But the Chinese history is new and interesting to me. What makes the Long Geng system so good? It seems like they're only actually planting half the field, so I don't understand why that's so much better than alternating fields. I don't know much about farming, but I would have thought they all plant the crops spread out enough to get airflow and avoid trampling.
And, wasn't the Chinese farming dependent on the canals and levees? It's not like the Grand Canal was some vanity project that they built for fun. What was rice farming like in the early days before they had massive canals and levees?
I read somewhere that, while Rice is amazing on a per-land-area basis, it's not so good on a per-person basis, because it requires massive manpower to work a rice paddy. So while China and other rice-farming countries could support massive populations, but most of those people were still stuck toiling in the rice paddies all day every day. But maybe that's just my western bias.
Honestly, as far as I can tell, every since China's had written history, canals and levees have been a thing in China. Hydrological engineers are given way, way more attention in history than every other field of engineering combined. And I don't know enough about prehistory to know what people did back then.
The ancient Egyptians did a bunch of irrigation work, and so did the Mesopotamian civilizations, and the Harappans in the Indus river valley. It may just be an obvious thing to work on when a lot of agriculture depends on the flood cycle of a very big river. I don't know much about the Harappans, but rivers and water feature heavily in a lot of the Egyptian and Mesopotamian myths. Although none of those regions seem to have the complicated geography of China, which may be why China needed more impressive works.
The thing that stands out in your descriptions of Chinese history is in recording the names of specific people and what they did. Most of the Egyptian and Mesopotamian accounts that I'm familiar with are just myths, involving gods or god-kings or ambiguous figures like Enki. I haven't heard that any of those other civilizations recorded who did what, and how, in a way that passed the knowledge on to future generations. (But then, a lot of this was much earlier; I think most of these civilizations had their high point before the Zhou dynasty.) But like I said, one of the things that struck me from your history posts was the emphasis on written records and written stories and written manuals, and on educating people enough to use them. That the brilliant people of an era would have access to the writing of the brilliant people of past eras. And that even when someone who isn't a historian is writing a short version of Chinese history thousands of years in the future, these are the sorts of things that are important enough to mention. That feels huge to me.
From wikipedia, after Enki heard that the people of Dilmun lacked water, and did something about it:
Her City Drinks the Water of Abundance,
Dilmun Drinks the Water of Abundance,
Her wells of bitter water, behold they are become wells of good water,
Her fields and farms produced crops and grain,
Her city, behold it has become the house of the banks and quays of the land.
To me, this sounds a lot like a grandparent being happy that their kid fixed their computer - they don't know the details of what was done, but they really like the result.
From what I understand, much of the hydrological expertise in Mesopotamia was lost when the Mongols killed a lot of people, and afterwards the remaining people made some very bad irrigation decisions that sped up the desertification. So maybe that's another big advantage China had, in that its conquerors pretty much all wanted to live there and keep the civilization going? After Alexander the Great, Egypt was mostly ruled by foreigners who wanted to extract food and taxes, Mesopotamia kept being a border region passed between larger empires on the sides, and no one really knows what happened to the Harappans, but it might have something to do with the Indo-Aryan invasion.
One of the bits that's missing here is the huge difference in geographical conditions between Europe and China — there's really no comparison to the North China Plain, one of the largest contiguous agricultural regions in the world. In contrast, Europe in medieval times was covered in mountains and thick, impenetrable forests. Imagine if all of China was like the mountains in Sichuan. You'd be hard-pressed to get anything done. And that lack of access kept people insular, suppressing technological development and trade.
The Roman Empire being able to dominate all of Europe was a one-off historical fluke, since they emerged at just the right time to be able to monopolize the Mediterranean, and control of the Mediterranean is the only way to maintain a large European state before modern transportation technology. After the Empire fell no state was ever able to dominate the Mediterranean ever again.
If the Mongols didn’t bring agriculture to Europe because they were nomadic and thus had no need for it, then it couldn’t possibly be the reason that they didn’t conquer Europe was simply because “the crop yields were too low.”
Starting from 1227 Mongols conquered most of Russia and raided Central Europe. The East European splinter of the Mongol Khanate was the Golden Horde which lasted longer than the Yuan dynasty. It broke down in several Tatar states, the most important one was Crimea which survived under Turkish protection almost until 1800. In these 500 years mongols/tatars raided Eastern Europe and killed and enslaved millions of people.
Before the mongols Europe was attacked by other asian invaders from the Mongolian steppe, most notably the Huns who are very likely descended from the Xiongnu and played a key role in the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Avars, khazars, cumans and the ottomans were all descended from people from Inner Asia and they attacked Europe.
Even on the Chinese side, the history is pretty bad, because China still had famines ever 30-40 years thereabouts. It just wasn't nation-wide, but localised to a state or a couple of states. But a couple of Chinese states is like the size of Spain anyways. Pre-industrial and pre-GMO farming is just always dependent on luck.
Definitely some "Bad History" here... I feel like it's taking a single statistic about crop yield and using that to extrapolate all of history. That's missing rather a lot, like the fact that 1:2 was only for Northern Europe during the worst part of the dark ages (https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/9044/what-was-the-size-of-surface-of-a-cereal-crop-needed-per-man-per-year-during-the). Other places and times were better.
