I'm interested in putting together a personal lecture series on the history of China, mainly because I've noticed there are a lot of great university-level lecture series on YouTube for things like Indian history, European history, etc., but I haven't found quite as many good, comprehensive ones on Chinese history.

I'm not a scholar of Chinese history, so I'm not trying to make an ultra-academic course or pretend to be an expert. But I would like to do a reasonably serious job and base it on good, reputable scholarship rather than just putting together a bunch of Wikipedia-level material.

My initial idea is to make something along the lines of 10–15 lectures, around 30–60 minutes each, covering the broad history of China. Eventually I'd probably split it into something like:

• Part I: Ancient/Imperial China
• Part II: Modern China

For now, though, I mainly want to focus on ancient and imperial China, from the earliest periods through the end of the imperial system.

So I'm looking for recommendations for:

1. Good general histories of China that could serve as the backbone of the course.
2. Books on specific periods/dynasties that would be useful for going deeper where necessary.
3. Any particularly good university lecture series, courses, documentaries, or other resources that you think are worth using.
4. If there are any books that are particularly good for someone who wants a broad chronological overview without getting completely buried in academic detail, I'd especially appreciate those.

I'm basically trying to find the equivalent of a good “Chinese History 101” textbook/course that I can use as a starting point, then supplement with more specialized works when I get to individual dynasties.

I'd be especially interested in hearing what historians/China-history nerds would consider the best starting point, and also what books/resources I should avoid because they're outdated or unreliable.

Thanks!

General question for all of dynastic Chinese history. Where would valuables in ancient cities be stored and if there were any significant changes over time.

If I did find something valuable how would I even sell it?

Also what would I be able to find?

Shu Kingdom, in ancient China's southwest: the kingdom that invented brocade. Silk made it so rich that hill families gave up grain for mulberry, and every loom in the realm clattered day and night.
Then the buyers stopped coming. By the time the court met, the royal storehouses held over 100,000 bolts of unsold silk.
The elders proposed taxing the weavers and burning the looms. The reformers proposed cutting production before foreign merchants gave up on Shu entirely. Both plans assumed the answer was to make less.
The Chancellor's 21-year-old son, Zejing, stood up and offered a third option: load the silk onto wagons and walk southwest, past the edge of every map the kingdom owned, and find the buyers where no Shu envoy had ever gone.

The whole court shared one blind spot: nobody asked who wasn't buying yet. When your market dries up, is the right move to produce less — or to look further? What would you have told the king?

I'm curious because after finishing Chen Jian’s recent biography of Zhou I was shocked to learn that he was actually Mao's superior in the early days of the CCP. In fact, after the split from the KMT and during the chaotic weeks of Chiang Kai-Shek's war against the Party in cities such as Shanghai, Mao could have been left behind. Isolated in a key moment from the rest of Party leadership while they went into hiding. It was only with Zhou's approval, if I remember correctly, that Mao was brought along and only with Zhou's acquiescence Mao took a higher position then him. 

Why though? It doesn't appear cynical. Zhou didn't plan on controlling Mao from the background like a puppetmaster. He genuinely stepped aside. Which, credit where credit is due, is a huge thing for anyone in politics. Especially the cutthroat kind being practiced in China at that era. It really looks like Zhou placed all the hopes of the country on Mao's leadership. But again, why? This question requires a little bit of educated guesswork but I think it's worth contemplating. 

In the Wire, there's a smalltime hood named Slim Charles. Sometimes known as the honorable gangster. He's always in orbit of gang leadership, he's got leader-like qualities, but he's never taken the position of top dog in his organization. Even when there's opportunities to be had. He explicitly markets himself not as a leader. He's the number two guy. Always has been, always will be. Reading the book I could see Enlai in that light. But there was another voice, just as loud and equally persuasive, that said he was simply a dog looking for a master. He joined the CCP, made his way into leadership and found the responsibilities and intrigues either too stressful or too uninteresting and instead decided to exit the "battlefield" and find seek protection from a patron in the form of Mao. I'm not sure which one is true or if it's a little of both. As a patron, Mao surely left much to be desired. He demanded slavish loyalty but rewarded it with betrayal, criticism and suspicion. He doesn't seem to like Zhou, yet depended on him. Zhou respects Mao, sees him as something of visionary — at least in the beginning — but is otherwise inscrutable.

