Why was it only Europe that ever experienced a true Dark Age?

>>2094788

You should look up what happened in China after the Han collapsed. If that isn't a dark age, I don't know what is.

Wars of the three kingdoms were like the grimmest shit that has ever happened on this planet.

>>2094788
Greece went through a dark age senpai

>>2094799
>Greece
>Earliest place defined as Europe

>>2094788
China went through several dark ages. It's just happened so frequently no one really cares anymore.

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>>2094788
Uh it did.

Thrice.
>Pre Imperial China
The Warring States Period. Zhou Empire wanes and the component states of the Proto-Chink people- the Huaxia- become their own. The bigger Kings and Dukes fight for supremacy- not necessarily unification. It was so bad, peeps started thinking a single state was better. Confucianism/Legalism was born and with them, Kings who wanted to create a single realm. One man succeeded.
>Imperial China
-Three Kingdoms & the Nanbeichao (Northern and Southern Dynasties Period. The Sima Jin Dynasty was so fucking short, and the age so fucking terrible, the Chinese call the 200s-500s AD "The Age of Fragmentation." The 3 Kingdoms is famous. The Nanbeichao pretty much started with the Turkic Invasion of Northern China. Turkics couldnt unite for shit so they balkanized into numerous Turkic ruled dynasties fighting each other for the Mandate. Southern China was native ruled but they too balkanized for the fight for supremacy. Chink VS. Turk. Turk VS. Turk. Chink VS. Chink.
-Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms Period. Mercifully short, took just the 900s AD. Followed the Collapse of T'ang and the infighting by the Jiedushi (Military Governors) in the North (the successive 5 dynasties) while in Southern China, petty Kings tried to one up each other (the 10 kingdoms)

The Jin-Song Wars and the Mongol Invasions is a close contender. But it wasnt as terrible as the three.

>>2094798
This right here especially.

>Population before the Three Kingdoms period.
>56.5 million.
>Population after the Three Kingdoms period.
>16.2 million.

>>2094788
Since no one else has taken the opportunity:
>Europe
>Dark age

>>2094788
The Middle-East is still in a dark age

>>2094857

Syria maybe, but Iran is in a golden age

>>2094806
Greece wasn't part of the European world in that period. It was far more tied in with the eastern Mediterranean world centred on the Levant.

>>2094789
>>2094798
>>2094843
Not that it wasn't horrifying, but this is like saying WWI and WWII were Dark Ages. It's not like Chinese civilization itself collapsed and regressed.

>>2094854
Yes, people in Western Europe during the 400s-700s were just continuing Rome's shit, there was no power vacuum and they were not squabbling up the continent creating overnight kingdoms or something until one achieved hegemony in the 700s.

>>2094899

> It's not like Chinese civilization itself collapsed and regressed.

Except that actually is exactly what happened. Chinese civilization DID collapse and regress. (at least for the three kingdoms and Jin periods, which I know better than the others).

You had political collapse, followed by population level and economic collapse, followed by erasure of arts and sciences and literature production, generally inferior material goods production, and it taking hundreds of years to get back to where they were.

>>2094903
Even what immediately followed the Carolingian Renaissance was less than impressive.
It pisses me off that people who finally realized that their cartoon vision of the Medieval era was maybe not entirely accurate then start running to the opposite extreme like fucking lemmings. In a few years I fully expect them to claim that the Church invented space travel.

>>2094903
Europe is a big place. Greece tied to the near east, yes, but was still Europe. You would have been more accurate to say Western Europe, or the Roman-German world, or Latin Europe.

>>2094903
The term Dark Age hasn't been used in scholarship for decades. The only part of western Europe that actually suffered what you see as a Dark Age is Britain. Shit went bad, but Dark Age is the wrong periodisation. It's the Early Middle Ages.

>>2094788
The Maya went through similar after the Classic period, they were starting to revive the classic period culture in the late postclassic but then the Spaniards showed up.

>>2094913
In that case I stand corrected. I always got the impression that despite the political fractioning, prolonged warfare and the occasional plunders, it was still pretty much business as usual in the new states, or even that they progressed compared to the late Han thanks to turmoil spurring invention, but if you claim there is material evidence of decline then I accept that.

