One corner of China’s internet is insisting that the Tang Dynasty never existed
cnn.com
cnn.com
There are also histories written just after the Tang Dynasty had fallen. It was considered good form for a new dynasty to write a historical review of the previous one, and there are two retrospectives on Tang, e.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Book_of_Tang
And there is ironclad evidence from foreign sources. Among others, Japanese histories detail the journeys of emissaries to the Tang Court: https://web.archive.org/web/20260315181529/https://japansoci...
So the theory is bait, and hard to take seriously.
But I'll give it credit for hijacking a genuinely interesting scholarly premise: What is taken quite seriously is the notion that China's first dynasty -- the Xia Dynasty -- never existed. It is of rather mythic proportions; later Chinese would speak of Xia the way Romans would speak of Troy. And there is very little evidence to support its existence. The Shang Dynasty is also supported by rather scant evidence -- and is also mythic, though obviously less so than the Xia.
Worth noting that both the Xia and Shang are exceedingly ancient -- roughly 2000 BC to 1000 BC between them -- unlike the Tang, which fell around 900 AD and is thus middle-of-the-pack by Chinese dynastic standards.
Shang, and all of the post-dynasty collapse centuries like The Spring and Autumn Period, were not great times to live in. Dismal and evil vibes, for the most part, unless you happen to be a mighty hero or bandit-lord who believes that he can conquer the age. Even so, most of them ended up in soup pots.
Notably the Tang Dynasty in China was concurrent with the Taika Reforms, Nara period & beginning of the Heian period in Japan.
There's some truth to this. The Japanese preserved certain Tang Dynasty customs which were lost to China, and they have some of the best collections of Tang-era artifacts.
This line of thought was, however, used in very unfortunate WWII-era propaganda, like "we have to invade China to rescue its civilization, only we can do this!"
I'd argue its difficult to find major aspects of Japanese culture that don't trace back to ancient China (maybe the language, eating raw food and sumo)
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Shang#/media/File:Shang_d...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhinoceroses_in_ancient_China
Shang being an villain fits this narrative.
A timely reminder that, damn, China is olllldddd.
China proper starts about 1000 BC, so China is quite a bit younger than Europe. (Whatever "Europe" is.)
You have introduced a comparison, which thus begs the following questions:
1. What is the event that defines "China proper"? 2. What is the event that defines "Europe [proper]" to you?
2. Proto-Indo-European and Ancient Egyptian cultural norms and patterns are still very much alive in "Europe" today, so probably the invention of the wheel in the early Bronze Age is a good start.
As far as I'm concerned we're all equally ancient descendants from LUCA.
I think this thread is referring to record keeping. In Europe and especially in the mid-east, when an area was conquered, seems the trend was to destroy written records.
I think when that happened in China, a lot written records survived, so it has the appearance of being older.
Not exactly apples and apples mate.
Including a rather unusual battle between the Tang Dynasty and the Abbasid Caliphate:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Talas
It's recorded that the Caliph, on hearing of the battle, said "What is this? A crossover episode?"
There are some nuances about this. We know that there are multiple developed cities (and likely monarchies, given there are palace-like ruins) around or before Xia era. It's just that we don't know which one is so-called Xia Dynasty. But it doesn't meant that there were only small tribes and suddenly Shang came out of nowhere.
There were robber barons in early Norman England. It's just that we don't know which one is so-called Robin Hood... when in reality it's most likely just a pop myth.
There are people who believe that Trump won in 2020, that vaccines cause autism, and that the Holocaust is a hoax. You cannot reason people out of an idea they didn't use reason to arrive at.
There's just a substantial bias where people assume all 'new knowledge' is wrong. Probably correct most the time, but still often wrong.
Sometimes the things they accept is facts are merely delusions, of course, but that doesn't mean they don't reason. It just means that their reason is based on delusions.
Otoh, I also have met a number of people that when you ask "because why" freeze up as they simply have no basis at all and don't understand themselves why they came to hold a position.
And we can't forget that wood and witches are the only things that float because Science.
Troy was indeed largely fabricated though! Really I think that's of a piece with stuff being, y'know, really old. There are big holes in Sumerian and Egyption history too (though the latter helped out a ton by digging secret tombs and hiding them really well). Post-classical Mayan history is pretty suspect in a lot of places, etc...
That's a weird phrasing for describing that China itself does basically the same thing: Redefining history aka lying about it. That's certainly not 'honoring' the history.
