https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJbdVWal6SU&t=53s
无作者
In 221 BC, China was unified into a single political entity for the first time.With a handful of interruptions,it has remained unified or pulled itself back into unity for roughly 2,200, years ever since.
a handful of sth
a very small number of people or things
There were only a handful of people there.
Europe has never once managed that.Not under Rome, not under Charlemagne,not under Napoleon, and not under Hitler.Every serious attempt to unify the continent by force has ended in permanent, failure.While China’s unity has proven to be the default state its civilization, keeps returning to.And this isn’t a story about China simply having less ground to cover.China’s total land mass is roughly 9.6 million square kilometers.Europe’s is roughly 10.18 million,which includes everything in Europe west of the Ural Mountains.Europe is actually bigger of the two.So,whatever kept one of these regions permanently fractured, and the other constantly pulling itself back together,it wasn’t a difference in terms of scale.And while there are a number of reasons why this is the case,
none are more important than the physical geography both regions were built on.China’s geographic core sits across two enormous river systems,the Yellow River in the north and the Yangtze in the south.Both cutting through vast stretches of flat,open farmland with no mountain range, desert,or major internal barrier separating one river system from the other.Picture it as one continuous bowl of workable land,thousands of kilometers wide,rather than a continent broken up into separate rooms.
picture
to imagine sb/sth; to create an image of sb/sth in your mind 想象；设想；忆起
~ sb/sth
I can still picture the house I grew up in.
我还能回忆起我童年时住的那座房子。
~ sb/sth as sth
We found it hard to picture him as the father of teenage sons.
我们很难想象他居然是有几个十几岁儿子的父亲了。
~ sb/sth doing sth
When he did not come home she pictured him lying dead on the roadside somewhere.
他还没回家的时候，她想象着他已横尸路边了。
~ what, how, etc.…
I tried to picture what it would be like to live alone.
我努力设想一个人单独生活是什么情景。
And this flatness did three things at once,and each one matters for a different reason.The north grew wheat, the south grew rice.Two different agricultural systems in different climates, that could easily have stayed two separate economies, with little reason to stay connected.But because there was no mountain range or major barrier physically separating, one region from the other,there was nothing stopping, these two food sources being traded freely between them.Wheat moving south and rice moving north,
each region getting access to a staple crop it couldn’t easily grow itself.
crop
[C] a plant that is grown in large quantities, especially as food 庄稼；作物
Sugar is an important crop on the island.crop rotation/production/yield
The crops are regularly sprayed with pesticides.
This terrain, also meant an army raised in the north could physically march south, to put down a rebellion, or the other way around, without being bogged down, crossing difficult terrain such as rugged mountains or deserts.And finally, it meant information,orders,and tax revenue, could all move between a political capital and the furthest edges of the empire, in a matter of weeks and not months.Europe’s kings and emperors kept running into that exact wall, over and over again.China largely never had to.But there was still a problem though.Nearly all of China’s major rivers flow from west to east.Moving people, food,and collecting tax revenue from north to south was still a little bit difficult, since there was no natural river, connecting the two halves of, the country together.So China, they innovated and built one.Starting as early as the 5th century BC, and reaching its most complete form under the Sui Dynasty in around 605, AD,
China constructed the Grand Canal,an artificial waterway eventually stretching over 1,700 km, physically connecting the Yellow River and the Yangtze.And to this day, it remains the longest human-made waterway on Earth.And at the time,it was the largest civil engineering project the world had ever seen.Built using the forced labor of millions of workers, over the course of just a few years.Its job was really simple,move grain and tax revenue from the wealthy agricultural, south to feed the political capital in the north,wiring together two very different halves of the country into one functioning, economic, and political system.At its peak, roughly 400,000 tons of grain moved along it every single year,supporting a level of central control, that simply wasn’t physically possible before it existed.China didn’t just get lucky with connected geography.It got most of the way there naturally, and then spent a few decades building the rest.Europe never had anything close to that option.Its geography.
does the opposite job entirely, and the numbers make that obvious almost immediately.Europe’s coastline runs somewhere around 38,000, to 43,000 km depending on how you measure it.Africa’s coastline is only around 30,000 km.That sounds backwards, until you remember that Africa is nearly three times the size of Europe, and geographers actually have a name for this.It’s called the coastline paradox, and it exists because Africa’s coast is mostly smooth, whilst Europe’s is torn apart by peninsulas,islands, inlets and bays over and over again for thousands of kilometers.A great way Europe has been described is being a peninsula of peninsulas, and once you see it that way,you really can’t unsee it.Iberia is its own peninsula, cut off from the rest of the continent by the Pyrenees.Italy is its own peninsula again, cut off by the Alps.Scandinavia, Denmark,Greece, all separate peninsulas again,each one naturally isolated from its neighbors by water on nearly every side.Denmark is a mix of peninsula and islands.
sitting right at the mouth of the Baltic Sea.Greece is practically an archipelago rather than a mainland country, and Britain isn’t even attached to the continent at all,an island entirely separated by water, which has shaped nearly every part of its history differently to its neighbors, just across the channel.Even Europe’s mountains line up in a way that reinforces fragmentation.The Pyrenees, the Alps,the Carpathians, and the Balkans, form something close to one continuous, chain running from west to east right through the middle of the continent, walling off the Mediterranean south from everything further north, and where China’s rivers all converge into one connected system,Europe’s rivers actually work against each other.The Rhine River drains into the North Sea.The Danube runs the opposite direction entirely, through 10 different countries,and then drains into the Black Sea.The Volga drains into the landlocked Caspian Sea,cut off from the ocean altogether.So,
this makes three of Europe’s biggest rivers, flowing in three completely different directions, into three completely different seas,with nothing connecting any of them to each other.But, that didn’t stop some from trying.And I’m going to take you through each of them because, it repeats almost identically, every single time.The first and most obvious attempt was Rome, and it came closest,even if it never came as close as people often assume.At its height, it controlled the entire Mediterranean rim,plus Gaul, Iberia,and most of Britain, and a strip of Central Europe up to two natural boundaries.The rivers we’ve already discussed, the Rhine and the Danube.A Roman army was catastrophically, defeated trying to push further into Germania in 9 AD,and after that,Rome simply drew its border, along the Rhine and stopped moving any further forward.Scandinavia, the Baltics,and most of Eastern Europe were never part of the empire at all.
