There’s much about China that I did not know when we started this journey on January 28, 2010.
We visited China’s early dynasties (the Xia, Shang and Zhou) before Qin Shi Huangdi became the first emperor and unified China.
Then we visited the Han, Tang, Sung, Ming and Qing Dynasties while learning of the chaos and anarchy between the dynasties.
We met Confucius and Wu Zetian, China’s only woman emperor during the Tang Dynasty.
We discovered China’s music, art and opera while meeting one of China’s national treasures, Mao Wei-Tao.
Learning about the 19th century Opium Wars started by the British and French opened my eyes to evils I had not known of.
What shocked me most was how the West forced China to allow Christian missionaries into China along with opium.
One reader challenged me in a comment saying that couldn’t be true then didn’t respond when I provided links to the evidence that missionaries and opium were included in the same treaty, which forced the emperor to accept against his will.
Then I sat spellbound as I joined Mao and the Communists on the Long March where more than 80,000 started out and about 6,000 survived — the only choice was to fight or die.
Along the way, I learned that Sun Yat-sen was the father of China’s republic and how Chiang Kai-shek started the Civil War in 1925 when he ordered his army to slaughter the Chinese Communists.
I didn’t know that the Communist and Nationalist Parties were the two political parties of China’s first republic and how it was the US supported Nationalists that fired the first shot that shattered Sun Yat-sen’s dream for China.
After the Communists won the Civil War in 1949, I saw the suffering and death from Mao’s mistakes during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution that ended in 1976.
And there was my continued attempt to explain China’s Collective Culture. One comment basically said, “Yea, sure!” as if there were no such thing as cultural differences such as this.
We also were introduced to other Blogs about China such as the China Law Blog.
Of course, with more than a thousand posts in a year, what I have mentioned here is but a small part of the 2010 journey of China.
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
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China’s longest lasting dynasties survived due to one or more great emperors.
After China was unified by Qin Shi Huangdi (221 – 207 BC), there were only five dynasties that survived for long periods — the Han, Tang, Sung, Ming, and Qing Dynasties.
Although China’s civilization survived, the country’s history is rampant with rebellions, palace coups, corruption among palace officials, and insurrections. Between the five longest dynasties, the country usually fell apart into warring states as it did after 1911.
The most successful emperors managed to stabilize the country while managing wisely as the Communist Party has done since 1976.
EmperorHan Wudi (ruled 141 – 87 B.C.) of the Han Dynasty (206 B.C. – 219 A.D.) was fifteen when he first sat on the throne.
Wudi is considered one of the greatest emperors in China’s history. He expanded the borders, opened the early Silk Road, developed the economy, and established state monopolies on salt, liquor and rice.
After the Han Dynasty collapsed, China fell apart for almost 400 years before the Tang Dynasty was established (618 -906). The Tang Dynasty was blessed with several powerful emperors.
The first was Emperor Tang Taizong (ruled 627-649).
According to historical records, Wu Zetain, China’s only woman emperor also ruled wisely.
Emperor Tang Zuanzong , Zetain’s grandson, ruled longer than any Tang emperor and the dynasty prospered while he sat on the throne.
After the dynasty fell, there would be short period of about 60 years before the Sung Dynasty reestablished order and unified the country again.
The second emperor of the Sung Dynasty, Sung Taizong (ruled 976 – 997) unified China after defeating the Northern Han Dynasty. The third emperor, Sung Zhenzong (ruled 997-1022) also deserves credit for maintaining stability.
The Sung Dynasty then declined until a revival by Sung Ningzong (ruled 1194 – 1224) After he died, the dynasty limped along until Kublai Khan defeated the last emperor in 1279.
After conquering all of China, Kublai Khan founded the Mongol, Yuan Dynasty (1277-1367). Not long after Kublai died, the dynasty was swept away.
In 1368, a peasant rebellion defeated the Yuan Dynasty and drove the Mongols from China.
The Ming Dynasty (1271 – 1368) is known for rebuilding, strengthening and extending the Great Wall among a list of other accomplishments.
Historical records show that the rule of the third Ming Emperor, Ming Chengzu (ruled 1403 – 1424), was the most prosperous period.
After Chengzu, the dynasty would decline until 1567 when Emperor Ming Muzong reversed the decline.
His son, Emperor Ming Shenzong, also ruled wisely from 1573 to 1620.
After Shenzong’s death, the Ming Dynasty quickly declined and was replaced by the Qing Dynasty in 1644.
The Opium Wars started by England and France and the Taiping Rebellion led by a Christian convert in the 19th century would contribute to the fall of the Qing Dynasty in 1911.
The Qing Dynasty was fortunate to have three powerful, consecutive emperors: Emperor Kangxi (1661 – 1722), Yongzhen (1722-1735) and Qianlong (1735-1796). For one-hundred-and-thirty-five years, China remained strong and prosperous.
