This year, I read Linda Jaivin’s The Shortest History of China — a pretty good condensed history of the massive country! This post collects some of the more surprising and/or useful things I learned from the book.

  • Notes on pronouncing Pinyin (the government’s official romanization of Chinese phonetics): “X (as in Xi Jinping) is pronounced like the sh in ‘she’; C (as in Cáo Cāo) is pronounced like the ts in ‘its’; Q (as in the Qin dynasty) is pronounced like the ch in ‘cheese’; Zh (as in Zhōu Ēnlái) is pronounced like a j, but with the tongue curled almost to the roof of the mouth; and Z (as in Zūnyì) is like the ds in ‘adds’.”
  • More than 90% of the Chinese population is Han, making them the world’s largest ethnic group.
  • Han Chinese consider the mythical Yellow Emperor one of their oldest ancestors. The Yellow Emperor is credited with inventing silk, carts, boats, the pottery wheel, and the calendar, and uniting the tribes north of the Yellow River. Some accounts also credit the Yellow Emperor with inventing writing (these underlie the popular claim that China’s recorded history is 5000 years old — in fact, the earliest hard evidence of the Chinese script dates back 3500 years).
  • Here’s a chronology of China’s major dynasties:
  • The notion of the Mandate of Heaven, by which the emperor, or Son of Heaven, enjoys a semi-divine authority to rule, was rigorized by Mencius, a follower of Confucius. Now you know where Curtis Yarvin’s pen name Mencius Moldbug comes from!
  • Bruce Lee’s famous invocation to “be water” comes from Laozi’s Dao De Jing. The aphorism “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step” also comes from the book (it’s not from Confucius, as I previously thought).
  • Laozi’s followers, the Daoists, preached wuwei, “inaction” — flowing like water. They clashed with Confucians, who yearned to serve a ruler and developed a diverse set of rituals and disciplines. But both revered the I Ching, a book containing sixty-four hexagrams, representing all possible groupings of solid (Yang) and broken (Yin) lines in sets of six. The I Ching is a fairly abstruse artifact that translator John Minford calls “the strangest and most incomprehensible item in the [Chinese] canon”.
  • Besides Confucianism and Daoism, the third major school of thought founded in the Zhou dynasty that continued to inspire Chinese politics for millennia was Legalism. Hanfeizi founded this school of thought, and he argued that governing by moral example, as the Confucians advocated, was futile. The ruler decided right and wrong.
  • Qin Shi Huang had nearly a million soldiers and commoners — about one out of five of his subjects — to work on the Great Walls.
  • Qin Shi Huang severely persecuted Confucians, who were fixated on virtuous rule. He would live on as a symbol of tyranny — the expression “burn the books and bury the scholars” originated as a way to describe his style.
  • The main tomb in Qin Shi Huang’s mausoleum (guarded by the famous terracotta army) has not been excavated since it’s in a seismic zone (so underground cultural relics need to be unearthed for protection). Given Qin Shi Huang’s towering importance in Chinese history, overcoming the technical challenges to unearthing his tomb seems worthwhile!
  • Two somewhat humorous euphemisms for homosexuality come from the Han emperor Ai: “The story goes that one day, Ai and Dong were napping on the imperial bed when Ai was summoned to the court. Rather than disturb his beloved, whose head was resting on the long sleeve of his robe, Ai cut off the sleeve. The phrase ‘to cut the sleeve’, duànxiù, has entered the language as a metaphor for homosexuality. It is typically paired with ‘to share the peach’, fēntáo, from an earlier tale related by Hanfeizi about a male lover of a prince who committed a great breach of protocol — for which he was not punished — by eating half a peach and giving the ruler the rest.”
  • Castrates made useful servants, particularly for watching over wives and concubines, as there would be no doubts about the paternity of any children. Until the tenth century, a master could legally castrate his slaves for that purpose, and some impoverished families had their sons castrated in the hope that they could gain access to power and wealth.
  • During the Tang period, the ability to write poetry was considered an essential attribute of an educated man. Poets were celebrated, and their work popularized by singers in teahouses and wineshops. Surprisingly, though, more Tang poems extol male friendship than romantic love. This was because most marriages were arranged.
