How the absolute fuck is Chinese history so ridiculously poorly documented?
What would be considered, in terms of European magnitude a huge travesty, has an entire 3 paragraphs detailing it on wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org
If Mao's communists supposedly destroyed large amounts of historical documents, how come Russian history is still relatively well-documented post-communism?
Pic unrelated
Other urls found in this thread:
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
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Because no one wants to read their languages
There is a lot of attention paid to Chinese history, one wikipedia article doesn't prove there isn't. Another explanation could be that people just find floods boring while things like this are more interesting.
I think you're looking for reasons to be offended. I think the problem is you lack masculinity which is a typical problem among asian males and this is what makes you feel so anxious. Try to relax, go to the gym and start lifting.
Because they are still rewriting their history to fit the Party's narrative. All works must are therefore subject to the Party's discretion.
If they teach actual history, they will be a bane to the One China policy.
Because of the destruction of texts such as this:
en.wikipedia.org
> It comprised 22,937 manuscript rolls[4] or chapters, in 11,095 volumes, occupying roughly 40 cubic meters (1400 ft3), and using 370 million Chinese characters.
Largest encyclopedia ever before Wikipedia gone forever...
>If Mao's communists supposedly destroyed large amounts of historical documents, how come Russian history is still relatively well-documented post-communism?
I didn't realize Mao's communists went to Russia and started burning Russian books.
Chinese history seems really interesting and something that I'd like to learn... if it wasn't for the fact that every single period and person of value is Ching Kong Wu Song or something like that. That's the one thing that retards me in learning about Chinese history. It's 4 thousands years of Ching Songs.
Well they did but the Russians said, "no, stop"
So they had to go home
I'm guilty of this. I got into Chinese history from reading Romance of the Three Kingdoms.
I really don't like the idea of using Wikipedia as a metric for how well documented something is, though. There are a lot of Chinese historical sources. Problem is there aren't many that are translated. Burton Watson has done a few choice translations of parts of Sima Qian's stuff, though. Richard Davis has also done a translation of most of Ouyang Xiu's History of Five States and 10 Kingdoms. For anybody interested in those eras, I would recommend those books.
Also the combination of Dr. Rafe de Crespigny and Achilles Fang translated all the relevant chapters of the Zizhi Tongjian by Sima Guang dealing with the post-Han dynasty civil war and subsequent Three Kingdoms era, culminating in the fall of Shu-Han.
One thing I think that's worth mentioning is that Chinese historiography, just like any historiography, has its own built in biases. There was a custom for example of a succeeding dynasty commissioning a history for its predecessor, and history was often looked at in terms of dynasty and political figures. Sometimes aspects of daily life would be obscured in favor of annals of overall political events or biographies of specific gentry figures. At other times a historian might write a vague annals type of history and then other historians would write a commentary on it to explain details, drawing upon corroborating local sources to do so.
A lot of it was destroyed, and most of the historians didn't write about poor peasants. Also other than the Three Kingdoms, Later Warring States, Han, Tang, Ming, and Qing dynasties, no actual Chinese gives a fuck about any other periods because it's so fucking boring.
I actually think the post-Jin period and interim between Tang and Song are really interesting personally. I also think the Song dynasty (both Northern and Southern) were really neat too.
The Chinese never had a figure like Herodotus, the concept of "history" as an accurate account of past events never took root, so little effort was made to preserve documents that didn't have some practical use, such as the ancient poetry that was used as the basis of the Imperial examination system.
>How the absolute fuck is Chinese history so ridiculously poorly documented?
You're searching in English when most of it is Chinese? How do you know it's poorly documented, do you read Chinese?
>Yellow River Floods
Literally happens all the time for the Chinks to even give a shit in History. Hence that huge dam in the Three Gorges.
>The Chinese never had a figure like Herodotus
Western historians keep spouting Sima Qian as the meme "Asian Herodotus."
> so little effort was made to preserve documents that didn't have some practical use, such as the ancient poetry that was used as the basis of the Imperial examination system.
First level of examinations. Which is basically "Congrats, you can read." And then you moved on to higher levels, involving questions of state and policy.
>Pic unrelated
SoftAnnaPL???
Chinese scholars wrote down a fuck ton of history. China has only recently opened up so there is probably massive backlogs that are untranslated.
