Imperial China thread What was the best Dynasty?

>>3106
>Privatization of State Industries
>Abolition of forced labor
>2% Agricultural Tax
>1.5% Commercial Tax
>Rebuilt the Great Wall to be actually somewhat effective until some fuck let the Manchu in
Ming China is Trump's China.

Ming

>>3106
hang and song
it was so good even japan copied it

oh yeah, and korea and vietnam too, they just thought we were so great that they took our culture

>>3106
Tang Dynasty was the best. The Ming stopped being remotely interesting after the Yongle Emperor

Song

Song > Ming

>>3308
To their credit they still kicked out the mongols.

>>3106
Ching Ping Pong

>>3423
Han is interesting was a clusterfuck. First you have a semifeudal state with all of Liu Bang's generals becoming warlords, and suddenly his first wife rips his concubine's legs off and poisons half his descendants. Then being keked constantly by Xiongnu until the world's first marxist fucked everything up. It was an interesting age but hardly the best dynasty.

The Song are basically just a continuation of the Tang, so they were solid but fairly boring.

Ming

File: 8115200275.jpg (60KB, 501x494px) Image search: [Google]

60KB, 501x494px

>>3439
>invaded the Vietnamese
>fought with the Koreans against the Japanese
>fucking pirates
>development of gunpowder technology
>3 of China's 4 great classics
>Fucking Pirates
>boring
Ming is about as interesting as it gets without being incredibly embarrassing for Chinese people (See: Yuan, Qing).

>>3841
>invaded the Vietnamese
Tang did that
>fought with the Koreans against the Japanese Tang also did that
>development of gunpowder technology
it was invented under the Tang

Plus the Tang did battle with the Abbasid Caliphate for control of Central Asia.

>>4258
>fought with the Koreans against the Japanese Tang also did that
Not on the same scale as the the Ming
>it was invented under the Tang
And didn't get much of anywhere, also until the Ming.

>Plus the Tang did battle with the Abbasid Caliphate for control of Central Asia.
And Ming pirates did battle with the Dutch for the East Indies.

>>3308
The manchu were let in because Ming's generals didn't like the peasant rebels that captured Beijing.

As a Xia I have to say the Xia dynasty. First dynasty best dynasty.

Han

File: Final-Story-of-Han_zps4df6dba92.gif (3MB, 433x325px) Image search: [Google]

3MB, 433x325px

>>3106
Han Dynasty, not because they accomplished anything noteworthy or brought proper change, but because I absolutely adore the events leading to it's destruction.

Three Kingdoms best Chinese period.

>>5498
Reminder that Cao Wei is the best 3 Kingdoms

>>5498
The Three Kingdoms as most people know it at all is basically a compilation of fanfiction, fanwank and OC character donut steal overlaid on top of a vague historical background.

>>5629
I feel like most history is like it from that time, best to accept it for what it is imo.

>>5629
I know and it's great

>>5696
Yeah but the Romance goes all fucking out.
>Generic MC Liu Bei
>Some chinese concubine's gay fanfiction shipping Guan Yu and basically half of Cao Cao's men and also Cao Cao himself
>OC character son of Guan Yu who never appears again (Guan Suo)
>Self-insert best at everything Onii-sama Zhuge Liang with a contrived flaw that doesn't matter when he's in charge
>Sun Ce fedora tips an actual wizard so hard that he fucking dies
>Cao Cao fedora tips an actual wizard so hard that he almost dies except a soothsayer shows up and just tells him that it was all in his head
>Meng Huo is comic relief

>>5876
While the Romance is my favourite book of all time, I do recognise it has some... inaccuracies.

I still love the period, even if it means Liu Bei is a knob, Cao Cao was based, and Dong Zhuo wasn't a cartoon villain.

File: Blue_Sky_White_Sun.png (24KB, 600x600px) Image search: [Google]

24KB, 600x600px

>>3106
Ming, and the honorable mention of the Kuomintang republic if Sun Yat-sen had not died so early

File: 200792123448633.jpg (199KB, 1151x610px) Image search: [Google]

199KB, 1151x610px

Were non-han dynasties absolute failures?

