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I eventually found a local villager. He was sitting on a stoop on the town's long, dusty main street. He stared at us with his mouth open, his four front teeth missing. In the local dialect, I told him my last name and asked if he knew where the Chuas had lived.

The villager blinked at me a few times. Then, he turned and waved his arm. “Everyone on this side of the street is named Chua,” he grunted. “Everyone on the other side is named Lao.”

The sudden discovery of two hundred new, inbred relatives complicated matters, and the search for my family's house ultimately proved futile. There was, however, solace. We found my great-grandfather's tomb, which, amazingly, and for reasons probably long forgotten, is still regarded as sacred by the townspeople—even if it is now next to some municipal drainpipes.

In addition to my great-grandfather, I have obsessively tried to track down every other remotely impressive ancestor I have in China. A fifth cousin by marriage, thrice removed, collected great works of nineteenth-century calligraphy; his collection is now in the Shanghai Museum. My great “uncle” Chua Ge Kun, possibly unrelated by blood, was a renowned symphony conductor and the founder of the Fuzhou Music School. Finally, my family's most prized heirloom—in fact, our only heirloom—is an original 2,000-page treatise from 1655, handwritten by a direct ancestor named Chua Wu Neng, who was the royal astronomer to Emperor Shen Zong of the Ming dynasty. Also a philosopher and poet, Wu Neng was appointed by the emperor to be the chief of military staff in 1644, when China faced a Manchu invasion. A leather-bound copy of Wu Neng's treatise sits prominently on my living room coffee table.

Like many others who can trace their roots to great fallen empires—whether China, Greece, Persia, Turkey, or Rome—I cling for my identity to ethereal strands of history and high culture. China's long traditions of calligraphy, science, poetry, opera, philosophy, naturalism, and Confucian discipline have always fascinated me, perhaps because they contrasted so sharply with the dismal third world reality of the China that confronted me as a child.

For Westerners, the best known of the Chinese dynasties may be the Ming, famous for its blue and white porcelain and recently the subject of Gavin Menzies’ 1421: The Year China Discovered America. But for ethnic Chinese around the world, it is the Tang dynasty that represents China's golden age—not only a period of unprecedented prosperity and political power, but the pinnacle of Chinese literary and artistic achievement, setting a standard to which every subsequent dynasty aspired.1 In terms of population under its control, the Tang dynasty towered over every other contemporaneous empire, including the powerful Arab caliphates. The Tang was also, not coincidentally, more open, cosmopolitan, and ethnically and religiously tolerant than any other empire of its day, and perhaps than any other period in Chinese history.

INTOLERANCE AND “BARBARIANS” IN CHINESE HISTORY

For centuries prior to 221 BC central China's Yellow River plains had consisted of numerous vying kingdoms, tribes, and states engaged in perpetual warfare. Known as the “Spring and Autumn” and “Warring States” eras, this period of disunity and constant strife was also characterized by tremendous intellectual ferment. All of China's major schools of philosophy—including Confucianism, Taoism, and Legalism—emerged during this period. As Chinese historians would later note, it was a time when “one hundred schools of thought” contended.2

The Warring States era was brought to an end by the First Emperor of the Qin (Qin Shi huangdi), who unified China politically for the first time in 221 BC. (“Qin,” pronounced “chin,” is the source of the Western name “China.”) Like other great nation builders, he imposed a standard currency and a uniform written script, undertaking construction projects of unprecedented scale, including the 1,500-mile-long Great