Chinese History

xaznxryux · Jun 25, 2011

Hey guys, after watching a few historical series I feel like opening a thread just on discussing Chinese history (pre-Communist era, Qing Dynasty or before)

I know a few members here are interested in Chinese history so let the discussion begin

I remember one member was really interested in the Three Kingdoms era so we just had a long talk

mr_evolution · Jun 25, 2011

This might interest you.

http://www.dramasian.com/forum/showthread.php/45946-Random-Pics-Of-Old-China

xaznxryux · Jun 25, 2011

yeh i actually saw this quite awhile ago, the pictures were amazing but all the pictures were around 1890 - pre-modern China

[N] · Jul 2, 2011

pretty much they killed each other for superiority because they were mostly short kingdoms went down for the envy of height

xaznxryux · Jul 13, 2011

[N];940421 said:

pretty much they killed each other for superiority because they were mostly short kingdoms went down for the envy of height
Click to expand...

yeh, but between most wars are 300-400 years of dynasty rule, the worst is Warring States and the 5 Dynasties/10 Kingdoms which lasted about 400-500 years of wars. The Three Kingdom only lasted about 100 years...

ralphrepo · Jul 13, 2011

I certainly do not mean to belittle your interest in Chinese history, as it is one of my own life long pursuits and a field of deep personal interest. However, I do hope that you understand the impossibility of your request (anything Qing and before) as an equivalent of that in western world history, analogous to anything from before the Great War to 2000 years before the birth of Christ. Your simple "thread" would attempt to cover the breadth and scope of a web site the likes of China History Forum

I suggest that instead of trying create such a monumental undertaking here, you go there instead as they're much more dedicated and their degree of interest and knowledge is extensive. However, be forewarned; many of their respondents are extremely Pro PRC and highly political; any hint of negative commentary towards China or their government will usually get pounced on by multiple flames. I used to be a member there and had genuinely appreciated their depth of knowledge but eventually grew annoyed of and at the incessantly blind nationalism that pervaded that site and by it's admins. They say that they're fair to all, but (IMHO at least) it seemed that the Chinese animal was lot more equal than any other on that farm. So I eventually resigned my forum membership and withdrew my postings.

In terms of material though, if one can look beyond the politics, their history research and discussions are top flight and the site should be in your browser bookmarks, insofar as Chinese history goes, as a 'must have' point of reference.

That being said, there is always a danger of too much politicizing agenda vis a vis history (Chinese or otherwise). The mixing of the two can be horrifically damaging. I cite the suspicions by some research quarters as but one example. In recent years, well preserved bodies of presumed European traders or occidental residents were previously excavated along the ancient silk road but which had been "discovered" headless within their graves. Western archaeologists long suspected that the modern Chinese government purposely did this (ie. secretly removed their blond haired heads) so as to preclude any argument that the area was previously not a part of China. That is, China is purposely attempting to change the evidence of human history to suit its modern political purpose. Nowadays, though they're no longer desecrating dead bodies, even the inclusion of DNA "evidence" can be argued ad infinitum.

From an article in the New York Times:

March 15, 2010
A Host of Mummies, a Forest of Secrets
By NICHOLAS WADE

SYMBOLISM Archaeologists believe the hundreds of 13-foot poles at the Small River Cemetery in a desert in Xinjiang Province, China, were mostly phallic symbols.

In the middle of a terrifying desert north of Tibet, Chinese archaeologists have excavated an extraordinary cemetery. Its inhabitants died almost 4,000 years ago, yet their bodies have been well preserved by the dry air. The cemetery lies in what is now China’s northwest autonomous region of Xinjiang, yet the people have European features, with brown hair and long noses. Their remains, though lying in one of the world’s largest deserts, are buried in upsidedown boats. And where tombstones might stand, declaring pious hope for some god’s mercy in the afterlife, their cemetery sports instead a vigorous forest of phallic symbols, signaling an intense interest in the pleasures or utility of procreation. The long-vanished people have no name, because their origin and identity are still unknown. But many clues are now emerging about their ancestry, their way of life and even the language they spoke.

Their graveyard, known as Small River Cemetery No. 5, lies near a dried-up riverbed in the Tarim Basin, a region encircled by forbidding mountain ranges. Most of the basin is occupied by the Taklimakan Desert, a wilderness so inhospitable that later travelers along the Silk Road would edge along its northern or southern borders. In modern times the region has been occupied by Turkish-speaking Uighurs, joined in the last 50 years by Han settlers from China. Ethnic tensions have recently arisen between the two groups, with riots in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang. A large number of ancient mummies, really desiccated corpses, have emerged from the sands, only to become pawns between the Uighurs and the Han. The 200 or so mummies have a distinctively Western appearance, and the Uighurs, even though they did not arrive in the region until the 10th century, have cited them to claim that the autonomous region was always theirs. Some of the mummies, including a well-preserved woman known as the Beauty of Loulan, were analyzed by Li Jin, a well-known geneticist at Fudan University, who said in 2007 that their DNA contained markers indicating an East Asian and even South Asian origin.

