This is much more informative than absorbing Chinese history via bootleg translations of xianxia/wuxia/palace drama webnovels! That section on the heavenly DMV really cleared some things up for me.
Any advice for recognizing which time period a setting is based off of? I know they’re mostly mélanges, but I’m still curious. Every so often I read a story that mentions corn/tomatoes/potatoes and I can guess those are anachronistic. But then there’s stuff like paper, rockets, and wheelchairs that were around in China way earlier than in the west. I don’t know where, say, horse-drawn carriages, coal hand warmers, or ice skates fall, though.
Pretty much every unspecified or fantasy Chinese dynasty is more or less based on two time periods.
1. Tang Dynasty, because it's just in a really good sweet spot. It has the most forgiving laws, the most gender equality, the most multiculturalism, a lot of quality of life improvements over Han, etc. And it has legit fireworks, but not guns. By the time Tang Dynasty comes around, all four of China's great inventions have been created, and society is prosperous enough that you don't have to write about depressing realities like famines very often.
2. Five Kingdom and Ten Dynasties Era: It's basically not that different from Tang Dynasty in terms of culture, food, clothing, etc, etc, but you have a lot of different smaller nations in China, so you can write about international politics and diplomacy and wars between real political powers, instead of just barbarian invasions. If there's more than one kingdom in the story that has more or less a Chinese culture, they're borrowing from this period of history.
And nobody who's writing a historical novel actually bothers with food accuracy, because what's even the point of being alive if you can't eat whatever you want :P
Thanks for this breakdown!! It’s very handy. And I love that approach to food, too. In certain online writing circles, I’ve seen whole essays calling for writers to account for the sociopolitical ramifications of potatoes, and that’s a bit… literal… for my tastes
It really depends on the genre. If I'm just trying to chill and relax, then I don't really want to read the kind of depressing slog where the protagonists spend the entire story eating nothing but dry bread (ahem, Return of the King).
I don't have any specific comments to make, but I want to communicate that I think this is cool and interesting, (and a topic I have embarrassingly little knowledge of) and I'm actively looking forward to the rest of the series. Thank you!
The single China-Europe timeline comparison is enough to make this a good post. I could look them up, but the equivalence was never mentioned during World or Chinese History class. All I know before Opium War stuff is that 李白 was born around 700, and that's because I was messing around with Tang poems trying to figure out Tang rhymes and needed to restrict myself to a range of dates.
>Modern archaeologists now believe the real reason there was a revolt against Di Xin is because he tried to end the practice of human sacrifice for the purpose of divination- which proved immensely unpopular. Human sacrifice would remain common practice until population loss from the wars of the Spring and Autumn era made it impractical.
I would like to read more about this. I just learned about Chinese human sacrifices less than a month ago and I feel like I have to catch up.
Hmm, I'm not sure what a good source would be that I could point you to (in English), but Shang Dynasty (and possibly before? Not sure) has a lot of varied rituals of human sacrifice, from burying alive to boiling to impaling to cutting out the heart, Aztec-style, all for ritualistic purposes. Specifically, for the purposes of divination. This didn't actually cause a lot of problems for population loss, because it didn't necessarily require that many people, and it didn't occur all the time. It's usually something done at the beginning of the year, to divine the next year's fortunes, and before important battles and such.
The main cause of population loss is the practice of um...I'm not sure what a good word for it is. Burial customs? When a wealthy individual died, it was customary to not just bury them with their books and furniture and utensils and money and decorations, but also to bury all their favourite servants and butlers and such with them, so they can use the same servants in the afterlife. For an Emperor, this could involve burying large numbers of actual human soldiers and ministers and chancellors and concubines.
In fact, the terracotta soldiers are significant not just because of the amazing skill involved in their creation, but also because it was a very deliberate political goal for Qin Shi Huang to end the practice of burying human soldiers alive. It was him sending a message that, "If clay soldiers are good enough for me, then clay servants should be good enough for you." And it worked. After Qin Shi Huang, burying humans alive as a part of a funeral stopped being a thing for the next 1700 years.
The second one does have English subtitles, which aren't great, but I think I got the gist of it. It sounds as though sacrifice-as-divination was being reduced by the end of the Shang dynasty, but when the Zhou came in they ended it and pinned the blame for the practice (fairly or not) on the Shang? Whereas the sacrifice-by-burial kept going for a while, until Qin Shi Huang ended it?
Yup. Supposedly, the idea of sacrifice-as-divination got a lot less popular in Zhou Dynasty, because in the final battle against the Shang, they divined the result of the battle, and the divination said not to fight that day, because they'll lose really bad. But the commanders didn't want to keep waiting, so they went ahead with the battle anyways, and won. So from that point on, the first Emperor of Zhou didn't really believe in the idea of divination.
Whether this is true or not, I have a lot of doubt about it? I just have a hard time believing anyone who truly and sincerely always believed in divination would have their faith completely shattered with one inaccurate result. Most likely, if he can abandon divination that quickly and that completely, he never really believed in it to begin with. But it's not like we've got a lot of concrete archeological proof of any of this. Everything we know comes from Spring and Autumn Era history books, written several hundred years after the fact.
This is much more informative than absorbing Chinese history via bootleg translations of xianxia/wuxia/palace drama webnovels! That section on the heavenly DMV really cleared some things up for me.
