A Brief History of China
As suggested/recommended/encouraged by @Anduin @mlnevese @Aristillius...
I share my amateur effort, which I wrote a few years ago for fun, to summarise the history of China and describe the key phases, events and trends of Chinese history. It can be found here or attached to the post if visible.
This is not an academic work, though I'd like to think that there are no glaring mistakes within, and it offers an objective and broad overview of an epic scope of history and the countless individual stories that make up the story and history of China, starting from the origins of Chinese civilisation to the birth of the People's Republic of China in 1949.
I share my amateur effort, which I wrote a few years ago for fun, to summarise the history of China and describe the key phases, events and trends of Chinese history. It can be found here or attached to the post if visible.
This is not an academic work, though I'd like to think that there are no glaring mistakes within, and it offers an objective and broad overview of an epic scope of history and the countless individual stories that make up the story and history of China, starting from the origins of Chinese civilisation to the birth of the People's Republic of China in 1949.
Post edited by Troodon80 on
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Comments
Though I kind of hoped to find something about the Paleolithic and Neolithic ages of China in there as well. I'm obviously nitpicking here, I know. But since I'm a hopeless paleontology geek, I just can't help of wanting to read something about how Homo erectus "conquered" China... some 1.4 million years ago. :P
I'm glad you liked it.
I actually own a really old history book printed by official Chinese education authorities. In that 'official history' book, the first chapter focuses on "Peking Man", which is described as being over a million years old and the ancestors of the Chinese people. We now know of course that "Peking Man" was Homo Erectus, and that Chinese people are Homo Sapien, like the rest of the Human race, but the Communist authorities initially preferred the propaganda value of claiming 'Chinese Exceptionalism' by claiming a different origin for the Chinese people, and one that did not arise from Africa, but was native to and tied to the 'sacred land of China'.
So basically Homo Erectus are not really Chinese :P. Just like Neanderthals are not really Europeans (although some studies suggest that there might have been some inter-breeding between Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals in Europe).
Oh... that's weird... Well I've 'insert image', even though it's not an image. Hopefully it's okay now.
I've downloaded it. I am curious, so I'm going to take a look at this. :-)
Thanks! I didn't realise I could do that with files as well!
@Heindrich amazing read, I certainly appreciate history so I'm going to read it!
Awesome.
I particularly like your links to the Ghauzadong (excuse spelling) peninsula as a place of defence... That kind of fact would be missed in a more in depth history. I learnt a lot. Thank you for educating me. (Wish my own pupils would say that!)
China's history is very bloody.
Makes British history seem quite peaceful.
I'm glad you enjoyed it, and you're very welcome.
Guanzhong (关中), which means 'within the gates', was a region in the northwest of the Chinese core, corresponding to the modern Shaanxi Province and surrounding areas (it's not a peninisula and it is totally landlocked). It was named because there were fortifications (gates) guarding all the mountain passes leading into it, and was considered (by the Qin Empire) to be their core territories. By the reforms of the Han Dynasty, the term started to go out of fashion, because the Han Dynasty tried to erode the distinct identities and power of the former-states, and presumably a term that implied 'us and them' was not helpful to that cause.
Not to be confused with Guangdong (广东), which is a province in Southeastern China, near Hong Kong. I tried to explain how and why the centres of Chinese civilisation shifted. In the early periods, Guanzhong was a strategic goldmine as it sat on the eastern end of the lucrative Silk Road, and was agriculturally rich and militarily easy to defend. Later on Silk Road trade was replaced by Maritime trade, the Grand Canal created a new economic system that was largely separate to western China, and repeated barbarian invasions devastated the north, and massed southern exodus led to dramatic development along the Yangtze River and the coastline. Thus overall, the centre of Chinese civilisation shifted from the north and west toward the south and east, such that Guangdong today is much richer than Shaanxi today, in stark contrast to Qin, Han and Tang periods. Unfortunately all human history is rather bloody, and unfortunately, wars and periods of strife are the most notable events in any historical records, both because of its importance to historians, and the fact that most readers don't find it interesting to read about the gradual enhancements in agricultural technology, logistics, industry etc... that actually make a much bigger impact on daily lives.
