Chinese/History

Faction Overview	Strategic Overview	History

The origin of Chinese civilization is shrouded in myth and conflicting tales. Documented history begins with the Shang dynasty, founded about 1600 BC. China has long been the most populous country in the world. It's warring states were united into a single nation by Ying Zheng, the king of Qin, in 221 BCE.

Traditional history begins with Pangu, the first living being. When Pangu died, his left eye became the Sun. Various parts of his body became different parts of the Earth. There followed a succession of Three Sovereigns, or demigod rulers. The first and best known of these was Fuxi (2852–2737 BC). Fuxi and his sister Nüwa survived a worldwide flood by retreating to the Kunlun Mountains. After the Three Sovereigns, China was ruled by the Five Emperors. The Yellow Emperor (r. 2698–2598 BC) is given credit for numerous inventions and is considered the founder of Chinese civilization.

During the reign of Emperor Yao (2356 - 2255 BC), a great and terrible flood began.[1] The waters overtopped hills and mountains, threatening heaven itself. Yao appointed Gun to control the food. To build dikes, Gun stole soil that expanded magically from the Supreme Deity. This angered the Supreme Deity, and the flood raged on. Yao consulted the Four Mountains, who advised him to appoint Shun as his successor. Shun (r. 2255 – 2195 BC) was only a distant relative of Yao, but he was known throughout the kingdom as a dutiful son. Shun's father had repeatedly tried to murder him, so being a dutiful son was not as easy as it might sound. Shun was later singled out by Confucius as an example of outstanding filial piety. Yet he too proved helpless before the flood. Shun's successor, Yu the Great (c. 2200 - 2100 BC), was finally able to control the raging waters by building embankments made of non-magical soil. Yu's son succeeded him, making Yu the founder of the legendary Xia dynasty (2070 – c. 1600 BC).

Archaeological The neolithic site of Yangshao in Henan Province was excavated by Swedish archaeologist Johan Gunnar Andersson in 1921. The Yangshao culture thrived along Yellow River and cultivated millet from about 4900 to 3000 BC. Silk was produced and pottery was fired in kilns dug into the ground. The bones of domesticated dogs, cattle, sheep and goats have been found.[2] As of 1999, a total of 31 Yangshao sites have been located.[3] The remains of a second neolithic culture were uncovered by C.T. Wu at Longshan in Shandong in 1928. Black pottery is a characteristic find at Longshan archaeological sites. Longshan is now considered an example of the second phase of a Yangshao-Longshan culture, one that lasted from 3000 to 2000 BC. Copper was introduced around 2000 BC, and China entered the Bronze Age around 1700 BC. China's first significant state was the Erlitou culture (1900–1350 BC). This was a Bronze Age state whose capital in Henan Province was excavated in 1959.

Historical History of China History of China Ancient Neolithic c. 8500 – c. 2070 BC Xia dynasty c. 2070 – c. 1600 BC Shang dynasty c. 1600 – 1046 BC Zhou dynasty c. 1046 – 256 BC

Western Zhou
Eastern Zhou
  Spring and Autumn
  Warring States

Imperial Qin dynasty 221–206 BC Han dynasty 206 BC – AD 220

 Western Han
 Xin dynasty
 Eastern Han

Three Kingdoms 220–280

 Wei, Shu and Wu

Jin dynasty 265–420

 Western Jin
 Eastern Jin	Sixteen Kingdoms

Southern and Northern Dynasties 420–589 Sui dynasty 581–618 Tang dynasty 618–907

 (Wu Zhou interregnum 690–705)

Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms 907–960 Liao dynasty 907–1125 Song dynasty 960–1279

 Northern Song		W. Xia
 Southern Song	Jin	

Yuan dynasty 1271–1368 Ming dynasty 1368–1644 Qing dynasty 1644–1911 Modern Republic 1912–1949 People's Republic 1949–present The traditional view of ancient Chinese history, still promoted by the Chinese government, is of a succession of dynasties from Xia to Shang to Zhou going back 5,000 years. Historians working in China identify Erlitou with the Xia dynasty.[4] Other states and cultures existed at the same time, and the focus on the traditional dynastic sequence may reflect the basis of dynasty-oriented historians. Among the first historians to carefully separate myth from history was Sima Qian. His history begins with the exile of King Li of the Zhou dynasty in 841 BC, still the earliest securely dated event in Chinese history.

