The history of China, one of the oldest civilizations in the world with continuity to the present, has its origins in the Yellow River basin where the first Xia, Shang and Zhou dynasties emerged. The existence of documents written about 3,500 years ago has allowed the development in China of a very precise historiographic tradition, offering a continuous narrative from the first dynasties to the contemporary age. Chinese culture, according to myth, is inaugurated with the three original emperors: Fuxi, Shennong and finally the Yellow Emperor Huang, the latter considered as the true creator of culture. However, there are no historical records that demonstrate the real existence of these personalities, which according to oral transmission from generation to generation, would have lived about 5000 to 6000 years ago.
The enormous geographical extension of the current state of the People's Republic of China inevitably means that the history of this entire territory encompasses, in a broad sense, a large number of peoples and civilizations. However, the common thread of the traditional narrative of Chinese history focuses, in a more restricted sense, on the ethnic group of the Chinese, and is closely associated with the evolution of the Chinese language and its writing system based on the Chinese. ideograms. This cultural and linguistic continuity is what allows establishing an exposition line of the history of Chinese civilization, which, both from the oldest texts of the 1st millennium BC. C., as from the Confucian classics, through the great dynastic histories promoted by the emperors, it has continued to the present. The archaeological discoveries of the 20th century, especially those of the oracle bones, which collect the first written manifestations in the Chinese language, have contributed in recent decades to a much more detailed knowledge of the origins of Chinese civilization.
The enormous geographical extension of the current state of the People's Republic of China inevitably means that the history of this entire territory encompasses, in a broad sense, a large number of peoples and civilizations. However, the common thread of the traditional narrative of Chinese history focuses, in a more restricted sense, on the ethnic group of the Chinese, and is closely associated with the evolution of the Chinese language and its writing system based on the Chinese. ideograms. This cultural and linguistic continuity is what allows establishing an exposition line of the history of Chinese civilization, which, both from the oldest texts of the 1st millennium BC. C., as from the Confucian classics, through the great dynastic histories promoted by the emperors, it has continued to the present. The archaeological discoveries of the 20th century, especially those of the oracle bones, which collect the first written manifestations in the Chinese language, have contributed in the last decades to a much more knowledge.
- Qin Shi Huang, fundador de la Dinastía Qin.
- Sun Yat-sen, primer Presidente de la República de China.