NB: This is the beginning of a book I'm thinking of writing. I'd appreciate feedback
Whenever the subject of history comes up with a Chinese audience, by far the most common statement heard is
“中國有五千年的歷史”.
Literally translated, this is rendered: “China has 5000 years of history.” While certainly intended to impress, this pithy statement, is, for a number of reasons, both misleading and not particularly informative regarding the subject of Chinese history.
The figure of 5000 years is itself arbitrary, derived as it was from Sima Qian’s first written history of China, itself just over 2100 years old and containing a great deal of semi mythical conjecture in its earliest chapters. The number is misleading on two counts.
First, the settled history of the land that would become China is considerably older than 5000 years, with the first known settlements dating from c. 8000 BC.
Second, and perhaps more importantly for useful historiography, culturally, socially, and in many ways ethnically, the ancient peoples that inhabited what is now China were so distinct from the modern Chinese people that the implication of the statement that China has 5000 years of history, that there is an unbroken line of cultural and ethnic descent running from the 3rd Millennium BC to the present is, frankly, spurious. If one were to remove the statement of China’s 5000 year history from its context, the absurdity of it becomes quite clear. As an analogue, it would be like the Ayatollahs of Iran claiming unbroken descent from Darius of Persia, or perhaps Mussolini crowning himself Emperor of Rome and claiming his direct descent from Augustus.
China is admittedly a land with a long and interesting history, one that has created ripples throughout the region, and indeed, because of a unique nexus of geography, climate, and culture, across Eurasia. That is the subject of this book.