Almohad dynasty

29 November, 1915 If the Turks don’t get me first, I might just die of boredom. There are no books here, and the closest thing to entertainment is Captain Crownsworth’s deck of cards. The soldiers make wagers, but have nothing to bet. “If ya beat me, I’ll give ya a hundred pound when we get home, I swears it!” they say, or something along those lines. The only trouble is no one really knows when we’ll get home, if at all. Not to mention, I doubt that any non-officer here has a hundred pounds to…

What helped the Qin Dynasty reunify China after the Era of the Warring States? After the era of the Warring States the Qin ruler managed to reunify the country by a combination of military force and administrative reorganization (pg176.) China became a unified empire after the six largest states surrendered or fell to Qin armies. `Shih Huang-di administrative gifts were tremendous and his personality defects were huge. The administration was unified on Legalist principles by the emperor who…

is legitimate since it had dominated the territory of the central realm. The Central Plain is the allegedly rightful territory of the central realm as ancient Chinese believed. Just as mentioned in 2.2.3, both the Northern Wei and the southern dynasties adopted various ways to manifest their dominance of the Central Plain thereby to ensure their territorial legitimacy. Huangfu Shi, however, has a different view towards the central realm. As he argues, the central realm did not possess any fixed…

When the Han dynasty ceased, China was ushered into a period of unrest. The system of ethics based Confucianism was shown to be flawed. Buddhism was spreading, and it showed similarities with Daoism. So, the Chinese took the best out of the three, and the period of unrest was over. However, in the Song dynasty Confucianism would once again be dominant. The Chinese thrived in the arts and in architecture, with creations like the pagoda. The Chinese also had many technological advances and the…

The Han Dynasty and the Roman Empire existed during the Classical Era (500 b.c.e. – 500 c.e.). They were both second-wave civilizations, meaning they took place after and were somewhat based off of the world’s first civilizations. These regions were similar due to the fact that China accepted the new religion of Buddhism while Rome accepted the new idea of Christianity, as well as how the men in China were the heads of their families while male citizens in Rome had control over their wives,…

Tang Yin (1470-1523), also known as Tang Bohu or Tang Ziwei, was a famous artist of the middle Ming dynasty. Interestingly, his names are not only associated with the historical figure of a recognized painter and poet, but also with numerous fictions that feature him as the protagonist, ranging from Ming dynasty novels to modern television shows. Within the Tang Yin scholarship, studies are therefore sometimes divided into the ones on his biography and oeuvre and those on the fictional or…

outstanding naval capacity in the early 1400s (see the discussion of the Ming voyages in the unit Ming Voyages: 1405-1433). The Chinese political and social order is at its height in this "late imperial" period of the last two dynasties: the examination system has, from the Tang dynasty onward, created a strong centralized and fully functional civil service in place of an aristocratic elite with a territorial base of power. Scholar-gentry, residing at home as they study for the next level of…

In addition to Muslim religion, Islamic scientific and technological advancement had fundamental impacts on the Silk Road participants. For instance, Chinese Buddhist traders conformed to the Islamic medical knowledge with regards to wound healing and urine analysis (Beckwith 2009, p.22). Furthermore, as Muslims carried out trading and religious activities in India, they brought some knowledge related to astronomy; for example, scepticism of the universe was the idea found in the Indian science,…

non-Chinese civilizations as barbaric. In 1380, Fang Xiaoru, a Confucian scholar of the Ming Dynasty, wrote about the Yuan/Mongol rule, saying that they instilled a barbaric culture in Chinese society. He said that the ignorance of human relationships, barbaric living habits, and greed formed from Yuan rule consequently destroyed Chinese culture. This view of Mongols as barbarians became…

I was unaware of the fact that the Romans had such a huge impact on the maritime trade. I knew that they had boats that were capable; but I had never realized the full extent of their impact. It is interesting how quickly the Indian culture icked up the trade as well. The shipbuilding occurring in India is unlike others and the insight that they have to possess in order to build them without sketches and only a vision is something I highly respect. Also the insight into the patterns of the…