China’s first hard history is written on bone
Chinese history gains its first firm written anchor with Shang oracle bones carved around 1250 BCE. Qin Shi Huang forged a centralized empire in 221 BCE, after which dynasties rose and fell for two thousand years until revolution toppled the last emperor in 1911.
Civilization grew in the Yellow and Yangtze basins. Homo erectus fossils such as Yuanmou Man (about 1.7 million years ago) and Peking Man (700,000–400,000 BP) mark deep prehistory; modern human teeth from Fuyan Cave date about 120,000–80,000 BP. Neolithic farming took hold about 10,000 years ago: rice by the Yangtze carbon-dated about 8,000 years old, millet in the Yellow River valley about 7000 BCE. Jiahu (7000–5800 BCE) preserves early village life; Yangshao (5000–3000 BCE) and Longshan (3000–2000 BCE) cultures followed. The legendary Xia (c. 2070–1600 BCE) is often linked to Erlitou, though Western scholars treat Xia as mythical without contemporary writing.
Shang (c. 1600–1046 BCE) is archaeologically firm: Erligang finds and Yinxu near Anyang yield oracle bones from about 1250–1046 BCE—the oldest Chinese writing yet found. At least twenty-nine kings ruled; Wu Ding moved the capital to Yin about 1250 BCE. Zhou (1046–256 BCE), China’s longest dynasty, rose in the Wei valley, defeated Shang at Muye, and spread the Mandate of Heaven while seeding Confucianism, Taoism, and Legalism. Qin centralised the empire in 221 BCE; Han (202 BCE–220 CE) institutionalised Confucianism and advanced paper-making. Sui and Tang restored unity after Buddhist-era fragmentation; Song pushed printing and exams; Mongol Yuan (1271–1368) preceded Ming and Manchu Qing, which peaked territorially before nineteenth-century crises.
The 1911 Revolution created the Republic of China. After the Second Sino-Japanese War and civil war, Mao Zedong proclaimed the People’s Republic on the mainland in 1949 while the ROC government retreated to Taiwan. From 1978 Deng Xiaoping’s reform and opening transformed China into the world’s fastest-growing major economy of that era. Traditional historiography still reads the past as a dynastic cycle—even when archaeology shows overlapping polities rather than a single neat succession.
Source: History of China
