The problem is that too many people accept the Chinese national myth that China is a peaceful nation that has never attacked others. This is patently false. China didn’t emerge from the primordial muck fully formed as the third largest nation on the planet. It became so large by conquering and integrating land that was inhabited by other peoples.
The first great conqueror of China was Ying Zheng, the king of Qin. Roughly contemporaneous with Alexander of Macedon, he conquered all the states of the North China Plain by 220 BC at age 38 and proclaimed himself Qin Shihuang. In the next few years, he campaigned southwards and expanded the Chinese world further than it had ever reached. By the time he died, the Qin Empire stretched from the edge of the Eurasian steppe into the jungles of Vietnam. This realm was similar in size to Alexander’s empire and had a similar aftermath. Neither empire outlasted its founder’s death for long, but although the expanded Hellenic world created by Alexander collapsed within 300 years, the Sinosphere continued to expand over millennia.
Later emperors would rule even larger polities. For example, Li Shimin, who founded the Tang Dynasty alongside his father whom he would go on to depose went on to rule an empire even larger than Rome’s. Tang soldiers occupied swathes Korea, the jungles of Vietnam, and even marched across thousands of miles of desert and mountains to subjugate territories in Afghanistan and Central Asia. Although the Tang never settled the Mongolian steppe to their north, they succeeded in annihilating the Eastern Turkic Khaganate that ruled it, eliminating the nomad threat for generations. All of this was accomplished in a single lifetime.
The Tang are in yellow while the subjugated polities on their borders are in brown
The real issue is the over lionization of certain Western military figures. The campaigns of Hannibal, Julius Caesar, and Alexander have been studied and repeated so often that they have attained a certain mythic aura around them. They were certainly some of the most gifted military minds in human history, but the rest of the world held some serious talent too. Men like Cyrus, Khalid ibn al-Walid, Chandragupta Maurya, and Li Shimin conquered huge tracts of land and helped build long lasting empires, but are often left by the wayside in discussions of great conquerors out of no fault of their own.
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