The Origins Of China: The Ancient Civilization That Birthed A Superpower | Lost Treasures | Odyssey

Foreign The Middle Kingdom is a

civilization

dating back more than 3,500 years Foreign traditionally considered a land of mystery. Only in this century have the secrets of

ancient

China begun to be revealed with incredible archaeological discoveries that give us insight into early China. Foreign

civilization

s could be forgiven for thinking this is Shanghai or Beijing; in fact, it is London's Chinatown. Many western capitals now have their own Chinatown where Chinese culture is easily accessible while visitors can experience the flavors and architecture of the

ancient

East. China still spans hundreds of years and thousands of miles with traditional symbols of lions and dragons abounding.

The reality of ancient China is however very far from this bright and brilliant Western interpretation. Chinese legend says that at the beginning of the world there was great chaos. and the sky and the Earth were like the yoke and the white of an egg, then Panku was born. Primal man shaped the Earth and the Sky by creating the Earth from impure dark elements and the sky from light and bright elements. Each day the sky rose 10 feet higher. The Earth was 10 feet thicker and Pam Cool became 10 feet taller. Panku lived for 18,000 years, when he was already very tall, the sky was very high and the Earth was thick and solid.

When Panku shed tears, they formed the yellow and Yangtze rivers with his breath. the wind his words created roaring thunder and his swift glances became lightning when he finally died his eyes became the Sun and the Moon and his body formed the five sacred mountains of China his hair became trees and plants and his fleas They became the human race in The countryside of China has not changed much in the last few thousand years. Fishermen have fished the Yangtze River in the same way for centuries as men and women work in the fields. However, there is a notable lack of old architecture in this rural landscape like most.

The buildings were made of perishable wood, however, through archaeological finds we can trace human civilization in China from the Paleolithic and Neolithic, discover the past with exclusive historical documentaries of history and discover the secrets of some of the people and most famous events in history. Immerse yourself in the history of the Ancients with historic hits, exclusive documentary offerings, explore the enchanting Temple of Karnak with us or delve into the fascinating prehistory of Scotland. We also aim to bring you the stories and legends that shaped our world through our award-winning podcast network. Sign up now for a free trial and Odyssey fans will get 50 off your first three months, just be sure to use the code Odyssey at checkout.

This is followed by the Shang dynasty from 1600 to 1027 BC. C., these people were the successors of the Bronze Age stone people of China and the Shang dynasty is the first undisputed dynasty in Chinese history whose 27 or 28 kings ruled through divination by reading bones and shells. of oracle to predict events the oldest Chinese writing also comes from this period feudal system where those at the center of the state were linked to the Royal House by blood beliefs and self-interest. The Western Joe dynasty extends from 1027 BC. C. until 771 BC. C., the Joe were a semi-nomadic clan that originated in the far northwest of Chinese land and as they moved south and came into contact with what was then China and the Shang kings for two generations, the Shang were gradually replaced around the year 1000 BC.

C. China, what was then China, which was only a relatively small area in the north, was conquered by the Joes, which became the Joes. dynasty in the Joe Kings and established or continued a feudal system of government that quickly began to crumble until feudal lords began to take control and more or less set themselves up as princes of separate states; they still supposedly had allegiance to this king. of Joe, but in fact they were practically independent foreigners. Confucius was a feudal art and of course he came from the ruling class, so he naturally wanted to perpetuate it and the teachings of it, which became King, so to speak, until this century.

The teachings of Confucius arose from that, but he was not alone, there were other schools of philosophy that advocated other ways of governing China, one of which was non-feudal and around 256 BC. C. came a man who we know as the first emperor of China, he was head of a small declared state of Chin and was greatly influenced by a quite different philosophy, the legalistic philosophy, which said that government should be by merit, the people It was rotten and therefore needed to be governed by a series of very harsh measures, he called it rewards and punishments but there were not many rewards.

