Transcript: Lecture 1 – Introduction to China’s History w/ Tristan G. Brown

How often does that happen when somebody invades? They say “We’ll keep the White House.” No. We can do better than the White House. They kept this one. So this is actually a Ming Dynasty palace that was used right up until the early twentieth century. Today, a museum.

How to Think About Chinese History

TRISTAN G. BROWN: I was thinking about how do you even introduce this subject. I love this subject. I’m sure you got that from my email. I’m so excited to share about this subject with you and I realize there’s never a good way to get into this subject because it’s so big and it’s so much to cover.

I’ll just say let’s look at a map right here. This is, as you could imagine, Beijing, right? This is the Forbidden City, this is the Palace. I think this map is from about the 1950s or something like that and there’s these three lakes to the left, to the western side of the Forbidden City. Anybody know what those three lakes are? Have you visited? Have you been to Beihai Park? It’s okay, it’s okay.

Let me just tell you, there are 3 lakes there. The top lake is the northern lake. That was an imperial garden and that is today a public park. You can access that one. The second one and the last one are the middle lake and the southern lake, that’s Zhongnanhai. Have you ever heard of Zhongnanhai? That’s where the head of the Communist Party is. That’s basically where nominally Xi Jinping lives and everything like that. It’s kind of like the White House and the Kremlin together, very, very big place.

Those two lakes are not open to the public. That area is like the compound of the center of the party’s power structure basically. There’s so much, right? Just in this little — how many kilometers of space? History from hundreds of years ago all the way up to history going on today, right?

So the thing I love about this term is that the word “hai” means sea, ocean or lake. In Mongol, actually this distinction — you can imagine why — is not really made between ocean and a big body of water and sort of some Chinese dialects over the centuries adopted that or also had that.

Chinese History as an Ocean

TRISTAN G. BROWN: You can kind of see here, and I know this might be sort of a little corny to say but I want to just say it here at the very beginning and I’ll just say it once. Chinese history is like a sea or an ocean. It’s big, it’s — how do I say it? It’s vast, it’s beautiful, and it’s difficult. It can be dangerous, right? Of course I’ll talk about how history can be dangerous in just a second, but it’s not like perhaps other kinds of history you’ve studied thus far.

I’ll just say that I started studying almost 20 years ago. I will be a student of it for the rest of my life. I’ll never be able to master this, right? It’s not something you master. It’s just too much stuff. But that’s the thing.

This class — what I can do is I’ll take you to the ocean and I’ll say, in that first time you see the ocean, think about where you were, especially if you didn’t grow up near the sea. The first time you saw the ocean you said “Wow, that’s a beautiful sight,” or “Wow, that’s so interesting, look at the waves.” That’s what this class can do. I’m going to show you across time — from the Zhou Dynasty, from the origins of writing in China which is the Shang Dynasty, Han Dynasty, the Medieval period all the way up to the early modern era. I’ll show you something about every era that I think is interesting, that I think you’ll appreciate, and then it’s up to you to go from there.

I’ll take you to the sea, you can swim however far you want to swim. I’m still swimming, so that’s what we’re going to do.

Course Overview and What to Expect

TRISTAN G. BROWN: This is Dynastic China 2024. Let me say something at the outset here. What I’ll do today is I’ll introduce Chinese history in the broadest possible terms. How do we think about it? Some key terms, we’ll go over the syllabus, the requirements for the class, and then I’ll give you a geographical tour of China which is really fun actually. It’s really fun just to go talk about food and here’s this province and here’s this province. The rest of the class won’t be like that, but you do need to know the geography of China. There will be a quiz in a couple of weeks.

The Forbidden City: Official and Unofficial History

TRISTAN G. BROWN: This is the Forbidden City that we were just talking about and you can see here this is, I think, the largest single hall within the palace complex, this Taihedian, the Hall of Supreme Harmony. This is a Ming dynasty structure. That’s — don’t get overwhelmed — that’s like let’s say a fifteenth century structure. This is basically where the emperor had major audiences, weddings were held here, enthronements were held here and you can see it’s right here, it’s kind of like in the almost looks like the center, it’s like right in that central axis.

There’s another place and it’s not like a famous place, the Place of Everlasting Spring, this Changchun Gong, it’s in the back, it’s right over there, I highlighted it right there. I bring out these two sort of parts of the palace to you because in a way they kind of represent two tides of Chinese history or two ways of thinking about Chinese history.

There’s Zhengshi, official history. What is official history? Now when you think about history in China, don’t just think “Oh I’m sitting down, I’m thinking about history, oh that’s so fun.” No, “Shi” refers to a kind of writing. It’s a genre of writing. There are officially 24 official histories that were written across Chinese history. The dynasty that follows the previous dynasty writes the official history of its predecessor. Ironically, we do not yet have an official history of the Qing dynasty, the last dynasty. That’s an ongoing big project of tension within China today. How to write that history of the last dynasty, but we have 24. That’s this official history. Emperors, dynasties, battles, natural disasters recorded by state authorities.

But then there’s something else. That’s not all we look at. That’s not all we talk about. There’s also this kind of idea in Chinese of “wild history.” History that’s outside, things that happened in the past that are not in those official histories but are still worthy of talking about, that are still worthy of remembering. That’s like folklore, families, women, popular tales not recorded by state authorities.

One way you can think about Chinese history is that it’s the tension between these two things. It’s like also going back to the sea metaphor, high tide and low tide, whatever you want to say. There’s the stuff that’s officially recorded — “On this day the emperor said this” — but then there is all this unofficial stuff that we piece together and say what was really going on.

What is so great about Chinese history is that you actually don’t need a textbook. There are so many sources. There is art, there’s so much writing, there’s private writing, there’s writing by scholars, there’s debates. There’s so much you can look into.

But take a look at again that sort of palace. What I said is that looking at the palace itself, it kind of tells you a story about Chinese history. This is that sort of Zhengshi type of place. The things that happened in the Hall of Supreme Harmony are recorded in official type of histories, but the stuff that happens in the rear of the palace — this is the Hougong — that’s where the imperial family lived. That’s actually where they lived. They didn’t live in the front of the palace. That’s an expression in Chinese, “Hougong,” the back of the palace, that’s the imperial family, that’s where they actually lived.

By the way, if you watch Chinese dramas, family dramas, they’re all about that. Nobody really cares about this but they’re all about that. What’s going on? The romance, all this stuff. Yes, wild history has a lot more to it than just that. I’m not endorsing any drama by the way but it’s a way to think about it.

Why Study Dynastic China?

TRISTAN G. BROWN: This is an incredible hall. We will return to it in the last class of the semester because in this Palace of Everlasting Spring in the rear of the palace on its walls are depicted murals of probably the greatest novel of Chinese history, Hong Long Meng, A Dream of the Red Chamber. Images from that novel were painted on the walls of this kind of residential complex for the imperial family, one of the consorts in the nineteenth century. Those scenes of that novel is all about a family in decline, right? So it’s actually I’ve always thought it’s extremely moving and thought provoking to think that the emperor, that the imperial family has these images on that wall.

