The Asian Summer

THE QUESTIONThis volume poses a question: Who are the true Asians?The answer to this question will not come from a genetic test, a passport, or a map indicating where an ethnicity supposedly originates. Asia has been invaded, formalized, and redrawn so many times that such an answer could not exist.If the question were about ancestry, it would have no stable answer, as every population tracked here has mixed, moved, and absorbed newcomers longer than any nation outside Africa has existed.The question being asked actually concerns the persistence of over seventy thousand years of migration, invention, invasion, and empire. Which aspects of a people represent them most accurately?If this is your first foray into our series on literal human history, then you must know that we, humanity, speak loudly and clearly, with our chosen human codes.Our codes manifest in actions over more than 300,000 years, which, when viewed with unbiased human eyes or, as I like to say, human-centered eyes, clearly reveal who we have chosen to be.We have chosen to be human, not animal.We have decided to focus not only on today but also on tomorrow, for those who follow.We have chosen consideration over reaction and participation over exploitation.In short, we choose the enlightening paths of respect and love for life - instead of the negative pressure of conflict and control.The fact that we are still here, despite countless near-extinction disasters, many of which we caused ourselves, testifies that our codes have granted us the grace not only to survive in a hostile world but to thrive.For most of this history, it was never a conscious choice available to a single person. It was simply what a people built and passed down over centuries, without comparing it to what another people on the other side of the world had built instead.That has changed. For the first time, an individual can learn what almost every culture on Earth has preserved, tested, and transmitted, and choose which of these codes they wish to carry themselves.So, on our journey through Asia, we will seek these precious pearls of human insight and ethics, generation after generation, through every invasion, every fall, and every rebuilding.To begin this search, we must return to the source of us all.