I don't know if there has been any quantitative analysis done, but I would guess that Chinese history is actually more peaceful than European history, because of course the history of China is equivalent to the history of all of Europe in terms of scope, and it would be wrong to compare it to any individual European country. Prior to the establishment of the EU after WW2, I struggle to think of any significant period of time when there was peace in all of Europe. In many ways, Europe was like the China of the Warring States Period that never ended with total victory for any one faction. It was a collection of peoples with related culture and faiths, and a spectrum of languages, organised into many states/kingdoms, and warred endemically with each other. Just look Medieval English history... it is hard to find a monarch who did not go to war against France! And of course England is but a corner of Europe.
Also, I am pretty sure that for most of pre-industrialisation European history, life expectancy and living standards were higher in China than in Europe. For a start, the Black Death, which actually originated in China, did not have the same devastating impact, or prominence in history, in China compared to Europe, partly due to a better understanding of medicine, and the fact that most large Chinese cities has some sort of sewage system.
Some of the wars I have described have resulted in colossal loss of life in the context of a European country, but when these catastrophic conflicts occur in China, where the entire country is plunged into chaos, it is like a Europe-wide war, on par with the First World War, and thus we are talking about casualties on a 'continental' scale. This is one of the reasons why (I am going to generalise and use D&D terminology) China has a more Lawful culture than the 'pioneering and individualistic' Chaotic culture of the US. There is a collective memory/awareness, partly driven by state propaganda, that division and chaos leads to terrible suffering and foreign domination. This is why China is so obsessed with 'unifying the country' and so sensitive about separatism and perceived foreign manipulation in Chinese affairs.
There are also many smaller conflicts where parts of the country might be devastated and/or heavily involved, but other parts might enjoy decades, or even centuries of peace and prosperity, much like the wars between the Russian princes had little effect or significance (in the short term) for Medieval England.
A good example would be the Sino-Burmese War (1765–69). In response to a local crisis, the Qing Empire first dispatched a small local force to deal with the 'problem', in this case a border dispute with Burma. This small poorly trained and equipped Han Chinese border force (~5,000 men) was easily defeated by the Burmese. The Qing then sent a second army of around 25,000 men, this time drawn from the provincial army of Yunnan Province, to attack again. This force was also soundly beaten. Convinced that the Han Chinese soldiers of the 'Green Banner' armies were incompetent, the Qing dispatched Manchu forces to reinforce them, and attacked again with around 50,000 men. This was also beaten by the Burmese, and so the Qing attacked for a fourth time with an even larger contingent of Manchu and Mongol troops, totalling around 60,000 men.
The fourth invasion was also a failure. But despite relatively light Burmese casualties in comparison to the Qing Empire, the Burmese still accepted a peace treaty that the Qing propaganda described as a "mission accomplished" victory, because they realised that the harder they resist, the harder the Chinese would respond, starting with a town, then a province, then a region, and finally the whole country, with perhaps the emperor personally leading the army, and in proportion to population and manpower availability, the Burmese could not resist indefinitely. During this vicious border conflict, most of China was 'at peace'. If you met a rice farmer from one of the south-eastern provinces, he probably had no idea that the country was at war with a foreign power.
However... China is far, far, far vaster in size and population than Europe.
The entire Roman civilization had a population at it's height of only 59 million. Europe was a small part of this.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_demography
Britain couldn't scrape together a million at this time (although it is thought that pop. could have been around the 2 million mark before the Roman arrival and then plummeted due to the arrival of new diseases... evidence is scant...)
In fact the population in Britain did not much rise past the 1 million mark, not until Elizabethan times did the population rise to nearly 5 million and even the 1801 census shows it below the 10 million mark still...
http://www.visionofbritain.org.uk/unit/10061325/cube/TOT_POP
The black death caused such major suffering, mainly because, in places, hardly anyone was left alive... There are still villages you can visit in England that were abandoned after the great plague of 1665. (On another note, the Black Death came from China? I thought Africa was the point of origin?)
So when you read 30 million killed and displaced, many times in the text... Yes... Your assessment that it is comparable to WW1 is totally agreeable!
I think something that is commonly forgot, in China the peasantry seemed to be involved in the conflicts from a very early stage. In Europe, this was not the case.
The Romans primarily had an army made up from the citizenry... However the rest of Europe had a warrior class... You were given the right to bare arms, usually by birth (which is a terrible way to decide!)
Vercingeterix, the leader of the united Celts who faced Julius Caesar, was seriously hampered by the fact that most of the population under his command could not fight as they were not of the warrior class. It allowed Rome to take over, and simply replace the nobles at the top with little change to those at the bottom.
