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'The weapon of criticism cannot, of course, replace criticism of the weapon, material force must be overthrown by material force; but theory also becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses.' - Karl Marx
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File: 1633725778682.jpg (163.44 KB, 875x617, scale_1200.jpg)

 No.8045

Thread for History of Ancient China up until the end of the Chinese Empire
Discuss History, Mythology, Archeology, Socio-Economics, Politics and Culture of Ancient China. This includes Tibet, Korea and Mongolia.
Leftypedia >>3780 requires an article on Ancient China, all that is covered is the current People's Republic

Important Topics
>Mythology and Legends and their Modern Cultural Impacts
A society that arose at the beginning of human civilization, China's culture is enormous and diverse. Legends and mythology of China such as Fa Mulan and Journey to the West are just prominent examples of legends that influenced others across the globe. Recommend and discuss literature or myths on this.

>Eastern Philosophy, Culture and Religion
The East, especially China developed several unique religions and philosophies utterly separate from the primarily Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian philosophies of Western and Central Europe as well as the Middle East. The 3 primary Chinese philosophies are Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism. Discuss the merits of these.

>Military Conflicts and Everyday Life in Ancient China
Society in China developed on its own and so it had much different ways of life. China is also known for having massive conflicts, some of the first to have millions of men fight at a time. China is known for it's generals such as author of "The Art of War"* Sun Tzu, Han Xing and CaoCao.
*https://sites.ualberta.ca/~enoch/Readings/The_Art_Of_War.pdf

>Colonial China
In the 19th Century, China, having stagnated under the Manchu or Quing invaders, lagged behind and lost the Opium Wars, being forced to open up to British, German, Russian and Japanese colonialism of such cities and territories like Beijing, Manchuria and Hong Kong.
- Бутаков Александр Михайлович; барон Тизенгаузен Александр Евгеньевич, Опиумные войны. Обзор войн европейцев против Китая в 1840—1842, 1856—1858, 1859 и 1860 годах http://militera.lib.ru/h/butakov_tizengauz/index.html

Recommended book for basic overview - Harold M. Tanner, China: A History Volume 1 (2009)

 No.8046

File: 1633725849968.png (358.52 KB, 670x377, md_e195672e7aa44c131ba665b….png)

>>8045
>Eastern Philosophy, Culture and Religion
- Li Zehou’s “History of Classical Chinese Thought” is from from a Marxist (albeit also vaguely small-n nationalist) perspective and people may find it useful: https://b-ok.cc/book/5576067/51bb02
- Karyn Lai’s “Introduction to Chinese Philosophy,” while not Marxist, is accessible and interesting: https://b-ok.cc/book/730929/dc0ae1
The social context of these matters but is interesting and not at all Strange and Inscrutable to westerners really - Western philosophical revivals also tended to happen in the midst of periods of interminable interstate wars etc.
- http://www.sino-platonic.org/complete/spp211_confucius_laozi.pdf which clarifies differences between Taoism and Confucianism
It requires the readers to know about the Huangdi-Shennong era, Yao-Shun-Yu era, Shang-Zhou era, Qin-Han era, basic knowledge on classical books of ancient China, etc. All of these knowledge, while common to Chinese scholars, is not easily accessible to Western scholars. Therefore, it's impossible to understand eastern philosophies separated from their social context, especially many of them were social philosophies.

 No.8047

File: 1633725972892-0.pdf (2.6 MB, 212x300, The myth of the hands of c….pdf)

File: 1633725972892-1.jpg (4.07 MB, 5472x3648, Terra Cotta Army pit.jpg)

