The Chinese Historical Era short count estimates a start date of 2637 BC (AD 1998 + 2637
= 4635 Anno Sinarum). The Chinese Historical Era, long count estimates a start of 2852 BC
(AD 1998 + 2852 = 4850 Anno Sinarum). The long count is used in the lists, with short count dates
in grey alongside.
The Shang, a splendid Bronze Age civilisation, marks the true beginning of Chinese
history, emerging just as India was falling into its own Dark Ages period (1500-800 BC).
The system of writing we see developing in the Shang already displays most of the
characteristics of Chinese characters and was destined to be the only ancient system of
ideographic writing to survive into modern usage, both in China and Japan.
However, Shang
writing is known mainly from oracle bones. There is no surviving literature or documents
from the period. Data like the list of Shang kings or the excavation of Shang royal tombs
therefore leaves us pretty much in the dark about historical events, though this is not much
different from what is often the case with contemporary Egypt or Mesopotamia.
The
sophistication of Shang culture, on the other hand, may be inspected directly in the
magnificent bronzes that are featured in many of the world's museums.
Besides reuniting the country, the Sui are particularly famous for the building of
the Grand Canal. This took essentially the entire duration of the Dynasty, and aroused
great resentment from the severity of the forced labour.
More than 3,000,000 workers were
impressed, and those evading service were executed. Defeats by the Turks then precipitated
rebellion.
The Southern Sung is inevitably remembered mainly as the victim of Mongol
conquest. It is noteworthy, however, that the Sung gave the Mongols the hardest time of
any of their ultimate conquests.
The final campaign by Qubilai Khan took twelve long
years, when most people were lucky if they could resist the Mongols for twelve weeks. One
explanation of this is that the Mongols were definitely out of their preferred element. A
saying in China is that "in the north, you go by horse; in the south, you go by
boat."
The Mongols undoubtedly were more comfortable with horses than with boats. The
southern terrain posed a challenge that the Mongols could not meet with their accustomed
cavalry tactics.
The Sung state was also more formidably organised than many opponents of
the Mongols. The Sung had resources unavailable to the Russians or the Khawarizm Shahs.
But the price of resistance to the Mongols was, of course, death. On one account, Qubilai
Khan, in the course of his conquest and rule over China, killed "more than 18,470,000
Chinese" (RJ Rummel, Death by Government, Transaction Publishers, 1995,
p.51).
This puts him in the same league, at least, as Adolf Hitler. So many Chinese died
during the tenure of the Mongol Yuan Dynasty that several ancient surnames, like Ou-yang,
simply disappeared.
There are some problems with reconciling the Mongolian dates and names (The
Mongols, David Morgan, Basil Blackwell, 1986, and The New Islamic Dynasties,
Clifford Edmund Bosworth, Edinburgh University Press, 1996) with the Chinese list of Yuan
emperors (Mathews' Chinese-English Dictionary, Harvard University Press, 1972,
p.1175).
The Ming Emperors, mainly the Yung-Lo Emperor, sent Admiral Cheng Ho (Zheng He),
a Moslem eunuch who started out as a prisoner-of-war slave, on seven great naval expeditions
into the Indian Ocean between 1405 and 1433. Chinese historians report that the largest
ships, the baochuan or "treasure ships," were 440 feet long.
However, most of
the records of the expeditions were destroyed, and the reported dimensions are unrealistic
(eg. a beam of 180 feet, which sounds more like a bathtub than a sailing ship).
Bruce
Swanson (Eighth Voyage of the Dragon, Naval Institute Press, 1982, p.33) reports
that a modern surviving Chinese junk of five masts, the Jiangsu trader, was 170 feet long.
Since baochuan were reported to have up to nine masts, if this is accurate and the number
of masts is proportional to the length, we might extrapolate ships of 306 feet in length.
This is comparable to the length of some nineteenth century clipper ships: The Great Republic of
1853, the largest ship of its time, was 325 feet long. Although this is larger, by half
again, than Swanson wants to allow, there now have been some archaeological discoveries of
ship fittings that seem consistent with the larger sizes.
The Manchurian conquest of China was a deeply humiliating experience for the
Chinese. The Manchus, indeed, made things harder for themselves, as foreign rulers, with
their decree that Chinese men would have to adopt Manchu costume (including the infamous
"queue").
This provoked violent Chinese popular resistance and helped the
"Southern Ming" princes rally forces against the Manchus for almost two decades.
However, it is noteworthy that subsequent Chinese governments, both Nationalist and
Communist, regarded all Manchurian conquests as "intrinsic" parts of China.
Thus
Tibet, which had been conquered by both Mongols and Manchus, and was independent after the
fall of the Ch'ing in 1911, is claimed as an "intrinsic" part of China even
though it had never actually been ruled by Chinese until the
Communist invasion of 1950. Culturally, Tibet is a sub-Indian rather
than a sub-Chinese civilisation.
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