Xia dynasty: 2070–c. 1600 BC The Xia dynasty is the first dynasty in traditional history. The legend of this dynasty was used by the Zhou to justify their conquest of the Shang. It can be compared to the King Arthur legend in England, which Medieval writers developed to justify the Norman conquest. The fourteen Xia rulers on the traditional dynasty list were descended from Yu the Great. Jie, the last king of the dynasty, is said to have fallen in love with a beautiful but cruel woman. In response, Zi Lü led a revolt, overthrew the Xia, and founded the Shang dynasty.

Shang dynasty: 1600-c. 1046 BC The Shang, found in 1600 BC, was China's first fully historical dynasty. It was a Bronze Age culture.

Zhou dynasty: c. 1045–256 BC Iron replaced bronze around 600 BC, during the Zhou dynasty.

Imperial China Successive dynasties developed a system of bureaucratic control that gave the agrarian-based Chinese an advantage over neighboring nomadic and hill cultures. Chinese civilization was further strengthened by the development of a Confucian state ideology and a common written language that bridged the gaps among the country's many local languages and dialects. Whenever China was conquered by nomadic tribes, as it was by the Mongols in the 13th century, the conquerors sooner or later adopted the ways of the "higher" Chinese civilization and staffed the bureaucracy with Chinese.

When the Chinese discovered gunpowder they had no intention of using it as a weapon. Instead, it was developed in the Tang dynasty as a formula for immortality by religious Daoist alchemists. It was discovered to be a powerful explosive, and when lit, gunpowder in a bamboo stick made a colorful explosion. This loud explosion was used to chase away evil spirits and to celebrate weddings, victories in battles, and religious ceremonies. However, contrary to popular belief, the first depiction of gunpowder in pictorial form shows it in military use. Similarly, it is also known that before the arrival of Westerners in China, Chinese troops were equipped with firearms.

While this history article was meant primarily to support the Warbirth project with regards to Chinese factions (viz, Chinese, China, Nanyue, Shang and Zhou), it however is also being prepared to support Swords of the Prophets. As a result, this article also touches on the pre-Islamic history of the Turks and their ancestors who ruled northern China during the post-Jin Northern and Southern dynasties period. The Shang dynasty was an era of Chinese history that began in 1600 BC and continued until 1046 BC. It was preceded by the Xia dynasty and was followed by the Zhou dynasty. The Shang was China's Bronze Age. Shang casting technique was the finest in the world, and many highly decorated vessels have survived. A large foundry has been unearthed at Miaopubei near Anyang. The establishment of a permanent capital at Anyang in 1300 BC marks the founding of the first historical Chinese state.

Template:Language box Chinese writing first appeared in this period. Pictographs were written on bones, shells, and later in bronze. The Shang was the first dynasty to use chariots. Over 500 sites have been classified as culturally Shang, although not necessarily politically. These sites are located, not only in Shang heartland in the central portion of the Yellow River, but all across northern and eastern China. Shang religion was a form of shamanism, with divinations made by the king. The Shang worshiped a sky deity named Shangdi ("high ruler").

A Legacy of Dragons?

The earliest archaeological evidence in China is of the Shang dynasty, 1766-1122 B.C. By folklore it began when a virtuous and wise man named T'ang overthrew the decadent emperor Chieh of the Hsia dynasty. The Shang dynasty ended when it was ultimately overthrown and replaced by the Chou dynasty.

The Shang dynasty built cities in northern China, along the eastern banks of the Yellow river. It did not control all of the land that belongs to China today. Sometimes called the Yellow River Civilization, the Shang dynasty benefited from the use of bronze, which Mesopotamia had introduced to China around 2000 B.C. Notice that Bronze had previously been invented in Mesopotamia around 3000 B.C.

The Shang dynasty had writing in the form of oracle bones: questions and answers inscribed on actual bone. For archaeologists, these bones were the first concrete evidence that the Shang dynasty really had existed. Oracle bones were widely sold as "dragon bones" and believed to have magical healing properties, and the bones were generally ground up and used as medicine. No one realized what the bones were until a high ranking official who was sick noticed that the bone which was to be ground for his medicine was covered in strange glyphs! His discovery proved the existence of the Shang dynasty.

