I know this sounds like a /pol/-esque question of why Asians are bad at warfare, but I'm genuinely curious. The famous conflicts of the Dark Age to Renaissance era Orient are factional wars within their own territory to establish control. You see this with the Three Kingdoms and Warring States.
Meanwhile in Europe, established kingdoms routinely fought each other for various reasons and also engaged in the middle east against Islamic forces.
The reason I'm asking this is because I've been looking into historical weaponry and Asian armaments are far more static than their European counterparts -- and seem much less practical.
Probably because the far East is just that: far. To get from China to another major advanced civilization you'd have to either cross massive inhospitable mountains, traverse arid deserts and massive, nomad infested steppes, or sail across large stretches of sea e.g. The Indian Ocean.
Meanwhile, for Europeans to contact middle eastern civilizations all they had to do was sail across the Mediterranean. And of course the Middle East was a gateway to India and to a lesser extent Africa.
Basically it's just geography. If the mountains west of China or the deserts to the north didn't exist, or if the Pacific Ocean was just a narrow sea with Iberia and Africa on the other side, I'm sure at least one dynasty might have tried conquering a land further away. China did conquer its neighbors on more than one occasion, and the Mongols obviously engaged in conquest. The Japanese are a modern example of eastern conquerors though in the age of aircraft carriers and jet engines geographic limits became less important, of course.
Jaxson Brooks
Its because Japan Korea and China saw themselfs as some meme tier civilization and everyone else is a filthy barbarian who doesn't deserve their time
Also Vietnam Conquered the Champa
Tyler Collins
Another factor is the fact that Chinese culture sort of discouraged the idea of independent nations. If I remember correctly, the very idea of "China" for most of history has been a vast empire ruled by an emperor ordained by heaven. This mandate of heaven is their equivalent of the divine right of kings, from which they derived the leader's right to rule. Most wars in China therefore were not fought to establish independent kingdoms, but to stake one's claim to the Mandate of Heaven - and thus make all of China accept your rule. Even outside invaders worked within this system and were eventually "Sinicized" - that is, made Chinese. The Mongols and the Yuan/Qing dynasties are the primary examples of this.
Meanwhile in the West, the idea of Rome was a bit similar. There was a great and powerful empire, and the one with the right to rule it was chosen by God. It's no coincidence that so many rulers styled themselves with variations of Caesar.. But for whatever reason, the Imperial system didn't hold up over time in the West. Perhaps the peoples were too diverse to be absorbed into a uniform empire too easily. Perhaps the great migrations aggravated that problem. I'm no expert so I don't know.
Gabriel Bell
They had fuckhuge mountains blocking off India. Central Asia was full of steppe nomads with nothing worth conquering. Nothing to conquer in the Gobi desert and Siberia either to the north.
I don't understand how you can look at the far east and say "oh well it was just one civilization (china) fighting itself over and over" but you look at europe and don't say "well it was one civilization (rome) fighting itself over and over".
China/Korean/Japan/Indochina was just as large and diverse and fragmented as europe. Imperial china was the HRE of its day, just more centralized. Its people had different ethnic backgrounds and its bureaucrats were basically counts and dukes whose personal loyalty to the emperor varied.
And southeast asian pirates and mongols were their "muslims"
Samuel Russell
They believed in isolationism and thought that entering other land would violate their own beliefs.
Nicholas Perez
>Why did the Far East never conquer anything besides itself? Do Huns and Mongols not count as Far Easterners?
Jaxson Hernandez
China literally thought they were in the center of the world and everyone else was irrelevant, not even worth conquering.
Charles Collins
I'm going to guess it had to do with rome hype being pretty specific to rome which most of the empire, really wasn't.
Josiah Edwards
Are you seriously implying that all of Eastern Asia was one big country?
Might as well say all of europe just a bunch of people cucked by rome fighting each other to see who gets to succeed the romans.
Andrew Lee
One thing about the Far East is that it is huge. China by itself has a larger population than Europe. Chinese Emperors usually had Hadrian-large Empires.
Ian Sullivan
It's rare that anyone conquered outside of their immediate regions of interest- trade networks that coalesced into these intercommunicating zones- for reasons not much different than why we (Westerners) put an emphasis on the Mediterranean world, just as they developed their own distinct narratives of world history.
