A General Discourse on Chinese History

[Knight-Dragon]

I am thinking of starting a thread on Chinese history. I'll post something about each period per post, fr the earliest beginnings to the present day. After each post, there'll be a Q & A and I'll try my best to answer any questions. Also side-posts about interesting stuff in Chinese history like Mongols invading China, the sea trade with other parts of Asia, the Japanese invasion of Korea etc etc.

Anybody interested pls vote in the poll and if the response is sufficiently OK, I'll TRY to do it; time, will, body and Civ3 willing. Firstly I am not saying that my ver of Chinese history is the correct one or that my memory is that good and accurate. Anybody is welcomed to rectify my errors. I'll also like to caution that my views will probably be biased somewhat. Also it'll take a very long time since Chinese history is quite lengthy.

I'm doing this cos I like history and would love to discuss it; also there seems to be a lack of knowledge of Chinese history among the general Western populations (or even among some Chinese ).

Anyone interested??? Pls lock in your votes.

 

[Fayadi]

What is the main reason for the decline of Prosperous China?
Hell if All the period of China is like Tang Dynasty,China would have dominated the world and invinted rockets to go to space in 1800's!

 

[Kublai-Khan]

Yes
please
I would be nice
to know
something else than thr basic
about chinese history.

 

[Sodak]

I took a chinese/japanese history course at university, and found it very interesting. A whole interesting story that we in the west are simply not taught except as a quick gloss of major events. And usually only those that affected western interests. In any case, it's been years, so a refresher would be welcome!

 

[donsig]

Go for it SKM! I've been very interested in the posts I've seen from you before (such as those in the forgotten war thread).

I am subscribing to this thread so I will be notified when new posts are made here.

Look forward to what you can tell us.

 

[Knight-Dragon]

Alright, here goes since I don't have Civ3 anyway. Also can't really play in the office. And also suffering fr Civ3 weariness cos of all the reading in the Civ3 forums. Seems like a lot of issues presently.
Disclaimer : I repeat, as had been posted my first post, that all the history presented here is of my own view and opinion. If I make an error anywhere, pls feel free to correct me. Discussion is of coz welcomed. And let's keep this thread civil, light-hearted and cool-headed.

1 General

A few basics to aid in the understanding of the way things were in Chinese history.
1) Chinese history is long; like all ppls elsewhere, the Chinese ppl, society, govt etc was (and is) continuously evolving. The character and even the tone of each period and dynasty are pretty different (as you'll discover); sometimes even fr reign to reign. Don't expect things to be static fr the beginning till the end.
2) The Chinese weren't that peaceloving as some ppl might imagine. There were whole periods in Chinese history when there were rivers of blood and mountains of corpses. Although culturally, the Chinese abhor war, but still war was frequent, whether fr foreign invasions or fr massive civil wars.
3) China is a vast country. It had already reached its present size around the Han period 2000 yrs ago. Some provinces were as large and as populous as France or England. I don't think many ppl appreciate this little fact and how it impacted on the course of Chinese history and why things moved so slowly in China.
4) In reference to 3) above, Chinese govt was 'light'. Although the empire seemed pretty big on the map, in actuality many areas were not ruled or administered (or taxed) directly by the imperial bureaucracy (which consisted of maybe a few thousand officials at the very most). Most of the time, the imperial officials 'ruled' outlying areas with the aid of the local gentry classes. The imperial govt usually got direct taxes only fr one or a few economically vibrant areas (I think, not sure) and also thru the salt, iron and other monopolies.
5) The Chinese is not really a single monolithic ethnic ppl, surprising this may sound. The N Chinese are tall, fairer, slant-eyed and more akin to the Koreans, Mongols and Tibetans while the S Chinese are shorter, darker, almond-eyed and more like the Thais, Burmese and Vietnamese. Also don't really speak a single language although have a single written script. There are 800 mil Mandarin speakers and 300 mil speakers of Chinese 'dialects'. These dialects are just as diff fr each other as Spanish is fr French. I know cos I can understand spoken Mandarin, Hokkien (Fukienese) and Cantonese (great for cursing and swearing ). Even Mandarin has its regional variants. The N Chinese Mandarin sounds like a bit like singing while the one I speak is more gruff and harsher in sound.
6) Also in Chinese military tradition, there's no shame or stigma with going over to the enemy's side. Anyone doubting this shld read the Romance of the Three Kingdoms on which whole generations of Chinese military leaders had been weaned. This is critical to understand how sometimes small and unlikely factions could come to conquer all of China. Usually only maybe a couple of ppl were fighting to be the emperor; the rest just wanted security and to get on with their lives, so they were mostly fence-sitters. When one of the antagonists began securing victories in the field, these fence-sitters would begin flocking to him so eventually he would secure enough support to 'win'.
7) China was geographically isolated since ancient times. So she had not really developed foreign diplomacy with foreign nations as equals cos there were no foreign nations of sufficient strength around China. So the Chinese worldview was that the emperor was ruler of All Under Heaven. The difference betw imperial subjects and foreign barbarians was simply that barbarians had yet to receive the 'benefit' of imperial rule. This kind of mentality had gotten the Chinese into trouble pretty often.
All for now. Gotta work.

