The Complete History of China | Compilation

Nuwa and Fushi, usually depicted as half-human, half-dragon spirit creatures, created humans out of clay as companions. The humans settled in the Yellow River and were ruled by the Five Good Emperors, mythological figures who were peaceful and benevolent. But tragedy struck when the river flooded, devastating the land. Yu the Engineer spent thirteen long years building canals and locks to control the waters, earning his place as the land's king. He founded the Xia Dynasty, China's first ruling family, and a structure of government that would remain unchanged for millennia. In the words of John Green, An open letter to the Xia Dynasty. Dear Xia Dynasty, why you gotta be so fictional? Yeah, the Xia Dynasty is largely considered mythological at this point, but may be intertwined with some real events, considering how much the later Chinese scholars wrote about them. Speaking of writing, the Chinese were really, really good at it. They developed their own famous pictograph-based system concurrently without any outside influences. But they looked a lot more like this than this. In any case, humans settled in the Yellow River Valley, forming numerous cultures which is collectively called the Yellow River Civilization. The myth of Yu the Engineer likely began with this early civilization's attempts to control the flooding of the river. These settlers are what we now call the Han, although they didn't refer to themselves as that for at least a few centuries. They were surrounded by numerous other peoples to their south, north, and west. The first Chinese state to be supported by historical evidence is the Shang. The story goes that the Shang were one of the member states of the Xia Dynasty and rose up to overthrow the last Xia Emperor under their leader, King Tang. Tang defeated the forces of the Xia during a storm at the Battle of Mingtao. The storm was seen as a sign that the spirits were blessing his overthrow of the dynasty. In 1046 BC, the Shang were overthrown by the Zhao, which is China's longest lasting dynasty. It is speculated that the name for China in the Mandarin language comes from this period. The Zhao ruled the kingdom under a quasi-feudal system, meaning that power was given to regional warlords, all of whom pledged fealty to the king. This means that the king's power depends on keeping the lords happy, which King Yu did not. He exiled his wife, whom he had married for political reasons, and the state she came from rose up in revolt. They deposed the king and installed his son Ping to the throne, but merely as a figurehead with no real authority, as regional warlords began crowning themselves kings over their own states. Chroniclers refer to this time as the period of Spring and Autumn. It doesn't translate well into English. Soon, a rivalry would emerge among the states for control of all China, beginning the Warring States Period, and a collapse of any centralized control. Warring became so fierce in fact that the local kings began building compacted earth fortifications on their mutual borders to deter invasions from rival states. Fighting ended in 221 BC when the Qin finally defeated the rest and unified China once more. The Qin dynasty didn't last very long, but they did have absolute authority. Agriculture and herding were regulated and everyone paid their taxes, but they did have a weird fear of books for some reason. The teachings of Confucius became very popular and his brand of philosophy began having huge impacts on Chinese society. In response to the growing power of the Xiongnu, the ancestors of the Mongols, Emperor Qin Shi Huang began joining parts of the Warring States Walls at strategic weak points in the border. This would be the first foundations of China's Great Wall. The walls continued to be expanded upon using hundreds and thousands of slave laborers and soldiers over successive centuries to protect the empire from various other nomadic raiders. Qin Shi Huang became deranged and senile in his old age and became obsessed with finding a cure for death to allow him to attain immortality. He traveled far and wide and spent a small fortune on alchemy, medicines, and potions, one of which killed him. The succession of the emperor caused a crisis when their nobles attempted to crown his son and control him as a puppet, causing the country to erupt into a civil war between rival states. The Han State was victorious which began the rule of the Han Dynasty, famous for inventing paper, which is apparently what people used to write things on. During the Unification War, the rulers of the Yu State fled to the south in exile where they set up their own kingdoms, the Nanyu and the Minyu, stretching all the way to modern Vietnam. The Han began a period of aggressive foreign policy under Emperor Wu, conquering both Yu Kingdoms in the south and going to war with the Xiongnu Confederation in the north, annexing vast amounts of the ethnic Turkic Tarim Basin. This extremely