Knyght Errant did a video comparing armor recently, worth a watch:
Symmetry of warfare. The 'western Europe' area had many competing states of rough technological parity, while in east Asia, China dominated completely until they started attacking themselves then become peaceful for abother hundred years
Austin Howard
I am curious why China did not discover America first. They had a chain of islands to follow. The did not have to sail thousands of miles of open ocean.
Noah Turner
Even in more modern terms, China shares borders with 16 sovereign states and has the largest land border of any country; not something that facilitates aggressive border policy.
Grayson Powell
Well iirc Zheng He was the last chineses explorer in the 14th century. After him, the emperor basically called for an isolationism policy
James Sullivan
>Another factor is the fact that Chinese culture sort of discouraged the idea of independent nations.
No it didn't. Vietnamese independence was permitted and indirectly created by the Chinese. Chinese people never tried to claim Cambodia, Myanmar, Thailand, etc. They left those nations alone.
Charles Diaz
Because it's pretty fucking cold.
Extremely fucking cold in fact. They couldn't surpass the cold until the invention of cotton clothing and when cotton clothing was invented, Zheng He did sail around the world.
I think he meant independent nations within China, not outside of it.
Lucas Gray
>Asian armaments are far more static than their European counterparts -- and seem much less practical. wew lad
Jack Bell
They did. What, you think China started out that big?
Your utter ignorance of the Warring States and the Three States is showing. How do you think the border states gained resources to combat the stronger and more populated heartland states? Conquest and expansion outward against a frontier.
Angel Turner
>Asian armaments are far more static than their European counterparts -- and seem much less practical. Tell me more.
Liam Gonzalez
>Asian armaments are far more static than their European counterparts -- and seem much less practical.
The repeating crossbow is a pretty mediocre weapon that persisted for centuries because there was no impetus to create anything better. In order for the reloading function to operate, the bow needs to have a very low draw weight. Classical Greek and Roman crossbows might have equaled them in power, but by the late middle ages, Europeans developed steel prod crossbows, which were orders of magnitude more powerful than the repeating crossbows that were still in use in China, having not evolved at all for over a thousand years.
It's actually a good example of Chinese weapon design, as it is a potentially powerful weapon, that was never improved much beyond the original design, being superior to European equivalents at its invention, but not changing, being laughably inferior to the then extensively developed European equivalent in use 1500 years later, that was the product of continuous, incremental improvement.
Lincoln Ward
>repeating crossbows never changed from since their invention during the Warring States How can you seriously believe this?
And I suppose those Song Dynasty crossbow design contests never actually happened or something?
Landon Flores
Not OP but imho (and I'm not alone) central asian fits them better.
Colton Lewis
Actually in some periods China was extremely aggressive in their north and western fronts. Most of what is China now can only hardly be called far eastern, and the chinese conquered well beyond that point. They reached Uzbekistan.
Your examples of factional wars are more famous than conquests because China didn't really have an equal for most of it's history. Notice how a disproportionate roman conflicts are also internal conflicts, and romans did have a couple of equal or near-equal enemies.
Grayson Fisher
>I'm existing everyone to be deeply familiar with Chinese and not being citations.
Jayden Campbell
this. i mean, fuck. largest empire in history.
Juan Rodriguez
Don't forget about the Gökturks.
Oliver Cooper
China once conquered Ceylon, apparently out of sheer boredom.
Zachary Richardson
Main thing is, China is big. Bigger than Europe, with historically always more population.
Why would any Emperor seek to rule more if all their neighboring lands were of less value and harder to keep? North nothing but cold, West nothing but desert and mountains, South nothing but thick jungles and hard to rule people.
It is same as asking why didn't Rome seek to expand deeper to Africa or further in to North Europe? Not worth the effort.
From the perspective of Chinese historically, it is perfectly fair to say they were living at the center of the world, and ruling it on top of that.
Ryan Diaz
...
Cooper Rodriguez
Japan tried once and got btfo. Korea was too weak. China had enough trouble with its borders.
Christian Perez
Can't speak for the rest of Asia, but China was always arrogant about its position in the world. Chinese never referred to China as "China" or "Central Kingdom" but as tianxia, something that would be translated as "all under heaven." These people really believed that China wasn't just the center of the world, but the world itself.