He was enthusiastic about punishments and in fact was very successful in organizing his Society. It was a terrifying Society but it worked and it finally worked because he was able to model his Army and the same principles as his The army became more efficient and, in short, in 221 BC. C. he was able to conquer all the other states of China and establish himself as the best and called himself the first emperor of China. Each of these states had begun to develop their own scripts for Chinese which they didn't want could not be communicated properly if they had different scripts, so they got to work or they put people to work to come up with a standardized script for China that would work in their entire Empire and that standardized writing is still with us so when the first emperor of China codified the language and forbade anyone else to use any other writing and today through archeology we discover all kinds of evidence that shows that The writings before the codification of the first member of China were a great diversity and you can see all kinds of writings like birds and a writing written like a little bird or a small snake and you can see some new elements that are added to the writing which probably represents some kind of local dialect and all these things disappeared after codification and you can see the Chinese writing coming into the mainstream and we see the official writing becoming something sacred, no one can change it, it's a bit difficult to conceive for people accustomed to English and European languages. but Chinese writing does not depend on the sounds of words, it is more like our number system, the number eight can be pronounced eight if you speak English, wheat, if you are French, act if you are German, whatever, but the symbol It is the same for everyone. you and that is what Chinese characters are, like all Chinese characters are, so to speak, numbers, they are symbols of ideas, they are not connected with the sound of the word when you say it, and although through his Empire the people spoke different languages, they all wrote the same thing and so that he could have unity and had a means of communication throughout his Empire the first emperor whose full title was xinji Wan TI became emperor in 221 BC.

Before taking over the other states of China he was the Shan king of Shin in northwest China ascending the throne in 246 BC. C. at the tender age of 13 years. But things hadn't gone well at first. The man who really had control of Shing was the regent of Shang, a minister named Lupu Way in 238 BC. C., Shang's own mother. He was suspected of being involved in a plot against the young King Chang, crushed the rebels, banished Lupu, and was forced to put his own mother under house arrest, unable to trust his own mother. King Shang began to distrust anyone, as perhaps these events led to his strict rules.

Chang is described by one of his officials as a man with a high-bridged nose, long, narrow eyes, breasts like a bird of prey, and a voice like a bird of prey. A jackal, with an ungrateful character and the mind of a tiger or wolf, he normally behaved decently towards his men, but in the intoxication of success he only made them his victims, paints a rather ruthless picture of the man who became the first emperor. He constantly prepared the Shing state for a great Destiny: to reunite all the lands of China under one Emperor, all of Shing. men had to dedicate their lives to military service and rank systems among nobles were eliminated.

The power came from a single source: the king completely abolished the feudal system, that is, he abolished the hereditary classes and China became a society in which people were promoted according to merit and according to their ability, to administer this state of efficiently, he adopted strong centralization measures and that meant good communications to begin with, so he devised a road system and the roads left his capital in two years and his roads were straight like Roman roads. In star form, to the farthest limits of his Empire, he dedicated himself to the defense of this new state he had produced and one of the most important ways of doing this was to defend it against external attacks from all of China's enemies once it had arrived.

We have the concept that you can call China: all the Chinese enemies came from the north and he built the Great Wall of China to keep those enemies out. The Great Wall remains one of the Seven Wonders of the World and remains an astonishing achievement in terms of its size stretching more than 3,000 miles long from eastern China to the Gobi Desert and rising to a height of 25 feet . Watchtowers were built in Rocky Heights and garrisons were erected in Riverbanks to accommodate the man to start the war now that parts of that war had been there. before they had been built by these various states as they fought each other to keep the other states out, but he joined the whole lot about 1400 miles from the sea in the east, across the desert to the west and built this.

The Great Wall of China, uh, that helped keep China safe from attacks from the north and meant that I could then think about pacifying what was inside a famous Chinese folktale that is over 1000 years old and tells of a lady Meng Chang who believed that her husband had died working on the wall traveled 10,000 miles to find his bones for a proper burial when he arrived at the wall he spent days searching for his body but to no avail so he lay down next to the wall and cried for days the wall was so moved by her grief because part of it collapsed revealing the remains of her husband, we tend to see the first emperor, that is, we in the west, looking in from the outside, tend to see him as a very important ruler , dramatically intelligent and capable, the construction of that great wall so far.

