If you want to end China, you must first understand the history of China, thousands of years of cultural inheritance, so that we have a different style from other civilizations, the vast historical data is now the cultural treasures of mankind, and many of these histories are familiar to the Chinese people.
However, for foreigners, it is very difficult to understand Chinese history or ancient culture, and the ancient history written in chinese is no small test for the Chinese people, and modern people read history the most or rely on the vernacular version of the general history of the dynasty.
This is undoubtedly more difficult for foreigners who do not have the advantage of innate Chinese. In many places, Chinese history can only be introduced by a few words, and individual sinologists have paid a lot of sweat, and personally have a very thorough conclusion of Chinese history, and then pass on his knowledge by writing books and sayings.
Among them, the American He Kai is one, in 1975, Stanford University published his American version of the general history of China "China in the Imperial Era", which can be understood as the American version of the general history of China, after publication, it was used by many American universities as a textbook to introduce Chinese history.
Five thousand years up and down, that is to say, China's history has a history of up to 5,000 years, since the beginning of three generations, the country has a special historian to record all the affairs of the imperial court, so after thousands of years, our history has not only not been lost, but has been passed down.
Compared with the model of domestic history books, either chronicles, or intergenerational histories, or chronicles or national forms, the American book adopts an alternative approach, according to the social system to distinguish, He Kai divided thousands of years of history into three periods.
The first stage is the formative period, from the ancient period in the distant legend to the fall of the Qin Dynasty in the 3rd century BC; the second stage is the imperial era, from the establishment of the Han Dynasty to the end of the Five Dynasties, and the third stage is the late imperial era, from the establishment of the Song Dynasty to the pre-Taiping Heavenly Kingdom Movement.
After this time distinction, all that remains is a summary of the social system, economy, politics, thought, culture and art in each time period. The adoption of the pattern is fixed, that is, a simple introduction to chinese history, but this genre has not been a form of recording in China, which can be said to be unique.
For such a historical reading, naturally can not ask for more, he can not record every historical event in great detail, nor will he record every historical figure, just a summary of each period, with the eyes of a foreigner, a foreign sinologist to introduce his eyes of ancient China.
The history involved is very long, the space is limited, so naturally there will be a lot of hard wounds, the last thing that should not appear is the ancient Chinese era, no matter what, the two dynasties of Qin and Han should not be disconnected, and the Han dynasty and the Qin system can almost be regarded as one.
In the first stage of the legend, from ancient times to three generations are also different social styles, at least Yin Shang and Zhou can be sure that the feudal system, different from the Qin bureaucracy, is also included in general, naturally, they will not accurately reflect the real history of the time.
As in the first stage, the Three Kingdoms, the Two Jin Dynasties, the Southern and Northern Dynasties and the Sui and Tang Dynasties were not the same, and there were two completely two social systems, the former scholar society, the latter was the transition from the scholar society to the imperial examination system, the political system was completely different, and should not be classified as a period.