History of China/Chapter 1

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History of China

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Chapter 1: Prologue — Writing a History of China: Sources, Methods, and Periodization

1. Introduction: What Is "China"?

To write a history of China is, at the outset, to confront a question that appears simple but is in fact profoundly complex: what is "China"? The modern Chinese state — the People's Republic of China, founded in 1949 — occupies a territory of approximately 9.6 million square kilometers, stretching from the Pamir Mountains in the west to the Pacific coast in the east, from the Amur River in the north to the South China Sea in the south. It encompasses deserts, grasslands, tropical forests, high plateaus, and fertile river valleys. Its population of over 1.4 billion people speaks hundreds of mutually unintelligible languages and dialects, practices a bewildering variety of religions and customs, and includes fifty-six officially recognized ethnic groups. Is this "China"?

The answer depends on the period one is examining. The territory controlled by the Shang dynasty (ca. 1600–1046 BCE) was a small patch of the North China Plain, perhaps no larger than modern Henan province. The Qin empire that first unified "China" in 221 BCE extended from the Ordos Loop to the Yangtze Delta but did not include Yunnan, Guizhou, Guangxi, Tibet, Xinjiang, Mongolia, or Manchuria. The Tang dynasty (618–907) controlled vast Central Asian territories that are now independent states. The Song dynasty (960–1279) never controlled the northern half of what is conventionally called "China proper," which was ruled successively by the Khitan Liao and the Jurchen Jin. The Qing dynasty (1644–1912) assembled the largest territorial extent of any Chinese polity, incorporating Tibet, Xinjiang, Mongolia, and Taiwan — but did so as a Manchu conquest dynasty that self-consciously ruled a multiethnic empire, not a Chinese nation-state.

The very word "China" is foreign to the Chinese tradition. The most common Chinese term for China, Zhongguo (中国), literally "Central State" or "Middle Kingdom," originally referred not to a unified country but to the small states of the Zhou-era Central Plain, distinguishing them from the "barbarian" peoples on their periphery. The concept expanded over time, absorbing non-Zhou peoples and territories into an ever-widening circle of civilization, but it remained fundamentally a cultural rather than a political or ethnic category until the late nineteenth century, when Chinese intellectuals, under the influence of Western nationalism, began to reimagine Zhongguo as a modern nation-state with fixed territorial boundaries and a unified national identity.

This book adopts a pragmatic approach. "China" here refers to the evolving political, cultural, and geographical entity that the people who lived within it understood as such — recognizing that its boundaries, its ethnic composition, its political structures, and even its name have changed dramatically over five millennia. The story begins not with a nation but with a landscape: the Yellow River valley, the Yangtze basin, and the diverse regions surrounding them, where human communities first developed the agricultural practices, social structures, writing systems, and political institutions that would eventually coalesce into what we call Chinese civilization.

2. The Evolving Boundaries of State and Civilization

The relationship between the Chinese state and Chinese civilization has never been straightforward. At various points in history, the area of Chinese cultural influence has far exceeded the boundaries of any Chinese polity; at other points, non-Chinese peoples have ruled over territory that was culturally and demographically Chinese. Understanding this distinction is essential to writing a coherent history of China.

The earliest recognizable Chinese states — the Shang and Zhou — were centered on the Yellow River valley in what is now Henan, Shaanxi, and Shandong. Their cultural influence, however, extended well beyond their political control. Archaeological evidence shows that Shang-style bronze ritual vessels, oracle bone divination practices, and writing conventions were adopted or adapted by communities across a much wider area, from the Yangtze valley to the northern steppe frontier. The Zhou concept of tianxia (天下, "all under heaven") — the idea that the Zhou king held a mandate from Heaven to rule the entire civilized world — further blurred the distinction between political authority and cultural sphere. In theory, tianxia had no boundaries; in practice, it designated the zone within which Zhou cultural norms were recognized and to which non-Zhou peoples were expected to assimilate.

The Qin unification of 221 BCE created, for the first time, a centralized bureaucratic state that aspired to territorial totality — to control all the land and people within its reach through standardized laws, weights, measures, currency, and writing. But the Qin empire was short-lived, and its successor, the Han dynasty (202 BCE–220 CE), spent much of its existence negotiating the boundary between the settled agricultural world of "China proper" and the pastoral nomadic world of the steppe. The Great Wall, first connected into a continuous fortification by the Qin, was less a fixed border than a shifting zone of interaction, trade, conflict, and accommodation.

