The Most Basic Guide To Chinese History You'll Ever See
Those of you who've seen the rest of my site are aware that I've got a fondness for Asian art and culture, particularly Chinese. Recently one of the RPGs I play in has given me the opportunity to develop an alternate history for the Middle Kingdom, and for all the rest of Asia to boot. Now, this is a lovely thing for me, but alternate histories never work unless you start by knowing the original history, and change it - or not - from there.
Some of the folks who were interested in this game liked the idea, and were also curious about the real history of China, as it wasn't the sort of thing that got taught in any detail in secondary school here.With that end in mind I started putting together some basic e-mail lectures on Chinese history, based on sources easily available to your average American with access to the internet and an idea of what search terms to use. I've had some good response to these so far, so I thought I'd put them out here for the rest of the Net, or any other visitors, to see.
Disclaimer: I am not a teacher. I am not a historian. I am not a linguist. You would do far better to get yourself down to the library and look this stuff up in a real book than to rely on me. I take no responsibility for your grades if your teacher marks you off for saying 'in 771 or so BCE, the Zhou kings became UTTER AND TOTAL WEENIES' on your assignment.
That being said...
Lesson 1: The Very Beginning
Lesson 2: The Yellow Emperor, and writing
Lesson 3: Sage Kings
Lesson 4: Romanization (not technically history, but
language-related)
Lesson 5: Xia and Shang Dynasties
Lesson 6: Western Zhou
Lesson 7: Fun Things About The Zhou (again, not necessarily
history, but important concepts)
Lesson 8: Eastern Zhou, Spring and Autumn, and Warring
States
Lesson 9: Confucius (because sometimes, biography
and history are the same thing)
Lesson 10: Laozi and Taoism
Lesson 11: Warring States / Sun Tzu - New! Added
16 Jan 2003!
Further updates will come in due time.
people have viewed this page since 3 April, 2002.
Counter art courtesy of The Museum of Counter Art.