The Early History and Geography of China
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- čas přidán 3. 03. 2022
- Attributions:
Maps were created using maps-for-free.com/ by ©OpenStreetMap
www.openstreetmap.org/copyright
Images:
"East Asia from Space" by Przemek Pietrak is licensed under CC BY 4.0
"Yellow River Bend" by Fanghong is licensed under CC BY 4.0
"China River Map" by Antonioga is licensed under CC BY 4.0
"Loess Plateau Map" by Christycheungkayan is licensed under CC BY 4.0
"Loess Plateau " by Till Niermann is licensed under CC BY 4.0
"Middle Neolithic Chinese Cultures" by Ismoon is licensed under CC BY 4.0
"Xia Dynasty Map" by Gurdjieff is licensed under CC BY 4.0
"Shang Dynasty Map" by Gurdjieff is licensed under CC BY 4.0
"Shang Inscribed Scapula" by Babelstone is licensed under CC BY 4.0
"Zhou Occidentaux Etats" by Zunkir is licensed under CC BY 4.0 / A derivative from the original work
"Spring and Autumn" by Yug is licensed under CC BY 4.0
"Warring States" by Yug is licensed under CC BY 4.0
Video Clips:
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As many of you have commented, the sound quality of this video is quite bad to say the least. This was one of my first videos and at the time I still didn't know how to set the volume properly, and all my other videos should have better sound quality. Now that the video is already published, I'm not sure if there's anything I can do to improve the sound either, and hopefully the subtitles, which I've manually added, may help a bit.
Thank you so much for making these! This is by far the best video I've been able to find on pre-dynastic Chinese History. Would you consider going into more detail on this period, specifically Spring and Autumn and the Warring States in future videos? I feel like I have a broad understanding of the imperial era but I've always been especially interested in this early period and it's maddeningly difficult to find accesible materials in English.
Thanks for the kind words! Yes I definitely plan to do more videos on this time period, and I’m in the planning process for some of them. For me it’s one of the most fascinating periods in Chinese history. A big part of the challenge of learning about this period is that so few records survive, so a lot of the narrative has to be pieced together, although there’s been lots of really cool archaeological discoveries of ancient texts written on bamboo strips and buried in tombs that’s changing our understanding of the period
Thanks for the kind words! Yes I definitely plan to do more videos on this time period, and I’m in the planning process for some of them. For me it’s one of the most fascinating periods in Chinese history. A big part of the challenge of learning about this period is that so few records survive, so a lot of the narrative has to be pieced together, although there’s been lots of really cool archaeological discoveries of ancient texts written on bamboo strips and buried in tombs that’s changing our understanding of the period
ok i watched half a dozen of your videos in a few hours and had to make a comment.
let me preface this by saying i am a geographer and social scientist by trade, and my partner is a historian. i write and talk about demography, geography, history and economics for a living, every day. i also spend a lot of my time learning - non fiction reading and youtube documentaries primarily - and i am often 'teaching' others, from how to use niche computer programs in the workplace to giving some additional context about a news headline to a friend. long story short, i spend a lot of time thinking about how best to present information or explain arguments or mechanisms etc.
with the above in mind... your presentation style and explanations are some of the best i've ever seen. every video i have seen, you are achieving something that i struggle with every day - being concise, detail rich, and interesting, all at once. it's seriously, seriously impressive. yours is a talent / skillset that often goes unnoticed so i wanted to compliment you on it. if it's something you put a lot of effort into and practice, well done. if you're a natural, then you're a lucky bastard.
i hope that, as well as youtube, there's an employer, staff, or clients out there that get to experience what you do. i've completed multiple tertiary qualifications and you leave most of the lecturers and tutors i've had for dead. and that's without even thinking about how you've probably parsed a lot of material from chinese to english, including concepts that don't even really exist in english/western culture.
anyway cheers and have a good one!
Thanks for the kind words, and really appreciate the thought and time you put into writing this! I'm always making adjustments with each new video, and it's very encouraging to read feedback like yours.
It's been a fun challenge working on this channel this past 1.5 years, and I feel like I've grown a lot from the experience so far. One thing I try very hard to do is to be as concise as possible, even at the expense of leaving out details that I personally wish I could include, to prevent overwhelming viewers with details, especially if they make the key themes harder to follow. Some of the hardest parts of writing has been repeatedly editing the material down to as little as possible. For my latest videos I'm more related with the self-imposed time limits, although even then I still try not to take up too much of my viewers' time.