The subsequent centuries of division (220–589) shattered the idea that "China" was coterminous with a single state. Northern China was ruled by a succession of non-Chinese dynasties — Xiongnu, Xianbei, Di, Qiang, Jie — while the south was governed by Chinese emigre dynasties based in Jiankang (modern Nanjing). Which was "China"? Both, in different ways: the north preserved the geographic heartland but was ruled by non-Chinese elites who gradually adopted Chinese culture; the south preserved the Chinese political tradition and elite culture but was geographically peripheral. The reunification under the Sui (581–618) and Tang (618–907) reassembled the political and cultural halves, but the Tang empire was itself profoundly shaped by the Central Asian, Turkic, and Buddhist cultural influences that the period of division had introduced.

The Mongol Yuan dynasty (1271–1368) and the Manchu Qing dynasty (1644–1912) posed the most radical challenges to any simple equation of "China" with a Chinese-ruled state. Both were conquest dynasties founded by non-Chinese peoples who ruled over Chinese populations while maintaining distinct identities, institutions, and territories. The Qing, in particular, governed a vast multiethnic empire in which "China proper" (the eighteen provinces of the former Ming dynasty) was only one component alongside Manchuria, Mongolia, Tibet, and Xinjiang — each governed through different institutional arrangements. Recent scholarship in the "New Qing History" has emphasized the Qing's Inner Asian dimensions and questioned whether the Qing should be understood as a "Chinese" dynasty at all, or rather as a Central Eurasian empire that happened to include China.

These boundary questions are not merely historiographical. They have direct political implications in the present. The People's Republic of China claims sovereignty over Taiwan, Tibet, Xinjiang, and the South China Sea islands on the basis of historical precedent — arguing that these territories have been "part of China since ancient times" (自古以来就是中国的一部分). Critics counter that such claims retroject modern territorial concepts onto a past in which neither "China" nor its "borders" existed in their current form. The historian must navigate these politically charged waters with care, acknowledging the legitimate complexity of the evidence without becoming an advocate for any present-day political position.

3. Sources for Chinese History

China possesses one of the richest and most continuous historical records of any civilization. The range of available sources is extraordinary, spanning archaeological remains, inscriptions on bone and bronze, transmitted literary texts, administrative documents, legal codes, local gazetteers, personal diaries, visual art, and material culture. Understanding the nature and limitations of these sources is essential to any critical engagement with Chinese history.

3.1 Archaeological Sources

Modern archaeology in China began in the 1920s with the excavation of Zhoukoudian (the Peking Man site) and the discovery of Yangshao painted pottery by the Swedish geologist Johan Gunnar Andersson in 1921. Since then, and especially since the 1950s, archaeological work in China has expanded enormously. Major excavations — Anyang, Erlitou, Sanxingdui, Mawangdui, the terracotta warriors of Qin Shihuang's mausoleum, the Zhangjiashan bamboo strips, and hundreds of others — have transformed our understanding of every period of Chinese history.

Archaeological evidence is particularly important for periods before the development of writing (pre-Shang) and for correcting the biases of the literary record. The discovery of the Sanxingdui bronze civilization in Sichuan, for example, revealed a sophisticated Bronze Age culture with no clear connection to the Shang tradition described in transmitted texts, forcing historians to reconsider the assumption that Chinese civilization had a single origin in the Yellow River valley. Similarly, the excavation of tombs belonging to ordinary people — farmers, soldiers, minor officials — has provided a much-needed corrective to the elite focus of the transmitted literary sources.

China's archaeological heritage is vast and continually expanding. The Chinese government estimates that there are over 760,000 registered immovable cultural relics across the country, and major new discoveries are reported every year. The challenge for historians is to integrate this archaeological evidence with the literary record, recognizing that the two types of source material have different strengths, limitations, and biases.

