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The Empire, long divided must unite -

long united, must divide.Thus, it has ever been. So opens the famous Chinese tale "The Romance of the
Three Kingdoms", or to put it another way, China is whole again! Then it broke again! And that's
honestly pretty accurate. The story of China is a very long, often winding and all too frequently
shattered enterprise - but it is DAMN interesting. So, to find out what's causing this three thousand year
long dance of unifying and fragmenting, let's do some history. To start, every civilization needs water in
some form or another. Egypt has the Nile, Mesopotamia has the Tigris and Euphrates, and China has the
Yellow River. The earliest records of centralized civilization in China point to the Yellow River Basin as
the cradle of that civilization, but written records only tell part of the story, and in China especially
there's a pretty shocking gap between what our sources tell us and what we found archaeologically in
the past century all across the country. So, for instance, the Yangtze River to the South was once
regarded as a later development during the Chinese Bronze Age but nope! There was all kinds of
separate stuff going on down there before we ever see significant textual evidence for it. So, back to the
Yellow River. From what we know, Civilization got properly going during the reign of the five semi-
divine and almost certainly legendary Emperors. The last one, Emperor Yu, founded the - also likely
mythical - Xia dynasty in the 22nd century BC. And real quick on the subject of names - despite two
Chinese speaking friends very generously coaching my pronunciation, I am still sure to fail so: blanket
apology. Skipping ahead to sturdier footing, we have the definitely real Shang dynasty, who ruled from
the Yellow River Basin during the Chinese Bronze Age. But even here we found boatloads of evidence
for distinct cultures with regionally unique bronze work, implying fairly independent societies across
China .There's also a decent chance that the Shang and later Zhou dynasties overlapped. I recognize
that this is all a bit too hazy, but I hope that you can see why this might be a very contentious issue and
we're still discovering new things all the time! So even more so than usual: general disclaimer that
academics are currently spilling rivers of ink debating some of what I'll cover in this series. And speaking
of writing, err, things, our first glimpse of the written Chinese language comes from the Shang Bronze
Age. Where Oracles enscribed turtle shells and bones with predictions, before hocking them into a fire,
to see how they cracked and which statements were verified. The writing, though obviously SUPER old
is still recognizably Chinese. And the quality implies that the script had been around even before that.
Plus, the hefty collection of turtle shells We've dug up indicates that this was a regular, if not daily
procedure, and this tells us two important things: for 1) the Shang rulers believed themselves to have
an IN with the gods, and 2) While artwork and bronze work weren't unique to the Shang, writing at this
level of sophistication likely was. This sets the stage for an entire history of power lying with those who
have divine favor, and those who can most effectively employ writing to convey that. Our written
sources tell us that the last Shang Emperor became tyrannical and King Wu overthrew him to found the
Zhou dynasty. Which went on to rule for another 800 years. And this brings us to one of the most central
concepts in Chinese history: The Mandate of Heaven.The basic idea is that if you rule justly, Heaven will
smile upon you and grant you dominion over China, But if you behave wickedly, as the last Shang
Emperor did, you've forfeited your power and someone more noble than you is going to claim it. So,
just watch out for that happening all the time for the next 3,000 years... Anyway that Zhou dynasty
starts to consolidate our mental image of classical China with unique knife and Spade coinage, walls,
bureaucratic government and a lot of soon-to-be very famous literature. Unfortunately for the Zhou,
their strong start wouldn't last forever and China's longest Dynasty would spend half a millenium
fending off assailants from all sides after caving in on itself in the 770s BC. So I mean, yeah. The Zhou
were around for another 500 years, but come on look at it. barely even exists - it's tiny. The split
between the strong and cohesive western Zhou and that tiny Eastern Zhou as they were known, also
marks the start of a lot of wars over the next few centuries. The spring and autumn annals (a historical
text describing the 8th to early 5th centuries [BC]) also gives us the name for the Spring and Autumn
period. And all things considered, it wasn't too bad. What started with about 150 independent
kingdoms, dukedoms, and city states, gradually glomped each other to narrow that number down to 30
or so. And then to 7 by the end. The Spring and Autumn period was a pretty slow burn, but definitely
heated up as the remaining territories became bigger and wealthier. Still, you couldn't just deathball
your way into an empire. So strategy became a crucial weapon. And that's where the art of war comes
in. Sun Tzu's famous work of military philosophy makes clear, that the first weapon in any generals
arsenal is stratagem. All the better to break your opponent without even lifting a spear if you can avoid
it. Sun Tsu knew that lengthy campaigns were a disaster waiting to happen - so clever politics and tricky
tactics often won the day. Machiavelli would be very proud. So, with all this high-level political, military,
stateger-y going on, these states would sure do well to have a smart person or two on hand. And a
latter portion of the Spring and Autumn period saw rise in the power and influence of educated
aristocracy. One such scholarly gentleman was a guy who saw no greater purpose in life than serving as
a government bureaucrat. No, but like, seriously! Career prospects were way different back then. So
anyway, this guy travelled around China for 13 years accomplishing not much of anything the career of
this Kong Qiu looks like a complete failure at face value, because it kind of was. But fast forward a few
hundred years, and his assorted teachings come to us through arguably the most foundational work of
Chinese philosophy, The Analects of Confucius Look at that, pulled a sneaky on ya. In a world
dominated by conflict and political duplicity between competing States Confucius taught the value of
gentlemanly virtue and adherence to cultural norms of conduct and respect yet a very particular view of
the past is holding valuable instruction for his largely wayward times and you can argue the subtext
here is "Hey guys, if any of you want the Mandate of Heaven you better *get your damn act together*",
but he was also simply teaching everyday people how to cope with stuff being all crazy and invadedy all
the time keep a routine, be a good person those ideas come up a lot throughout world history.
Confucius was far from the only active philosopher as the famed hundred schools of thought were
writing philosophy like there was no tomorrow. Because sometimes there wasn't.

