A Paleolithic homeland that unified under Qin in 221 BCE
China, the People's Republic, has 33 province-level divisions and trails only India in population. First unified under the Qin in 221 BCE, it went on to give the world gunpowder, paper, printing and the compass, and today it ranks as the largest manufacturer on Earth.
Its terrain runs from the Central Plain and the Yangtze and Yellow rivers to deserts, forests, plateaus and the Himalayas. Beijing is the capital and Shanghai the largest urban area. A single party, the CCP, rules a unitary state that holds a permanent seat on the UN Security Council and whose economy ranks second in the world by nominal output. The country counts 60 World Heritage Sites, among them the Great Wall and the Grand Canal.
Homo erectus lived here around 1.7 million years ago, and modern humans appear about 50,000 years ago. Farming villages spread across the lower Yellow River basin by the 6000s BCE, and the Bronze Age Erlitou culture arose on the Central Plain after 2000 BCE. The Zhou toppled the Shang around 1046 BCE, and after central authority collapsed in 771 BCE rival states fought until Qin Shi Huang declared himself first emperor; his dynasty lasted only fifteen years.
The Han, ruling from 206 BCE to 220 CE, grounded government in Confucian scholarship and helped open the Silk Road, along which Buddhism later arrived. The Sui reunited the country in 589 and built the Grand Canal, the Tang presided over a cosmopolitan capital at Chang'an, and the Song, founded in 960, made the first military use of gunpowder. Kublai Khan's Yuan conquered the Song in the 1270s, and a peasant leader founded the Ming in 1368.
The Manchu Qing, proclaimed in 1636, expanded into Tibet and much of Central Asia. Britain's First Opium War of 1839–42 imposed the first unequal treaty, and the Taiping Rebellion of 1850–64 killed millions. Defeat by Japan in 1894–95 cost Taiwan, and the 1911 Revolution ended imperial rule. The English word China traces through Portuguese, Malay and Persian to the Sanskrit Cīna, while the Chinese name Zhongguo means central state.
Source: China