Next - Discussion
Next - 2 In the beginning .....

 

[Knight-Dragon]

2 In the beginning .....

In the beginning, there was Nothing. No matter, no energy. Nothingness ruled. Then there was an Earth-sized ball of stuff, containing all the matter that would make up the future Universe. Then it exploded and the Big Bang expanded and the Universe came into being, with galaxies and stars and what crap.
Then 5 billions yrs ago, the Sun, our Sun, and the Solar System, our Solar System, was formed. And there was the Earth. And then life begun, and evolved, first as single-celled creatures and then multi-celled. Then came invertebrates and then the first vertebrates. And there were fishes, amphibians, reptiles, dinosaurs, birds and mammals. And finally, human-like creatures made an appearance.
Half a million yrs ago, the creatures known as the Peking Man would walk the earth (near Beijing of coz). They knew fire and stone tools. Were they the first forbears of the Chinese? No one knows.
Some anthropologists believed modern Chinese descended fr homo erectus who evolved into homo sapiens in Asia; most believed that all humans (incl Chinese) descended fr an African Eve. It doesn't really matter since this took place so damn long ago that to argue would be pointless. Soon we had Stone Age villages in the territory that would in future made up the Chinese heartland.
To be continue ......

Got you all, didn't I???

Next - 3 The Stone Age and the Xia

 

[Knight-Dragon]

3 The Stone Age and the Xia

The Chinese don't really have a special ppl creation myth. They don't really have something like that they were the chosen ppl of God or what or that they were created fr the union of the heavenly wolf and heavenly something else or something similar. What myths the Chinese have are rather pedestrian.
The ancient myths go somewhat like this. First there were ppl who lived like animals on the earth. They lived in the caves, clothed themselves with tree-bark or something, eat fr whatever's available. You get the idea I think. There are a lot of variation on this but basically all about the same.
Then amongst the ppl, there appeared sages (basically smarties). These sages, being sages, taught the ppl how to live like humans. In other words, they taught the first rudiments of civilisation. Some were famous enough to be venerated as gods later on. Of note was Huangdi, the Yellow Emperor. He taught the earliest Chinese how to farm and how to spin silk (I think). Then came Yao and then his successor Shun. I think Shun passed on to his son, and so there was the first Chinese hereditary dynasty.
Now this first dynasty was known as the Xia. I think there was some King list somewhere, not sure. Anyway this dynasty wasn't archaelogically verified so ..... I think it's probably got to do with some Stone Age culture in the Chinese heartland region (along the Huanghe i.e. Yellow River) in Henan today and neighbouring parts. Maybe the Yangshao Stone Age culture. Who knows?
Anyway the Xia lasted for some centuries. For some reason, they came to be replaced by the next dynasty, the Shang. Actually I am pretty weak on the earliest beginnings of the Chinese cos it was pretty much uninteresting. Also forgotten mostly. So you may want to refer to some books instead on this part.
To be continued ....