Some other thinkers to note are Mencius, who elaborated

on Confucian thought half a century later and codified much of Confucian philosophy

for later use and also very much counter to all of this, was Lao Tzu who was cited as the
 philosopher behinds Taoism and the author of the Dao de Jing, though there is some debate on that
one too.

I could easily keep going on

Confucianism and Daoism for another 30 minutes but suffice to say,

the hardest times can produce the wisest works, and oh boy where time starting

to get hard. The Spring and Autumn period gave way to the proverbial winter that was the Warring

States period when things got much grimmer on the combat front as the remaining powers in China
became

fiercer in their bid to be the last one standing.

Perhaps no surprise considering the few remaining kingdoms gained considerable

wealth and power along with their territory the dwindling number of states

also coincided with much stronger

centralized governments as only the states that could recruit, equip, and mobilize large armies could

survive in the first place.

And speaking of states that were good at, um. Warring.

Blue, you're really killing with the transitions today aren't ya.

The Qin Kingdom

became fiercely legalistic and ruthlessly

expansionist in the late 4th and 3rd centuries BC

For one, those guys loved their crossbows and I honestly can't blame them.

because crossbows are dope, but more alarmingly they had a clear

take-no-prisoners

policy and that applied to civilians as well.

So their armies pushed east and conquered the remaining kingdoms, unifying China,

under the Qin banner in 221, and granting their king the title of

ShiHuangDi, first emperor. Given the brutality

of their methods you may wonder if they deserve the Mandate of Heaven after all,
 and heaven seems to have wondered the same,

as the Qin Dynasty

collapsed a few short years after the death of ShiHuangDi.

Still, the Qin are a landmark moment for the birth of a true

Chinese Empire and the name China itself comes from the Qin Dynasty.

Kind of. The etymology actually goes through about five other languages *before* we get China, but
point stands.

Short as his dynasty was, ShiHuangDi

made some important innovations to literally pave the way for centuries of future Chinese empires.

In addition to editing and standardizing the Chinese written language,

the Qin engaged in fantastically huge building and infrastructure projects from

walls and roads to insane royal structures.

Some descriptions of Qin architecture have been mocked as overly

fanciful, but after we discovered the Terracotta Army in the

1970s, everybody stopped laughing real fast.

A couple of years after the Emperor died from what the doctor promised was an elixir of immortality

but in all likelihood was a one-way ticket to mercury poisoning, the Empire

was up in full revolt against the Qin.

Out of a fierce but mercifully brief civil war,

arose the Han Dynasty

under Liu Bang, ruling over most of China by 202 BC.

During the 400 year long and largely peaceful reign of the Han

Confucianism emerged as a state philosophy after the Qin won on a book-burning spree

Woops! Yeah, that happened.

Anyway, the Han retained a firmly

legalistic framework but they weren't draconian about it.

Instead, they focused on actually being a good Empire, by expanding the bureaucracy.

This period also saw the introduction of circular coinage, paper and silk production,

early hydraulics and cool astronomy. Plus, more Taoism.

