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About the same time that Gautama was starting Buddhism in India, a man in China, a great wise man named Confucius, was teaching the people of China what they ought to do and what they ought not to do. His teachings filled several books and formed what came to be a way of life for the Chinese and many other people in Asia.
Confucius taught that people should be loyal and obey their kings and also that rulers had a duty to take care of their people. He believed that this would bring peace and harmony in China. He taught people to obey their parents and teachers and to honor their ancestors. This sounds something like one of the Ten Commandments: “Honor thy father and thy mother.”
Confucius also taught the Golden Rule, the same Golden Rule that you are taught today, only instead of saying, “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you” he said, “Do not do to others what you would not want others to do to you.”
China had one of the earliest civilizations in the world. Maybe you remember the name of the river that was the cradle of Chinese civilization. It was the Huang River, or Yellow River, that overflowed with thick yellow mud. This mud fertilized the soil where people grew their crops. People settled first along the Huang and then also along the Yangtze River, also called the Long River.
Huang River |
Yangtze River |
China is very far away from all the other places we have been talking about. It was isolated from the rest of the ancient world. The Himalaya Mountains lie to the west and the Gobi Desert to the north. On the south are more mountains and seas. On the east lies the great Pacific Ocean that stretches all the way to the west coast of the United States. In the days before large sailing ships and way before airplanes, the Chinese had very little contact with any other people. So Chinese culture developed all by itself.
We know the Chinese had a written language as early as 1500 B.C. at a time when the Shang dynasty ruled northern China. You can see that Chinese writing is still very different from the writing in any other country. The Chinese never switched to an alphabet but continue to use characters—a different character for each word. It must be very hard to learn to read and write Chinese.
We have to learn only twenty-six letters. Boys and girls in China have to memorize about six hundred characters before they can do even basic reading and writing.
Many inventions were made and used in China before the rest of the world ever heard of them. Around the time of Christ, the Chinese were making silk, porcelain, and paper. By this time, the Chinese did trade with some of the other people we have read about. Chinese silk was in great demand by Romans and their neighbors around the Mediterranean.
By 600 A.D. the Chinese had invented printing and used printing presses. A few centuries later, they were making the magnetic compass, which was such a great help to the sailors. Do you know what a compass is? It’s a little gadget with a needle that always points to the north. Knowing which way was north made it possible for sailors to know which way they were sailing—even when they were way out in the ocean, too far from land to be able to see the shore. Maybe someone in your class or neighborhood has a compass and can share it for everybody to see.
The Chinese also figured out how to immunize against the dread disease smallpox. They also were first to discover how to make explosive powder, the kind that we use both for gunpowder and for fireworks.
From all this, you can see that the Chinese may have been relatively isolated, but they were very busy making things that the rest of the world found really exciting when people learned about them.