As far as the Chinese people are concerned, even the 20th year of the 20th century was a horrible event. We consider it a great triumph of humanity. It is the only man-made thing that can be seen from the Moon. It is built on quite inhospitable terrain. The cost of construction. In terms of money it was great, but in terms of human lives it was terrible, many died and the Chinese have inherited from this a kind of belief that the people buried under the walls makes them strong now, whether that belief existed before the time of the first emperor, it is Not known, it certainly exists now, even in the 20th century, rumors still arise of people who were surreptitiously buried under buildings to fulfill that construction.

In 1921, in Hong Kong, when they took a census, they discovered that they had no results on men. children under three years of age and it was because at the same time there was a rumor in Hong Kong that they were going to build a bridge across the port supported by 99 piers and under each pier they were going to bury a baby boy and so no one declared male children not at all and the census was totally ruined by this and it's the kind of belief that probably crops up all the time in Chinese society and you come across it again and again and it's said to have started with the Great War.

As much as many people died building that great wall and it remains for the Chinese a symbol of cruelty and oppression and this tyrannical ruler standardized everything, all weights and measures were standardized before each state had its own and even pieces of states had theirs. own, said no, there will be a standard measurement for everything, including and this is the example that is cited very often, including the length of the card axles, and he actually wasn't that stupid, he had this wonderful system of roads, but it was not a paved road. The road system was a mud road system and in wet weather the cart wheels formed ruts very quickly and unless everyone has the same axle length you know that one end of the card will tilt too much and if Unfortunately , you will get into a traffic accident and crash your communication system, so he more or less invented the tram by having these axles of the same length, invented a standardization of currencies, while everyone else had their own currencies before that. um, he tried to make everything fit absolutely what he wanted.

The first emperor of China achievednotion of a unified China of an Empire that could encompass the Chinese people who, because they lived in a very wide physical area, developed local customs and local manners. of expression, even slightly different local political systems, but there were those at the local level, but the notion that China was a whole was a unity and that there should be a unified central government was with China forever from then on despite the success . When unifying China, the first Emperor's weakness was his fear of death. There are at least three assassination attempts on his life, in addition to which he had established himself as the most important man in Chinese history and only immortality would be a suitable continuation of his reign. on Earth, so his preparations for death were as lavish as his palaces and the Great War.

He died in 210 BC. C., while traveling through the eastern provinces along the Yangtze River and the coast of the Yellow Sea, he had dreamed of fighting a sea. god and advised him that if he wanted to become immortal he should kill a giant fish with a crossbow in chifu. He killed what was probably a whale, but the bitter irony was that he died a month later. His great advisor, Lisue, and another advisor were afraid. After losing their own lives, they covered up his death by carrying his coffin on a covered stretcher. This gave the man time to forge the will of the emperor, leaving his empire to his second son.

The news of the emperor's death was published after his return to the capital. Shenyang. He was eventually buried at Mount Lee, the place where he had built an incredible tomb. First emperor of China without Himitsu books. The records of the great historian and it is written in great detail, it is a family and his achievements, but it also describes the burial of him and the large scale of the construction of his tomb is described in the summary of the book. He was a historian who lived about a hundred years after the first. emperor and recorded the she she or historical records that discuss how the tomb was built as soon as the first emperor became king of shin.

Work began on his mausoleum at Manley, more than seven hundred thousand recruits from all over China worked there and dug three underground streams, poured molten copper for the outer coffin and filled a burial chamber with models of palaces, towers and official buildings, as well as fine utensils, precious stones and rarities. The waterways of the Empire, the Yellow and Yangtze rivers were represented by Mercury and were made. flowing mechanically above the celestial constellations, while below was a representation of the Earth. Lamps were installed that used whale oil to burn for a long time. The royal tomb buried deep under a grassy mound is in the process of being investigated and preserved for magnificence. of its interior can only be imagined for the moment, today the mound is surrounded by fields, but in 210 BC.

