Historiographic Essay: Chinese history

Historiographic Essay Students Course Professor Date In the past decade, Chinese history has gained much popularity. A few periods of Chinese history have been subjected to thorough research, and past text on them have been observed sufficiently all in an attempt to make this history clear and sensible. There have been many attempts by the authors to put out text which explains and layout of the events in early China. Where some are widely accepted, some are met with criticism for either lacking information or adding what is known not to have existed. The flood of works produced by historians reexamining Chinese history is in plenty but not enough yet. Summarizing some of these texts helps one understand what the author was trying to achieve while creating the text. This essay is going to look at some text written about Chinese history and try to answer how different historians report on non-Chinese exercising considerable influence in Chinese history. Where culture, social and economic impacts influence events recorded in history, historians often follow later or sooner. In our case, Chinese history has been influenced by all these factors, but in particular, it is the outside factors such as influenced by an outsider that the following authors took an interest upon. The innovate study of Valerie Hansen's through her book The Open Empire, and Eberhard Wolfram through his book A History of China undertook the extensive research of the Chines history, and each of these books gives the historical topic a methodological ingenuity with an interpretive flair that they either educate or inspire a young historian. The open Empire by Valarie Hansen is one such text where the author argues that during the long China history, the nation experienced beneficial interactions with her neighbors. The environment was neither unitary nor closed society, but an open one with dynamic changes with borders that were permeable including the era of stringent control. Inspired by recent found texts and facts, Valerie Hansen observes that China was at the time gradually but continuously responding and taking in outside influences, such as economic, cultural, linguistic and religious forming the vital and diverse China. In religious, she accounts for the economic and social developments, which underlay the religious changes of the Southern Song. In the South of the republic, most people would worship individuals that were resident of the area before their demise. Influences and effects of increased mobility of the cultivators who were in the lowland and those in the rice growing regions resulted in the assimilation of other gods especially from the place they moved. In the isolated mountain, regions, there were fewer changes as cults remained.[Hansen, Valerie. The open empire: A history of China to 1600. WW Norton, 2000.] [Hansen, Valerie. The open empire: A history of China to 1600. WW Norton, 2000.] Eberhard Wolfram gives a similar observation of Chinese history. This scenario is expected as history does not involve the creation of new facts or reconstruction of the past, but it is the creation of the past by using primary sources hence some similarities in different author’s writings. Wolfram gives an account of the first division of China. There were like in the first narrative economic and social problems; however, he adds intellectual problems. China experienced the first division, where states demanded to be legitimate rulers. Then came the three kingdoms Wei, Wu, Shu Han to the rule of Western China. Following was a division of the south and north with the north getting non-Chinese nomad and south had several cliques taking power one after the other. The dynasty system followed to United China in 580 which adopted the culture of the north and gentry traditions. Just like Hansen, Wolfram observes the increase in the population of the Chinese which affected the economies of the cities especially the capital. The monetary system was disorganized. After 400 years of a monetary economy, China reversed to the predominance of natural economy; he gives this transformation to the Europeans. Mongol and Turkish who ruled the North of China influenced the region with their traditions of feudal nobility taking over the social order of the gentry. This period consisted of push and pulled between the northern nobility and Chinese gentry. Both the North and South influenced Buddhism until A.D 220 where the effects started fading because of the penetration of the European, whose civilization brought change in 1580 and 1842. Coming in of Buddhism was characterized by new science, new notions, many elements of culture and new ideas which gradually killed the old Chinese philosophies as it had to compete with the new phenomenon. Before Buddhism China had regarded herself as the only civili...