Talk:History of China

In time, I want to move both these topics into their own pages. Until then I got as much information as I could here so that it could easily be copied and pasted to a new page.

I think on this page (History of China) we should just keep the general important events and their significance to the history of china. For example, the life of Confucius is not necessarily interesting in the history of China, but what's relevant is that subsequent kings and emperors took after his teachings.

Likewise for Buddhism, the origins and teachings of Buddhism should not be on this page. But the importance of Buddhism in the late Han dynasty as well as its importance since then in Chinese culture is relevant to the History of China.

If anyone wants to take care of this, please go right ahead. I won't get around to it until I finish the page.

I'm able to write down the content of around a lecture a day into this page. If you'd like to help on this page, please feel free to work on anything but the latest section, as the lectures sometimes carry over into the next.

Some work that is needed (if you don't know where to start):

- clarify an explicit historical materialist analysis, which the lectures don't really go into explicitly. For this you might need to rewrite portions.

- proofreading, especially on style.

- switching present tens to the the past tense (a big one)

- finding sources other than the lectures (not super important as Dr. Hammond is an authoritative source on the topic)

- expanding on some events that might not have been mentioned but are still important.

- we've been talking about making a Chinese philosophy page and moving most of the hundred schools of thought section into it, keeping only the important stuff (the figures and their main beliefs, especially those that become important in the future) here.

From the article, "The earliest people to call themselves Chinese, which means "people of the black hair", lived in the North China plain". Except Chinese is an English term coming from the Qin (Chin) dynasty. Chinese today use huaren or zhongguoren, neither of which originated at the time being discussed nor do they mean anything about black hair.

Perhaps it means that there was once a term that was about people with black hair - and this group later developed into a Chinese ethnic group such as the Han.

Thanks for the precision, I wasn't sure either as the lecture didn't really develop on that and spent like one sentence on them. I think it would be more accurate to say that this group would indeed later become the Chinese.