Let’s talk about why would you even take this class. Okay. Why talk about dynastic history? Why get into it? Well the answer could be because China’s a really important place today, right.

I think it’s going to have the largest economy in the world, whatever, and it’s the second largest population. It’s an important place. There’s a lot of interesting technological developments going on with that, all of that stuff. My favorite of which are these like robots that I’m sure if you’ve been to China recently, I’m sure you’ve encountered these. If you stay in a hotel and you get take out, somebody brings it to the hotel front desk and then this GT Red, this robot sends it to your room so you don’t have to actually talk to any human beings.

This was a thing that came in during COVID I think and now it’s just like standard across the country. So you say you get to have medicine, you get all this stuff like that, but it was like my first night in China this summer, arrived at 1 AM for a conference and then I got a phone call and it was like a robotic voice and it said I’m here and I’m like what’s going on? Then it was like please open the door and I opened the door, it’s one of these and they go please press this button and I press the button and then there was this rice and all this food.

It’s like they’re walking all over these hotels. They even say, “Please excuse me. I need to get to the elevator.” I don’t know why we don’t have them yet. Any budding anthropologists in the room, there’s so much to study about these robots, right, about how humans interact with them and such like that.

The Relevance of Chinese History

Yes, okay, so I understand the current scene of China is worth paying attention to, is relevant, is important, okay, but then we get back to this question why study Dynastic China. One reason, is that if you spend time in China and you talk to people in China, people in China talk about their history all the time. From the top leadership all the way down to everyday people, people driving cabs that you’ll meet just in day to day life. History really matters in this place. It’s the way that people talk about issues in the present.

It also is really contentious, right? I just mentioned to you this kind of like question of the official Qing history. There’s been an ongoing project to write the official Qing history in theory since the days of like Mao and Zhou Enlai. It started and then it stopped because of the Cultural Revolution and then it got started again in recent years and now it’s kind of again controversial. How do you officially record that history?

That should tell you something. There’s all of these debates, there’s all these tensions that go on within China about how to understand what happened in dynastic China. We don’t pay attention to, well the Wall Street Journal did a cover of it, okay, that kind of signals its importance, right? So I do not think in any way that this class, dynastic China, is less relevant or less practical than modern China. I’d say if you had to pick, take this one.

Forget about modern China. Twentieth century, it’s a tough century. We cover a lot more centuries here, okay, so you get more bang for your buck, okay, but they’re both good. Take it in 2026. Okay, so now let me tell you another reason, kind of building on what I was just talking about is that people in China like to talk about their history.

The Long Recorded History of China

There’s a long recorded history in China, so that means there’s a lot to talk about, there’s a lot to debate, and there’s a lot to analyze. I’m sure many of you may be familiar with this opening sentence. Has anybody read Sanguo Yanyi, Romance of the 3 Kingdoms? I think Professor Dung has a class on Romance of the 3 Kingdoms, some of you might be taking it or want to take it, you should take it, it’s an interesting. This is another one of those two, those great novels.

We talked about Journey to the West a little bit earlier. This is Romance of the 3 Kingdoms and there’s the opening lines of it, this right. “There’s a saying in our country that long divided it must unite, long united it must divide.” Think about that for just a second and then let me show you this quote, okay, by Mark Elvin 1973. “The Chinese empire is the major exception in the pre modern world to what would appear to be the rule that units of territorial and demographic extent comparable to China are not stable entities over long periods of time.”

So one of the things where you say why look at it, why study it, why think about it is because actually this kind of does seem to happen, okay, there are periods of division where everything falls apart, okay, and it looks like okay this is going to be Italy and this is going to be France and this is going to be Switzerland and then all of a sudden it comes back, Rome comes back, okay. Rome comes back and it keeps coming back and you’re like why? What’s going on? People across the centuries noticed this. It was like a thing they noticed and talked about or even anticipated.

That’s not to overstate continuity in Chinese history. I don’t want you to think, “Oh yeah, 2000 years ago that was China and China today,” it’s not the same, it’s very different, tons of things happen, tons of things change, but this conversation that we’re talking about right here is very old, right? So I think Chinese history is good for training your mind about how to think about big difficult questions. You have a ton of data, you have a ton of information, you can think on different scales. When people do climate history, what’s the first place they look to?

They look to China, right, because China wrote about its climate, people in China wrote about climate for at least 2000 plus years, right? All sort of meteorological phenomenon, comets, etcetera, all of these records are in those histories that I was talking about. So it’s really, really great to think about history. If you haven’t taken another history course here before, this is a great introduction. Even if you don’t want to continue with China, you want to go and do England, take this class and then go think about England, take this class and then go think about India.

Eavesdropping on an Ancient Conversation

Okay, you can do all of that stuff. Okay, is ancient but it’s an ongoing conversation and really filled with nearly endless perspectives and here’s the key point. This class is about eavesdropping into that conversation. This goes back to that image that I was giving to you. I take you to the ocean, you swim.

Okay? You eavesdrop into the conversation. This is a huge conversation. Lots of people are going to say stuff. You’re to have Taoists, you’re to have Buddhists, you’re have Confucians, you’re going have Confucians who hate other Confucians, you’re going to have terrible emperors, you’re going to have some decent emperors but really bad emperors too.

To have everything, right? It all comes together as people over the centuries try to make sense of it, right, and that’s that ongoing conversation. That conversation continues in China to today. So you get a little in this class you get to eavesdrop on it, think about it a little bit.

Class Goals and Aspirations

Okay, so here are the class goals and aspirations. Okay first of all let me tell you what the game plan is and it’s like a really intimidating slide so just buckle up. There you go. Basically that’s the game plan, not this part. This part’s modern China. That’s the thing, I take 2 classes.

One does this and then one does this, okay? Look, what I can tell you is I’m a historian primarily of this era, right, the Ming and Qing dynasties, the last 2 imperial dynasties. That’s my specialty, that’s what I love. But the thing is that because this is the class you’re taking at MIT that is dynastic Chinese history, I feel I have to give every era its due. So I really try, I really go out of my way even though I’m not like the biggest fan of the Han dynasty.

I love the Tang dynasty as a sort of like a historian who works on another period, but I will give you what I think is the essentials to know about that era. Every period that we cover, I try to get you those kernels, right? That say, “Oh wow, that’s really interesting. I didn’t know that before.” So that when you look at this by the end of the semester, you’ll say I know what happened pretty much across this whole time span, right.

I know something, I can say something about it, okay. And then that way you go off in your winter holiday and you can have great conversations with your parents, right, or friends or you can travel and you can visit places and say I know what that is, I know when that was built, I know what’s going on here, okay. Alright, so class goals and aspirations, learn something about China, 20 percent of humanity. This is a good aspiration. We should learn something about China, right, especially in the United States, it’s incredible I have to say it.

History as a Discipline

Okay, learn something about history. Okay, so there’s 2 things here. This is a class about China. It’s also a class about history. Of course these things can overlap, right, but history is a discipline.

It’s a way of thinking. We have certain ideas in history, primary sources, secondary sources, okay. This is a secondary source. This is a secondary source. These are not primary sources.

