Ancient China

hy does it seem like Ancient China never gets any love in the documentary sector?

OH FUCKING BOY HAVE I SOME INFORMATION FOR YOU MY FRIEND

youtube.com/watch?v=Yb1CcvqJ0gc

youtube.com/watch?v=Gc4y-C0DejM

youtube.com/watch?v=SoSIpWbqS60

youtube.com/watch?v=DU9Hd9a4Q54

youtube.com/watch?v=qXrkF5Nd4i8

Granted, most of these aren't purely Western Documentaries.

On Viasat History(A nordic history channel) had a whole week dedicated to Chinese History

>Song Dynasty in Waste of Life Tier
>The dynasty that invented paper money, movable type printing, and military application of gunpowder, and had trade ships bringing exotic animals from Egypt to fill the Emperor's zoos, is Waste of Life Tier
Shit list that knows nothing about Chinese history

Because you're not allowed to study proper history in China. All the stuff is heavily politicized. If you mention how Tibet wasn't considered part of China for most of its history, you'd be sent to re-education camp/prison. If you show the map of China proper, people go apeshit over it and tear it away from your hand.

You can't have a proper discussion without resort to active nationalistic ideals.

Fuck off with your propaganda

>Because you're not allowed to study proper history in China. All the stuff is heavily politicized. If you mention how Tibet wasn't considered part of China for most of its history, you'd be sent to re-education camp/prison.

Really nigger?

>USA God-Tier
>British Empire only Top-Tier

Unofficial List-tier tbqh m8

at first, i was going to point out your laziness on learning another language, but then i realize i didn't learn latin to read on roman stuff.

so, it might be the absence of chinese-english fansubber that caused your frustration.
Chinese are known to be very obsessed with history.
To be bureaucrat are questioned on things happen thousand years before in the imperial exam.
Yes, we're talking about bureaucrat of the ancient ( take Song) being frequently questioned on state affairs of their ancien regime (take Qin/Han or even Autumn/Spring one thousand years earlier) respectively.

The reigning seeks knowledge from precursors to enlighten on contemporary situation. There was a idea, that nothing happened today is unique from before. So when the "Science and Democracy" came, it's a Change of TenThousand Years.

Back to the question. After my description, it's obvious that demand for and product of historical documentaries is at no low level together with multimedia culture. It's a problem of accessibility anyway.

The problem is also western's low interest in anything chinese, which causes
>no visible chinese to english fansubbing happening
>little western documentaries on chinese history that is of quality.
>your inability to read chinese

This.

Chinese history is actually incredibly well documented. Not many civilizations can compare to this: guoxue123.com/Shibu/index.htm

Problem is that pretty much the only country outside of China to have translated the canonical histories is Japan.

>Lol werent you around in the early 2000s when LE RISE OF CHINA was a thing and Nat Geo-Discov have loads of them?

Yes I was.

Are you implying that China is not rising?

Are you implying that memeshit on nat geo on modern China is relevant to ancient China?

I blew you the fuck out last time you posted this lie.

(You)

>only China is allowed to study Chinese history
>Taiwan, Korea and Japan never discuss Chinese history, especially not Ancient China

Ironically we're at a time when recent archaeological discoveries (Sanxingdui culture, pre-Imperial heterodox bamboo strips, the much-maligned Xia-Shang-Zhou chronology project) shattered the Qin-Han historical dogma, and this was due in no small part to the phenomenal efforts of Chinese academicians with little interference from the central authorities. It's similar to how they revolutionized paleontology.

Had some discussion with recent chinese immigrants @ college, so I'd assume that was the case.

Are you guys practicing Taqiyya? Isn't that just a muslim thing?

Let me guess, you're from /pol/

>thinks ancient China gets no love

Spare a thought for the Warlord Era and the Xinhai Revolution, all that exists is a shitty American PBS documentary which largely ignores the actual Warlord Era.

FUCK DOCUMENTARIES

See this from beginning to start and you will understand lots of things.

youtube.com/channel/UC5Z9T_niZ29OSrS_uaBriiQ/videos

youtube.com/watch?v=_8rkcJ5sYDI

Thanks my Veeky Forumsfriend.

Look, I love Chinese dramas as much as the next guy, but you are an absolute fool if you think you any of these portrayals are historically accurate in any way.

>watching documentaries
>not even fucking once
Kill yourself.

The only doco's which matter are nature documentaries, EVERYTHING WHICH ENDS ON TV OR THE MOVIES IS FOR FUCKING PROFIT.