Next - Discussion
Next - 4 The Bronze Age and The Shang

 

[Vrylakas]

SKM -

There was a radical overhaul in the last decade or so of how Chinese was transliterated (written phonetically) into the Western languages. Can you talk a bit about this?

(i.e., "Peking" became "Beijing", "Mao Tse-Tung" became "Mao Zedong", "Chinshurwongti" became "Qinshihuangdi", etc.)

 

[Sodak]

The transliteration was actually a standardization, IIRC. The old way of using a western character with or without the ' to denote voicing was dropped in favor of using different letters.

Some examples:
t'=t and t=d was changed to the two separate western equivalents.
ts'=ts/ts=z was changed to ts or z.
The Q in the new system equals the english ch.
w changed to hu (similar to english wh) to more accurately reflect the sound being made

Why was the ' used in the first place, you might ask? This was an attempt to spell following the generally internationally accepted phonetic alphabet, which has a separate character for EVERY sound made by humans in language.

The ' is used to denote aspirated sounds. Every consonant (based on how it is produced by the mouth) has 3 possible forms - voiced (vocal cords vibrate before the letter is made by the mouth), voiceless (vocal cords vibrate as the letter is made) and unvoiced (no vocal cord use). There are further variations that expand on these base 3, such as aspiration. English, for example, does not have voiced consonants (really!) - we have voiceless and unvoiced/aspirated. Voiced or unvoiced (no aspiration) consonants sound funny in our words, but we have great difficulty distinguishing them in other languages. I don't know chinese, so I'm not sure it the original spellings were confusing because they were incorrectly typographed in the attempt to be phonetic.

ANYWAY, back to the original topic...

 

[Crazy Eddie]

I think some of the changes (eg. Peking - Beijing) were due to the fact that the West had greater contact with the southern, Cantonese, Chinese and roughly followed their names for Cities, people, etc. ?
But, anyway, the part of Chinese history that interests me most is the voyages made by Cheng Ho. (yes, I did have to look up his name) The scale of his fleet was just amazing for the time.

 

[Knight-Dragon]

Gee, don't know that. Thanks, Sodak, for the explanation. Anyway the new system is now called hanyu pinyin. Also Mainland China has been simplifying commonly-used Chinese characters over the yrs. These characters are called jiandizhi (in Chinese, not sure about the transliteration). Some overseas Chinese communities (think Taiwan) are still sticking to the older, vastly more complicated set of characters and called fandizhi.

As for Eddie, you'll just have to look back here in a long while for us to get to the Ming dynasty (if ever). Once I got my hands on Civ3, hehe, can't guarantee what will happen ...... Also you got the Cantonese part partially correct. Peking, Mao Tse-Tung, Nanking etc sounds more like Cantonese (actually it's more like Pei-Kheing). I dunno. Maybe it's how Westerners picked up the sounding fr the Cantonese originally. For a long time, Western traders etc were only limited to Canton and weren't permitted elsewhere in the Qing empire.

 

[Knight-Dragon]

I am hoping that this format will be used to discuss the histories of other ppls and historical entities. We have too many quizzes anyway that it's getting kinda boring.
I am interested in the history of Prussia fr the beginning till WW1 and also the history of Continental Europe fr the end of the Roman empire till the Napoleonic era. Anybody wants to give it a try? Pls?

