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. Wars in this period involved tens of thousands of peasant conscripts clad in scale armor (either wood or metal) armed with crossbows, halberds, pikes and short swords fighting in formations commanded by nobles on chariots, who also acted as bow armed cavalrymen.

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

Though the Zhou were a memory, their idea of the Mandate of Heaven would live on and would be used. One ruling household and their officials would become complacent and corrupt so Heaven would show its disapproval with things like famines (IE farmland was not properly managed and emergency granneries were not kept topped up), banditry (peasants who were starving due to said famines began to steal stuff to survive) and barbarian raids (soldiers who would have been guarding the boarders are re-assigned to deal with the bandits or, annoyed that their paychecks have not arrived in six months, bugger off and either go home or join with the bandits), so some rebels and a a charismatic general who is not a total dick comes in, defeats the Imperial Armies. Since he deposed of the guys to which Heaven had gotten mad at, it was clear that they lost it and had given it to the victor since he was the victor and all. In time, things go down hill again and the cycle continues.

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. Liu Bang 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 (not including the time they moved the capital east after barbarians sacked the last one). Paper, Porcelain, waterwheels and fairly advanced mathematics (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 their efforts only yielded potions of mortality, though this will continue and be of some importance latter on. At this time, Buddhism began to enter China.

There was also the 14-year Xin Interregnum right in the middle, but nobody counts that as a proper dynasty.

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.

From 220 to 280 there were three states, Wei in the north, Shu in the southwest and Wu in the southeast which fought like a bag of cats to reclaim the Imperial throne. Even so, technology marched on with guys like Ma Jun and Zhuge Liang inventing repeating crossbows and compasses and so forth. Wei evnetually conquered Shu, but Wei eventually fell to an new upstart called the Jin rose up, conquered Wei and eventually conquered Wu.

This period is the setting of "Romance of the Three Kingdoms", one of the most important bits of classical Chinese literature.

Southern and Northern Dynasties

The Jin Dynasty eventually broke into two states in 420, one in the north and one of the south. Unlike the Three Kingdoms, these kingdoms went through several short lived Dynasties. The South had the Liu Song, Southern Qi, Liang and Chen. The North had the Northern Wei, Eastern Wei, Western Wei, Northern Qi and Northern Zhou.

Sui Dynasty: The Rather Short-Lived One

China was reunified under the banner of Sui. The Sui Dynasty were effective administrators, but were also pretty brutal and warlike. Among the accomplishments of the Sui Dynasty was the construction of the Great Canal, a 1776 kilometer artificial waterway running north to south which is still in use today, the re-centralization of power and the creation of the Imperial Examinations. Rather than having hereditary nobles running stuff, every year there would be examinations where people had to write essays based on Confucian moral philosophy. The guy who wrote the best essay out of a five hundred guys got a diploma and could take a position in the Imperial Bureaucracy. Never the less, they wasted a bunch of resources trying to take over Korea, which soon led to their end.

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!"

Chinese Civil War Part 2: Communists win everything!

After the little fun and tag game called "World War 2" had officially ended in 1945, which left China financially bankrupt and Japan personally irradiated, the Nationalist Party in China which was still led by Mr. "Cash My Cheque" was forced to have a truce with Mr. Mao, the leader of the Communist Party. As you can imagine, having a Fascist, Paranoid and Incompetent Dictator try and sign a 'peace treaty' with a Communistic, Paranoid and Incompetent Dictator wasn't going to end well, and sooner enough the two parties resumed their age-old Civil War against each other. However unlike the Civil War from before WW2, this time the people was on the side of the Communists. This was because the Nationalist "genius idea" of taxing the local peasants during their War against Japan while getting almost nothing done, contrasted to the Communists who actually got shit done and promised the local peasants of what they want is bound to foreshadow something severely bad for the Nationalists. When the Civil War Part 2 was undergoing its way, America being the "Bringer of Democracy and Freedom" decides to say "Fuck this shit" and proceed to ignore the Nationalists call for help until the last minute. America's reason for not helping the Nationalists initially was mainly because they found out it wasn't really a good idea to support Chiang Kai Shek, a person they knew was politically corrupt and paranoid as well as being notorious for being an incompetent military leader, all the while leading a Political Party which had no support for the majority of the people and was more corrupt then the failed-states in the Middle-East, against a rival Party whose leader (Although just as politically incompetent as Chiang) could at least know a few rules on how Wars actually work. Needless to say, within a span of a few years, the Communist forces kick the Nationalists ass out of mainland China, even despite the fact that the Nationalists had more numbers, better equipment, more tanks and planes, more advance weaponry and a logistic advantage, and they still lost miserably, all because Mr. Chiang thought it was a 'brilliant idea' to become the commander of the Nationalists military despite having little to no skill in the battlefield. By the next year, the Communists ousted out the last Nationalist from Hainan Island and declared the "People's Republic of China", led by Mao Zedong and was close enough to conquer Taiwan (ROC Headquarters by then), until America intervened at the right moment by threatening to nuke china, needless to say that sooner or later, China constructed its first nuclear bomb and gave America the middle finger by calling it a, "Paper-Tiger" or AKA a Pussy, while later stating to America, "We can afford losing over 300 million men, but can you? thereby making Mao as one of histories greatest Trolls. Mao was, like most communist dictators, a pretty fun guy to be around. He espoused a particularly fun brand of Communism called Maoism which theoretically called for a state of constant revolutionary turmoil, and practically speaking amounted to doing whatever the fuck Mao felt like at the moment. So on any given day Chinese peasants might be exhorted to kill all the sparrows in the country, and then next day it would switch up and they'd have to kill all the intellectuals. Whether this was political theater or Mao legitimately being insane as a shithouse rat is debatable, but there's undoubtedly a bit of both involved. What we do know is that he and his right hand man Zhou Enlai would spend the next twenty five years running history's most successful good cop bad cop routine.

