East Asia

The time frame of this volume extends from 200 to 1500 CE, and we see East Asia forming a region with both common features and distinct characteristics of each of the three countries – China, Japan, and Korea – with their internal historical complexities. There has been a general consensus among Chinese critics and scholars almost since the Mid-Tang period that Li Bo (701–762) and Du Fu (712–770) are the greatest poets not only of Tang, but of all classical Chinese literature. The first emperor of the Song dynasty, Zhao Kuangyin (927–976), was an army officer in the Later Zhou, one of the ten kingdoms of the period, and he became emperor through a coup d'état in the year 960. In 1271, Kublai Khan (1215–1294), a grandson of Genghis Khan (1162–1227), formally established the Yuan dynasty, the first foreign dynasty to rule the whole of China, with Khanbaliq (modern-day Beijing) as the capital.