 

[Knight-Dragon]

4 The Bronze Age and the Shang

Originally the Shang, like the Xia, weren't verified by archaeological remnants. That changed when they found out that 'dragon bones' used as Chinese medicine were actually the old bones and shells that were used by the Shang for auguries. The Westerners who found this tracked it back to the site where they were digging out all this stuff and found the first Shang settlement. Since that time, Shang sites had been located all across the old Chinese heartland.
At this time, China was still heavily forested and I think the climate was warmer and more humid (even for N China). There were records of hunting of elephants, lions, tigers, hippos(!) and other large-sized mammals by the Shang aristocracy. Human settlements were sparse. The Shang probably controlled a stretch of the Huanghe, the original Chinese homeland, and there were barbarian tribes all around it.
The Bronze Age started in China at this time. Not very good with dates, esp those long long ago but I think the Shang lasted fr the early second millenium BC till the 1200s BC? Anyway the Shang were good with bronze and left behind religious bronze vessels in quantities, esp those huge tripods. I am sure they also used bronze to make other stuff like weopans.
The Shang were basically much like priest-kings and in Civ3 terms, would be religious and maybe commercial (?). Basically they were nominally acknowledged as one of the earliest Chinese entities but were still quite some way off fr the typical imperial Chinese. They gave the Chinese ancestor-worship (I think), the earliest Chinese written ideograms (they used it on oracle bones for auguries), the earliest rudiments of govt, maybe the concept of barbarians vs us and the war-chariot (really not sure about this one but its usage became prevalent in the next dynasty).
In many ways, the Shang were much like the barbaric tribes around them but they were farmers (of millet) and they were organised. However towards the end, they would fall to a barbaric people to the west who had been semi-Sinicized, the Zhou. This theme would be repeated a few other times in the history of China. One of the strengths of Chinese civ was its ability to absorb foreign barbaric tribes so well that these became as Chinese as any other original Chinese. Probably the Shang were only the direct ancestors of maybe 1-5% of the present day Chinese. The rest were all originally barbarians.

Next - Discussion
Next - 4.1 Sidepoint - Name of the Chinese ppl

 

[Knight-Dragon]

4.1 Sidepoint - Name of the Chinese ppl

Something else just occured to me - the Chinese don't really have a name for themselves as a race! The term Chinese is actually a Western convention (coming fr the Chin [Qin] Dynasty - the first real Chinese empire). Native Chinese refer to themselves as Han zhi i.e. the sons of Han (after the Han Dynasty cos it was so great). Generally the people of China will take the name of the prevailing dynasty at that time. I.e. the Chinese of the Ming empire would call themselves the subjects of Ming.
Modern mainland Chinese would also call themselves Zhongguo ren i.e. people of Zhongguo, the Central State (not the Middle Kingdom, this is a more romantic translation). In my case, I call myself Hua ren, ppl of Hua. Not sure why. Some other overseas Chinese call themselves Tang ren, ppl of Tang (after the Tang Dynasty cos it was so foreign-oriented and also a great dynasty).
I think I am confusing myself .....

Next - 5 The Zhou

 

[Knight-Dragon]

5 The Zhou

The Zhou dynasty officially lasted for 800 plus yrs till 221 BC (I think). It was divided into two timelines - the Western Zhou and the Eastern Zhou. In turn, the Eastern Zhou could be divided further into two periods - the Spring and Autumn period (named after a book of the same name; very important but can't remember what was it about) and of coz, the Zhan guo period i.e. the Age of the Warring States, one of the bloodiest historical periods in Chinese history.
The Zhou were originally barbarian pastoralists inhabiting the Wei river valley who practised some agriculture. Due to influence by the Shang who were to the east, the Zhou tribe coalescended into a powerful force to the extent that they could threaten the Shang. Apparently the Duke of Zhou was very learned and he instituted reforms that would make the Zhou powerful.
Anyway, according to legend, the last king of the Shang was an evil ruler. His brutal rule led to much dissatisfaction and eventually the dissatisfied elements invited the Duke of the Zhou to lead a rebellion to topple the king. So the Duke invaded the Shang, aided by dissident forces. I think by this time, the Zhou were using war chariots to wage war.
The Duke was successful and the Shang ruling house was toppled. I think the Zhou actually absorbed the Shang. The Shang prob went into commerce after that cos the character Shang also mean business in Chinese. Like shang ren - businessman, shang ye - business. Or something like that.
In any case, this was how the Zhou recorded their rise to power and I more than suspect they were prob cleaning up the records on their bloody grab for power. So the Duke of Zhou became the King of Zhou and a new order came into existense with the houses swearing allegiance to the King. This was the beginning of the feudal aristocratic period in China.