>>2094954

I mean, sometimes it got good, and sometimes it got bad. The link inside got devoured, I'm going to try to look for the paper cited somewhere else, but you can see from the discussion and people quoting it

http://historum.com/asian-history/64874-estimating-historical-levels-income-china.html

that for instance, Ming China never actually recovered the population and wealth levels of Song China.

If you really want to look up the Han to Jin period, I'd suggest this.

http://library.uoregon.edu/easia/

Although it will probably take you a year to get through it all, there's a lot of material.

>>2094788

The Qin dinasty literally destroyed like 95% of the philosophy that existed before.

>>2094935
>The only part of western Europe that actually suffered what you see as a Dark Age is Britain.
Whut. How was it any different to the rest of Europe? Hell, it did pretty well out of the deal, since it didn't have anyone to seriously compete with beyond itself.

>>2094899
>It's not like Chinese civilization itself collapsed and regressed.
That' exactly what it was.

>>2094954
The population after the Three Kingdoms period was only ~29% of the population before it, that alone should tell you how much of a collapse China had at the time.

For comparison, even after the Black Plague, at worst around 40% of Europe survived.

>>2095005

It's probably not quite that bad; the collapse of general governmental ability meant that the censuses themselves weren't as accurate and couldn't keep track of stuff as well.

But you do get some pretty big names in the field like Jiangjong Gi (sp?) saying it was around 60%, and others like Ulrich Theobald suggesting around 66%, so still amazingly horrible.

>>2094837
>the Huaxia- become their own
A geographically limited ethononym that never existed as a compound term.

Semi barbarians on the southern periphery of the Sinitic world never identified themselves as Hua in culture or claimed descent from the Xia.

The Qin wasn't viewed as Hua after Shang Yang's reforms.

>The Nanbeichao pretty much started with the Turkic Invasion of Northern China.
Xianbei and Khitan are proto/para Mongolics if reconstructions can be trusted.

>>2094843
>Population after the Three Kingdoms period. >16.2 million.
Over-exaggerated. The Western Jin simply didn't have the capacity to conduct an accurate report with the roaming/hidden population that plagued Chinese censuses.

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>>2094788

According to my calculations, 365 years of the last 745 years were spent in foreign occupation.

Add European colonialism and Japanese invasions to it and China spent most of its last 800 years cucked

>>2095022
By that logic the UK would be cucked because of its foreign rulers.

There's a huge difference between the Xianbei Mongols and the Manchus.

>>2094788
China never had the light of rome shine up on it so arguably they are still in a dark age.

>>2094859
t. Hamza Hussein

>>2094899
>It's not like Chinese civilization itself collapsed and regressed.
China collapsed so hard that all following dynasties are practically we wuzzing

>>2094954
>In the late Eastern Han dynasty, due to natural disasters and social unrest, the economy was badly depressed, leading to the massive waste of farmland. Some local landlords and aristocracy established their own strongholds to defend themselves and developed agriculture, which gradually evolved into a self-sufficient manorial system. The system of strongholds and manors also had effects on the economical mode of following dynasties. In addition, because of the collapse of the imperial court, those worn copper coins were not melted and reminted and many privately minted coins appeared. In the Three Kingdoms period, newly minted coins never made their way into currency. Due to the collapse of the coinage, Cao Wei officially declared silk cloth and grains as the main currencies in 221.

>>2094788
>Why was it only Europe that ever experienced a true Dark Age?
Have you seriously never heard of the Bronze Age Collapse you turbonigger?

>>2094788
Of the top of my head, the Hundred Schools fell when the Qin Dynasty. That is like if Alexander, instead of building shit like Alexandria, insisted that Aristotle was the best philosopher EVER and killed all other living ones, burned their records and writings.

>>2095005
Few modern scholars take the post-han census literally.

The territory under control fell, the people migrated away from the war, and administrative abilities deteriorated.

Still, a 40-50% fall in population because of war, crime, disease, and starvation is reasonable.

>>2095144

That's sorta what happened to Library of Alexandria isn't it?

>Jesus is the best ever, burn all this heretical shit!

>>2095022
>le Qing dynasty was foreign

Ahh and the Tudors were german and Romans were Syrians

>>2095152
Not quite. That was a riot which was out of hand. Plus, it'd already been burned a few times before, so odds are not much was lost at that point.

>>2095144
Isn't that what the jews, christians, and muslims did?