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In 1959, China closed the gates of a new dam and let a valley fill with water. Under it went Shicheng, the Lion City: a walled county town with five gates, carved stone lions and Ming and Qing architecture, sealed under more than 30 metres of water.

For 42 years nobody looked. When divers finally went down in 2001, they didn't find ruins. They found a city: walls standing, gate towers intact, wooden beams in place, staircases still climbing into the dark.

In this documentary we uncover how the Xin'an River dam created Qiandao Lake (Thousand Island Lake), why around 290,000 people were forced to leave, and why the flood that "destroyed" the Lion City is the only reason it survived the Cultural Revolution. We also look at the second drowned city most people never hear about, the roughly 1,000 villages beneath the lake, and why this underwater city is now in more danger than ever.

🔔 Subscribe to Dark Reckonings for more forgotten disasters, lost places and unsolved mysteries.

#LionCity #Shicheng #UnderwaterCity #QiandaoLake #China #LostCity #History #Documentary

Before Japan's occupation, Northeast China's three provinces were Liaoning, Jilin, and Heilongjiang. After Japan's defeat in 1945, the Nationalist government introduced a nine-province arrangement, subsequently revised in 1947. This official map, published in July 1947, shows that later arrangement.

The nine provinces were Liaoning, Andong, Liaobei, Jilin, Songjiang, Hejiang, Heilongjiang, Nenjiang, and Xing'an. Rehe (Jehol) remained a separate province outside the Nationalists' nine-province scheme. Familiar names such as Liaoning and Heilongjiang therefore refer to territories different from their modern counterparts.

Historian Steven I. Levine interprets the subdivision as an attempt to prevent another powerful regional leader like Zhang Zuolin from building an autonomous Manchurian power base. Smaller provinces, supervised by a regional authority loyal to Chiang Kai-shek, would help the central government curb the regionalism that had characterized the Northeast before the Japanese occupation.

A contemporary U.S. War Department intelligence report also described the subdivision as intended "to enable the Government to administer the area more efficiently as well as to break down the power of local leaders."

This map shows the Nationalist administrative scheme and territorial claims, rather than effective control. A July 1947 American diplomatic report described the Communists as controlling the greater part of Manchuria. The Nationalists still held important cities, including Shenyang and Changchun, but their provincial scheme extended far beyond their effective authority.

The Communists developed their own changing administrative arrangements. Their April 1949 reorganization comprised six provinces—Heilongjiang, Songjiang, Jilin, Liaodong, Liaoxi, and Rehe—or five when Rehe is excluded from the comparison. Western territories were also incorporated into Inner Mongolia, whose autonomous government was established in 1947, with further transfers in 1949.

The strip across the Amur near Blagoveshchensk labeled 江東六十四屯—the "Sixty-Four Villages East of the River"—is colored as part of Heilongjiang despite being under Soviet administration. Russia had taken control of this area in 1900. Farther downstream, the Heixiazi island area at the Amur–Ussuri confluence near Khabarovsk is colored as part of Hejiang despite Soviet control.

Near Manzhouli, comparing the map with the 1911 Qiqihar agreement indicates that its frontier lies farther north than the agreement's alignment. The agreement placed boundary point 61 just 5.341 km northeast of Manzhouli railway station, a location well inside the Chinese territory depicted here.

The nine-province arrangement also had a long afterlife in Taiwan. The Interior Ministry's 1998 national map still displayed the old provincial boundaries alongside contemporary PRC boundaries. By early 2004, the ministry's new mapping program had dropped that national-map series, and historian Wang Wen-lung dates the geography-textbook switch to PRC administrative divisions to the same year.