Translating Chinese concepts to English can also be quite difficult like you said. For this I think I rely a lot on my upbringing - I grew up in the US and feel pretty Americanized with most day-to-day things, although I also grew up reading lots of history and other subjects in Chinese. What strikes me is that even though there are differences between how people in China and the west think about and portray the world, there are also a ton of similarities that are often overlooked, since after all we are all humans anyway. So I feel like being at the intersection of two worlds has helped me write in a way that's both western and Chinese, although again I still feel new to all this and am still refining my techniques as I go along.
@@gatesofkilikien my pleasure mate!!!
i hope that this channel continues to bring you joy.
A wonderful video but the volume is terribly low, it is very hard to hear.
Thanks, and yes apologies for the sound quality. This was one of my earliest videos and I was still learning - it should be better for all the other videos after this one.
@@gatesofkilikien Oh that's wonderful, thank you.
Yea haha and whenever there’s an ad it blasts in my ears 😂
Otherwise wonderful video :)
Yay! Thank you so much!
These videos are fantastic!
Thanks, glad you like them!
Great content!!
Thanks!
For your first video, this was a good effort! Although the audio is very low, I appreciate that an updated video was later released.
It's great to have more Chinese CZcamsrs present the history and culture of China (which I've had an interest, especially in Qin and Han, for a while) to a mostly uninformed Western public.
I'll be sure to watch more of your content!
Great videos man
Appreciate it!
Love this. I discovered your channel last night, and it hits precisely the spot I needed in order to finally take the plunge into Chinese history. Something I've grown to appreciate more and more in the past decade of expanding my historical knowledge is how large a role geography plays, and while I have good knowledge of North American, European, Middle Eastern, and increasingly African geography, my lack of knowledge of Chinese geography made it so I could never place any snippet of Chinese history I'd come across into context. I'm loving how you include the geography in the history lessons, so that it's always clear why the landscape and resources facilitated the actions that played out.
Thanks, glad you've found this helpful. I feel like there's a woeful lack of good sources on Chinese geography available in English, and maybe it's because it can be a very hard nut to crack, especially since so much of the geography and history are intertwined, so understanding one requires understanding the other too.
These are so great the map view while presentation makes Chinese history so much easier to consume
Thanks, glad you've found it helpful!
I adore the effort you have put into showing the geography and its history! this is absolutely fascinating! i would love to receive a tourist visa someday and travel from Canada to China and travel the countryside and mountain valleys!
Thanks! Yes China has lots of incredible landscapes, hope you can visit sometime
Keep making videosss
Thanks, will do!
Great video, superb content. Volume needs to be higher as hard to hear your great insights :)
Thanks, appreciate it. This was one of my first videos so I didn't know how to set the volume properly at the time, although it should be better in the other videos.
after reading so many chinese webnovel i finally hear how all the names are actually pronounced
also really informative and nice to listen to
Thanks, glad you've found the video helpful! The sound quality on this is not great to say the least, although should be better in the other videos.
So glad to have discovered your channel and extraordinary work! I would love to see a collab between you and 安州牧 one day! I’ve long wished someone would present Chinese history in English with animated maps. You are the first English-language CZcamsr I found who did that and the only one who can present southern-northern dynasties with clarity in either language😂. My husband and I binged all your Chinese history videos in one evening!
Would you set up Patreon or open the channel for paid membership? Would love to contribute in some way so that the videos keep coming.
Kudos 🎉
For background: I am bilingual and read most of my Chinese history in Chinese. I received primary and secondary education in mainland China. Husband is a history major in college but does not know Chinese. Your videos hit the spot for both of us!
I'm really glad to hear that you guys enjoyed it. People like your husband and you are one of the target audiences I had hoped to reach when I started this channel - interest in history, already with some knowledge of Chinese history (although I try to write my videos in such a way that anyone with no pre-existing knowledge of Chinese history can click on any video and not get lost), and also bilingual like me with personal ties to both the west, in my case the US where I grew up, and China/East Asia. Looking forward to sharing more in the future too.
Right now I don't have any plans for Patreon or paid memberships, and just you guys' continued interest in my work already means a great deal to me. My posting schedule currently can also be quite inconsistent with work and travel, although I have an idea of what I want the channel to eventually become, and so plan to patiently build it up over time and not abandon it when things get busy or hard. Right now I'm also still laying the foundations for the channel, so hope that in the months/years to come I'll have a lot more to show for my efforts, and a lot more content for you guys to enjoy too.
