For example: Japan shares many characters with Chinese, and Korean and Vietnamese both used to use Chinese characters, but they are all separate languages. Similarly, numerous "dialects" in China are less mutually intelligible than many different Western languages. Compare Portuguese and Spanish to Cantonese, Mandarin, Taiwanese (Hokkien), Fuzhounese, Shanghainese, etc. Not to mention languages like Mongolian (see the Yuan dynasty). And that doesn't even begin to get into even more ethnically diverse regions like Tibet and western China.
Then there's also the "warring states period" when, for over 250 years, no fewer than 14 different independently governed states made up what is today eastern China.
Claims that China has always been one civilization are politically expedient versions of history that glaze over an enormous quantity of inconvenient facts.
Did you know that after the Ottoman Empire conquered Constantinople, Sultan Mehmed viewed himself as the successor of the Roman Empire and declared himself "Caesar of Rome"?
China today is as much a continuation of those previous states as Turkey is of the Roman Empire.
I was previously curious how many countries declared themselves to be the heirs of the Roman empire, and I found there is something of a wikipedia list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Rome
the Chinese script have evolved, but one can still look at inscriptions from thousands of years ago and understand it.
it might be hard for people to understand different dialects in China but they all use the same writing system, standardized in the Qin dynasty.
Same with the borrowed Chinese characters in Japanese and Korean. A native Chinese speaker would have little problem reading those, although the pronounciations might be a little different
Are you Indiana Jones?
With some training, people can read seal script inscriptions because the structure is already fairly close to regular script which is what people use today.
The radicals are written in slightly different styles from today. It actually makes sense. Seal script is a very artistic form of calligraphy, so people use it for their seals hence the name.
An example of the "drum" character: http://www.guoxuedashi.com/zixing/yanbian/11208mb/ The horizontal arrow is the time line, starting from oracle bone script. The 4th one of the first row is seal script and the last regular script.
The idea depicted here is hitting a decorated drum on a rack with a drum stick holding in the hand.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seal_script
If you look at the picture on the upper right, you can make out "tian xia" and "wang" -- all under heaven (i.e. the world) and king (the character for emperor isn't invented yet)
Hmm it's right there。 The 4th “皇” and 5th “帝”。 And the combined form “皇帝” - a title invented by the First Emperor himself。
'ȝ' becomes 'g', 'Ð' becomes 'D', and we still use 'æ' today, which is also a rune, and they even used 'W'!
Also, the number of characters in Chinese has also drastically changed over time. So while many characters have a 1:1 lineage, far more characters simply did not exist 1 or 2 thousand years ago.
The only commonality is that they are based on pictographs and have a traceable etymology, although that's true for all languages.
The Japanese pronunciation of Chinese characters is absolutely nothing like the Chinese pronunciation of them, and the meaning is sometimes different too. (The Kanji for "letter" (as in a piece of paper you write a letter on) means "toilet paper" in Chinese.)
My guess is that civilization is too nebulous of a term for good discussion, but thats just my 2p.
The comparison between China and Turkey as descendants of the Roman Empire is a bit of a stretch. China at least uses the same language (old Chinese poems written in the Tang dynasty and even Han dynasty can still rhyme correctly and make sense if read in Cantonese), holidays, culture, etc. Turkey doesn't use a romance language or Greek.
Japanese explicitly borrowed Chinese characters, it doesn't "share" them. It's just like modern English and Latin: English uses Latin characters, but it's not at all the same (or even a similar) language. Lots of languages use the Latin character set, and even Japanese is adopting more and more "Romaji". The characters a written language adopts has little to do with its relation with other languages from a linguistic point-of-view. Latin characters can be used for any language.
Rome lasted ~1500 years as a continuous political entity. Zhou dynasty comes is about half that at ~790 years. Though, you can make various arguments around those numbers.
More of a metastable meta-civilization. Over thousands of years, they keep collapsing and re-forming the same country.
Dynasty usually in China doesn't category as one civilization, it is just a episode in the Chinese history. And this is not a modern invention either, China has the great tradition of 修史, literaly meaning the making of history, which means the later dynasty is responsible of recording the official history of previous dynasty, and by doing so it is treated as a testament to the current dynasty's legimacy.
Interestingly, even PRC is somewhat inherited this tradition, where an official account of Qing's history is set to publish this year, which is almost 30 million characters long.
Change happens faster in the centers of civilization. So change is as much an indicator of the degree of civilization.
