China

The Chinese heartland: the floodplains of the Huáng Hé (north) and Yángzǐ (central). To the west: the Tibetan Plateau, To the northwest: the Taklamakan Desert, To the north: the Mongolian Steppe, To the northeast: Manchuria & Korea, To the east, the Yellow Sea & China Seas of the Pacific Ocean, To the southwest: Vietnam, Laos, Thailand and Burma                                      (Image courtesy of Google Maps)

The Chinese call their country Zhongguo, the Central Empire, traditionally believing themselves to be the epitome of culture, prosperity and civilisation surrounded by barbarians. China's prosperity is assured by two great rivers, the Huáng Hé and the Yángzǐ, which originate on the Tibetan Plateau, flow across the Chinese heartland and empty into the Pacific Ocean. The bounty of their floodplains has sustained a rich and powerful civilisation since the dawn of history, and the complexity of managing irragation works provided the spur for the development of a centralised state. It is no coincidence that the founding myths of Chinese civilisation concern flood control on the Huáng Hé. According to these myths, China was first ruled by three deities, before being handed to long-lived, but mortal, sage-kings, the Five Emperors. They in turn were succeeded by the Xia Dynasty at the beginning of the second millenium BC, which consisted of seventeen kings and whose historicity is in doubt. They were overthrown by the Shang Dynasty sometime around 1500 BC; the first Chinese dynasty to leave unambiguous archaeological evidence in the form of inscriptions. After roughly five hundred years, this dynasty was itself suceeded by the Zhou Dynasty, which presided over the height of the Chinese Bronze Age and the beginnings of the Iron Age. The capital was sacked in 771 BC, and thereafter the various feudal lords assumed greater and greater independence from central authority. Their domains became states and they eventually styled themselves Kings, ushering in a period of disunity known as the Spring and Autumn Era (771-476 BC) and the Warring States Era (476-221 BC), during which multiple states strove to reunify China under their rule. This pattern of union, division, and reunion was repeated throughout Chinese history, up to the present era. Despite being a period of disunity, this period was a time of great intellectual development, during which Kong Fuzi founded Confucianism and Lao Zi founded Daoism.

The various lords contended amongst themselves for supremacy for five hundred years, until, in 221 BC the King of the westernmost state, Qin, succeeded in conquering the whole of China. This was the Qin Dynasty, which established standard weights and measures, writing systems, currency and law in order to ensure that military unification was mirrored by cultural, economic and institutional unity. This process of standardisation was extremely heavy-handed and tyrannical and the Qin were overthrown after a mere fifteen years in power. The Han Dynasty which succeeded them, however, reaped the rewards of that standardisation, presiding over a golden age, in which China extended its control to Vietnam in the south, Korea in the northeast and to the Taklamakan Desert in the northwest. This period also saw the arrival of Buddhism to China. Eventually, however, famine and the cruelty of the large landowners brought and end to that prosperity and the Han collapsed in AD 220 into the Three Kingdoms: Wei, Wu and Shu. Wei conquered Shu, but a palace coup saw it replaced by the Jin Dynasty in 265, which then conquered Wu and reunified China.

The Jin Dynasty was wracked by civil war in 280 and lost the northern half of China to the nomadic Wu Hu, who founded sixteen Chinese style kingdoms. One of them, the Northern Wei, conquered the whole of Northern China in 386, but it was shortlived, being succeeded by Eastern Wei, Western Wei, Northern Qi, and Northern Zhou, none of which were ruled by ethnic Chinese. In the same period the South was ruled by the Jin, the Liu Song, the Southern Qi, the Southern Liang, the Western Liang and the Chen. This flurry of dynasties, which lasted until 581, is known as the Northern and Southern Dynasties. This period saw China south of the Yangtze conclusively absorbed into the Chinese culture and was brought to an end when China was reunified by the Sui Dynasty.

The Sui Dynasty invented the examination system under which all government positions were assigned based on achievement in a standardised national exam, the world's first meritocracy and a hallmark of later Chinese culture. However, the Sui was tyrannical and expended its entire budget on several disastrous failed invasions of Korea and the construction of the Grand Canal, a 1700 km long canal linking the Yangtze to the Huang He. The Sui were overthrown by the Tang Dynasty in 618, less than forty years after taking power. The Tang Dynasty presided over the second Chinese golden age, extending their control deep into Vietnam in the south and as far as what is now Uzbekistan in the west. This period saw the height of Chinese Buddhism, but also its downfall and supression. The prosperity of the Tang ended abruptly in 755 when a frontier general, An Lushan, revolted and sacked the capital. The rebellion was eventually defeated, but the Tang never really recovered. The Tang were overthrown in 907 and the country collapsed into the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms Period, during which the north remained largely united, but chaotic as five dynasties of Turkish origin succeeded each other rapidly, while the south was divided between around ten petty states which enjoyed a measure of prosperity and innovation.

This disunity left China weak to external threats, especially the nomadic Khitans who consolidated the steppes and parts of northern China under their Chinese-style Liao Dynasty, which dominated the Five Dynasties in China itself. From 960 they were opposed by a resurgent centre and south, unified under the Song Dynasty, which reconquered most of China, and presided over a renewed era of prosperity, which saw the invention of gunpowder, bank-notes and the compass. However, the Song were blocked from expanding to the northwest by the Western Xia, a Chinese-style dynasty founded by Tangut nomads and they also proved unable to fully conquer the Khitans. In 1115 they helped the Jurchen tribe to revolt against the Khitans, hoping to thereby destroy the Khitans. The Jurchens succeeded in conquering the Khitans, but then they turned on the Song, driving them out of northern China and founding the Jin Dynasty.

That uneasy three-way division of China between Song, Xia and Jurchen lasted until 1227 when the Mongols under Genghis Khan swept out of the steppes and conquered all of China as well as much of the rest of Eurasia. In their Chinese territories they called themselves the Yuan Dynasty, quickly becoming a Chinese-style state, and thereby losing the respect of the Mongol soldiers, without gaining the esteem of the Chinese, who still perceived them as foreign. They were overthrown in 1368 and replaced by the ethnically Chinese Ming Dynasty. Under the Ming, China began to take on its modern shape, stretching far into the northern steppe and sending out naval missions which collected tribute from distant India and East Africa. China was enriched by silver, brought from the Americas by European trade galleons in exchange for silk and porcelain. This was prosperous period, but the vast expense of a proxy war with Japan, declining stock in silver, and the increasing power of eunuchs at court weakened the dynasty. In 1644 the capital was conquered by the nomadic Manchus, who founded the Qing Dynasty and expanded China even further before falling prey to corruption and the depredations of European colonisers. This dynasty finally collapsed in 1912. It was breifly replaced by the Republic of China, which itself collapsed into warlordism and civil war. China was invaded by the Japanese during World War II and was unified in 1949, in the aftermath of that war by the Communist Dynasty, which rules to this day.