History of China

• History of China series
  3 Huang 5 Di * Xia Dynasty * Shang Dynasty * Zhou Dynasty * Qin Dynasty * Han Dynasty * Three Kingdoms * Jin Dynasty * Sixteen Kingdoms * N/S Dynasties * Sui Dynasty * Tang Dynasty * Five Dyn./Ten King * Song Dynasty * Liao Dynasty * Western Xia * Jin Dynasty * Yuan Dynasty * Ming Dynasty * Qing Dynasty * Republic of China * P.R. China

Table of contents

1 Prehistoric times 2 Ancient history 3 The Chinese Empire 4 Mongols 5 Revival of Chinese Culture 6 Ming: from exploration to isolation 7 The Qing Dynasty 8 The Republic of China 9 See also 10 External link

Prehistoric times

China was inhabited more than a million years ago by Homo erectus: the excavations at Yuanmou and later Lantian show early habitation; however, any connection between these people and modern Chinese is tentative. The Homo sapiens or modern human might have reached China about 65,000 years ago from Africa. Early evidence for proto-Chinese rice paddy agriculture dates back to about 6000 BC and the Peiligang culture of Xinzheng county, Henan. With agriculture came increased population, the ability to store and redistribute crops, and to support specialist craftsmen and administrators: in short, civilization as we know it. In late Neolithic times, the Huanghe valley began to establish itself as a cultural center, where the first villages were founded; the most archaeologically significant of those was found at Banpo, Xi'an.

Ancient history

The earliest written record of China's past, and therefore the beginning of its history, dates from the Shang dynasty in perhaps the 13th century BC and takes the form of inscriptions of divination records on the bones or shells of animals—so-called oracle bones. However the earliest comprehensive history of China, the Historical Records written by Sima Qian, a renowned Chinese historiographer of the 2nd century BC, begins perhaps 1300 years earlier with an account of the Five Emperors. These rulers were legendary sage-kings and moral examplars, and one of them, the Yellow Emperor, is sometimes said to be the ancestor of all Chinese people. Following this period Sima Qian relates that a system of inherited rulership was established during the Xia dynasty, and that this model was perpetuated in the successor Shang and Zhou dynasties. It is during this period of the Three Dynasties (Chinese: 三代; pinyin: sāndài) that the historical China begins to appear.

Sima Qian's account dates the founding of the Xia to some 4,000 years ago, but this date has not yet been corroborated. Some archaeologists connect the Xia to excavations at Erlitou in central Henan province, where a bronze smelter from around 2000 BC was unearthed. Early markings from this period, found on pottery and shells, have been alleged to be ancestors of modern Chinese characters, but such claims are unsupported. With no clear written records to match the Shang oracle bones or the Zhou bronze vessel writings, the Xia remains poorly understood.

Archaeological findings provide evidence for the existence of the Shang dynasty (ca. 1600-1046 BC), and the archaeological evidence is divided into two sets. The first, from the earlier Shang period (ca. 1600 to 1300) comes from sources at Erligang, Zhengzhou and Shangcheng. The second set, from the later Shang or Yin period, consists of a large body of oracle bone writings. Anyang in modern day Henan has been confirmed as the last of the six capitals of the Shang (ca. 1300-1046 BC).

Chinese historians living in later periods were accustomed to the notion of one dynasty succeeding another, but the actual political situation in early China is known to have been much more complicated. Hence, as some scholars of China suggest, the Xia and the Shang can possibly refer to political entities that existed at the same time, just as the later Zhou (successor state of the Shang), is known to have existed at the same time as the Shang.

By the end of the 2nd millennium BC, the Zhou began to emerge in the Huanghe valley, overrunning the Shang. The Zhou appeared to have begun their rule under a semi-feudal system. Nevertheless, power became decentralized during the Spring and Autumn Period when regional feudal lords began to assert their power, absorb smaller powers, and vie for hegemony. The Hundred Schools of Thought of Chinese philosophy blossomed during this period and such influential intellectual movements as Confucianism, Daoism, Legalism and Mohism were founded. After further political consolidation, seven prominent states remained by the end of 5th century BC, and the years in which these few states battled each other is known as the Warring States period. Though there remained a nominal Zhou king until 256 BC, he was largely a figurehead and held little real power.

