Editing China (section)

===Medieval Imperial China===
* ''[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sui_dynasty Sui]'': The good: they reunited a divided China, and 1) successfully undertook such vast internal-improvement projects as the Grand Canal connecting the city of Beijing in the north to the city of Hangzhou in the south, a thousand miles away; 2) initiated the test reforms, which will slowly change China into the model state in Voltaire's eyes in the course of five hundred years. The bad: they were extravagant assholes and control freaks whose projects were built on a foundation of peasant bones mortared with blood. Fell apart after the second emperor's repeated attempts to conquer Korea against dogged resistance and interference from the top broke the back of the army.
* ''[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tang_dynasty Tang]'': The Emperor Li Yuan, who seized the capital from the Sui, is his dynasty in microcosm.  When he took power, the people thought he would be the greatest emperor in their nation's history; energetic, brilliant, skilled at all manner of government, military, and artistic tasks. He stabilized the shaking nation.  Then he turned into a paranoid, murderous asshole as he got older until he finally got deposed.  Sounds about right. This is the age in which the Chinese invented gunpowder, and, at its height, it was also the richest, most-advanced, most-cosmopolitan society on Earth, rolfstomping basically every thing that crossed the great houses of the dynasty. Problem is such conquest was completed by governor-generals that can tax their lands, which allowed them to rebel quite easily. The Tang dynasty also had the only officially recognized empress regnant (i.e. a woman who rules as a monarch in her own right, not as the wife of the emperor) in the history of Imperial China, Wu Zetian. Once things started falling apart, a radical sect of Confucianism began attempting to purge China of "outside influences" and restore China to the good old days through teaching and circulating their works,  and also encouraging persecution and robbery of said outside influences, including Christianity and Buddhism.  Buddhism survived, Christianity (Nestorians) did not.