3.2 Epigraphic Sources

Epigraphy — the study of inscriptions — bridges the gap between archaeology and textual history. The earliest Chinese writing appears on oracle bones (甲骨文, jiaguwen), turtle shells and animal scapulae used for divination at the Shang court, dating from approximately the fourteenth to the eleventh century BCE. Over 150,000 oracle bone fragments have been recovered, bearing approximately 4,500 distinct characters, of which about 1,700 have been deciphered. These inscriptions provide invaluable evidence for Shang religion, politics, warfare, agriculture, and daily life.

Bronze inscriptions (金文, jinwen) from the Shang and especially the Zhou period provide a different type of evidence. Cast into the interior of ritual bronze vessels, these inscriptions record appointments, grants of land, legal judgments, military campaigns, and dedications to ancestors. Some are quite lengthy — the Mao Gong Ding (毛公鼎) inscription, for example, contains 497 characters — and they offer a direct window into the political and social world of the Zhou elite. Because bronze inscriptions were produced to be permanent records, they provide a useful check on the sometimes idealized or retrospective accounts found in transmitted texts like the Shangshu (Book of Documents) or the Zuozhuan (Zuo Commentary).

Stone inscriptions, bamboo and wooden strips, and silk manuscripts add further dimensions to the epigraphic record. The Qin and Han dynasties produced enormous quantities of administrative documents on bamboo and wooden strips (简牍, jiandu), many of which have been recovered from tombs and ancient wells. These include legal statutes, tax records, military registers, calendrical calculations, medical prescriptions, and personal letters. The Shuihudi Qin bamboo strips (睡虎地秦墓竹简), discovered in 1975, provided the first substantial evidence of Qin law, fundamentally changing scholarly understanding of the Qin state.

3.3 Transmitted Textual Sources

China's transmitted literary tradition is one of the longest and most extensive in the world. The core of this tradition is the official dynastic histories (正史, zhengshi), a series of twenty-four (later twenty-five or twenty-six) comprehensive histories, each devoted to a single dynasty, compiled according to a format established by Sima Qian (ca. 145–86 BCE) in his Shiji (Records of the Grand Historian). These histories include imperial annals (本纪, benji), chronological tables (表, biao), treatises on institutional topics such as ritual, music, astronomy, geography, and economics (志/书, zhi/shu), and individual biographies (列传, liezhuan).

The dynastic histories are indispensable, but they are also deeply problematic as sources. Each was compiled by the succeeding dynasty, which had strong political incentives to portray its predecessor in a negative light and to legitimate its own claim to power. The histories focus overwhelmingly on the imperial court, the central government, and the social elite; they have relatively little to say about the lives of ordinary people, women, ethnic minorities, or regional societies. Their treatment of non-Chinese peoples is often filtered through a lens of sinocentric cultural superiority. And they are inevitably shaped by the Confucian moral framework that guided their compilers, who selected, arranged, and interpreted facts to illustrate the operation of heavenly mandate, the moral qualities of rulers, and the consequences of virtuous or wicked governance.

Beyond the dynastic histories, the Chinese textual tradition includes an enormous range of other sources: the Confucian and Daoist classics, philosophical treatises, poetry and prose anthologies, encyclopedias, local gazetteers (方志, fangzhi), family genealogies, Buddhist and Daoist scriptures, novels, drama, travel accounts, agricultural manuals, medical texts, and much more. The Qing-era Siku quanshu (四库全书, Complete Library in Four Branches of Literature), compiled in the 1770s–1780s, attempted to collect all important Chinese books and runs to over 36,000 volumes. Modern digital databases — notably the Scripta Sinica database maintained by Academia Sinica in Taiwan, the Chinese Text Project, and the Zhongguo jiben guji ku — have made this vast textual heritage searchable and accessible to scholars worldwide.

4. Periodization: How to Divide Chinese History

Every history must divide its subject matter into periods, and the choice of periodization reveals assumptions about what matters most in history — politics, economics, culture, or something else. Chinese history has been periodized in at least three fundamentally different ways, each with its own strengths and limitations.

4.1 Dynastic Periodization

The oldest and most familiar method of periodizing Chinese history is the dynastic framework. Chinese historians have traditionally organized the past around the succession of ruling houses: Xia, Shang, Zhou, Qin, Han, and so on through to the Qing. This framework has deep roots in Chinese historical thought: the concept of the Mandate of Heaven (天命, tianming), first articulated in the early Zhou period, holds that legitimate rule is granted by Heaven and can be withdrawn from an unworthy ruler and transferred to a new dynasty. The rise and fall of dynasties is thus not merely a political narrative but a moral and cosmic one, reflecting the operation of heavenly justice.