Primary sources referring to the original sources that were written in the original language by people at the time, okay. Those are the premiums in history, okay. But of course we as historians we write textbooks, we write books, right. So just realize history is not in a textbook, okay. Textbooks are like the least, historians look down on textbooks, we don’t like textbooks because with textbooks you have to edit, have to take out, you have to go back to the originals.

Make your own textbook. That’s what we’re going to do in this class. So that’s what I want you to think about history. I don’t want to turn you into a walk encyclopedia, sort of I do actually, that would be nice, but to equip you to approach related issues. One of the things I say and I’ll just tell you right up here, yeah, it’s a content heavy class, right, because I don’t know if it’s old fashioned or what but like I think you just need to know it, right.

I think you need to know it. You need to leave this class in command of knowledge, okay? And one of the things that you will realize, you might think, “Oh this is a lot, why do we have to know all this stuff?” When you go to China, you will realize that people that you encounter in everyday life know so much about history, okay. They will blow away the average American about what they can say about history that happened 2000 years ago even if it’s wrong, even if it’s wrong, okay.

Even if it’s just kind of romanticized or whatever but they talk about it, they know it. So you got to know it, that’s the thing.

Why You Should Take This Class

Let me just emphasize here why you should take it, why I think you should take this class, why I think maybe this weekend you should convince your friends to take this class, okay, is that it’s not something you can just pick up like with a book like so many people think with history. “Oh yeah, over the summer I’ll read a book and catch up.” No, no, no, no, no, no, no.

You don’t with computer science, with physics, you don’t just read a book over the weekend and become an expert, okay. Chinese history is one of those fields where you’ve got to take a class in it. You’ve got to drill it, you’ve got to know it, you’ve got to think about it from all these different angles and then you can say you know something about it, okay. It’s not actually something that you just pick up with osmosis, okay. Or what you can pick up by osmosis by reading Wikipedia and sort of bad history, right, but that’s what we’re going to try do something better than that in this class, yeah?

Okay, and this knowledge will stay with you. I always say that, I always say that, right? 50 years from now, let’s say 30, you graduate from MIT, you’re talking to your relatives or your children or whatever it is, what are you going to talk to them about? You’re going to talk to them about this class. You’re going to say, “Hey, you know the 3 kingdoms, I know something about that.”

This is the type of thing that people want to talk about. Not whatever, Python or whatever, right? It’s not a table of conversation, right? This is, this is. I guarantee you a holiday break of great conversations after this class at minimum.

My Personal Journey with Chinese History

Okay, so why do I like Chinese history? Oh wow, where to begin? Okay, well I went to China for the first time in like right before the Beijing Olympics and that was me many years ago. You can see I changed a little bit, maybe a little bit. That’s me, maybe in Taiwan, I think I’m in a which is like a breakfast place and I love it.

Life in China: Personal Experiences and Reflections

TRISTAN G. BROWN: I go like you get the dojang, the soy bean sort of a milk substance with youtiao, this fried donut, it’s like heaven. You know what I mean? It costs like 2 dollars and it’s incredible. Huge lines, right? So that was me and then, okay, food, so it’s not just about the food but we can talk about food.

I don’t think I have to convince most of you. China’s got really good food. It’s got a ton of different types of food. The U.S. Chinese food has gotten better in my lifetime, but it’s still right, it was starting at 0. So the thing is that it is better but good Chinese food in the U.S. tends to be expensive. In China you just get so much, right? You have so many options, everything like that.

We can talk about food. I have another class called Nature and Environment in China. We do a whole week on food, so if you really want to talk about food maybe consider that class, but we’ll do a little bit of food here, okay. And then this is me playing mahjong, right. So what I’m trying to say is that you get in, right.

When you go to a place and maybe it won’t be China for you, it could be Japan or it could be Mongolia, it could be Russia, it could be Italy, you know something’s going to grab you. It might not be the Colosseum, it might be just like everyday life, you know drinking espresso in a Florentine afternoon and you go “I just love this, I really love this,” and then you go “I want to learn the language and I want to understand what happened here and I want to understand what happened here in the nineteenth century, I want to understand what happened here 2000 years ago,” okay. I want this to happen to you. It doesn’t have to be China. It can be, it could be Mexico, it could be any place, but some place that you weren’t born in and then you go there and you go “wow I really want to understand this place.”

That’s a wonderful part of the human experience. I hope you all have it, but that kind of happened to me in China. Okay, and it wasn’t 1 moment, right. It was many meals, it was many gambling sessions, was this is me many years ago probably going to Tibet, I can’t remember but it was on 1 of those sleeper trains.

Back in the day, I have to say I have become like a middle aged Chinese person in the sense of because I’ve been in China now for the past 20 years and I’ve seen all this change. So I remember like oh the green trains that went super slow and like you had to stay on them for like overnight. I took the train from Beijing to Shanghai. The first time I took it, it was like I was standing. I was eating instant noodles, praying that they wouldn’t like tip over in a very crowded car because we didn’t even have, there weren’t even tickets left for a bed, right? Now it’s like oh it’s business class high speed rail all the way, right?

I mean it takes what, 5 hours? 5 hours, right? 5 hours now, right? It’s totally changed, right? There were a lot of fun experiences on Chinese trains back in the day.

You talk to Chinese parents or you talk to people of a certain generation, they will have stories for you about taking long, long train rides in China and the whole generation who grew up in the Cultural Revolution have these especially, yeah. Then I’ve gone back, oh yeah, I wrote a book. I was there this summer talking about my book, right, and then oh yeah, the last thing I want to say. So I got into it, I continue to go back, I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve been there. I probably lived there for a few years overall but it’s like more every year I go for a few months.

This summer I went for a month and a half or something like that.

Coffee, Food, and Change in Modern China

TRISTAN G. BROWN: The 1 thing that I say that really, really has struck me in terms of changes, when I first went to China, hey how are you doing? When I first went to China, you know the coffee was terrible, for somebody addicted to caffeine it was brutal and I had to drink a ton of tea to make up for it. It’s just like too much tea, you know what I’m saying? But I love tea, don’t get me wrong.

Coffee is now way better. I actually tweeted about this when I got back. Coffee in China is now better than coffee in the United States. I come back here and I’m just so disappointed. The thing is that what China has actually accidentally perfected, and you can also find this in Thailand, you also find this now in Korean cafes, is non dairy espresso drinks and it’s a world that Starbucks is just out to lunch, they’re not getting this.

You take espresso, you create an Americano with sparkling water and you add lemon, incredible. Grapefruit, incredible. Lychee, whatever, like all of these, like Chuangy Cafe, right, Chuangy Maeshi Cafe, like creative Americanos. And I say like why don’t you take this global? This is the next thing.

I mean this is the next bubble tea for sure. But it’s like I think that there’s an interesting thing of like they feel like “oh but maybe we’re not doing it right like the Italians.” Enough with the Italians. Enough with the cappuccinos. We’ve got to go to the next phase.

It’s all these milky drinks. It tires you out, right? This is like the absolute pickup. Low calorie too. Love it.