Like the Yuan and the Qing

>>3106
Han Dynasty rocks my world desu senpai

Just the story alone how Liu Bang fucked everyone's shit up and conquered China is enough to get my dick erect.

>>6268
Qing could've been good if they had managed to modernize.
Big emphasis of could have.

>>6268
Yuan was a failure, I don't see Qing as one, they lasted pretty well and had some cool Emperors. You could argue they entered and decadence and fucked everything but that's literally the history of every Chinese dynasty.

>>6461
Liu Bang is great if he's anything like how he was depicted by Sima Qian. A womanizer, an unexceptional fighter and basically an overall idiot whose only real strength was 20 Charisma.

>>6268
Qing was based for the first half. They effectively neutralized the nomadic thread that all Chinese dynasties before had been struggling with (aside from Yuan), continued the shift away from agrarian-focused economy to a more commercialized one that gave more initiatives to private merchants.

In the traditional texts, they get criticized a lot for failing to modernize, but in the more recent examinations that have come out in the last 3 decades, you realize how impressive they actually were, despite being heavily understaffed in administration.

>>6729
They "neutralized" the nomadic threat because they WERE the nomads.

I remember reading somewhere years ago that the Song Dynasty was pretty close to an industrial revolution on the same level of the Europeans. How true is this, or is this another one of those assumptions like "guys the greeks could've had an industrial revolution since they had a prototype of a steam-based machine"?

>>6754
You're right in that they were nomadic, but you're wrong in assuming that would automatically allow them to conquer the nomads. Go see what happened to the Jin dynasty. How'd they fare in neutralizing the steppes? Oh that's right, they got buttfucked by the fucking Mongols.

With the Qing, the pushed Chinese frontiers farther West than ever before and actually subdued the various Mongol tribes as well as Tibet.

>>6754
https://books.google.com/books?id=QfkWAAAAQBAJ&pg=PA271&dq=%22the+manchus+were+not+nomads%22&hl=zh-CN&sa=X&ei=NommUtWDMczaoATT6IHgDQ&ved=0CDkQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=%22the%20manchus%20were%20not%20nomads%22&f=false

>>6818
Yeah I heard the same thing, that they had all the conditions. Paper money, large production facilities and even using coal.

>>6818
That depends on your views of what factors were necessary to sustain an industrial revolution. If things like pure industrial output and usage of coal power is more important to you, then sure. If capitalist and financial institutions are more important to you, than no, not quite as China never developed the concept of public debt which some would argue was crucial to Britain's industrialization.

>>6818
Dumb sinophile fantasies.

>>3106
Qing

File: Flag_of_the_Qing_dynasty_(1889-1912).svg.png (146KB, 800x530px) Image search: [Google]

146KB, 800x530px

>>7287
I liked their flag.

>>7017
You can't have an industrial revolution without a systematic science on which to base advancement, which China simply did not have. Europe industrialized because of the scientific method and academia as much as because of capitalist institutions.

What are some good books on chinese history?

>>7325

It reminds me of Dragonball.

>>7249
check the rules

>>6087
that's DOCTOR sun yat-sen to you

>>7398
Sorry, I see industrial revolution as when changes in the manufacturing processes, allowing for massive changes in the production process (factories), economy, income and society. What you said went hand to hand with the European one but I don't really see it inherently required.

>>7445
Try out the History of Imperial China series for something not too in-depth but not too cursory either. Short series of books with each one focusing on one major dynasty. They're mostly analyses of government, law, family, etc., so if you're more interested in narrative history for the human drama, you may find yourself bored.

>>7325
I like how pissed that dragon looks

>>7723
Qing wasn't too happy about the unequal treaties at the time.