>citation needed
this definitely wasn't made by one guy to enforce his own personal beliefs, seems legit to me.

>Sanxingdui culture
How does this contradict traditional narrative?

None of these peripheral cultures are directly ancestral to Chinese civilization.

>ranking of nation-states
>lists empires
I dont think whoever wrote this knows what a nation-state is.

Quit your bullshit. Unless you're talking about HKers who bullshit about the PRC then Chinese immigrants are likely to lie about how liberal their government is as opposed to authoritarian.
This so much, it gets to downright WE WUZ at some points

>historically accurate in any way.
Makes me rage that some dramas can afford to make period accurate civilian costumes yet military costumes are trash.

>tfw obsessed with Chinese history
>have Chinese gf
>want to visit China so bad
>Mandarin too fucking hard to ever get close to reading novels and primary sources

Seriously what the FUCK were they thinking when they invented this shitty language

去死你這個外鬼

And take your 漢奸 with you

That's because Mandarin, like fucking English, evolves over time. No shit you're gonna have a fucking time reading over primary sources if you're reading some jack off Ming dynasty's recordings about a siege

Cao Cao's grandfather was an actual eunuch.

His grandfather Cao Teng adopted a distant relative's son (Cao Cao's father Cao Song)

There's a shit load of stuff on DA FIRST EMPERAH and DA QINGZ DENASTY

But western documentary makers either know nothing or don't bother to cover the periods in-between.

I think the Ming dynasty and Song dynasty is heavily underrepresented in the documentary sphere.

How the fuck can a Eunuch spawn a clan?

He had brothers and cousins.

He just adopted one of their kids.

I think a lot has to do with the fact there's much more primary documentation on the Qing

>start a game in Medieval II
>play as Abbasids
>realize I know fuckall about them so I pull up Wikipedia and read about them during the end turn wait
>turns out they fought a war or two with Tang dynasty China
>turns out they eventually became fast allies with the Tangs and there's extensive records of Arabic-Chinese courtly interactions
Sounds fascinating, honestly

I'd like to respectfully interject that IMO it's China's fault the west aren't interested in learning Chinese language. Thats a failure to promote soft power on China's behalf.

Primary Western* you mean.

Nope, it's nobody's fault because there isn't a failure yet. A country starts massively 'successfully' exporting its culture in its' post industrial and service phase. China is obviously still in its' industrial phase, although it has consciously started to 'transition' in that the current 5 year reform is more neoliberal and involves cutting down a lot of manufacturing and promoting higher quality thereof. Take Japan for example, when its' economy was on a freight train in the 70s, its' cultural export was laughable at best (and some thought that it would always stay that way), and it wasn't until they offshored their manufacturing to China and SEA that there are now weeaboos in every last hole of the world.

I now understand, what you say makes a lot of sense.
Can't wait for Chinaboos in 40 years or so.

I can. Weeaboos are almost unilaterally revisionist and Chinaboos will be like em

IMO There *was* initial Chinaboory (in the Asiapac region at least) thanks to Shaw Brothers/Hong Kong action cinema. back in the golden ages of Taiwanese cinema from the 70's and 80s.

But the shitty part of it is they never learned how to market shit to younger audiences, and their directors stuck to familiar themes & conventions. Hence its gradual decline even in the region and becoming only cult-shit in the west.

WE
WAS
QINGZ n

Yeah, China was pretty great. Might be that the society was generally too stable and repetitive to be worth documenting. It sort of gets most interesting in the war phases and when Westerners arrive. But, of course, the West is only interested in things that make it how it is and will influence the future. And detailed ancient Chinese history has little to do with that (currently).
Basically:
The West and Middle East were more unstable, and have influenced the modern West more and more directly.

你叫我什么???

全球是中国的。这会儿就不知道。中国万岁!(有朝他们吸纳我。)天救我,先辈。。。

being a pleb I am just now watching 2010 Three Kingdoms

whenever they introduce a character I type in their name + Dynasty warriors and sure enough they have a Superhero anime version, lel

Because most of our documentaries are from the European tradition, which never included China in anything other than an ancillary capacity until Marco Polo.

t. Eternal 汉

>too stable and repetitive to be worth documenting

If you want conflict, you can have as much conflict as you want.
Conflict between central and regional power, the road of consolidating central authority is interesting and long before western nationalism.
Conflict between court and the emperor results in various legal/bueracratic reform that is as interesting as a topic to track imperial power and civillian power.
Throw in the eunuch, who are the closest to the king but can never harbour a family to pass down power, and king's consort's kin, who depends on which king's consort getting favour and in turns might grow soo powerful that culminating in female emperor.
You can also factor in the eternal power struggle between civillian vs military.
You also have conflict coming from both domestic and external.
Which are peaseant uprising that happens every once in a while.

