> The extent to which present-day politics hovers over China’s archaeological ambitions became clear during a Wall Street Journal reporter’s encounter with an Uzbek researcher at the ruins of an ancient Kushan city near Chinor. “Tell the Chinese that they will not find any traces of the Chinese here,” he said.
Kind of an interesting story if you can look past the attempt by WSJ to shoehorn in a geopolitcal angle.
> Asked whether Beijing could use the Yuezhi to make territorial claims, Wang said the notion was absurd because the nomads are a historical people and no one serious would put forth that argument.
"We're just asking questions", etc.
It's not being anti-Chinese to observe that China is currently an expansionist totalitarian state, and that Chinese archaeologists will be under pressure to support a state-approved narrative. Their research should be viewed with their cultural context firmly in mind.
Or more likely: because they have, far too often, proved the natives wrong and also shown that the people the natives called ancestors weren't... or, if they were, they were also the ancestors of those terrible people from the Evil Enemy Tribe that Nobody Likes.
Natives have political agendas, too.
Sensoji temple in Tokyo was also rebuilt to its original design in the 1950s.
The giant stone Buddhas of Afganistan could do with reconstructing IMHO as well.
One day Soviet Union or Russia will remember the if china can claim Mongolian empire theirs and it reached Moscow …
But if chinese really studied its own history, its history are full of expansion then totally collapse. Anything went into the core land collapsed in it no doubt. But the core is not stable. There is no political solution to solve an empire which abhor difference and only use exam to do social cohesion and inclusion.
This is nonsense. Truth is patently objective. Narratives fail to get at truth, but that doesn't change the nature of truth.
Nah, HN readers might be more familiar with its anime adaptation, "Dragon Ball".
It's kinda like Pinocchio, which you may find in Ergo Proxy or a thousand other stories.
No.
Gandhara finds its name in way older documents such as Mahabharata. The people of Gandhara were called Gandharva. According to Mahabharata, these were people skilled in archery, wars, and also fine arts.
I am not sure about the history, but I am sure the name doesn’t come from Alexandria.
This sort of thing happened a lot with the Old Testament (despite being written down). I would be shocked if it didn't also happen with Mahabharata, which is famous for not having been written down (much).
I’m sure ideological archeology can solve that though. That path also has a lot of history.
Usually the way of the site of higher riches and more advanced technically, organizationally, etc, to the less one?
We don't really acknowledge in history class just how lucky the west got with Temüjin dying and stopping the expansion that was literally right at our door.
Edit: The sibling comment is grossly misleading, the west barely won against a scouting battalion that we had time to prepare for that was frozen and starving because the greatest wingman in history tricked the army into taking the long dangerous way through the mountains and sent us a heads-up.
The Mongol army wasn't primitive, it's that their purposeful strategy (and what made them so dangerous so far from home) required they plunder food and supplies regularly along the way. It made it so they didn't need huge supply lines and could outmaneuver armies that did.
Later, roving hordes on horseback arrive without warning from far away, and simply take everything, breaking any balance. The horse masters are the new rulers. Later, the horse masters lose. etc
A short, memorable, oxymoronic, and yet accurate description of these efforts.
I like the term so much that I'm going to start using "ideological [scientific field]" to refer to similar pseudo-scientific efforts in other fields.
It’s unlikely that this is really going to move the needle as far as rivalry between China and other countries goes; it’s more of a side effect of that rivalry, like national museums, the Olympics, and moon landings.
If we look at what was happening in India, in Mali, in Japan and China, in Tenochtitlan or Caracol or Cusco, we see a different history happening.
From the failure of the siege of Vienna in 1683, to the end of World War II, Europe and the US did dominate the world. That has been fading, and the narrative is facing too.
So the world turns.
It's a bit tiring to see the average tech guy on HN demonstrate their critical thinking about everything China. Being able to write some code and read your own country's propaganda does not mean you're well equipped to talk about other countries.
That's because it is hard to learn about pre-Columbian America because we have very little writing from that period -- mainly because they didn't write much down compared to for example how much was recorded in writing by people in China 3,000 years ago.
Pardon my ignorance but why is a culture's existence for millennia such an extraordinary fact that it has to be seen as a myth or popaganda? Did humans just pop out of nowhere?
I was of the persuasion that "History is written to say it wasn't our fault" - Sam Phillips, but it may play a more active role than that.
I recently read and enjoyed 'The Silk Roads', Frankopan, which, to oversimplify, takes as its thesis the idea that "...for millennia, it was the region lying between east and west, linking Europe with the Pacific Ocean, that was the axis on which the globe spun." I was persuaded that he has a point.
I'm currently reading 'The New China Playbook', Jin, together with an ideologically-varying friend as a way to base our discussions more on knowledge than opinion.
So I'm particularly interested in what others have found helpful in understanding China's past and present. Any recommendations?
"The reasoning of 1421 is inexorably circular, its evidence spurious, its research derisory, its borrowings unacknowledged, its citations slipshod, and its assertions preposterous ... Examination of the book's central claims reveals they are uniformly without substance."
Whelp!
Those chinese ships were small floating cities and disease would have spread throughout the continent.
