There are two striking facts about China. First, the country is quite large. Second, the country was remarkably large early in its history, compared to most other political units. For instance, here is China in 200 AD:
How did this happen?
Or consider a modern version of the puzzle: currently there are over one billion Chinese in one political unit, and a bit of scattering. And there are over one billion Europeans, spread in fairly significant numbers across about fifty political units. How did such a fundamental difference come to pass?
I can think of many instructive explanations for China’s early size and unity that are nonetheless derivative. For instance perhaps a common language for writing played a key role, or perhaps the civil service and the exam system bound the country together. I don’t mean to gainsay those claims, but they are not fundamental. In part they are simply alternative descriptions of China’s relatively early unity. And there still ought to be reasons why those factors were the case, and some of them seem to postdate unity. On top of that, ideally we would like the explanation to account for China’s periodic descents into fragmentation and sometimes warring chaos.
I can think of a few factors that might count as fundamental, and often they involve economies of scale:
1. There may be greater economies of scale in Chinese agriculture. One specific hypothesis is that China’s “hydraulic” system of rice irrigation favored a centralized despotic authority (Karl Wittfogel, though I’ve never found this particular view convincing, see also earlier takes on “Oriental Despotism”).
2. There may be economies of scale for fighting land battles with horses. Alternatively, when it comes to naval warfare — more common for Europe — small countries have a chance to punch above their weight, witness England and Portugal.
3. China had lower climate volatility than did Europe, and that made it easier for a more stable equilibrium to emerge. (Or the kinds of climate volatility China had mattered less for its agriculture.) Big changes in climate, in contrast, periodically overturn political equilibria, most of all when agriculture was a huge chunk of gdp.
4. China has two main, navigable rivers running east to west, the Yellow and Yangtze rivers. It also has a large space of relatively flat plains.
5. China was formed when the prevailing technologies favored size and scale, and thus size and scale were imprinted onto early Chinese political DNA. This is a bit like the “inflation” theory of the universe. (NB: This part of the explanation is arguably “accidental” rather than “fundamental.”)
6. China and Rome are with regard to size and early unity not so different, but China did a better job absorbing the “barbarians” and thus persisted as a larger political unit.
What else? With some mix of those (and other) factors in place, the more traditional detailed explanations then kick in to promote China’s size as China.
Ideally, an explanation for China’s early size and unity, and why that size and unity bounced back from so many periodic bouts of warring states, should address the following:
a. Why the mountainous Tibet also ended up as a more or less coherent nation-state, and why that too happened fairly early. That seems to militate against purely rice-based explanations.
b. Why Yunnan was absorbed into China at a relatively late date — the 17th century — but once attached did become a stable part of the country in a manner that other parts of southeast Asia did not mimic.
c. Why Korea remained separate.
d. Why the Khmer empire proved unstable and perished, despite a high level of sophistication and state capacity.
e. Why the Aztec Triple Alliance grew to a much larger size than any political unit in North America at the same time.
What else?
I am grateful to a presentation by Debin Ma, and to comments from the Washington Area Economic History Seminar (recommended!), from a seminar last night. None of them are implicated in what I have written. I look forward to Debin’s paper on this topic (here is his earlier 2012 work), and Kenneth Pomeranz is writing an entire book on the question.
Addendum: Here is the Ko, Koyama, and Sng piece (pdf).
Many factors may have contributed, but obviously the most important is the very high average IQ of the Chinese and their horses.
How smart were those horses?
Let’s just say their donkeys weren’t called “smartasses” for nothing
But were the donkeys book smart or street smart?
I stil don’t understand how the horses could take an IQ test.
Multiple choice is easy for horses but they have trouble with the essay questions.
I guess it makes sense, I have seen horses using their hoofs to count. Thanks.
Clever Hans.
Now, I feel blindsided again. So if I understand the consensus here, Chinese Hans are clever because they are born this way, but German Hans was clever because he was well-taught and everyone knows the German training system is the world’s best. Are American schools failing American horses? How can America train American horses for the jobs of the future?