But when you consider their neighbors outside of Japan, it sort of makes sense. Although I always wonder why China never cared that much about India. Maybe it was the impenetrable jungle of Southeast Asia that discouraged more communication?
Angel Miller
Look up Cino-Roman relations.
Both knew about each other, both sent envoys for proposal to trade. Both both encountered other empires that did not want this trade/meeting of the minds to happen.
Juan Bailey
>Might as well say all of europe just a bunch of people cucked by rome fighting each other to see who gets to succeed the romans.
well that's not entirely inaccurate.
Anthony Mitchell
>Zheng He did sail around the world.
No he didn't. His fleet made it to the African East Coast.
Jace Walker
The brits are not east asian but south asian chap.
Connor Garcia
Wut?
Mongol any?
Adam Young
They cared a lot. But the interest was mainly spiritual/religious thanks to Buddhism.
Also trade of course but that was by sea so you have all SEA in between.
Jack Peterson
>They had fuckhuge mountains blocking off India
Unrelated but if i were a "human" hundreds of thousands of years ago I don't think I'd leave Africa. People crossed massive mountains, sailed great seas, and icey wastes for food/home.
I mean, even the ancestors of the Australian aborigine deserves some credit for making it to Australia. You wouldn't catch me out in the sea looking for something that might not even be there, relying on some damn stars to navigate.
Landon Rodriguez
Why do people who obviously know nothing about Chinese history keep trying to comment on Chinese history?
天下 was only one of many designations to refer to the Empire, other popular ones including 海內, 九州, and yes even 中國, where one must realize that 中 comes from 中外 "inner vs outer" perspective and not this idiotic "arrogance" meme about being the center of the world. From a very early time the rulers of 天下 were aware that 天下 did not include the entire world, and some of these more ambitious rulers from 秦始皇 to 漢孝武 sought to use this as justification for aggressive military expansion.
Hudson Martin
Central asian t.b.h.
Jackson Myers
Yeah but they had to rely solely on that narrow corridor to get there, and if that became contested/controlled by someone else then they immediately lost all of that territory. >cross inhospitable mountains/deserts/jungle/forest >lose half your troops >suppress and vassalize natives >cross inhospitable mountains/deserts/jungle/forest to get home >lose half of your remaining troops >conquered region revolts >have to go through the whole thing over again Mounting such major expeditions just isn't worth it in the long run.
Joseph Morris
What's with Cinophiles/Chinamen writing names with logograms like the rest of the world can actually read them?
Cooper Parker
Because it's the best way to deflect idiotic and inaccurate "translations" like "Middle Kingdom" which are loaded with cultural assumptions and spawns idiotic memes like "China thinks they're the center of the universe."
Plus it sidesteps the endless pinyin vs Wade-Giles arguments.
Hudson Sanchez
>Plus it sidesteps the endless pinyin vs Wade-Giles arguments. There are arguments? How is pinyin not better in every way?
Kevin Nguyen
English speakers never stop bitching about how C, Q, and X are used in pinyin.
Parker Sanchez
Never seen someone on Veeky Forums complain about the way Cao Cao is written.
Jason Nelson
Because they conquered it and kept it, unlike Europe. "China" encompass more conquered territory that initial China.
Chase Long
Then go to /v/ and watch how many people post "COW COW"
Juan Bennett
Because Renaissance era Maths, correct use of the compass, mariners astroblade use weren't properly implemented for sailing until the "Age of Discovery".
Jacob Green
Note also that Qin also expanded into and conquered the Sichuan basin, exterminating or assimilating the local cultures there, which from this map is clearly shown as not being included in the Shang/Zhou cultural order.
There is also debate among scholars as to whether Chu and Wu-Yue should be considered part of the original Zhou culture or a frontier culture that was conquered and assimilated.
Daniel Russell
Isn't that technically supportive of the spelling? Seems like the memepool trying to correct itself.
