If you are sick and tired of “The End of History” (by F.Fukuyama) and of “The Clash of Civilizations?” (by S. Huntington), you are sure to restore your historical optimism as soon you open this article: you are going to get absorbed in life-asserting, thoroughly illustrated exposition of the “beginning of history” being expanded, and of the “synthesis of civilizations” just going on. The article deals with the East Asian civilization and its complex relationships with the Western civilization – mainly within the recent one hundred years. The article contains numerous original observations as to mutual influence of the two large self-dependent cultural-ideological formations: the Western Enlightenment project, with its impact on the ideology, and the centuries-old East-Asian Confucian tradition.