Please make a remake version of this video with improved audio. The learning is great.
Thanks for the suggestion, and you're right - I've been trying to see if I can extend the shelf life of this video but it's really a lost cause at this point with the poor audio. I'll keep a remake of this video on the list of upcoming videos to make - will try to add more content to it too.
What are good books with an overview of Bronze, Iron or Medevil China? Thanks. These videos are good, I'm the one who commented on reddit. Keep going Kilikien these are very food for those of us who have no clue where anything is located.
Hey thanks for visiting and I appreciate your messages. I’ll try to answer your question as best as I can.
I grew up bilingual English and Chinese, and almost all of my knowledge on Chinese history I’ve read from sources in Chinese.
I think the first question to ask is what aspect of Ancient Chinese history you’re most interested in, is it actual events like politics or wars, or broader things like economy, political/social structure, philosophy, etc. For the latter I think any general history book on Chinese history would do, since any good historian who is knowledgeable about these trends should be able to teach it well.
With the former it’s much trickier, because there’s just so much information to sift through, and the names/geography get confusing very quickly. The approach that I think even most Chinese people who love history do is to just learn the major dynasties and a few key things that happened in each, and then be familiar with a few key historical periods, like the First Emperor/Chu-Han Contention, Three Kingdoms Period, and the Mongol conquest. From there, if anything else catches your interest you can focus in on specific periods, but in general the key is to not get bogged down with details unless you absolutely need to know them. It’s fairly easy to hear an event with a catchy name, like the “War of the Eight Princes”, and then get sucked into a rabbit hole of trying to understand which person did what, but these are stuff even educated ancient scholars used to complain are too complicated. It’s often easier to just make a mental note of saying “complicated stuff happened” and then move on.
With Chinese geography, it helps that that all the several thousand years of history happened on the same piece of land. The names of places change, but there’s only a small number of key cities, rivers, mountains, and mountain passes that keep showing up because they’re important. Once you remember certain rules, like Chang’an/Xi’an is surrounded by mountains so it’s a secure base to fight a war, you can apply it to pretty much all situations.
Hope this helps.
The volume of this video is too low. Please tune this up.
Yeah this was one of my earliest videos and I still didn’t know how to set the volume at the time. I’ll look into adjusting the volume later this week when I get the chance - I hadn’t thought it was an option without remaking the video so haven’t done so yet, but maybe it’s possible, I’ll try to figure it out
@@gatesofkilikien yep and the volume kind of falls even lower towards the end of the video too lol
Great content! Worth straining my ears a little: the audio is quite faint.
Sorry about that, it was one of my earliest videos and I didn't know how high to set the volume to. Should have been fixed in all later videos.
the volume is extremely low on this video
"Qin Dynasty Epic" is a Chinese historical drama covering the Qin conquest of the other 6 states. It's very violent, but I suspect that the violence was toned down for a modern audience. It also shows Qin Shi Huang standardizing the written characters, currency, axels widths of vehicles, weights and measurements, and building a canal. Amazing foresight! Where was this canal? "The King's Woman" is a Chinese historical fiction that takes place during this same era. Dilraba Dilmurat is a woman from the conquered state of Wei who is traveling with her martial artist grandfather, and his apprentice. Complete fiction, but quite compelling! Both series are on CZcams, in Mandarin with English subtitles. I'm glad you fixed the volume on subsequent videos!
I haven't watched either series so I don't know which canal, but I'm guessing it's the "Zhengguo Canal" that was built in the Wei River Valley early on during Ying Zheng's reign.
@@gatesofkilikien Thanks!
sound is a bit low in this video. but thanks.
You need to fix the audio. I got this all the way up and it can still be difficult to hear you. I'm hard of hearing but I should still be able to hear everything loud and clear at full volume. Please boost audio in future videos. People can always lower it for themselves, us deafies are struggling here 😂
Where is the location at 10:23? Would love to do some hiking through historic mountain passes and such.
It's the "Bai Xing", one of the 8 "Xings" through the Taihang Mountains. That staircase is part of an ancient road, and I got the footage from this video: czcams.com/video/fEI3wxJRRa4/video.html&ab_channel=CCTV%E7%BA%AA%E5%BD%95.