So check out coffee in China next time you’re there. Okay, that’s been an interesting change.

Course Syllabus and Structure

TRISTAN G. BROWN: Alright, let’s talk about syllabus. So I just have like a bunch of, I used to do a printout syllabus but then MIT students told me that nobody does that anymore. So then I felt like a historian but in a bad way. So I said like okay, let’s just put it all online, right?

So no prerequisites, you’re all welcome to enroll. You can bring guests, just let me know. You can bring your parents, some people bring their parents, right, if they’re visiting, again what are you going to bring, computer science glasses, come on. You want to bring them here, right, okay that’s fine, just let me know that they’re coming, okay.

Chinese is not a prerequisite. Some of you are doing a Chinese minor, okay. That’s fine and for all of the primary sources that I give you this semester, I’ll try to give you the Chinese original. If you want to look at it, if you’re learning Chinese, challenge yourself, take a look at it, right. You don’t have to look at it but you can, so that’s an option.

If you want to do the minor for this class, you should be looking at those, okay? That looks good, study guides, okay. So the thing that when I first taught this class it was like essays and then I was like I’m done with essays. I had a historical evolution at MIT and I realized if you teach a class on Chinese history you’ve got to offer an exam. For those of you who know about Chinese history you know how important exams are in Chinese history, you’ll realize yeah, you need an exam.

Grading and Assessments

TRISTAN G. BROWN: I just do midterm, we’re going to have a final, don’t worry. The average of the midterm last year, about every year, tends to be about a 90. Most of the students who take the class, let’s just be frank here, modern China we get 40 or 50 maybe, many, many people get As, A minuses, A pluses, whatever. Some people will get Bs, the occasional C. If you get below a B, you’re trying, okay?

If you get in the B range, what I mean to say here is if you put the work in, you put the effort in, there shouldn’t be a huge issue with getting the grade that you want. It is a challenge. You do have to study, alright? You do have to study and some people will bomb the midterms and everything like that and that’s okay. It’s not the end of the world. We’ll figure it out.

I’ll show you the group. Here’s the grading rubric. We’ll talk about this.

Attendance Policy

TRISTAN G. BROWN: First things, attendance. Let me say something about attendance right up at the front. There are 2 excused absences over the course of the semester. You come in, you scan the QR code. That’s how we know that you’re in class. You have 2 excused absences, just let us know.

I realize some of you want to take this class and you have a conflict with another class. That’s a partial conflict, not a complete conflict but a partial conflict. If you have a partial conflict and you can come to 50 percent of these classes then Linda, the TA and I will make an arrangement for you. You can come, we will not take you down if you have a class conflict that you show us your schedule and you show us “I have this conflict at this time.” We’ll give you 2 extra writing assignments over the course of the semester. In that way we just take the question off the table, so you can.

But if you want that arrangement you got to let us know in the next week or so, okay, because we need to know that, all right. So we’re happy to accommodate, but otherwise we’re really hoping everybody will be here most of the time, okay.

Writing Assignments and Discussion Posts

TRISTAN G. BROWN: So in terms of writing, the major writing that you will do over the course of the semester is your discussion responses. I’ll tell you about what I expect from those discussion responses in just a second. There are 10 of them, each of them is worth 2 points. If you do a decent job on them, you get the 2 points, right. That’s as simple as that. You can do it late, it’s worth 1 point if it’s late, okay.

It’s just, every time, like every semester somebody comes and says “I didn’t do any of them. I didn’t know that they were required,” or something like that. Okay, just letting you know we will accept it late. That’s what it’s worth if it’s late.

Okay, there’s a geography quiz. All of the quizzes in the tests with the exception of the final, okay, will be a retake and it’s open to everybody, okay. So what that means is you come in, you do the geography quiz. If it didn’t go well you can take it again and I’ll just take the highest score. If you can’t make it the day of the geography quiz because you have to take an absence or you have 1 of those conflicts that I just mentioned, that’s fine. There will be 1 retake, okay.

Same with the classical text quiz where I quiz you on Confucius and the Taoists and all that, 1 retake offered. Midterm, we do a 1 retake offer for the midterm too, okay. And it’s a new exam. Some people literally take everything twice because they just like the challenge. I’ve had that. MIT students are incredible. It’s like “you took this midterm, you got a 95, I want to take it again.” Alright, we’re going for that 5 points. Got it, okay.

Alright, so there is a timeline project. It’s not bad. You just propose a topic. This is where you can kind of follow your own interests. If you want to do the history of a certain type of fashion in China, a certain type of Chinese food, you can follow that over time. You just create a timeline. I give you all the sort of how do you create the timeline. It’s not bad, and then final exam, and then that’s the final grade.

1 thing that we do, and I just want to say we’re really excited this semester, we have a TA from the HASS program, Linda Rinswan, who’s wonderful to join us, a historian of nuclear energy, so really, really excited to have Linda. And Linda does know Chinese history fairly well. So definitely correspond with me, correspond with Linda.

During the semester, as I try to do in all my classes, we’ll do 1 sort of, it’s like a required office hour mid semester. You come to my office, Linda and I will greet you and we talk for 10 minutes about whatever you want to talk about, typically about what confuses you in Chinese history or questions about the midterm or questions about whatever, right? Everybody does that and that’s also part of the grade. Do have to do that once. I’m happy to answer questions at any time but that’s what we do expect.

Alright, so let me just say something, final point about the discussion posts, okay? So discussion posts, yes, I’ve changed this. I’ll do Wednesday, I’ll give it to you Wednesday before 3:30. I’ll give you a little bit extra time than Tuesday. So get them in before that time, the Wednesday class, okay?

Basically what you have to do is you have to look at the readings and you have to answer a question. I’ll give you an example for next week’s discussion post in just a second. You write 2 paragraphs, okay, and the 2 paragraphs, right, I’ll tell you exactly how we want the structure of these paragraphs to look like. You have some agency and creativity in it, don’t worry, but I’ll tell you about what we’re looking for.

The thing I want to just remind you all, facts, inferences, judgments and opinions, how you sort of separate out those things. Facts, things that we know to be true based on evidence, “bees make honey.” Inferences, statements of the unknown based on the known derived from reason. Judgments and then all the way to opinions like “I like whatever ice cream.” When you write a post, I don’t want just opinion, right. “I hate Confucius,” so congratulations, okay, but that’s not a post, okay. We want a combo, right.

Course Structure and Reading Materials

TRISTAN G. BROWN: You can give me the opinion at the end in the second paragraph. The first paragraph we want you to focus on facts and inferences based on the primary sources of that week’s reading. So you look at the question, you try to answer based on the primary sources and then in the second paragraph you can expand into judgments and opinion, okay. So that way you know what we expect, you know how to do it, alright. So I laid it out I think really just clearly and nicely for you there.

Let’s take a look at what we’re doing next week. I have to tell you, this will just give you an example for next week. So next week on Monday you come in, I’m going to rush you through the rise of agriculture, the origins of state formation in China and we end up on next Monday with I think one of my favorite lectures of the whole semester, the rise of writing in China. Writing is super fascinating as it’s a technology and China was a very early place to have it. So what is writing? What counts as writing?

