Editing China (section)

==Fun Facts and Moronic Misconceptions about China==

* There is technically no singular Chinese language, instead you have a few dominant spoken tongues (politically classified as dialects) like Cantonese and Mandarin followed by a gorillion smaller dialects. They do share a common written script (though that too is split between Simplified and Traditional) so even if a Cantonese and Shanghaiese speaker can’t speak to each other, they can at least communicate with writing to a modest extent. The closest analogy would be an Italian and a Portuguese person (shared Latin root and alphabet but not necessarily mutually intelligible tongues).

* China is one of the oldest polities in the world in terms of broad cultural continuity, meaning that while other nations would radically change or get supplanted, China was more or less enduringly Chinese.

* As with dialects/language, the country is actually composed of a number of ethnicities, the dominant being the Han, followed by the Mongols, Manchu and Zhuang.

* Yes - cats, dogs, bats and other critters are on the menu, though this has less to do with extreme Chinese omnivorism and more with the fact that famines were so bad that it was either that weird animal-thing or starvation. Having rice 7 days a week is prosperity, when times get bad you eat tree bark and grass.

* The Song dynasty (960. - 1279.) was remarkably tech-savy and had intensive industry in steel production and coal mining, being close to the 18th century Europe and possibly to industrialization. They were in the cusp of moving from feudalism to a more cosmopolitan and mercantile society. For better or worse, this was cut short by, you guessed it - the Mongols.