I just want to say how great it is that “Thiago” isn’t pretending to be a Brazilian any more.
It was a good run, big guy. We all enjoyed your 700-word posts in respond to my six-word trolling. But all good things must end.
The early urbanization, specialization, and trade that this large state enabled eventually resulted in the higher IQs.
Not sure about the horses.
Indeed, I believe Charles Neigh Murray wrote about this in his magnum opus, the hoof curve. Some liberal idiots think it’s due to the nutrition content of Chinese barley, but horse twin studies prove that this is fundamentally false.
Of course, there are those neigh-Sayers who say horse IQ tests are culturally biased towards the Chinese, but this is simply anti-science. I mean, horses can’t read anyways.
Does it mean Silicon Valley should be allowed to recruit more horses overseas?
Europe is constituted of the parts of failed empires. China isn’t.
China is almost entirely constituted of failed empires: The Shang, Zhou, Qin, Han, Sui, Tang, Yuan, Ming, Qing, and those are just the big ones. The difference is that these failed empires were much bigger than most failed European empires. But an explanation for that is almost exactly the question Tyler is asking.
#4
You have a large fertile area with relatively easy internal transport surrounded by difficult terrain.
Easy internal transport leads to unification. Difficult surrounding terrain keeps potential rivals at bay.
Korea was too mountainous and did not produce enough economic surplus for conquest to be cost effective.
+1
How did a fairly locked out country like Rome manage to conquer the west then? And why are France and Germany separate rather than a single country? I grant that this does explain the independence of islands.
It seems less a question of conquering as of maintaining — which leads nicely into your second question (for which I have only the most superficial answers: language and the dissolution of Western Rome).
The Med is the easy internal transport that the Romans took advantage of. Look how they spread, it’s along the coasts of the sea. Even close by areas like Alpine Gaul weren’t conquered until very late. The only exceptions are really northern Gaul and Britain, both of which sloughed off the empire early in its dissolution.
I agree that it has similarities to Ancient Egypt with two rivers instead of one.
Exactly. Surrounded by mountains, desert and ocean. Whereas Europe was forced to defend more borders.
Not something I’m an expert on, but a possibility: Confucian philosophy. This fits nicely into the rise of a unified China, and makes a certain intuitive sense as a cause, given the value it places on hierarchy an authority.
U.S. and Canada both have a larger landmass than China. Must be all that Confucianism of the British settlers.
Except that the Spanish settlers beat the English by more than a century, and St. Augustine was founded 52 years before the first British settlement – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Augustine,_Florida
The French too were not exactly layabouts, with Quebec being founded one year after Jamestown – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_colonization_of_the_Americas
“The French too were not exactly layabouts, with Quebec being founded one year after Jamestown”
Quebec was marginal land – barely worth having for the French and not worth seriously defending.
At the Treaty of Paris 1763, the French abandoned Quebec to save their sugar islands in the Caribbean. To this day, Quebecers have a hard time accepting that they were sold out and abandoned by France for sugar.
At the time the fur trade was a pretty big thing.
Sugar is sweet, Quebecois not so much
Confucianism would indeed have been an important factor in promoting the stability and prosperity that would encourage a larger China. Although there are elements of hierarchy and authority in Confucianism, it could be argued that Confucianism also strongly limited and controlled the exercise of political power, and that these limits along with Confucian virtue ethics offer greater influence on China ‘s size.
Probably more because of geographical attributes. China isn’t surrounded by mountains, a desert, and an ocean vs a small sea like the Mediterranean.
Is surrounded rather
I’m comfortable with these being semi-random outcomes. Throw in a little Jeff Goldblum monologue about chaos and strange attractors. Most observers during most of human history could point to a large political unit that was “winning.” One hundred years ago that would still be the British Empire.
They were probably less complacent than europeans. Or more.
