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220 pages

English

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Discover the history of one of the world's most influential civilizations. Based on the Cyrus Tang Hall of China exhibit at The Field Museum, China: A History traces the 7,000-year story of this diverse land. Full-color maps, photos, and illustrations of the people, landscape, artifacts, and rare objects bring the history of this nation to life! Young readers learn about prehistoric China, follow the reign of emperors and dynasties, and come to understand how China became the world power that it is today. The book also explores the role of children and women in everyday life as well as how religion, politics, and economics shaped the deep traditions and dynamic changes of modern China. This book stands alone from the exhibition and is a go-to resource for young readers looking to learn more about this powerful nation. It includes a timeline, bibliography, and index.

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Publié par	ABRAMS BOOKS
Date de parution	15 janvier 2019
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781683353621
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	11 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0862€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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THIS BOOK WAS MADE POSSIBLE IN PART BY THE ELIZABETH F. CHENEY FOUNDATION AND THE HENRY LUCE FOUNDATION.
Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for and may be obtained from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-1-4197-2121-2 eISBN 978-1-68335-362-1
Text copyright 2018 The Field Museum Book design by Melissa J. Barrett For image credits, see this page .
Published in 2018 by Abrams Books for Young Readers, an imprint of ABRAMS. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.
Abrams Books for Young Readers are available at special discounts when purchased in quantity for premiums and promotions as well as fundraising or educational use. Special editions can also be created to specification. For details, contact specialsales@abramsbooks.com or the address below.
ABRAMS The Art of Books 195 Broadway, New York, NY 10007 abramsbooks.com
China s history is the story of people responding to opportunities and challenges, striving to balance tradition and change.

THERE IS NO SINGLE CHINA
China is the world s fourth-largest country and home to one-fifth of its population. It also has the world s oldest, ongoing tradition of urban civilization.
Starting around 1600 BC, the Shang Dynasty in China ruled over a territory that rivaled what was ruled by Egyptian pharaohs of the time. Since then the pharaohs have fallen, Greek and Roman empires have come and gone, and other ancient cultures have been fundamentally changed by political, religious, and social upheavals. Meanwhile, China s rulers created an empire that persevered until the twentieth century. Then, even after the last emperor was overthrown, China s borders remained mostly unchanged and many Chinese cultural traditions have been largely maintained.

As the world s fourth-largest country by area, China (outlined in white above) is a collage of diverse landscapes and peoples.
Yet there is no one single China. This nation encompasses vast deserts, rugged mountains, fertile plains, coastal lowlands, and tropical rain forests. Its people include fifty-six recognized minority groups with unique stories and customs. China s peoples have repeatedly stitched together this patchwork of landscapes and cultural traditions-and for centuries, the empire was more organized and powerful than Western societies.
The results were not always seamless. As everywhere else, the peoples of China have confronted weak government, warlords, famine, and foreign invasion. They also have navigated trade routes, changing technologies, new ideas about how society should work, and massive shifts in political power. Nothing about China s history was predestined. Rather, it is the result of people responding to life s opportunities and challenges, striving to balance tradition and change.
People are perhaps most familiar with China s history of the last century. This book focuses on the seven thousand years that came before. Taking a longer view highlights how modern lives compare to those of past peoples-and reveals how intertwined China s history is with the rest of the world.
For hundreds of thousands of years, Paleolithic nomads barely changed China s landscape. About ten thousand years ago, people living in more permanent settlements began a dramatic transformation.

PREHISTORIC CHINA
CHINA S STORY BEGINS IN THE STONE AGE
Based on the fossil record, close relatives of modern humans have lived in China for at least seven hundred and fifty thousand years. For most of this time, these hominins-and the modern humans who succeeded them-survived by hunting and gathering. They lived nomadically, moving from place to place and making few changes to the landscape. They struck stones together to shape and sharpen them into tools, so scientists call most of this time expanse the Paleolithic, which means Old Stone Age.
About ten thousand years ago people began building more-permanent homes, dwelling in larger groups, and experimenting with farming. These dramatic changes required new ways of thinking about how to live and work together.
Settled communities physically changed surrounding landscapes, and individuals began making specialties of various tasks. Success brought population growth, constant trying out of new ideas, and increased layers of status in society. People still relied on stone, but now had more techniques-including grinding and polishing-to shape a wider range of tools. Scientists call the years from about 10,000 to 1800 BC the Neolithic, which means New Stone Age.

