Sublime

This great southward expansion, absorbing new land and people into the Chinese world, was the crucial stage in the ‘making’ of China. It added the hugely productive rice-growing region (where double and triple cropping was possible) to the agrarian economy. It brought new crops and commodities from the sub-tropical south to stimulate a rise in

Jugs with handles are one popular form that appears first in the Hungarian Neolithic and continues into Bell Beaker sites around 2700 BCE, then spreading south and west, reaching France by 2300 BCE. Another type of pot that follows a similar trajectory is the ‘polypod cup’ – more of a bowl, really – with poly pods: many feet. Pots with a line of

Although the Qin Dynasty lasted only from 221 until 206 BCE, it was followed by the Han Dynasty, which lasted for four hundred years, from 206 BCE to 220 CE. The Han Dynasty established boundaries of China that remain the core of the Chinese state today.

The first to appear was the sutra. It arrived in the baggage of a monk from central India named Dharmakshema. He arrived in the Silk Road oasis of Tunhuang in 414, if not a year or two earlier, and he either learned Chinese quickly, or he did so earlier at one of the other oases where he stayed on his way to China.