‘perhaps a common language for writing played a key role’
Considering that speakers of different languages can communicate using a single set of ideographs, it is a bit flippant to say it is not ‘fundamental.’
There are many disadvantages to ideographs compared to an alphabet. However, the one major advantage of ideographs is the ability of people who do not share a single spoken word in common to communicate using them. An alphabet based system is inherently reliant on users sharing the same language.
‘In part they are simply alternative descriptions of China’s relatively early unity’
Somewhat tautological in attempting to dismiss the point – being part of that early unity is not the same as saying that an ideograph based system was not a fundamental building block in creating that unity.
+1
I had a professor in college who attributed the cultural collectivism or communitarianism of China to some unique hydrological features of the Yellow River. The claim was that the Yellow river carries an unusually high concentration of silt after it passes through the Loess Plateau. This silt than starts to fall out of suspension when the river slows down as it reaches flatter, lower land with less elevation gradient. The silt accumulates on the river bed, creating underwater dams and sometimes building up the river bed to a somewhat higher elevation than the surrounding plains. Hence, when the river floods, it is frequently catastrophic, as the river easily changes course, flooding the most productive farmland in China and causing large famines. Hence attempts to prevent the river from flooding were very important, so important that one of China’s mythical founding Emperors Yu the Great, the founder of the Xia dynasty (the first dynasty according to traditional Chinese historians), is credited with having figured out how to effectively control or mitigate the effects of the flooding of the Yellow River. The point being that if there was any weak point in the defenses against flooding, there was a very large risk that the Yellow River would flood, cause famine, and consequently also bring about a fair amount of violence due to the weakened status of the Empire. So if anyone shirked their duties, especially in regards to flood control, it could be putting everyone at real risk. If it is true that this kind of intensely collectivist culture is in some sense endogenous to the landscape, that might explain why China was able to grow so large so early, as people were already culturally attuned to obey authority, as opposed to societies full of more individualistic, unruly, and warlike barbarians. Anyway, that was the theory the professor expounded.
Sorry, I meant to post this in a separate thread here. Ideographs or logographs certainly do make administration of a polyglot empire easier, although there are some phonetic elements within Chinese characters when used to represent Chinese words. If you try and use Chinese characters to write down Japanese words, I am not sure if there remain any phonetic elements. Also, most of the languages spoken in China are from the same language family and have similar grammar, and some unique features that enable Chinese characters to be used to write the multiple languages, such as a lack of declensions, a lack of verb conjugation, and a lack of the use of phonemes used to distinguish singular and plural, and a shared SVO sentence structure. It is actually fairly easy for English speakers to gain some competence in reading Chinese if you can learn what the characters mean.
India had nearly just as big an area as a single political unit in 250BCE. And was pretty big as a unit (Gupta Empire) in 400AD.
They also had geographical boundaries based on mountains, etc.
This suggests that geography is the main factor.
The Deccan Plateau was the last area integrated into India’s ancient kingdoms, just like Tibet.
Seen elsewhere. The remains of two ethnic Chinese were unearthed in a Roman cemetery in Britain.. Apparently, they were well-traveled.
Link? If true, that is fascinating, which is why I don’t believe it.
Phoenician coins were found in Britain, which started much ado about nothing. It showed indirect trade iirc, but not the early direct links of silver to timber/tin that had been hoped for.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kristinakillgrove/2016/09/23/chinese-skeletons-in-roman-britain-not-so-fast/
Is it accurate to describe China as a single country before Mao? For much of its history, China was dominated by warlords. So was Japan, until the Meiji Restoration unified Japan. Due to the division in China, it was dominated by much smaller countries including Japan. That experience of being dominated by foreigners, including the British as well as the Japanese, contributed to Mao, nationalism, and the economic miracle we know as China today. American conservatives prefer to emphasize states over the national government, to strengthen the former while weakening the latter. Our Austrian friends prefer even greater division, or devolution, the city-state. Can they and the Chinese both be right?
