Culture & Society

Topics in this knowledge base concerning the philosophy, traditions, and social structure of China.

| Topic | Description | |——-|————-| | Confucianism | An ancient philosophical and ethical system founded by Confucius that shaped Chinese governance, education, and values for nearly 2,000 years. | | Taoism | A Chinese philosophical and religious tradition rooted in the Tao Te Ching and Zhuangzi; teaching wu wei, naturalness, and harmony with the Tao, it forms the inward-turning, naturalistic complement to Confucianism. | | Buddhism in China | The Indian religion that entered China via the Silk Road during the Han Dynasty and, over two millennia, synthesized with Confucianism and Taoism—shaping Chinese philosophy, art, literature, and daily spiritual life through the Chan, Pure Land, Huayan, and Tiantai schools. | | Chinese Medicine | A healing system developed over more than 2,000 years—herbal pharmacology, acupuncture, moxibustion, and massage grounded in concepts of qi, yin-yang, and the Five Elements; still practiced worldwide, it yielded the Nobel Prize–winning antimalarial artemisinin. | | The I Ching (Book of Changes) | One of the oldest Chinese texts; a divination manual and philosophy of change built on 64 six-line hexagrams of yin and yang—canonized as one of the Five Classics, central to the imperial examinations, and later noted by Leibniz for its binary structure. | | Filial Piety (Xiao) | The cardinal Confucian virtue of respect and duty toward parents and ancestors; codified in the Classic of Filial Piety and the Twenty-Four Paragons, enforced through imperial law and mourning ritual, it organized family, society, and governance for over two millennia. | | Porcelain and Ceramics | China’s ceramic tradition, refined over five millennia from Neolithic earthenware through Song celadon to Ming and Qing porcelain; the imperial kilns of Jingdezhen and the blue-and-white and famille-rose wares made porcelain one of history’s most valued exports, shaping global trade and aesthetics until Europe cracked the hard-paste formula at Meissen. | | Printing and Woodblock Printing | China’s printing tradition, from Tang woodblock Buddhist texts and the 868 CE Diamond Sutra through Bi Sheng’s eleventh-century movable type to the Song commercial boom and the Ming polychrome zenith; it standardized the classics, powered the examination system, and spread across East Asia centuries before Gutenberg. | | Legalism | An ancient philosophical school emphasizing codified law, meritocratic administration, and centralized state control over moral virtue; forged in the Warring States and made state doctrine by the Qin, its statecraft outlasted its name to shape two millennia of imperial governance. | | Mohism | The Warring States school founded by Mozi (c. 470–391 BCE) and Confucianism’s chief early rival, teaching jian’ai (impartial care), opposition to aggressive war, and meritocracy; its later Canons pioneered logic, optics, and mechanics before the school was eclipsed by the Han’s Confucian turn. | | Calligraphy | The art of Chinese brushwork (shufa), practiced for over three millennia from oracle-bone and seal scripts to the regular, running, and cursive hands; central to the literati ideal and self-cultivation, it produced canonical masters from Wang Xizhi and the Tang giants to the Song and later dynasties. | | Oracle Bones and Divination | The Shang Dynasty practice of heating ox scapulae and turtle plastrons and reading the resulting cracks to divine the will of ancestors and spirits; its inscriptions (jiaguwen) are the earliest known Chinese writing and the first direct textual record of ancient China, recovered in their tens of thousands from Yinxu near Anyang. |

See also the master index and the timeline.