5 of the greatest Chinese cultural exports, from foods and tea to writing and Confucianism
- Chinese civilisation dates back millennia. It was one of the first to develop a written language and has had a big influence on neighbouring countries
- We look at five of China’s greatest cultural exports, including noodles, tea, tofu and Confucianism, all of which have made a mark around the world
Chinese civilisation can be dated back to the second millennium BC near the Yellow River, where the earliest undisputed archaeological evidence of the Shang (circa 1600BC to 1045BC), one of the first royal dynasties of China, has been unearthed.
In comparison, the ancient Greek civilisation was considered to have begun around 400 years later.
Chinese history has produced many cultural exports, particularly to East and Southeast Asia. Here are five of the most significant:
1. Hanzi (Chinese characters)
The logographic system of Chinese languages is widely accepted by world scholars as one of human history’s four independent inventions of writing.
Salt in tea? In India, and for Tibetans and Hakka in China, it’s old hat
Imperial China introduced the hanzi writing system to neighbouring countries, where it was adapted to write local languages. The adopted Chinese characters are called kanji in Japanese, hanja in Korean and chữ hán in Vietnamese – all terms which translate to “Han characters”.
Chữ hán is no longer a compulsory school subject in Vietnam; and although Vietnamese surnames are practically all Sino-Vietnamese words, they are no longer written as such.
2. Confucianism
Confucianism is also called the Ru school of thought or religious doctrine. Promoting the importance of familial and social harmony over the self, it considers human relationships as the expression of people’s moral nature, while emphasising the self-cultivation of virtues such as ren, yi, li and zhi – co-humanity, righteousness, rite and wisdom. It holds in contempt those who fail to uphold these values.
3. Tofu (bean curd)
The word “tofu” was brought to the West by the Japanese, who borrowed the term from the Chinese doufu, meaning “bean ferment”.
4. Mein (noodles)
Noodles were first mentioned in a book from the Eastern Han period (220BC to 25BC), when written records state that wheat dough noodles had become a prominent food item in China.
5. Tea
Tea has been drunk in China since about 2700BC, at least according to Chinese legend. The earliest evidence, discovered in 2016, showed that Han dynasty emperors drank camellia tea as early as the second century BC.
The oldest documentation of tea drinking found is from the third century BC, when late Eastern Han dynasty doctor Hua Tuo recorded it in a medical text.
In around AD760, Tang dynasty tea master Lu Yu wrote The Classic of Tea, known as the world’s first text on the brewed drink. The text introduces the mythological origins of Chinese tea and contains a horticultural description of tea plants, and aspects of tea planting, processing and drinking.
The Tang dynasty exerted a powerful influence over neighbouring East Asian nations, and it was also around this time that the practice of tea drinking was exported and took root in Japan and Korea.