China used a pictographic form of writing that it continues to utilize to this day, albeit in a more developed form. Then the word looked like its meaning, but today the characters are much more complex.

Early Shang

It is hard to say that the Shang truly comprised an empire. There seemed to be great conflict between the various cities, but most belligerence was usually and particularly focused against the non-urbanized, agricultural populations in the rural areas. The capital cities shifted as often as power changed hands. The capital was initially located at Bo, identified with a walled city in Yanshi in northern Henan Province that was unearthed in 1983. Interestingly enough, Erlitou, the Xia capital, was also nearby, which suggests that there was at one time a relationship between the two states. Bo was radiocarbon dated to 1600 BC. This date is considered to be the founding of the Shang dynasty. If the traditional date of 1766 BC is accepted as the actual year the dynasty was founded, that would imply that the upper layer of Erlitou is a Shang site. In the Middle Shang, the capital was moved several times. In this period, the king may be viewed as a wandering shaman, moving from one city to another in response to arcane oracles.

Despite the seeming existence of a metallic culture, Shang society however, for various reasons, was not as developed as the contemporaneous cultures of the Levant and the Middle East. Metalware (and a new form of finished goods, lacquerware) were mostly concentrated in the hands of an aristocratic elite, while the vast masses of Chinese continued to live in more or less the same way as their Neolithic ancestors did (and would probably do so until the emergence of cheap ironware during the Spring and Autumn Period, almost a thousand years later). It is hypothesised that early Shang society was matrilineal, people point to the existence of the queen Fu Hao and the seemingly extensive power given to her, as well as finds made in the graves of Banpo and the altars of Yangshao — but this is a topic that is still being debated with no conclusive end.

Regardless, Chinese society was becoming stratified and the warrior elites who made up the chariot core had become an aristocracy. The chariots carried three people, an archer, warrior and driver. The archer had become equipped with the new and deadly but expensive compound bow.

Another innovation borrowed from the derided steppe nomads, now called the Horse Barbarians and actively campaigned against. The warrior used a dagger-axe, a long handled axe with a dagger blade mounted on it. Chariots served as mobile command centers, firing platforms and shock forces. However, the bulk of the army was made up of agricultural laborers conscripted by nobles who were under the ruling dynasty. The feudal system that developed required these subservient lords to provide supplies, armor and weapons for the conscripts. The Shang king kept a force of around a thousand troops that he personally led in battle. A Shang king could muster an army of about five thousand for in border campaigns or call all his forces up in a grand army numbering around 13,000 to face down serious threats such as insurrection and invasion. Shang infantry were armed with an assortment of stone or bronze weapons, including spears, pole-axes, long handled dagger-axes and simple bows. For defense they used shields and occasionally bronze or leather helmets.

The infantry fought in massed formations under the banner of their noble or the Shang king himself. A rudimentary military bureaucracy was established in order to organize and supply these troops. The Shang rulers demanded a lot of bronze weapons and ceremonial vessels, required a lot of labor and expertise. This in turn spurred the economy as vast efforts were required for mining, refining, and the transportation of copper, tin, and lead ores.

Late Shang

After a permanent capital was established at Anyang in 1300 BC, the king began to function more as a ruler and head of an established government. But he continued to tend to divination personally. A proposed divination would be written on a bone. The bone was then heated until stress caused it to crack. The cracks were interpreted by the king as either confirming or denying the divination. Ritual required the king to travel extensively, including trips to four sacred mountains.

As the Shang did not develop a system of writing until 1200 BC, only the later part of the dynasty is considered fully historical. Contemporary inscriptions establish the sequence of rulers from this point on, so this can be considered the beginning of China's recorded history. The chariot was also introduced at around this time. Like the Xia, the Shang was once thought to be legendary. The excavation of Anyang, begun in 1928, demonstrated that the dynasty is historical. Anyang does not have a wall, which suggests the kings were confident that they could fend off invaders without one. The royal tombs that have been unearthed suggest that human sacrifice was practiced.