>>7445
I am having fun with the History of China podcast, most of what I learned was from there completed with wikipedia (and RoTK despite all it's fictional nonsense)

File: 1444875348584.gif (157KB, 1276x996px) Image search: [Google]

157KB, 1276x996px

>>5876
>Self-insert best at everything Onii-sama Zhuge Liang

Southern Song just on the cusp on Industrializing but was crushed prematurely by the Mongol conquest.

>>7922
>Wei Yan is going to betray us after I'm fucking dead because he killed an incompetent governor who was about to kill his most loyal subordinate because of delusions of conspiracy
>Ma Su is amazing and should be entrusted with holding the linchpin of my assault strategy
They couldn't even figure out whether he was a good judge of character or a bad one.

>>7990
They say the same thing about Ming becoming a fully gunpowder-based capitalist society before it was crushed prematurely by Mongol Conquest, but I would take those with a grain of salt. Industrialization is more than just the technologies themselves.

call me a faggot but ive always liked shu han


>inb4 muh benevolence

>>8117
>Ming becoming a fully gunpowder-based capitalist society before it was crushed prematurely by Mongol Conquest

Ming revolted from the Mongols and in actuality lost much of the ancient knowledge of the Chinese after conquest as the education system of China was neutered.

>>8294
>Mongol
I meant the Manchu, of course.

File: Liu Beiby.webm (2MB, 720x400px) Image search: [Google]

2MB, 720x400px

>>8273
>Muh beibis
>muh cannibalism
>muh brothers

>>8273
You mean you like a massive bunch of dicks who made their kingdom by backstabbing a friendly clan member of their leader and the ally that just saved their skin?

>tfw Chinese history is so hard to study since every dynasty tried to replace the old dynasty by erasing their documents and peoples

File: The Buddha Preaching the Law, 984 A.D.－989 A.D..jpg (558KB, 1000x1688px) Image search: [Google]

558KB, 1000x1688px

Why is Song painting so fucking sexy.

Best dynasty was probably Ming though. Tang was amazing but started fucking up after 750 AD.

>>8402
Why did they do that?

>>6754
They commited genocides against other namads to secure China then, most notably the Dzungars.
>they gave smallpox blankets to nomads

>>8402
>Meanwhile we are all sitting on a literal treasure tomb of ancient Chinese knowledge that we are afraid of opening because it might turn into a massive gas bomb.

>>8540
Same reason Roman authors would accuse people they didn't like of fucking goats or being keks.

>>8402
>so many primary sources which are only translated into Chinese and sometimes Japanese

Fuck.

>>8602
>TFW Records of the Three Kingdoms never

>>3106
I personally am a fan of the Southern Song dynasty. It gets a lot of bad reputation for being military unsuccessful (relatively speaking) but that was actually because it was facing much tougher enemies. It developed a lot of significant military technology and was overall prosperous. The tribute it paid to the Jurchen, Xi Xia, etc. was also largely irrelevant. The profits it made off trade with the same people more than made up for tribute costs.

I also find the Han through Tang dynasties interesting. The interim dynasties between the Han and the Tang were largely disastrous and unstable, but fascinating to study imo as they represented a major transition in Chinese ethnicity, culture and religion.

>>8402
Everyone did shit like that. I think the problem has more to do with communications. China is like a whole different world, and it's hard to find English translations of a lot of their writing.

Just as a random example, I found this gigantic Buddha statue carved out of a cliff face while looking around Google Earth. If that existed in Japan or India or pretty much anywhere else it would be easy to find literature about it, but looking it up I couldn't find a single piece of English information about it. And there are countless other monuments like that.

>>8643
It does suck that's not translated, but to be fair we have Dr. Rafe de Crespigny's translations, kongming.net, Empresses and Consorts and the combination of de Crespigny's and Achilles Fang's translations of the relevant chapters of the Zizhi Tongjian (which sometimes draws verbatim from the SGZ).

Ming was pretty cool over all, but they really fucked up by scrapping Zheng He's voyages and destroying all their seafaring knowledge.

They would've developed much better if they had kept up their exploration and trade voyages, instead of practicing mostly isolationism.

