Home » China » China Postcard 0: Problogue

One of the things that I've learned in my past travels is the importance of having some basic knowledge of the history and politics of a country before even setting foot there. Without this context, it is too easy to be overwhelmed by cultural differences as they wash over you without at all soaking in. The trick it seems, is to do one's homework. This problogue may serve as a useful primer for readers of my China Postcards.

China Postcard 0: Problogue

Mark Morin
2006-04-29 14:28:09

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One of the things that I've learned in my past travels is the importance of having some basic knowledge of the history and politics of a country before even setting foot there. Without this context, it is too easy to be overwhelmed by cultural differences as they wash over you without at all soaking in. The trick it seems, is to do one's homework. This problogue may serve as a useful primer for readers of my China Postcards.

A Short History and some Tall Tales of China

Civilisation is nothing new in China. Up to 7000 years ago, when european civilisation was still in diapers, forerunners of the Chinese were busy making silk garments, carving intricate figurines from super hard jade and firing high quality ceramic pottery. Artifacts show sophisticated government by about 2000 BC but the earliest written poems and stories come from the Zhou dynasty (long before Homer) who also invented the handy doctrine that the emperor was son of Heaven.

China was far fom unified, with long bloody periods of warfare between small states. This confusion spawned Confucius (551 BC) and later a young state king named Qin (pronounced "chin") Shihuang who killed enough of his neighbours in the name of peace to become the first emperor of a unified China (named after guess-who) in 221 BC. Qin ruled with paranoid ruthlessness, burning books and buring questioning scholars alive. Perhaps he buried too many of them because when he commanded his surviving alchemists to invent a potion for immortality, the best they came up with was a daily dose of mercury. Luckily, he had a plan B: an enormous tomb complex thanks to 700,000 labourers and guarded forever by thousands of life-sized terracotta warriors in army-sized underground vaults. Despite, or perhaps because of his tyrany, Qin was able to standardise a common written language, units of measurement and public administration to last 2000 years. Oh yes, it was also Qin who ordered the construction of a big ...