With this second example, I’ve started a "There’s a Culture" category, in appreciation of successes in past history, which we would do well to simply copy, if not take as inspirational benchmarks.

This one is from An Intimate History of Humanity, by Theodore Zeldin.  Again, highly recommended.

"History is full of people who talked as though they were alive today, and yet it is assumed that the experience of the Celestial Empire was so exotic that it has no relevance to the West, which sees China simply as a developing country waiting to follow the Western path to prosperity.  But of course China had its own Industrial Revolution, and experimented with mass production while Europe was still in the Dark Ages.  China went through a financial and communications revolution a thousand years ago, when it invented paper money and printing and a cheap system of water-canal transport, creating both a cast national market and an export industry so enormous that it was the world’s principal source of luxury products.  China probably profited from the discovery of the Americas more than any other nation, for half the silver mined there before 1800 ended up in its coffers, in payment for silk, ceramics and tea, which were the refrigerators, televisions and computers of the day.  By then, Kwantung, which has recently caused the West surprise by becoming the fastest growing economy in the world, was already a precursor of the service-sector economy, living off craftsmanship and commerce, and importing its food.  Agriculture was so efficient that wheat yields were 50 percent higher than in France.  By AD 1108 the Chinese already had treatises listing 1,749 basic medical drugs.  The empire survived so long because, despite war and corruption, taxation was reduced over the centuries from 20 to 5 per cent of GNP.  The army, instead of being a burdensome expense, farmed and fed itself.  The civil service, recruited by examinations requiring candidates to be poets as well as scholars, used to be the envy of all bright and ambitious Europeans whose careers were impeded by the privileges of birth."