Not really. The Chinese tend to emphasize viewing their history through a lens of continuity and a single notional empire whereas the Western history tends to view their history as discontinuous and fractured empires. But when you start comparing the actual effects of these empires and their rises and falls, they are actually much more similar.
For example, after the Crisis of the Third Century, the Roman Empire was effectively partitioned into a Western and Eastern Empire. The Western Empire proceeded to decentralize itself out of existence over the course of the fourth and fifth centuries, but it recoalesced under the Merovingian and Carolingian dynasties into the Holy Roman Empire by 800 (before splitting up into effectively a Frankish kingdom and the Germanic kingdom of the HRE). The Eastern Roman Empire lasted until around 1200, when the Fourth Crusade conquered it instead (a conquest which didn't last, but the Byzantines never recovered and the Ottomans finally put them out of their misery 250 years later). It's worth noting that pretty much all of the people I've cited considered themselves the true heirs of the Roman Empire.
Meanwhile in China, the Han dynasty crashed hard in the early 200s, with three major successor states cropping up. One of these managed to conquer the others, so the successive dynasty was the Jin dynasty. Of course, the Jin last control of most of their territory, which fragmented into the Sixteen Kingdoms, but the entire era is still called the Jin dynasty. After the final collapse of the Jin, the north/south dichotomy continued with the Northern and Southern dynasties, which is again a successive series of powers vying for control eventually coalescing into the Sui dynasty after one wins out, which quickly transitions to the Tang dynasty, the first truly unified China since the fall of the Han dynasty. After about 300 years, the Tang dynasty collapses into a major period of disunity, the next truly unified China again taking 300 years to crop up again.
There's a lot of similarity. The major difference is that Western Europe never reunified into a single unitary state (unless you want to count the extremely short lived Napoleonic Empire and Third Reich). But Western Europe did have a successor state that directly retained the traditions from the Roman Empire (namely, the Byzantines) and could plausibly claim to have no break in continuity (the Byzantines never called themselves anything other than the Roman Empire), and all of the major successor states directly drew inspiration and customs from the Roman Empire, rather like China. The writing system, the state religion, the bureaucratic apparatus, the legal system--all of these are derived from the Roman Empire in Western Europe, just as much as they are derived from the Qin and Han dynasties in China.
This is simply false. Please learn about the pre-Roman history of Italy.
And yet, there are 800 million native speakers of Romance languages ("the modern languages that evolved from Vulgar Latin between the third and eighth centuries") in the world [0].
It very much did.
> never mind Europe.
It did that, too, though less tightly.
> The lands and tribes they conquered simply used Latin for trade and as a lingua franca. It never became the mother tongue for any of those people.
And where exactly did the Romance languages that are the mother tongues of much of the area that Rome used to rule come from, then?
Italy, France, Spain, Romania, Portugal all speak a variation of 'Latin'.
It'd be more like saying Finnish or Hungarian are a variation of Latin or German. Some small amount of shared vocabulary (and maybe phonetics) due to proximity, but no more.
Instead they speak direct descendants of the language of the common tongue of Roman citizens, 'vulgar' Latin. The pre-Roman languages of most of Roman occupied Europe were extinguished. Apart from Greek, which was kind of the second language of Rome (and later the only language, once the west collapsed) and Palestine/Syria, it's only in Britain where pre-Roman languages survived -- that is until the Anglo-Saxons wiped most of it out, excepting Wales and Cornwall.
I find the fact that we have no idea quite liberating.
What we can say is that chinese civilization came into existence a long time ago. Then a serious of dynasty ( some not even "chinese" ) like the mongols or the manchus adopted aspects of chinese civilation.
"China" itself didn't survive for thousands of years. The dynasties rose and collapsed. Conquered and got conquered.
And "china", for much of its history, didn't even speak the same language. They used the chinese writing system ( which also evolved through time ), but does a writing system entail "part of civilization". Koreans and Japanese used chinese writing system, does it mean they are part of the chinese civilization? Of course not. Much of africa uses latin alphabet, does that mean africa is part of "greco-roman" civilization? Of course not.
The chinese capital changed multiple times. There have been periods where "china" had multiple competing capitals.
But then you could argue that chinese civilization didn't die out or get supplanted like the egyptian, mayan, mesopatamian, etc civizations.
The more you think about it and the closer you look, the more blurry the situation becomes. But like most things history, I guess the best answer is "it's complicated".