>>2095152
>>2095168
Yea I guess, but that was the infancy stage of China's philosophical development. Plus tbf Christians did persevere SOME texts and carried on some intellectual traditions.

So basically, OP BTFO.

The post-classic Maya would probably count. Even though civilization didn't completely collapse, they were nothing compared to what they had been before 900 AD.

These are only small countries rather than whole regions like Europe and China, but there also Cambodia after 1400, Ethiopia between around 600 and 1100 AD, Greece between 1100 and 800 BC, and Babylonia between 1000 and 900 BC.

>>2094990
>Hell, it did pretty well out of the deal, since it didn't have anyone to seriously compete with beyond itself.

Shit was so bad that Latin virtually vanished, Christianity had to be reintroduced, literacy all but disappeared etc. Gaul, Spain and Italy by comparison all had functioning bishoprics, some wealthy market towns and that sort of thing. Between 400 and 800 Britain was on the floor.

>>2094806
The Greek dark age was hundreds of years before Christ, he doesn't mean the dark age that followed the collapse of the Western Roman Empire.

>>2095209
This is true. Large swathes of the British Isles regressed back from the Roman model of civilisation, even the places that stayed Christian like Ireland became really different from Christianity on the continent due to their isolation from other christians on a regular basis.

>>2094788
Dark Age is a meme idea. There was no such thing.

>>2095236
Do you mean that the "Dark Ages" in the popular sense (all of Europe after the collapse of Rome) is a "meme idea," or that any and all of the dark ages people have listed in this thread are memes? Former is basically true, latter would be some bullshit.

The Greek Dark Age ironically fits the model better than the actual Dark Ages ever did.

>>2094788
That's wrong though
The muslim world have been in a dark age for centuries now

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>>2094859

Makes you think, huh?

ancient egypt went through two dark ages

>>2094837
>that pic
where the hell are they fighting, Mordor?

>>2095496
Mongols*

>>2095144
That's not exactly what happened. "The Burning of Books and Burying of Scholars" is a horribly exaggerated event that didn't really cause much damage. Not that many books were burned, and not that many scholars were buried. It's just a story that was continuously retold to emphasize how much of a tyrant Qin Shi Huang was.

Qin Shi Huang made Legalism the official philosophy of his dynasty and it was the Confucians he persecuted. The fact that Confucianism survived shows that he didn't cause much damage.

The reason why the Hundred Schools of Thought died out was because of how Confucianism became the state ideology of subsequent dynasties and how studying Confucian texts was the basis of the imperial examination. People had less incentive to preserve non-Confucian texts, and they were lost over time just like other texts from the ancient world.

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>>2094859
well here's a list in no particular order:

>mass neglect of human rights
>religious persecution of non-muslims
>little freedom of speech
>little freedom of press
>war, decades long
>many tribes who fight each other with fierce hate
>poor quality of living

>>2094788
>Why was it only Europe that ever experienced a true Dark Age?
>What is the Bronze Age Collapse

>>2094899
well its not like Europe collapsed or regressed either in that case.

every time a dynasty imploded it was like all of China was punched in the gut.

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>>2094837
> the Mongol Invasions...wasnt as terrible

>>2094788

late era qing when the barbarians started invading and importing opium

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>>2094913
>>2094998
Nope.jpg.

Ironically the Chink Dark Ages led to many developments in Chinese history.

The Warring States was at the tail end of the 100 Schools of Though Period, which is basically the European Enlightenment only set in Ancient Pre-Imperial China.

The Three Kingdoms and the Nanbeichao period completely wiped out the feudal aristocracy and assured the rise of meritocracy.

In addition to shitloads of technological changes occuring at these times.

Sure a lot of people were dying, there was no central government to speak of, and wars were shitty, but the periods of breakups did provide a lot of leeway and fluidity of thought in China.

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>>2094788
>dark ages meme

>Why was it only Europe that ever experienced a true Dark Age?
Greece experinced a dark age due to the shit-tier parents of the Spartans/Macedonians

It's easy to appear dark when you shined so bright for a long time. Most haven't. so their regressions are perceptually negligible and insignificant.

>>2097921

This is the biggest point

Europe was the leader in recording their history and producing tangible output

so when they slowed down (relatively) things were called "Dark"

China has always been overrated

>>2094788
Europe didn't experience a true dark age. It just had lots of little splotches. The dark ages are a meme. Heaps of things were still being learned and taught during