China

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China/Qing Dynasty at its greatest extent, an overloading land-hog and a source for all the Chinatowns in the world

When people say Asia, the first thing that would pop in their heads is China (Much to the other Asians dismay). China as we all know, is one of the Oldest As Fuck Civilizations that is still flexing their Geopolitical muscles, with a history that spends over 5000 years and is still kicking. How old are they? they were already making high city walls and Empires when the Glorious Romans were still living in mud huts, yeah that fucking old. Only the likes of the Egyptian Dynasties, Mesopotamia, Babylonian Empire, India and other early Middle-Eastern/Euro-African Empires rivaled or surpasses it in sheer age and unlike China, they are all dead. Furthermore, unlike most civilizations which had one Golden Age in its lifetime, China had Three Golden Ages. However unlike the others listed (With the exception of India) who unfortunately suffered the common symptoms of civilization heart attacks, coronary barbarian infections or outright absorptions, China and to some extent India manage to survive by sheer isolation. China is also known for their Celestial Dragon Emprahs, multiple imperial Dynasties, overpoweringly influential, being too unusually advance for their age for nearly 2000 years, "Four Great Inventions" (Compass, Gunpowder, Paper and Printing), Confucius, martial arts, Chinese New Year and now recently Communists or manufacturing everything you buy in very, very poor quality.

On a much more unfortunate note, China was also known as being a bunch of incredibly Arrogant and Egoistical Cockhats with a massive Superiority Complex that made even the Stiff Upper-Lip British look tame in comparison. In a more simplified note, they viewed themselves and their civilization as the, "Center of the Universe and only civilization on the planet, that is unfortunately surrounded by filthy uncivilized barbarians and animals that want to pillage China because their soooooo jealous of our cultural enlightenment and achievements". Tl;dr sounds fucking familiar to you?

To give you a clue on how Egoistical China was, check a look on the list of the amount of honorifics they get, yes even the fucking nicknames of China make the British "Empire where the Sun never Set" look amateur in comparison. These honorifics are....

• Middle Kingdom
• Celestial Empire/Kingdom
• Heavenly Empire/Kingdom
• Center Kingdom
• Universal Civilization
• Land of the Heavenly, Celestial...(Pick the name of whichever Chinese Dynasty here)
• Empire of the Great Ming
• Empire of the Great Qing
• Great Chinese Empire
• Sleeping Giant of Asia
• Sleeping Dragon of Asia
• Land of the Dragon Emperor
• The Roman Empire of the East
• Cradle of Civilization of the East

And my personal favorite....

• The Empire so damn rich and wealthy, that even with all the treaties it had to pay in the 19th century, it still had a GDP twice that of the entire US economy today

History of China Part 1: The Ancient Times

As we all know, China has a lot of historical content, so we tried our best to fit all the important bits and peaces in a small and condensed paragraph.

Prehistory

Leving aside some Homo erectus, Modern Humans first showed up in East Asia about 75,000 years ago. For at least 20,000 people in China were making pottery. About 7,000 BCE some chinese farmers worked out how to grow millet and we have the rise and fall of a bunch of regional cultures to which we know little, but we do know that they worked out glazed ceramics, how to make silk, some systems of markings which might have been forms of writing and by 3,000 BCE they could work bronze.

Xia Dynasty: Fake or Real?

According to a few ancient accounts of note (among them being those cited by Confucius), there was a great kingdom ruled by a Dynasty founded by a King named Yu the Engineer from about 2100 BCE to 1600 BCE, which the Shang overthrew. The problem being that these accounts were written at least centuries after it fell. Its not in dispute that some form of comparatively complex agrarian civilization existed in China at that time, there is no hard evidence that said culture or cultures added up to something to the effect of the Dynasty described.

Shang Dynsaty

In the Shang Dynasty we begin to get written accounts about how things operated and we see something to the effect of Chinese writing emerging written on cattle bones. The Shang Dynasty was a theocracy in which a central priest king who ruled by burning bones and making predictions based on how they cracked. Weird as this is, the Shang managed to make a bunch of other clans of people their vassals and get taxes out of them and this set up lasted for more than 500 years.

Even so it eventually fell. The last king of Shang was by all accounts a sadistic tyrant and an enormous asshole - taxes were raised to build him new palaces and pleasure domes, which he'd fill with lakes of wine and trees hung full of meat and had people frolic in while he watched; when he got tired of that he started inventing new ways of burning people to death. This didn't endear him to his people or his vassals, one of whom was the king of this podunk kingdom called the Zhou - the fact that the king of Shang also killed and fed him his son that one time didn't help. So eventually the Zhou went all Last Alliance on the Shang and took over.

Of course, do note that most of what was passed down about the Shang dynasty (that wasn't confirmed by modern archaeological findings) was about how awful their last king was, and remember the Zhou had to justify their uprising somehow, so take the above paragraph with a bit of salt.

Zhou Dynasty

Zhou was originally a smaller kingdom that bordered the Shang kingdom in Western China and eventually managed to take it over in 1046 BCE. When they did the Zhou King Wu came up with the justification for their takeover: Heaven had given the Shang Kings a mandate to rule, but because they had become corrupt and debased they had taken that Mandate away and have given it to the Zhou Dynasty. The idea stuck and the Zhou conquerors gained influence. At the same time agriculture improved, the population expanded and things were alright, for couple of centuries at least.