You can never have enough Taoism. The Han also had to

with trouble in the form of an invasion by the Huns

Yep, those are the ones. In the process of dealing with the XiongNu, as they were

also called, the Han armies pushed west into Central Asia and found a number of other civilizations.

Among them were the Bactrian, said to have a talent for horse riding.

A sophisticated culture and splendid cities these

Bactrian were in fact the farthest East successors to the Greek Empire of Alexander the Great.

What??

Yeah!
 The King and Generals Channel has a fantastic

two-part series on this so I'll actually just point you to him.

But the short of it is that the Han wanted some of these heavenly

horses from the Bactrians to help fight the XiongNu and after an unproductive round of haggling, they
sent a giant army to the

City of Dayuan aka Alexandria Eschate

sacked it,

took the heavenly horses and yoinked a large share of the territory in the Terran basin on their way
back.

It's after pushing this far

west and establishing contact with the various states of Central Asia, that the Han began trade
relations that would carry

goods all the way to the Mediterranean.

Most famously, silk.

This Silk Road became a backbone of the Han economy for the next few centuries and helped kick
 the Han Golden Age into high gear.

And also, the Han defeated the XiongNu with the help of those heavenly

horses though the historian Sima Qian noted presciently that this was likely only the first round of a
much

much larger conflict. And on that subject

Sima Qian, the Han's court historian produced one of the greatest works of history *period*.

his ShiJi, aka records of the grand historian,

compiled at the turn of the 1st century BC is a

really big deal for China and for history

Basically he wrote a 12 chapter narrative history from as far back as he could find up until his present
day.

He also included 30

histories about individual states and a further 70 standalone biographies.

It is exceptionally thorough
 while remaining fairly flexible to read. Though in the process of writing his history

Sima Qian may have committed some light treason by speaking a little too openly to the emperor about
his opinions as a result

he was cast out and castrated but

he did get to finish his life's work and history is all the richer for it.

The following decade saw the Han rise to its greatest

extent, stretching down along the eastern coast

eastward towards Korea and westward into Xinjiang.

The bureaucracy also grew during this period,

becoming more efficient at acquiring and spending tax revenues broadly and locally,

as well as employing mandatory conscription labor to build public works.

Life was peaceful, culture was booming,

resources were plentiful. It was a good time for everyone involved

Of course, it's usually after a long run of things going well, that politics tend to sour
 and the heads of state turned away from

Confucianism to reprise the harsher tactics and expansionary world view of their Qin predecessors.

You've seen this before and you'll see it again

someone's Empire is about to get dunked on

and a steady parade of terrible omens for half a century made it very clear that Heaven's Mandate was
about to scram-date.

So one enterprising Confucian scholar named Wang Mang carried out a very peaceful

usurpation of the throne with every intent to set things right, and start a new dynasty.

Unfortunately, things didn't work out great for him.

He had some interesting reforms but he was paying too much attention to whether or not his

bureaucrats had the right titles and ignoring how the Yellow River was constantly flooding.

No surprise that he too, got the boot.

After that it was a bit of a power scramble and against several odds, a member of the Han family
 reclaimed China moving the capital eastward from ChangAn to LuoYang to establish or re-establish the
latter

eastern Han Dynasty.

The early decades of this Empire were spent recovering from the mess of the past century

and with a lot of effort things were pretty solid for a while.

Though the official histories pushed the final end of the Han as far forward as 220 AD, their empire

kinda went back to a steady decline in the mid second century

as the throne passed through a line of young

or otherwise incompetent emperors

whose regents did all of the governing for them.

And honestly calling the Han an empire after the 180sAD is just an exercise in self delusion.

Along those lines there's a comical amount of succession crises and political intrigue

shenanigans throughout the 100's ad that go-a-ways to explain why no one was in a position to do
anything when the Empire shattered
 apart of the turn of the century.

However, it's from this complete mess that we get the setting for the famous Chinese epic,

The Romance of the Three Kingdoms and I could keep going,

But honestly, I'm done. I'm stopping here. Screw it, China's broke again we'll fix in the next damn
video.

Okay, I actually lied. I'm back. So, as you can see building an empire is hard. But you know what's easy?
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squarespace.com/overlysarcastic, and use code Overly Sarcastic for 10% off. Thank you all for watching,
and also thank you for putting up with my voice this time, it might have been a little bit more gravelly
and batman-y. Because I have a bit of the cold, but anyway, thanks for watching, had a lot of fun
putting this video together, definitely looking forward to going a little bit farther afield, then the typical
Greece and Rome, but in any case thanks for watching so much and we'll see you in the new year!