There would have been an inner walled enclosure with gates on each side with another walled enclosure around which these enclosures would have been part of the strict measures were taken to protect the tomb from grave robbers and it is written that inside the tomb there were also automatic crossbows ready to shoot any intruder. The graves dug by the first emperor's famous terracotta army are located a mile east of the burial site. mound in archeology you can see that this tomb is still there today and the most surprising thing is that they are probably the very famous terracotta soldiers or also called Terracotta Army of the first emperor of China.

It was discovered during the cultural revolution and is now a museum with three huge pits filled. of terracotta figures of immense size or even taller, some of them measuring more than 100 centimeters, which is why some people say that they will turn the first northerners into people much stronger than the Chinese of today. It is estimated that around seven thousand terracotta soldiers were buried next to the emperor's tomb, not only soldiers but also horses. and chariots and them, the soldiers originally had bronze weapons, but these bronze weapons were mostly taken by a rebellion of peasants or rebels when they first came to a tomb, the first thing they wanted were weapons, bronze weapons, so the tomb was disturbed and not long after. has been built, however, I mean, it's still in Impact, I mean, today, if you go to the site, you can actually see these soldiers on these clay horses and why the first emperor buried his soldiers, the horses that They were replicas on or next to his grave. always questioning a fascinating question to consider this phenomenon or question, we may also have to go back to an earlier period, such as the Shang dynasty, in the shower inscriptions it has been recorded that human sacrifice was used frequently, numbers may be five, six dozen or a hundred and sometimes thousands.

I don't know exactly if they actually used the Thousand Men, cut off their heads and buried them in or next to the King's tombs. So far there is no evidence that more than a thousand people have been cured, but certainly several hundred decapitated men were buried at the site. The site that has been discovered is that this human sacrifice is very much a custom of the Shang dynasty and when the ruler Joe came, they reduced the use of human sacrifice and as we all remember, Confucius was very against the barbaric custom of human sacrifice, but the rulers or the rich.

They are not abandoning the idea, but since, unless very powerful rulers still sacrifice human beings, most people start using replicas made of clay or wood and, as can be seen in early Chinese tombs, when the first emperor of China He started to build his tomb when he was still alive and also started to create a terrorist code army to protect his tomb, why did it serve me? Who were his enemies? And that's an idea that needs to be debated among scholars, but it's generally believed in the East. side of China and he was not completely in control, so there were still rebels and rebellions against the first emperor of China at that time, so maybe it was his concern that led him to make this a huge terracotta army for defend yourself in the underworld, little Chinese art can do.

It can definitely be dated to the Qin dynasty. It is the later dynasty that has proven to be rich in archaeological and artistic finds. This dynasty was founded only four years after the death of the first emperor, after a period of Civil War. The Western Dynasty began in 206 BC. 88 and then sandwiched in between is the short Shin dynasty of 9-23 AD. C., followed by the Eastern Hand dynasty from 24-220 AD. C., so we are now looking at a total time span of around 400 years. The Hand Dynasty is one of the great periods. of Chinese art one of the great periods of Chinese history more or less the cycle of dynasties that continued uninterrupted until the beginning of the 20th century had its pattern established in the Han dynasty in this period from 200 BC.

C. until approximately 280 speaking and thousands and thousands of that time have been discovered tombs of the dynasty of hands, these are the material that gives us the most information not only about the beliefs of the hands about death and the afterlife, but also about life and daily activities and what they considered important in their lives, one of the most spectacular. The finds have been a series of tombs in Changshai in Hunan province, right in the center of China, essentially their amounts between 16 and 20 meters high in one of these three tombs were discovered side by side, slightly overlapping, each consisted of a deep pit cut through the man.

