Editing China (section)

===Second Age of Strife===
* ''[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Dynasties_and_Ten_Kingdoms_period Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms]'': The period of political disunity between the Tang and the Song, known as the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period.  During this period, five states quickly succeeded one another in the Chinese Central Plain, while more than a dozen concurrent states were established elsewhere, mainly in south China. During this half-century, China was in all respects a multi-state system. 
* ''[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Song_dynasty Song]'': Invading barbarians devastated a Tang dynasty that was already eating itself alive from within.  After a brief but invigorating series of civil wars and abortive wanna-be dynasts, an opportunistic general seized control of a splinter state that begun uniting China, and would go on to overlap with the Yuan for a while until the Mongols finally finished 'em off.  The Song dynasty was, no bones about it, a cultural and economic powerhouse.  They invented such modern marvels as paper money, steam and water-powered industry, and mass production.  They also created beautiful and marvelous art, like pots depicting ponds on which fish appeared when water was poured in, or rice that smelled like flowers while it was cooking.  However, they were ''also'' weak politically and militarily, and their ongoing "sour grapes" stance toward most of their neighbors, combined with Neo-Confucian abhorrence at the thought of allowing ''merchants'' to do the fighting, prevented them from properly leveraging the economic advantages of their hyper-advanced economy to dominate them with "soft power," and their underdeveloped understanding of economics meant many of these advances were eventually abandoned by a society not ready for their consequences.  Ultimately gave in to...
* ''[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuan_dynasty Yuan]'': Goddamn Mongolians.  Technically "started" by Genghis Khan himself, it only really became a Chinese-style dynasty when his grandson, Kublai Khan, set up his capital in Khanbaliq (later Dadu, modern Beijing).  Like the Greeks and the Romans, the "conquering" Mongolians slowly resembled their Chinese subjects. Culturally, this was the beginning of the modern Chinese novel and drama, though always with the wary eye of Imperial censors lurking over the writers' shoulders.  (This was nothing new, incidentally, though the volume sure was.) This was also the dynasty that brought China to the West's attention, partly due to the Mongol invasions threatening Eastern Europe, and partly due to Marco Polo's accounts of the reign of Kublai Khan. The Mongols generally imported nobles rather than using locals, so a variety of Middle Easterners were brought in to manage and police the Chinese nation, while Chinese bureaucrats were sent to the Middle East to manage and police it.  This is the origin of the Hui people, Muslim descendants of intermarrying foreign officials and soldiers who maintain their faith today and served as some of the most disciplined and feared of all Chinese soldiers in future wars.  Eventually, the Yuan proved how "Chinese" they'd become by going out in the traditional Chinese way: collapsing into a mass of squabbling warlords and decadence because of fiscal disaster.  Notably, the fleeing Khan took the ancient Imperial Seal dating all the way back to ol' Qin Shi Huangdi himself with him when he went back to Mongolia, and no one's ever found where he stashed it, according to legends anyway.