Is the terracotta army fake?
http://www.notbored.org/commentaires.html
> The highest point has without doubt been reached by the Chinese bureaucracy's laughable fake of the great statues of the industrial army of the First Emperor, which so many visiting statesmen have been taken to admire in situ. Since one could mock them so cruelly, this thus proves that in all the masses of their advisors, there was not a single individual who knew the history of art, in China or anywhere else.
Is Debord right to claim that the terracotta army is a fake?
More from Debord:
> Nothing has better shown at which point taste and knowledge have both disappeared, along with the senses of the improbable and the ridiculous, than the clumsy archeological-cultural imposture of this century, which (it seems) people still laugh at and which its principal dupes prefer to believe has been forgotten without any other explanation. Around 1980, one was ecstatic about an army of statues of thousands of soldiers and horses, a little larger than life-size, that the Chinese claimed to have discovered in 1974 and that were supposed to have been buried with Emperor Tsin Che Hoang Ti [Qin Shinuangdi] twenty-two centuries ago.[12] Hundreds of newspapers and dozens of publishers swallowed the bait and the line, and – guaranteed, moreover, by the enthusiasm of the aforementioned Valery Giscard – this treasure was displayed in many great cities of Europe. Inevitably, subaltern doubts about whether these traveling marvels were the originals, as had been affirmed by the neo-Maoist government, or copies, as it was forced to admit later on. Here, the formula of Feuerbach, which already said that his times preferred the copy to the original, was quite surpassed by progress, since these were copies of originals that had never existed. With a single glance at the first photos of the "excavation," one could only laugh at the imprudence of the Chinese bureaucrats, who so shamelessly took foreigners to be cretins. But still more extravagant than all of these absolute improbabilities was the fact – easily discernible from the images of the soldiers' heads (all of which were strongly similar) – that nowhere and at no moment in the history of the world were such figures produced in molded forms, that is, not before the first third of our century (in fact, they were fabricated in the last years of Mao's reign to be an abundant and miraculous discovery that compensated for all that had been destroyed during the insanity of the pseudo-"cultural revolution"). To compose the poor, basic forms of these gigantic marionettes, one needed to already have the die-casting capabilities of the factories of the early 20th century; the paintings of [Paul] Gauguin, which had relatively recently traced a new artistic figure of the exotic in Western art; and, finally and especially, Stalinist and Nazi statuary – which were the same things – , which had existed since the 1930s.
http://www.notbored.org/debord-4May1986.html

Apparently there's some other French guys who agrees: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Terracotta_Army/Archive_1#The_statues_are_a_fake

 No.8048

The China History podcast is another good source covering a very large range of topics. There are over 1 decade of episodes to listen through.
https://chinahistorypodcast.libsyn.com/

 No.8049

https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Первая_опиумная_война m
Russian sources on the Opium Wars are pretty good

 No.8085

File: 1634098604274.png (883.19 KB, 885x497, ClipboardImage.png)

>>8045
>3 primary Chinese philosophies are Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism
Also Legalism is important. Unfortunately people tend to lump Confucianism under Legalism and tout that Legalism is the overarching influence of Chinese culture. This is of course untrue:
China's intellectual traditions can't be compressed into a single ideology; i.e, there's Confucian, Taoist, Buddhist, and Legalist elements throughout the culture. Narrowing it down to Legalism (the legacy of Qin Shihuang, Shang Yang, and Han Feizi) is reductionist. Assuming that Confucianism is merely a veneer for State Legalism is denying actual actions by Chinese officials throughout the ages. The infamous coffin protests against Zhu Yuanzhang is something that could never have happened in a pure Legalist state. I'd argue that Confucianism has greater primacy than Legalism in traditional Chinese culture. Legalism perhaps best described how the state functioned, but Confucianism was the ideological superstructure of both the state and the population.
A fairly good article on the matter - https://www.e-ir.info/2018/07/03/confucianism-or-legalism-a-grand-debate-on-human-nature-and-economic-thought/

 No.8086

File: 1634098779188.png (1.42 MB, 1280x720, ClipboardImage.png)

Read this excerpt recently on the PRC general but the thread cycled before I could come back and reread the contents, can anyone confirm and flesh out the following?
>Han Gaozu was actually captured by the Xiongnu Confederacy, but used the most underhanded tactics to get out. The Han Dynasty actually had to pay tribute to the Xiongnu Confederacy for a number of years, all the while liberalizing their economy from Qin Command Economy under the influence of Taoism. At a certain point, however, Han Wudi took power and opted for a military solution against the Xiongnu. This worked to a substantial extent, destroying the Xiongnu Confederacy, but also left the Han state bankrupt in the process.
>The two points of interest are the liberalization, which allowed the Han Dynasty to bulk up its economic power, as well as the eventual result of Han Wudi's anti-Xiongnu campaigns. Liberalization in modern China has managed to massively strengthen the economy, and Xi's tilt back toward Communist solidarity and state control of the economy resembles Han Wudi gearing up for the anti-Xiongnu campaigns.