So he seems to have incentives to be aligned with Chinese dictates which makes him being an unreliable source.
Its just as silly as phantom time and covers almost exactly the same period. The motive is possibly racist which makes it more sinister.
This feels more plausible if you've only ever encountered pigeons and at some distance. If you've owned a parrot or some chickens, it is very apparent that this is not a spy camera. In fact the word I'd use for chickens is "saurian". They're clearly just lizards with feathers, if I didn't know their evolutionary story it would still scream at me when I see one laying on a rock in the sun that this is a lizard.
If you actually read the article, you'd be directing your vitriol at the Nanjing Daily and "The Paper, a media outlet affiliated with the Shanghai government."
https://www.perkins.org/qa-a-factual-look-at-helen-kellers-a...
I was fairly put off by this, so I pressed her to explain. After much back and forth, she finally got down to what had convinced her of this: "Helen Keller flew a plane. Clearly she was a fraud"
Oh wow, Helen Keller once flew a plane? You definitely cannot fly a plane while blind and deaf, at least not ethically and safely! That's so weird, whether it's true or false, better look it up!
In fact, Helen Keller at one point, for activism, was brought up in an airplane in the second seat, handed the controls, and allowed to "Fly" for a while. By this metric, I have also flown a plane. It was a PR stunt.
But importantly, this one odd fact, presented purposely stupidly, was all it took to seed doubt of a known person.
All of social media is someone taking a singular fact, pulling it out of context, and framing it to make a huge narrative unsupported by the basic facts of the original story, spoon fed to morons who will then adopt the full narrative rather than just taking this new information as new information to investigate and update your understanding with.
I don't know why people are so bad at spotting the "Wait, but you didn't dig deeper?" problem with all this shitty content though. It's normal on TikTok to just kind of say words and people believe them for some reason.
> In September 2020, major Russian politician and academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences Sergey Glazyev publicly proposed Fomenko's New Chronology as a "reliable support for the formation of modern ideology that consolidates Russian society"
And related to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tartarian_Empire
I mean it's a nationalist ideology - any connection with reality is coincidental.
its amazing, and one of the most thorough and clever conspiracy theories and it has no lack of scope and ambition. Jesus was made up based on a 12th century Byzantine Emperor is almost as good as Suleiman being Solomon, and lots of otherwise reasonable seem very ready to believe conspiracy theories about Jesus (Dan Brown made a lot of money out of people who thought the Da Vinci Code theories were plausible).
Kasparov was a proponent!
The context was weird, the person pushing it was very passionate about the subject, and since I certainly don't know all that much about Chinese history from the period, I just smiled and nodded. Apparently this is a bigger thing?
I have to admit - Expanding Earth is hard to debunk!
I think because like Flat Earth many of the observations and elements therein are accurate - they just get the overall picture wrong.
Like stealing the ball with 4 sec left running down the court no defense in sight for the winning layup and missing - comically bouncing off the backboard.
Alas, I believe most crackpots mean well, they just aren’t very good at the sport
It doesn’t really matter if the earth is flat or not, for them it’s about being part of a community of people who believe in something that society tells them is wrong. There is no changing minds besides the 1 in a million you hear about and so all the calculations you could do would never work, sadly.
My daughter did the shadow stick experiment when she was 14 (for GCSE astronomy), we have lived in different countries so have observed the differences in constellations for ourselves, and we speak to people around the world anyway.
Likewise, flying in a plane for any distance and seeing the course is identical to if you pulled a string tight against a globe (give or take). I suppose pilots could choose to fly in an arch to keep the secret, but eventually some capitalist has got to spill the beans to cut costs, right?
Also: the southern hemisphere.
The routes planes take make absolutely no sense if the earth was flat. They actually use great circle routes which are the shortest distance on a globe and these routes look curved on a flat projection.
The more interesting phenomenon is that we are able to agree on anything at all, it's not exactly our strongest instinct. Reading through HN, for example, the longest comment chains are a series of disagreements. But we build resources like Wikipedia and science journals, which also use disagreement as an engine for generating a more correct understanding. Its a strange and hopeful aspect of human societies.
It’s fine, and healthy, to disagree on how best to deal with the world as it exists, but if we can’t agree on reality itself, compromise and progress are so much more challenging.
But to help you understand, rewriting the past to sustain power is the type of thing that degenerates into genocide for example.
In the short term it might look innocuous, but if corrupting truth and suspend basic moral and ethic values on something as basic as History, what other basic human values are you willing to suspend because you don't like how something feels?
