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34 Cards in this Set
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homo erectus
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earliest visitors to East Asia were homo erectus. A now-lost set of fossils found in China, dubbed Peking Man, represented an early band of tool-using, fire-lighting erectus.
However, they were displaced by homo sapiens sapiens, arriving from Africa between fifty and a hundred thousand years ago |
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Erlitou Civilization
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may have been the site of the mythical Xia Dynasty. The Xia are said to have ruled from 2100 BCE to 1600 BCE. However, because they didn't leave written records, we don't know if the Erlitou people called themselves the Xia, or if any of the mythical rulers of the Xia were real. Them's the breaks, guys.
If you've ever had a debate on whether noodles were invented in East Asia or in Europe, wonder no more: the world's oldest noodles are petrified millet noodles cooked in China around 2000 BCE. |
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Neolithic, people in China domesticated two major food crops, millet and rice
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Millet was heavily cultivated in the Yellow River valley in North China. This excess food led to several large city-states, none of which left written records. The images of phoenixes and dragons found at many Neolithic sites indicate some continuity between later Chinese society and these early civilizations.
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Shang Dynasty
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earliest example still available to us is the oracle bones. Oracle bones were ox or turtle bones that were used for fortune telling by shamans. A question about the future was written on a bone, and then the bone would be heated until it cracked. A shaman would decide what the answer was based on the cracks. The fortune recipient then wrote down the shaman's predictions as well as the actual result, perhaps as a form of shaman quality control.
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Western Zhou (1046 to 770 BCE) and the Eastern Zhou (770 to 256 BCE).
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"How" of Zhou Rule
The Zhou kings were known for introducing iron technology to China. They also expanded their control to South China, reaching farther than the Shang ever had. They introduced a system of feudalism where peasants owed aristocrats labor and taxes in exchange for military protection. Minor aristocrats, in turn, owed dukes taxes and military service in exchange for protection. And, of course, dukes owed the same to the king. The "Why" of Zhou Rule The Zhou kings justified this whole system with a concept called the Mandate of Heaven. The Zhou claimed that Heaven, a supreme moral force of nature, naturally rewarded moral rulers with good weather and success. The Zhou said that the Shang used to have the Mandate, but became immoral and were punished with famine, floods, and military defeat. Convenient. The concept of the Mandate is a powerful one in Chinese history. Because no ruler wanted to be seen |
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8th century BCE, nomadic pastoralists from the west came and sacked the Zhou king's capital. The Zhou moved their capital east and founded the Eastern Zhou
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However, the damage to their reputation was done. Feudalism only makes sense if the king can protect his people, and this king couldn't even protect himself. In the Eastern Zhou, the dukes stopped paying attention to the king and ruled as mini-kings in their own right.
Without a powerful central authority to dictate right and wrong, many different schools of philosophy emerged. |
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100 Schools of Thought
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Chinese history is full of terms that are big round numbers that tend to be exaggerations. However, the popular term for this period's "100 Schools of Thought" might actually be an underestimate. The writings of hundreds of different philosophers have survived to the present day, and these writings reference philosophical debates that involve thousands of thinkers.
A lot of philosophers had specific areas of interest, like logic, mathematics, literature, or even warfare. (Sunzi's Art of War, anyone?) However, a few of them focused on bigger questions, like "what is the purpose of life" and "how to make the perfect society." The big players here are the philosophies of Daoism, Confucianism, and Legalism. Fun Fact: During this period, the world saw its first pacifist hippies. The monotheistic Mohists used to protest wars by standing on besieged city walls. |
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One of the new kings vying for power was the king of Qin
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This king hired as his Prime Minister a Legalist philosopher named Li Si, who set up a Legalist state system that was as close as the ancient world got to totalitarianism. Li Si's state was organized to divert all resources to the war effort. Over forty years, more than a million men were conscripted and sent off to die.
In the end, it worked. In 221 BCE Li Si's armies won and his boss became Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of China. Everyone before then was called either king or duke. |
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Under Qin Shi Huang and Li Si, China underwent significant changes
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The defensive walls of the northern duchies were linked together and extended, creating the Great Wall. Weights and measures were standardized. Confucianism was driven underground through purges of schools and libraries. The written language was standardized to a form similar to the one we know today. As a final touch, the Qin attacked feudalism, distributing aristocrats' land among individual taxpayers.