 No.8087

Is there an epic or mythos that is necessary to fully understand Chinese philosophy and historiography, much like the Homeric epics are pretty much required to understand ancient Greece and Rome?
I was thinking about Journey to the West as a good starter, as I believe it takes place on the silk road.

 No.8088

>>8047
>white people didn't build it so it's fake/aliens
uyghur the same people built the great wall
I think a bunch of statues is pretty plausible

 No.8089

>>8087
Three Kingdoms.
It's classic Chinese literature covering the period of the same name.
It was made into a TV show you can watch for free on youtube (for now).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUydGrh01jE&list=PLd7LptFYgU82gryIhclybPnfyBMyEsC-i&index=1
About 100 episodes about 45 minutes each.

 No.8090

File: 1634100085928.jpg (231.13 KB, 898x718, Illustration_of_Byzantine_….jpg)

>>8089
>About 100 episodes about 45 minutes each
holy tits, well okay then, maybe ill check out the books…
>Romance of the Three Kingdoms is acclaimed as one of the Four Great Classical Novels of Chinese literature; it has a total of 800,000 words and nearly a thousand dramatic characters (mostly historical) in 120 chapters

I will never finish all these damn books ;—;
I guess if the TV show is mostly faithful to the original, it will have to do

 No.8091

File: 1634100215233.pdf (334.97 KB, 211x300, 9-1-2.pdf)

>>8087
>>8089
Yes, I was going to mention Three Kingdoms, also The Investiture of the Gods is important.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investiture_of_the_Gods
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classic_Chinese_Novels
The role of Jiang Ziya for example is quite interesting in regards to the 9 tailed fox spirit/demon Daji (Tamamo no Mae in Japan) and it is she that is claimed to have started the practise of female footbinding in China as a plot to disguise her fox-like feet by forcing other women to wear the same shoes.
https://yokai.com/tamamonomae/

I'd add also China's Four Great Folktales: Legend of the White Snake, Lady Meng Jiang, Butterfly Lovers, and The Cowherd and the Weaver Girl (Niulang Zhinü).
https://web.archive.org/web/20141006103301/http://www.eastasia.ntu.edu.tw/chinese/data/9-1/9-1-2/9-1-2.pdf (pdf 1)

>>8090
Yeah getting through the entire thing is hard, (I've not done it either) and frankly finding good translations is hard too.

 No.9985

>>8091
>Legend of the White Snake
Speaking of those stories, China's recent animated films on the basis of these stories are rather good. I particularly liked Jiang Zhiya.

 No.10366

File: 1649804329820.pdf (6.5 MB, 197x255, The Romance of the Three K….pdf)

>>8090
Bro chillax, there's a shortened version.

 No.10823

>>8088
>the same people built the great wall
A wall is not the same complexity as highly detailed and utterly unique pottery.

 No.10826

>>10823
Structural complexity is complex in its own right too, details =/= 'complexity' in terms of assembly. But there's no point, racists like you will always remain racist and see what they want to see.

 No.10842

File: 1654018290835.png (208.77 KB, 800x1672, 1653811532681.png)

I've seen /pol/ post this shit tons of times. Any thoughts on it? Is it any accurate?

 No.10843

>>10842
it's accurate but it's also just essentialist "muh originals" bullshit. Yeah. No shit the modern chinese nation state isn't 100% continuous with the Huaxia people who settled on the yellow river 3000 years ago. It's like saying "did you know that 500 years ago America had almost no Europeans?" or "Did you know that 1000 years ago, English sounded nothing like it does now?" Every single region on the face of this planet has been inhabited by people who have, under one identity or another, played the role of conquered, and conqueror, assimilator, and assimilated. Our numerals are arabic. Our "Germanic" language is mostly latin and french and greek loanwords. Americans follow a religion called Christianity, which centers around a Jewish man who was crucified by Romans in modern day Palestine. Expecting some kind of infinite and uninterupted continuity of homogenous identity is a form of chauvinist hyperfixation I will never understand.