Landon Torres
>their own isolationism (in several cultures) >their own contentment with having conquered enough lands and people (in several nations) or difficulty keeping them >their own fixation on conquering each other, because you want what's just out of reach and what you lost a few decades ago >the Mongols >the Kazakhs (Cossacks) >the Persians >dense jungle (in southeast Asia) >the Steppes (not super friendly in geography terms or people terms) >the Tibetan Plateau (same) >the driest desert on the planet (Gobi) >the highest mountains on the planet (Himalayas) >the biggest patch of fuck-all on the planet (Siberia) >the second-biggest patch of fuck-all on the planet (Afghanistan, with its additional desert and moderate mountains of its own) >the largest ocean on the planet (Pacific) Their countrymen, their neighboring nations and tribes, and the very planet it self were against this hodgepodge we called East Asian civilization breaching its borders. Even then, it did happen, twice-- once when the Mongols co-opted it and eventually got assimilated by it, and again when Japan got a hard on for conquest and enough technology and resources to do something about it.
Elijah Hill
What people don't seem to understand is that ancient China was hardly "Chinese".
Shang,pre dynastic Zhou,Fen River polities were originally independent of each other.
That's not even getting into neighboring polities such as pre Zhou Yan,Jing Chu,Yan,Qiang/Rong,Gui/Di,Yi/Ren/Dongyi.
Jing Chu was already mentioned in Shang oracle bones as a indigenous polity in modern day southwestern Henan/Hubei.
Gou/Gong Wu(Kuŋo) Yu/Gan Yue(Kan/Giwo giwat) were non Sinitic. Though they had interactions with the Huai Yi polities.
Logan Martinez
>To get from China to another major advanced civilization you'd have to either cross massive inhospitable mountains, traverse arid deserts and massive, nomad infested steppes, or sail across large stretches of sea
Meanwhile hannibal barca crossed the alps with elephants and arabs who were never used to the blistering winter and still nearly conquered the greatest civilization in history.
Get a better excuse next time, chink.
Matthew Bailey
Are you stupid? Look at the world map and you'll see that what you're asking the Chinese to do is an order of magnitude greater than what Hannibal had to do, in terms of distance and scale. Not to mention the number of casualties that Hannibal's army suffered with his little stunt- how would the Chinese have maintained a fighting force at the end of the expedition? They didn't have the self-sufficiency of a largely cavalary force that the Mongols had either.
Life is a simple cost-benefit analysis, user. If life in East Asia was already agreeable, there's no need to move the military machine across a continent just to prove a point to a random guy on a cambodian crouqette board in 2016.
Nicholas Carter
>you're asking the Chinese to do is an order of magnitude greater than what Hannibal had to do What's scary though is that during the wars against the Xiongnu the Chinese actually DID.
Anthony Foster
You are forgetting that the Xiognu were nomads. Losing an army was the same as losing a quarter of their population during certain periods probably. Then, remember the wars went on for hundreds of years, and the Chinese only ever needed a 50% victory rate in any single extended conflict to literally push the Xiognu to near-extinction. Literally all the Chinese needed to do was out-breed their enemy. It's like the United States winning the Revolutionary War by losing 10% of its population per year vs 1000 British casualties per year, and then doing this for 300 years, and even then just barely winning.
Landon Torres
>Why did the Orient Conquer itself and not others because buddhism is about conquering the self?
Ryder Lopez
>Asian armaments are far more static than their European counterparts -- and seem much less practical. Wow, like how every East-Asian siege weapon was wheeled as opposed to fixed? Chinese were even crazy enough to do that to Persian Counterweight trebuchets under the Mongols. Or the fact that every East Asian cavalryman is a fucking archer? Or how about the Chinks being the first civilization to do supply depots and dedicated supply corps instead of meme baggage trains & foraging? Or going back to China, most of their campaigns were defensive ones versus the steppes, involving long patrols out in the border. Lets add to the fact that the Chinks hired themselves some Steppe Nomads to help do this? How about the Samurai whose initial pre-gunpowder Idea of Fortifications was not to keep the enemy out permanently but to level the battlefield in favor of defenders? Opting for stockades and earthworks despite knowledge of Masonry, so after defending, they can easily go out and pursue them? Not to mention it plays a big role in their HONORABOR COMBAT way of thinking.
Sure is static OP.
Cooper Ramirez
>supply depots and dedicated supply corps instead of meme baggage trains & foraging Supply depots are the real meme >lets amass all of our necessities for living in one area so that the enemy can raid and destroy it and we can go back to the "meme" methods Don't even know why people would praise supply depots in pre-modern warfare, it's not a particularly great idea.
