By contrast, consider the traditional Chinese home. Blank walls enclose it. Outside is a courtyard with perhaps a miniature garden around a corner. Once inside his private compound you are wrapped in an ambiance of calm beauty, an ordered world of buildings, pavement, rock, and decorative vegetation. But you have no distant view: nowhere does space open out before you, the only open space is the sky above. The Chinese is rooted in his place.

The Chinese tie to place is deeply felt. Wanderlust (漫游癖) is an alien sentiment. The Taoist classic Tao Te Ching captures the ideal of rootedness in place with these words: “Though there may be another country in the neighborhood so close that they are within sight of each other and the crowing of cocks and barking of dogs in one place can be heard in the other, yet there is no traffic between them; and throughout their lives the two peoples have nothing to do with each other.” In theory if not in practice, farmers have ranked high in Chinese society. The reason is not only that they are engaged in a “root” industry of producing food but that, unlike pecuniary merchants, they are tied to the land and do not abandon their country when it is in danger.