rapid expansion into Central Asia gave China its first contacts with the numerous nomadic tribes of the inner steppes, attracting many merchants to the lucrative corridor between east and west. It was the beginning of the Silk Road. It was during the Han that China experienced its golden age. Great strides were made in developing art, culture, and science that would come to shape almost everything we know about oriental culture today. A new religion making its way down the Silk Road began taking its own shape in the southwest. It is known to us as Buddhism. In the year 9, the Han Dynasty was briefly interrupted by a usurper named Wang Mang, who seized power from the Han in an attempt to establish his own dynasty. And he would have been successful were it not for his reforms to He lost his territories in the west and was deposed by a mob after only 13 years of rule. I guess nobody told him it was way too early for China's communist revolution. The Han eventually defeated the Xiongnu after generations of fighting and expanded their trade with the west. They eventually split into three rival kingdoms in 222 and briefly reunited under the Jin Dynasty in 280, but the northern section rebelled against their rule by the so-called Five Barbarians, which the southerners called the Sixteen Kingdoms. But both the south and the north were unstable and changed ruling families too many times to name. The Sui came to power as successors to the Zhao State and unified China again in 589, while the Gokturks rose to power in the central steppes. The Tang succeeded the Sui and expanded the empire. They subjugated the Gokturks in the north, conquered the Koreans in Goryeo, and solidified their iron hold in southwest Asia. Tang China spread its influence over all the rest of Asia in China's second golden age. They were famous for introducing land reforms called the Fubing system, which is again a flirtatious experiment with communism. I can see where this is going. The reforms were albeit successful and the economic boom allowed for the budget of a standing army. If you're thinking to yourself that all this prosperity is too good to be true, then you'd be right. In 906, China collapsed again due to the power of regional warlords. The Song managed to control the southern part of China, but the north remained ruled by Chinese-influenced nomads. The Jurchens, a fringe tribe in modern-day Manchuria, rebelled against their nomad rulers and soon conquered all the way down to northern China. They proclaimed the Jin Dynasty and vied for power with the Song in the south. But as both kingdoms contended with each other, a new powerful confederacy was brewing in the Mongolian steppes. The Mongols were initially a squabbling band of nomadic herdsmen. They had distant links to the Xiongnu of the past and made their home on the Eurasian steppe. Their culture was deeply steeped in tradition and a religion that tied them to their land. But this was all to change with one man named Timogen, who history remembers as Genghis Khan. A man who would reform the Mongols from within and unite them into a powerful confederacy bound by blood and honour and create a legal framework and exceptional social mobility. The Mongols under Genghis and his descendants founded the largest land empire in history and would have impacts on nearly every part of Asia and even Europe. The Mongols under Ogedai Khan would grow rapidly into a large organised empire. The land flourished in Mongol lore and they financed their state through large-scale raids. The Chinese of the Jin and the Song Dynasty were no match for the rapid horse-based warfare of the Mongols, whose entire strategy was based on lightning warfare. By 1271, Kublai Khan was crowned Great Khan and Emperor of all China, beginning the Huan Dynasty. The Mongols brought with them their lore, customs and steppe traditions which blended with those of East Asia. Commerce and technology increased in the multi-ethnic empire, but it did not last very long. An inflation crisis due to the over issue of Mongol currency, as well as quite a few earthquakes, started to make the Chinese question whether heaven really wanted the Huan Mongols to rule. And soon, an All Out Revolt ensued, with Huan Jiang driving the Mongols back to Central Asia and crowning himself the first Ming Emperor. The last two dynasties of China were the Ming and the Qing. Both presided over China's earlier modern period and shared similarities in policy. One, isolationism. Both dynasties pursued aggressive self-defence measures amid quite a lot of xenophobia. This manifested in the cutting of Two, both had terrible mismanagement of money. Being unwilling to trade with foreign powers beyond the port of Canton led to an increased self-reliance and decreased sphere of influence. Three, both failed to recognise the threat of foreign powers in their waters, all of whom would play a direct role in collapsing the dynastical system by the turn of the century. China's unwillingness