Of course, this argument has been taking place in America since its founding. I just started reading The Framers’ Coup by Michael Klarman and it’s going to be very good read. The “coup” refers to the Federalists having prevailed in the argument over ratification of the Constitution, which was opposed by many (including George Mason) because of the power granted to the national government, the strongest case made for the national government by Washington et al. that it was essential if America was to survive not only another war with the British, France, or other European powers but an insurrection by anti-government mobs.
“Can they and the Chinese both be right?”
Yes: Singapore is a Chinese city-state ruthlessly rule by technocratic Mandarins.
Lee Kuan Yew wasn’t ruthless, he was smart. Smart in the way he ran the government in Singapore and smart in the way he ran Singapore’s relationship with China. In a previous comment I alluded to the Five Families and what was required to maintain the peace. Lee Kuan Yew knew how to maintain the peace.
“Lee Kuan Yew knew how to maintain the peace.”
So did Salazar and Franco and a number of other Fascist leaders. It does not xhange the fact they lead by terrorizing their peoples.
Yes, it is. There’s a reason the opening line of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms is, “The empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide.” Mao’s not an exceptional uniter; he’s just a another founder of another dynasty in a long cycle, after the dissolution period of the Opium War through the end of World War 2.
The Tokugawa shogunate ruled all of Japan for hundreds of years before the Meiji restoration. I believe other shogunates ruled all of Japan prior to that.
China has two agricultural systems. A rice, irrigation system in the south and a semi-arid wheat dominated system in the north.
This would appear to argue against claims that the rice culture of cooperation on irrigation played much of a role in the nature of the country.
The South of China is different.
Europe is a peninsula, made up of smaller peninsulas, themselves often made up of smaller peninsulas. It means it is virtually impossible to control with a large army in a central location. Add the Alps, the Pyrenees, the Channel and the Carpathians into the mix and uniting Europe by force is a fool’s errand.
Incidentally this explains why Koran is a separate country (Peninsula), Tibet (analogous to Switzerland).
Another reason is that the river system allows bulk transportation of food across vast areas with uncorrelated food shocks. If there is an earthquake or draught in Province X, the central government can send wheat from unaffected provinces Y and Z by river barge, which is by far the safest and cheapest option. This imposes obvious costso to breakaway provinces.
In Europe, rivers tend to be much shorter, and famine relief will generally involve expensive/dangerous sea travel. Again, South Korea is on a different river system, and I am guessing Tibet rivers are not particularly navigable.
Why isn’t Shangdong its own country? Its also a peninsula.
I believe that there are few natural barriers between Shandong and the rest of the North China plain, i.e. nothing comparable to the Amur.
Its also worth mentioning that Shandong is right next to the cradle of Chinese civilization, while the areas adjacent to Korea were more peripheral for most of early Chinese history.
A book I read about Gengis Khan’s empire said that the dense European forests at that time might have made further conquest difficult. (Although, it doesn’t seem to have stopped the Romans?)
Maybe look into how terrain favored attack versus defense?
Cavalry vs infantry based armies. This is a large part of the reason that Roman eastern expansion stopped where it did. Everything that could be dominated by an infantry centric army was taken. The eastern steppes were ruled by cavalry centric armies, in particular horse archer armies of light cavalry.
In the west, a cavalry based army would suffer disadvantages due to topography and forestry. In the east, Roman legions were annihilated by bow and arrow without ever even closing with the enemy. See Marcus Antonius’ dismal attempt at invading the east.
Europe was very poor at the time. Genghis didn’t really try.
This Quora thread on how Korea stayed independent is of interest: https://www.quora.com/How-was-Korea-able-to-resist-China-and-remain-a-separate-nation-state-throughout-history-given-that-it-is-so-close-geographically-to-the-mighty-nation
I have a theory that the reason why Korean dramas are so valued is because Korean language and culture has evolved to be more fierce due to having to defend from China, Japan and Mongolia throughout their history.