After the corrupt Qing Dynasty was swept aside in 1911 by a rebellion led by Dr. Sun Yat-sen, China fell apart and warlords fought to see who would rule China.
When Sun Yat-sen died, the republic he was building in southern China fell apart when Chiang Kai-shek broke the coalition that Sun Yat-sen had formed between the Nationalist and Communist Parties. Mao’s famous Long March shows how the Communists survived.
Then Japan invaded, and China would be engulfed in war and rebellion until 1945 when World War II ended. After World War II, the rebellion between the Nationalist and Communists ended in victory for the Communists in 1949.
This victory was made possible because the Communists were supported by China’s peasants that hated, despised and distrusted the Nationalist Party, which represented China’s ruling elite.
The Communists gained the support of the peasants by treating the peasants with respect and promising reforms that would end the suffering.
Then Mao’s Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution extended the peasants suffering.
However, since the early 1980s, the Communist Party has been working to fulfill the promises made during the revolution, and the lifestyles of China’s peasants are slowly improving.
There are many impatient voices in the West and a few in China that are not happy with the speed of China’s reforms or how the Party has handled them.
In fact, China has modernized and improved lifestyles in China since the early 1980s at a pace that has never been seen before in recorded history.
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
His third book is Crazy is Normal, a classroom exposé, a memoir. “Lofthouse presents us with grungy classrooms, kids who don’t want to be in school, and the consequences of growing up in a hardscrabble world. While some parents support his efforts, many sabotage them—and isolated administrators make the work of Lofthouse and his peers even more difficult.” – Bruce Reeves.
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It is a common assumption in the West that we invented the machines that power our modern lifestyles.
However, new discoveries from ancient China are forcing us to rewrite history.
While Europe was mired in the so-called dark ages, ancient China ruled supreme as the world’s technological super power.
Now we are discovering that many of the inventions that have shaped our modern world had their roots in China’s ancient civilization.
There were complex geared machines that allowed production on an industrial scale such as precision seismographs that detected earthquakes, drilling machines that bored for natural gas hundreds of meters beneath the earth, or a super-scale Cosmic Engine that not only told the time but also predicted the passages of the planets and the stars.
Some of these technologies were so complex, they remained a mystery for centuries.
Two thousand year old books show in detail things that are still needed today — sixteen hundred years ahead of the West.
Another discovery from ancient China is still important – drilling for oil. We assume it was modern engineers that developed oil-drilling techniques.
In fact, the techniques used in gaining access to oil and natural gas were reinvented from what the Chinese had already invented two thousand years ago.
During the Song Dynasty (960 – 1276 AD), China’s innovations reached their peak. Inventers and engineers were creating machines that wouldn’t be seen in the West for another thousand years.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.
In 986 A.D., a Sung Dynasty emperor ordered that an encyclopedia be written.
This ancient encyclopedia is known as the Four Great Books of Song (宋四大书), which was compiled by Li Fang (925 – 996 A.D.) and other scholars during the Sung Dynasty (960–1279 A.D.).
The last book (Cefu Yuangui) was finished during the 11th century. The four encyclopedias were published with the intent to collect all known knowledge of the time. Source: History Cultural China
There were one thousand scrolls with 2,200 biographical entries.
This ancient example of the literary world printed about a thousand years ago was commissioned by Vice Primer Zhou Bida (Sung Dynasty), who had a group of scholars proof read the original copy of the encyclopedia before block printing it.
Surviving copies are kept in China’s national library. Bookworms, who over the years fed on the paper, scarred the original encyclopedias.
Although there are textual errors, the work is still valuable for historical research.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
If you want to subscribe to this Blog, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.
The first time I read about China’s singing crickets was in “Empress Orchid” by Anchee Min. Retired concubines spent time carving gourds where these crickets lived to entertain empresses, emperors and princes.
I learned about China’s fighting critics from a comment on this Blog and there was a link included.
While writing this post, I Googled the subject. In Gardening4us.com, Catherine Dougherty tells us, “cricket culture in China dates back to the Tang Dynasty (618 – 906 AD).”
She says, “It was during this time the crickets first became respected for their powerful ability to ‘sing’ and a cult formed to capture and cage them. And in the Sung Dynasty (960 – 1276 AD)… cricket fighting became popular.”
In TrueUp.net, Kim says, “The Chinese consider the cricket to be a metaphor for summer and courage…”
We learn from Pacific Pest Inc. that, “Crickets are popular pets and are considered good luck in some countries; in China, crickets are sometimes kept in cages, and various species of crickets are a part of people’s diets … and are considered delicacies of high cuisine in places like Mexico and China.”
From Home Made in China, we learn in a comment from Gogovivi, who is based in Qingdao, North China that, “Summer used to mean picking berries in the yard and making jam, canning green beans, going to the farmer’s market, BBQs, lawn mowing, hiking, swimming. Now my whole family looks forward to the arrival of singing crickets.”
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
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