China

Included are interdisciplinary suggested activities and downloadable handouts for approaching this subject through skill sets applied across world history studies.

The Han Dynasty is one of the great dynasties in Chinese history, encompassing nearly four hundred years of expansion and consolidation which coincided with the period of the Roman republic and empire in the West.

Just east of the modern city of Xi’an, you can see an army of soldiers unearthed. Discovered first in 1974, the work continues on three pits containing over 7,000 model soldiers. The army was buried within a framework of wooden pillars just east of the large tumulus containing the tomb of the First Emperor. It was a massive undertaking, certainly the largest ceramic project ever undertaken anywhere.

The Buddha—that is, the “Enlightened One”—lived nearly 2500 years ago in northern India. His followers have always seen his life as a shining example to all, but what “really happened” is now impossible to know for certain. Even the earliest stories of his life include miraculous events that may seem hard to take literally. Later versions are even more elaborate, and they differ from one another in many details.

Among the most globally significant innovations of the Tang and Song dynasties were the inventions of woodblock printing and moveable type, enabling widespread publishing of a variety of texts, and the dissemination of knowledge and literacy.

Students will become members of the “literati/scholar” class by demonstrating their understanding of Chinese history, philosophy, and poetry. They will also display high achievement in the “Three Perfections”: calligraphy, painting, and poetry. This project is designed to be a creative alternative to daily or weekly assignments which might otherwise be assembled in a notebook or binder at the end of the 7th-grade Medieval China unit.

Scholars often refer to the Tang (618–907) and Song (960–1279) dynasties as the “medieval” period of China. The civilizations of the Tang (618–907) and Song (960–1279) dynasties of China were among the most advanced civilizations in the world at the time. Discoveries in the realms of science, art, philosophy, and technology—combined with a curiosity about the world around them—provided the men and women of this period with a worldview and level of sophistication that in many ways were unrivaled until much later times, even in China itself.

The Qin empire(221–206 BCE) of China lasted only fifteen years, but the rise of the state of Qin began several decades earlier, and Qin’s defeat of all the other rival states brought a definative conclusion to the Warring States period (475–221 BCE). Ying Zheng, the future First Emperor, ascended the throne of Qin in the year 247 BCE at age thirteen, and only a few years later launched a series of military campaigns against the neighboring states of Han, Zhou, Wei, Chu, Yan and Qi, defeating the last in 221 BCE, ‘as a silkworm devours a mulberry leaf ’ according to the Han historian Sima Qian.

Islam is one of the world’s major religions. It shares with Judaism and Christianity a belief in a single god. The Arabic name for God is Allah. The word Islam means “surrender (to God).” The followers of Islam are called Muslims, which in Arabic means “one who surrenders to God.”

We will refer to Ancient China as the time between the Neolithic period (ca. 6,000‒ ca. 1750 BCE) and the Han dynasty (206 BCE‒ 220 CE), which is roughly equivalent to the period of the Roman Empire in the West. This is the formative stage of Chinese civilization. During this time, what we now call China developed from a collection of isolated cultural communities to a set of organized states which eventually coalesced around the idea of a single unified state, and then expanded to include contact with other civilizations.