Their language took on their historical drama basically. It just sounds more dramatic.
I go for topography
e.g., the Han empire covers pretty much the eastern plains missing the mountainous and highland regions.
Other examples might be the Persian or the Ethiopian empires covering more or less the respective plateaus. The Incan empire streched over the Andens after developing the matching infrastructure (but not over to the lowland plains).
The Espanas lie on the higher sections of Iberia while Portugal covers the western lowlands
and so on
Less disease in China may have made it easier to unify the population. Sickness promotes independence.
Wait, there! What about the role of government investment in infrastructure? The Grand Canal is by far the most profitable public works project of antiquity. It supercharged the Chinese economy for centuries. Whatever its cost, it’s paid it back thousands of times over. Those ancient Chinese were smart cookies, indeed.
China has been so large for so long, as opposed to being divided into multiple nation states, because:
1. Shared writing system
2. Shared spoken language – Mandarin – dictated by Mao. It is now the official language of China. India should GB for English. I’m glad I don’t speak Irish or Italian.
3. Confucianism – a group oriented ethos that subordinates individual needs to the family and community, respect for tradition and authority, and veneration of past generations.
4. Genghis Khan – his DNA is shared by a significant percentage of the population – he had a thousand(s) concubines and even more daughters.
5. A wide, relatively flat, terrain spanned by an enormous navigable river.
5. Horses because Ghengis.
It is interesting to ponder what that means for the USA and for Europe.
I meant to say: “India should thank GB for English”.
Only a small percentage of Indians speak English (I’ve read 15), and many not very well.
15% is a lot of Indians…
For Christ’s sake, Cowen, read some Turchin!
In case you don’t know, it’s offensive to Christians to take the Lord’s name in vain.
I assume you don’t use the N-word and don’t call homosexuals F—-ts because you don’t want to offend. Please show the same courtesy to others.
It’s all about the geography. China has a huge central plain that was conquered quite quickly once someone – the Emperor of Qin State – was strong enough to do so. Until then, China was made up of various independent kingdoms.
Various Chinese and Korean dynasties fought each other, and at times strong Korean dynasties ran much of what is now northeast China and southeastern Siberia. The Mongols tried to conquer both of them, crushing the existing Chinese dynasty but ultimately failing in Korea. As they set up their seat of power in China as the “Yuan Dynasty” in what is now Beijing, the Mongols are regarded by Chinese as a Chinese dynasty. Korea is very rugged and mountainous, and has very harsh winters, both of which make it tough to conquer, especially from the land.
China actually did conquer Vietnam and occupied it for over 1000 years. After that, stronger Chinese dynasties influenced (and occupied) parts of VN on and off until the French came in the late 19th century.
Both Korea and Vietnam purposely abandoned or de-emphasized Chinese characters and developed their own script at least partially to assert cultural independence from China.
What the hell is this Korean propaganda? The Mongols failed to subjugate Korea? What the hell. Korea was made a province. The king kept because he kowtowed so hard the Mongols thought him more loyal than a fellow mongol.
It’s fashionable because Trump mentioned that Korea was a vassal state of China. So, the poseurs have to act like they know Korea has always been independent.
The cliodynamics/social evolution crowd has a lot to say about this. China faced a much greater threat from horse-riding pastoralists on the steppe. In premodern times, horse-riding pastoralists had exceptional war-making capacity. Since the main form of wealth in pastoralist societies (livestock) is easily taken in raids, pastoralists are subject to endemic warfare, and the social units that survive are geared towards warfare. The invention of horse archery further increased their war-making capacity. Morris at least calls this the “nomad anomaly”, where steppe pastoralists’ war-making capacity is far out of proportion with their social development, but I don’t know if he coined the term.