But it was short-lived. Li Si pressed for too much, too fast. Many of China's people were starving, fleeing, or in revolt. The economy was in the toilet. After Qin Shi Huang died in 210 BCE and was buried with the terracotta warriors, there were uprisings across the country. Li Si and the Crown Prince were both murdered within a few years. In 202 BCE, a new, more lasting dynasty took the reins. (Reigns? #hehe) |
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Han Dynasty owed a lot to the Qin
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The Great Wall and the standardized written language helped them a lot. However, they also hated the oppression of the Qin.
The Han went out and found the Confucian underground, recovering as many hidden Confucian books as possible. They then enshrined Confucianism as the official state ideology, which lasted in China until 1911. However, they also learned the lesson of the Qin and allowed other philosophies to flourish. Legalism and Daoism both became prominent. When Buddhist missionaries from India came to China, the Han Dynasty actually used taxpayer money to build them a monastery to preach from. The Han also took a more lax approach to the economy. They welcomed new trade links with the Hellenistic countries of Central Asia, exchanging gifts with kings across South and Southeast Asia. At home, more people than ever had freedom of movement, leading to more substantial trade. The Han became wealthy and powerful beyond anything the world had ever |
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The Han ruled for a long time, about 400 years. However, nothing lasts forever
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.In the 3rd century CE a famine led to widespread peasant unrest. Sensing an opportunity, political parties of bureaucrats, generals, and palace eunuchs moved to take control of China. Each party attempted to purge the bureaucracy of its enemies. The resulting violence crippled the government and left the Emperor powerless.
Shortly after, several prominent generals and provincial governors declared themselves independent. Eventually China was divided into three kingdoms. Despite 50 years of war, none succeeded at totally re-establishing rule over China. This period of civil war inspired the Chinese literary classic The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, which in turn inspired a lot of video games. Eventually, even the three kingdoms fell apart. For the rest of this period, China was ruled by changing collection of smaller dynasties and foreign invaders. With so many foreign invaders coming in, it became import |
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Since the Neolithic, Vietnam was home to sedentary rice farming villages
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These villages were organized into kingdoms, some of which were influenced by the Sanskrit language and Hindu culture from India. In the Qin and the Han, China attempted to colonize the region, often sending disgraced officials or criminals into exile there. The exiled Chinese married into the Vietnamese population. When the colony was abandoned, the mixed-ethnicity descendants of the Chinese colonists came to rule Vietnam as feudal lords.
Vietnam was noted for having its own culture distinct from both India and China. One notable aspect was that women had stronger property rights and greater political roles. Among the most important Vietnamese historical figures are the Trưng sisters, female lord generals who rebelled against Han colonial rule. |
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Japan
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Japan had recently crowned their first emperor in 500 CE, but the island nation was still underdeveloped. However, they were in contact with the Chinese dynasties and had adopted Chinese characters for their writing system; they were also in contact with Chinese Buddhist missionaries.
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Korea
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Korea during this period was ruled by a series of feudal kingdoms, many of which were tied to nomadic tribes to the north and west. Several of these Korean kingdoms submitted as tributaries to the Han, sending regular gifts to the Han Emperor in exchange for military protection.
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East Asia From 500 CE to 1500 CE
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During this period, China hit its stride, Japan grew up, Korea unified, Vietnam got its groove back, and Tibet became the world's first and only Buddhist theocracy. Then, they all got smacked repeatedly by the big mean stick of the Mongol horde.
Also during this period, several technologies that made the modern world possible—such as printing and gunpowder—were invented in East Asia. |
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Turks
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The historical term "Turks" is different from the modern term "Turkish" for people from Turkey. The historical Turks were a huge ethnic group that included pastoral people across Central Asia, from Turkey to Korea.
Like the Chinese in Vietnam, the Turks in north China intermarried significantly with the local population. Their descendants became powerful ethnically mixed clans of soldiers and generals. One of these families seized control of North China in the early 580s. By 589, their armies had conquered most of the southern heartland and they proclaimed a new dynasty, the Sui (pronounced "sway"). |
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The Sui had some big ideas.
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hey rebuilt sections of the Great Wall. They dug the world's largest canal between the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers to make it easier to tax and control the South.
Finally, the Sui decided to invade what is now North Korea, which was then under control of mixed Turk-Korean feudal lords. They failed disastrously. This was the last straw. The provincial governors stopped listening to the government. Armies mutinied. People took to the hills. In the end, another Turk/Chinese family took the reins, and declared the much longer-lasting Tang (pronounced "tong") Dynasty. |
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the Tang was awesome
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Their rulers' Turk language and relations helped them expand deep into Central Asia and open up new trade ties. Their rulers also had a love of foreign culture.
