If I were to ask you what the oldest civilization in the world is, which one would you answer with?
Egypt? Mesopotamia? The Indus River Valley? America? Okay, well maybe not the United States,
but when humans started to shift from bands of hunter-gatherers to sedentary,
agricultural city-states, they did so in fertile river valleys. Obviously the Near East is full
of fertile rivers like the Nile, Tigris, Euphrates, Indus, and several others, but
two other rivers to consider would be the Yangtze, and especially the Yellow River in China. In fact,
China is one of the oldest surviving civilizations in the world, so just how old is China?
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The area we would today know as “China” was first settled by hominids at least 1.3 million
years ago by Homo erectus, which is phenomenally old, but not exactly a helpful answer, seeing
as Homo erectus didn’t necessarily have a complex culture that we would recognize today as Chinese,
so let’s fast forward by a huge amount. Neolithic settlements in China have been traced as far back
as 10,000 BC, with rice agriculture on the Yangtze River having been carbon dated to around 8000 BC,
utilized by cultures such as the Jiahu culture, along with millet from about 1,000 years later.
These cultures (along with many others) made up parts of what modern archaeologists refer to as
the Yellow River civilization, essentially an alpha version of China, consisting of numerous
different cultures in different areas, because yeah China is massive. Later on in this period,
the Majiayao culture of the upper Yellow River (around modern China’s Qinghai and
Gansu provinces) have been found to have used bronze as early as 3100 BC, with the technology
spreading in the following millennium. According to early Chinese legend, this
was not long before the Three Sovereigns and Five Emperors ruled from 2852 to 2070 BC, said to have
been either rulers or deities who (among other things) introduced fire, agriculture, and housing
to humanity, though their existence is generally considered mythical. This however brings us to
very early dynastic China, with the semi-mythical Xia Dynasty. Before gaining power around 2070 BC,
the Xia were said to have been a tribe under the legendary Three Sovereigns and Five Emperors.
By the reign of emperor Yao began the myth of the Great Flood, when the founder of the Xia--
known as Gun-- was tasked with protecting the kingdom from the floodwater. Gun is said to have
tried to solve this problem by stealing the magical ever-expanding Xirang soil from the
Supreme Divinity, but be it due to divine wrath or bad engineering, the dams and dykes eventually
collapsed and flooded the nearby settlements. Emperor Shun banished Gun, who left his son Yu
to finish the job. After 13 years of dedicated work, Yu would become known as Yu the Great,
or Yu the Engineer, having solved the flooding not by damming the waters but letting them flow out
through irrigation canals and by dredging the rivers. Emperor Shun was said to have been so
impressed by this engineering marvel that he would pass the throne onto Yu, starting the Xia Dynasty,
the first of China’s many different dynasties. Evidence of the Xia Dynasty’s existence however
is also scarce, with the dynasty itself likely also being mythical, or at the
very least embellished by 296 BC, when the Bamboo Annals describing the Xia Dynasty in detail were
written. They were however succeeded in around 1600 BC by the indeed very real Shang Dynasty,
who ruled for over half a millennium until being conquered by the Zhou Dynasty in 1046 BC,
making the Xia Dynasty kind of a bridging point between the mythical and the historical.
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So we’ve at least got an outline of the time frame we’re looking for. The stories of the Xia Dynasty
and the Three Sovereigns and Five Emperors of course tell a kind of cultural narrative for the
beginning of the Chinese civilization and culture as we know it today. Either way, people have
obviously existed in China for tens of thousands of years, and China is indeed home to one of the
oldest civilizations in world history. Of course the beginning of China is hard to determine,
possibly because the idea of a singular “China” didn’t come along until fairly recently in their
history. Xidnaf made a good video all about this, but in short all you need know is China’s endonym:
zhōngguó, roughly meaning “Middle Kingdom” or “Central State”, meaning China likely at first
wouldn’t have seen itself as a European-style nation-state, so much as the center of
civilization itself. This by no means disqualifies China’s true age, but it does highlight how,
the further back in time you go, the less China starts to look like one united kingdom, so much as
a loose collection of somewhat related cultures, either under one government or just clinging onto
a life-giving river, in a time-- as my friend Jack Rackam put it-- when anyone more than a couple
hundred kilometers may as well have had antennae. So while we have records of non-mythical Chinese
dynasties dating back to 1600 BC (and possibly even 2070 BC), we also have archaeological records
dating back much further. Of course the question “how old is China?” is kind of an impossible
question requiring impossible sources, seeing as this was all more than 4,000 years ago. If
you want an actual answer to the question though, the founding of the Xia Dynasty could be at least
seen as a stepping stone to a better answer, though of course China doesn’t have a founding
date like Rome or even nearby Japan, really just evolving into its current form over the millennia.
Nonetheless, China most certainly deserves to be counted as one of the world’s oldest
civilizations, alongside the aforementioned Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Indus River Valley,
and China’s impact can be seen in many ways all across Eastern Asia to this day.
Thanks as always for watching, even if this video kind of just went in circles. Either way, if you
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