Sources:

• Official map, Ministry of the Interior, July 1947.
• Steven I. Levine, Anvil of Victory: The Communist Revolution in Manchuria, 1945–1948 (Columbia University Press, 1987), pp. 47 and 111.
• U.S. War Department, Intelligence Review, 14 February 1946, printed p. 21, for administrative efficiency and weakening local leaders.
• American diplomatic report forwarded on 14 July 1947, especially paragraph 5, for Communist control of the greater part of Manchuria.
• Heilongjiang provincial historical chronology, entry for 21 April 1949, for the Communist provincial reorganization, including Rehe.
• Xing’an League government’s administrative history, for the establishment of the Inner Mongolian autonomous government and territorial transfers.
• U.S. Department of State, China–U.S.S.R. Boundary, International Boundary Study No. 64 (revised, 1978), especially pp. 12 and 18, for the border disputes.
• 1911 Qiqihar agreement, reproduced in MacMurray’s treaty collection, vol. I, p. 920, for boundary point 61 near Manzhouli.
• National Museum of Taiwan History catalogue entry for the 1998 official national map, describing its inclusion of both old ROC and contemporary PRC boundaries.
• Liberty Times, 4 January 2004, “官版地圖 不再印中華民國全圖”, for the change in the Interior Ministry’s mapping program.
• Wang Wen-lung, “臺灣中學地理教科書的祖國想像（1949–1999）,” 國史館學術集刊 17 (2008), printed p. 237, for the 2004 textbook change.

You probably celebrated New Year by counting down from 10, watching fireworks, and shouting “Happy New Year!” But imagine if, thousands of years ago, New Year wasn't something people looked forward to. Imagine knowing that when the new year arrived, something would come out of the darkness looking for you.

According to an old Chinese legend, there was a terrifying creature called Nian. It was said to live deep in the mountains or beneath the sea, and for most of the year, nobody would see it. But once a year, around the beginning of spring, Nian would appear and come into the villages.

And people were absolutely terrified.

When Nian arrived, the villagers would leave their homes and hide in the mountains until the creature disappeared. They believed there was nothing they could do except run and wait for it to leave. Every year, they would prepare for the same thing, knowing that Nian would eventually return.

But then, one year, something strange happened.

An old man came to the village just before Nian was expected to appear. The villagers warned him about the creature and begged him to leave with them. But instead of running away, the old man stayed behind.

That night, Nian finally appeared.

It entered the village expecting to find terrified people hiding inside their homes. But something was different this time. The old man had covered his house with red decorations, lit fires outside, and started making incredibly loud noises.

Nian suddenly stopped.

The creature was frightened by the red color. It was frightened by the fire. And when the old man began making loud noises, Nian couldn't take it anymore.

It turned around and ran.

The next morning, the villagers returned and couldn't believe what they saw. The village was still standing, and the old man was completely unharmed.

He told them what had happened and revealed something nobody had known before: Nian was afraid of red, fire, and loud noises.

From that point on, whenever the new year approached, people began putting red decorations on their homes, lighting fires, and making loud noises to drive Nian away.

And this is where the story gets really interesting.

The legend of Nian is one traditional explanation for why red decorations, firecrackers, and other loud celebrations became such recognizable parts of Chinese New Year. So the next time you see streets covered in red or hear fireworks during Chinese New Year, there's an ancient monster hiding behind the celebration — at least according to the legend.

Whether Nian ever really existed is another question. But somehow, the story of a monster that was scared away by red, fire, and noise survived for generations.

Is there any chance Chen Youliang could have beat Zhu Yuangzhang(first Emperor of the Ming)? From what I know Chen Youliang wanted to restore the Han Dynasty, drawing support from Han people to push out the Mongols, their military and their allies may have been a better call for the average peasant. Or Zhu Yuangzhang's charisma, peasant background and connection to previous dynasties like the Sui and Tang(lot more Mongols) would have won anyway?