History Of Ancient China | Dynasties, Confucius, And The First Emperor

This video is sponsored by CuriosityStream. Get free access to my video streaming service, Nebula, when you sign up at CuriosityStream using the link in the description. This is China. It's big. Most of your stuff probably comes from there and they have a solar farm shaped like a panda. But most interestingly China is old. For as long as people have been talking about history there has been a China to point to. So how did China become the world's oldest continuous civilization? What's it's dynasty? Who's Confucius? And is it ever okay to just bury people alive? Well let's find out. China was born along two great rivers, the Yellow and the Yangtze. People began farming rice and millet here around 8000 BCE. Silk cultivation would follow at around 3000 BCE and silk would remain a Chinese trade secret for thousands of years. But these early farmers had a problem. The Yellow River. Which had this nasty habit of flooding everyone to death. Enter Yu. Well no, not Yu, but like Yu, Yu the Engineer. He spent 13 years travelling up and down the land fighting the floods. So dedicated was he to his task that he walked past his own home on several occasions but never went inside to visit his wife or newborn child. Yu built canals that led the excess floodwater into the fields or out to sea and so stopped the floods. Everyone was very impressed with Yu, he gets named king and so starts China's first dynasty, the Xia Dynasty. What's a dynasty you might ask? A dynasty is a family that rules over China. If the family dies or is overthrown a new family takes over...eventually. China would be ruled by dynasties from now up until 1911 CE. It kind of tells you a lot about Chinese culture that one of their greatest heroes is a hydraulic engineer. The Xia are said to have reigned from around 2100-1600 BCE. We used to think that the Xia were fictional, which isn't wrong but isn't really right either. We have evidence like bronze tools, the remains of cities, and tombs near Erlitou and Yanshi that point to an urban civilization existing around 2100-1600 BCE. But it probably wasn't an actual unified state. More a collection of culturally similar cities and villages. It was once believed that a distinct Chinese culture spread out from the Xia to the rest of China but now examples of dozens of Neolithic cultures ranging from Manchuria to Guangdong have been unearthed. None is really more advanced than the others. Chinese civilization seems to have been forged by all of these cultures mixing together. By the 16th century BCE the Chinese had learned to mix tin, lead, and copper together to form bronze. Warriors riding a new Eurasian import called the Chariot took these fancy bronze weapons and clobbered the Xia to death with them. These people founded the Shang Dynasty which was like an actual dynasty. Sorry Xia but you just weren't. At the Shang capital of Anyang archaeologists have dug up tens of thousands of so-called oracle bones. Priests would scratch questions for the gods on these bones and then apply heat to them. The heat would crack the bones and those cracks would be read as a response from the gods. The incredible thing about these oracle bones is that the questions were written on them. The Chinese independently invented writing. These bones have recognisably Chinese characters. We can still read a fair amount of them. This script on the oracle bones is the ancestor of modern Chinese. The last of the pre-imperial Three Dynasties is the Zhou who overthrew the Shang around 1045 BCE. They would still be there nearly 800 years later. China's later dynasties wouldn't last half as long. The Zhou came from the Wei Valley and were vassals to the Shang. But getting tired of that they coddled up their armies, marched into Shang territory, and whooped them at the Battle of Muyi. The defeated Shang king fled back to his palace, had himself a little bit of a cry, and then burned the palace down with himself inside. This posed a question to the Chinese. The Shang ruled because heaven had given them the right to rule. How could the Zhou just come along and overthrow them? Surely the Zhou were in the wrong here. Luckily, the Zhou had an answer. Heaven had dumped the Shang. Why? Well, according to ancient Chinese historian Sima Qian, the last Shang king may have hosted some festive orgies and written some extremely pornographic poems and tortured a bunch of people and maybe, just maybe, built himself a giant alcohol lake. And inside of previously said alcohol lake built a meat forest. Heaven frowns on that kind of behaviour. This resulted in the Shang losing heaven's mandate, which heaven was happy to transfer to a more virtuous people like the Zhou. From now, heaven would throw storms, earthquakes, and peasant uprisings at rulers that it saw as unfit. If rulers didn't listen and change, the mandate of heaven would fall from their grasp and into another's. The mandate of heaven became central to Chinese politics as different dynasties lost and claimed the mandate for the next few thousand years. Under the Zhou, China's first classical texts were