External conflict of Chinese history also worth a block of text.
The chinese are the only one advanced enough, also cared enough to write down, record almost all the happenings.
Surrounding regional entities today have to rely on chinese text for their history.
>A brief line of Han.vs.Foreign
Nomadic steppe vs Han, culminating into the turks, Huns, Mongol's genesis and appearance to europe.
Sinicization of Choseon and Hinomoto and Annam, a fascinating case of lingua sinica.
Interaction with western civilization in the form of Indo-Greek kingdom

Also, there's as many "mein kampf" or "al hijrah“ stories of chink's rise to power.

I recommend Zhu Yuan Zhang's stuggle, as he truly comes from nothing other than the farming peasant

I know. The historical accuracy complaint is that Cao Cao didn't punch out snobs for calling him out on it (as awesome as that would be).

Adoption. Literally explained in the video.

Can anyone here recommend a good Chinese history book? I want to read about Feudal China and shit but I'm having a hard time finding anything comprehensive

>Cao Cao didn't punch out snobs for calling him out on it
You can't prove that never happened :^)

All Chinese history is "Rule of Cool".

“A female can completely restore her youthfulness and attain immortality if she refrains from allowing just one or two men in her life from stealing and destroying her [sexual] essence, which will only serve in aging her at a rapid rate and bring about an early death. However, if she can acquire the sexual essence of a thousand males through absorption, she will acquire the great benefits of youthfulness and immortality.”

That's one way to solve the Madonna/Whore complex.

The cable network in my area has a Chinese CCTV channel that broadcasts documentaries all day. Although my take on it is that they are probably produced by students in a hurried manner in order to put out more content on a continuous basis. It can be difficult keeping up with the narrative because it's often rushed and disjointed and also because of it being translated from Chinese with subtitles.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CCTV-9

US turned english into the global Lingua Franca, a feat that the British Empire (even at its height) failed to accomplish.

>Ancient China never gets any love in the documentary sector
You think that's bad? Try finding a decent doc on the sino-Japanese wars, the Chinese civil war or the history of Taiwan as an independent state.

Shits fucking empty.

It's not like all your calls for technical support are wired to India or any public sign in a non western country is written in a European language because of the historical presence of the British across the globe.

>it's a Diaochan episode

>nation-states

There was one neat doc about a 'rainbow bridge' and an attempt by a team of English(iirc)-Chinese architects to recreate it.

I don't think it was just the US. It was probably British world leadership being followed directly by US leadership and both being English speaking.

So you basically have like 200 years of English-speaking domination.

>ywn be a former qing general, raise a personal army and form your own dictatorship in central china

I assure my my friendos, that this 95 episode series is extremely good. In fact, unlike most chinese movies where they have great action scenes and poor dialogue, drama and acting, this series is on the contrary very good in the drama, dialogue and acting prts but very lacking in action scenes.

It is almost like a game of thrones epic(no sex and whores though) but with ancient chinese people.

Well...it would help if Taiwan were actually a state, or if Japan staked their claim at all.

>Mandarin too fucking hard to ever get close to reading novels and primary sources
>Mandarin
>Hard

Jesus christ user, it really isn't, you even have a Chinese gf! Learning Mandarin shouldn't be a problem.
Even if you learn Mandarin, you will still have to learn Classical Grammar to read old chinese texts.

Classical Chinese have mostly stayed the same. If you study Classical Chinese you can read documents from Qin to Qing.

shits fucking empty
Well, it is empty, but it got many high quality ones. Like China: A Century of Revolution, which is a 6h documentary spamming from 1911 to 1979

Where the fuck is the Song dynasty

This is bonkers.
This is dumb.
This is retarded.

The real reason is obvious. History documentaries are meant to appeal to a wide western demographic so that they can make money. Westerners aren't that interested in Chinese history/producers think Westerners aren't interested in Chinese history.

The real period of history that is queerly lacking from popular culture/documents is the 7 years' war.

>massively influential
>huge casualties
>happened in the west
>cool battles and formations and shiet