Every textbook starts with basic concepts. This series is no exception. I would like to introduce some fundamentals about China to you, and hopefully, you don’t get bored and learn a few things, even if you think you already know China very well.
I first give an introduction to Chinese history. Unfortunately, our history is a little bit longer than that of most other countries. So even though I’m making this as brief as possible, it will be a few articles long. I promise I will make it interesting though. Also, since I’m not a historian, what I describe below reflect what an ordinary Chinese person knows about our history (however limited or biased it might appear).
We in China typically say, proudly, that China has 5000 years of history. That, of course, depends on how you define China. There has always been human activity on this vast land, and it is certainly ridiculous to pinpoint a time in the history and say: ok, this is the start of China, and then count 5000 years after that.
The way the historians counted probably comes from the time of the Xia dynasty (not even on the timeline map above), which was about 4000 or 5000 years ago. It is claimed to be the first dynasty in China, although the concept of China was probably not established until much later. It was also the time of San Huang Wu Di, or three kings and five emperors (or three emperors and five kings, it doesn’t matter).
These eight guys were considered to be great kings that ruled consecutively, at that time, a portion of what China is now. And they were ancient, dating back to roughly 4000 to 5000 years ago. They did many good things, including leading people to fight barbarians, teaching people how to farm, taking great effort to find floods, building cities, etc. But what really moved these eight kings to the level of quasi-saints was that they were intelligent, diligent people with noble and kind souls. Or at least that is what we are taught.
After the period of the Xia dynasty, the Chinese civilization went through another long dynasty (Shang) and came to the stage where agriculture started to stabilize and flourish, and feudalism started to settle in. The next chapter of Chinese history sees the founding of the Zhou dynasty, the founding father of which (King Wu) defeated and overthrew the last (and infamous) king (King Zhou) from the Shang dynasty. Because histories are written by the winners, King Zhou was a said to be a cruel ruler living a luxurious life.
Allow me to interrupt the flow of history and introduce some side notes. One thing you want to know about Chinese history is that there were a lot of dynasties. These are like various chapters of the Chinese history book, very similar to the dynasties in Europe, such as various Houses in the UK. Each dynasty usually started by uplifting the previous one and ended by being uplifted by the next. Normally the same family (of the same last name) runs the same dynasty from generation to generation.
The majority of dynasties existed consecutively, meaning dynasty A comes first, goes away then it was dynasty B. Before going away, these dynasties usually ruled entire China, no matter how big it was at that time. However, there were a few times in Chinese history when more than one dynasty, and more than one country, co-existed. One example would be that during the Song dynasty (960–1279 AD) there were a few others, including Nomad tribes, that ruled different parts of China. So the term “China” was not necessarily associated with a particular dynasty, but a loose term that refers to the government and people that live on this land.
Speaking of the Chinese people, it comprises of many ethnic groups. Among them, over 90% is Han. The Yuan dynasty (established by the Mongolian people, 1271–1368 AD) and the Qing dynasty (by the Manchu people, 1636–1912 AD) were the only two times in the Chinese history that ethnic groups other than Han controlled China.
Let’s go back to the ancient Zhou dynasty. There were two parts to it. The first leg (the West Zhou) came first, and ended somewhere around the year of 770 BC, when the barbarians forced the king and his men to abandon their capital and flee to another city to settle down. Their old capital (Gao Jing, located in the west, thus the dynasty name) was then savaged and burned down, and because the new capital (Luo Yang) was to the east, the next part of the dynasty was called the East Zhou (770BC to 256 BC). This part of history strongly reminds me of what happened to the Roman empire, which was founded some two hundred years after East Zhou went away.
This is a good place to take a break. We have traveled through ~ 2000 years of Chinese history. In the next article, we will look at what happens in the next six hundred years or so, which was again full of surprises and drama.