Dynastic periodization has the advantage of providing clear, well-defined boundaries (the founding and fall of each dynasty) and of reflecting the way Chinese people themselves understood their history for most of the imperial period. It also corresponds, roughly, to genuine political and institutional discontinuities: the transition from Han to Tang, or from Song to Yuan, involved real changes in governing structures, elite culture, and social organization.

But dynastic periodization also has serious limitations. It privileges political history and the activities of the ruling elite at the expense of social, economic, and cultural change, which rarely coincides neatly with dynastic boundaries. The "Tang-Song transition," for example — a profound transformation in Chinese economy, society, technology, and culture — began well before the fall of the Tang in 907 and continued well after the founding of the Song in 960. Dynastic periodization also struggles to accommodate periods of division, when multiple states coexisted (as during the Warring States, the Three Kingdoms, the Southern and Northern Dynasties, and the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms), and conquest dynasties that do not fit comfortably into a narrative of Chinese civilizational continuity.

4.2 Socioeconomic Periodization

In the twentieth century, Chinese and Western scholars proposed various socioeconomic periodizations that sought to fit Chinese history into universal developmental schemes. The most influential was the Marxist periodization adopted as orthodoxy in the People's Republic of China after 1949, which divided Chinese history into primitive society, slave society, feudal society, semi-colonial semi-feudal society, and socialist society. In this scheme, the Shang and Western Zhou were classified as slave societies; the period from the Eastern Zhou through the Qing was feudal society; the period from the Opium War (1840) to 1949 was semi-colonial semi-feudal; and the period since 1949 has been socialist.

This periodization was always problematic. The characterization of Shang society as "slave-based" rests on limited evidence and has been questioned by many scholars, both within and outside China. The application of the European concept of "feudalism" to the enormously long period from approximately 770 BCE to 1912 CE — over 2,600 years — obscures far more than it reveals, collapsing the fundamental differences between the decentralized aristocratic politics of the Zhou, the centralized bureaucratic empires of the Qin and Han, and the mature scholar-official state of the Song and Ming. Even within the Marxist tradition, fierce debates raged about the dates of the transitions between stages — the so-called Zhongguo gudai shi fenqi wenti (中国古代史分期问题, "problem of periodization in ancient Chinese history") — without reaching consensus.

Non-Marxist socioeconomic periodizations have also been proposed. The Japanese sinologist Naito Konan (1866–1934) argued that the most important turning point in Chinese history was not a dynastic transition but the Tang-Song transition, which he characterized as a shift from an aristocratic to a meritocratic society, from a manor-based to a market-based economy, and from a cosmopolitan to a more distinctively "Chinese" culture. Naito's thesis has been enormously influential and continues to generate debate.

4.3 Global and Comparative Periodization

More recently, historians have sought to periodize Chinese history within global or comparative frameworks, asking how Chinese developments relate to those in other parts of the world. The rise of world history and global history as academic fields has encouraged scholars to think about China not as an isolated civilization developing according to its own internal logic but as one node in a web of Eurasian (and eventually global) connections. From this perspective, the most significant periods in Chinese history are those that correspond to large-scale Eurasian phenomena: the Bronze Age interaction sphere, the spread of Buddhism along the Silk Road, the Mongol world empire, the early modern "silver century" linking Ming China to Spanish America, and the industrial divergence between Europe and Asia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

This book adopts a hybrid approach, using dynastic labels as convenient markers while organizing the narrative around the major social, economic, cultural, and political transformations that gave each period its distinctive character. The dynastic framework is too deeply embedded in the sources and the scholarly literature to be abandoned entirely, but it is supplemented — and sometimes corrected — by attention to processes of change that cut across dynastic boundaries.

5. The Chinese Historiographical Tradition

China possesses one of the world's oldest and most sophisticated traditions of historical writing. The origins of Chinese historiography can be traced to the Shang dynasty, where court scribes (史, shi) kept records of royal divinations and ritual activities. By the Zhou period, the role of the historian had expanded to include the recording of speeches, edicts, treaties, and diplomatic exchanges. The Shangshu (Book of Documents), traditionally attributed to Confucius but containing material of diverse dates, preserves what purport to be speeches and proclamations from the early Zhou and even earlier periods, though modern scholarship regards much of the text as later fabrication or reworking.

