I like medieval stuff but I've nearly learned everything I care about in Europe. I want to get started on China, but I don't have the cultural background to dive in to anything detailed, I'd just get lost in a sea of missing context.
This is exactly what pop historians are for, but 80% of them just make shit up, so I need a recommendation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byjBNKyQXJ0&list=PLqi_HIn6wIRHTEYd_wHZB-qDVNAbKDxCT
If you are looking for more a chinese produced high quality documentary serie on Chinese philosophy, early nation formation, developement, etc. focus on an key historical figure, you have this serie. There is a season 2 now
season 2 is also completed: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUM8x224JrX-EF3FLZ8_7YsKO2mviA_1P they speedrun from sui dynasty to Sun yatsen :agony-minion:
The romance of the three kingdom should be a good start, since seem like that part history is the most mainstream one. Next is the warring state era and first emperor of China
It is almost entirely exaggeration. However, with much of the existing known history from that era being fairly mundane annals and otherwise recorded in an un-noteworthy fashion, the Romance of the Three Kingdoms mythos is the leading historical mythos for 'China as a state'. With Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism being more of a set of beliefs and practices rather than a specific liturgical canon (and incredibly varied and distributed at that) alongside other historical folk diety worship, the Romance of the Three Kingdoms is basically the Chinese version of the Bible a.k.a. 'the kinda-sorta history book whose characters and stories everybody constantly references all the time'.
Actual Chinese history and archaeology of the era is quite complex as well, but it's these dramatizations that make up a large bulk of older pop historiography and are good to know for that alone.
Depends of which one. The one we know about is the Romance of the three kingdom, which is a highly dramatized version of the annals (anal xd) of the three kingdoms
The Spring and Autumn Annals, The Book of Han, The Records of the Three Kingdoms, The Shitong, and Selections from Records of the Historian.
yes they are fun and accurate. :huh:
The Annals can be a bit dry unless you're the sort of person who reads the Anglo Saxon Chronicle and Nennius for fun :side-eye-1:
We're not so Different did a series on Chinese history through I think the Mongols. It's a pretty broad survey and a podcast, but it might be an easy place to start.
i've suggest wen tiejun's lecture online, but they are all in Chinese with no subtitle
:agony-shivering:
I read John Keay's China: A History last year, a single-volume pop history, and it definitely provides the grounding and context you'll want in order to engage in further explorations. Up next, in addition to the primary sources mentioned elsewhere in this thread, might be the Belknap History of Imperial China series. For intellectual history, I strongly recommend A.C. Graham's Disputers of the Tao.
For more recent history (Qing and onward), the gold standard is Jonathan Spence's The Search for Modern China. Other folk here will have better recommendations for post-revolutionary China, I'm sure, but Spence will give you the context you need for that.
maybe you know it already, in my opinion all of this guy's documentaries are good, he always goes over the macro stuff as well as common life, and he did one episode covering a part of Chinese history..
https://piped.palveluntarjoaja.eu/watch?v=FwEkp4I75OA
I can't say how accurate he is though