and one of the birth places for a world wide established martial art.
Every time I dig into Chinese cultural history, I am amazed. For example, I've been studying the Hong Lou Meng series by Cao Xueqin (and Gao E, I suppose for the last 40 chapters), and in the process I found that the earliest musical manuscripts
PREDATE European attempts at notation by 600+ years (!!!!) and the evidence is hanging in some Japanese Museum...
They were using paper currency when Europe was in the dark ages... Gunpowder... They were navigating the oceans (supposedly...there's some debate about this still) before Magellan had pubes...
But for all the positives, they have some ugly negatives... political corruption (ever present) especially... That's one piece of history I imagine they'd like to NOT be known for.