Although this may sound disappointing for travellers seeking the Tao ("Way") in China, it should be pointed out that the neglect of the outward forms of religion is by no means a sure indicator of the state of mind of the Chinese people. The resilience of old ideas in China, and the ability of the Chinese people to absorb new streams of thought and eventually to dominate them, has been demonstrated again and again over the centuries. The philosophies which unified China and defined the very idea of what it is to be Chinese for millennia are not likely to be forgotten in a mere half century of communism.

The product of the oldest continuous civilization on earth, Chinese religion actually comprises a number of disparate and sometimes contradictory elements. But at the heart of it all, three basic philosophies lie intermingled: Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism. The way in which a harmonious balance has been created among these three is expressed in the often quoted maxim San Jiao Fa Yi - "Three Teachings Flow into One".

Both Confucianism and Taoism are belief systems rooted in the Chinese soil, and they form as much a part of the Chinese collective unconscious as Platonic and Aristotelian thought does in the West. Buddhism , though, was a foreign import, brought to China from India along the Silk Road by itinerant monks and missionaries from about the first century AD onwards. As such, it was the first organized religion to penetrate China and enjoyed a glorious, if brief, period of ascendancy under the Tang in the eighth century. Just as the mutual contradictions of Confucianism and Taoism had been accommodated by the Chinese, however, so Buddhism did not long eclipse other beliefs - as it established itself, its tenets were gradually integrated into the existing structure of thought and in turn transformed by them, into something very different from what had originally come out of India. Buddhism may have been the only foreign religion to have left a substantial mark on China, though it was not, incidentally, the only religion to enter China via the Silk Road. Both Islam and Christianity also trickled into the country this way, and to this day a significant minority of Chinese, numbering possibly in the tens of millions, are Muslims. Unlike most of the rest of Asia, however, China did not yield wholesale to the tide of Islam - the rigid, all-embracing doctrines of the Koran never stood much of a chance with the choosy, flexible Chinese.

Similarly, China may have been periodically dominated by foreign powers, but her belief systems have never been overwhelmed. Instead, conquering invaders such as the Mongolians in the thirteenth and the Manchus in the seventeenth centuries, have found themselves inexorably sinicized. On this strength rests the understandable Chinese confidence in the ultimate superiority of their beliefs , a confidence that survived through the lowest periods in Chinese history.