Not until feudalism, when William the Conquer, fought alongside his retinue of nobles, who were given the right to raise men from their fief, could the peasantry join in. Poor Harold just had his housecarls... He was going to lose...
This theme continued through medieval times. The English were not good at following the rules it seems... Longbowmen being Yeomen at best, were of the lowest sort, according to the French Nobles, the knights (and you needed to be a rich noble to afford a warhorse, armour, weaponry and the servants needed to keep your tools of the trade in servicable order and to get into the darn armour!), who would severely underestimate them and die in there thousands...
The local population just did not get involved in the wars, until Napoleon invented conscription...
The wars in Europe, primarily, have been about replacing the people at the top.
Viking raids, pillaging, looting and popping over to France to claim kingship and putting a thousand arrows up your upper class noble (and even this was frowned upon... Catch a noble alive and you get a hefty ransom! A medieval version of winning the lottery, if you slip with the nasty pointy thing, you lose all your money...)
This is an over simplification, but in no war until WW1 did anywhere near a 100,000 (let alone a million) were killed in any war.
This was a useful site to back up my words...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_battles_by_casualties
China takes up the top slots... Although the Mongols killing nearly 3,000,000 million at Baghdad raised an eyebrow. Legend has it one man fell of the walls of Baghdad and somehow survived. Genghis took this as an omen, after stripping all the men and women naked he herded all the occupants of the city into a huge crowd and sent his armed men in to kill them all... Making the lone man, who fell from the walls, watch.
Genghis... Truly Chaotic Evil. Because he made the rules up as he went and gave no mercy... not even to his sons (another story for another time perhaps...)
It would be unfair to compare the Roman Empire with later Chinese dynasties, where advancements in agriculture, particularly fertlizers and the development of rice farming in the Yangtze River valley allowed a population boom in China in the Song, Ming and Qing dynasties.
The accurate comparison would be with the Han Dynasty, which had a similar population to the Roman Empire at its peak. You are right in that I forgot the Roman Empire included non-European subjects. But also remember that Rome never conquered all of Europe, so there were Germanic, Celtic and other peoples who were 'European', but not counted in Roman population census.
Overall equating Europe and China as roughly equal in size and population is reasonable. China's geographic size has changed over the ages, depending on how expansionist the ruling dynasty is, but the Chinese core, or 'China-proper', is about the same size as Europe. There are different theories, but it was quite certainly spread by trade that was associated with China. In addition Chinese physicians examined and studied diseases matching such symptoms, and recorded them in a fair amount of detail.
The Chinese record everything; accountants and bureaucratic geeks by tradition. Did you know that a lot of the histories of Central Asian, Persian and other Asian cultures are recorded by the Chinese, rather than their respective peoples? Cos you know, what else is a bureaucrat historian in the Civil Service gonna do all day? XD
From Wikipedia:
"The Black Death is thought to have originated in the arid plains of central Asia, where it then travelled along the Silk Road, reaching the Crimea by 1346.[6] From there, it was most likely carried by Oriental rat fleas living on the black rats that were regular passengers on merchant ships. Spreading throughout the Mediterranean and Europe, the Black Death is estimated to have killed 30–60% of Europe's total population." Yes I described that revolution occurring during the Warring States Period. The success of the State of Qin was partly because it was the first to make the most use of new technology and organisation to mass produce weapons and armour to equip huge 'commoner' armies. The Ji, or early Chinese halberd, for example, was brutally effective, and composed of simple parts that could be mass produced (cast iron forging) from moulds like in a modern factory assembly line.
Cast iron technology was first used in China in the 5th Century BC, and not seen in Europe until the 15th Century AD, about 2,000 years later. This (partly) explains why Chinese empires were able to equip large armies so early in history. If a Chinese kingdom stubbornly held onto traditions that only the nobility would fight in battles, then that kingdom would be wiped immediately out by a horde of peasant infantry armed with crossbows and halberds.
Actually China had a version of this system in certain dynasties, but I'll maybe write about that in a separate comment. Sinophiles (people who possibly give ancient China too much credit) consider China to have been in the Feudal era prior to unification under the First Emperor and the Qin Dynasty (221 BC). With the development of the (officially meritocratic) Civil Service in the Han Dynasty (206 BC – 220 AD), China began to exhibit traits of a modern nation-state that made it much more politically developed/advanced than other countries until the European Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. This is a rose-tinted analysis however, as the Imperial Examinations were obsessed with Confucian doctrine and tradition, and was also not immune to corruption and official manipulation.
