Wednesday, August 22, 2007

China's First Emperor






China wants to tell now the world ,of itself.
The First Emperor's army of terracotta warriors have an important role to play.
Firstly, the warriors were commissioned by one of the greatest figures in Chinese history as part of his lavish burial preparations.
The First Emperor, Qin Shi Huangdi, was the founder of China:
in the 11 short years of his rule between 221 and 210BC, he united the separate states of China, standardised the written language, law, coinage, weights and measurements, and set up a centralised bureaucracy to administer his huge empire. Napoleon's rule of Europe approaches the First Emperor's extraordinary achievement, but while the French empire quickly fragmented, the China united by Qin Shi Huangdi in 221BC is the world's oldest political entity.http://arts.guardian.co.uk/art/heritage/story/0,,2153766,00.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qin_Shi_Huang
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_character According to legend, Chinese characters were invented earlier by Cangjie (c. 2650 BC), a bureaucrat under the legendary emperor, Huangdi. The legend tells that Cangjie was hunting on Mount Yangxu (today Shanxi) when he saw a tortoise whose veins caught his curiosity. Inspired by the possibility of a logical relation of those veins, he studied the animals of the world, the landscape of the earth, and the stars in the sky, and invented a symbolic system called — Chinese characters. It was said that on the day the characters were born, Chinese heard the devil mourning, and saw crops falling like rain, as it marked the beginning of civilization, for good and for bad.


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