The decisive figure in Chinese historiography is Sima Qian (司马迁, ca. 145–86 BCE), whose Shiji (史记, Records of the Grand Historian) established the model that all subsequent official histories would follow. Sima Qian's achievement was twofold. First, he created a comprehensive historical framework that began with the legendary Yellow Emperor and continued to his own time, covering approximately two and a half millennia of Chinese history. Second, he developed a sophisticated narrative method that combined annalistic chronology with biographical portraiture, allowing him to present both the broad sweep of political events and the individual personalities and moral choices that shaped them. Sima Qian's famous statement of purpose — "to investigate the boundary between heaven and man, to penetrate the changes of past and present, and to establish the words of one school of thought" (究天人之际，通古今之变，成一家之言) — set the standard for Chinese historical ambition.

The tradition that Sima Qian inaugurated continued for over two millennia. Each major dynasty produced an official history of its predecessor, compiled by a state-appointed commission of scholar-officials. Ban Gu (32–92 CE) wrote the Hanshu (History of the Han), the first history devoted to a single dynasty. The practice was institutionalized under the Tang, when the government established a permanent History Office (史馆, shiguan). By the Qing period, the compilation of the official history had become a massive bureaucratic enterprise, involving dozens of scholars working over years or decades.

Alongside the official histories, a rich tradition of private historical writing flourished. The Zizhi tongjian (资治通鉴, Comprehensive Mirror to Aid in Government), compiled by Sima Guang (1019–1086) in the Northern Song period, is perhaps the most impressive example: a chronologically organized history of China from 403 BCE to 959 CE, running to 294 chapters and based on meticulous comparison of multiple sources. Sima Guang's explicit purpose was pragmatic — to provide rulers with historical precedents that could guide political decision-making — but his method was rigorously empirical, and his source-critical annotations (preserved in the companion work Zizhi tongjian kaoyi) represent a remarkable exercise in historical methodology.

The Qing dynasty produced a flourishing school of evidential research (考证学, kaozhengxue), centered on the rigorous philological and textual analysis of classical texts. Scholars such as Gu Yanwu (1613–1682), Yan Ruoqu (1636–1704), and Dai Zhen (1724–1777) subjected the Confucian classics and other ancient texts to critical scrutiny, exposing forgeries, correcting transmission errors, and establishing more reliable readings. This tradition has been compared to the European philological tradition associated with Lorenzo Valla and the Renaissance humanists, and it laid the groundwork for modern Chinese historical scholarship.

6. Western Sinological Historiography

Western engagement with Chinese history has a long history of its own, stretching back to the Jesuit missionaries of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, who produced the first substantial European accounts of Chinese civilization. Matteo Ricci (1552–1610), Martino Martini (1614–1661), and Jean-Baptiste Du Halde (1674–1743) conveyed to European audiences an image of China as an ancient, stable, and remarkably well-governed civilization — an image that profoundly influenced Enlightenment thinkers such as Leibniz, Voltaire, and the Physiocrats.

The professionalization of sinology as an academic discipline in the nineteenth century brought more critical approaches. The French scholar Abel-Remusat (1788–1832), the first holder of a chair in Chinese at the College de France, and his successor Stanislas Julien (1797–1873) laid the foundations of modern Western sinological scholarship. In Germany, the study of China developed within the framework of Orientalism, with scholars such as Georg von der Gabelentz (1840–1893) and Richard Wilhelm (1873–1930) making important contributions to the understanding of Chinese language, philosophy, and culture.

The twentieth century saw a transformation in Western sinological historiography, driven by several factors: the opening of Chinese archives and archaeological sites, the development of new methodological approaches (social history, economic history, gender history, postcolonial studies), the immigration of Chinese scholars to Western universities, and the geopolitical significance of China in the Cold War and post-Cold War world.