Okay, let me explain...
1) I really don't like that Wikipedia list... not only is it not particularly comprehensive, it can be rather misleading. The Siege of Baghdad is used as an example to include civilian casualties occurring as a result of a massacre, but there has been plenty more massacres in the classical era where more than 100,000 people were killed after a city fell, or died as a result of famine during a siege. That list is full of inconsistencies that I personally feel that it is pretty much meaningless.
2) Historic casualty counts are hopelessly unreliable, even more so than the accounting of the size of armies. Historians have all sorts of reasons to inflate or deflate numbers to serve different political agendas. If you look at the Battle of Changping, the records were written by Sima Qian, a famous Han Dynasty historian. The Han Dynasty hated the Qin Dynasty bitterly, and used the battle as an example of the ruthless brutality of the Qin Empire, in particular the supposed massacre of 450,000 prisoners of war, which would be considered a deeply dishonourable act in Chinese culture. The record was intended to legitimise their rule and say to their people "Look guys, I know you might be a bit angry about all the poverty and hunger whilst the Han elite enjoy luxurious palaces and fabulous wealth, but at least we've destroyed the tyrannical Qin Empire, and ended the wars that used to cause such terrible suffering. Don't rebel... you don't want to return to those dark days do you?" Did such a massacre actually take place? That's far from certain.
Take another example in the supposed loss of over 300,000 soldiers in the Battle of Salsu in the disastrous Sui invasion of Korea. Yes there was a huge invasion of Korea, yes it ended in total defeat. But did all those soldiers really die? Given that a fleeing soldier, if caught by the authorities, likely faced execution as punishment, soldiers that fled a lost battle would not likely report back to their units again. Instead they might have deserted and returned home, or maybe settled in Korea, or became outlaws and bandits. All soldiers missing at the end of a campaign are counted as dead, which is not exactly accurate. Also the records of the Goguryeo–Sui Wars were written by the succeeding Tang Dynasty, which like the Han Dynasty, had a vested interest in exaggerating the failures of its predecessor to legitimise its take over.
"The Sui Dynasty has lost the Mandate of Heaven, look at their colossal failure in Korea! Look at the glory of the Tang Dynasty! We have conquered Goguryeo and brought the light of civilisation to these barbarians! We have succeeded where the Sui failed! The favour of Heaven lies with the Tang Empire!"
3) The Roman Empire was the only power in Europe to have dominated as much land and people as the Chinese dynasties, and so if you compare Roman battles with those of the contemporary Han Dynasty (and look at realistic numbers), then the numbers are comparable.
For example at its height the Roman Empire had around 400,000 soldiers. Han China had around 600,000 soldiers. It would have been interesting if the two empire ever came to blows. The Han army was larger, but standard Han infantry was not as well equipped and trained as Roman Legions. On the other hand, the Han Empire, due to the necessity of fighting the Xiong'nu, had massive professional cavalry regiments totalling around 250,000 men. Neither side would have had any experience of each other's way of war.
4) Finally your schoolboy error! Genghis Khan died in 1228, the Siege of Baghdad was 1258, 30 years later. He could not have been present!
People always simplify history for the convenience of a story, and Genghis Khan, as remarkable as he was, has been overblown by historians into something even bigger than he was. His key achievement was unifying the Mongol people and other nomadic tribes, and forging them into a military superpower. Under his leadership the Mongols destroyed the Persian Empire and mauled the Jin Dynasty, but the major conquests of the Mongol Empire would follow with the campaigns of his sons and grandsons. The Chinese Song Dynasty, held out until Genghis' grandson, Kublai Khan, finally achieved total victory, but by then the Mongol Empire had already fragmented into several Khanates.
Halagu Khan, brother of Mongke Khan conducted the siege of Baghdad...
The legend of the man falling from the walls was from a siege... So sure it was Ghengis! So sure it was Baghdad... The legend I read was from a book... I cannot find corroboration on the internet.
Ghengis's death is shrouded in mystery (I checked to see when he died...)
Did he die falling from his horse? Or did a wife kill him in his sleep? Give him a warriors death let it be a fall from his horse!