There's a ton of great hiking in the Taihang Mountains and across China. I grew up in the US so it's hard for me to directly compare the hiking "culture" in China vs in the US, but my general sense is that as China gets wealthier and tourism develops these kinds of historical trails through nature will either become "rediscovered" or grow much more popular.
I've been to Yinxu but not Zhaoge. Been to Chang'An i.e. Xi'An and Luoyang though.
just me or did it get really quiet volume?
Audio is far too low :(
Yes sorry about this, I was still learning when I made this video and set it too low. The other ones should be much better though.
@@gatesofkilikien Although it's quiet, it's nevertheless very interesting and clear you put a lot of thought into it. Thanks for the upload!
Wow, i loved this! I'm from Barcelona. I've been interested for years about the origins of the chinese civilization. But there is still doubts about what are the prehistoric origins. Is it true that chinese people lived in the tibetan plateau on the neolithic era? Or they came from the gobi/tarim/mongolia area? Or perhaps from the south, through myanmar? Where exactly were slanted eyes evolved? Also, i heard that the tao te ching was developed over thousands of years by a culture of meditators of central asia, passed on orally until codified much later in henan area. Is this true?
Thanks, glad you found all of this useful! There's been a ton of migrations and mixtures of different groups of people all throughout Chinese history, and many different groups of people have migrated into the area over time from almost all directions. As for the Tao Te Ching, I haven't heard about the Central Asia origin before. Chinese tradition usually just says that Lao Zi was a librarian of some sort for the Zhou court, which in those days required a lot of literacy to do, although it's hard to know exactly how much of this is true. I plan to start making videos on the Tao Te Ching soon too, looking forward to adding philosophy content to the history and geography content so far
@@gatesofkilikien Thank you! And i'm sorry, i said tao te ching but i meant to say i ching! t was Terence Mckenna, who was an avid fan of the i ching, who said this in his lectures, that the tradition of the 64 hexagrams as a way to interpret the different flows of time was developed over millenia in central asia near china, and much later codified in china proper.
@@EduNauta95 OK I see what you mean. I haven't heard about that yet either, but could see how that according to Chinese tradition King Wen of Zhou (who came from the far west) was supposed to have developed the Zhou Yi, so there may be some northwestern Chinese/Central Asian influence to the I Ching. Although realistically it's been so long ago that it'd be hard to know either way at this point. I will have to check out Terence McKenna's lectures sometime, didn't know much about him before.
@@gatesofkilikien czcams.com/video/AqP6IX4U8Wc/video.html
@@EduNauta95 You have an itching for the I Ching.
Is there a way to find out the historic climate and vegetation of ancient China?
I don't know of any one source right now, although the info and research on these things tends to be mentioned in passing when discussing other subjects. I'm thinking these could be interesting topics to discuss in the future, especially something like large land animals that used to live in China but not anymore. Is there anything specific about historical climate or vegetation that you're interested in?
@@gatesofkilikien hello! And yeah this topic is very hard to find, at least for English sources
I guess some things that really interest me are the 五谷, the connection between climate, agriculture, society,maybe even how Chinese domestication of ancient vegetation (fruits, vegetables, spices) turned it into a civilization?
It’s a big topic so feel free to find interest/choose topics in whatever! I’m happy for any video that comes out :D
@@somatia350 Got it, yeah they're all important topics, although they tend to get clumped in together with other stuff. Right now I'm in the early planning stages for a series on ancient Chinese history from the early beginnings to the fall of the Han Dynasty (to be continued with my current series on medieval Chinese history). A lot of these topics are quite important for setting the context to discuss early Chinese civilization, and I'm quite interested in weaving the narrative with these topics alongside early mythologies and archaeological discoveries. I'm pretty eager to make these videos on early Chinese civilization, although it will likely be some time before I can produce them since they'll require a lot of research to get right, and right now I want to power through and finish the period of disunity (100s - 500s AD) to bring closure to this segment of the overall project.
i cannot hear the sound that much. have to read from the captions at max volume
Yes sorry about that - this was one of my first videos and I still didn't know how high to set the volume. I haven't been able to figure out how to increase the volume on an already-uploaded CZcams video either. All my other videos should have much more appropriate volume though.
@@gatesofkilikiendont worry, nice video tho
11:23 / 11:49
Audio too soft
Yeah definitely, this was one of my first videos and I wasn’t sure how to set the volume back then, it should be better for the more recent videos
@@gatesofkilikienwould you redo them eventually?
Amazing content
Thanks, appreciate the support!