One of the questions I think we have are, are emojis writing, right? What counts as it? You can answer that question if you’d like next week, right? So this is what we’re kind of doing, right? So you look at it, you’ll notice up here every week you’ll see, wow, it looks like there’s a lot of reading.

There’s not that much reading. You just have to break it down. The primary sources are what you really need to focus on. That is the original translation of oracle bone inscriptions, something like that, inscriptions, something like that, translations of jewel bronzes, you’ll see those are primary sources. That’s what you focus on.

But if you’re like, I don’t really understand what this is, then you go to the secondary source which for the beginning part of this class will be Li Feng’s Early China. Very nice book, I’ve given you sort of selections from it, I’ve uploaded them. It’s like a pretty sophisticated book of early Chinese history. It’s really good, it’s fairly comprehensive, yeah?

And then if you’re like, I took a look at this and I still don’t know what’s going on, we have the textbook big picture, okay? So this is the optional textbook, okay. I provide you with 3 different ways to break down sort of an era’s writing or an era’s sources. The primary sources, secondary sources, and the textbook. The secondary sources in the textbook are optional for you, okay. If you want to read it, you can read it.

If you feel you need it, some eras you might feel, I know 3 Kingdoms, I don’t need it, right. I know Tang Dynasty, I don’t need it this week, I’ll just do primary. But some eras you might be like, oh, you know, North South Division, I want to read the textbook, right. So it’s there if you need it, right. So it’s not as much as it looks, okay.

And then I got the diagnostic geography quiz study guide, put up all the study guides, don’t worry. Questions? How does it sound? Interesting, compared to your other classes, yeah? Pretty good, right? Let me know. Alright.

Periodization of Chinese History

So let’s talk about how we talk about Chinese history. Periodization. Alright, there are ways. This is just getting you into like foot in the door. Remember that long sort of like list, that chronology I gave you of all those reigns, dynasties, whatever? Here’s how we break it down.

First, pre-modern China. Pre-modern China, this is a loaded word. When does modernity begin? It’s kind of a useless phrase, okay, because 50 years from now they’ll be like, was the twentieth century modern? It looks pretty old to us, right?

But for the sake of conversation, for the sake of dialogue, you should know that in China officially, in Chinese textbooks in China today, modernity begins with a very actually western-centric notion of the Opium Wars, middle of the nineteenth century basically. So you have modern history, pre-modern history. Okay, pre-modern, sometimes we could also say traditional. I’m just not endorsing these terms, I’m just letting you know these are the terms you may encounter.

When we say imperial China, that has a very, very fixed beginning and end date. That is not open to interpretation. Imperial China begins in 221 BCE. Okay, that begins when Qin Shi Huang proclaims himself to be the first emperor. He was the first person to do it.

Realize, writing was invented in China approximately in 1200 BC. China’s got 1000 years of recorded history before there were any emperors, before there were any. So this is the amazing thing about thinking about scale in terms of Chinese history. When Confucius was alive, he was already thinking about the deep past in antiquity.

We think of Confucius and we go, wow, that guy lived a long time ago. He was thinking of other people living a long time ago, say 600 years ago, right? So this is just, imperial China begins with the proclamation of the first emperor, which was a new form of sort of royal kingship that sort of superseded everything that came before it.

That imperial system remains basically the primary form of governance in China until 1912. Well, this is another thing of like, when does it end? 1911, the Xinhai Revolution, many of you have been familiar with it, might have heard of it, broke out in 1911. The emperor abdicated in early 1912. So as a historian of late imperial China, I insist on 1912. Okay, but you will sometimes see 1911. It’s not, okay, what are we talking about? We’re talking about a couple of months here. I won’t mark you down if you say 1911. It’s when China had an emperor. That’s what we’re talking about.

Early, Medieval, and Late Imperial China

We also sort of have a few periods, periodizations that we can say. Now think about sort of like history that you might have encountered in AP World. I haven’t taken AP World in a long time so I don’t know, and I heard now it’s starting in like 1500, is that right? 1300, still way too late, what a tragedy. Whatever it is, so you basically start in like the late medieval period or medieval.

We have early China. This is again a really good book on early China. What is early China? Early China basically means the origin of whatever we can talk about, when it happened, to basically the end of the Han dynasty, about 200 common era, 200 AD, okay, approximately like that, roughly.

Then we enter, we can talk about another era called the middle period or medieval China, and that’s from that end of the Han. That’s a great way, I know everybody will hear, this is a better way to think about it, the 3 Kingdoms period, right. Okay, the 3 Kingdoms period is like the end of early China, you can think about. We’re entering a new era at that point.

So you can say that’s approximately medieval China, which, you go, when does “medieval” or “middle period” China end? Some people say, do you put it before the Mongols, do you put it after the Mongols, is it about 1000? Okay, I’m just doing really, really traditional reign dates here, founding the Ming dynasty. You don’t have to. It’s approximate, okay? And then the last 2 dynasties are something like late imperial China.

Sometimes you’ll also hear this called early modern China. It all depends on what type of historian you’re talking to. If you’re talking to a European historian you might say early modern because that’s how they talk. Late imperial China is how, if the Chinese historians are together in a bus, that’s how we go, oh, late imperial, because we all know what that means. Either one is fine, but just realize this is how you break it down, these very long periods of history.

A Chinese History Hack: North, South, East, and West

Let’s talk about a Chinese history hack. North and south, east and west, right? Okay, these are just cardinal directions, right? We have a western Zhou and we have an eastern Zhou. We have a western Han and we have an eastern Han. That basically means in the early period of China, in early China, basically we have western capitals and eastern capitals, okay?

As time goes on, this changes. This shifts. Okay? The Tang dynasty in medieval China, seventh century, eighth century, ninth century, approximately around here. There’s still a western capital and still an eastern capital at Chang’an, Xi’an and Luoyang. But once you get to about the year 1000, this shifts, and now we don’t have western and eastern capitals, we have northern and southern capitals, and that’s Beijing and Nanjing, right?

You know, Beijing, northern capital, Nanjing, southern capital. So what’s going on? Well, what you have to realize is that over a very, very long period of time, the Chinese people migrated south. There was a major migration of people from the North China Plain, okay, to the south, as the south is basically filled in with rice agriculture, okay.

The south, that area south of the Yangtze River, don’t worry I’ll show you where the Yangtze River is in just a second, it was really swamp and marshland, okay. The population, as early as the Han dynasty, as early as around the year 0, there were people moving down there. That picked up over the first thousand years of this era. So from the year 0 to about the year 1000, the population moved south, and then by the time you get to that medieval era, sometime in the medieval era, most of the people, most of the population of China, lives in the south.

And the south actually ends up becoming rather wealthy because they grow rice, they have surpluses, they pay taxes. Where do they pay taxes to? The north. This is a very interesting dynamic.