He brought the mound back to ground level and slightly below this was a magnificent heavy wooden structure that formed a compartment. Central compartment for the tomb of the royal coffins, which were a set of nested coffins and four compartments at the top and bottom and then on the two sides. containing grave goods, all of which were elaborately wrapped, for example, clothing baskets labeled and listed in an inventory on bamboo strips, while the entire burial was sealed with a thick layer of charcoal and another thick layer of white clay leaving the whole set. waterproof this was a common method of burial in this particular area and since the beginning of this century tombs have been discovered in this area that were in good condition, but the difference in this tomb is that the condition in which everything was found was practically pristine there had been little decomposition even of the body of the lady who was buried there in the nest of three three coffins uh practically the last object that was deposited in the Tomb would have been a silk Banner which was folded and placed on top of the coffin The innermost part that contains the body of the lady herself appears to be a funeribana that may have been carried in a procession to the Tomb and that represents the lady herself seen with her servants in the center and her transformation into a celestial spirit with a snake.

The body right at the top of the Foreigner Foreigner painting is an extraordinary site that links the Hand Dynasty to the present day because it was originally in 111 BC. When the warrior Emperor Wudi sought to consolidate his power, he expanded to the west and east, so in 111 B.C. Don Huang, meaning great and glorious, something like that, was established as a garrison commandery, but rarely became famous, it began to become famous much later, in the 4th century AD, when a Buddhist monk, his name is juertzen, he carved a cave, probably for solitary meditation. an incredible kilometer and a half long cliff about 25 kilometers from Don Juan towards the southeast and continuing during the period of the northern dynasties, that is, in the 5th and 6th centuries AD. and then at an increasing rate in the following centuries, caves were excavated in Den.

Hong one after another walked out of the gravel cliff because the stone was a kind of pebble gravel stuck together and quite easy to dig, but not easy to carve. These caves were all lined on the inside with a type of clay plaster mixed with organic material, wild hemp and straw. which can be seen very thickly deployed in the plaster this plaster has lasted for over fifteen hundred years without showing signs of cracking or deterioration and entering these caves is quite an extraordinary experience because every surface and sometimes even the floor is decorated with floor with tiles, but the rest, clay plaster on the walls and stucco figures that were built on a wooden framework and, although at first perhaps intended simply for solitary meditation in the desert, according to a vital part of the practice Buddhist, they soon became trans to the Buddha there are scenes of Paradise there are scenes of the daily life of merchants held back on the Silk Road by border guards or by bandits Don Juan was this important place supported by the expansionist Han Empire was that expansion of Han, which made the land route to Western Asia possible, became a true highway of intercultural influences and communications and many luxuries reached China and left for China through this route.

The Buddhist art in the Dunwan Caves reflects how popular the religion became in the 6th and 7th centuries. centuries in China, but it did not displace any of the existing religions that were already in practice, shaping and evolving around them, instead creating a spirit of balance and harmony. It is very difficult to talk about a religion for China. There really is no Chinese religion like China has. What is practiced is a lot of religious elements that have come together to make a kind of religious stew. I guess most people in general, most ordinary people in China have practiced a whole mix of religions at once and they would include Buddhism which came from India. to China around the first century AD, sometimes not far from the time of Christ and very quickly gained acceptance in China, but changed in the process.

Chinese Buddhism is not much like Indian Buddhism, in fact it has become very Chinese style, eh, but Buddhism. It was very acceptable to people, at that time they didn't have a religion that talked about personal salvation in any sense, before that you were just a figure in a family and then there was fate that sat on you, but there was no There was no way to work in this life to get a better life later and Buddhism must have been like a real jam on the bread when it first came to China because suddenly the Chinese people could see that they had not

lost

. value to the suffering that they had certainly experienced that they could get something out of that uh Taoism which is t-a-o Tau generally written Taoism was a native Chinese philosophy that was one of those philosophies that were current in the time of Confucius and the legalists and Taoism is very dear to Chinese Hearts, it's a kind of naturalistic philosophy that basically says that nature doesn't really take any action at all.