Next - Discussion
Next - 5.1 Sidepoint - the Wei river valley

 

[Knight-Dragon]

5.1 Sidepoint - the Wei river valley

So many other powers would have their original base here (the Qin and the Tang esp) that I think I shld go into more detail here. The Wei river is a branch of the Huanghe and joins up with the main river near modern Xi'an. This area is fertile cos of the loess soil I think and well-irrigated (cos of all the irrigation projects later on). In the time of the Zhou, it still wasn't developed much but the Qin who came later would develop it into an economic powerhouse.
More importantly, the valley was well-protected by mountains to the north and south and could be easily defended at the pass which connected the valley with the rest of China. The ppl were hardy cos of constant raids fr the nomadic tribes to the west and north and so were used to war and autocratic govt. Perfect to serve as the base of any aspiring conqueror of China.

Next - Discussion
Next - 5.2 The Western Zhou

 

[Knight-Dragon]

5.2 The Western Zhou

The King of the Zhou now ruled the kingdom with the support of the feudal houses. In the beginning, these houses were all related to the royal lineage or from trusted retainers of the king. But with time, the relationship grew more distant.
Now this was the age of feudalism and chivalry. China was still thickly-forested, most of it and sparsely populated. The way feudalism worked was for the feudal houses to provide military forces for the King when needed in return for recognition. Also the land of each house was divided into 9; supposedly the lord's peasants would work the outer 8 for themselves and jointly worked the middle lot for free for the lord.
When not at war, the Zhou aristocrats engaged in hunting, supervising their retainers, overlooking their affairs and sometimes duelling. Typically issues arose betw diff lords and these were settled by fighting. The lord and his retainers would march smartly to the chosen field of battle and then the two opposing lords would fight (to the death). And they were honourable during the fight in much the same spirit as Arthurian knights or Jap samurai.
So the lords, on their war-chariots, would duel on the field while their retainers probably cheered on (cos they didn't have to do the fighting and dying). One story was that during a fight, one lord broke his bow (or ran out of arrows, something like that). The other lord graciously gave him the chance to get a new bow (or a new supply of arrows). Then the first lord instantly killed the honourable lord upon resumption of the duel. Funny ppl.
Confucius later on would write that this was the golden age of China. In fact in his writings, he idolized the Duke who became the King of Zhou. And also someone else, can't remember. He based his ideal forms of govt and relationship with barbarians on what he believed was the standard during this period too. Which would later bring some grief to China cos the govt forms for this era and setting would hardly be suitable to govern a huge empire.
The Western Zhou lasted for some centuries. The King, secured in his base in the Wei valley, could maintain control over the kingdom. Then disaster struck. Chiang and Di barbarians in the north and west attacked the Wei valley. The feudal lords answered the King's call to arms and rushed to aid the King's forces. Not sure what happened next but the outcome was the lords escorted the King eastwards to establish a new capital in the old Chinese heartland. Cut off from his base, the King of Zhou, as an effective political and military power, was no more. From then on, he remained the figurehead and also the religious symbol for the Chinese but other than that, he was no longer a player on the Chinese stage.

Next - Discussion
Next - 5.3 The Spring and Autumn Period

 

[donsig]

Just wanted to say that's I'm enjoying this thread!

 

[Knight-Dragon]

Glad that at least somebody is enjoying it. I was beginning to think that I am talking to the wall or something. Don't worry; will keep this up for as long as I can.