Basically let me just phrase it to you this way. You look at over here. That’s the Big Goose Pagoda. You’ll recognize that in a few weeks from now. That’s Xi’an, the capital of Shaanxi province. It’s a very, very historic city. It’s basically like a great number of the early imperial capitals are located there. This is kind of what you might think of South China looking like, right? Mountainous, green, water, humid, and rice. That’s South China in a nutshell.

So then we go back to our map. This is the Mongol Empire. The Mongols, once their reign in China is established, move their capital to Dadu, the great capital, which is Beijing. They are kind of the ones who actually move it to Beijing, right? So Beijing actually gets its start not as a Han Chinese capital. It was actually the northern peoples, the non-Han peoples, who started it.

So after the Mongol period you get that Nanjing and Beijing mix. That’s in the last 2 dynasties, southern capital and northern capital. What you can kind of say, even to this day, is that the economic part of the country, the most basically profitable part of the country, highest incomes, are in that greater Shanghai area, also in Guangdong, Pearl River Delta area. Those southern hubs, those are the economic engines of the country. The political center of the country is in the north, and that’s basically been that way for a few centuries actually, going a number of centuries.

Southerners end up paying for defense, right? The northerners handle frontier defense, right? When you see where Beijing is on a map and you see where historical Mongolia was, Beijing is almost not in China, right? That’s why it has all those sandstorms. It’s almost in, what is it, the Gobi Desert or whatever it is. It’s really far up north actually.

So that’s a sort of Chinese history hack. Think of north, south, east, west, right? That tells you a lot about what era you’re in. It tells you a lot about the geography of power of the era.

Defining North and South China

Okay, talk about north and south, okay? Some of you, if you’ve taken a class with me before, you might have seen this slide before. Let’s talk about north and south. What is North China? What is South China?

Let me just pause here for a minute. What is the northern United States? Is Maryland north? Is it south? It’s north. Why do you say it’s north? Okay, right. So you’ve answered this question by referring to like a historical political geography, and that’s great, because there is no real objective answer to this question aside from doing that. The same is true in China.

Basically, in the twentieth century there was a line drawn, and it was like, okay, this is the Qinling Mountains over here, and the Huaihe, the Huai River.

China’s Geography: Regional Overview

TRISTAN G. BROWN: Draw a line, if you’re to the north that’s the north, if you’re to the south that’s the south. The joke I’ve always made is that in the 1950s, I think we went over this, the 1950s drawing line basically made it so that if you’re above that line you got subsidized or free central heating from the state, and if you’re below that line you froze because the south was generally warmer.

But this is the whole thing. It’s one of those things where it’s like how do I describe it? I once did a Chinese New Year spring festival in Guangyuan, which is in the northern part of Sichuan province.

You could imagine how frozen I was. That’s pretty far north but staying south, right? That’s one of those border places, you know? I went to bed at night with like 8 blankets over me. I shared a bed with like a 60 year old man for days and there were so many blankets over me, I couldn’t move. So when I woke up, was just like, I’m up. And then somebody came and took off the blanket. I mean it was just incredible.

I don’t want to say that’s a — there are many warm parts of the South, don’t get me wrong. If you’re in Guangdong or Hong Kong, that’s warm. That’s a nice place to be in the winter. But just to know, this is a very large area with a very diverse climate. So that can be really cold. So this is the Mason Dixon line. This is kind of like this kind of idea, yeah?

But there are cultural traits that we associate with northerners. There are cultural traits we associate with southerners. Again, nothing is ever absolute, but we can talk about that when we get into more specific geographies.

Political Jurisdictions of the PRC

TRISTAN G. BROWN: Let’s say political jurisdictions of the PRC today. I realize this is a dynastic Chinese history class, so you might be kind of like, why do we need to know this? I think the reason you have to know this is because you do need to know the geography of China today to appreciate where things are happening, to be able to have a conversation about it.

Just realize there are 34 total units, 23 provinces. There are also these autonomous regions. Tibet is today recognized as an autonomous region. Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, Ningxia, the Hui autonomous region, and Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region. There are also special zones, Shanghai, Chongqing, and so forth. We can talk more about — I have the whole geography quiz for you and I have the study guide to tell you what exactly you need to know.

The Heihe-Tengchong Line

TRISTAN G. BROWN: One other sort of way to think about Chinese geography is this line. This is called the Heihe-Tengchong line, and it was so interesting. This summer I finally got a chance to visit Tengchong. You might not find that impressive, but actually Tengchong is not a particularly famous place. The only reason why Chinese people across the country know about it is because of this line, but it’s actually a great place and it’s a really fun part. It’s in Yunnan province. I have some photos when we go through the tour here.

But the key is that basically this is 64 percent of the area of the country, and in 1934 it had 4 percent of the population. And in 2015 it had 6 percent of the population. This is actually something that hasn’t changed all that much. Most Chinese people live in the red zone. They live in this area. This is a very high density area — like the big cities, a city with 2 million people has encountered anything in China. This is all that. Over here, Tibet, Xinjiang, lots of land, not so many people. So that’s a sort of big way to do it.

Pronunciation Notes

TRISTAN G. BROWN: Let me just say pronunciation — should I say this? Let me do it really, really quickly so that you know. I know many of you probably know Chinese, many of you speak Chinese. You know Chinese is tonal. That means that it’s very hard to be a beginner in this language because you’re constantly saying Horse, I miss you, but it’s really your mom. It’s tricky when you’re getting into it because the tone makes the difference.

Just realize that, maybe just going through a few things here, the Z in the ZH — ZH is like a heart, but these are words that I sort of encounter in research. X, you see X, it’s like an SH, something like this. So just know this is how the pronunciation works.

Tour of China’s Provinces

TRISTAN G. BROWN: What do I got? Let’s start talking about China’s geography. We’ve got like 20 minutes left. Cover the country. I’m going to start purely for no apparent reason in Sichuan province. It’s just because this is what my PowerPoint told me to do. I opened it up and I was like, alright, we’ve got to start somewhere, let’s start over there.

Sichuan Province

TRISTAN G. BROWN: You have probably encountered Sichuan province before. It’s actually a pretty famous province. It’s got, compared to other Chinese provinces, a lot of international cachet, in part because look at all the Sichuan restaurants all over the Cambridge-Boston area. When Chinese food traveled, Sichuan cuisine was a sort of kind of cuisine that just traveled. A lot of times the restaurants are not owned or operated by people from Sichuan, but they just created a Sichuan restaurant — I don’t know why, but there it is. You also sometimes see Szechuan, alright? That’s again that older transliteration system, same thing, it refers to that province. There it is in Western China.

Sichuan is famous for spicy food. A lot of parts of China today have spicy food, to be frank. It’s also famous for hot pot, right? Sichuan is like where hot pot — or Chongqing. Now again, I’m sort of biased here because I’m a historian of the imperial period. I sort of take Chongqing and Sichuan together. Culturally they are together. They all speak a very similar kind of Mandarin dialect, but Chongqing was siphoned off from Sichuan in the 1990s, and it’s now a separate political entity today. But you can see Chongqing and Sichuan culturally they’re kind of in this — this is Chongqing right here, right there.

