History Summarized: Ancient China

Hey Blue, thanks for the shout-out! :-)

It seems that there are still many gaps in our understanding of ancient Chinese history. Perhaps the archives are incomplete?

china's history is just "this dynasty sucks, we need to split up" then "being split up sucks we need to form another dynasty"

China: Forms a Dynasty Peasants: "HOW MANY TIMES DO WE HAVE TO TEACH YOU THIS LESSON OLD MAN!"

You pulled a Suibhne and are making us wait for part 2

"Machiavelli would be very proud." Damn it Blue you have to bring Italy into everything don't you.

So, China went from city states, to empire, to bigger, smaller states, to bigger empires, to states, to empire, to different empire, to other empire. Are we sure this isn’t just Greece?

Chinese person here. YES. THE VALIDATION IS REAL. I LIVE IN BLUE’S PLANE OF EXISTENCE.

Great video! It should also be noted that the Xiongnu/Hun link is a bit debated. But so is just about everything in ancient history.

I like how the history of China follows closely with Taoism, with cycles of order and chaos. Yin and yang.

Still think it's pretty cool how China's writing system became so uniform under Shi Huangdi. There were tons of different dialects of spoken Chinese but no matter where you went, the writing style was always the exact same so even if two people couldn't understand what the other one was saying, they'd be able to understand each other perfectly in writing.

Fun fact about Sima Quan (don't know what you're calling him Blue, or why?) he had the choice about to get executed or castrated. He chose castration so that he could finish his Shiji (Also known as Records of a Grand Historian) which were originally written by his father, Sima Tan, who died before finishing. Sima Quans choice was an incredible dishonor, automatically making him a second class citizen, but the Shiji was so formative that it basically defines Chinese Historiography. I guess you could call him the Chinese Jesus. He sacrificed his dick, so that we could get great courtly intrigue stories 2000 years later (seriously read the Shiji, it's basically just game of thrones in China)

Everything went well until the Mongols attacked

"Yeah, my empire broke." "Have you tried turning off and on again?"

The Mesopotamian and Ancient Egypt had their records and scripts massively on clay and stone, while ancient China used mostly bamboo slips which could easily rot away before paper-making was improved, PLUS mid-Shang dynasty had a prosperous divination culture. This was probably one of the reasons that the oracle bone script and bronze inscription turned out to be the earliest record in Chinese history that was discovered. Those bone scripts were so sophisticated that one cannot stop believing that there had already been a long time of Chinese writing before 1600 BC.

Honestly, you pronouncing it as ‘Shang’ instead of ‘Shaeng’ is better than 90% of people in America. You did good

My History Class composed of: (in no particular order) Overly Sarcastic Productions Kings and Generals Extra Credits Shadiversity

So when are we going to get the next exciting chapter of Tripataka Gets Kidnapped Again Due To The Incompetence Of Piggy ?

Alright, Blue didn't really cover much of early China, especially the first three legendary dynasties, so I'll give it a go. The name of the first real "emperor," or rather local king has been lost to time, but in China it's almost universally accepted that such a man did exist, and that it was roughly around this time that numerous advances in agriculture such as irrigation techniques as well as herbal medicine. His successor was a man referred to as Yao, and what's unique about the first two successions was that the kingdom was basically handed off to whoever impressed the previous guy rather than the normal dynastic succession in which the ruler's descendants inherit the throne that developed shortly after the Xia dynasty. It was around the time of Yao that a man emerged named Shun. Long story short, his stepmother and stepbrother were really abusive, tried to kill him by burning him and tossing him down a well, but Shun, being the nice and benevolent person he was, forgave his relatives who tried to kill him, and this event was later recorded in a text known as the The Twenty-four Paragons of Filial Piety. Yao was really impressed by this, and as a result handed the throne over to Shun. All was well for a few years until the Yellow River began flooding, causing massive amounts of death and destruction, hence why the river is known as "China's Sorrow." Shun appointed a guy named Gun, who was the Prince on Chong and a distant relative of Yao, the previous emperor, to resolve this issue. Gun attempted to use a series of dikes and dams to control the river, which failed. Shun was furious and had him banished, and in his place appointed Gun's son, Yu, to control the flooding. Yu decided to focus on drainage and created a series of irrigation canals as well as dredging the accumulated silt in the Yellow River, in particular an area near Mount Longmen which had a narrow channel that blocked water from flowing into the ocean. After around thirteen years Yu managed to resolve the flooding issue and Shun was so impressed that he decided to hand the throne over to him, thus beginning the semi-legendary Xia dyanasty.

Sinology student here: 天 tian1, although it literally translates to "sky" or "heaven", has little to do with what we in the west think about heaven. It's more like "the universe" or probably "the largest something", "the extreme". The Chinese character 天 shows a human 人 ren2 who reaches for the highest that there is: the heaven. Please don't confuse tian with God or heaven in our western tradition.