1.
I Ching
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The I Ching, or Classic of Changes, is an ancient divination text and the oldest of the Chinese classics. The I Ching uses a type of divination called cleromancy, which produces apparently random numbers. Four numbers,6 to 9, are turned into a hexagram, the hexagrams themselves have often acquired cosmological significance and paralleled with many other traditional names for the processes of change such as yin and yang and Wu Xing. The core of the I Ching is a Western Zhou divination text called the Changes of Zhou, various modern scholars suggest dates ranging between the 10th and 4th centuries BC for the assembly of the text in approximately its current form. It is possible that other systems existed at this time. The name Zhou yi literally means the changes of the Zhou dynasty, the changes involved have been interpreted as the transformations of hexagrams, of their lines, or of the numbers obtained from the divination. Feng Youlan proposed that the word for changes originally meant easy, as in a form of divination easier than the oracle bones, there is also an ancient folk etymology that sees the character for changes as containing the sun and moon, the cycle of the day. Modern Sinologists believe the character to be derived either from an image of the sun emerging from clouds, the Zhou yi was traditionally ascribed to the Zhou cultural heroes King Wen of Zhou and the Duke of Zhou, and was also associated with the legendary world ruler Fu Xi. The Zhou yi itself does not contain this legend and indeed says nothing about its own origins, the Rites of Zhou, however, also claims that the hexagrams of the Zhou yi were derived from an initial set of eight trigrams. During the Han dynasty there were various opinions about the relationship between the trigrams and the hexagrams. The basic unit of the Zhou yi is the hexagram, a composed of six stacked horizontal lines. Each line is broken or unbroken. The received text of the Zhou yi contains all 64 possible hexagrams, along with the name, a short hexagram statement. The book opens with the first hexagram statement, yuán hēng lì zhēn, edward Shaughnessy describes this statement as affirming an initial receipt of an offering, beneficial for further divining. The word zhēn was also used for the divine in the oracle bones of the late Shang dynasty. It also carried meanings of being or making upright or correct, the names of the hexagrams are usually words that appear in their respective line statements, but in five cases an unrelated character of unclear purpose appears. The hexagram names could have been chosen arbitrarily from the line statements, the line statements, which make up most of the book, are exceedingly cryptic. Each line begins with a word indicating the number, base,2,3,4,5, top
2.
Classic of Poetry
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It is one of the Five Classics traditionally said to have been compiled by Confucius, and has been studied and memorized by scholars in China and neighboring countries over two millennia. Since the Qing dynasty, its rhyme patterns have also analysed in the study of Old Chinese phonology. Early references refer to the anthology as the 300 Poems, with a typically inexact use of three hundred. The Odes first became known as a jīng, or a book, in the canonical sense. The same word shi later became a term for poetry. In English, lacking an exact equivalent for the Chinese, the translation of the word shi in this regard is generally as poem, song, before its elevation as a canonical classic, the Classic of Poetry was known as the Three Hundred Songs or the Songs. The Classic of Poetry contains the oldest chronologically authenticated Chinese poems, the majority of the Odes date to the Western Zhou period. A final section of 5 Eulogies of Shang purports to be songs of the Shang Dynasty as handed down by their descendents in the state of Song. According to the Eastern Han scholar Zheng Xuan, the latest material in the Shijing was the song Tree-stump Grove in the Odes of Chen, dated to the middle of the Spring and Autumn period. The content of the Poetry can be divided into two sections, the Airs of the States, and the eulogies and hymns. The Airs of the States are shorter lyrics in simple language that are generally ancient folk songs which record the voice of the common people. They often speak of love and courtship, longing for an absent lover, soldiers on campaign, farming and housework and they also include hymns used in sacrificial rites and songs used by the aristocracy in their sacrificial ceremonies or at banquets. Whatever the origin of the various Shijing poems as folk songs or not, in other words, they show an overall literary polish together with some general stylistic consistency. About 95% of lines in the Poetry are written in a four-syllable meter, lines tend to occur in syntactically related couplets, with occasional parallelism, and longer poems are generally divided into similarly structured stanzas. All but six of the Eulogies consist of a single stanza, almost all of the Airs, however, consist of three stanzas, with four-line stanzas being most common. Although a few rhyming couplets occur, the pattern in such four-line stanzas required a rhyme between the second and fourth lines. Often the first or third lines would rhyme with these, or with each other and this style later became known as the shi style for much of Chinese history. One of the characteristics of the poems in the Classic of Poetry is that they tend to possess elements of repetition and variation
3.