written. Irrigation and flood control sprang up along with a large bureaucracy. A network of canals were built to transport food and luxuries. Zhou elite families could live in fancy walled cities and enjoy poetry in silk clothing while commanding large armies and taxing the peasants to death. It was a time of immense change. Iron appeared in China around the 9th century BCE, about a thousand years later than in the Middle East. But the Chinese quickly became experts. Europe and the Middle East could not figure out how to melt iron and so were forced to use wrought iron, which is terrible. By the 4th century BCE the Chinese were using heat-resistant clay in their furnaces which allowed them to reach temperatures of over 1,537 degrees Celsius so they could liquefy iron and cast it into moulds. This technology wouldn't reach Europe for another 1,800 years. This gave the Chinese much stronger tools and weapons that could be produced on a massive scale. Trade kicked off as the population soared to 15 million and cities turned into manufacturing centres. Chinese silk has been discovered as far away as Germany in the 6th century BCE suggesting that the famous Silk Road was already emerging. The Zhou started using money which was a novel idea at the time. It was shaped like knives or spades which seems inconvenient but they were figuring things out. The Zhou kingdom had an issue though. It was very decentralised. It was a feudal state so the king handed out his lands to lords. But these local lords began to amass more and more power and the Zhou began to lose control of their own kingdom. In 1771 BCE the Zhou capital was sacked and they fled to a new capital at Laoyang. The Zhou still had about 500 years left in them but at this point they were just puppets to their much more powerful vassals. This ended the Western Zhou period and began the Eastern Zhou period. This period is divided into two parts, both named after the historical texts that record them. The Spring and Autumn Annals and the Warring States Annals. At the beginning of the Spring and Autumn period 148 states were all fighting to be top dog. This whittled down to about 30 or so and in the highly volatile Warring States period it brought it down to 7, then 3, and finally 1. But troubled times bring new ideas. At around the same time the warring city-states of Ancient Greece gave us Socrates and the competing Vedic kingdoms of India brought us Mahavira and the Buddha. In Ancient China the most important philosopher in East Asian history is about to be born. Master Kong, or Confucius as he is known to us, lived a fairly uneventful life. A failed civil servant, dying in 479 BCE without ever having wielded any real power or influence. But he had managed to gather a small group of followers who recorded his sayings in the Analects. Confucius' philosophy was concerned with the chaos that was destroying China. He wanted to restore order to a world that was falling apart. To do this Confucius advocated a system of five hierarchical relationships. The five relationships were ruler to subject, husband to wife, father to son, older brother to younger brother, and friend to friend. The younger partner was always supposed to respect and honour the older or more male partner. Yeah, Confucius as a man from thousands of years ago wasn't really great when it came to women so keep that in mind. Most of these relationships were within the family with the father holding the highest position. This led to a tradition of filial piety, still important in East Asia today. Filial piety means to be good to one's parents, to respect them, to follow their orders, and to act in a way that positively reflects on them. It worked the other way too. Parents were supposed to provide the best care possible for their children and make sure they were safe and their futures secure. Within this system family came before anything else. Confucius emphasised a concept called Ren which roughly translates to benevolence or humanity. This virtue was key to Confucius' golden rule which is, do not do unto others what you would not wish done to yourself. Confucius believed that if everyone followed their role and acted with benevolence then society would work perfectly. The ruler especially needed to be benevolent because they were the one that set the example for everyone else. People were only stealing or warring because their rulers were greedy and violent. Confucius said, In administering your government, what need is there for you to kill? Just desire the good yourself and the common people will be good. Confucius was a fairly outspoken critic of the powerful of his day. Maybe his most revolutionary idea was that the government should work to benefit the people and should be open to everyone, not just nobles. This evolved into a new concept, the civil service examination. Centuries after his death the Han Dynasty government would establish examinations based on Confucian texts that all government officials would need to pass. Any male could take these examinations. This meant that careers in government were open to the best and brightest men. This exam based system was in place in China