  • Here’s how the Jin dynasty was wiped out: having confined the Song to the south, they controlled the coal and iron ore deposits in the north and learned advanced ironmongery from the Song. Imprudently, they sold iron to the nomads of the northern grasslands, including the Mongols, who were talented equestrians and fierce warriors. The Mongols replaced their horn and bone arrowtips with iron, and forged swords and armor; a century later, under the leadership of Genghis Khan, the ironclad cavalry of the Mongols thundered south to conquer both the Jin and the Song. This seems like a good allegory to explore about selling security-sensitive technology to adversaries for profit-minded reasons!
  • During the reign of the Qing dynasty, the British East India Company expanded its opium trade in China. As addiction was damaging to the social fabric, opium trade was illegalized. In 1839, an official seized and flushed out almost 1.4 million kilograms of opium to the sea, triggering the First Opium War with the British. It concluded in a humiliating Chinese defeat. Under duress, the Qing had to cede the island of Hong Kong (“fragrant port”, named for its spice trade). Amusingly given Hong Kong’s economic success now, the British foreign secretary at the time questioned the wisdom of acquiring “a barren island with hardly a House upon it” that would never become a great “Mart of Trade”.
  • Chinese history has notable conflicts that cost staggering amounts of lives without leaving any notable political or social impact. A good example is the Taiping rebellion, which caused 20-30 million deaths, dwarfing the roughly contemporaneous American Civil War (about 750,000). In fact, low-end estimate of Taiping deaths (20 million) is roughly equivalent to the entire population of the United States at the time. Yet it failed to overthrow the Qing dynasty, which would limp on for another half century. The rebellion’s Christian-influenced ideology didn’t take root, and its leader’s vision of a “Heavenly Kingdom” left almost no institutional legacy. Similarly, the An Lushan rebellion between 755 and 763 killed 13-36 million people; the Tang dynasty, which it challenged, continued for another 150 years.
  • Anglo-French forces sacked the Qing summer palace, Yuanmingyuan, as retaliation for the torture and killing of one of their negotiating parties. Hundreds of elegant wooden Chinese buildings were burnt to ashes. Today, the image of the Yuanmingyuan ruins is central to the story of the “century of humiliation” related in patriotic education on the mainland. I found it interesting that the force was led by Lord Elgin, whose father, Thomas Bruce, had stripped the Parthenon of its marble sculptures.
  • Sun Yat-sen, the Han figure who founded the Nationalist Party, or Kuomintang, and helped overthrow the Manchu Qing dynasty, is revered by both Taiwan and the PRC.
  • 1920s Shanghai was called the “Paris of the East” — one of the most glamorous and cosmopolitan cities in the world teeming with Chinese artists, filmmakers, and writers, alongside foreign luminaries like George Bernard Shaw and Rabindranath Tagore. The milieu included refugees from the Bolshevik revolution and Baghdadi Jews drawn to the city’s tolerant cultural and political environment.
  • Unit 731 was a Manchurian outpost where the Imperial Japanese Army carried out horrifying medical experiments similar to those of the Nazi doctor Josef Mengele in concentration camps. The US secretly offered the Unit 731 physicians immunity from prosecution in exchange for exclusive access to their research data.
  • The CCP banned footbinding, concubinage, child marriage, and arranged marriages. Mao ordered in 1955 that all counties and collectives implement equal pay for women and men, declaring: “Women hold up half the sky.”
  • When the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) came to power in 1949, less than a quarter of the population could read or write. To promote literacy, they simplified many of the 10,000 most commonly used characters, including some of the 2000 to 3000 characters needed for basic literacy.
  • Puyi, the last Qing emperor and the subject of Bernardo Bertolucci’s Oscar-winning film, was forgiven by the CCP in 1959 and became a humble gardener in the Forbidden City’s botanical gardens. In his autobiography, he called the voter’s card he was issued in 1960 “the most valuable thing” he’d ever owned.
  • Jaivin implies that Mao’s Red Guards almost rewired traffic signals so that red signalled go, before sane voices prevailed. Many of Mao’s policies were painfully wrongheaded. For example, he mandated the construction of backyard furnaces, which churned window frames, pots, and pans into millions of tons of useless scrap metal. His campaign to eradicate rats, sparrows, flies and mosquitoes infamously caused the Great Chinese Famine, claiming tens of millions of lives. A smaller-scale but similar tragedy is Red Guards enjoying free train and bus passes to propagate the Cultural Revolution while unwittingly spreading cerebrospinal meningitis in an epidemic that would claim 160,000 lives.