ALL THINGS BIG AND SMALL 2.0

China's history show periods of 200-400 years when China was united under a ruling dynasty (although some dynasties such a Qin and Sui lasted less than 50 years) But interspersed between these  dynastic periods were the periods when war and famine ruled the land with China with breaking up into small states and kingdoms controlled by warlords and even non-Han Chinese rulers. Examples: Spring and Autumn Period, Warring States Period,  Three Kingdoms Period, 5 Dynasties and 10 Kingdoms Period and so on.  For those interested in China's history these intervening periods can be very confusing. Particularly when all these small states and kingdoms try to inherit legitimacy by adopting the names of past glorious dynasties. So you get Western Xia, Later Tang, Later Liang, Eastern Jin and many others.  The two full-color .png in the form of a table   shows the dynasties and  intervening periods with information the years they existed, the Foundeer of the dynas...

  I have been reading the history of imperial China, a time when dynasties rose and fell like clockwork in a pattern that seems almost cyclical. I have observed that there were many instances of the death penalty being meted out (either by public execution or by forced suicide) by Emperors and Kings to: Sons, Prime Ministers , Generals and Military Strategists, Eunuchs and even Concubines. This post is a chronicle of a phenomenon that I do not think is found in Western history. The Sons Who Never Made It to the Throne Being the Crown Prince was one of the most dangerous jobs in the empire — proximity to power made you a threat long before you ever wore the crown. • Fusu (Qin, 210 BCE) — eldest son of Qin Shi Huang. A forged edict, engineered by the eunuch Zhao Gao and Chancellor Li Si, ordered him to end his own life. He obeyed without question — and the empire he should have inherited collapsed within four years. • Liu Ju (Han, 91 BCE) — Emperor Wu's own Crown Prince, caught ...

  The Mandate of Heaven  philosophy in Chinese history The Mandate of Heaven (Tianming) is the political-cosmological philosophy that served as the foundational bedrock of Chinese dynastic legitimacy. it evolved into a deeply ingrained cultural belief system that permanently shaped the Chinese psyche regarding authority, governance, and justice with each dynasty aiming to legitimize its rule, and each failed dynasty depicted as losing the Mandate of Heaven.  Founding phase • A long, exhausting war of reunification (often a decade or more) precedes the new dynasty, fought by a low-born or frontier-military strongman rather than an aristocrat (Liu Bang/Han, Zhu Yuanzhang/Ming, Nurhaci-Hong Taiji lineage/Qing). • The founder or his immediate successor enacts tax relief, land redistribution, and demobilization to reward war-weariness and buy legitimacy — a near-universal "reconstruction dividend" in the first 1–2 generations. • A short, harsh "transitional unifier...