Nature simply is and man, if he really wants to be happy, must somehow conform to nature and thatmeans that he. You shouldn't do anything from any kind of hippie philosophy in some way, you know, you didn't have to ask where your money came from, it kind of seems like, but it certainly attracted a lot of Chinese people and there's this notion that you could be one. with nature and that the best one can hope for is to become one with nature was what Taoism emerged from trying to be like nature. I led them down very strange paths because the nature that people could see continued forever, it was eternal and therefore the notion that Man should be Eternal began to occur to people and they began to search for the elixir of Life. , they started looking for ways to make himself um uh and gave him some very strange powers, including finding the Philosopher's Stone and all this stuff, but it became very obvious that whatever they did, whatever technique they prepared, whatever medicine they If they tried to invent for themselves or any fasting technique or anything they did, they died and around the time that Buddhism came to China, which is not long after the time of Christ, Taoism had merged on its own in an area where it started to separate the body and the soul and became a religion because the body cannot last forever.

It was obvious that you died, but maybe there is a soul that can do it. Donaldson became a The religion also believed in ancestor worship and ancestor worship in its Chinese form consists of worshiping your father, your grandfather and your great-grandfather, and so on in the male line back as gods, and those ancestors would then take care of you in this life that you expected uh in some ways it's a kind of negative religion because if you don't worship them, their souls go into terrible difficulties in the afterlife because their souls stay alive Thanks to the offerings you make to them, if they die, you were going to pay for it, but there was also the positive side that you believed that your ancestors had a positive interest in your well-being and, in exchange for your worship, they would do everything they could. to ensure that your life was good on this Earth. the religion of family and family was very important to the Chinese and still is today ancient taoism buddhism all kinds of beliefs about nature the beliefs that mountains, trees, streams and things had gods associated with which had to be appeased and worshiped and a huge belief in the presence of evil spirits and ghosts everywhere meant that Chinese culture was quite busy with all kinds of religious and quasi-religious phenomena and the Chinese tended to believe in all.

For them, the route Silk not only opened China to the religious and cultural influences of Buddhism, but also to trade with other countries. The Silk Road, as its name suggests, was primarily used to trade silk through Persia and then to Europe, and this network of roads remained the same throughout subsequent dynasties, back around the time of the Empire's heyday. Roman, it had a more or less common border with China in Persia and silk was traded with the Roman Empire. You know, in the time of Christ, the Romans knew about silk. They didn't produce it, it came from China and some very strange stories about how they thought it looked like the spaghetti tree.

They had this vision of the type of silk tree that produced this material they coveted, but trade with China was not generally done by sea. a little bit of trade by sea with the Arab world, but mainly by land through the ancient Silk Road and into Persia and then into Europe, but the Chinese didn't think it was really good, they didn't really want it, they wanted it. to be self-sufficient and in later years we see this same desire put into practice again and again as the Chinese rulers have tried to keep China isolated from the rest of the world and this has continued well into the 1980s with only minor attempts. by some slightly more enlightened emperors, perhaps, who tried to trade a little bit, and that trade changed over time, of course, there was silk and later, probably around the 8th or 9th century, we got to tea, the Chinese They had started drinking tea themselves. at that time and of course tea is enormously valuable not only because people like the taste but it is also very good for your health because you have to boil the water and it has an immense effect on public health if you are a tea drinker.

The nation and the Chinese knew about it and T was very important to China. Tea was not widely known in China until the Tang Dynasty around 600 AD. C., when it was introduced from the border country around India. Their arrival in China is actually attributed to the later Sun Dynasty period of 960 AD. C. onwards, Buddhist monks discovered that tea contained something that helped them stay awake during long periods of meditation, this of course was caffeine. Chinese legend says that the armored Buddhist monk cut off his eyelids to stay awake. While he meditated, they fell to the ground where they became tea bushes.

