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The planet Earth, according to many scientists, is roughly 4 billion years old.
Give or take a few million years.
225 million years ago, dinosaurs walked the surface of the Earth.
And by 65 million years ago, they were extinct.
Five to seven million years ago, man that walks upright began appearing on the scene.
In the beginning, man was not much different than any of the other animals who lived in constant fear,
hunted by the great predators of the time.
But about two and a half million years ago, something special happened.
Man began making tools and weapons.
Then, as he learned how to cooperate within the tribe,
to organize the hunt, to defend his family and plant crops,
the first traces of civilization began to appear.
And of the early civilizations, none was more innovative and resourceful,
or for that matter more durable, than the one that sprang up 7,000 years ago along the Yellow River in China.
From the coast of the East China Sea to the deserts of Mongolia
and the Himalayan Mountains into bed,
China's 3,600,000 square miles of territory
make it a bit larger in size than the United States.
In 1933, 40 partial skeletons were found near Peking, China.
At first thought to be only a couple of thousand years old,
they became an archeological sensation when carbon dating established that their age was between 200,000 and 500,000 years old.
The skeletons collectively came to be known as Peking Man.
For 200,000 years, the tribes of Peking Man flourished along the Yellow River and the coast of the Yellow Sea.
It's also believed that some of the relatives of Peking Man were the Paleolithic tribes that migrated out of Asia and into North America.
They crossed over the Bering Strait Land Bridge that was above sea level because of the last ice age.
In the Chinese province of Sanxi, artifacts from the Neolithic or New Stone Age show that man lived in villages here well over 5,000 years ago.
With a moderate climate year round and plenty of good land for farming,
it's easy to understand why early man chose to give up his nomadic ways and settle in the Yellow River Basin.
Originating on the plateaus that surround the Yellow River Basin, the Huang or Yellow River flows almost due east for over 2,900 miles where it empties into the Yellow Sea.
The basin, the river, and the sea are made yellow by the dust that blows down off the high plateaus of Central Asia, driven by the prevailing Russian winds.
Although the advent of agriculture, writing, and the invention and use of tools and weapons occurred over hundreds of years, each event is remembered by the early Chinese as folklore.
The tales of the legendary emperors who shaped the future were passed down from generation to generation.
A powerful lord named Chen Nong is identified as the inventor of agriculture.
He figured out the relationships of seeds and plants.
The Yellow Emperor Huang D invented writing and weapons.
An Emperor Yu of the Great, in the year 2197 BCE, taught the people how to tame floods.
But Emperor Yu must not have done a very good job because the Yellow River is also known as China's sorrow because of the millions of people that died in its great floods over the centuries.
Before the invention of paper in China, writing and records were inscribed on animal bones, and since the writing on the bones was said to talk, they were known as oracle bones, an oracle is someone who can tell the future.
By 1600 BCE, historical records inscribed on oracle bones tell us the Shang dynasty was in power along the Yellow River.
This was also the beginning of China's Bronze Age, and there are many fine bronze weapons, cooking vessels and art objects that survived from this period.
Another very important Chinese cultural event is traced to this time and place.
It's the production and use of silk as a fabric.
King Wu, first ruler of the Western Zhou dynasty, came to power in the year 1027 BCE, when China was a patchwork of more than 500 feudal states.
A feudal state, which consisted mainly of a warlord's fortress and its surrounding farmland, was awarded to a lesser noble by a king or a higher ranking noble in exchange for a promise of military support.
When these 500 feudal states warred with each other for survival, it was called the spring and autumn period.
Meanwhile, there was also an emergence of daring new philosophical thought across China.
The most venerable of all Chinese philosophers, Confucius, was born in 551 BCE and lived to be 72 years old.
In an age of constant warfare, Confucius centered his teachings on benevolence, gentleness, and loyalty, and gained a huge following.
Confucius also gave rise to the Chinese practice of ancestor worship, the honoring of and praying to deceased relatives.
If you did this, Confucius said, your ancestors would then help you overcome the trials and challenges of your own life.
Worshipping of one's ancestors is still widely practiced in China today.
By 475 BCE, wars between the 500 feudal states had reduced them to what became known as the Seven Warring States.
In 246 BCE, at the age of only 13, King Zhang inherited the throne of Qin, one of the seven warring states.
By the time he was 39 years old, he had conquered the other six warring states and unified old of China for the first time.
At that time, he took a new name to go with his new title and became Qin Shi **** Di, Emperor of all China.
He wasted no time consolidating total control over his newly won empire.
His first step was to standardize the Chinese language.
By combining the common symbols of the seven states, he created a set of 3,000 symbols that remain the core of the modern Chinese language today.
While English uses 26 letters to make thousands of words, the Chinese language has a separate symbol for each word totaling over 60,000.
Next, Qin Shi **** Di established one form of money and one set of laws.
He didn't believe in freedom of speech, and it said he once buried alive 460 scholars and philosophers who had criticized him.
In 214 BCE, Qin Shi **** Di feared that the barbarians who lived to the west and north of his new empire might attempt an invasion.
To defend against this possibility, he ordered that a great wall be built on his northern and western borders.
At the time of his order, much of the wall already existed.
As far back as 700 BCE, the state of Chu and others had built their own walls, and the emperor's plan was to connect them all together, thus creating the great wall of China.
Once completed, the great wall would be 1,675 miles long as the crow flies, but with all its twists and turns, its total length is over 2,600 miles.