This is the breeding ground for racial supremacists, ethnophobia, etc. Terrible stuff.
And you don't need to go into the past to see the consequences, Ukraine is fighting for their existence because a group of people in Russia don't want to acknowledge that a ethnic group they deem inferior can have better chances at thriving than them, to the point of denying Ukrainians existence all together.
But they belong to a bigger trend which questions the value of experts and institutional knowledge. This could either send us into a dark age, or challenge a better class of experts and institutional knowledge. My money is on the latter. Few things improve without some kind of challenge.
Additionally, they've redefined that a pandemic is (removing severity from the definition), additionally it's expanding way from its traditional geopolitical framework and also what were recommendations are now becoming legally binding mandates that supersede sovereignty.
So, yes, people are overreacting but the WHO and people who suppressed truthful but contrarian claims during the pandemic, share some of the blame.
Over a million Americans died, but OK, that's not a severe problem...
2009 pandemic H1N1 was not severe, and was called a pandemic.
What jurisdiction and enforcement mechanism?
Spread flat earth theories, get influencers to question if sunscreen is actually harmful, etc. Spread enough contradictory information so that gradually, people don't have any idea what to believe, and then they become susceptible to political misinformation, or just become completely politically disengaged.
It is not a sign of a healthy society at all, it is a disease.
It’s only 1729! Let’s goo, I mean:
Come on ye lads!
Of course, this phenomenon is by no means unique to these two countries. I know a Japanese author who has a small but dedicated following for his argument that nuclear weapons don't exist: https://books.google.com/books/about/Death_Object.html?id=Mw...
Narrative warfare… I guess the question is, what isn’t “narrative warfare”?
I'll write a book about it. See you in your local bookstore!
Edit: clarified which part of the post I was referencing.
If you search on Google, there's a slew of Chinese restaurants in the US named "Ming Dynasty." If you were in the SF Peninsula in the 80's and 90's, the one on Embarcadero and 101 drew well known chefs from Hong Kong during its heyday. Conversely, Google knows of two "Ching" or "Qin Dynasty" restaurants in the US. Many Han Chinese have always looked down on the Ching Dynasty as illegitimate colonialists.
This particular issue is a sore point with the CCP with respect to Hong Kong. During the crackdowns in 2019, mainland propaganda justified the crackdown as de-colonization. They called the British takeover an invasion to force subjugation through mass drugging (opium).
In response to this, many protestors appealed to Han-centrism. They argued that the Ching were already an illegitimate colonizing force, and blame them for everything that led up to Western colonization. This includes everything from weakened military might to failed trade/war negotiations, to anti-opium crackdowns. If the British broke in, it's because the Manchus left the door open. And by legitimizing the Ching Dynasty, you have an indirect trail of responsibility to the CCP themselves.
This Hong Kong link is why this Tang issue is not a joke to the CCP.
Final note because I have to pre-emptively address this on social media: If you feel like you need to jump in with a generic anti-colonial comment, don't. Hongkongers' views of being British subjects, especially from 1970's on, should absolutely not be seen through Western, especially modern progressive PoV. TL;DR - the majority, often vast majority, of Hongkongers wished to remain under British rule.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tang_Dynasty_(band)
They lived the Spinal Tap lifestyle before Spinal Tap.
> In China’s official narrative, the country suffered a “century of humiliation” of foreign invasions, starting with the first opium war in 1840 and ending only with Mao’s rise to power in 1949. But the 1644 view—cheekily expressed by some online as “three centuries of humiliation”—argues that subjugation began with the Qing. According to this school, the Qing were anti-Han interlopers and, making matters worse, feckless in repelling foreign forces.
> Dredging up all this history is uncomfortable for the party. The territorial boundaries claimed by modern China—including Tibet, Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia and Taiwan—were brought into the Chinese empire by the Qing, not the Ming. Grievances about the Manchus also cut against the ideal of ethnic harmony advanced by the party. Although much of what forms modern Chinese identity is derived from Han traditions, it is unseemly to talk openly about the dominance of this one ethnic group, which accounts for 90% of the Chinese population. The party looks askance at “Han chauvinism”, believing, with reason, that it may lead to more resentment from non-Han groups.
[1]: https://www.economist.com/china/2026/07/20/why-criticism-of-...
So clearly this is rather important to some people.
