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Q: where does china originate?
who knows the past history of china
The average Chinese person will tell you that China has a 100,000 year history but it really started around 3500 to 2000 BC in the period before the mythical Xia Dynasty in a time known as the Three Sovereigns and Five Emperors. Hunter gatherers settled around the river basins of the North China Plain and eventually began harvesting domesticated crops, of which the most important was rice. That's how it started.
50,000BC, they invented everything, The sun rises in china and sets in China, the universe revolves around China, all major religions and systems of government were created in China, all foods, basically anything you can think of... China. Then around 60 years ago all their Innovation, creativity, manners, as well as social and cultural achievements went away and the clock reset to zero.
Quickly, the culture and language:
1) The first historically verifiable Kingdom was Shang. They ruled the area around Henan, but with surrounding vassal states. They invented Chinese writing.
2) One of the vassals, Zhou, located on the Wei river, conquered Shang. It's unclear if the Zhou originally spoke Chinese, but they certainly had a quite different culture. The mix of Shang and Zhou cultures is roughly the origin of anything recognizably Chinese. Confucianism looked back to early Zhou as it's model for everything. There were a bunch of great cultural achievements during Zhou, and a lot of surrounding kingdoms became Sinified (Wu definitely did not speak Chinese at first, but picked it up before ever being conquered by the Chinese, for example). Zhou was politically very unstable, and splintered into smaller kingdoms.
Keep in mind that all of this occurred on a thin stretch of northern China.
As a country:
Chinese China ("Han China" as it's still called today) as a country (ignoring minority areas, which were mostly later conquests), happened when the kingdom of Qin conquered all the other splinter kingdoms, the surrounding kingdoms, and then started to send armies down south. Qin had always been successful on the battlefield, but the brains behind the big expansion was a guy named Li Si, along with the first emperor. After they died, Qin collapsed, resulting in a civil war in which, eventually, the much more stable Han dynasty took over. This happened roughly the same time as the Punic wars.
It's not quite that cut-and-dry, that's the general outline.
