History of China

The history of China spans several millennia across a wide geographical area. The notion of "China" can be understood under many diverse historiographical, cultural, geographic, and political lenses, and has evolved tremendously over time. Each region now understood to be part of the Chinese world has alternated between many periods of unity, fracture, prosperity, and hardship. Classical Chinese civilization first emerged in the Yellow River valley, which along with the Yangtze and Pearl valleys now constitute the geographic core of China and have for the majority of its imperial history. China maintains a rich diversity of ethnic and linguistic people groups. The traditional lens for viewing Chinese history is the dynastic cycle: imperial dynasties rise and fall, and are ascribed certain achievements. Throughout pervades the narrative that Chinese civilization can be traced as an unbroken thread many thousands of years into the past, making it one of the cradles of civilization. At various times, states representative of a dominant Chinese culture have directly controlled areas stretching as far west as the Tian Shan, the Tarim Basin, and the Himalayas, as far north as the Sayan Mountains, and as far south as the delta of the Red River. During the Neolithic period, increasingly non-parochial societies began to emerge along the Yellow and Yangtze rivers. In the north, varieties of millet constituted the primary agricultural staple of those inhabiting the Yellow River valley, while the cultivation of rice predominated along the Yangtze further to the south. It has been a major goal of contemporary Chinese archaeology to establish a relationship between the material cultures appearing in the archeological record and accounts from traditional Chinese historiography. For example, the Erlitou culture existed throughout the central plains of China during the era traditionally attributed to the Xia dynasty ( 2070–1600 ) by Chinese historiographers, as detailed in foundational works like the Records of the Grand Historian—a text written around 1700 years after the date it assigns to the fall of the Xia.