So the ecological frontier between settled agriculture and nomadic pastoralism selected for agrarian states that were highly cohesive and functional, since non-cohesive, weak agrarian states would be destroyed by pastoralists. Eventually, one such strong state would be strong enough to turn around and conquer other agrarian states, especially ones far from the agriculturalist-pastoralist frontier, which did not face as strong selection pressure for state and war-making capacity. The Koyama et al. paper also argues that the agriculturalist-pastoralist frontier drove Chinese unification, but the mechanism seems to be different (though not mutually exclusive with the process I talked about) (I’ve only skimmed the paper so far).
There must be other processes by which states and empires form, since many of them have been built away from such frontiers, as in pre-columbian North America and Mesoamerica and in Western Europe. Rome didn’t form on an agriculturalist-pastoralist frontier. But then again, when Rome fell, no one ever managed to unify the Mediterranean basin again.
Agreed! This issue has been thoroughly addressed by Turchin, Morris and others as a response to a plethora of steppe Nomadic raiders. The pastoralists live martial lives with swift horses and learn to organize together to steal from the agricultural communities. The Mongol recipe is simple — unite as needed to quickly overwhelm any local community and then steal all their surplus. The logical response of agricultural communities (in this case China) was to unite together into a very large empire. Failure to do so threatens survival.
Europe had better natural barriers of forests and mountains.
I am not saying this is the only answer, but it should at least be added to the list, as it what several prominent historians believe.
I would actually almost reverse the question though, as empires were common historically. The better question is why was Europe (and earlier Classical Greece) able to resist unification for so long? As most historians of the Great Divergence suggest, intermediate levels of fragmentation seem to be necessary for rapid cutting edge (as opposed to catch up) progress.
Oh, and BTW, China was fragmented various times throughout history and these were often eras of cultural dynamism (as were the initial stages of unification).
Any explanation that relies heavily on rice cultivation has to contend with a couple things:
1) Much of northern China has traditionally relied on wheat and millet rather than rice, and it has historically been northern, rather than rice growing southern, Chinese who more often have been the drivers of China’s political unity.
2) Rice didn’t have this effect on Southeast Asia.
Talk about Gell-Mann amnesia.
I would’ve thought that given Mr. Cowen’s reading speed he could read all the history books written about China in a week, but apparently there are things he doesn’t understand.
First of all that map is wrong; Koguryo was further north, and somewhat bigger.
China is big for the reason that Rome or Persia were big. Empires are efficient. China more so. China also had the advantage that it’s vector of conquest was south; and it’s always easier to conquer to your south. Gets warmer the further you conquer. And the south is mountainous; hard to build a big state there, while the north is a huge plain; so in every instance of collapse of central authority China usually had a big state on the north and several small states in the south; and the guys on the north always ended up conquering the southern states.
Isn’t this discussed at length in Guns, Germs, and Steel? Wasn’t the idea there that, in China, you had relatively fewer mountains, thick forests, and coasts forming natural borders (vis a vis Europe) and relatively fewer climate problems, deserts, etc. (vis a vis India)?
Also, regarding Korea, isn’t the obvious answer “tons of mountains” … and the Chinese weren’t never really great at that whole boat thing given that there was no pressing need to be good at boats.
Precisely. Topography and physical geography has everything to do with today’s political geography.
Why the Aztec Triple Alliance grew to a much larger size than any political unit in North America at the same time.
Did it? Our available sources on the various Mound Builder cultures are so thin (no written history, no visitor chronicles except De Soto in the southern reaches, mostly wiped out by disease and decivilized before anyone else came by) that we have no good idea if the political organization was all city-states, if it had several polities in the north of the same order of magnitude as the Aztecs, or even a single empire that dwarfed the Aztecs. At best we can make guesses on the basis of physical artifacts, but that’s pretty weak when none of them have any writing on them.
Mound Builder Civilisation: http://dispatchesfromturtleisland.blogspot.com.au/2012/01/monroe-louisiana-as-source-of-new-world.html
China is not more geographically divided than other regions of the world. One could as well argue that the deep reach of the Baltic into the North European Plain, which is very flat and climactically homogeneous, helped to knit it together, as much as it helped to divide it, much as the Mediterranean did for Rome. The Chinese advantage in rivers and waterways was not exploitable until the Southern parts of China (rich in rivers) and the Grand Canal was constructed, and this occurred relatively late in its history, from the 7th Century on at the earliest.