Meanwhile, neighboring territories of these warring states were gradually annexed, including areas of modern Sichuan and Liaoning, and governed under the new local administrative system of commandery and prefecture (郡縣), which had been in use since the Spring and Autumn Period and was very loosely a primitive prototype of the modern system of Sheng & Xian; (province and county). The final expansion in this period began during the reign of Ying Zheng, the king of Qin. His unification of the other six powers, and further annexations in the modern regions of Zhejiang, Fujian, Guangdong and Guangxi in 214 BC enabled him to proclaim himself the First Emperor (Shi Huangdi), forming the first Chinese empire under the Qin Dynasty.

The Chinese Empire

The word China was probably derived from "Chin" (Qin).

Though the unified reign of the Qin Emperor lasted only 12 years, he managed to subdue great parts of what constitutes the core of the Han Chinese homeland and to unite them under a tightly centralized Legalist government seated at Xianyang (in modern Xian). His sons, however, were not as successful; as soon as the Qin reign ended, the Qin imperial structure collapsed.

The Han Dynasty emerged in 202 BC; it was the first dynasty to embrace Confucianism, which became the ideological underpinning of all regimes until the end of imperial China. Under the Han dynasty, the Chinese civilization made great advances in historiography, arts and science. Emperor Wu of Han China (Han Wudi) consolidated and extended the Chinese empire by pushing back the Xiongnu (sometimes identified with the Huns) into the steppes of modern Inner Mongolia and wrested the modern areas of Gansu, Ningxia and Qinghai from the Xiongnu; this enabled the first opening of trading connections between China and the occident: the Silk Road.

Nevertheless land acquisitions by elite families had gradually drained the tax base. In AD 9 the usurper Wang Mang founded the short-lived Xin Dynasty and started an extensive program of land reform and innovative monetary and economic reforms. These programs, however, were never supported by land-holding families; and, though they favored the peasant and lesser gentry, the instability they produced brought on chaos and uprisings. Emperor Guangwu of Han China reinstated the Han dynasty with the support of land-holding and merchant families at Luoyang, east of Xian; hence the new era is termed the Eastern Han Dynasty. Han power declined again in the midst of land acquisitions, invasions and struggles of consort clans and eunuchs. The Yellow Turban Rebellion broke out in 184, ushering in an era of warlords. In the ensuing turmoil, three states tried to gain predominance in the Period of the Three Kingdoms, a time that has since been greatly romanticized in works such as Romance of the Three Kingdoms.

Though these three kingdoms were reunited temporarily in 280 by the (Western) Jin dynasty, the contemporary non-Han Chinese (Wu Hu) ethnic groups ravaged the country in the early 4th century and provoked large-scale Han Chinese migrations to south of the Chang Jiang. In 303 the Di people rebelled and later captured Chengdu. Under Liu Yuan the Xiongnu rebelled near today's Linfen County; his successor Liu Cong captured and executed the last two Western Jin emperors. More than Sixteen states were established by these ethnic groups. The chaotic north was temporarily unified by Fu Jian who was defeated at the Battle of Feishui when he attempted to invade South China. Later on, Emperor Taiwu of Northern Wei reunified north China again, marking the beginning of the Northern Dynasties, a sequence of local regimes ruling over regions north of Chang Jiang.

Along with the refugees from the North, Emperor Yuan of Jin China reinstated the Jin regime at Nanjing in the south; from this came the sequence of Southern dynasties of Song, Qi, Liang and Chen, which all had their capitals at Jiankang (near today's Nanjing). As China was ruled by two independent dynasties, one in the south and the other in the north, this is called the era of Southern and Northern Dynasties. The short-lived Sui Dynasty managed to reunite the country in 589 after almost 300 years of disjunction.

In 618, the Tang dynasty was established, opening a new age of prosperity and innovations in arts and technology. Buddhism, which had slowly seeped into China in the first century, became the predominant religion and was widely adopted by the royal family. Changan (modern Xian), the national capital, is thought to have been the world's biggest city. The Tang and Han are often referenced as the prosperous ages of China; the Tang, like the Han, established jurisdiction on trade routes. However, the Tang dynasty declined in the end, eventually succumbing to the ambitions of warlords; another time of political chaos followed, the Five dynasties and the Ten kingdoms.