Let me just say one thing about hot pot. The problem I feel about talking about Chinese food today is that now China has become so flattened, and in a sense it’s a good thing. It’s part of the progress of the country. It’s part of the wealth of the country, but now every place has hot pot. It’s not like you’re going to go and say, “Oh, I’ve got to go to Sichuan, I’ve got to go try the hot pot.” It’s like you’re going to get hot pot in Kunming and Yunnan, you’re going to get hot pot in Beijing, whatever they have. I realize they have a Beijing hot pot, it’s different, I get it. But the point is nowadays if you’re in a provincial capital, you can pretty much get the food of all the other parts of China. It might not be good but they will have it.

So it’s kind of like Mexican in the U.S. Massachusetts has it. If you want to eat it they have it. Is it as good as Arizona? I don’t know, but you get what I’m saying.

It’s also home to the panda, Sichuan’s most famous export besides the peppercorns. We talk a lot about the panda. Just realize something about the panda — it is not important in Chinese history. I’m not breaking any hearts here. It’s a very, very lovable vegetarian bear. It fits so well with so many of the aesthetics of modernity in so many ways. It is sort of friendly, vegetarian, and a bear. How do you get that combination? It’s like evolution.

It is actually a bear. It is related to the Russian brown bear and all of that stuff. How did this happen? Well, I don’t know how many years ago a bear moved to Sichuan and said, “I like it,” and then just said, “I’m just going to eat bamboo all the time,” right? So basically you ended up with that.

The panda became a symbol in actually really the communist era because the panda was not associated with imperial symbols. The dragon is an imperial symbol. The tiger is a very ancient symbol. The elephant even is an ancient symbol. All of these things are fair game — you can see them in imperial history, you can see them in ancient history. Nobody talked about the panda. Nobody was impressed by the panda. But then, that’s why — perfect, we’re having a communist revolution, we’re throwing out all the old, we’ve got a new animal right here, it’s the panda, and it worked. You just got to say it worked. It was incredible marketing, and now it’s on the World Wildlife Foundation’s — like it’s their emblem. I mean, this is like — it’s the most famous bear in the world, let’s face it.

And then the other thing is with Sichuan you get this great culture of tea houses. You go back to the twentieth century, Sichuan also had a great number of mafias — we could talk about mafias in China. The South was loaded with them and they would hang out in the tea houses, and there were so many interesting things that happened there. It’s got a great lifestyle.

The way that people talk about life in Sichuan, they say it’s easygoing, easy life. There’s even this expression: “When you’re young don’t go to Sichuan, when you’re old don’t leave it.” There are expressions in China for everything that kind of give you advice, and this is one of those, right? So I didn’t listen to this expression. I went, and you can see what am I doing now, right? So it continued.

One interesting thing about Sichuan is that it is a basin. It is a geological basin. What that means is that it is surrounded on basically all sides. To get into Sichuan is difficult. To get out, there is one really easy way to get out, which is through the Yangtze River, but it only flows in one direction. You can send rice out of Sichuan, you can send people out of Sichuan, but getting into Sichuan is rather difficult.

That is actually why across Chinese history it’s been a place to flee to. So during the Tang dynasty we’re going to have a really, really big rebellion called the An Lushan rebellion. It’s one of the most famous, devastating civil wars and rebellions of Chinese history. The emperor will go from Xi’an — he will go from Chang’an, don’t worry, you will memorize all these places, you will know what I’m talking about — and he will flee into Sichuan. And actually this happened in the twentieth century as well. Some of you will know this. Jiang Jieshi’s government, when Japan invaded from the east and Nanjing fell, the government basically had to move to the west, and it moved to Chongqing, which is again basically the Sichuan region. That’s where they held out for the war more or less.

Just realize this is a big part of the sort of geography of Sichuan that gives it its interesting flavor. There’s another expression that I love here: “When China has yet to fall into chaos, Sichuan is the first to fall. When China has yet to be pacified, Sichuan has yet to be pacified.” Again, because it’s hard to get to, right? So that gives it a unique culture in a way, really interesting.

Shaanxi Province

TRISTAN G. BROWN: Now we continue on with our tour. We’re going to go from Sichuan — you can see where Sichuan is right here. That’s Chongqing. We’re going to go to the northeast. We’re going to go to Shaanxi Province.

Now Shaanxi Province — if you love history and you take this class, this is the province you really have to go to. It’s loaded with history. You basically cross the Qinling Mountains down here in the southern part of the province. You get right up here. It’s called the Guanzhong region — don’t worry about it — but Xi’an, “western peace” literally, or Chang’an, was its older medieval name. That’s the capital of the province.

That tower that you see right there was built a very long time ago. That was built in the medieval period. It is not very common across China to see towers that are that old. It’s an incredibly impressive piece of architecture. You probably know this place because of course the terracotta warriors are here more or less. This is where you would go if you’re going to go see them, and that’s certainly something to go see. We will cover them in probably a few weeks. We will cover all of this.

Let’s talk a little bit about local food. Again, the caveat being nowadays in Xi’an you can get whatever fish you want, you can get hot pot, whatever. So again, it’s all flattened, but there are still local tastes and there are still local specialties. Northerners in general eat wheat — they eat not as rice heavy. So it’s a noodle eating culture. Most of North China eats noodles, and Xi’an is famous for its all different types of noodles and noodle type dishes.

This is a noodle dish from a county — it’s got like a vinegar taste, it’s a little spicy. Does anyone know what this is?

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Palm oil, yarrow palm oil, right?

TRISTAN G. BROWN: This is a lamb — sort of, you take like, it looks like a naan bread and you destroy your hands by cutting it up into a million little pieces, and then they pour like a soup in it with lamb. It’s delicious, it’s super heavy. So when you eat this, you don’t eat anything else for the rest of the day. So it’s fun, it’s really good.

Now let me just tell you, when you’re learning Chinese history for the first time, you’re learning Chinese geography for the first time, you will say, “How is this true? This is totally not fair.” The province right next to Shaanxi province is called Shanxi province. Are you kidding me? Right, like you say, couldn’t they put it in another place?

The North China Plain and Its Historical Significance

TRISTAN G. BROWN: Yeah, you just got to learn it. You just got to learn it. In English, this will be transliterated. Okay. The one that I was talking about the ancient capital with the terracotta warriors and all that stuff, 2 A’s, okay.

There will always be 2 A’s. It’s in the third tone, okay. It’s another tone. If you come over to this one, you go east. It’s the first tone, 1 A. So for a Chinese person these don’t sound alike.

But when you’re in the US and you’re like okay, what’s going on? You’re like, seriously, I have to learn this. Yes, you have to learn it. So not the same, okay? It actually will make it easy for the geography quiz because you’ll know that approximately in this area there’s a place and it’s approximately spelled the same way, okay?

Shaizhi Province, really great place, lots of interesting stuff, lots of great Taoist temples, old temples to visit. Also noodles, I believe, is from here. This is like a knife cut noodle. It’s famous from this region. The hanging temples over there, this is really fun.

