“Before … Jiang Zemin made an official visit to Egypt in the late 1990s, the Beijing authorities tended to talk of three or four thousand years of Chinese history. It appears that in Egypt someone brought to Jiang’s attention that there, on the Nile Delta, was a civilization that could claim even more venerable origins than the Middle Kingdom. So Chinese leaders unilaterally awarded the country an extra thousand years of history…

Not that those lesser claims were any sturdier. … The earliest written records date from … 1600 BC … [and only] 221 BC saw the Qin unification of the warring fiefdoms and principalities that comprised a significant area stretching from modern-day inner Mongolia to Hunan province in the south. Qin Shi Huangdi, the man who accomplished this feat, styled himself the ‘first emperor’, and his surname became the root of the European name ‘China‘. … The Qin dynasty … lasted fourteen years …”

aus: Ben Chu: Chinese Whispers. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson 2013, S.25/26, zitiert für den ersten Absatz Kerry Brown: Struggling Giant, London: Anthem 2007, S.13, seinerseits eine anonyme britische Quelle zitierend (siehe hier im Internet).

05/20