China was an empire, and was forgotten. Today I could go to the book store and buy "Historic Atlas of the world" that completely ignore China.
I have lived in China and of course the Chinese propaganda does the opposite: They consider Confucius the best philosopher of the world(because is the only one they have with Universal status), and what Europe only did was copying China innovations, and so on.
I used to like the bbc in the past.
Armenia was an Empire long before Ani. List of Largest Empires in Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_empires If you look at "Ancient Empires" section, there are only 6 empires and both Armenia and China are in the list.
>> China was an empire, and was forgotten.
I do not think that is the case. I have never seen any respectable historical atlas that does not have China. Also there are Hollywood movies depicting China in times when it was (or was becoming) an Empire, so you can hardly call it forgotten.
The main reason that Chinese Empire is not forgotten and won't be anytime soon, is that China is still a major power with 1.357 billion population.