening of formal relations. Splendidly remote in the “Great Within'' of the Forbidden City of Peking, the court refused to concern itself with the knocking on its doors. It would admit foreign emba**ies who came to plead for trade treaties only if they performed the ritual of three genuflections and nine prostrations in approaching the Son of Heaven. British envoys, after surmounting innumerable obstacles to reach Peking, balked at the kowtow and turned back empty-handed.