Wu Zetian
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Wu was the only Empress regnant of China in more than four millennia. Wu was the concubine of Emperor Taizong, after his death, she married his successor—his ninth son, Emperor Gaozong, officially becoming Gaozongs huanghou in 655, although having considerable political power prior to this. After Gaozongs debilitating stroke in 660, Wu Zetian became administrator of the court, besides her career as a political leader, Wu Zetian also had an active family life. One of her grandsons became the renowned Emperor Xuanzong of Tang, in Chinese history and literature, Wu Zetian was known by various names and titles. Mention of her in the English language has increased their number. The exact birth name of Wu Zetian is no longer retrievable and she changed her name to Wu Zhao after rising to power, often written as 武曌, with 瞾 being one of the invented characters by Wu. Wu was her surname, which she retained, according to traditional Chinese practice, after marriage to Gaozong. Emperor Taizong gave her the art name Wu Mei, meaning glamorous, during her life, and posthumously, Wu Zetian was awarded various official titles. Both hou and huangdi are titles, born Wu Zhao, she is not properly known as Wu Hou until receiving this title in 655, nor is she properly known as Wu Zetian, her regnal name, until 690, when she took the title, huangdi. Various Chinese titles have been translated into English as empress, including empress in both the sense of empress consort and empress regnant, generally the emperor was male and his chief spouse was given a title such as Huanghou, often translated as empress or more specific empress consort. Since the time of Qin Shi Huang the Emperor of China used the title Huangdi, Wu Zetian was the only woman in the history of China to assume the title of Huangdi. Wu Zetian is said to be the woman in Chinese history to wear the yellow robe as a monarch. The Wu family clan originated in Wenshui County, Bingzhou, the birthplace of Wu Zetian is not documented in preserved historical literature and remains controversial. Some argue that Wu Zetian was born in Lizhou, while others insist she was born in the imperial capital of Changan. She lived from 17 February 624 –16 December 705, Wu Zetian was born in the seventh year of the reign of Emperor Gaozu of Tang. In the same year, an eclipse of the sun was visible across China. Her father Wu Shihuo was engaged in the business and the family was relatively well off. Her mother was from the powerful Yang family, during the final years of Emperor Yang of Sui, Li Yuan stayed in the Wu household many times and became close to the Wu family, whilst holding appointments in both Hedong and Taiyuan
4.
Pinyin
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Pinyin, or Hànyǔ Pīnyīn, is the official romanization system for Standard Chinese in mainland China, Malaysia, Singapore, and Taiwan. It is often used to teach Standard Chinese, which is written using Chinese characters. The system includes four diacritics denoting tones, Pinyin without tone marks is used to spell Chinese names and words in languages written with the Latin alphabet, and also in certain computer input methods to enter Chinese characters. The pinyin system was developed in the 1950s by many linguists, including Zhou Youguang and it was published by the Chinese government in 1958 and revised several times. The International Organization for Standardization adopted pinyin as a standard in 1982. The system was adopted as the standard in Taiwan in 2009. The word Hànyǔ means the language of the Han people. In 1605, the Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci published Xizi Qiji in Beijing and this was the first book to use the Roman alphabet to write the Chinese language. Twenty years later, another Jesuit in China, Nicolas Trigault, neither book had much immediate impact on the way in which Chinese thought about their writing system, and the romanizations they described were intended more for Westerners than for the Chinese. One of the earliest Chinese thinkers to relate Western alphabets to Chinese was late Ming to early Qing Dynasty scholar-official, the first late Qing reformer to propose that China adopt a system of spelling was Song Shu. A student of the great scholars Yu Yue and Zhang Taiyan, Song had been to Japan and observed the effect of the kana syllabaries. This galvanized him into activity on a number of fronts, one of the most important being reform of the script, while Song did not himself actually create a system for spelling Sinitic languages, his discussion proved fertile and led to a proliferation of schemes for phonetic scripts. The Wade–Giles system was produced by Thomas Wade in 1859, and it was popular and used in English-language publications outside China until 1979. This Sin Wenz or New Writing was much more sophisticated than earlier alphabets. In 1940, several members attended a Border Region Sin Wenz Society convention. Mao Zedong and Zhu De, head of the army, both contributed their calligraphy for the masthead of the Sin Wenz Societys new journal. Outside the CCP, other prominent supporters included Sun Yat-sens son, Sun Fo, Cai Yuanpei, the countrys most prestigious educator, Tao Xingzhi, an educational reformer. Over thirty journals soon appeared written in Sin Wenz, plus large numbers of translations, biographies, some contemporary Chinese literature, and a spectrum of textbooks
5.