>>8792
I was quite amazed when travelling in China by the level of historical culture they have there in the form of temples, palaces, monument and other historical sites, its truly on a whole other level from any other nation.

>>8315
The Manchu were much more accommodating to Chinese traditions than the Mongols. For one they kept the traditional imperial administration. Really the greatness of the Ming only came from their size. Their re institution of traditional Chinese insularity, which was then taken up by the Qing, doomed them to irrelevancy. The Song, however, had a powerful trade network and outward looking mindset, which could have allowed them to perhaps begin the age of colonialism centuries earlier.

>>9061
So much that the Chinese government considers it no biggie to just inundate thousands of ruins to build a dam.

File: Zhanmadao[1].jpg (104KB, 859x555px) Image search: [Google]

104KB, 859x555px

>>8792

That's the same with tons of Chinese stuff sadly.

Everyone knows what a katana is, but barely anyone knows that that style of curved swords originated in China and made it's way through Korea to Japan.

There's still areas in China that continue a two thousand year tradition of sword forging. Next time I'm over again I'll be visiting Longquan hopefully.

>>9091
>Their re institution of traditional Chinese insularity, which was then taken up by the Qing, doomed them to irrelevancy.
That was a governmental decision, not a private one. Merchants in the Ming Dynasty actively traded with the New World (introducing most of the new world crops to Chinese cuisine) through trade with the Phillippines; Chinese pirates jostled with the Dutch in the Indies, and the Chinese actively imported portugese musket designs. Even if the government of Ming China was insular, society at large wasn't.

File: 1304934659066.jpg (7KB, 224x213px) Image search: [Google]

7KB, 224x213px

Chinese history can literally be summed up by the phrase "Never trust a eunuch"

>>9007
>>9007
In hindsight, yeah that's probably true.

I recall that they kind of reoriented themselves toward Central Asia (especially Mongolia) when they moved the capital from Nanjing to Beijing, though. I think the literati were worried about the overseas expeditions overextending Chinese resources which they reckoned would need to be used to contain the Mongols. The Chinese kind of had a complacent view that they basically had everything they needed and didn't really need to bother with overseas expeditions, so from the cost/benefit perspective of the literati, the expeditions were a drain of resources which amounted to little. Practically speaking there was probably a lot to be gained through overseas trade and contact, but the officials at court didn't see it that way.

>>9190
Zhang He though

>>9007
No, scrapping Zheng He's voyages was the right thing to do as it was only done for political, not actually useful fiscal, purposes. If you look at the early Ming's budgetary concerns, you'll see how important the Northern nomadic threat cost to combat and it makes sense to cut non-productive ventures that only served to make an emperor who usurped his throne to feel more legitimate. Zheng He's voyages were completely different from the kinds of voyages the Portuguese or Spanish monarch funded in the age of exploration.

That being said, early Ming was fucked over by the emperor's devotion to creating an agrarian regime based on the independent farmer, and not openly embracing commercial enterprises. The government should have spent more money to motivate merchants to go out and conduct private trade instead of putting up arbitrary restrictions on and off for over a century, which only served to encourage privacy and make wealth gained from trade escape government hands.

File: MingKotte.png (13KB, 320x267px) Image search: [Google]

13KB, 320x267px

>>9190

Despite having no dick or balls, Eunuchs can fuck your entire kingdom if they want.

>>9007
probably true, though its understandable why it happened. After the capture and ransom of the Zhengtong Emperor by the Oirat Mongols spending on the army was vastly increased so there wasn't as much money to spend on lavish expeditions. This I think combined with the conservative character of Ming emperors themselves who were more interested in a return to chinese traditions after disastrous foreign rule.

File: Shanhua Temple, Puxian Tower (1154, Jin Dynasty), Datong.jpg (1MB, 850x1291px) Image search: [Google]

1MB, 850x1291px

>>9061
To bad all the real historic stuff is being submerged in a sea of fake replicas.