The mummies in the Small River Cemetery are, so far, the oldest discovered in the Tarim Basin. Carbon tests done at Beijing University show that the oldest part dates to 3,980 years ago. A team of Chinese geneticists has analyzed the mummies’ DNA. Despite the political tensions over the mummies’ origin, the Chinese said in a report published last month in the journal BMC Biology that the people were of mixed ancestry, having both European and some Siberian genetic markers, and probably came from outside China. The team was led by Hui Zhou of Jilin University in Changchun, with Dr. Jin as a co-author. All the men who were analyzed had a Y chromosome that is now mostly found in Eastern Europe, Central Asia and Siberia, but rarely in China. The mitochondrial DNA, which passes down the female line, consisted of a lineage from Siberia and two that are common in Europe. Since both the Y chromosome and the mitochondrial DNA lineages are ancient, Dr. Zhou and his team conclude the European and Siberian populations probably intermarried before entering the Tarim Basin some 4,000 years ago.

The Small River Cemetery was rediscovered in 1934 by the Swedish archaeologist Folke Bergman and then forgotten for 66 years until relocated through GPS navigation by a Chinese expedition. Archaeologists began excavating it from 2003 to 2005. Their reports have been translated and summarized by Victor H. Mair, a professor of Chinese at the University of Pennsylvania and an expert in the prehistory of the Tarim Basin. As the Chinese archaeologists dug through the five layers of burials, Dr. Mair recounted, they came across almost 200 poles, each 13 feet tall. Many had flat blades, painted black and red, like the oars from some great galley that had foundered beneath the waves of sand. At the foot of each pole there were indeed boats, laid upside down and covered with cowhide. The bodies inside the boats were still wearing the clothes they had been buried in. They had felt caps with feathers tucked in the brim, uncannily resembling Tyrolean mountain hats. They wore large woolen capes with tassels and leather boots. A Bronze Age salesclerk from Victoria’s Secret seems to have supplied the clothes beneath — barely adequate woolen loin cloths for the men, and skirts made of string strands for the women. Within each boat coffin were grave goods, including beautifully woven grass baskets, skillfully carved masks and bundles of ephedra, an herb that may have been used in rituals or as a medicine. In the women’s coffins, the Chinese archaeologists encountered one or more life-size wooden phalluses laid on the body or by its side. Looking again at the shaping of the 13-foot poles that rise from the prow of each woman’s boat, the archaeologists concluded that the poles were in fact gigantic phallic symbols. The men’s boats, on the other hand, all lay beneath the poles with bladelike tops. These were not the oars they had seemed at first sight, the Chinese archaeologists concluded, but rather symbolic vulvas that matched the opposite sex symbols above the women’s boats. “The whole of the cemetery was blanketed with blatant sexual symbolism,” Dr. Mair wrote. In his view, the “obsession with procreation” reflected the importance the community attached to fertility.

Arthur Wolf, an anthropologist at Stanford University and an expert on fertility in East Asia, said that the poles perhaps mark social status, a common theme of tombs and grave goods. “It seems that what most people want to take with them is their status, if it is anything to brag about,” he said. Dr. Mair said the Chinese archaeologists’ interpretation of the poles as phallic symbols was “a believable analysis.” The buried people’s evident veneration of procreation could mean they were interested in both the pleasure of sex and its utility, given that it is difficult to separate the two. But they seem to have had particular respect for fertility, Dr. Mair said, because several women were buried in double-layered coffins with special grave goods. Living in harsh surroundings, “infant mortality must have been high, so the need for procreation, particularly in light of their isolated situation, would have been great,” Dr. Mair said. Another possible risk to fertility could have arisen if the population had become in-bred. “Those women who were able to produce and rear children to adulthood would have been particularly revered,” Dr. Mair said. Several items in the Small River Cemetery burials resemble artifacts or customs familiar in Europe, Dr. Mair noted. Boat burials were common among the Vikings. String skirts and phallic symbols have been found in Bronze Age burials of Northern Europe. There are no known settlements near the cemetery, so the people probably lived elsewhere and reached the cemetery by boat. No woodworking tools have been found at the site, supporting the idea that the poles were carved off site. The Tarim Basin was already quite dry when the Small River people entered it 4,000 years ago. They probably lived at the edge of survival until the lakes and rivers on which they depended finally dried up around A.D. 400. Burials with felt hats and woven baskets were common in the region until some 2,000 years ago.

WELL PRESERVED The mummy of an infant was one of about 200 corpses with European features that were excavated from the cemetery.