The most ambitious collaborative effort in Western sinological historiography is The Cambridge History of China (1978–present), a planned fifteen-volume series that aspires to comprehensive coverage of Chinese history from the Qin dynasty to the present. Edited by Denis Twitchett and John K. Fairbank (and, for later volumes, their successors), the series has assembled contributions from the leading specialists in each period and topic. Though incomplete — some volumes remain in preparation decades after the project's inception — the Cambridge History remains the standard reference work for the non-specialist seeking authoritative accounts of specific periods or topics in Chinese history.

Among individual scholars, several have shaped the modern Western understanding of Chinese history in profound ways. John King Fairbank (1907–1991) of Harvard University was the dominant figure in American sinology for half a century. His "impact-response" model — the idea that modern Chinese history was set in motion by the Western impact of the nineteenth century, to which China was forced to respond — defined the field for a generation, though it was later criticized for its sinocentrism and its implicit assumption that China was a passive recipient of Western modernity. Fairbank's students, including Philip Kuhn, Paul Cohen, and Jonathan Spence, developed more nuanced approaches that emphasized internal dynamics and Chinese agency.

Jonathan Spence (1936–2021) was perhaps the most gifted narrative historian of China in the English language. His The Search for Modern China (1990, 3rd ed. 2012) remains the most widely read general history of China from the late Ming to the present. Patricia Buckley Ebrey's Cambridge Illustrated History of China (1996, 3rd ed. 2022) provides an accessible and beautifully illustrated overview of the entire span of Chinese history. Dieter Kuhn's multi-volume contributions to the Cambridge History and his monograph The Age of Confucian Rule (2009) offer authoritative treatments of the Song period. Mark Edward Lewis's six-volume history of early China, published by Harvard University Press between 2006 and 2012, represents the most comprehensive recent synthesis of the period from the earliest times through the Tang dynasty.

7. Key Reference Works and Digital Resources

The study of Chinese history has been transformed in recent decades by the development of digital resources. Endymion Wilkinson's Chinese History: A New Manual (5th ed., 2018) is an indispensable guide to the full range of primary and secondary sources, reference works, and research tools available to the historian of China. Running to over 1,300 pages, it covers everything from chronology and geography to weights and measures, from official histories and local gazetteers to modern databases and digital archives.

Major digital resources include the Chinese Text Project (ctext.org), which provides searchable full-text access to a vast corpus of pre-modern Chinese texts; the Academia Sinica Scripta Sinica database, which includes the full text of the twenty-five dynastic histories and many other primary sources; the China Biographical Database Project (CBDB), a prosopographical database containing biographical information on approximately 470,000 individuals from the seventh through the nineteenth centuries; and the Harvard-Yenching Library's Chinese rare book digitization project, which has made thousands of rare Chinese texts freely available online.

Archaeological databases are also increasingly important. The Chinese government's National Cultural Heritage Administration maintains records of registered cultural relics, and major excavation reports are regularly published in journals such as Kaogu (Archaeology), Wenwu (Cultural Relics), and Kaogu Xuebao (Acta Archaeologica Sinica). The integration of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technology with historical data — exemplified by the China Historical GIS project, a collaboration between Harvard and Fudan University — has opened new possibilities for the spatial analysis of Chinese history.

8. Scope and Method of This Book

This book tells the story of China from the earliest archaeological evidence of human habitation to the present day. It is organized in nine parts and thirty-two chapters, covering the full chronological span from prehistory through the twenty-first century, with additional thematic chapters on economy, society, foreign relations, governance, and ethnicity.

The narrative is political in its backbone — the rise and fall of states, the exercise of power, the conduct of war and diplomacy — but it integrates social, economic, cultural, and intellectual history at every point. Each chapter situates Chinese developments within a broader regional and global context, asking how events in China related to those in the wider world. The book draws on both Chinese-language and Western-language scholarship, and it makes extensive use of primary sources in translation.

A word about what this book does not do. It does not attempt to be encyclopedic: thirty-two chapters cannot cover five millennia in exhaustive detail, and many important topics receive only cursory treatment. It does not attempt to advance original arguments based on primary research, though it engages critically with the secondary literature. And it does not attempt to present a single unified interpretation of Chinese history: the state of the field is too diverse and the evidence too complex for any single interpretive framework to do justice to the subject. What this book does offer is a readable, up-to-date, and critically informed synthesis of the current state of knowledge about China's long and remarkable past — a starting point for further exploration, not a final word.