Eastern Zhou man fighting a dragon (ca. 300 BC) Central Asian cavalry attacks In 771 BC, skillful fighters from the northwest invaded Zhou Dynasty China; they may have been the [...]
Fan Kuan, "Traveling amid Streams and Mountains" (National Palace Museum, Taipei) Landscape painting got even better under the Song Dynasty than it had been under the T'ang Dynasty that came [...]
Ancient Chinese art: Song Dynasty painting General themes of ancient Chinese art From the earliest Stone Age art to the Ming Dynasty in 1500 AD, Chinese artists took up the [...]
Yonglegong Taoist temple in Shangxi (1247 AD) When the Mongols conquered China in the 1200s AD, they did not bring in their own architecture, but continued the older Song Dynasty [...]
Longmen Caves (493-900 AD) By the time of the T'ang Dynasty, in the 600s AD, people were bringing together the Buddhist and Taoist traditions in China to create a new unified [...]
Anji Bridge, China (600s AD) Under the Sui Dynasty, in the 600s AD, people in China built this beautiful bridge. The bridge shows the ideas of symmetry and balance that [...]
Hall of Supreme Harmony Forbidden City (Beijing, 1406 AD) - Ming Dynasty Architecture What's the Forbidden City? Early Ming Emperors built Taoist temples to show their power, like the Golden [...]
Early Chinese architecture - A typical Chinese house Chinese houses Most people in ancient China could not afford to live in fancy houses. They lived in small houses made of [...]
Golden Hall (Wudang Mountain, 1416 AD) Who built the Golden Hall? Ming Dynasty emperors built the Golden Hall palace on the slopes of Wudang Mountain in 1416 AD. The Golden [...]
In 1500 AD, most people in China prayed to their traditional gods. The most accepted philosophy was Taoism. But many other people were Buddhists, and rejected Taoism. Because of the Mongol Empire [...]
