2.2.1 The Hwang-Ho and Yangtze Civilization of China

Arc: the Hwang-Ho (Yellow River) — "China's sorrow" for its floods — grows the Yangshao andLongshan neolithic cultures → the Shang dynasty (c. 1600–1046 BC: bronze, cities, oraclebones — China's writing's birth, the ancestors' counsel by divination) → the Zhou (1046–256 BC: the Mandate of Heaven — tianming — the dynastic theory: Heaven awards rule to the virtuous and withdraws it from the corrupt — revolution's religious licence; the "Warring States" chaos) → Qin unification (221 BC): the First Emperor — one script, one axle-width, the Great Wall, the Legalist state (Han Fei's doctrine: laws as the ruler's tools — punish and reward, no virtue needed) → the Han (206 BC–220 AD): Confucianism as state orthodoxy (the scholars defeat the Legalists in the bureaucracy's soul), the examination system's beginnings, the Silk Road — the imperial-bureaucratic state that runs, with interruptions, to 1911. Chinese society (theConfucian grid): the five relationships (ruler-subject, father-son, husband-wife, elder-younger brother, friend-friend — hierarchical but reciprocal: the state as family writ large); the family asthe model institution (ancestor worship, the patriarch's authority, filial piety — xiao); the scholar-gentry (the keju examinations — merit selection, the world's first professional civil service: Nepal's Public Service Commission's ancestor); peasants, artisans, merchants (in that Confucian order of prestige); the Tang Code (653 AD) — East Asia's great penal-code archetype, emulated across…