It’s not that hard to pin down. Nobody seriously doubts that the Tang dynasty existed; this was mostly a joke made to satirize the Western Pseudohistory Theory: - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Pseudohistory_Theory
That said, plenty of Chinese people genuinely believe Chinese civilization has been the most advanced since antiquity, and that the sophistication of ancient Greek and Western civilization should be questioned.
> “It is a way for people to attack the established authorities. It is almost like saying ‘those so-called experts are nothing special. They have all been misleading people. I am the one who understands the truth, and I have exposed them all.’”
China got it's own form of Qanon.
They say a lie can travel around the world while the truth is still lacing up its boots. Part of the reason these things are viral is because their ridiculous nature demands attention. And that attention alone is enough to generate influence.
Historical revisionism, random people :angry: :barf:
Is this significant? I never saw anyone talking about it on my side of corner.
But, It's not really that surprising. A significant part of human civilization still believes that we humans were created by beings who live somewhere in the sky/atmosphere, and these beings are watching our every move to punish or reward us, and you beg really really hard, they'll help you (if they didn't, you ain't begging hard enough).
I assumed that any "influencer" could be easily googled, but I cannot find literally anything. Or Google censors their name?
Not sure how HN's symbol stripper handles them, but here's a try:
qiao乔于yu- birds aren't real
- Flat Earth
- Atlantis (did Plato made it up or not?)
- years 800-1000 were completely made up so some guy could be crowned king in the year 1000
- DNA evidence shows ancient Egyptians are Eastern Europeans
Zuck I think is also just for goofs but the others yes indeed have true believers.
Great, lets make this useful … this specific nonsense will settle down and be proven to be a hoax and/or misinformation. An important component of parenting today is to raise kids who take claims presented on the internet with a large grain of salt. Rather than contrived examples in critical thinking exercises they might get in class or a textbook, parents now have a perfect, real example here to show their kids that online nonsense can look authoritative and be very widely believed, and yet still be false. Shields up. Less time online for kids. And don’t outsource your critical thinking to the online majority or to AI!
It is more important than ever that we teach people to think critically and skeptically, and the necessity of empiricism (i.e., publicly verifiable evidence).
It is a series of science fiction novels in which a future China conquers the world and re-writes history as if the Tang dynasty never ended. The rulers present themselves as being the legitimate inheritors of a continuous Tang dynasty and all of western history from 900 CE onward is secret banned information.
Sort of the exact opposite of this conspiracy theory.
Aren't republicans in Texas trying to rewrite history books to ignore lynchings and burnings of Black Wall Street and claim that slaves were treated pretty well?
Seems like every country has factions who do this - right?
to the TEXAS flag.
Just pointing out that the educational experience in Texas is not necessarily indicative of what the educational experience in the rest of the US is like.
I remember this controversy from a while and IIRC I don't think this is accurate. For one thing, they teach that slavery was a central role. https://www.npr.org/2018/11/16/668557179/texas-students-will...
I remember looking at the actual key points in the Texas curriculum and nothing seems that unusual. Some people we IMO nitpicking.
There's a great difference of scale.
Lincoln died about 150 years ago. There are voluminous primary sources about Lincoln - e.g. photographs of him, original documents that he wrote, firsthand accounts of his actions, etc. We certainly don't know every detail of his life, but we do know a lot of it, and we're quite confident it's true.
The Tang dynasty, by contrast, fell over a thousand years ago. We know of it primarily through second- and third-hand histories and through interpretation of archaeological artifacts - much like our knowledge of Greek and Roman history, for instance. There are a lot of thinly covered areas, and many of the sources are biased; there's a lot more to be uncertain about.
I'm sure you can see the parallels of this in the United States and Europe.
same information value, why is this even here and not flagged into oblivion?
Take the incident mentioned in the piece: the Xi'an Culture and Tourism Bureau later clarified that no one had actually made such phone calls. The reporter simply cited an unverified online comment without doing any fact-checking.
This is a classic tactic used to smear an opponent—exaggerating their views to an absurd degree to weaponize public disgust against them. In reality, aside from this fabricated "phone call" incident, conspiracy theories claiming the Tang dynasty didn't exist have never received any attention from mainstream media or the general public in China.
Its real-world impact is virtually zero. Following this bizarre logic, the author would be better off reporting on how praise for German Nazism spreads on Chinese social media(but i know CNN dont have the balls).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tang_%28drink_mix%29
Many ancient flavors and notoriety was achieved in that dynasty. Mango Tang was my favorite.