The worst I've seen is Datong, a city with a number of really amazing medieval temple complexes. The whole historic part of the city was demolished (except the temples themselves, luckily) and rebuilt as a cheap orientalist replica of an old city. The genuinely old temples are now submerged inside modern complexes and overshadowed by fake pagodas (and I mean fake, they're not even run as monasteries).

It's the equivalent of building Disneyland around Notre Dame.

>>9374

Man Datong was weird. They're rebuilt the old city wall, but not in any shape or form of the original.

There's a documentary about it's mayor floating around on youtube somewhere. He basically wants Datong to become something like Disneyland to attract tourists, offering a faux old China.

>>6268
I think the Yuan was disastrous. Some of the others weren't so bad. The Northern Wei laid a lot of important foundations for example. The Qing were very strong early on until later in Qianlong's regime, and the Manchus assimilated better than the Mongols.

The Jurchen Jin were not so bad either, despite having a golden age of only about 40 years.

A lot of the interim conquest dynasties like the ones between Jin and Tang were shitty (exception of some like Northern Wei). The Shatuo (sic?) Turk dynasties between Tang and Song weren't all that great either.

File: lin.jpg (17KB, 320x480px) Image search: [Google]

17KB, 320x480px

I've always found it amusing that there's a monument to Lin Zexu in NYC's chinatown with an inscription that reads "pioneer in the war against drugs". He really didn't care that much about Opium but rather the strength it gave the british over china.

The reason it says that is because the chinese council of new york got the money to build it from George Pataki because all you needed to get money from him was to say it was going to anti-drug efforts.

>>9452
It's not limited to there either, the build this fake stuff everywhere. I don't have a problem with building traditional buildings in traditional styles, but there's nothing traditional about this new stuff.

It's pretty sad really. The Chinese seem to really regret destroying so much in the 20th century, but now they're just going in the opposite direction and making things even worse.

>>9670

Yea, a lot of the younger Chinese are wanting to become more traditional as well, but they don't really know how. I visited one of the large temples in Hangzhou with my girlfriend and as she said, basically everyone there wasn't praying the right way or observing Buddhist customs. A lot of younger ones also look with envy at Japan since they've kept their traditions alive very well.

Mao really fucked the country culturally.

>>9801
Jesus christ, this is depressing.

Places like India and the Middle East might be shitholes, but at least they still know who they are.

>>10055

Give it fifty years and they'll hopefully have found their way back to their roots.

>>6595
>20 Charisma
>is able to recruit all of the strongest, smartest, reliable subjects of the time

Idk about you but Liu Bang sounds like a pretty gud guy to be around with

>>10055
I don't know man. I'm not a fan of how the Taliban blew up those large Buddhist statues in Afghanistan.

>>9645
Haha, that's awesome.

>>9159
>That was a governmental decision
And the government held tremendous influence over the course of the nation. Imperial law forbade the construction of ships with more than one mast essentially banning long distance trade. Burning the Chinese fleet, preventing any government communications and long distance trade agreements from being passed with more technologically and economically advanced nations. Furthermore, government prevention of exploration and trade ended any possibility of Chinese colonial and imperial expansion.

File: pra01110658p1.jpg (181KB, 800x692px) Image search: [Google]

181KB, 800x692px

>>10404
> Imperial law forbade the construction of ships with more than one mast
except either nobody listened or the law was quickly amended, because 15th century European accounts all list Chinese junks in the Indian Ocean with multiple masts (pic related).
>Burning the Chinese fleet
Only the Treasure Fleets, which again is irrelevant in terms of the private enterprise which abounded during the Ming
>preventing any government communications and long distance trade agreements from being passed with more technologically and economically advanced nations.
No Chinese country ever did this, and again this had nothing to do with commercial trade and development, purely governmental.
> Furthermore, government prevention of exploration and trade
The trade ban lasted only a decade or so.
>ended any possibility of Chinese colonial and imperial expansion.
Bullshit, the Ming continued to attempt to expand into Vietnam, and Zheng Zhilong, a guangdong merchant and pirate captain, was more than capable of maintaining control of Taiwan (along with later Ming Loyalist Koxinga) against the Dutch without any assistance by the Ming government.