The language spoken by the people of the Small River Cemetery is unknown, but Dr. Mair believes it could have been Tokharian, an ancient member of the Indo-European family of languages. Manuscripts written in Tokharian have been discovered in the Tarim Basin, where the language was spoken from about A.D. 500 to 900. Despite its presence in the east, Tokharian seems more closely related to the “centum” languages of Europe than to the “satem” languages of India and Iran. The division is based on the words for hundred in Latin (centum) and in Sanskrit (satam). The Small River Cemetery people lived more than 2,000 years before the earliest evidence for Tokharian, but there is “a clear continuity of culture,” Dr. Mair said, in the form of people being buried with felt hats, a tradition that continued until the first few centuries A.D. An exhibition of the Tarim Basin mummies opens March 27 at the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana, Calif. — the first time that the mummies will be seen outside Asia.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/16/science/16archeo.html
Click to expand...

Oh, and if you want to read up on another hot Chinese topic, try looking up Shang human sacrifice and oracle bones.

Good luck with your research.

xaznxryux · Jul 13, 2011

actually I'm part of Chinese History Forum as well...its a great forum for any people interested (basic - expert level)...

I'm personally using this site to advance my knowledge in the Age of Fragmentation (5 Dynasty/10 Kingdoms)

Im also aware that pre-Qing is too long to discuss, but its just for interest purposes

ralphrepo · Jul 13, 2011

xaznxryux said: ↑

actually I'm part of Chinese History Forum as well...its a great forum for any people interested (basic - expert level)... I'm personally using this site to advance my knowledge in the Age of Fragmentation (5 Dynasty/10 Kingdoms) Im also aware that pre-Qing is too long to discuss, but its just for interest purposes
Click to expand...

Frankly, most of the people here tend to be light on the intellectualism of history and but heavy on the entertainment value. If one gets too deep, I find that people tend to lose interest in the matter rather quickly, LOL...

xaznxryux · Jul 13, 2011

ralphrepo said: ↑

Frankly, most of the people here tend to be light on the intellectualism of history and but heavy on the entertainment value. If one gets too deep, I find that people tend to lose interest in the matter rather quickly, LOL...
Click to expand...

yeh...btw thanks for the article, i read something similar before...about a 3000 year old Chinese mummy, her hair and skin were still in tact...quite interesting

ralphrepo · Jul 13, 2011

xaznxryux said: ↑

yeh...btw thanks for the article, i read something similar before...about a 3000 year old Chinese mummy, her hair and skin were still in tact...quite interesting
Click to expand...

There was another recent article that I got from China Smack, which lead me to another site with similar pictures about the chance recovery of a three Ming era coffins with one bearing an intact corpse. I don't know how genuine the article is, as the manner in which they, er... recover the remains and artifacts within the sarcophagus flies directly in the fact of what I assume to be proper salvage technique. Link

These guys look like they work at Home Depot... They took the ring off her finger? (last photo near the bottom) I guess they were in a hurry to clean it up and place it into a museum, LOL...

mr_evolution · Jul 13, 2011

Ralph, whats in the baby's eyes?

ralphrepo · Jul 13, 2011

mr_evolution said: ↑

Ralph, whats in the baby's eyes?
Click to expand...

In another article regarding funerary practices of mummified remains found around the Tarim Basin, there was reference to "small flat stones" being placed on an infant corpse's eyes. Link I'm assuming that the practice was similar at the Small River Cemetary 5 site of the Time's 2010 article.

Another article appeared in a blog with a similar description and a better picture:

I certainly didn't mean for this to be a thread hijack, but here's more info:

[video=youtube;AJZ38PtW3SI]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJZ38PtW3SI[/video]

[video=youtube;gphNMFXReVw]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gphNMFXReVw&NR=1&feature=fvwp[/video]

[video=youtube;wRERvnXVmdE]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRERvnXVmdE[/video]

[video=youtube;QatkSOB4XZ8]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QatkSOB4XZ8[/video]

[video=youtube;xE-liHf7dLM]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xE-liHf7dLM[/video]

xaznxryux · Jul 13, 2011

saw those videos before, its a very good documentary, thanks for posting this

btw talk about indo euros in China

check this link http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/photo/2011-03/21/c_13790816.htm

it talks about mysteries of Chinese people who are born with European features

Chinese History

xaznxryux Well-Known Member

mr_evolution ( • )( •ԅ(ˆ⌣ˆԅ)

xaznxryux Well-Known Member

[N] RATED [ ]

xaznxryux Well-Known Member

ralphrepo Well-Known Member

xaznxryux Well-Known Member

ralphrepo Well-Known Member

xaznxryux Well-Known Member

ralphrepo Well-Known Member

mr_evolution ( • )( •ԅ(ˆ⌣ˆԅ)

ralphrepo Well-Known Member

xaznxryux Well-Known Member