The leaves of the tea bushes were exactly the same shape as his eyelids. Over the years, the Chinese developed a special red clay which they used to shape delicate teapots and which is said to enhance. the taste of tea, the worst problem was that they did not want anything from the outside world so they could not market it and this in the 17th, 18th and early 19th centuries became a major problem for merchants who desperately wanted to obtain Chinese products and had no means to pay for them except, ultimately, silver, and silver on the world market became an extremely difficult commodity in the 18th and 19th centuries because everything was disappearing in China, which the Chinese didn't particularly want either, but there was. opium was eventually found as payment and that is a very different story and takes us to a much more recent era that could be said to end in 1997 with the return of Hong Kong to China.

Hong Kong was founded, one might say, on the basis of the opium trade. China's history, dating back thousands of years, still has a resonant influence on China's current appearance. Every aspect of Chinese life is steeped in ancient traditions and Chinese pride in its culture has ensured that history and legends are One of the best-known and most colorful examples of this is the Beijing Opera, which has its roots in drama Chinese, a traditional form of entertainment with a continuous history dating back more than 900 years. The first recorded work took place in the early Tsun period. around 960 AD. and they combined a number of art forms that had already existed for more than a thousand years.

Chinese works are called operas because music is a very important element, but they bear little resemblance to Western Opera. The Peking Opera was formed in the early 19th century. When Emperor Quang Long ordered opera groups from all over China to Beijing to perform on his 80th birthday, inevitably some groups remained in the city and formed a new troupe and, in turn, a new form of opera containing music, dance, mime and acrobatics, the audience will already be familiar with the stories and performances that are based on historical events and folklore and the characters are two-dimensional because they are symbols of the virtues and vices that affect us in everyday life.

There are four main character types that were identified through traditional makeup. and disguise the male role or Shang the female role or tan the painted face or Shing and the clown or shoe the Chinese attitude of balance and harmony is reflected everywhere, even in the architectural houses arranged around courtyards, the space between the sides of the patio is as important as the interior of the building, the emphasis is on the contradiction between the interior and the exterior, the orientation of the construction of the patio is on an axis from north to south and the head of the family lives in the homes of the upper northern section arranged in such a pattern.

The early days of Chinese history even in rural areas, but perhaps the best example is the Imperial Palace located in Beijing's Tiananmen Square or Heavenly Peace Square. The Forbidden City is separated from the rest of the city by walls and inside there is a large open courtyard. dominated by the Hall of Supreme Harmony containing the dragon Throne of the Emperor The inner courtyard is marked by a pair of golden lions at the Gate of Heavenly Purity and it is within this inner area that the imperial powers lived Beijing abounds in traditional examples of Chinese architecture The general ethic is that buildings should blend with nature or the surrounding buildings.

The Chinese view of the cosmos is that the sky is round and the Earth is square, therefore the dwellings of man are square, while the sacred buildings where the emperors communicated with the heavens, such as the Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests around This beautiful example of Chinese wooden construction was built without the use of a single man, even the Chinese gardens are a feat of careful construction with the ancient Taoist principle of a delicate balance between man and nature that constantly reflects the harsh elements. Rock Yang. balanced by the gentle Yin of water and an energy called Chi can flow freely, this flow of energy is also essential for a healthy body.

Fragments of ancient drawings show that the Chinese have practiced slow gymnastic exercises called Tai Chi for the last thousand years to help this. Fluid Chinese cuisine continues this theme of balance with flavors and ingredients carefully combined so as not to upset the body's harmony. The Chinese practice of herbal medicine has also evolved on Taoist principles and the first herbs were written down in the 1st century, during the Han dynasty, in most of the larger cities. and cities with apothecaries that still sell traditional herbs and medicines, so China's traditions and historical legacy are inextricably linked to current Chinese life.

Archaeological discoveries of this century, such as the emperor's first terracotta warriors and remaining ancient structures, such as the Great Wall, have contributed greatly to our understanding of China, the Middle Kingdom, providing insights into moments in ancient history and diverse of China, but there are undoubtedly still many secrets to unearth in the Land of the Dragon.