Luoyang
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Luoyang, formerly romanized as Loyang, is a city located in the confluence area of Luo River and Yellow River in Central China. It is a city in western Henan province. It borders the capital of Zhengzhou to the east, Pingdingshan to the southeast, Nanyang to the south, Sanmenxia to the west, Jiyuan to the north. Situated on the plain of China, Luoyang is one of the cradles of Chinese civilization. The name Luoyang originates from the location on the north or sunny side of the Luo River. Since the river flows from west to east and the sun is to the south of the river, Luoyang has had several names over the centuries, including Luoyi and Luozhou, though Luoyang has been its primary name. It has been called, during various periods, Dongdu, Xijing, during the rule of Wu Zetian, the city was known as Shendu The greater Luoyang area has been sacred ground since the late Neolithic period. This area at the intersection of the Luo river and Yi River was considered to be the center of China. Because of this aspect, several cities – all of which are generally referred to as Luoyang – have been built in this area. In 2070 BC, the Xia Dynasty king Tai Kang moved the Xia capital to the intersection of the Luo and Yi, in 1600 BC, Tang of Shang defeated Jie, the final Xia Dynasty king, and built Western Bo, a new capital on the Luo River. The ruins of Western Bo are located in Luoyang Prefecture, in the 1136 BC a settlement named Chengzhou was constructed by the Duke of Zhou for the remnants of the captured Shang nobility. The Duke also moved the Nine Tripod Cauldrons to Chengzhou from the Zhou Dynasty capital at Haojing, a second Western Zhou capital, Wangcheng was built 15 km west of Chengzhou. Wangcheng became the capital of the Eastern Zhou Dynasty in 771 BC, the Eastern Zhou Dynasty capital was moved to Chengzhou in 510 BC. Later, the Eastern Han Dynasty capital of Luoyang would be built over Chengzhou, modern Luoyang is built over the ruins of Wangcheng, which are still visible today at Wangcheng Park. In 25 AD, Luoyang was declared the capital of the Eastern Han Dynasty on November 27 by Emperor Guangwu of Han, for several centuries, Luoyang was the focal point of China. In AD68, the White Horse Temple, the first Buddhist temple in China, was founded in Luoyang, the temple still exists, though the architecture is of later origin, mainly from the 16th century. An Shigao was one of the first monks to popularize Buddhism in Luoyang, in 190 AD, Chancellor Dong Zhuo ordered his soldiers to ransack, pillage, and raze the city as he retreated from the coalition set up against him by regional lords from across China. The court was moved to the more defensible western city of Changan
6.
Shangdi
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Shangdi is the pinyin romanization of two Chinese characters. The word itself is derived from Three Huang and Five Di, including Yellow Emperor, the originator of the Chinese civilization. However, 帝 refers to the High God of Shang, thus means deity, thus, the name Shangdi should be translated as Highest Deity, but also have the implied meaning of Primordial Deity or First Deity in Classical Chinese. The deity preceded the title and the emperors of China were named after him in their role as Tianzi, Shangdi seems to have ruled a hierarchy of other gods controlling nature, as well as the spirits of the deceased. These ideas were later mirrored or carried on by the Taoist Jade Emperor, Shangdi was probably more transcendental than immanent, only working through lesser gods. Shangdi was considered too distant to be worshiped directly by ordinary mortals, the emperors could thus successfully entreat Shangdi directly. Many of the oracle bone inscriptions record these petitions, usually praying for rain, in the later Shang and Zhou dynasties, Shangdi was conflated with Heaven. Shangdi was not just a tribal but instead a good moral force. It could thus be lost and even inherited by a new dynasty, nonetheless, the connection of many rituals with the Shang clan meant that Shang nobles continued to rule several locations and to serve as court advisors and priests. Likewise, the Shangs lesser houses, the shi knightly class, developed directly into the learned Confucian gentry and scholars who advised the Zhou rulers on courtly etiquette, the Confucian classics carried on and ordered the earlier traditions, including the worship of Shangdi. All of them include references, The Four Books mention Shangdi as well but, as it is a later compilation, by the time of the Han dynasty, the influential Confucian scholar Zheng Xuan glossed, Shangdi is another name for Heaven. Dong Zhongshu said, Heaven is the authority, the king of gods who should be admired by the king. In later eras, he was known by the name Heavenly Ruling Highest Deity and, in this usage. In Shang sources, Di is already described as the supreme ordainer of the events occur in nature, such as wind, lightning and thunder. All the gods of nature are conceived as his envoys or manifestations, Shang sources also attest his cosmological Five Ministries. Di, or Tian, as later texts explain, did not receive cult for being too remote for living humans to sacrifice to directly, instead, an intermediary such as an ancestor was necessary to convey to Di the offerings of the living. According to this interpretation, this identification had profound political implications, moreover, Kui is frequently appealed in horizontal relationship with other powers, undermining any portrait of him as the apex of the pantheon. Especially intriguing is the fact that palatial and ceremonial structures of these cultures were carefully aligned to the celestial pole, the interpretation of Shangdi as the celestial pole, Taiyi and as Ku the progenitor of the Shang is not contradictory
7.
