Book excerpt: This book mainly focuses on the close relationship between Chinese dialects and Chinese culture. It reveals,on the one hand, a long, rich and splendid Chinese culture from the perspective of Chinese dialects; on the other hand, it unveils the evolution, the development of Chinese dialects as well as their diversity and charm at the cultural angle. By combining the study of Chinese dialects with that of the history of Chinese culture, the author attempts to explore the cultural background of Chinese dialects’ formation and evolution,and at the same time, the author attempts to view Chinese dialects as the key access to find solutions to related questions appeared in the history of Chinese culture. Thus, it not only opens a new research scope for the Chinese dialectology, but it also finds a new path for the study of cultural history. The book is the first of its kind to create the concept of cultural linguistics, which leads to a new era of combined research on both language and culture.