>>10796
Right, the government policies only really affected the Ming government's (in)ability to capture a good % of wealth from taxing trade that the European nations of that era were getting better at. Private merchants and citizens of Southern China for the most part said fuck it and always was connected to the greater Southeast Asian trade and there were plenty of Chinese communities springing up in Southeast Asia on their own initiatives.

>>7479
Fuck off

Spring and Autumn was the best period. The political structure of sort of united but really not, plus the hundred schools of thought preached by itinerants, just make it really interesting.

File: khoo1.gif (140KB, 590x375px) Image search: [Google]

140KB, 590x375px

>>9801
In recent years there's been a few books by Chinese authors suggesting that China implement a more Confucian-style government

I have a few .pdfs, but I haven't read them or know whether there is actual significant Chinese interest in bringing Confucianism back, or if it's just fringe circlejerking like Mencius Moldbug and other monarchists in the alt-right

Also, I apologise for any derailing but does anyone know much about the Kongsi federations of Malaysia?

>The Chinese kongsi federations of Southeast Asia, also known as kongsi democracies or republics, were political entities that functioned like self-governing states.[1] They were formed from the unions of mining kongsi (Chinese: 公司; pinyin: gōngsī), commercial organizations consisting of members that provided capital and shared profits.[2] By the mid-nineteenth century, the kongsi federations were the only states governing western Borneo.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kongsi_federations

>>11006
Warring States period is more interesting, since it's the period where various states were actively sponsoring and trying out different philosophical traditions to state policy, as well as intense competition spurring the decline of feudalism and consolidation of centralized rule and meritocracy. And then, of course, there's all the war.

>>3308
Ming China was horrifically corrupt, crippled by the founder, and riven with conflicting ideologies.

Han Dynasty best dynasty.

http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Course_Pages/legal_systems_very_different_12/Book_Draft/Systems/ChineseLaw.html
Just read this, traditional Chinese law is really weird

>>7723
EUROS GET OUT

REEEEEEEEE

File: 1436860636663.gif (27KB, 700x284px) Image search: [Google]

27KB, 700x284px

>>3106

>>6087

Just where the hell did the KMT go so wrong?

File: 1355013328560.jpg (132KB, 653x510px) Image search: [Google]

132KB, 653x510px

>>12014
>A merchant who had sold goods on credit and not been paid could, if he wished, report his debtor to the district magistrate for the crime of swindling him—but once he had done so, the case was out of the merchant's hands. The magistrate, if convinced of the justice of the claim, might compel repayment—usually only partial repayment. He might do nothing. He might even conclude that the merchant was the one at fault and sentence him to a beating.

OY VEYYYY

>>9190
That's only because it's the bureaucrats that write the official history of every dynasty.Eunuchs were a means for the emperor to combat the bureaucracy in power struggles.

>>16131
Like how the Roman Senate would mess with histories to make Emperors they didn't like tyrants?

>>16131
I agree honestly, though it kind of depends. Sometimes eunuchs were horribly corrosive to the dynasty and corrupt. At other times the gentry landlords or powerful officials at court were dangerous, or else just individuals favored by the Emperors.

>>16131
>Eunuchs were a means for the emperor to combat the bureaucracy in power struggles.

You can shitpost all you want EIDF, you'll never get your balls back

>>17305
Yes. Caligula is a perfect example of extreme slandering. If Caligula was so bad and ran the treasury to the ground, there is no way his successor Claudius would have been able to wage war soon after he took power.

>>17407
The thing about eunuchs that made them trustworthy for the emperors was that they had no descendants and therefore had less of an incentive to pocket money for themselves. Generally, they were not as competent as the bureaucrats but at the same time, corrupt eunuchs usually did less damage than corruption in the bureaucracy.