What eventually broke even that much unity was defending two enormous frontiers, thousands of kilometers apart,the Rhine and the Danube, plus a third against Persia further east,with no connected defensible core the way China had.Reinforcing one frontier meant exposing another, and in the early 5th century,several crises hit at once.406 AD, an undefended stretch of the Rhine gave way,and with it,the western half of the empire unraveled from there and never reassembled.The eastern half of the empire, survived for another thousand years as the Byzantine, Empire,whereas the western core of Europe fractured into dozens of successor kingdoms,and then stayed that way.Charlemagne came next, roughly three centuries later.He built an empire across what’s now France, Germany,and also northern Italy.And in the year 800, was crowned Holy Roman Emperor.However, this unity never survived his own bloodline.Under the Treaty of Verdun in 843,his three grandsons split the empire into three separate kingdoms.
What’s important is where those lines landed.They roughly, followed the same natural fault, lines the continent’s terrain, had always encouraged.And the two outer kingdoms, hardened over the following centuries into recognizable, separate nations.What we’d come to call France and Germany.Still fighting over the contested, middle strip between them a thousand years later.Napoleon, tried again at the start of the 19th, century and for a brief moment came pretty close.Controlling or dominating most of continental Europe by 1810.But again, geography beat him twice in two completely different ways.Britain, protected by the English Channel,was the one major power he never managed to invade.And it became the financial and organizational base for coalition, after a coalition of European powers assembled against him.Then in 1812, he marched into Russia.A country so vast that his army simply couldn’t be supplied, across the distance involved.
And the campaign that was meant to cement his dominance became the disaster, that ended it.Hitler tried again in the 20th century and ran into the exact same two walls.Britain, across the same stretch of channel,refused to fall, and became the staging ground for the eventual Allied invasion of the continent.And Russia’s sheer size defeated Germany’s invasion, the same way it had defeated Napoleon’s, over a century later against completely different technology, and completely different armies.So there were four serious attempts at unifying the continent, separated, by well over a thousand years of history, and every single one of them was ultimately broken, by the same underlying problem.Rome’s frontiers were too spread out across disconnected, terrain to defend all at once.Napoleon and Hitler, both ran into an island the channel made difficult to conquer.And then there was Russia,a country too vast to invade and supply at the same time.Even Charlemagne’s empire split along the same natural lines.
the continent had always wanted to divide along.Every conqueror was fighting the same terrain in a different century, and the terrain won every single time.China’s own history isn’t a clean uninterrupted run of unity either.The Warring States period running, for roughly two and a half centuries, before 221, BC was genuinely brutal.A single battle at Changping fought between two rival states in 260, BC is recorded as killing several hundred thousand soldiers, among the deadliest single battles in the ancient world.The Three Kingdoms period which was several centuries later was arguably worse.A census records from the time suggest China’s population, collapsed from somewhere between, 50 to 60 million at its peak under the Han Dynasty, down to as few as 16 million shortly after reunification.But look at how long these interruptions, actually lasted against the bigger picture.A few centuries each inside a story spanning over 2,000 years.China fractured violently more than once.
and then the same underlying geography that made unification, possible in the first place pulled it straight back together again, every single time.Even at its most broken, China’s geography, never stopped working in favor of putting itself back together again.Europe’s geography never did that for Europe.Once Rome fell fragmentation, wasn’t a temporary interruption waiting to be reversed.It was permanent, because there was no equivalent gravity, putting the pieces back toward each other.Nothing about Europe’s rivers, mountains,or coastlines was ever going to reassemble it on its own.Every reunification, that followed had to be built entirely by force, against the grain of the land itself, which is exactly why none of them lasted.Now,this is what makes what happened, in Europe over the last 70 years, in some ways remarkable, and arguably the first real answer to a 2,000-year-old, problem.In 1950, with a continent still in ruins from the war Hitler had just lost,France and Germany,the same two rival cores.
that had fought each other repeatedly, since Charlemagne’s grandsons first split them apart in 843,agreed to pull their coal and steel production under one shared authority.That small agreement the foundation for what’s now the European Union.The EU isn’t a military conquest.Nobody marched an army across the continent to build it,but it manages to deliver several of the same practical benefits, that unification, always promised:shared trade, freedom of movement,a shared currency across much of it,and a level of cooperation, between historic rivals, that would have been unthinkable for most of European history.It didn’t try to override Europe’s geography the way Rome, Charlemagne,Napoleon, and Hitler all tried to do.It built cooperation on top of that geography instead, accepting the mountains,the rivers, and the coastlines exactly as they are.For 2,000 years,the only tool anyone tried to use to solve European fragmentation was an army,
and every single one of them failed within a generation or two.The one approach that actually, lasted this long is the one that, stopped fighting the land and, started working with it.