In 960, the Song Dynasty (960-1279) gained power over most of China and established its capital in Kaifeng, establishing a period of economic prosperity, while the Khitan Liao Dynasty ruled over Manchuria and eastern Mongolia. In 1115 the Jurchen Jin Dynasty (1115-1234) emerged to prominence, annihilating the Liao Dynasty in 10 years. It also took power over northern China and Kaifeng from the Song Dynasty, which moved its capital to Hangzhou. The Southern Song Dynasty also suffered the humiliation of having to acknowledge the Jin Dynasty as formal overlords. In the ensuing years China was divided between the Song Dynasty, the Jin Dynasty, and the Tangut Western Xia. Southern Song was a period of great technological development which can be explained in part by the military pressure that it felt from the north.

Mongols

The Jin Dynasty was defeated by the Mongols, who then proceeded to defeat the Southern Song in a long and bloody war — the first war ever in which firearms played an important role. A period of peace began for nearly all of Asia. This era, called the Pax Mongolica, made it possible for adventurous Westerners, like Marco Polo, to travel all the way to China and to bring the first reports of its wonders to their unbelieving compatriots. In China, the Mongols were divided between those who wanted to remain focused on the steppes and those who wanted to adopt the customs of those they conquered. Kublai Khan, being of the latter group, established the Yuan Dynasty (meaning "first"). This was the first dynasty to rule the whole country with Beijing as its capital. (Beijing had been ceded to Liao in AD 938 with the 16 Prefectures of Yan Yun (燕雲十六州); before that, it had been the capital of the Jin, who did not rule all of China.

Revival of Chinese Culture

Among the populace, however, there were strong feelings against the rule of the "foreigner" (known as Da Zi), which finally led to peasant revolts; Mongolian rule was pushed back to the steppes and replaced by the Ming dynasty in 1368. This dynasty started out as a time of renewed cultural blossoming: Arts, especially the porcelain industry, reached an unprecedented height; Chinese merchants explored all of the Indian Ocean, reaching East Africa with the voyages of Zheng He (original name Ma Sanbao 馬三保). A vast navy was built, including four-masted ships displacing 1,500 tons; there was a standing army of 1 million troops. Over 100,000 tons of iron per year were produced. Many books were printed using movable type. Some would argue that Ming was the most advanced nation on Earth.

Zhu Yuanzhang, (Hongwu Emperor of China or Hong-wu) the founder of the dynasty, laid the foundations for a state little interested in commerce and more interested in extracting revenues from the agricultural sector. Perhaps because of the Emperor's background as a peasant, the Ming economic system emphasized agriculture, unlike that of Song, which had preceded the Mongolian and relied on traders and merchants for revenues. Neo-feudal land holdings of Song and Mongol period were expropriated with the establishment of the Ming. Great landed estates were confiscated by the government, fragmented, and rented out; and private slavery was forbidden. Consequently, after the death of Yongle Emperor of China, independent peasant landholders predominated in Chinese agriculture. These laws might have paved the way to social harmony and removed the worst of the poverty during the previous regimes. The laws against the merchants and the restrictions under which the craftsmen worked, remained essentially as they had been under the Song, but now the remaining foreign merchants before Ming era also fell under these new laws, and their influence quickly dwindled.

The emperor's role became even more autocratic, although Zhu Yuanzhang necessarily continued to use what he called the Grand Secretaries to assist with the immense paperwork of the bureaucracy, which included memorials (petitions and recommendations to the throne), imperial edicts in reply, reports of various kinds, and tax records.

During the Mongol rule, the population had dropped 40 percent, to an estimated 60 million. Two centuries later it had doubled. Urbanization thus progressed as population grew and as the division of labor grew more intricate. Large urban centers, such as Nanjing and Beijing contributed to the growth of private industry as well. In particular, small-scale industries grew up, often specializing in paper, silk, cotton, and porcelain goods. For the most part, however, relatively small urban centers with markets proliferated around the country rather than growth being concentrated in a few large cities. Town markets mainly traded food with some necessary manufactures such as pins or oil.

Ming: from exploration to isolation

Despite the xenophobia and intellectual introspection characteristic of the increasingly popular new school of neo-Confucianism, China under the early Ming Dynasty was not isolate
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