The China page
simply click on which ever epoch you wish to go and it will open for you in a new tab
a) The Pre-Imperial Age - Xia, Shang, Zhou
b) Qin, Han, Xin and Jin
c) Liu Song, Chen, Sui, Tang, Liao and Liao
d) The Song Dynasty
e) The Yuan Dynasty
f) The Ming Dynasty
g) The Qing Dynasty
h) The Republic(s) of China
My starting-point for this is the Wikipedia timeline, which I went to in hope of finding a full, complete and balanced annotation of all the key events in Chinese history, but which turned out to be a Euro-Centric, and worse a Christo-Centric, gathering of badly spelled, often grammatically incorrect, frequently unverified (and shown to be wrong or biased when I tried to do that) and even more frequently confusing...
What you will find on these several pages is the same Wikipedia timeline, but also my notes, complaints and corrections, and in the end, perhaps, less a page about China than about the dreadfulness of Wikipedia, a detailed exposition of what is wrong with it, and a forlorn hope that students of all ages will refuse to use it, unless they are seeking superficial information whose accuracy and veritude doesn’t really matter.
What follows, that is to say, is an attempt - fully aware of the multitude of difficulties and the unlikelihood of overcoming them - to create a meaningful account of Chinese history out of the mass of agendas, blindnesses and biases that lie stored behind all of the available information – and by that I don’t just mean Wikipedia, but all the information, because all sources are agenda-driven, and we who use them need to remember that.
Sadly - and probably all countries of the human world are exactly the same - this account of Chinese history has turned out to be little more than a record of the brutal alpha males, and occasional alpha females, the SuperIds and SuperIdesses as I prefer to call them, who used poison, trickery, a knife or an army to seize power, and who then enjoyed its trappings while doing absolutely nothing for their people except enslaving and exploiting them, and who then succumbed themselves to the next aspirant: these will be listed, with links for follow-ups, but I do not intend to waste my time and energy doing more than that.
However, I said “little more”, and there is that little: human beings of merit whose names crop up, usually artists, poets, philosophers or scientists, with their achievements, and these will get much fuller coverage.
You can find David Prashker at:
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