What was China Called Before 1949?

For decades, the mainland Chinese market for beauty products has been dominated by foreign brands.

Last month, however, more than 100,000 lipsticks developed by the Palace Museum in Beijing were snapped by up online buyers within days of their launch. Many were reportedly attracted by the pretty packaging, inspired by artefacts in the museum’s collection.

This reflects a growing trend among mainland Chinese consumers of supporting home-grown brands and celebrating a genuine Chinese aesthetic across a variety of products.

Unfortunately for those who bought the cosmetics, the products proved to be a case of style over substance, and production has ceased following countless complaints on social media.

That the Palace Museum, formerly the Forbidden Palace and residence of emperors, had created beauty products and sold them to the public harks back to the past, when the imperial palace, as well as the princely and noble houses, were the arbiters of fashion.

Palace ladies would start a beauty or fashion trend, which would then percolate down to the denizens of the capital before radiating outwards towards the provinces.

A song was sung in the capital in the late first century AD during the Eastern Han dynasty: “When the palace fancies bouffant coiffures, women elsewhere raise their hair by one chi (equivalent to around 23cm); when the palace fancies thick eyebrows, women elsewhere paint theirs to cover half their foreheads; when the palace fancies voluminous sleeves, women elsewhere sew theirs with a whole roll of cloth.”

Continuing my series on the most interesting facts about China, I’d like to look at a few of my favorite pieces of trivia involving China’s history as well as its culture and traditions.

Continuing my series on the most interesting facts about China, I’d like to look at a few of my favorite pieces of trivia involving China’s history as well as its culture and traditions.

China boasts a history of over 5,000 years, all of which I’ve captured in my Chinese History Timeline. Below are some of my favorite China history facts.

Today, Chinese (Mandarin) is the most widely spoken language in the world, with about 850 million native speakers (and about 1.34 total speakers worldwide).

Humanoids have lived in China for hundreds of thousands of years. As part of China’s pre-history period, a group of fossil specimens—collectively known as “Peking Man”—were discovered in Zhoukoudian cave near Beijing. These specimens of Homo erectus (a relative of Homo sapiens) lived between 780,000 and 300,000 years ago and could make fire and used primitive stone tools. In Liujiang in southern China, the first modern human skull was discovered and is estimated to be about 67,000 years old.

The Chinese started cultivating rice and millet as early as 7500 BC, according to scientist and author Jared Diamond (Guns, Germs, and Steel). However, the first signs of settled agriculture in China started around 5000 B.C.

The Chinese name for “China” is “Zhong Guo” –which translates as “Central Nation” or “Middle Kingdom”—reflects their ancient worldview that China was at the center of the world.

Interesting Chinese translation of foreign countries: The Chinese names of other countries were mostly derived by phonetically translating the Western names into similar sounding Chinese characters, with some interesting results.

The People's Republic of China was founded as a country in 1949. You might get the idea that China was liberated from Japan and got its start then. China was at civil war between the Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Communist Party (CPC) before, during, and after WWII. The civil war continued after WWII ended, and it took the CPC to win and drive out the KMT for the new country to start.

The KMT was driven out of mainland China and held siege in Taiwan and became the government of the Republic of China in exile in Taiwan (The Taipei government's constitutional capital is still Nanjing as of 2016).

The San Francisco Peace Treaty was signed in 1951, and Japan's rights to Taiwan was officially renounced therein. You might thusly get the impression that Taiwan got their independence from Japan after WWII. This isn't the case either.

Hong Kong (a British colony until 1997) was under Japanese occupation from Dec 1941 onwards. Britain resumed control of Hong Kong in Aug 1945, until 1997. So Hong Kong never had independence from Japan, and it still is not independent today, as a Special Administrative Region of mainland China.

Behind the enemy lines, CPC fought Japanese as Taliban fought USA. Actually, Taliban learned Guerrilla warfare from CPC (Mao’s On Protracted War is very popular in Afghanistan. The national hero of Afghanistan, Lion of Panjshir, Ahmad Shah Massud, was a huge fan of Mao, applied Mao’s theory of guerrilla warfare and people’s war in Afganistan) .