Hi, Dennis here, welcome to Timetrip.
Have you ever wondered how in China became
a country with 1,4 billion people and the
second largest economy in the world?
In thousands of years of its existence, what
changes, events, developments and people made
it a country that now, everyone seems to be
talking about?
China
China
China
China!
In this series we’ll try to answer these
and other questions about China by looking
at its history, and today we’ll start by
looking at how for the first time ever, i
what today is China, civilisations began to
develop.
As you probably know, for hundreds of thousands
of years, people all over the world used to
live as hunter gatherers, until about 10.000
years ago, people began to domesticate animals
and plants and to start living in settlements,
a process called the agricultural revolution.
It happened in several placed, and China was
one of them.
One unique thing about China is that it developed from two different agricultural revolutions
that happened around two neighbouring river systems-
one agricultural revolution happened in the north around the Yellow river
, where people began to grow millet,
and one happened around the Yangtze river
in the south, where people began to grow rice.
These two areas were different, but within
each area, people lived around the same river
under similar conditions, and this allowed
innovations and ideas to spread rapidly.
All of these early societies developed within
a huge but isolated area-
in the east, there’s the pacific ocean,
In the north - the Mongolian plateau
and Siberia;
in the west there’s the west tibetian plateau ,
and the himalayas
and also deserts;
which are great for wallpapers, but are bad
for (like) staying alive, unless you are a camel.
and in the south there are monkeys and tigers
and elephants and also rain forest.
So within this enclosed area, there were many
different cultures that could communicate
with each other, but were isolated from the
rest of the world, which is one important
reason why this area developed into a politically
unified but very diverse country.
So to do agriculture and to store the food
they produced, people began to make tools
and pottery, including some of the earliest
pottery in the world.
On some of the pottery there were symbols
found which some scholars believe are sort
of a predecessor of Chinese characters, though
nobody knows for sure what they mean and if
they mean anything at all.
Just like me sometimes with modern Chinese
characters.
It was in this period that people had to find
ways to live together in permanent settlements,
So for the first time ideas emerged that tried to solve the unsolvable problem of how
people can live together and not kill each other.
Because early agricultural societies consisted of villages
made up of one or several clans, ideas and
practices focused on how members of the clan
could live together in harmony.
One such practice was ancestor worship.
The entire clan would see itself as originating
from a common ancestor and they would make
sacrifices to him.
Ancestor worship is closely linked to the
idea of „filial piety“, xiaoshun which
probably also emerged in this period, since
it already was a well developed concept by
the time writing appeared.
While in other cultures, there is usually
also some tradition of respecting your parents,
the Chinese concept of filial piety means
much more than that.
For example, imagine you see your mother and
your child about to be crushed by a train
and you have only the time to save one of
them.
Who would you save?
Just for a second, pause this video and
quickly write in the comments whom you would
save and which country you’re from.
So if you’re the from the US or Europe,
you’ve probably written that you’d save
the child.
However, most Chinese would say that they
would save the mother.
This is because, at least for traditionally-minded
Chinese people, respecting and obeying one’s
parents is a really important value and saving
the child would seem egoistic and neglectful
towards one’s mother.
If you’re Chinese, filial piety pretty much
defines your status in the family and in Confucian
thought, for the state to be in order, the
family must be in order, so filial piety was
and still is a very important for chinese
society.
It was also important for emperors, because
filial piety defined their relationship to
their lineage and also to heaven, whose mandate
to rule emperors would claim.
While Chinese society has undergone many changes, 
it has also
over long periods of time, stayed remarkably stable and continuous, and one of the
reasons for that was it’s emphasis on the
family as the basic, stable unit of society.
So these concepts quite likely emerged out
of the village structure of early agricultural
societies, and would later become formulated
and systematized by Confucianism, and to a
lesser extent other school of philosophy in
China.
As agriculture developed, people became able
to amass a surplus, settlements became larger,
societies became stratified and some people
didn’t have to do farming anymore, let alone
hunting and gathering.
This meant that they could do something else
instead, like- go to war!
And if you’re already at war, why not capture
a few people and sacrifice them to some gods
and ancestors?
Then, the harvest will be even better,
you’ll have enough surplus, and can go to
war again.
Also, some clans were able to secure their
position and to form a nobility to distinguish
We know this because in some early agricultural societies,
90% of the burials are just one person in
one grave, but the other 10 percent have fancy burial goods inside
So in order to distinguish it’s status,
the nobility needed luxury goods, which mostly
meant thing of bronze, copper or jade.
To produce such stuff they needed division
of labor, and the result was division of labor
not only between agriculture and manufacturing,
but also within manufacturing itself.
This in turn meant that even more and cooler
stuff could be produced.
The first society in China that was definitely
a state was the Erlitou.
The Erlitou was a bronze age culture.
Almost all of the bronze was found in the
inner city, while almost none in the hinterland,
meaning that there was a rich aristocracy
. It also means they had some form of religion
and ideology, because you need those to justify
the status of the nobility and the ruler.
Many Chinese historians think that the Erlitou
site was actually a capital city of the semi-legendary
Xia dynasty.
The Xia dynasty is only mentioned in texts
written long after it’s supposed existence.
They say that it was founded by the legendary
hero Yu, after he had tamed a big flood at
the Yellow river.
Thou this is a legend, there actually was
one of the biggest floods in record around
the period when the Erlitou culture began,
and some historians see this as evidence that
the Erlitou really was the Xia dynasty.
In this case the Xia dynasty would be the
first Chinese dynasty.
But whether or not it was the first dynasty,
it definitely wasn’t the last one and we’ll
talk a lot about them in this series, so if
you want to see more videos about Chinese
History, subscribe to our channel.
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