The Shang calendar had 360 days with twelve months of thirty days each was developed. Intercalary months were added as necessary. The urban population were mainly engaged in metallurgy and other support services for the army and the state. In the countryside, the primary activity was growing millet.

Writing

About 200,000 oracle bone inscriptions have been found. The earliest date from about 1200 BC. The characters used are generally pictographs. They are often primitive versions of characters that are still used to write Chinese in modern times. Almost all of the inscriptions are proposed divinations. They address the gods concerning matters of immediate practical significance. No Shang literature survives.

Downfall

Dixin, the last Shang ruler, is traditionally described as an immoral tyrant. To please a concubine, he is said to have built a lake of wine around which naked men and women chased one another. The Zhou, a people from the northeast, defeated the Shang in the battle of Muye and established a new dynasty in 1046 BC. Zhou religion is the basis of Chinese Native Religion, so the downfall of the Shang is the subject of much popular literature, including Investiture of the Gods.

Rulers

The following is a list of Late Shang rulers from the Xia-Shang-Zhou Chronology Project. The traditional dates of accession are from Liu Xin. There were also nineteen Early Shang rulers, but no widely accepted dates have been calculated for them.

Ruler		Date of accession (BC)
Pinyin	Chinese	XSZCP	Traditional
Pangeng	盤庚	1300	1380
Xiaoxin	小辛
Xiaoyi	小乙
Wuding	武丁	1250	1324
Zugeng	祖庚	1191	1265
Zujia	祖甲
Linxin	廩辛
Kangding	康丁
Wuyi	武乙	1147	1198
Wending	文丁	1112	1194
Diyi	帝乙	1101	1191
Dixin	帝辛	1075	1154
Source: XSZ Project 2000: 86-88.

References

China has always been isolated by geographic protections. The highest mountains in the world, the Himalayas, separate it from India. The Himalaya Mountain Range is famous for having the world's tallest peaks, including Mount Everest and K2. Vast amounts of semi-desert land known as the Gobi desert separate China from the Middle East and the area which was Mesopotamia in ancient times.

In the south of China, the Yangtze river flows for 3000 miles, navigable from the sea for half of its course. In the north is the Yellow river (now called the Huang He), which runs westward from the Yellow Sea (labeled in the map) and then northward a bit before turning south. The Yellow river obtained its original name from the murky tan color of its waters. The Yellow River is known for its tendency to flood surrounding lands, often with disastrous results. The silt and sand carried in the muddy water builds up on the bottom of the river until it blocks the water's flow and causes the river to divert its course, flooding into another area. Floods like these make the course of the Yellow River change often.

The First Emperors (~3000BCE)

According to Chinese mythology, the Chinese race was founded by a confederation of two tribes, the Hua and the Xia, by the banks of the Yellow River. Civilisation soon followed with the rise of the "Three Sovereigns and Five Emperors" (三皇五帝), godlike or ancestral figures (the border between god and ancestor is very blurred in Chinese religious tradition)  who taught the Chinese the fundamental arts of agriculture, medicine, divination, etc. Of these, the most revered was Huang Di, the "Yellow Emperor" who was said to have first united the Chinese people and paved the way to nationhood under the Xia, China's very first imperial dynasty.

Since then, however, accounts of how the first Chinese state arose have changed, but the old myths are still held up as tantalising clues that Chinese civilisation has had a long process of development, and that it developed a fair degree of sophistication long before the beginnings of verifiable history. Various archaeological finds throughout China attest to this. It is thought that the Xia, being the progenitors of the Chinese race as we know it, also introduced the pictogrammic writing found later in the oracle bones used by the warrior-kings of the Shang which over the last century have been collected by archaeologists and museums across China. The pictograms on these bones continued to be used by succeeding generations and simplified and recombined over time, eventually evolving into the Chinese script that we recognise today — and to a certain extent also continue to be used in so-called "seal format" in some cases. If anything, this last innovation could well be the greatest contribution they ever made to China and mankind in general. 