William Taylor
>what are the Mongols
Go back to /pol/ and stay go
Noah Turner
>Heading to the other guy's supply depot. >Easy. Fucking kek.
>Don't even know why people would praise supply depots in pre-modern warfare, it's not a particularly great idea. t. Napoleon "My army still forages for supplies" Bonaparte.
Easton Fisher
>Don't even know why people would praise supply depots in pre-modern warfare, it's not a particularly great idea. So your soldiers can eat and fight instead of just dying.
Ryder Long
...
Connor Rivera
That's just people making fun of how it was pronounced in the games.
Dominic Cox
It also destroys any divulgative potential your post could have. As far as I'm concerned you didn't rebuke whatever the other user was saying, you just posted cool drawings.
Jacob Brown
>im a moron and im proud of it
Nolan Kelly
>everyone should learn to read chinese or they're morons
Lincoln Phillips
>everyone who wants to have an opinion on East Asian history should learn to read chinese Sounds pretty basic to me.
Joseph Morris
Also if you want to get technical you can count the Ottomans as Asiatic since the middle east is often lumped with Asia rather then Europe.
Jace Diaz
Aren't there some old Chinese maps that include America before Columbus travelled there?
Christian Baker
Those might be the same maps that show Tibet has always been a part of China and has never once been independent. Anything from the PRC needs to be taken with a grain of salt.
Dominic Ortiz
>believing all that anti-PRC propaganda Yes, because apparently one map covers all possible time periods.
The only maps that could even be considered controversial on the topic are Ming dynasty maps, as Ming Emperors sent seals and badges of office to claim overlordship over the territory but lacked the resources to actually maintain permanent garrisons and appointed officials like the Yuan and Qing.
Kayden White
Not a specialist on the subject.. but my guess would be that martial arts on boats is not really a thing and....mountains... shit ton's of mountains
Asher Perez
>often lumped with Asia rather then Europe.
It's literally Asia, even "more" than the far east since the term was developed to describe the middle east and later evolved to be "the middle east and beyond". Only the fact that yellow and mongoloid are seen as offensive terms allowed "asian" to mean far eastener.
The thread was about the Far East, not Asia, and the Ottomans are not far eastern.
Andrew Ramirez
You mean >everyone who wants to lurk this cambodian opera forum should learn to read chinese
Ryder Clark
>the kazakhs (cossacks) Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahawhy would anyone think theyre related
Evan Carter
Why did the West never conquer anything besides itself?
Colton Perez
>Africa >India >South East Asia >Oceania >Americas
Wyatt Cox
>everybody that wants to have an opinion on Roman history should learn Latin
Ayden Sullivan
...yes? Is this a contest to state the obvious?
Isaac Brown
if mongolia is central asia, then china is central asian too since it is even more to the west
Brandon Russell
Could you link me a Chinese map that shows Tibet has ALWAYS been part of China or are you just baiting?
Noah Reyes
>tibet
Brody Peterson
Not it's hearthland. Also Portugal is more west than France, but nobody would call it more western when talking about geocultural areas.
Hudson Gonzalez
For those without autism
Juan Diaz
Carthaginians are not Arabs, you retard.
Sebastian Ward
#rude
Joseph Lewis
It's against the law in china to state that Tibet was ever independent.
Jacob Bell
Fuck off with your propaganda
Kevin Rogers
Nope
far is relative. china was close to following civs:
ancient SEA viet, cambos, thais
ancient iranics/tocharians: persians, bactrians, sogdians, scytho-kushans
harappa, india, japan, malaysia
western/central asia had the most advanced civilizations until turko-mongol invasians. and china did indeed have close contact with CA and SEA
Benjamin Price
they are far eastern, they emerged from there and invaded towrds the west
Tyler Lewis
1.The Xinjiang production and Construction Corps(All Han-Chinese) 119.5 2.Zhejiang Province 115.8 3.Shanghai 115.3 4.Beijing 114.1 5.Jiangsu Province 109.0 6.Shanxi Province 108.0 7.Shangdong Province 107.9 8.Liaoning Province 107.5 9.Fujian Province 107.1 10.Jilin Province 107.0
