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Despera posted:Rest assured that we live in an age of urbanization compared to back then where things like multistory housing didnt exist. ancient Rome had 5 story apartment buildings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insula_dell%27Ara_Coeli
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Feb 21, 2020 00:27
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The chad Rome and the virgin China.
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Feb 21, 2020 00:32
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I would blow Dane Cook posted:The chad Rome and the virgin China. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smuggling_of_silkworm_eggs_into_the_Byzantine_Empire quote:In the mid-6th century AD, two monks, with the support of the Byzantine emperor Justinian I, successfully smuggled silkworm eggs into the Byzantine Empire, which led to the establishment of an indigenous Byzantine silk industry. This acquisition of silk worms from China allowed the Byzantines to have a monopoly of silk in Europe.
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Feb 21, 2020 00:39
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Rutibex posted:In the mid-6th century AD, two monks, with the support of the Byzantine emperor Justinian I, successfully smuggled silkworm eggs into the Byzantine Empire, which led to the establishment of an indigenous Byzantine silk industry. This acquisition of silk worms from China allowed the Byzantines to have a monopoly of silk in Europe. so when they steal technology from western countries, it's really just fair play
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Feb 21, 2020 00:42
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Despera posted:Biggest city in the world right now has 20 million people and that country has 1.4 billion. Rest assured that we live in an age of urbanization compared to back then where things like multistory housing didnt exist. Tokyo has a population of 38.1 million
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Feb 21, 2020 00:42
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Play posted:so when they steal technology from western countries, it's really just fair play i don't respect any culture that doesn't ruthlessly steal technology
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Feb 21, 2020 00:45
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Despera posted:Chinese had a lot of census takers for tax purposes. Impressing the foriegner wasnt a huge thing back then. When it comes to records of important events in China, they didn't exaggerate to impress foreigners, they exaggerated to impress other Chinese people and so that the emperor and other important people could be presented as huge swinging dick big boys in the historical record
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Feb 21, 2020 00:46
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Rutibex posted:any time a guy from the ancient world tells you how many people are in his army he is full of poo poo. So what the chinese were just the biggest exaggerators? Not to mention most of those were civil wars. Yay I killed millions of my own subjects doesnt make for great propaganda. Maybe the chinese just had a lot of loving people to throw at wars.
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Feb 21, 2020 00:46
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Fojar38 posted:When it comes to records of important events in China, they didn't exaggerate to impress foreigners, they exaggerated to impress other Chinese people and so that the emperor and other important people could be presented as huge swinging dick big boys in the historical record emperor goes "we have all these loving people where the gently caress is my money?" suddenly the plan doesnt sound so great
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Feb 21, 2020 00:48
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Despera posted:Yay I killed millions of my own subjects doesnt make for great propaganda. Actually it does, if your goal is to be seen as the aforementioned huge swinging dick big boy that nobody would want to cross This isn't even an ancient thing. Mao and Stalin were open about how many of their own people they murdered and loving reveled in it Despera posted:emperor goes "we have all these loving people where the gently caress is my money?" suddenly the plan doesnt sound so great lol if you think that the emperor was the guy in charge of taxing things and paying attention to that. The imperial bureaucracy is infamous
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Feb 21, 2020 00:49
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First we're arguing about whether ancient China was wealthy, now it's about whether it had a lot of people? It seems obvious and you'd definitely expect wars in China to have huge body counts. China lost at least 15 million people during World War 2, second only to Soviet Russia. Things just happen in great quantities there. Including violent deaths
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Feb 21, 2020 00:50
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Despera posted:I killed millions of my own subjects doesnt make for great propaganda. it does when you are the new emperor and you are writing a history book about they guy you just replaced
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Feb 21, 2020 00:50
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Like you really dont believe that China had a fuckton of people?