thousands of years before anywhere else. Confucius wasn't the only philosopher travelling around China at this time. In fact, it was the golden age of Chinese philosophy, often called the Hundred Schools of Thought. It saw the rise of a school known as legalists. They disagreed with Confucius' view that human nature was good. Legalists argued that humans by their very nature were evil and could only be made good through guidance of strict laws, powerful rulers, and a strong state. Daoism rose to popularity around the same time, founded by Lao Tzu or the Old Master. Daoism is all about accepting what is happening. It's not action but inaction, called wu-wei, that Daoism sees as important. It's best to act in harmony with the universe and just let nature take its course. These explanations of Confucianism, Legalism, and Daoism are far from complete. We simply don't have the time. But there are some links down below that you can follow to learn more. The state of Qin lay on the outskirts of what the Warring States era Chinese considered the civilized world. The Qin were semi-barbarians by their standards. The Qin lived in a dangerous world between Xiongnu nomads and the Warring States. This meant military might was needed for survival. They adopted every innovation they came across. Siege weapons, iron swords, crossbows, sitting on horseyboys rather than riding in chariots behind them. The Qin adopted all of these and had their own innovations too. Rather than being a feudal state with lords, the Qin created a highly centralised state. Strict laws now regulated trade and harshened punishments. The entire population was registered with the government and now peasants paid taxes and contributed labour and military service directly to the state rather than to their local lord. Every household in the state was grouped in fives or tens and each group was held responsible for the actions of their members. Soldiers of the same group were punished as a group if an individual was cowardly. Disciplined, drilled, armoured, and armed with swords and crossbows, the new armies of the Qin were ready to go take on their aristocratic chariot-riding enemies. King Zheng is normally given credit for conquering all of China and creating the first Chinese Empire. However, he owed a lot to his great-great-grandfather, King Hui of Qin, who reigned around 311-338 BCE. He cleverly shifted his focus off the drama of the warring states and to the weaker yet rich states to the southwest. There over the Qinling Mountains lay a land of silk and money. The central plain of Sichuan has been continuously farmed for more than 3,000 years. Because of its rich soil and benign climate, the Chinese call it Tianfu, the Heavenly Kingdom. This was Sichuan, today China's fourth most populous province. The warring states paid little attention to the isolated Sichuan kingdoms of Shu and Ba. They saw them as barbarians. King Hui saw them as an opportunity, but getting there remained the challenge. According to a much later and hilarious account, he came up with a cunning plan. He had five stone cows sculpted to perfection, with gold spattered around their tails and back legs. Then they were placed out in a field where the envoys of the Shu could see them. The Shu King, excited about the idea of these infinitely gold pooping cows, asked for them as a gift. But getting these gifts over the impassable mountains would be impossible until King Hui offered to build a road. This stone cattle road does have some archaeological evidence. It's probably the earliest mountain highway in China. Qin engineers made the mountains crossable by building gallery roads. What's a gallery road you may ask? This terrifying thing is a gallery road. They bored holes into the mountainside and then plugged them with wooden planks. They made these things large enough to accommodate chariots, horses, carriages, and stone cows. Along these sky death roads, as historians call them, the stone cows were brought to the King of Shu. An unexpected extra was the thousands of Qin soldiers and war wagons that came in behind them. In 316 BCE, with soldiers now pouring across the new road, the kingdoms of Shu and Ba fell and Szechuan now belonged to the Qin. This really was a land of silk and money. Szechuan had huge silk supplies and massive amounts of mineral wealth. Mined Szechuan copper was minted into Qin coins and made them filthy rich. All hyped up on Szechuan steroids, the Qin could steamroll over the other warring states. So when the young King Zhen came of age in 238 BCE, he already possessed half of his future empire. He just had to finish it off. And by 221 BCE he had wiped out all of the other warring states. With China under his rule he adopted the title Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of Qin. The Qin dynasty had now begun and the emperor set about turning China from a bunch of feudal kingdoms into a united empire. With the help of Li Si, the new chief minister, everything was standardised. Laws? Standardised. Weights and measurements? Standardised. The length of chariots, carts, roads, swords, walls, tools, all standardised. It was like a giant