发信人: qiusz(自命不凡)
整理人: y2ghijacker(2001-06-12 10:21:24), 站内信件
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First Emperor (始皇帝)
In 221 B.C. the western frontier state of Qin, the most aggressive of the Warring States, subjugated the last of its rival states.
Once the king of Qin consolidated his power, he took the title Shi Huangdi (始皇帝first emperor)a formulation previously reserved for deities and the mythological sage-emperors, and imposed Qin's centralized, nonhereditary bureaucratic system on his new empire.
焚书坑儒
In subjugating the six other major states of Eastern Zhou, the Qin kings had relied heavily on Legalist scholar-advisers.
Centralization, achieved by ruthless methods, was focused on standardizing legal codes and bureaucratic procedures, the forms of writing and coinage, and the pattern of thought and scholarship. To silence criticism of imperial rule, the kings banished or put to death many dissenting Confucian scholars and confiscated and burned their books ( 焚书坑儒).
Historical Record(史记)
The Han period produced China's most famous historian, Sima Qian (司马迁145-87 B.C.?), whose Shiji (史记Historical Records) provides a detailed chronicle from the time of a legendary Xia emperor to that of the Han emperor Wu Di (汉武帝141-87 B.C.).
People of Han(汉人)
From the Han dynasty, the members of the ethnic majority in China, the "people of Han,"(汉人) are named,who were notable for their culture and military prowess as well.
Silk Route(丝路)
The empire expanded westward as far as the rim of the Tarim Basin (塔里木盆地), making possible relatively secure caravan（大篷车） traffic across Central Asia （中亚）to Antioch, Baghdad（巴格达）, and Alexandria. The paths of caravan traffic are often called the "silk route"(丝路) because the route was used to export Chinese silk to the Roman Empire（罗马帝国）.
The Opium War（鸦片战争）
In 1839 the Qing government, after a decade of unsuccessful anti-opium campaigns, adopted drastic prohibitory laws against the opium trade. The emperor dispatched a commissioner, Lin Zexu ( 1785-1850), to Guangzhou to suppress illicit opium traffic.
Lin seized illegal stocks of opium owned by Chinese dealers and then detained the entire foreign community and confiscated and destroyed some 20,000 chests of illicit British opium. The British retaliated with a punitive expedition, thus initiating the first Anglo-Chinese war（第一次中英战争）, better known as the Opium War (1839-42).
Unprepared for war and grossly underestimating the capabilities of the enemy, the Chinese were disastrously defeated, and their image of their own imperial power was tarnished beyond repair. The Treaty of Nanjing (1842), signed on board a British warship by two Manchu imperial commissioners and the British plenipotentiary, was the first of a series of agreements with the Western trading nations later called by the Chinese the "unequal treaties."( 不平等条约).
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