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Feb 21, 2020 00:50
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Warbadger posted:Are you suggesting the engineering and construction of larger and enduring buildings/public works (bridges, raised aqueducts, etc) are of no benefit to society because earthquakes can damage them? no, i'm saying you have to take things within their context. Chinese people new about the arch and used it in many circumstances. Those circumstances appear less widespread to me than Europe in the same period, but I'm not sure why. Part of it may just be that there wasn't a need for monumental public architecture like the coliseum. Also possible, is that they didn't use certain methods because they didn't fit local conditions. Whoever mentioned polynesian sailors made a good point, but for obvious reasons they had much more motivation to develop open water sailing skills than anyone else. I only mentioned earthquakes because pagodas, a traditional East Asian religious building design comparable in some respects to cathedrals, are famously earthquake resistant. Cathedrals by contrast are not. How much such considerations actually weighed in design i don't know but its something you have to consider in these comparisons. I'm not sure when China began applying the arch in large scale architecture. I'm pretty sure it was later than the Mediterranean world but i'm not sure how much later. The oldest extant example of a Chinese arch bridge dates from the beginning of the 7th century, and is located in Hebei.  Just looking at it you can tell the architect already had a very sophisticated understanding of the arch. Presumably they had already been using similar forms for a long time. Of course the Romans were already building massive stone bridges in the second century BC, so that's a lot earlier than this bridge. I'm glad you brought up public works and aqueducts. River engineering and hydrology was one field in which the Chinese were I think indisputably world leaders until no earlier than the 17th century. This was of course largely a product of necessity, China is very flood prone after all. Still cities like Rome suffered perennial flooding right up into the modern era with very little done to prevent it. By contrast China was always very proactive in levee construction and management, and most of the time it worked pretty well.  Here we see part of the Dujiangyan water diversion system. Built in 256 BC by the state of Qin, it included the construction of levees and the boring of a channel through hard rock. Still in use today, it helped reduce flooding while irrigating thousands of kilometers of farmland in Sichuan. This thing moves a lot more water than any Roman aqueduct. Squalid fucked around with this message at 00:53 on Feb 21, 2020 |
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Feb 21, 2020 00:51
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Despera posted:Like you really dont believe that China had a fuckton of people? I'm saying that you can't point at Chinese records and say "well they said X therefore X must be true" any more than you can with any other historical source. This is historiography 101 and yet for some reason people tend to discard it when talking about China
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Feb 21, 2020 00:52
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Fojar38 posted:I'm saying that you can't point at Chinese records and say "well they said X therefore X must be true" any more than you can with any other historical source. Look even if you look at the most conservative estimates the population dwarfs anything in the west. Most historians AGREE about these body counts.
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Feb 21, 2020 00:53
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Historiography on China is also kind of a giant dumpster fire nowadays, because proper assessment of records and evidence requires that you speak Chinese, that the CCP likes you enough to do research in China, and that the CCP themselves didn't destroy critical records or evidence that would corroborate the historical accounts.Despera posted:Look even if you look at the most conservative estimates the population dwarfs anything in the west. Most historians AGREE about these body counts. This is also wrong. Estimates of the Han Dynasty's population are analogous to the Roman Empire's population, and the Song Dynasty's population was comparable to the Umayyad Caliphate (depending on whether or not you consider that "western") Also, when talking about demography from anything pre-modern, historians don't agree on anything.
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Feb 21, 2020 00:59
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Like you are going to need better proof that the biggest country on earth wasnt the biggest country on the earth, other than the "Chinese lie".
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Feb 21, 2020 00:59
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Despera posted:Like you are going to need better proof that the biggest country on earth wasnt the biggest country on the earth, other than the "Chinese lie". We've been over this already. In terms of sheer size China has not always been the biggest country on the earth, both in population and in area, and this is not based on "Chinese lie." This is based on "Huh, places that aren't China existed throughout history and got really loving big and powerful in their own right." The criticism of Chinese record keeping is consistent with the criticism that is seen when looking at any other historical document. Again, for some reason though, people seem to think that this criticism is invalid when applied to Chinese records. Largely for similarly circular reasoning that you're using, ie "Chinese records are correct, because Chinese records say that China was the biggest, which we know is true because Chinese records say so, etc"
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Feb 21, 2020 01:03
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CIGNX posted:When I worked at my aunt's Chinese restaurant, we'd see people add soy sauce to their tea and drink it. It wasn't common, but it happened enough to be an inside joke with the staff. I mean if the condiment is on the table then it’s all fair game.
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Feb 21, 2020 01:04
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Fojar38 posted:We've been over this already. In terms of sheer size China has not always been the biggest country on the earth, both in population and in area, and this is not based on "Chinese lie." This is based on "Huh, places that aren't China existed throughout history and got really loving big and powerful in their own right." Most historians at least agree with these estimates. You want to say that you have secret inside information that the Chinese just exaggerated more than anyone else good luck.
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Feb 21, 2020 01:06
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I'm sure the CCP loves exaggerating the fact that a self caused famine killed about as many people as the second world war. Maybe china just has a lot of people.
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Feb 21, 2020 01:07
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speaking of condiments: Ketchup, invented by the Chinese? Yay or Nay china thread
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Feb 21, 2020 01:08
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Despera posted:Most historians at least agree with these estimates. You want to say that you have secret inside information that the Chinese just exaggerated more than anyone else good luck. To be frank my real point here is that pre-modern demography is a giant wash because there is virtually no way to verify records which were universally written by people who had an incentive to make poo poo up (not just in China, everywhere.) This isn't even some alien concept, recordkeeping even know in tyool 2020 is still kinda poo poo and requires corroboration to ascertain the accuracy of it. Hell, China is STILL blatantly making poo poo up yet it's beyond the pale to believe that people throughout history everywhere with even less oversight weren't also making poo poo up? Accounting fraud is the world's oldest profession after prostitution.