Cold War: Great Concept, but utter Failures

Korean War

China and USSR Marriage Proposal

Great Leap Backwards Around 1958 Mao decided that being a barely-post-feudal agricultural society sucked, and that he'd prefer it if China was a modern manufacturing power. Since Mao tended to get what Mao wanted, and since China had an acute murder related shortage of phd economists, everybody decided to go along with this. For this greatest domestic program Mao dredged the bottom-most reaches of his insanity for ideas. What he came up with was termed "The Great Leap Forward". The general idea was that China needed to modernize yesterday and that the way to do that was to mobilize every last human being into heavy industry. Initially a great idea at the time, but due to Mao's short-sightedness and political disorganization, the results were to say the least...disappointing. This is because the increased in homemade industrialization led to a resulting drop in farming, even more collectivization, and revolutionary zeal. Every insane program imaginable was tested at this time. Officials insisted farmers bury their seeds two feet underground and directly next to each other, because even plants need class struggle apparently. Another genius decided that sparrows were eating all the grain (they were actually eating locusts), so peasants were told to wipe out the species. There was also a lot of good old fashioned "Eating everything that moves". Fields were uprooted and replanted in others to give the appearance of plenty, woks and doorknobs were melted down to make steel in backyard furnaces, and everywhere party cadres competed to one up each another with ludicrous stories of how well their economies were doing. The central planners were thrilled with this turn of events and quickly ratcheted up the tax rate to compensate.

As it turns out Etsy tier steel yards and bird genocide are not acceptable foundations for a real economy, socialist scientists were all retarded (or dead), and you can't eat revolutionary zeal. That is to say the result was a massive recession tag teamed by an even more massive famine. Mao responded to this critical situation by promptly exporting their remaining grain reserves to the Soviet Union to cover some old debts he'd been welshing on. As the harvest season ended the peasants stripped their fields down to the last grain of rice. With the grain exhausted and no money to import, China's peasantry was left to subsist on nothing but their family pets and fond memories of the 50s. By most modern estimates 36 million Chinese would die in the next four years. History deals with a lot of big numbers, but try to wrap your head around that. Mao Zedong managed to kill more people (with economic stimulus) than every world war two military could manage to intentionally inflict on each other, in a comparable time frame. Literally making Mao the largest accidental and unintentional Men-Slaughterers in human history, all because of his short-sightedness and naivety.

Fortunately there are limits to collective human insanity, and the politburo finally managed to team up and "retire" Mao. Officially he was still leader, but practically speaking he was not invited to the meetings anymore and had to content himself with shuffling around his villa and yelling at counterrevolutionary kids to get off his damn lawn. Also it was one of the few things that Mao had severely regretted and would forever haunt him since it utterly ruined his reputation, furthermore unlike most Dictators, Mao absolutely hated the concept of a personality cult, believing that it made him as nothing more then a tool/joke (Something that he and all of us would eventually find as correct), but unfortunately, you can't stop a billion plus people of illiterates of accidentally worshiping you like a God, so he just let it pass. This kind of proved that although politically short-sighted and being slightly senile/insane which unintentionally led the deaths of millions, Mao hilariously proved to be more human then either Stalin, The Three Kims, Hitler and Tojo combined all because that he knew (With some help of being politically smacked on the head) that the decisions he made was utter failures, and looked back on it with regret.

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.