Why do I find Chinese history so boring and uninteresting? In theory, it has everything to be awesome, it has its own mythology, epic battles, its own cuisine, philosophy, art, empires, invasions, dynastic struggles,...
And yet I find it all just not appealing in any way. Whenever I try to read up on it, I just give up after a while. It seems all so repetitive, like it is all the same. All those things like the 100 schools of thought just dont get to me.
Anyone else feel the same?
No.
It seems a little static in my mental imagery
Like , 700bc and 1100ad are the same.
Wrong, I'm sure
Any tips on how to get better at appreciating Chinese history?
You've got a lot of TV shows about the Warring States and The Three Kingdoms periods, if that's a thing you enjoy.
Makes me wonder if the Chinese feel the same way about European history.
Learn some mandrin, go there and see for yourself. It's hard to find anything truly authentic anymore but the people there are always happy and proud to talk about their history pre-1949.
Don't. You don't owe anything to anyone, if you're not interested in Chinese history, your not interested in Chinese history. It's your taste, there's nothing wrong with it.
Because the names suck
Cao Cao is a pretty cool name desu
Probably because you're not Chinese
What nationality are you?
An ethnocentric viewpoint can make foreign histories seem uninteresting.
Not really no, but thanks.
Im not going to learn a Fucking language to read up on some history. I appreciate italian and greek and russian history without learning their language.
True I guess. Just feel a bit guilty because I actually enjoy modern stuff like the opium wars, boxer uprising, sino-Japanese wars,...
Belgian
Yeah it's convoluted and kind of boring and it's difficult to tell the people apart. Big ships, beautiful palaces and inventing fireworks in the 10th century is all cool but overall I guess I'll stick to western history.
No.
Probably because you feel like you can’t relate to it. I’m guessing that you’re of European descent?
I feel like I can’t relate to Chinese history maybe right up until the point that they begin interacting with the Arabs during the Tang Dynasty. I feel that that was when the Orient truly became “interconnected” with the Occident. I’ve even been able to confirm through AncestryDNA that I have both European and Asian ancestry, which makes it even easier for me to relate to that particular time period.
Basically
For us Chinese, European history is
>Guys in white robes, I guess they were wise
>Castles, knights, christian stuff, some wild savages, and dragons
>Everyone got smarter and made boats
>I don’t know what the fuck happens after that, suddenly they’re all massacring each other and wanna trade with us
>???
Modern era
For us Greeks, Chinese history goes like this
>guys in silk robes they must be wise
>They massacre each other brutally
>Oh now there's a new ruler
>Now they made gunpowder
>Now they massacre and eat each other literally because of great famine
>Another golden age
>I have no idea what's going on
>Now they're communist and are in our neighbourhood selling cheap electronics
>Why do I find Chinese history so boring and uninteresting?
cause its not relevent
u could glance over mao onwards with a couple of notes and you wouldnt miss much. Zhou was moderately interesting because of the ethnography but after that u just get waves of mong and its all han. china could of rivalled the west but for retarded shit like becoming so seclusionary and destroying treassure fleets and taht sort of mentality. their uniformity and isolation really stagnated them as a people, growth, and civilisations evolution
For us French, Chinese history goes like this
>they created gunpowder and fireworks. how cool.
>remember that opium bar in Around the World in Eighty Days? there was a war about that.
>Mao Zedong got Stalin's help and made a communist revolution. Mao then killed a bunch of people :'(
That's it.
Probably because you have to remember all those ching chong names
ching and chong went to wing wong and played ping pong with their ding dongs
>Around the World in Eighty Days?
You reminded me of that shitty fucking movie where they made the "Mongolian" ship a fucking hot air balloon or whatever
Chinese history is interesting because it's so different yet so similar to European history. Back in 300 BC, you already had people like Shang Yang trying to create a central governement with his proto-communist reforms. It took Europe until the French revolution to do that.
I read it because I'm fed up of Asian fanboys and chinaboos making it sound more glamourous than it was (muh East was better) when it was a complete clusterfuck a lot of the time.
Kek
What do they teach you guys about Greek history, fellow builder of independent civilization?
I see lots of western references to that short french king who tried to conquer Europe from the British or something
Kind of. The whole of Chinese history seems like a clusterfuck of internal struggles and stagnation.
You talking about Napoléon?
Yeah it would take some time to get used to more limited name variants. Surely it can't be that different from the West but right now European history perfectly satisfies my needs. Maybe it's because of what China has become today but at the same time I don't feel like researching information about medieval Vietnam or Indonesia. In case of Asia I prefer learning about modern times.
One major central civilisation with little variety surrounded by small insignificant periphery states that got absorbed and lost all unique features.
Why study chinese history when most of it has any effect on the current state of china. Everything that happened before european colonialism is 100% irrelevant for the following political and societal developement.
I genuinely think this is because culture hasn't raised you with good visual and ideological preconceptions of the different chinese eras.
Finding out how we got from Roman Legionnaires to red-coats is interesting to you because you have solid mental images and cultural associations for them in your mind. They're distinct and seemingly unique things.
But the difference between a chinese troop in the second century and one in the 19th century. as far as you know and instictually feel, is pretty much that one's holding a gun.
Of course in reality these two soldiers are probably as different as the Roman Legionnaire and and the British Redcoat, but you're not conditioned to think that that's the case and assign strong, distinct identities to each. This reduces history to a buzz of random numbers and the movements of faceless, featureless populations, a static with
no meaning or lasting significance.
For us Croatians, Chinese history looks like this.
>there's a country called China and it's really cool. I went there to trade. I was an advisor to Kublai Khan. Write this down, it will be important one day. I am Croatian btw
>Cool. You know when we're getting out of this cell?
That's it.
because it is culturally very different and difficult to break into when you perceive the names to be the same thing, making it very difficult to track events through history and thus fostering disinterest.
plus the theater of chinese history always falls within the boundaries the chinese interior, there is very little outside significant influence besides consistent conflict with northern steppe tribes on the chinese. to add to that, the same cycle of dynastic rise and falls happen due to the idea of the mandate of heaven-- if times are looking hard some guy with enough influence can scream to the sky that the emperor lost the mandate of heaven and suddenly the realm collapses.
It's a pain to learn because of how short and un-unique Chinese names are. I can only listen to ching ping fight against ling ming and ping ling for so long before I have to move on to something else.
I'll chime in with everyone else and say that the biggest turn off for me are the dumb sounding names.
>I don’t know any Chinese names
You have nothing to relate it to culturally like you do with European history (I assume) at least that's why I think I've never been interested in most of Chinese history.
>their uniformity
>china
>uniform
it really wasn't. it only appears so from the outside. north and south china have historically been vastly different, for example.
Its like reading about Roman civil wars that never end.
For us Chinese, French history goes like this
>people in silk dress, must be powerful
>oh that one got its head chopped off
>people in robes, must be wise
>oh they preach christianity
>they want to trade with us now, they can live in....guangzhouwan
>people conquering viets, must be good fighters
>oh they got kicked out
Asians are flat characters who don't really feel like real people with real motivations.
Highly underrated post
Check out osprey art from different eras, and look at the authentic chinese artworks from those eras. Its understandable for the reasons this other guy stated but if you expand your sources to give a more rounded view you will probably start appreciating it more. Most other answers in this thread are meme tier.
Everyone is a protagonist to their own image. Everyone else is a side character or a minor character in this play.