East Asian IKEA. The mining, winemaking, and salt industries were all brought under state control. This was all done to form China into a single cohesive unit. Li Si went about creating a government where people were promoted based on merit rather than birth. Which made it extremely efficient. He had the weapons of the warring states melted down into giant statues so that no one would get any ideas about whether they could challenge this new state. Which is some Game of Thrones type stuff. Qin copper coins became the empire's standard currency. Their design, circular with a square hole in the middle, would last more than 2000 years. People across China were using the writing system developed under the Shang but in different regions people were using different characters. It was making communication difficult and it was messing with the empire's taxes which just simply wouldn't do. The emperor had each and every character, you guessed it, standardised. This new small seal script created a written language that was common throughout the empire Without this standardisation Chinese lawmakers today would probably need about the same amount of translators as the European Union. All the ideas that popped up during the Hundred Schools of Thought were outlawed as legalism became the state ideology. They believed other schools of thought threatened stability and confused the common people. So in 213 BCE Li Si and the emperor ordered the burning of all books that went against state ideology. Preserving a few copies of each in state libraries away from public view. It was followed, according to some sources, by a purge of Confucian scholars who were either executed or buried alive. In an event called Burning Books and Burying Confucianists. Which is not the best PR move considering that Confucianists would go on to become the people that wrote Chinese history. To the north the Qin state was constantly hassled by nomadic Xiongnu to defend the a series of walls covering a distance of about 10,000 Li or 5,000 km were constructed. This is a Great Wall in China but it's not the Great Wall of China. That was built 1,500 years later during the Ming Dynasty but some parts of the Qin Wall are still visible. The Emperor's centralisation, conquest, and constructions had created a lot of enemies like the former powerful families, the Confucians, and the common people. But he was aware of all the people that wanted him dead. So he created a class of eunuchs, men whose yin and yang had been removed, to be the close servants of the royal family. As eunuchs couldn't have families it was assumed that a eunuch's loyalty was more reliable. The rivalry between eunuchs and other members of the court would go on to dominate Chinese history. The Emperor had ruled for about 11 years now and he was getting a bit old. But he wasn't planning on dying any time soon because death is for peasants. He began to consult with sorcerers to find an elixir of immortality. The potions prepared for him by the immortality experts contained cinnabar. And cinnabar when ingested has the unintended side effect of death. The first Emperor had a tomb of unimaginable scale built for himself. To this day it still remains unopened but parts of it have revealed the famous Terracotta Army which was reported to have taken over 700,000 workers to build. Which brings us to an important point. All the wonders of these empires, the Great Wall, the canals, the tombs, the palaces, and the cities were built with millions of hours and lives of forced or near-forced labour. All of this depended on exploiting the peasants and the slaves. Who tended to grow pretty tired of it. The Han, the Tang, the Yuan, the Ming, and the Qing dynasties were all brought down by peasant revolts. Shortly after the Emperor died in 210 BCE the dynasty was paralysed by rivalries and the oppressed peasants rose up. Four years later the dynasty was overthrown. Its 15-year reign was the shortest in Chinese history. But the Qin's revolutionary act of creating a united Chinese empire was a monumentous event in world history. The previous dynasties had been small and decentralised. So it was the Qin that really gave birth to the idea of China. From now on dynasties would change, more periods of warring states would occur, but China as a unified culture would remain constant. The Golden Age of the Han is about to dawn. They will invent paper, flying machines, and earthquake detectors. Confucianism will become the state ideology, where it will remain until now really. The famous connections with India and Rome along the Silk Road will shape world history. They will fight nomads and even Greeks as they expand north, south, and west. But that is a story for another time. And when that time comes that video will be up first and ad-free over on Nebula. A streaming video platform I am helping to build along with lots of other independent creators like CGP Grey, Lindsay Ellis, Knowing Butter, and a bunch of other creators. YouTube can be tough on creators like us. But CuriosityStream loves independent creators and wants to help us grow our platform. 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