The cliodynamics school is certainly onto something, and this is very apparent because there is a second geographical anomaly here: why is it that every successful steppic group that expanded into Eurasia nucleated on the borders of China and moved West? The Huns, Xiongnu, Kushans, Xionites, the Gokturks and all their descendant polities such as Khazaria, the Sekjuks and the Golden Horde, the White Huns, Kimeks, Kharakhitai, and of course the Mongols themselves and all their descendant Empires. Every steppic federation that was prominent in Eurasian history traces at least part of its social origins to the borders of China.
I’m surprised that no one mentioned the essay from David Friedman on the size of nations, which is the topic being discussed here. I’m not sure how much it answers the question of China though, since it’s been a very long time I haven’t looked at it
Here is the essay: http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Size_of_Nations/Size_of_Nations.html#fn1
#1: topography, #2: the existence of the Roman Empire and its subsequent dissolution. It’s way simple.
You’re really trying to force a much more complicated Guns Germs and Steel lately. Everything has to do with agriculture, geography, and the weather. In many countries of Europe, the indigenous people speak extremely different dialects depending on which mountain valley one finds himself in. They have different wedding traditions, as one example, and numerous other cultural traditions.
Another way of putting it is that the Great Man theory of history – that individual humans have any impact on political geography – is in the micro scale, whereas real changes in the macro scale have very little to do with individual humans and much more to do with how humans handle and manipulate their surroundings generally.
I took a class on Chinese history maybe 39 years ago. The actual process of the Chinese empire’s southward expansion was left hand-wavingly vague. Was it violent, was it by consent of the locals? It would seem like almost as big a story in Chinese history as westward expansion is in American history, but it seemed much less well-documented than other aspects of Chinese history.
Or at least that was the state of the art in the 1970s.
China had basically reached the modern southern border by 218BC. Completely done by 100BC By conquest, sure, but the locals weren’t many, nor very warlike. The area wasn’t heavily colonized by Han farmers for millennia, and it wasn’t heavily populated at all, so it’s not a big part of the Chinese histories themselves. No great battles. Just “natives did something stupid, we sent troops, annexed the place, revolts happened twice a century or so”.
The big stories are the westward expansions to Central Asia. Those are very well narrated. Great stories there.
The actual conquests weren’t particularly interesting, but the shift from North to South China is indeed one of the biggest stories in history. For the last thousand years, South China vastly outperformed the North in pretty much everything (academic achievement, business, science, culture, wealth, whatever) except fighting capacity. In other words, being next to steppe nomads may not have had such good long term effects.
Might this have to do with the fact that the South had better access to trade routes reaching Indochina, India and the middle East? The culture emanating from the Pearl River delta has just traditionally been so much more involved in global commerce, as well as emigration.
I have one thought to add. Korea – why did it remain independent?
Garlic.
It was annexed once, barbarians from Manchuria invaded. Tried once again; didn’t work out. Korean kingdoms were very nice vassals, the real estate isn’t very productive, so there was never a good rationale for invasion.
A possibility:
Gengis Khan conquered all the mongolic and turkic tribes of central Asia, and then, as an unit, they conquered China (meaning that, in the end, China becomes even bigger: now it was China + turco-mongol territories).
In contrast, most of the germanic tribes of central and eastern Europe, instead of being conquered by Attila and his Huns, ran to the Roman Empire, who was splitted between several independent tribes.
Of course, a mystery remains: why central Asia barbarians were more easily unified than central European barbarians?
>why central Asia barbarians were more easily unified than central European barbarians?
Brexit was a death blow to the status of people like Tyler, but I would not completely give up on the unity of European barbarians just yet.
Central Europe barbarians weren’t highly mobile like horse tribes.