to modernise and trade with the West would lead indirectly to the Opium Wars and the Taiping Rebellion by parties like the British, French and Japanese who had a vested interest in opening up China to trade and Christianity. This in turn would spark the Boxer Rebellion as a counter-revolt against foreign influence in China. The Qing had dealt with none of these problems well enough and soon revolts were more common than peace. Critiques view the failure of the Qing as the century of humiliation. In 1912, the Qing collapsed and China fractured into numerous pieces of independent states called cliques, also known as the Warlord Era. China would need to unify and to do that a republican movement under Sun Yat-sen allied with the communists under the CCP to fight the warlords on a united front. This went about as well as you would expect with Kuomintang leader Chiang Kai-shek purging and executing communists en masse, breaking the Soon it was civil war and the CCP were on the brink of annihilation, were it not for a near miraculous retreat of thousands of kilometres under Mao Zedong called the Long March. This incredible journey helped recruit new members. But the war had to be put on hold in 1932, when the Imperial Japanese Army invaded the Manchurian cliques and were now at the doorstep of China proper. With the threat of the Japanese, the two sides formed a united second front. The Japanese army invaded China in 1937 after a fabricated Chinese skirmish at the Marco Polo Bridge in Beijing. The war was tragic for the Chinese, with the second highest casualties of the entire Second World War. Millions of civilians and soldiers lost their lives for a state that did not technically exist. The ill-prepared and badly led Chinese armies were no match for the strict discipline of the Japanese Imperial Army with many blunders during the invasion. At one point, the Republican army even accidentally drowning half a million people while flooding the Yellow River in an attempt to halt the Japanese advance. After a three-month-long siege at Shanghai, the devastated Republican army retreated to the capital at Nanking, which fell to the Japanese on the 13th of December. An event you probably haven't heard about in the West known as the Rape of Nanking. The Japanese were so senselessly brutal to the Chinese that the Nazi ambassador was the voice of reason and is now celebrated as a hero in China. His letters and journals from the time tell of how up to 300,000 people were raped and murdered during the occupation. There were even contests to see which officers could behead 100 people with their swords in the fastest time, the results of which were printed in Japanese newspapers with the same tone that you would expect to see when reporting on a baseball game. Why has this event been mostly forgotten to history and in some cases flat out denied? When you're done here, head on over to my channel to find out. Please be sure to check out Knowing Better's channel in the link below for more on how entrenched the events at Nanking became on the collective Chinese psyche. Japan's war was stunningly successful. However, they began losing a lot of ground by 1945, since they were now fighting a four-front war. The stunning successes of the Communist army and the failures of the Republican army against the Japanese meant that the CCP was on much better footing in the minds of the people. The massive conflict had been an opportunity for Mao to prove his devotion to China and millions flocked to his side. China's civil war resumed not long after, and with the help of the Soviet army in northern China, the tie turned in the CCP's favour. The Kuomintang's Republican army were forced to retreat to the island of Taiwan, which still calls itself the Republic of China to this day. China was declared the People's Republic in 1949, with Mao named Supreme Chairman. He is infamous for the so-called necessary evils by which he ruled the mainland, both in terms of the starvation of millions of his own people during the Great Leap Forward, where industrialization caused a massive famine, and also the cultural revolution to dispose of old traditions and systems, resulting in the execution of thousands of dissidents. A controversial figure in both the West and the East, seen as both tyrant and liberator. China seemed like an ally of the Soviet Union during the Cold War, especially during their involvement in the Korean and Vietnam Wars against the West, but in reality, Sino-Soviet relations grew ever more antagonistic, reflecting their isolationist past. Much changed after Mao's death and the government began to relinquish controls over the planned economy. However, the same year the Berlin Wall fell, when calls for democracy sparked protests in the Tiananmen Square, the Chinese government revealed to the world that they had not weakened and were not going to collapse like other socialist states, by firing on their own people. A more mixed economy of socialism and capitalism