The Role of Climate Change in Shaping Ancient China

To survey the vast body of Chinese archeological and cultural antiquities is to forget every fragmented parchment record you’ve ever seen tucked behind European museum glass. Shifting in territorial shape and political contour, China’s 3,500 years of written history trails behind it like a magnificent bridal train across the sweep of human civilization in a marriage to the land which has outlasted the rise and fall of Byzantine, Incan and Ottoman empires. Before the first Roman levee was ever fortified against the Tiber River, a Chinese sage-king had already so artfully tamed the ravaging waters of the Yangtze that he became known as Yu the Engineer.