It seems like everything about Chinese history can be summed up as "DUDE EMPIRE LMAO" and "DUDE ANCIENT SAGE KINGS LMAO"
Practically all Chinese achievement - literary, technological, philosophical, military etc. for thousands of years had as its underlying purpose creating, empowering and submitting to an ever more powerful central bureaucracy and state control, and an autistic obsession with returning to how things were in the mythical past.
The best thing they did: gunpowder
The worst thing they did: """traditional""" chinese medicine
what the fuck does autistic even mean in this context
what a pointless question, please never make a thread again
Paper's better than gunpowder
>Practically all Chinese achievement - literary, technological, philosophical, military etc. for thousands of years had as its underlying purpose creating, empowering and submitting to an ever more powerful central bureaucracy and state control
>Literary.
2 of China's 4 great novels are about rebellion and banditry and 1 is basically Buddhist-Chinese Reverse Lord of the Rings.
. Though the 3 Kingdoms can be read in a Confucian manner.
Imperial China's most famous poet just wrote about being blind fucking drunk all the time and being sad.
I'm curious now, which one is reverse lord of the rings and how does it go in reverse?
Journey to the West is basically a fantasy retelling of Tang Period Monk, Xuanzhang's, perilous journey to India to acquire OG copies of Buddhist Texts since the Chinese copies were outdated and badly translated at the time.
Wu Chengen basically took that story, but the dangers that Xuanzang faced were supernatural attempts to block his path to India, in which Xuanzang is saved by being accompanied by a monkey demigod punished with exile to earth for literally massacring heaven at one time, a pig demigod punished the same way for flirting with the moon goddess, a dragon in horse form, and a warrior-monk.
>Paper's better than gunpowder
no.
we had things to write on before we had paper. Therefore, paper was just an innovative improvement in the medium of writing, rather than something inventive.
Gunpowder was the first method we had to really blow shit the fuck up.
Paper is part of gunpowder.
> paper
> gunpowder
Pleb tier choices.
...
what?
>we had things to write on before we had paper
Which were not cheap and were fuckhard to manufacture.
Paper was cheap as fuck which enabled bureaucracy to be cheap, books to be cheap, etc.
had to google it.
good job on that one Chinks.
>a reduction in the cost of bureaucracy is comparable to being able to blow up the greatest fortresses man could ever build and completely reshaping mining and tunneling and essentially transforming humans from beings limited to the power of animals they could tame to gods capable of unlimited force.
still no.
Sounds pretty dope, some of it rings a bell, and I understand the analogy now.
Yes. You wouldn't be able to do half the hyperbolic shit you said if people counldn't communicate more effiecently.
>implying that’s a bad thing.
How different do you think Europe would have been if the western and eastern Romans reunited. Or if the Germanic raiders were slowly converted to Roman ideals.
It would probably have stagnated like China did, with no need for the state to venture across the seas to find resources as they already control the entire land empire.
That’s definitely one way to look it and you might not be wrong. I always believed they would of united Europe or gone after the Persians.
Without gunpowder, everyone would be doomed to be cucked by steppeniggers forever.
You need paper to manage the logistics of all that.
>an autistic obsession with returning to how things were in the mythical past.
I’m pretty sure this was true of almost all of Europe until the Renaissance.
>Muh Roman Empire
>You need paper to manage the logistics of all that.
>Yes. You wouldn't be able to do half the hyperbolic shit you said if people counldn't communicate more effiecently.
triggered paper-boys
Everyone has traditional medicine
You don’t even want to see traditional Yemeni medicine.
Paper > Printing > Gunpowder > Compass
Totally agree.
Nice one OP
But only China has actual degrees and medical schools to study traditional "medicine".