Updated with significant terms
on Thurs 9/8/99, 4AM

Chinese Geography and Ethnography:
Who's China?

Significant terms:

* Tokarian
* Han Chinese
* Pinyin

Review Questions in Red:

Before we dive into Chinese history, we have to be careful of what we call Chinese. Like our own impressions of China and the Western historiography of China, we should be must be careful not to make generalizations. The China today is not the China of four thousand years ago. The PBS video on the Tokarian mummies of Northwestern China with distinctly European characteristics illustrates well the controversy surrounding what constitutes ethnic Chinese historically. Why did the Chinese officials keep the mummies a secret for most of the twentieth century? The answer to that question should at least lead us to conclude that the ethnography of the land area that we now consider China proper is extremely varied from East to West and North to South. After all, the geography is extremely varied, from dry deserts and grasslands in the north to sub-tropical rice-growing regions in the South. Five semi-autonomous regions and 300 different languages in modern China paint a more complex picture of China than the stereotypical picture of an ethnically homogenous culture. There is a core culture, however, the geographic area of which expanded and contracted with the rise and fall of its numerous dynasties. This is the China that we will focus on primarily in class. This is the China's who's language we have written evidence of since the Shang dynasty around 1700 BCE. There is certainly much cross-cultural contact between the core Chinese culture and surrounding cultures. We will explore these relationships through our group studies of the five semi-autonomous regions and a broad view of the Eurasian trade networks historically. What was the relationship between the Chinese and the various cultures over the history of the core Han Chinese culture? There will be many answers to this question throughout our course of study.

Maps:

  1. Physical Geography

  2. Agricultural

  3. Linguistic

  4. Modern Population Density

  5. Han Empire

Back to the Syllabus/E-Zine Index