Yin and Yang, Chaos and Order (3000-500BCE)

With the fall of the Xia and the rise of the Yin (or Shang) dynasty, the emergence of a China that was to dominate its neighbors for centuries began at this time. The territory of Shang was vastly smaller than that of the modern People's Republic of China, and while it wasn't precisely a kingdom or country, but a union of many clans and smaller kingdoms like its Xia predecessors (or the Zhou dynasty), were just the strongest clans at their ages, therefore they were chosen to be the leaders of their unions. Xia dynasty, and then past to Shang dynasty. but it laid down the foundations for a centralised state. The Shang made many advances in technology, producing metalwork that was superior to any other nation at the time, but it wasn't exactly a civilised paradise. Like many of the Bronze Age polities, the Shang were big on divine right and absolute power, and very much low on humanity by modern standards, dominated by a feudalistic society where the king and the nobles held sway with bronze over a society that was still very much Neolithic in character. Like many Mesoamerican cultures that would develop on the other side of the fearsome and mysterious Eastern Ocean (as the Chinese called the Pacific) Shang religion emphasised ancestor worship, ritual bloodletting and sacrifice — especially human sacrifice.

File:10150359807105237.jpg

Detailed closeup of a Shang-era oracle bone. The hole in the lower left was created by applying a heated bronze pin, with the cracks appearing being taken to be a response by ancestor-spirits to the question inscribed its surface.

As mentioned before, the oracle bones retrieved from Shang sites reveal a telling picture of Shang society. It seemed that their leader were very religious (or superstitious) and relied on diviners to communicate with ancestors and presented animal or human offerings to plead for victories in battle or for rains to end drought. Such requests for otherworldly assistance have been preserved in pictographs carved into the oracle bones. Warfare too was a perennial concern for the king and the nobility, for the oracle bones reflect many questions on military matters such as "If we send 3,000 men into battle, will we win?" 

Even so, the most enduring legacy of the Shang probably wasn't in bronze or religion, but in administration: the modern Chinese language, and a system of hierarchical government that would become a template for the millenia to come which would have brought with it a semblance of organisation and specialisation to what was otherwise very much a tribalistic society. With the oracle bones, we now know that the Shang had already developed all the principles of the modern writing system of Chinese: it is still possible, albeit with some understanding of the old script, for Chinese to read and understand the old inscriptions. 

File:Sw chn.png

Confucius.

Eventually, this dynasty was overthrown by one of its tribal neighbours, called the Zhou. Nominally established in the 11th century BCE, the Zhou dynasty It lasted the longest of all dynasties, even if only formally so until 221BCE. According to the Shiji or the Records of the Grand Historian, the last king of Shang, Di Xin, was an intelligent and gifted man, yet given to decadence, drunkenness and lechery. Di Xin had a concubine named Daji with whom he was besotted with and tried to please, even at the expense of the state. This led the ruler of a neighbouring petty kingdom, Ji Fa of Zhou (now present-day Shaanxi) to war with the Shang and an immensely bloody victory at Muye (if the old annals are to be believed) where the Shang army was annihilated. Di Xin was forced to flee, and he committed suicide, leaving Daji to be executed by the victorious Zhou forces, whose king now enthroned himself as king Wu of Zhou. 

What part of this is truth and what part of this is mere propaganda, we may never know, but Wu's reign sparked a revolution in the late Shang society which capitulated to him following Di Xin's death — for one, the chronicles of Shang and Zhou weren't compiled in any format that survived to this day until the Han era, well almost a thousand years after the rise of Zhou. But archaeological evidence thus far suggests some continuity from the Shang era well into that of the Zhou. Under the auspices of the new dynasty, the old ways of Shang were retained, yet there were new changes taking place. For one, ceramics, long disdained by the Shang as the mark of commoners, began to gain greater sociocultural importance. Equally, it was also the "Axial Age" of China, with the emergence of a genuine literary culture. The Yi Jing or "book of changes", a book on means of divination, is thought to have emerged with the early half of the Zhou era, or the so-called "Western Zhou" period. So great and influential is this period in China's development that the philosophies it spawned would dominate China and eastern Asia for centuries, and even the later Han, Tang and Sui dynasties felt it meet to emphasise their links to this formative period in Chinese history.

References

• Mark, E; "Daily Life in Ancient China"; Ancient History Encyclopaedia
• Chen, S; "The Creation of Female Origin Myth: A Critical Analysis of Gender in the Archaeology of Neolithic China"; University of Western Ontario Journal of Anthropology (vol 22 #1)
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