![]() In the Yangtze region, wet-rice cultivation predominates. ![]() The expansion of rice farming in southern China The long history of China’s civilization is dawning. These show that the Chinese system of writing is gradually developing. Even at this ancient period of China’s history, pottery shards carry inscriptions which include composite ideographs, conveying simple meanings. Elaborate burials for the elite suggest that the region is home to competing chiefdoms, ruled by warlike aristocracies. The larger settlements are surrounded by thick beaten-earth walls, an indicator of endemic warfare. In the Yellow River region of China, farming, based on millet cultivation, is the backbone of the economy, and small towns and villages dot the landscape. Civilization is emerging in Ancient China Over the past millennia, farming cultures in China have been becoming more and more complex. After initial struggles a final, glorious phase in China’s imperial history will begin. They have thus established a new dynasty, the Qing (“brilliant”), and, under their regent, Dorgon, are now in the process of pacifying the entire country. One group of invaders are a people from the northern steppes who, having developed a Chinese-style state in Manchuria (hence the name by which they are known to history, the Manchus), have taken advantage of rising chaos in China to march on the capital and seize the throne (1644). In the 16 th century the Ming dynasty showed the classic symptoms of dynastic decline, repeated at regular intervals throughout China’s history: corrupt and ineffective administration in the provinces, famine and floods inadequately dealt with, peasant revolt and invasion from across the frontiers. The turbulence of life at the centre meant that some deep-seated problems in the administration of the Ming empire were not addressed properly. These factions were frequently in bitter conflict with the scholar-officials of the imperial bureaucracy. However, the Ming emperors, for the most part nonentities, fell increasingly under the control of eunuch factions at court. Perhaps that's why China's present rulers have been eager to act on man-made climate change.The Ming dynasty presided over a reasonably tranquil period in Chinese history. "It is likely that the current globe warming trend or anthropogenic forcing will be accompanied by a weakening trend of Asian summer monsoons, especially in northwestern China," Cheng says. The record revealed over the past 50 years, however, paints a different picture, with man-made soot and greenhouse gases determining the rains' strength. "We have demonstrated that the cave record correlates well with many other records, including the Little Ice Age in Europe, temperature changes Northern Hemisphere, and major solar variability," Cheng notes.įluctuations in the sun's intensity in the past seemed to play the key role in determining the strength of the Asian monsoon. In fact, the collapse of the Tang Dynasty coincides with that of the Mayan civilization-both due to extreme drought. Further, the stalagmite record matches those of glacial retreat in the Alps, sediment records from Lake Huguang Maar in southern China and droughts from Barbados to Southern France. These periods of strong and weak rains, when compared with Chinese historical records, coincide with periods of imperial turmoil or prosperity, as in the case of the expansion of the Northern Song Dynasty-a time of abundant harvests. The region gets less rainfall when the monsoon is mild and more when it is strong, the researchers explain today in Science. "The climate acted," Cheng says, "as the last straw that broke the camel's back."Ĭomposed of calcium carbonate leached from dripping water, the 4.6-inch- (11.7-centimeter-) long stalagmite preserves a record of rainfall in this region, which is on the edge of the area impacted by the Asian monsoon. The stalagmite reveals, for example, that the vital rains of the Asian monsoon weakened at the time of the downfalls of the Tang, Yuan and Ming dynasties over the past 1,810 years. "We think that climate played an important role in Chinese history," says paleoclimatologist Hai Cheng of the University of Minnesota, a member of the scientific team that harvested and analyzed the stalagmite from Wanxiang Cave in Gansu Province in northwest China. According to the atmospheric record contained in a stalagmite, one of the causes of that downfall may have been climate change. 907-after nearly three centuries of rule-the dynasty fell when its emperor, Ai, was deposed, and the empire was divided. In the late ninth century a disastrous harvest precipitated by drought brought famine to China under the rule of the Tang dynasty.
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