Learn Classical Chinese.
>Herodotus
>Accurate
wew lad
Why do you keep bumping your own thread?
It probably has to do with the fact that China went through a lot of shit throughout history.
Like every 100 years, there's either a rebellion, barbarian invasion, civil war, flood, famine, earthquake, etc that wipes out like half of the Chinese population.
>Classical Chinese.
How hard is it?
Very.
Extremely hard. I am a native speaker and it took me over 3 years before I could read classical texts written in ~900AD
There is its just in chinese. I've considered learning chinese for this reason but ive heard modern scholarship in China is awful and hard to access. Which means i'd have to read primary sources which are not going to be in modern mandarin obviously.
>What would be considered, in terms of European magnitude a huge travesty,
And for China, it was Tuesday, desu.
The issue isn't just the grammar you have to deal with obscure references from historical texts,vocabulary,terminology and no punctuation.
>The flood also brought an end to the "golden age" of the Jewish settlement of China, said to span about 1300-1642. China's small Jewish population, estimated at around 5000 people, was centered at Kaifeng. Further, the flood destroyed the synagogue and most of the community's irreplaceable Torah.[3]
It's really not though. The dynasty names are all fairly distinct, and it's not like there are 100 of them. You only really have to worry about like 10 to be honest, if you just want to get the general idea. And Emperors can just be remembered by their temple names, which makes it much easier. Like they just take the name of the dynasty and then a second name, so an emperor of the Tang dynasty for example was Tang Taizong, then Tang Gaozong. It's really not -that- difficult.
>using ENGLISH Wikipedia as proof of anything
This has to be bait.
>there's no chinese version of the flood article
Huh, I guess the chinese really do not care.
Wikipedia is blocked in China. Do you not see why it's stupid to use this to support your argument?
I feel like the comparison with Sima Qian is actually accurate personally.
Neither historian is perfect, but Sima Qian was really a great historian who was deeply influential to later Chinese historians. Not only his ideas were copied but also his particular style and formatting.
That being said there were many others in Chinese history of similar caliber. Pei Songzhi was praised pretty highly for example, as was Sima Guang, though he was also criticized at times.
I think another issue with Chinese history is that historians seemed to have no concept of plagiarism. It was not uncommon for historian's to copy another historian's work verbatim or nearly verbatim and give no credit to the original author. Many histories, in fact, were more like compilations of several other historical works which were collected and collated.
>How the absolute fuck is Chinese history so ridiculously poorly documented?
Because you're an ignorant as fuck westerner? Wikipedia is created by people with access to English sources, aka. People who can't read fucking Chinese.
Go to the Chinese version of Wikipedia and you'll see there's a metric asston of info not mentioned in the English version.
Hey Dong Fan Long, you better lose that attitude. I hope you don't talk to people like that in real life, because I would send you to the hospital.
>British and French soldiers taking large portions of the manuscripts as souvenirs
>allied soldiers took hundreds of volumes
Thanks, white people!
Not blocked in Taiwan.
I read The Gay Genius: The Life and Times of Su Tungpo and I was really surprised by how well documented his life is/was. It was a good book too. The author did a good job in describing the life of this interesting and beautiful man to a Western audience.
Herodotus pretended to be accurate and impartial. He even was called philobarbaros by his fellow greeks for this same reason. He was just not good at being accurate, which is normal considering that the first rarely means the best. He paved the way for men like Thucydides, a way better historian and source (but we also should remember that he had it easier than Herodotus).
Herodotus tried to be accurate*
>haha this one wiki article written by a western person is bad, I guess china suxxxxxx
A learned scholar would know the source to begin with. Kind of like memes. Mandarins were not newfags.
Also the language itself is like this. For the longest time there was no established grammar. You just had to read a shitton and amalgamate an understanding like Ava from Ex Machina.
>I think another issue with Chinese history is that historians seemed to have no concept of plagiarism.
Because in Chinese historiography there is no concept of claiming "ownership" of what you write. You're not supposed to be a "creator" but a "transmitter."
Of course, the real issue is not non-existing "plagiarism" but the potential loss of information in failing to track down the lines of transmission through sources. Thankfully some more forward thinking historians like Pei Songzhi realized this and did specifically identify source texts.