These stone axes were made four to ten thousand years ago. Polishing them with grit made sharper edges, while attaching them to handles increased the force of each blow. The two axes on the bottom right do not show signs of use, so they were likely made to be buried with the dead.
Neolithic peoples invented the building blocks of modern society. Most people today, for example, reside in homes that stay in one place. More live in cities than in the countryside. Most eat farmed food, with diets relying on plants and animals first cultivated by Neolithic farmers. Today people talk about the fast-paced change of technology and how much humans are transforming the environment. Although such changes in the Neolithic period seem slow by comparison, they were rapid-fire when judged against the steadiness of earlier lifestyles.
The distinct societies that emerged in Neolithic China were the foundation for this nation s diverse population today.
SEEKING THE ROOTS OF CHINESE CIVILIZATION
The Yellow River springs forth in China s northwest mountains and meanders thirty-four hundred miles through the heart of this nation. It slices through lowlands covered in a fine, fertile soil called loess. For millions of years, winds gusting across nearby mountains and deserts have dropped specks of dust on these plains, gradually building loess to a thickness of five hundred feet in some places. It is no wonder then, that this valley attracted some of the world s earliest farmers.

Over time, regular flooding of the Yellow River created flat, fertile plains in the lowlands.

By 2600 BC, villages with thousands of residents existed in China. Farmers in surrounding areas produced surplus crops to trade there.
Marking history back to the first dynasties, scholars traditionally considered the Yellow River valley to be where Chinese cultural traditions or civilization began. It was assumed, however, that humans first made the leap from Stone Age-lifestyles to complex societies farther west. Scholars worldwide used to believe that the level of social organization that is recognized as civilization first occurred around 3500 BC in Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq) and nearby Egypt. They believed the strategies for lots of people living and working together then spread from this region to the rest of the world, including the territory that today is known as China. A Swedish geologist named Johan Gunnar Andersson, however, wondered if China could also claim a major prehistoric society.
Andersson came to China in 1914, hired by the government to identify geological deposits for mining. He noticed the ancient stone tools sold in the countryside and in 1921 traveled to Henan Province hoping to prove his theory. As Andersson explored the deep ravines rainwater had carved into the loess, he spied a distinct layer of ash and pottery fragments. The pottery was obviously ancient, but Andersson doubted that such advanced technology existed alongside stone tools. Somewhat dejected, he later wrote, I felt that I had followed a track which would only lead me astray.

Johan Gunnar Andersson conducted the first modern archaeological excavations in China.

He floated artifacts back to Beijing on rafts buoyed by yak skins stuffed with straw.

Andersson found pots similar to these. Scholars don t know whether the painted designs were symbolic or simply decorative.
Pondering this puzzle of pottery kept Andersson up nights. Finding ancient ceramics was nothing new in China. Where others focused on a relic s beauty, however, Andersson documented the depths at which objects were found. Being a geologist, he understood that older layers of earth are usually positioned below newer ones. Thus the deeper the artifacts were buried, the older they likely were. At last Andersson concluded that the pottery did indeed date to the Neolithic period. In the following years, he collected thousands of artifacts and floated them back toward Beijing on river rafts made of branches and yak skins stuffed with straw. His work proved that a complex society existed here thousands of years before China s first dynasty. Suddenly, scholars faced the possibility that Chinese civilization had its own separate roots.

IMAGINE YANGSHAO VILLAGE LIFE SEVEN THOUSAND YEARS AGO . . .
You live in a round house in which wooden poles support thatched roofs and walls made of packed earth. You share this home with your immediate family, and homes for your aunts, uncles, and cousins cluster nearby. The largest home belongs to the head of your extended family. About fifty such dwellings, housing several hundred people, make up the entire village. The door of everyone s house opens onto a central plaza-the hub of community life and the site for important ceremonies and group decision-making. One of your chores is to let pigs out of the thornbush pen that everyone shares at the center of town. The pigs spend the day foraging in the woods and you shoo them back into the pen each night.
Every family in this village does a little bit of everything to make a living. That means every family gathers and grows food, sews clothes with bone needles, fires pots in the kiln, and spends hours grinding stones into axes. For food, you enjoy acorns, sour dates, tubers, deer, rabbits