Shang dynasty
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The Shang dynasty or Yin dynasty, according to traditional historiography, ruled in the Yellow River valley in the second millennium BC, succeeding the Xia dynasty and followed by the Zhou dynasty. The classic account of the Shang comes from such as the Book of Documents, Bamboo Annals. The Xia–Shang–Zhou Chronology Project dated them from c.1600 to 1046 BC, the Shang dynasty is the earliest dynasty of traditional Chinese history supported by archaeological evidence. Tens of thousands of bronze, jade, stone, bone, the Anyang site has yielded the earliest known body of Chinese writing, mostly divinations inscribed on oracle bones – turtle shells, ox scapulae, or other bones. More than 20,000 were discovered in the scientific excavations during the 1920s and 1930s. The inscriptions provide critical insight into many topics from the politics, economy, many events concerning the Shang dynasty are mentioned in various Chinese classics, including the Book of Documents, the Mencius and the Zuo Zhuan. Working from all the documents, the Han dynasty historian Sima Qian assembled a sequential account of the Shang dynasty as part of his Records of the Grand Historian. His history describes some events in detail, while in other cases only the name of a king is given, a closely related, but slightly different, account is given by the Bamboo Annals. The Annals were interred in 296 BC, but the text has a complex history, the name Yīn is used by Sima Qian for the dynasty, and in the current text version of the Bamboo Annals for both the dynasty and its final capital. It has been a name for the Shang throughout history. Since the Records of Emperors and Kings by Huangfu Mi, it has often used specifically to describe the later half of the Shang dynasty. In Japan and Korea, the Shang are still referred to almost exclusively as the Yin dynasty, however it seems to have been a Zhou name for the earlier dynasty. The word does not appear in the bones, which refer to the state as Shāng. It also does not appear in securely-dated Western Zhou bronze inscriptions, xie is said to have helped Yu the Great to control the Great Flood and for his service to have been granted a place called Shang as a fief. Sima Qian relates that the dynasty itself was founded 13 generations later, when Xies descendant Tang overthrew the impious and cruel final Xia ruler in the Battle of Mingtiao. The Records recount events from the reigns of Tang, Tai Jia, Tai Wu, Pan Geng, Wu Ding, Wu Yi and the final king Di Xin. According to the Records, the Shang moved their capital five times, Di Xin, the last Shang king, is said to have committed suicide after his army was defeated by Wu of Zhou. Legends say that his army and his equipped slaves betrayed him by joining the Zhou rebels in the decisive Battle of Muye, according to the Yi Zhou Shu and Mencius the battle was very bloody
8.