In major cities in the Tang, foreign influences reached a peak. Buddhist monasteries became very popular and even wielded political power. Christian churches were established in major cities to serve Persian immigrants. Zoroastrian temples became the focal points of Central Asian merchant communities. Mosques served both Arab merchants and Chinese Muslim converts. The cultural openness of the Tang went hand in hand with a massive growth in urban population. The Tang capital of Chang'an (modern Xi'an) reached a population of over 2 million people. All these different people exchanging ideas and goods in such close proximity led to an intellectual explosion. Because of its vibrant culture, the Tang is the setting for a lot of great martial arts movies, like House of Flying Daggers and Curse of the Golden Flower. The Tang was a |
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Wu Zetian
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seized power from her husband and son, and in the process angered a lot of Chinese/Turk aristocrats in the bureaucracy. She decided to fire the haters and replace them with new bureaucrats. To find new people, she ordered the imperial academy to come up with an essay exam to test people's knowledge of ethics, laws, and governance. This was called the civil service examination system.
These exams were brutal. They were written in a locked cell over a period of three days. Only about 2% of candidates even passed, and those 2% often came out with the Tang equivalent of a D-. The SAT Subject Tests have nothing on the civil service examinations. Wu Zetian was overthrown by her relatives, but they ended up keeping the civil service exam. A few centuries after, in the Song Dynasty, virtually all government employees got their jobs by passing the exam. |
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The Tang was notable for two very significant inventions
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printing and gunpowder.
In the Tang, someone now forgotten made the brilliant leap from using stamps to mark post office letters or official documents, to using page-sized stamps to print whole pages. These stamps were made by carving a page's text into a woodblock, and so the process was called woodblock printing. This made large print runs very cheap. Before printing, every book had to be copied out by hand. A 1000-book publishing deal cost as much money as 1000 one-book publishing deals. But with printing, once the woodblocks had been cut, additional books only cost as much as the paper and ink they were printed with. We can't overstate the importance of printing. Every technological advance since has been possible because of the ability to print and distribute large quantities of written material. Printing is the difference between an inventor being able to afford three or four science textbooks, and being able to afford a whole library. Near the end of the Tang or slightly aft |
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Gunpowder
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was invented by Taoist alchemists. Taoists had been interested in the chemical called saltpetre, which burns extremely hot and has an unusual flame. In their experiments to refine saltpetre, they cut it with other chemicals and created gunpowder.
Gunpowder had limited military application for most of this period. Fireworks were used as signals or, sometimes, as in the Disney movie Mulan, as weapons. Woo, historical accuracy! However, experiments with gunpowder in Central Asia led to the invention of cannons and guns, which were later introduced back into East Asia. |
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An Lushan Rebellion
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751, the Tang lost control of parts of Central Asia to an Arabian general. In 755, a Central Asian general named An Lushan rose up, leading to the bloody An Lushan Rebellion. By the time the Rebellion was put down, the Tang had lost control of many of their provinces. They responded by closing their borders and persecuting foreign populations.
This trend continued. In the ninth century, the Tang emperors decided that Buddhist monasteries had become too wealthy and powerful, and moved to close them down and force monks to join the taxpaying population. China would not experience the same openness to foreign influences until the 19th century. |
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Fifty years later, China was again unified. This time, the unifiers were southern Chinese military commanders who founded the Song Dynasty.
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The Song oversaw the mass manufacture of compasses, which made sea voyages a lot easier and safer. Long-distance sea trade with India, the Middle East, and Africa began ramping up, and the Song rulers were in on the ground floor, taxing every ship coming in to the southern ports.
The Song upper class ended up with fat stacks of silver and spent this money with compassion, implementing the world's first public hospitals and old age pension programs. Their government during this period is sometimes called the world's first welfare state. This welfare spending was motivated by a new philosophy called Neo-Confucianism, which sought to replace Buddhism in society with Confucianism and the State. |
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MONGOLS
The Song was conquered by the Mongol ruler Kublai Khan, who founded the Yuan Dynasty |
The Yuan is known for printing the world's first paper money; they're also known as the employers of the Italian merchant traveler Marco Polo.
The Yuan expanded China's borders farther than ever before. The Yuan were the first Chinese dynasty to conquer Tibet. Following the conquest, the Yuan rulers converted to Tibetan Buddhism. Unfortunately, this conversion didn't dull their violent side, and they led several failed campaigns against Japan and Vietnam that bankrupted China. The Yuan government fell amidst economic crisis, paving the way for the rule of the Ming. |
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Ming means "bright," and the Ming Dynasty's first priority was to become visible again to the rest of the world
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100 years of Mongol rule and war had damaged China's position as the world trade leader.