triumphed, and soon China's economy began to grow and industrialize at a rapid rate, becoming the first nation to surpass a population of 1 billion. Modern China experienced an even further modernization, becoming the world's manufacturing powerhouse for both low- and high-quality products. However, even though economically China became more open, culturally, they remained well and truly closed, with modern China being one of the most culturally isolated nations in the world. So much so, that this video is illegal there. Ladrones, the Island of Thieves. This was the name given by the Spanish and the Portuguese to the area around Hong Kong, which was filled with pirates, crawling with miscreants and smugglers and all manner of barbary. The traders made deals with the imperial government in exchange for rooting out these pirates, and in doing so, established favorable trade conditions with the Chinese, and a permanent settlement in Macau. The names of these pirates are still famous in the Pearl River Delta, Zhang Yi and his wife Madam Zheng, who ruled the pirate confederations and the enormous Red Flag Fleet. Before the British arrived, Hong Kong was mostly a small fishing community and occasional haven for pirates. They had come to buy Chinese goods such as tea and porcelain, which was highly prized back in England. The conservative Chinese government, however, restricted trade with foreigners to the port of Canton, or Guangzhou, and local officials taxed imports at very high rates. The bankrupt East India Trading Company soon found itself at a huge trade imbalance, buying highly prized Chinese goods with the only payment the Chinese would accept, silver. In an effort to correct this imbalance, the British began smuggling opium into Canton, which is the only thing the Chinese were interested in buying. This effectively reversed the trade imbalance and created an epidemic of opium addicts. Things soon spiraled wildly out of control when the Chinese clamped down and destroyed British opium without compensation and cut off food supply to the traders in an effort to drive them away. So the British decided to leave. Just kidding, they stayed and were eventually attacked by Chinese ships on the island of Hong Kong. Now I don't think the Chinese were aware that you just don't mess with the British Navy in the 19th century. The British sent in ships and soon won the so-called Opium War and China was forced to hand over Hong Kong Island to the British, as well as abolish the Canton-style import taxes and open more trading ports. The first British institutions began showing up, mostly churches and missions to spread Christianity. When mainland China became embroiled in conflict, the British invaded Beijing in an attempt to force a handover of the Kowloon Peninsula to give Hong Kong Island a buffer zone. And then, in 1989, they leased the new territory surrounding the area, for a period of As Hong Kong grew, it began heavily westernizing, in education, government, and even culture. The differences between Hong Kong and China began growing, as the mainland became more and more unstable. Hong Kong's defining moment came during the Second World War, in which it was invaded and occupied for three years by the Japanese. More than one million people fled or were deported by the Japanese, who ruled Hong Kong directly by the military. British rule was then re-established after the Japanese Empire was defeated, although it was now a shadow of its former glory. However, its saving grace came with the Chinese Civil War, after which many of the wealthy business owners fled the communists and took refuge in nearby Hong Kong. As the prosperity of a nearly unregulated capitalist society took hold, so too did inequality skyrocket, and hundreds of thousands flocked to the prosperous island, living in poverty and extremely dense living quarters. Fires and When the West blockaded trade with China for its support of North Korea in the Korean War, Hong Kong had to do a complete 180 on its economy. Hong Kong's wealthy white-collar elite turned to finance, consultancy, electronics, and manufacturing, which caused a huge boom in prosperity. Hong Kong became ridiculously wealthy in the next few decades, and earned its nickname the Pearl of the Orient. In the 70s, it became much more progressive, with landmarks such as Life expectancy rose, and corruption fell. Uncertainty over Hong Kong's future began with the lead-up to the lease expiry in 1997, in which China demanded not only the new territories, but Hong Kong Island as well. At the negotiation table, Margaret Thatcher secured a deal on the One China, Two Systems policy, by which Hong Kong would remain largely self-governing for a 50-year handover period. So, as it remains today, Hong Kong is still largely independent, with its own economy, currency, passport, and is functionally a country for all intents and purposes. However, nobody really knows what will happen after the handover is completed in 2047.