Editing China (section)

===Early Imperial China===
* ''[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qin_dynasty Qin]'': Probably the shortest dynasty that people actually remember and care about, but it had the great emperor Qin Shi Huangdi. Yes, this motherfucker had the nads literally to name himself "God". Uniting the nation by military force, the so-called "First Emperor" invented probably the first modern nation-state, standardizing culture, weights, measures, roads, and countless other things to ensure that the Chinese stopped thinking of themselves as being from Lu, Jin, or Wei and started thinking of themselves as Chinese.  He's got a bad reputation as a crazed mass-murderer too, but that was mostly because he made enemies with the Confucians and the Confucians wrote the history books for two millenia and some change to come.  He also "abolished history" by burning all the books not containing useful technical information (and occasionally their authors as well), keeping only a copy of each one in his private library for the leader's personal use, which was promptly lost after his death - which happened sooner than it should have, because he thought that [[fail|chugging mercury would make him immortal]].  What he built barely survived him, but there's a reason the modern nation still bears his name.  (...It's pronounced "chin."  Goddamn pinyin.)
* ''[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_dynasty Han]'': This one's so important it's still what the Chinese call themselves as an ethnic group.  Roughly contemporaneous with the Roman Empire, with each being aware of the other without ever quite meeting (partly because the Parthian Empire was really anal about playing middle-man on the Silk Road). They seemed to think of themselves as opposite versions of themselves on opposite ends of the world. The Han was founded by a former Qin Sheriff who lost some of his prisoners during a convoy; realizing that the punishment would be death, he decided that he already had nothing to lose and instigated a successful rebellion against the Qin (this is why there is such a thing as too severe a punishment when it ceases to be a deterrent). Introduced the concept of a centralized bureaucracy offering positions to applicants who were judged by local officials based on the Confucian classics, the latter of which would survive until the Sui initiated reforms and the ''former'' of which didn't go away until the Emperor did.  A hugely-prosperous, technologically-skilled, highly-advanced society, with a new coinage standard that, unfortunately, as part of a running theme, began to fall into weakness and decadence.  First, the eunuchs, always resentful of their snipping, tried seizing power for themselves, only for military officers to storm the capital and slaughter them all, leading first to a tenuous military dictatorship, and then to, well...  
* ''[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Kingdoms Three Kingdoms], and the Romancing Thereof'': The late Han dynasty and generation shortly thereafter was a great and heroic age. It was a time of larger-than-life personalities, brave generals, brilliant strategists, and masterful politicians.   It is worthy of study both for historical/entertainment value and for inspiration in any good tabletop campaign that wants to have a military-political element.  And it is the subject of one of the Four Classical Novels, the historical epic usually translated into "The Romance of the Three Kingdoms" in English, this being the reason of its fame.  Unfortunately, it is also ''bastard complicated'', so let's just say that one of the Three Kingdoms finally usurped the Han after using them as a puppet state for a while, and then conquered the others a generation later, all the while, after successive underage emperors, being a puppet to the founders of the next dynasty.  Most gamers in the west know this period due to the Dynasty Warriors series and the [https://1d4chan.org/wiki/Total_War#Total_War:_Three_Kingdoms Total War: Three Kingdoms] game.