A Concise History of China-Pangu to Puyi - Part 1

**Laszlo Montgomery** (0:00)
Hi, everybody. Thanks for tuning in. So glad you're here. This is Laszlo Montgomery welcoming you to the China History Podcast.
Back in 2010 and 2011, one of the first things I presented was a long series of very short episodes, maybe 20, 30 minutes long, that went dynasty by dynasty, Xia to Qing, and offered up the briefest of overviews. The hope was that by gaining an idea about which dynasty was which and what happened when, the rest of the episodes of the CHP would be a bit easier to consume. The big-picture objective was to present a skeleton or framework encompassing the arc of Chinese imperial history. Honestly, after more than 15 years, I've had so many conversations and received so many comments and emails from listeners who have never studied Chinese, and they all seem to say the same thing. By the time of the Three Kingdoms period in the third century, the history starts to sound the same and they're drowning in details that, well, quite interesting, tend to blend into similar things that happened in other dynasties, and by the tenth episode they've OD'd on all the Chinese names.
Well, in presenting all these stories from Chinese history, all these Chinese names, one could say it's unavoidable. They go hand in hand with the history. So, right here and now, we're gonna start with China's prehistory and a few of the legends and myths, and then we'll head straight into the Shang dynasty of 1600 to 1046 BC and the oracle bones that brought the Shang over to the historical side of the ledger and away from the mythical column. And after that, we'll continue on to the Zhou, the Qin, the Han, three kingdoms, the Jin, and all the way to the last day of the Qing dynasty in February 1912
I was thinking, rather than reviewing Neolithic times, let's go all the way to the beginning of the beginning, to the Three August ones, or Sovereigns, or the Three Lords of China's pre-historical period. And then we'll cover the mythical five emperors of the ancient historical period.
The good news is that these eight figures, they sort of come one right after the other, so chronologically they're easy to keep straight. The bad news is there are multiple variations about who comprises the three and who makes up the five. So we'll look at most all of them, and although approximate dates are associated with various persons, the dates aren't that terribly important.
This period covers the six to seven centuries preceding the Xia dynasty. We only know from legends and from what the grand historian Sima Qian wrote in his Han dynasty chronology of Chinese history. In cultures the world over, they all have their own myths and oral histories and traditions about these times. These were the formative centuries when human beings on earth were beginning to settle and get themselves organized.
Those times between, say, 3000 and 2000 BC, humankind around the world, wherever they were in varying population densities, were learning the most fundamental necessities of life and the skills for survival in what was probably a very scary time for humankind. They also began to seek safety in numbers as clusters of families and clans joined together. In all manners of observed natural phenomena were first being ascribed to various gods and demigods. You know, since we're going this far back, we may as well mention the story of Pángu. He's not a member of the Sanhuang Wǔ Dì, the Three Sovereigns, Five Emperors group. Let's just briefly introduce him to the best of my knowledge in anything that has to do with China. There is nothing that goes back further than Pángu. Although this is more mythology than history, it all starts with him.
Pángu was born in an egg that contained the universe. The egg shape and the symbol of an egg is found in many cosmologies. China used it too. After gestating in that egg for 18,000 years, together with the primordial forces of yin and yang, the egg hatched in two pieces and then over an additional 180 centuries, Pángu separated the two halves of the egg into heaven and the earth below. Eventually, everything was in balance between the yang of heaven and the yin of earth. Pángu died afterwards and his physical remains were scattered about the earth. This is the Chinese version of what the Bible said happened on days five and six. All life on earth came into being. Pángu was by no means a god with a small g or a large g. Let's just say, in the Chinese mythological creation, it all happened with some great beginning and Pángu sort of went along for the ride to help to facilitate the formation of the heavens and the earth and then all life on earth. This is just one version of the myth of Pángu, the creation of the Chinese land and of the people. I don't want to get bogged down in too many details about all the different versions. Suffice to say, for our purposes today, first there was Pángu. And then there was Nǚwā, who also gets credit for creating the human race. Nǚwā is associated with a lot of myths in China who plays multiple roles and has a number of great powers. She's often associated with the god-king Fuxi, who we'll get to next. In some versions of the myth, Nǚwā is the daughter of the Jade Emperor. There's more agreement on who the five emperors were than with the three sovereigns. In some versions, and certainly Sima Qian's version, there were the three August ones, named Tiān Huáng, Dì Huáng, and Tài Huáng. In English, we'd say the heavenly sovereign, the earthly sovereign, and I guess the supreme sovereign. Sima Qian aside, most sources I ran across consider Fuxi, Shénnóng, and the Yellow Emperor, Huang Di, to be the three. So let's look at them. Again, Pángu aside, the most ancient of the ancients is Fuxi. His sister and or wife, as I just introduced, was Nǚwā.