Beijing: The Imperial Capital

Continue on. Let’s go. I think our next one, well let’s go. It’s coming, okay. Beijing, okay, the imperial capital Beijing. So if you look over here, we went from Sichuan and we’re going to the northeast. Went through Shanxi, we went through Shanxi.

I sort of cut through Hebei and then now we’re here in Beijing. How many of you have been to Beijing?

AUDIENCE QUESTION: You’ve been there, you’ve been there, you’ve been there. How was it, what do you remember? It was kind of smoggy?

TRISTAN G. BROWN: Yeah. Okay. What do you remember?

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Yeah, the palace is incredible.

TRISTAN G. BROWN: Yeah, what else do you remember?

AUDIENCE QUESTION: The weather is terrible.

TRISTAN G. BROWN: Look, you just got to say the weather. It’s like hot and then all of a sudden it rains and it’s like it’s not a nice rain. It’s like a killer rain and it’s like I don’t have an umbrella big enough to handle this. And then there’s tons of traffic. I realized just being there this summer, even though like all the cars, many cars are now electric and there’s great public transit everywhere, the traffic in Beijing is still really bad. It’s like whenever we were like, “I’ll be there in a half hour,” it’s like, no, just say an hour, okay?

But it’s loaded with historical sites. It’s an incredible place. I’ve been there probably a dozen times in my life over the years and you don’t see everything, right? You could always go back and see something new there. So it’s really, really fun.

Of course, many people who go to see the Great Wall will go to Beijing to see it. You actually don’t need to be in Beijing to see it. There’s Great Wall in Gansu Province out west, there’s Great Wall in other provinces, but Beijing has the most famous ones. Like the panda, I just realized that this Great Wall was oftentimes not very important. It was a little bit more important than the panda, okay.

It was mainly important in certain periods of time in history, and other periods of time just nobody cared, okay. It just depends on who was controlling Beijing at the time. We’ll get into all of this, okay.

Dongbei: Northeast China

But just realize, I’ll say one thing here. I want to take, I have a little video here I’ll show you about Dongbei. Has anybody ever been to Dongbei?

You’ve been to Dongbei? Why did you go to Dongbei? This is Northeast China, Manchuria. Where did you go?

Oh no way, you were born in Jilin Province.

TRISTAN G. BROWN: Fantastic, fantastic. Where else did you go there?

AUDIENCE: I went skiing.

TRISTAN G. BROWN: You went skiing, oh nice. Okay, yeah. You went to Heilongjiang?

AUDIENCE: Yeah, yeah. Nice. I was in Liaoning this summer. I had a very nice time, great historical place.

TRISTAN G. BROWN: I was going to say Dongbei is definitely unique. It’s unique in a number of ways. You will see if you go up to Heilongjiang, one of the provinces, you go to Harbin, it’s like almost in Russia and it does have some old sort of Russian architecture that’s around. It’s very interesting to kind of see. Manchuria is very important in the twentieth century.

You realize that like during World War II it’s a big site of contention. Japan sort of sets up a puppet government in Manchuria. I guess I would say, what would I say about it? Just realize that, first of all, this is again one of those things. I noticed over the years that people in China today associate people from Dongbei with being very funny, with being humorous, okay.

And there’s all of these folks. You can watch these shows on Chinese TV. It’s like a humorous talk show. So she’s like from Dongbei. She’s got a Dongbei accent.

And there’s this kind of humor and I don’t know exactly how to describe it, but it’s like people just think Dongbei people are funny. Is there a scientific basis of this? I don’t know, but just realize that like that’s what people will say, okay. So do you think it’s true? You think it’s true?

They’re a little bit funnier. I don’t know. Are there parts of America where you’d say like, okay, people from that state are just funny? Do we have that? Where are people funny? I don’t think Massachusetts people are that funny.

I’m going to be honest with you, I’m from here. Where are people funny? I feel like it’s more that we know where people are like jerks. Okay, see, okay, yeah, yeah, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

We know where people have attitude. Attitude for sure, yeah. Humor, it’s kind of an interesting question, like who’s funny, who’s not, but this is one thing just to kind of throw in there.

The North China Plain

Alright, so continuing on. I don’t have a ton of time left. I want to take, if you go south from Dongbei, from northeastern China in that area all around Beijing, basically the south of Beijing mainly, you get to this North China Plain and it’s flat.

This is a very, very old area, okay? What I mean by that is people have been farming here for thousands of years. Very, very early Chinese history starts around here in a big, big way. This is a fascinating place because on the one hand it’s so important. It’s near at least the capital in the later eras. It’s also where the Yellow River sort of gets to the North China Plain, and this is where the Yellow River gets really violent because the North China Plain is flat.

So the Yellow River every few hundred years changes course across the North China Plain and it’s devastating floods, crop failures, and chaos. That’s in a way one of the things you could say. This is again a generalization. Northerners have a sort of, let’s say, the state has been more interventionist in the north, right? The state kind of originates in the north, in some ways around the control of the Yellow River, because you have to control it.

Is the south very far, far away, right? It’s less controlled, more laissez faire, more like, right? “Heaven’s high, the emperor’s far away,” right? It’s a different relationship. This is one of the ways that you can think a little bit about South-North, yeah?

Confucius is from the North China Plain, right? He’s from Shandong Province. We’ll encounter him in a bit. A number of the big early Confucian philosophers are from this area. It’s got like an association, you could say, with Confucianism and with ancient learning, and with again the area around the late imperial capitals as I mentioned. But it’s also a place, you could say, of sometimes lawlessness, okay, and rebellions that threaten the states.

It’s one of those big Chinese novels, Water Margin. We’ve already went over it, my God, just one class. We went over 3 of the big novels today. This takes place, you could say, in this area. It’s like outlaws. It’s a very interesting location. It’s a very interesting place.

The Grand Canal: China’s Ancient Superhighway

Alright, 2 minutes left. By the way, I always use all of class time. I just keep talking, you know what I mean? I just can’t shut up about this stuff. I apologize, but I just love it.

Okay, one really, really, really, really, really fascinating thing that’s important in dynastic Chinese history is this thing, north to south, the Grand Canal. This was like the superhighway of dynastic China. It is constructed, believe it or not, you won’t believe this, but it’s like when I tell you this it’s like, well, where is it?

The origins of the Grand Canal go back to the seventh century. So you got me. This is one of those things in China where you’re like, what, really? What do you mean? You mean like a canal was constructed in the seventh century and then remained being used until 100 years ago? Yes, basically, yes.

It didn’t flow in exactly the same area. The origins of the Grand Canal were actually this one that you see here. It connected the Tang dynasty capital of Luoyang with the south. Then in later years it got expanded and eventually in the later period it basically connects Beijing and the south. That goes all the way down, you could say, like to Nanjing, Hangzhou, that area, all the way from the north. It’s like you get on there and you can go north-south.

It’s like you can transport grain. The emperor can travel it if he’s going to the south. It’s a super important way that the empire was connected. Today there’s high speed rail. At that time there was the Grand Canal.

Okay, I realize we’re out of time. So go home, tell your friends, enjoy the weekend. I’ll see you on Monday. We’ll finish up our tour of China and continue onward.

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