Any advice for recognizing which time period a setting is based off of? I know they’re mostly mélanges, but I’m still curious. Every so often I read a story that mentions corn/tomatoes/potatoes and I can guess those are anachronistic. But then there’s stuff like paper, rockets, and wheelchairs that were around in China way earlier than in the west. I don’t know where, say, horse-drawn carriages, coal hand warmers, or ice skates fall, though.
Pretty much every unspecified or fantasy Chinese dynasty is more or less based on two time periods.
1. Tang Dynasty, because it's just in a really good sweet spot. It has the most forgiving laws, the most gender equality, the most multiculturalism, a lot of quality of life improvements over Han, etc. And it has legit fireworks, but not guns. By the time Tang Dynasty comes around, all four of China's great inventions have been created, and society is prosperous enough that you don't have to write about depressing realities like famines very often.
2. Five Kingdom and Ten Dynasties Era: It's basically not that different from Tang Dynasty in terms of culture, food, clothing, etc, etc, but you have a lot of different smaller nations in China, so you can write about international politics and diplomacy and wars between real political powers, instead of just barbarian invasions. If there's more than one kingdom in the story that has more or less a Chinese culture, they're borrowing from this period of history.
And nobody who's writing a historical novel actually bothers with food accuracy, because what's even the point of being alive if you can't eat whatever you want :P
Thanks for this breakdown!! It’s very handy. And I love that approach to food, too. In certain online writing circles, I’ve seen whole essays calling for writers to account for the sociopolitical ramifications of potatoes, and that’s a bit… literal… for my tastes
It really depends on the genre. If I'm just trying to chill and relax, then I don't really want to read the kind of depressing slog where the protagonists spend the entire story eating nothing but dry bread (ahem, Return of the King).
I don't have any specific comments to make, but I want to communicate that I think this is cool and interesting, (and a topic I have embarrassingly little knowledge of) and I'm actively looking forward to the rest of the series. Thank you!
The single China-Europe timeline comparison is enough to make this a good post. I could look them up, but the equivalence was never mentioned during World or Chinese History class. All I know before Opium War stuff is that 李白 was born around 700, and that's because I was messing around with Tang poems trying to figure out Tang rhymes and needed to restrict myself to a range of dates.
This is amazing, and I'd love to see it expanded into an interactive e-book. 10/10 would buy!
breath water -> breathe water
>Modern archaeologists now believe the real reason there was a revolt against Di Xin is because he tried to end the practice of human sacrifice for the purpose of divination- which proved immensely unpopular. Human sacrifice would remain common practice until population loss from the wars of the Spring and Autumn era made it impractical.
I would like to read more about this. I just learned about Chinese human sacrifices less than a month ago and I feel like I have to catch up.
Hmm, I'm not sure what a good source would be that I could point you to (in English), but Shang Dynasty (and possibly before? Not sure) has a lot of varied rituals of human sacrifice, from burying alive to boiling to impaling to cutting out the heart, Aztec-style, all for ritualistic purposes. Specifically, for the purposes of divination. This didn't actually cause a lot of problems for population loss, because it didn't necessarily require that many people, and it didn't occur all the time. It's usually something done at the beginning of the year, to divine the next year's fortunes, and before important battles and such.
The main cause of population loss is the practice of um...I'm not sure what a good word for it is. Burial customs? When a wealthy individual died, it was customary to not just bury them with their books and furniture and utensils and money and decorations, but also to bury all their favourite servants and butlers and such with them, so they can use the same servants in the afterlife. For an Emperor, this could involve burying large numbers of actual human soldiers and ministers and chancellors and concubines.
In fact, the terracotta soldiers are significant not just because of the amazing skill involved in their creation, but also because it was a very deliberate political goal for Qin Shi Huang to end the practice of burying human soldiers alive. It was him sending a message that, "If clay soldiers are good enough for me, then clay servants should be good enough for you." And it worked. After Qin Shi Huang, burying humans alive as a part of a funeral stopped being a thing for the next 1700 years.
Chinese is fine.
Here's a good video that goes into Shang Dynasty human sacrifice (and cannibalism): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGY9JH4kYQE
Here's a good youtube historian that goes into the story of Dixin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfhwnWjOOiA
The second one does have English subtitles, which aren't great, but I think I got the gist of it. It sounds as though sacrifice-as-divination was being reduced by the end of the Shang dynasty, but when the Zhou came in they ended it and pinned the blame for the practice (fairly or not) on the Shang? Whereas the sacrifice-by-burial kept going for a while, until Qin Shi Huang ended it?
Yup. Supposedly, the idea of sacrifice-as-divination got a lot less popular in Zhou Dynasty, because in the final battle against the Shang, they divined the result of the battle, and the divination said not to fight that day, because they'll lose really bad. But the commanders didn't want to keep waiting, so they went ahead with the battle anyways, and won. So from that point on, the first Emperor of Zhou didn't really believe in the idea of divination.
Whether this is true or not, I have a lot of doubt about it? I just have a hard time believing anyone who truly and sincerely always believed in divination would have their faith completely shattered with one inaccurate result. Most likely, if he can abandon divination that quickly and that completely, he never really believed in it to begin with. But it's not like we've got a lot of concrete archeological proof of any of this. Everything we know comes from Spring and Autumn Era history books, written several hundred years after the fact.