 No.10846

>>10826
The Great Wall is not uniform, large portions of it are just stone and mud slapped together, the stuff seen in tourism photos and stuff is a small portion of the entire structure.

 No.10847

>>10846
The stone great wall was built during the Ming dynasty around 700 years ago and was built over the original Qin great wall which is 2200 years old. What tourists see today is the Ming dynasty wall. The original wall was almost exclusively built from rammed earth (compressed dirt) and very little of it survives to this day. Also parts of the great wall had been built before the Qin unified China so the Qin dynasty did not built the whole length of the wall.

 No.11896

The first Dengist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guan_Zhong
>He is also credited for creating the first official government sponsored brothel known as "女市" which funded the government treasury.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discourses_on_Salt_and_Iron
>The debate was characterized by two opposing factions, the reformists and the modernists. The reformists were largely Confucian scholars who opposed the policies of Emperor Wu and demanded the abolition of the monopolies on salt and iron, an end to the state price stabilization schemes, and huge cuts in government expenditures to reduce the burden on the citizenry. The Modernists supported the continuation of Emperor Wu's policies in order to appropriate the profits of private merchants into state coffers to fund the government's military and colonization campaigns in the north and west.
>The modernists survived this debate with most of their policies intact, with only the monopoly on liquor abolished, although Sang was later executed in 80 BCE for treason.[19][20] Reformists gradually gained more power through the rest of Former Han, due to the growing unsustainability of the Modernists' policies. They briefly succeeded in getting the central government monopolies on salt and iron abolished from 44 to 41 BCE, though this was unsuccessful and the monopolies resumed until the end of Wang Mang's (r. 9–23 CE) regime, which imposed ultra-modernist policies.[21][22]
U L T R A M O D E R N I S M
>The reformist view was based on the Confucian ideal which sought to bring about the betterment of man by conformity to fundamental moral principles. To achieve this, they wished to reduce controls, demands for service, and taxation to a minimum. The reformists' criticism of the monopolies largely centered on the idea that the state "should not compete with the people for profit", as it would tend to oppress the citizenry while doing so; mercantile ventures were not "proper activities for the state".[11] They pointed out that the monopolies had placed an immense burden on the citizenry. In addition, the reformists complained that the state monopolies oppressed the people by producing low-quality and impractical iron tools that were useless and made only to meet quotas, yet which the peasants had to pay for regardless of their quality.[12] The reformers believed former private smelting by small-scale family enterprises made better implements "because of pride of workmanship and because they were closer to the users", in contrast to the state monopoly.

 No.12176

>>10843
THIS AF
screennshotting this to spam at people

 No.12630

>>8047
They have carbon dated these things I'm pretty sure?
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/1359018988900775
I'm more willing to trust archeology over wacky Marxist "muh spectacle" racist French dude with a hate boner for MLs who seems to think it just looks hard to do therefore it's fake.

 No.12631

>>12630
I'm not some Bourgeois elitist, after all the Divide between mental and physical labor is something socialist states have tried to overcome. But I mean come on, when you're only evidences is it looks hard to do it and not in depth archaeological and historical research you just sound retarded. Debord has some interests works which has contributed to theory but this just a schizo position to take.

 No.19898

>>8045
>Leftypedia requires an article on Ancient China, all that is covered is the current People's Republic
Do you want a page titled "Ancient China" or "History of China"? The latter would better include the period covered in your OP i.e. Xia era to Qing Revolutionary period.

 No.20151

>>19898
OP here, back from being away; I would say the latter is pretty accurate and useful name, if you make it, go ahead and link it comr8.

 No.20157

>>8045
>Legends and mythology of China such as Fa Mulan and Journey to the West are just prominent examples of legends that influenced others across the globe.
Journey to the West is a novel. It's contemporary with Shakespeare's work. Hua Mulan is comparable to Arthurian legends in time period and legendary status.

 No.20167

>>20157
>Journey to the West is a novel.
A novel based on combined works and earlier stories.
>Hua Mulan is comparable to Arthurian legends in time period and legendary status.
Yes, that is what I'm saying.


I'd also like to mention Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio


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