Spring and Autumn Rapefest

After King Wu took over, he worked out a feudal system for china and put his relatives and generals in charge of various fiefs. The problem was that he gave them too much power and the central Zhou government gradually became irrelevant. The various fiefs built up their own armies, treated the King's orders as suggestions and eventually began fighting with each other over territory, which would just get worse and worse. Eventually smaller fiefdoms were eaten up by larger ones. At this point, people in china started working iron and building crossbows, which helped make these battles get even bloodier.

Among the people who took notice this bloodshed, as well as rampant corruption was a tax collector who would become known in the west as Confucius. His philosophies based around his ideas about humans should interact (tl,dr version: Subordinates should be loyal and respect their superiors, superiors have an obligation to be supportive to his subordinate and together both should work to be good people and create a nice harmonious society where shit gets done) would latter become the official ideology for china for years to come. Also, this period produced Sun Tsu and his book The Art of War.

Warring States Period of Bloodbath

The difference between the warring states period and the Spring and Autumn period was the fact that during the Spring and Autumn Period still pretended at times that the Zhou government was actually running things when it served its purposes. In the warring states they stopped playing that game and simply acted as independent states and (as the name suggests) fought with each other all the time.

Some of these states funded their armies by taking some of the silk that they made and selling it to people going west. These guys would again sell it to guys going further west, and so on and so on until the silk reached Persia and Greece and was insanely expensive.

History of China Part 2: Too Many Fucking Dynasties

Qin Dynasty: First EMPRAH!

A Terracotta Soldier, one of 8,000 such statues. Giving a whole new meaning of "Dieing with style".

One of those Warring States in the Warring States period was Qin. Eventually it became ruled by a guy called Qin Shi Huangdi, an exceptional statesman and military leader. Under his rule and using Legalist philosophy he re-worked his society. He raised a vast army which instead of being led by nobles who got their position due to birth, it's officers were promoted from the ranks. Power was centralized and one gained positions of power by exceptional service to the Qin state. By 221 BCE, all the other warring states had been crushed ruthlessly. He then proceeded to introduce a single system of writing and spread his centralized bureaucratic system across all the states he had conquered. Thus Qin Shi Huangdi became china's first Emperor. Word of his conquests managed to work its way along the silk road and eventually made its way to Rome, where "Qin" was corrupted to "Sina", which two thousand years latter would become in English word China.

The big problem was that while he was an effective ruler (at least until he went crazy from eating too much jade and drinking mercury to try to become immortal), he was also a brutal one. People who were not drafted into the army were drafted into building roads, the beginnings of the great wall and eventually his tomb with it's terracotta army. Defiance was dealt with swiftly and brutally with a whole bunch of executions. This did not endear him to the people and after he died, there was a rebellion which ended his dynasty in 206 BCE. According to one story, the thing that got the ball of Rebellion going was some conscripts getting delayed by bad weather and given the choice between arriving late and being executed or rebellion and possibly surviving, they rebelled.

Han Dynasty: AKA The First Golden Age of China

Fortunately for the Chinese, things did not go back into Warring states period after the Qin were overthrown. Xiao He managed to unite the peoples that Qin had conquered and formed the Han Dynasty. It was the first time that Confucianism was adopted as an official ideology, though some Legalist ideas were kept. For four centuries society prospered and advanced. Paper, Porcelain, waterwheels and fairly advanced mathmatics (including negative numbers) were developed. Due to the prosperity, the Han Dynasty would then become the name of the largest ethnic group in China, the Han Chinese. There was also a obsession among the rich to try to mix up potions of immortality out of minerals and plants. Usually this only yielded potions of mortality, though this will continue and be of some importance latter on.

Three Kingdoms: The Breakup

But like all good things the Han Dynasty eventually came to an end. Around 180 CE The central government weakened and a few civil wars caused the local officials to build up their armies for defense. Eventually the Prime Minister Cao Cao decided to re-unite china while being very brutal in doing so, but he was eventually defeated at the battle of Red Cliffs.

Song Dynasty: The Third Golden Age of China

Song Dynasty Firelance: M16, AK-47, Lee Enfield, Mauser; they all are the great great grandkids of this badboy

History of China Part 4: From "Red is Best, Fuck Capitalism!" to "Get Rich is Glorious!"

Cold War: Great Concept, but utter Failures

Korean War

China and USSR Marriage Proposal

Great Leap Backwards

The Divorce

Cultural Revolution: It Failed Again

Nixon in China

Goodbye Mao and hello Capitalism

Chinese Analogues in Fantasy

Due to its exoticism and age, there are a couple of Chinese inspired Empires in Fantasy.

• Eldar - Despite having weapons like Shuriken Catapults and Celtic names, the Eldar is actually more Chinese inspired. Examples include the cultural and historical arrogance, being incredibly advance for their era, martial arts, phoenix and dragon worshiping, being fantastic racists to everyone else and the obvious Yin-Yang symbols in some of the Eldar artworks.
• Cathay - Based on the old name for China, this is deliberate and perfect example.
• Dynasty Warriors - A series of Video Games based solely on the Chinese mythology and legends, expect a lot oversexualised women since the games was created in Japan.
• Jade Dynasty - similar to Dynasty Warriors, but in MMO style.
• Easterlings - The Movies depicted them as Persians with Chinese influence, while GW based most of their models on Samurais.