The wall is between 20 and 40 feet tall, and the top is about 33 feet wide, which allowed five horsemen to ride side by side.
Millions of Chinese lives were sacrificed to build the wall. Working on the wall was considered a death sentence.
One of its Chinese nicknames is "The World's Longest Cemetery".
The emperor's plan for manning his great fortification was to have soldiers live by the wall with their families and maintain their own farms to feed themselves.
Quite frequently, these resident soldier guardians would become friends with and trade with the people who lived on the other side.
Qin Shi **** Di also built a new palace and capital city named Xian Yang, about 25 miles south of Chang'an.
It was there that he began preparing his tomb. Like the Egyptians, the Chinese believed in the concept of mankind having both earthly and spiritual souls.
This duality is symbolized in the Chinese concept of Yin and Yang.
Firmly believing there was a life after death, the emperor decided he would need an army in the afterlife, and he set thousands of people to work making it out of clay.
Known as the terracotta army, the emperor's soldiers of the afterlife were a foot taller and larger than real men to give them extra strength and endurance.
At the time of his death in the year 210 BCE, a raid in front of his tomb mound was his clay army of 10,000 men and horses, complete with weapons and even chariots.
They were aligned in battle formation, facing the east, the direction from which his traditional enemies would have come.
When the emperor was buried, entombed with him, but still alive, were nearly a hundred of his wives and every workman who knew the secrets of his tomb.
His 20-year-old son, Air Shi, was then crowned the second emperor.
Air Shi chose to live a reclusive life of luxury and extravagance, and he left the governing of the empire to his tutor, who was a very brutal man.
In 207 BCE, the masses rebelled against the brutality of Air Shi's reign, and the Qing dynasty was ended in what is possible in the world's first successful peasant uprising.
The revolt was led by a man who was born a peasant, turned into a bandit, and then became emperor.
Liu Bang is one of the greatest of all Chinese folk heroes. He founded the Han dynasty and ruled as the emperor Gao Di.
Having suffered all the harsh indignities of living as a peasant under the Qing emperors, the new Han emperor's rule was a breath of fresh air.
This new kind of government was based on the more caring and humane teachings of Confucius.
In 139 BCE, Han emperor Wu Di sent an envoy west to find out what other kingdoms there might be.
During his 12 years away, the envoy traveled as far as the edge of the Greek world, and brought back word that, beyond the barbarians, there were kingdoms comparable to China.
By 100 BCE, a great increase in trade took place, and the Han capital of Chang'an became the beginning of a trade route to the west, known as the Silk Road.
The Silk Road took its name from China's main export.
Once the Western cultures learned of silk, they couldn't get enough of it, and not knowing how to make it, they paid the Chinese handsomely for their skills.
Far from being as smooth as silk, the two principal trade routes to the west ran for about 2,500 miles across some of the roughest and most unforgiving terrain in Central Asia, including the Gobi Desert and the Pamir Mountains.
Chang'an became the largest city in the world at that time, with a population of over half a million.
The court of the Han emperors flowered with refined culture. The main import coming back into China from the west was not goods or products, it was Buddhism.
Based on the teachings of Buddha from the 5th century BCE in India, the new religion quickly gained a wide following in China.
Pagodas or centers of learning sprang up across the land. The wild goose pagoda of Chang'an has stood for over 1,400 years.
After the fall of the Han dynasty, China again became a collection of warring states. This time, however, there were only three.
The story of the struggle as each of the three kings tried to reunite China is told in the most famous of all Chinese historical novels, Romance of the Three Kingdoms.
The novel, written in the 14th century, tells the story of the kingdoms of Wu, Shuhan and Wei. The kingdom of Wei was north on the Yellow River.
The kingdoms Wu and Shuhan were located to the south along the Yangtze River, and much of the wars between the three kingdoms took place on or near the Yangtze.
Known in China as the Changjiang or Long River, the Yangtze is the longest river in all of Asia, and the third longest river in the world.
From its headwaters in the Himalayan mountains of Tibet, the Yangtze flows for 3965 miles through central China on its way to the east China Sea.
The three gorges of the Yangtze, considered by many to be the most spectacular geographical feature in all of China, have inspired Chinese poets and painters for many centuries.
While Chinese civilization was developing on the Yellow River in the north, similar progress was being made on the Yangtze River to the south.
The area along the Yangtze had become the rice bowl of China. Agriculture there was responsible for feeding most of the country, and it was for rice that the three kingdoms fought one another.
There were grand battles on land with massive armies and mounted cavalry. There were also epic naval battles fought on the waters of the Yangtze, because it was the primary means of quickly moving armies into position.
Finally, in the year 280, King **** Di of Wei succeeded in conquering his foes and reuniting China. However, history repeats itself, and after the death of **** Di, the country again fell into warring dynasties that would persist until the beginning of the Sui dynasty in 581 CE.
From clans and tribes of nomadic wanderers, the Chinese became a collection of small feudal states, which eventually united into one country under the first emperor of the first dynasty.
Although each new dynasty would eventually fall, it would have added to the progress that had been made.
In timelines of ancient civilizations, China Part II, will witness the arrival of a dynasty that launched a building project rivaling the Great Wall itself.
It's the Grand Canal. And much like the Great Wall of China, the Grand Canal is still very much a part of life in China today.
Plus, we'll see how life in China is changed when this seemingly mysterious country is finally open to the influences of the Western civilizations.
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