were there any factors like food or cultural organization, which led to them having a sustained increase in population?
In: Culture
Intensive agriculture in a large area of land which could support it due to plentiful water supply, combined with a fairly well organised bureaucracy which enabled a reasonable system of government over the large area.
It’s not an apt comparison. In terms of geographical size and and the variety of regions and cultures, it’s better to compare ancient China with the whole Mediterranean region and Mesopotamia. The region now covered by China has had multiple empires, often competing empires, just like Western civilization. China now has over 200 living languages, and probably a similar number of cultures. So of course the “Chinese” (not really Chinese) thrived a long time. There was always someone nearby to carry on the torch. The same thing happened in the West, but the whole region of early western civilization isn’t covered by a single country, hence the confusion.
From my understanding, it was due to location. The Yangzi River provided very fertile soil. On top of that, there was a unique type of food in the region.
To understand this, there is an important concept that is required. Food is required to support a population. A population will grow till it reaches an equilibrium with the available food sources. If there is food to spare, the population will grow. If you take a look at the [population of the UK over time](http://cdn3.chartsbin.com/chartimages/l_28k_fb27f87c424b999a77661bdcc504d973), you can see when the industrial revolution started.
Back to the unique food in the Yangzi river valley, that is Rice. From my understanding, for a given acre of farmland, Rice can provide around ~10-11 million calories per year. While an acre of wheat can only provide ~5-6 million calories per year. From this alone you can see that the Yangzi river valley can support a huge population.
Edit: Mixed up my rivers. Meant the Yangzi river, not the Yellow River. Also changed the wheat caloric output from 1 million per year to 5-6 million per year since I had that value wrong.
You might be familiar with how the Nile River in Egypt works from school. If you aren’t – for 9 months out of the year the Nile has a moderate flow rate that is sufficient to support human settlement and agriculture. For the remaining 3 months the Nile’s flow rate increases dramatically and it floods a huge area around its river banks.
That flooding might sound bad but its not. Using soil for agricultural purposes will deplete it’s minerals within about 100 years. That’s a long time compared to a human life, but not compared to a civilization. When the soil runs out of minerals you can’t grow anything in it anymore, and it turns out that this is the limiting factor for most civilizations. IE, a civilization will begin intensively farming its soil, deplete the soil, then starve to death.
In the modern world we’re able to replenish the soil’s minerals with fertilizer. They were sort of able to do this in the ancient world as well, but this involved transporting huge amounts of animal manure which is difficult to do and, in practice, if an ancient civilization had to manually fertilize the soil it would result in very low agricultural yields.
This is what makes the Nile’s floods so good for the development of civilization – every time the Nile would flood it deposits a huge amount of new soil in the areas that got flooded. The source of that new soil was hills and mountains in Central Africa, so it was filled with minerals. Or to put it another way – every year the Nile naturally dumped a huge amount of fertilizer on Egypt.
This natural fertilizing allowed Egypt to be by far the most productive agricultural region West of India for thousands of years – everyone from the Pharaohs to Alexander the Great to the Roman Empire fed themselves using the food that the Nile was able to grow.
How does this relate to China? The Yellow River in China is the same type of river as the Nile. It spends most of the year with a moderate flow rate, then has massive floods for a few months that deposit a bunch of new soil along its banks.
Where the Yellow River is different from the Nile is in its size. The Nile is a single, small river with practically no tributaries or lakes. The Nile’s floods only cover a small geographic area located immediately adjacent to it.
The Yellow River, on the other hand, is a massive system with hundreds of tributaries and lakes. When it floods, it covers almost the entirety of South East China – which is an area thousands of times the size of that covered by the Nile.
The Yellow River basin has been among for the most productive agricultural areas on Earth for much of human history. Because the only limiting factor to population size is a region’s ability to produce food, this also means that the Yellow River Basin (and by extension, China) has managed to maintain a huge population for the entirety of human history.
Anti erosion agriculture. Asian can feed people indefinitely with the rice patties, but tilling the soil is civilization suicide.
Basically the two f’s farming and ffffffraternizing with the neighboring villages. Repeatedly and with vigor.
Maybe because they have a territory that’s entirely composed of land, and mountains and forests, whereas the mesopotamians only had a little space around their river? They couldn’t really extend their territory and so their population, because it was hard to get things to grow.
[deleted]
It’s a confluence of factors.
I recommend reading the long and a bit tedious book: Why The West Rules, For Now.
It gives a history of human prosperity in “western” and “eastern” geographies.
To sustain population growth, humans needed to make the leap from hunter gatherers to agriculture.
There were a few locations that had a climate to support this, fertile land that could be consistently farmed, and nutrient dense high production grains (of which there are surprisingly few).
In the end, this left the hilly flanks of Mesopotamia and the yangtze valley as two of the few potential locations around the world for civilization to develop.
Why China lasted longer? If I recall, the book claimed climate change, collapse of civilization in the middle east around the bronze age (China was insulated geographically), warfare, Mesopotamia shifted it’s Central locus to other Mediterranean countries, etc.
In short, it’s a lot of things, and not a simple answer why one side leads the other at a given point in time. Definitely read the book if you can. It’s not comprehensive either. It’s his best summary incorporating all the facts he gathered and even with all the facts, we still don’t fully understand everything.
Not just China, but India also.
There are probably a dozen factors that contribute to the long term large and sustained human populations of those regions, but if I had to pick ONE and only one, I would pick a reliable water supply. The headwaters of the Ganges, Indus, Brahmaputra, Yellow, and Yangtze rivers are all fed by melt water from the Himalayan snow pack. The Himalayan snow pack is built up every year by the seasonal Indian Monsoon Current and that snow pack is MASSIVE. If the monsoon fails or is weak one year, or even several years in row, there is still enough snow pack from previous years’ monsoons to provide plenty of water for drinking, irrigation, and navigation along those five rivers.
With a large and reliable source of fresh water for drinking and irrigation you can sustain large populations. These large rivers also provide a means of navigation so trade and communication are easier. This makes it easier to organize a civilization with a centralized(ish) government, making it easier to create a larger, more homogenized(ish) society and culture.
In contrast, the rivers of the Fertile Crescent, the Tigris, Euphrates, and Nile are all fed almost exclusively by direct rainfall. Annual melt water from snow pack is almost non-existent for those rivers, so they have no buffer if seasonal rains are abnormally low or if there is a drought.
YT video of historic human population from 200,000 BCE to present day: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUwmA3Q0_OE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUwmA3Q0_OE)
Also: Billions Rely on Himalayan Glaciers for Water. But They’re Disappearing. [https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/himalayas-melting-climate-change/](https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/himalayas-melting-climate-change/)
Latest Answers