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Before the Zhou, China didn’t even have a concept of “Heaven” or T’ian, but they did have a “high god” called Shangdi. So the concept of the Mandate of Heaven dates from the Zhou Dynasty, and current historians think that they created it to get rid of the Shang. So that's what happened, but what's interesting, as far as capital-H History is concerned, is why it happened, and especially why the people who were writing history at the time said it happened. because they were Mongols- - which sparked rebellions resulting in the rise of the Ming, which was the dynasty that built the Great Wall and made amazing vases, but didn’t save them from falling to the Manchus, who founded a dynasty that was called the Qing, which was the last dynasty because in 1911 there was a rebellion like the ones in, say, America, France or Russia, and the whole dynastic system which at this point had lasted for a long-ass time, came to an end. Leaving aside the Xia dynasty, which was sadly fictional, the first Chinese dynasty was the Shang, who were overthrown by the Zhou, which disintegrated into political chaos called the Warring States period, in which states warred over periods - oh, no, wait, it was a period in which states warred - which ended when the Qin emperor was able to extend his power over most of the heretofore warring states, but the Qin were replaced by the Han, which was the dynasty that really set the pattern for most of China’s history and lasted for almost 400 years after which China fell again into political chaos – which only means there was no dynasty that ruled over all of China – and out of this chaos rose the Sui, who were followed quickly by the Tang, who in turn were replaced, after a short period of no dynasty, by the Song, who saw a huge growth in China’s commerce that was still not enough to prevent them from being conquered by the Yuan, who were both unpopular and unusual. This is more or less what happened to all the dynasties, which makes it easy for me to go over to camera two and describe them in a single run-on sentence: Hi there – camera two.
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So the dynasty can end for two reasons: either they run out of dudes (which never happened thanks to the hard work of many, many concubines), or the emperor's overthrown after a rebellion or a war. First off, there were several empress dowagers who wielded tremendous power throughout Chinese history, and there was one very important full-fledged empress, Empress Wu, who WU-led China for more than 20 years and founded her own freaking dynasty! (cuts back to John in the studio) -and those emperors keep ruling, the dynasty gets to be a dynasty. As long as that family produces emperors - and they are always dudes- (cutting noise as it cuts to a voice-over from John) No they aren't. That doesn’t seem very fair- Present John: Shh! What makes a dynasty a dynasty is that it’s ruled by a king, or as the Chinese know him, an emperor, who comes from a continuous ruling family. So even Me From The Past with his five minutes of World History knows that Chinese History is conveniently divided into periods called Dynasties. This is great for us, because we can now see the things that the Chinese recorded as they were happening, but it is also problematic because of the way the story is told. In fact, one of the Confucian Classics is called the Shujing, or Classic of History. The Chinese were also among the first people to write history. And it lasted, in pretty much the same form, from 150 BCE until 1911 CE, which is technically known as a long-ass time. China was really the first modern state – by which I mean it had a centralized government and a corps of bureaucrats who could execute the wishes of that government. Instead, I want to talk about how the way you tell a story shapes the story. and bury us under a pile of inexpensive electronics, but I don’t want to address those fears today.
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Right, but anyway, you hear a lot about how China is going to overtake the U.S. No one thought this was weird, by the way.
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Hi, I’m John Green, this is Crash Course World History, and today we’re going to talk about China, which these days is discussed almost constantly on television and in newspapers - wait, are they still a thing? So, we used to print information on thinly sliced trees and then you would pay someone to take these thinly sliced trees and throw them onto your front lawn, and that’s how we received information.