The Shortest History of China

1) "Northerners prefer wheat and southerners rice, but not always; some Chinese never touch chili, while others can't cook without it. Beijingers complain that Shanghainese are mercantile and petty; Shanghainese snipe back that Beijingers are bighearted but crude. All stereotypes fall apart in the face of Chinese diversity. The citizenry of the PRC includes subsistence farmers and jet-setting billionaires, Buddhist monks and nightclub owners, passionate feminists and steely patriarchs, avant-garde artists and aerospace engineers, yak herders and film animators, pro-democracy activists and loyal Communists. They may live in towering apartment blocks, courtyard houses built to a two-thousand-year-old design, European-style villas, longhouses, stilt houses, yurts, or even modified caves. They may be fans of Peking opera, Western opera, punk, throat-singing, Canto­pop, chess, video games, Korean soap operas, calligraphy, photography, ballroom dancing, fan dancing, all or none of the above."

2) "Whereas Confucians were obsessed with the correct course of action in any situation, Daoists preached wúwéi 無為, 'inaction'—flowing like water does in nature. Followers of Confucius yearned to serve a ruler; Daoists were famously uninterested in taking part in government. Their followers developed a diverse set of rituals and disciplines, ranging from meditation, alchemy, and energetic healing to the pursuit of immortality through sexual practices (such as non-ejaculation for men) and the consumption of potions. Daoists have irritated straight-laced Confucians for millennia."

3) "Qin Shihuang, wary of the subversive power of a strong landed gentry, instead carved his realm into thirty-six (later forty-eight) administrative regions. A joint civil and military bureaucracy were put in charge of these, reporting directly to him—the Qin was thus the first unified and centralized Chinese state. Its capital was at Cháng'ān (near present-day Xī'ān, in the Northeast). He introduced a single currency, round copper coins with a square hole in the middle—a template used until 1911. He also unified measurements for length and volume, and even standardized the width of cart axles—an inspired solution to the danger and inconvenience posed by unsurfaced roads furrowed by differently spaced wheel ruts."

4) "The Sui put all land under dynastic control and distributed it to the people on the basis of their ability to cultivate it. Because the land reverted to the ruling house for reassignment after its cultivator's death, this prevented the emergence of powerful landowning families that could challenge the central authority. Agricultural production revived, and the economy grew. But the Sui, after that promising start, began its decline under its second emperor, who was fatally fond of both luxury and ill-considered military campaigns. Along the densely populated reaches of the Yellow River, land reclamation and deforestation caused by farming led to worsening floods. A catastrophic flood in the late Sui, earning the Yellow River the moniker 'China's sorrow,' appeared to augur the dynasty's loss of the Mandate of Heaven."

5) "Having served as a local official for several decades, Wang Anshi had observed how the accumulation of vast estates by powerful families allowed them to exploit those who tilled the land. He didn't see why the rich deserved to own so much more than anyone else. Besides, the wealthy, he observed, were adept at tax avoidance, allowing the burden of taxation to fall on those least able to support it. Confucian moral example and rites weren't going to solve these problems. Only Legalist methods would bring about social justice and equality."

6) "The detailed realism that characterizes the Qingming shanghe tu and many other paintings of the time reflected the spirit of reason that so obsessed the neo-Confucians. Yet other artists of the Song would take painting to new heights of intuitive expression, creating a fresh pictorial language in the process. Paradoxically, this also owed something to neo-Confucianism, which considered displays of technical virtuosity unworthy of the Confucian gentleman. This ideal achieved its highest expression in Song landscape, or 'mountain and water' paintings, shānshuǐ huà 山水畫. Combining the arts of painting, poetry, and calligraphy—often literally, with poems calligraphed onto the paintings themselves—such paintings aimed to capture the poetic essence of a scene, exploring the tension between abstraction or emptiness, xū 虛 (the void), and representation, shí 實 (what is real or solid). A poet of the Song dynasty, Sū Dōngpō (1037–1101), wrote of the Tang poet-painter Wáng Wéi (699–759), whose work is considered a forerunner: 'Savor his poetry, and there is a painting in each poem; look carefully at his paintings, and each one contains a poem.'"

7) "Another great Ming novel was the sixteenth-century Journey to the West, aka Monkey, which fictionalizes and injects supernatural elements into the story of the Tang monk Xuanzang's journey to India to bring back original Buddhist texts. In the novel, a talking pig and the mischievous, havoc-making Sūn Wùkōng—better known in English as the Monkey King—accompany the monk. The Monkey King employs 'magic weapons,' fǎbǎo 法寶, to battle various 'cow demons and snake spirits,' including the fearsome White-Bone Demon. The novel is an entertaining blend of mythology, Daoism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and satire. The inspiration for almost thirty films, television series, comics, anime, and operas, it is one of China's most successful cultural exports."

8) "In June 1917, before a new president could put the pieces of Chinese democracy together again, Qing loyalist general Zhāng Xūn (1854–1923), nicknamed 'the Pigtailed General' for his queue, staged a coup. He put the eleven-year-old Puyi, who'd been living in the inner court of the Forbidden City all this time, back on the throne. The republican air force dropped three bombs on the Forbidden City. Only one exploded, injuring one of Puyi's palanquin bearers. After twelve days, Puyi abdicated a second time but was still allowed to live in the palace. The Pigtailed General sought asylum in the Dutch legation. A new, hapless president was installed as the country slid further into chaos and division, and warlords (men with a territorial base and an army to defend it) carved it into virtual fiefdoms. Some warlords were Yuan loyalists. Others were gangsters or opium runners. One, a Christian, baptized his troops with a hose. Another promoted a political program dizzily combining 'militarism, nationalism, anarchism, democracy, capitalism, communism, individualism, imperialism, universalism, paternalism and utopianism.'"

9) "Puyi, the last emperor, had lived an odd and useless life, surrounded from childhood by eunuchs and other members of his defunct imperial court. He had never even been outside the Forbidden City when, in 1922, he cut his queue and, inspired by the example of his Oxford-trained tutor, Reginald Johnston, decided to escape to England. When Johnston refused to call him a cab, he gave up on the idea."

10) "In 1968, following intense factional fighting in Guangzhou, hundreds of bloated corpses, many trussed and bearing gunshot wounds or signs of torture, floated into Hong Kong waters from the Pearl River, further hardening anti-Communist sentiment in a territory that had for decades served as a place, as the Hong Kong journalist Lee Yee later put it, for 'fleeing the Qin.' By the end of 1968, Mao's enemies in the CPC were silenced. Intellectuals who survived the purges were sent off for 'reeducation.' The Red Guards had served their purpose. It was now necessary, Mao said, for urban youth to go to the countryside and 'learn from the poor and middle-level peasants.' In 1969, the CPC declared the Cultural Revolution over."