Expert: Jennifer - 1/29/2006

Question
My name is Pablo Hernandez; I'm ten (10) years old, and attend an English school in Bogotá, Colombia.
My Program of Inquiry project is about Ancient China and I have the following questions:

Which crops did the ancient Chinese grow?
How did they live?
How did they dress?
Did this civilization end, or was it conquered by another culture.

Answer
Hi Pablo,

Sorry for the delayed reply. We are celebrating the Lunar New Year over on this part of the world. I will answer your questions, but also leave room for you to do more research.

1) The Chinese grew wet rice, or padi, as we call it in Southeast Asia. This forms their staple food. Other crops were also grown, but rice was the most important.

2) Most Chinese were farmers and they grew rice for self-subsistence. Only when the harvest is very good will they sell the excess on the market.

3) China, being located in the Northern Hemisphere, can be very cold. Therefore, most of them wore long robes. A pretty accurate depiction can be found in martial arts movies. An upcoming movie is "Fearless" starring Jet Li.

4) The Chinese civilization is still in existence today. Ancient China was ruled by various dynasties, starting from the Shang all the way to the Qing dynasty which fell in the 1900s. After that democracy replaced the monarachy rule (for a short while) before the Communists took over. The Chinese were ruled by other cultures from time to time. One of them is the Qing dynasty. They are actually from Mongolia and there were a lot of resistence movements especially towards the end of the rule by the Qing dynasty. You might want to read up on Gengsis Khan and his influence on China.