Today's history narration is on China. I have him (Connor) edit these later, to go into the history notebook, but I initially write it down just like he says it, and I like to put that version here.
Some of this information is not technically correct, as we're figuring out by doing further research. But this is the info as he got it out of Chapter 9 of Story of the World 2. Except for the bit about the pandas.
China
The Sui Dynasty ruled for 40 years, and here's how it started. See, China was split into two parts, the north and the south. Eventually the emperor who started the Sui Dynasty decided to march from the north into the south and take it over. And he succeeded, so he became the new emperor.
He had a problem. There were two rivers that went across China. If you wanted to go into the north you'd have to cross one river, and if you wanted to go into the south, you'd have to cross another. These rivers were called the Yangtze River and the Yellow River. So the Emperor started construction on the Great Canal. Like the Great Wall, he had the people pay a lot and a lot of money, and he had a lot and a lot of people work on it. Eventually that emperor died before the canal was finished, so his son took over. His son eventually finished the canal. Lots of people decided to live in houseboats on the river. This is how houseboats were invented. The women would make bamboo life life jackets for the children until they learned to swim. This probably attracted lots of panda bears.
But the people of China were angry with the Emperor because they had to pay a lot of money to build the canal, and a lot of people died working on it. Eventually they rebelled against the Emperor, and killed him.
The Tang Dynasty ruled for 300 years, and invented a lot of stuff. They invented lacquer, which is like plastic. They did a lot of art and music. They ate with chopsticks. Also they eventually thought that China would be even more richer if they could make gold. So they combined a bunch of different stuff together, but none of them made gold. But when doing this they invented something by mistake. They combined charcoal, sulfur and saltpeter, and they ended up with a powder that was explosive. This became gunpowder! They also invented the first rockets, which were fireworks. They would take a stick of bamboo and fill it with gunpowder, and light it.
Posted by Steph at August 28, 2003 12:38 PM