But the Chinese history is new and interesting to me. What makes the Long Geng system so good? It seems like they're only actually planting half the field, so I don't understand why that's so much better than alternating fields. I don't know much about farming, but I would have thought they all plant the crops spread out enough to get airflow and avoid trampling.
And, wasn't the Chinese farming dependent on the canals and levees? It's not like the Grand Canal was some vanity project that they built for fun. What was rice farming like in the early days before they had massive canals and levees?
I read somewhere that, while Rice is amazing on a per-land-area basis, it's not so good on a per-person basis, because it requires massive manpower to work a rice paddy. So while China and other rice-farming countries could support massive populations, but most of those people were still stuck toiling in the rice paddies all day every day. But maybe that's just my western bias.
Honestly, as far as I can tell, every since China's had written history, canals and levees have been a thing in China. Hydrological engineers are given way, way more attention in history than every other field of engineering combined. And I don't know enough about prehistory to know what people did back then.
The ancient Egyptians did a bunch of irrigation work, and so did the Mesopotamian civilizations, and the Harappans in the Indus river valley. It may just be an obvious thing to work on when a lot of agriculture depends on the flood cycle of a very big river. I don't know much about the Harappans, but rivers and water feature heavily in a lot of the Egyptian and Mesopotamian myths. Although none of those regions seem to have the complicated geography of China, which may be why China needed more impressive works.
The thing that stands out in your descriptions of Chinese history is in recording the names of specific people and what they did. Most of the Egyptian and Mesopotamian accounts that I'm familiar with are just myths, involving gods or god-kings or ambiguous figures like Enki. I haven't heard that any of those other civilizations recorded who did what, and how, in a way that passed the knowledge on to future generations. (But then, a lot of this was much earlier; I think most of these civilizations had their high point before the Zhou dynasty.) But like I said, one of the things that struck me from your history posts was the emphasis on written records and written stories and written manuals, and on educating people enough to use them. That the brilliant people of an era would have access to the writing of the brilliant people of past eras. And that even when someone who isn't a historian is writing a short version of Chinese history thousands of years in the future, these are the sorts of things that are important enough to mention. That feels huge to me.
From wikipedia, after Enki heard that the people of Dilmun lacked water, and did something about it:
Her City Drinks the Water of Abundance,
Dilmun Drinks the Water of Abundance,
Her wells of bitter water, behold they are become wells of good water,
Her fields and farms produced crops and grain,
Her city, behold it has become the house of the banks and quays of the land.
To me, this sounds a lot like a grandparent being happy that their kid fixed their computer - they don't know the details of what was done, but they really like the result.
From what I understand, much of the hydrological expertise in Mesopotamia was lost when the Mongols killed a lot of people, and afterwards the remaining people made some very bad irrigation decisions that sped up the desertification. So maybe that's another big advantage China had, in that its conquerors pretty much all wanted to live there and keep the civilization going? After Alexander the Great, Egypt was mostly ruled by foreigners who wanted to extract food and taxes, Mesopotamia kept being a border region passed between larger empires on the sides, and no one really knows what happened to the Harappans, but it might have something to do with the Indo-Aryan invasion.
One of the bits that's missing here is the huge difference in geographical conditions between Europe and China — there's really no comparison to the North China Plain, one of the largest contiguous agricultural regions in the world. In contrast, Europe in medieval times was covered in mountains and thick, impenetrable forests. Imagine if all of China was like the mountains in Sichuan. You'd be hard-pressed to get anything done. And that lack of access kept people insular, suppressing technological development and trade.
The Roman Empire being able to dominate all of Europe was a one-off historical fluke, since they emerged at just the right time to be able to monopolize the Mediterranean, and control of the Mediterranean is the only way to maintain a large European state before modern transportation technology. After the Empire fell no state was ever able to dominate the Mediterranean ever again.
China's geography is so amazing that it really does seem blessed by god. I think the only country that can compare is America.
If the Mongols didn’t bring agriculture to Europe because they were nomadic and thus had no need for it, then it couldn’t possibly be the reason that they didn’t conquer Europe was simply because “the crop yields were too low.”
Both the question and the answer are total trash.
Starting from 1227 Mongols conquered most of Russia and raided Central Europe. The East European splinter of the Mongol Khanate was the Golden Horde which lasted longer than the Yuan dynasty. It broke down in several Tatar states, the most important one was Crimea which survived under Turkish protection almost until 1800. In these 500 years mongols/tatars raided Eastern Europe and killed and enslaved millions of people.
Before the mongols Europe was attacked by other asian invaders from the Mongolian steppe, most notably the Huns who are very likely descended from the Xiongnu and played a key role in the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Avars, khazars, cumans and the ottomans were all descended from people from Inner Asia and they attacked Europe.
Even on the Chinese side, the history is pretty bad, because China still had famines ever 30-40 years thereabouts. It just wasn't nation-wide, but localised to a state or a couple of states. But a couple of Chinese states is like the size of Spain anyways. Pre-industrial and pre-GMO farming is just always dependent on luck.