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Feb 21, 2020 01:09
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Fojar38 posted:To be frank my real point here is that pre-modern demography is a giant wash because there is virtually no way to verify records which were universally written by people who had an incentive to make poo poo up. China had an earthquake that killed 886,000 people. Besides pissing off the mandate of heaven what is the loving hope of exaggerating the body count/?
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Feb 21, 2020 01:11
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Despera posted:China had an earthquake that killed 886,000 people. Besides pissing off the mandate of heaven what is the loving hope of exaggerating the body count/? Minister of Agriculture needed a reason why the quotas for that year were low? \  /
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Feb 21, 2020 01:15
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Despera posted:China had an earthquake that killed 886,000 people. Besides pissing off the mandate of heaven what is the loving hope of exaggerating the body count/? A single earthquake in the early modern period killing as many people as Operation Overlord passes your smell test huh?
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Feb 21, 2020 01:17
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Despera posted:China had an earthquake that killed 886,000 people. Besides pissing off the mandate of heaven what is the loving hope of exaggerating the body count/? i mean i'm no expert on demography, but for example in the wikipedia article you linked on the An Lushan rebellion it goes into detail about how the demographic effects of the war are wildly disputed, and the 20 million estimate you gave is higher than what is accepted by academics cited in the article. There's an issue with estimating death tolls and the like from census data in that disasters tend to disrupt the census itself, and can result in under counts. In many ancient sources in both East and West I know there's a problem with them using numbers that they intend to just mean 'a shitload,' which some credulous modern historians make the mistake of taking literally. Obviously it is a complex subject though, I definitely don't feel confident enough to have an opinion of my own
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Feb 21, 2020 01:17
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To take the discussion away from who was better/more technologically/socially advanced in the 1500s talk.Fojar38 posted:When it comes to records of important events in China, they didn't exaggerate to impress foreigners, they exaggerated to impress other Chinese people and so that the emperor and other important people could be presented as huge swinging dick big boys in the historical record This is also, at least partially, why the CCP chucks its tantrums and is always decrying the unnamed country that can only salivate. It is for internal use to show Chinese people that they are big and tough and strong and powerful and won't take no poo poo from bullies who would dare do such a heinous act as not show the 9 dash line in a childrens cartoon. On this: when I was in China I studiously avoided any sort of political, or even political adjacent chat. So can I ask goons with Mainland Chinese relatives, or who were there longer than me, what do Mainlanders think of the CCP's international tantrums? Do they buy them? Are they embarrassed by them? Coz what I remember of the "this is a killing" incident, is that people were largely laughing at the dude and his parents, but what did they think of the CCPs hissyfit response?
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Feb 21, 2020 01:18
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Fojar38 posted:A single earthquake in the early modern period killing as many people as Operation Overlord passes your smell test huh? You ever seen a loess cave? Or was it china just trying to mooch off the red cross of 1556?
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Feb 21, 2020 01:21
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Squalid posted:speaking of condiments: Ketchup, invented by the Chinese? Yay or Nay china thread Yes because China invented the tomato.
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Feb 21, 2020 01:21
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Wtf y’all even arguing about?
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Feb 21, 2020 01:26
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Despera posted:You ever seen a loess cave? Or was it china just trying to mooch off the red cross of 1556? The wikipedia article you're looking at cites some real weak sources for this.
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Feb 21, 2020 01:28
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MarcusSA posted:Wtf y’all even arguing about? How accurate was Chinese recordkeeping and how much can it be relied on exclusively
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Feb 21, 2020 01:29
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Fojar38 posted:A single earthquake in the early modern period killing as many people as Operation Overlord passes your smell test huh? lol
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Feb 21, 2020 01:31
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The angle seems to be "the casualty rate was so high because lots of the population was living in cliffside caves" but that would still mean that apparently there was roughly an entire Detroit living in the cliff-rock which uhhhhhhh
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Feb 21, 2020 01:32
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Fojar38 posted:The wikipedia article you're looking at cites some real weak sources for this. its a lot stronger than you
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Feb 21, 2020 01:33
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Fojar38 posted:The angle seems to be "the casualty rate was so high because lots of the population was living in cliffside caves" but that would still mean that apparently there was roughly an entire Detroit living in the cliff-rock which uhhhhhhh my lack of an imagination is a good defense
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Feb 21, 2020 01:34
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Fojar38 posted:The angle seems to be "the casualty rate was so high because lots of the population was living in cliffside caves" but that would still mean that apparently there was roughly an entire Detroit living in the cliff-rock which uhhhhhhh lol
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Feb 21, 2020 01:36
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Despera posted:my lack of an imagination is a good defense Dude, you're claiming that this pre-modern earthquake killed 4 times more people than Hiroshima and Nagasaki getting loving nuked did If they had written down 5 million were killed would you believe that too
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Feb 21, 2020 01:39
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