To repair the damage, the Ming commissioned the largest trade fleet the world had ever seen. Led by a Chinese Muslim, Admiral Zheng He, this fleet made seven voyages across the Indian Ocean. Along the way, they made trade contacts, sold goods, established diplomatic contact with foreign rulers, and collected books and technological inventions. Zheng He's fleet made it as far as Mecca and Mogadishu. |
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Zheng He
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To repair the damage, the Ming commissioned the largest trade fleet the world had ever seen. Led by a Chinese Muslim, Admiral Zheng He, this fleet made seven voyages across the Indian Ocean. Along the way, they made trade contacts, sold goods, established diplomatic contact with foreign rulers, and collected books and technological inventions. Zheng He's fleet made it as far as Mecca and Mogadishu.
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The Unification of Korea
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The Tang Dynasty was notorious for sticking their noses into other regions' business. They especially liked to get involved in Korea's business and made an alliance with one Korean kingdom near modern-day Seoul. The Tang then funded and supported this kingdom as it conquered the rest of Korea, in exchange for loyalty.
In 918 CE, a coup in this kingdom led to the establishment of Korea's first dynasty. Korean dynasties were Neo-Confucian to the extreme, with rigid social hierarchies and massive government involvement in the economy. |
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Vietnam
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Vietnam fell in and out of Chinese control over this period. However, a big break came for them when the Mongols conquered Song China and Vietnam declared itself independent. When the Mongols tried to invade, the Vietnamese beat them back.
This is seen as a founding moment for Vietnam. It distinguished them from the other southern Chinese-dominated regions as a separate and independent nation. |
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Southeast Asia
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Southeast Asia benefitted the most from the invention of the compass and long-distance trade. Small city-states turned into major kingdoms. In the northern islands, like Indonesia and Malaysia, Muslim merchants set up well-connected trading ports. In the south, the increased wealth made new exploration and settlement possible.
In particular, the kings of Polynesia loved the idea of exploration. Well-funded Polynesian explorers charted the South Pacific and set up colonies as far away as Hawaii. |
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In 710, an empress of Japan sent ambassadors to the Tang court. These ambassadors were ordered to study the Chinese government, and then decide if Japan could build a similar government. The conclusion? They decided that Japan could pull it off.
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Japan copied the Tang government very closely and even constructed a new capital, Nara, as a miniature version of the Tang capital. The rule of an imperial bureaucracy from Nara started the Nara Period.
However, building a powerful bureaucracy is harder than it looks, and the Japanese project was in trouble from the start. The empress wanted to give a job in the bureaucracy to all her family members. Unfortunately, her family was larger than the government—and getting bigger. The Japanese government ended up cutting off their more distant relatives and sent them to the countryside, denying them government posts. |
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some of these relatives, the Fujiwara family, rebelled, sacked Nara, and forced the emperor to move to their own capital in Heian, near Kyoto. This started marked the beginning of the Heian Period.
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This pattern repeated itself over and over in Japanese history. Eventually, the Fujiwaras lost all their power to another distantly related family, the Minamotos. The Minamoto family ruled through a "barbarian-defeating general," or Shogun, and were called the Kamakura Shogunate.
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Japan did well under the Kamakura Shogunate
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They defeated Mongol invaders, built huge port cities, and sent merchants across Southeast Asia.
The Kamakura Shogunate also saw a major advancement in world literature. The aristocratic Lady Murasaki Shikibu wrote a book called The Tale of Genji, which was about a fictional prince who wanders Japan around sleeping with women. This is considered to be the world's first novel. Thanks to printing technology from China, The Tale of Genji spread across East Asia. |
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daimyo
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The shoguns did away with the expensive bureaucracy and ruled as feudal lords. They took taxes from local lords called daimyo, who in turn took taxes from peasants.
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Ninja, karate
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Once and for all, here's the difference between a samurai, a ninja, and a karate master. A samurai was a professional warrior paid to fight by a daimyo, or landlord. They practiced archery, horseback riding, fencing, and judo wrestling. A ninja was a hired assassin from the highlands of central Japan. Ninjas practiced stealth, guerilla tactics, and ninjutsu. A karate master was a commoner or townsperson who perfected the art of personal unarmed self-defense
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