Quote: (10-26-2016 10:37 AM)Meat Head Wrote:
Did Ancient Japan and China have more stable economies compared to Rome? Apart from wars with Europe did East Asian kingdoms ever fall?
Depends what you mean by ancient Japan. In the medieval period, it had not one, but two instances of sheer unadulterated luck that kept them from being overrun by the Mongols. In essence, the Mongols attempted to invade it twice: 1274 and 1281. On the first invasion, they were resisted by the samurai clans and forced to retreat to their ships. As they did so, a typhoon destroyed the fleet -- most of the invading army drowned.
The Mongols returned 7 years later, but in the intervening period the samurai had built fortifications on pretty well every conceivable place a navy could beach and land troops. The Mongols sailed around for a few months or so, looking for a beachhead, but another typhoon hit and destroyed their fleet again. (This had been one of the biggest naval invasions in history; 140,000 men in the Mongol horde, only surpassed in size by the D-Day landings 700 years later).
These typhoons were given the name
kamikaze -- divine wind. The Mongols never came back.
Japan was in essence a closed system, isolated on its home islands; it didn't have a massive population problem throughout much of its history, and wasn't that advanced compared to Imperial China. It was an essentially Paleolithic culture as late as 200 BC, when Rome was heading into the apex of its power. It only took on a permanent capital around 710 AD. The 'golden age' for Japan seems to have been roughly the early European medieval period, 784 - 1183, the Heian Period.
The Mongols were held back during the following period, the Kamakura ... though the cost of resisting those invasions basically bled the country dry and opened it to internal, civil strife for roughly the next 300 years, ending only with the accession to
shogun of the legendary Tokugawa Ieyasu, in 1600. He then closed Japan's borders, set rigid social classes in place, and arguably set the country into decline until the time of the Meiji Restoration in 1868 when the borders began to open (this last time period is best "represented" in the Tom Cruise film
The Last Samurai, insofar as Hollywood represents historical periods. Most TV and film portrays Japan as it was under the Tokugawas, called the Edo period.)
Remissas, discite, vivet.
God save us from people who mean well. -storm