Zhou dynasty
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The Zhou dynasty was a Chinese dynasty that followed the Shang dynasty and preceded the Qin dynasty. This period of Chinese history produced what many consider the zenith of Chinese bronze-ware making, the dynasty also spans the period in which the written script evolved into its almost-modern form with the use of an archaic clerical script that emerged during the late Warring States period. He even received sacrifice as a harvest god, the term Hòujì was probably an hereditary title attached to a lineage. Jus son Liu, however, led his people to prosperity by restoring agriculture and settling them at a place called Bin, tai later led the clan from Bin to Zhou, an area in the Wei River valley of modern-day Qishan County. Taibo and Zhongyong had supposedly fled to the Yangtze delta. Jilis son Wen bribed his way out of imprisonment and moved the Zhou capital to Feng, the Zhou enfeoffed a member of the defeated Shang royal family as the Duke of Song, which was held by descendants of the Shang royal family until its end. This practice was referred to as Two Kings, Three Reverences, according to Nicholas Bodman, the Zhou appear to have spoken a language not basically different in vocabulary and syntax from that of the Shang. A recent study by David McCraw, using lexical statistics, reached the same conclusion, the Zhou emulated extensively Shang cultural practices, perhaps to legitimize their own rule, and became the successors to Shang culture. At the same time, the Zhou may also have connected to the Xirong, a broadly defined cultural group to the west of the Shang. According to the historian Li Feng, the term Rong during the Western Zhou period was used to designate political and military adversaries rather than cultural. The proto-Zhou were first located in the Shaanxi-Shanxi highland, where they absorbed elements from the Guangshe culture, King Liu moved his people to the lower Fen Valley and to the western bank of the Yellow River, where they resumed agriculture. His son Qing Jie, led the Zhou to the valley of the Jing River. They stayed there until Dan Fu moved again to the Wei Valley in order to avoid incursion by the Rongdi nomads. During this period, the Zhou mingled with the Qiang people, in all these stages, the advanced Shang bronze culture constantly imparted its influence on the Zhou. The Qi area was the region in all these influences would come to fruition. The contact among the proto-Zhou, the native Shaanxi Longshan, the Qiang, King Wu maintained the old capital for ceremonial purposes but constructed a new one for his palace and administration nearby at Hao. Although Wus early death left a young and inexperienced heir, the Duke of Zhou assisted his nephew King Cheng in consolidating royal power. Wary of the Duke of Zhous increasing power, the Three Guards, Zhou princes stationed on the eastern plain, to maintain Zhou authority over its greatly expanded territory and prevent other revolts, he set up the fengjian system
9.
Cantonese
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Cantonese, or Standard Cantonese, is a variety of Chinese spoken in the city of Guangzhou in southeastern China. It is the prestige variety of Yue, one of the major subdivisions of Chinese. In mainland China, it is the lingua franca of the province of Guangdong and some neighbouring areas such as Guangxi. In Hong Kong and Macau, Cantonese serves as one of their official languages and it is also spoken amongst overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia and throughout the Western World. When Cantonese and the closely related Yuehai dialects are classified together, Cantonese is viewed as vital part of the cultural identity for its native speakers across large swathes of southeastern China, Hong Kong and Macau. Although Cantonese shares some vocabulary with Mandarin, the two varieties are mutually unintelligible because of differences in pronunciation, grammar and lexicon, sentence structure, in particular the placement of verbs, sometimes differs between the two varieties. This results in the situation in which a Cantonese and a Mandarin text may look similar, in English, the term Cantonese is ambiguous. Cantonese proper is the variety native to the city of Canton and this narrow sense may be specified as Canton language or Guangzhou language in English. However, Cantonese may also refer to the branch of Cantonese that contains Cantonese proper as well as Taishanese and Gaoyang. In this article, Cantonese is used for Cantonese proper, historically, speakers called this variety Canton speech or Guangzhou speech, although this term is now seldom used outside mainland China. In Guangdong province, people call it provincial capital speech or plain speech. In Hong Kong and Macau, as well as among overseas Chinese communities, in mainland China, the term Guangdong speech is also increasingly being used among both native and non-native speakers. Due to its status as a prestige dialect among all the dialects of the Cantonese or Yue branch of Chinese varieties, the official languages of Hong Kong are Chinese and English, as defined in the Hong Kong Basic Law. The Chinese language has different varieties, of which Cantonese is one. Given the traditional predominance of Cantonese within Hong Kong, it is the de facto official spoken form of the Chinese language used in the Hong Kong Government and all courts and it is also used as the medium of instruction in schools, alongside English. A similar situation exists in neighboring Macau, where Chinese is an official language along with Portuguese. As in Hong Kong, Cantonese is the predominant spoken variety of Chinese used in life and is thus the official form of Chinese used in the government. The variant spoken in Hong Kong and Macau is known as Hong Kong Cantonese, Cantonese first developed around the port city of Guangzhou in the Pearl River Delta region of southeastern China
