Migration

You may think as a country, China is a more fortunate than Babylon. We had been one of the earliest civilizations and remains a "civilized" country - our land is not deserted, yet.

Hold on. People of my age should have studied Chinese history in secondary school. It remains stocking to see how the territory and capital of our home country changed with dynasty. Early in the Shang (商) and Zhou (周) period, the "civilized" Chinese was confounded to area along the Yellow River; places around the Yangtze (長江) were considered to be occupied by barbarians (南蠻). In the Han and Tang Dynasty, the government settled in Chang'an (長安) - with a population of nearly 2 million at the prime of Tang. The head city moved east and south to Bianjing (汴京) and then Lin'an (臨安) in the Song (宋) time. At this moment, Chang'an was under the territory of the Jin (金) Empire - and by then a much deserted place. In Ming (明) and Qing (清) periods, most of the food within the kingdom was grown from southern provinces - so much so that King Hangxi (康熙) had to put "canal transport" (漕運) as one of the three major problems to tackle during his reign.

"Canal transport", alas, is the transportation of rice and all other agricultural products from Yangtze area to the northern part of the coutry - and Beijing.

(By the way, it seems most paradoxical for our local government to scrap the subject Chinese history from the syllabus of our secondary school on one hand, but promote "patriotic education" on the other. Oh, maybe our officials are actually right - you cannot achieve the latter otherwise.)