Welcome to Getting Curious. I'm Jonathan Van Ness. And every week I sit down for a 40-minute conversation

with a brilliant expert to learn all about something that makes me curious. On today's episode, I'm joined by

Barnard College Professor Jue Guo, where I ask her, can you set the scene for early China?

Welcome to Getting Curious. This is Jonathan Van Ness. I'm going to get right into our introduction.

Welcome, Professor Jue Guo. You are a professor of social and cultural history of early China.

It's come. You are also an assistant professor of pre-modern Chinese civilization and humanities at Barnard College

and Co-chair of Columbia University's early China seminar. Your resume is amazing.

Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. You're doing so good on the studies.

I am definitely loving what I do. I do not know what people outside my little circle thinks about what I do.

But that's why I'm so... I'm also very excited and quite frankly very flattered to be invited to this show.

Because I study such a kind of obscure subject and quite distant past. So I don't always get to talk to people

outside my academic circle or outside my academic life. But thank you for your interest and thank you for being curious about early China.

Oh my gosh, it's my pleasure. Thanks so much for taking your time to talk to me. Just a little teeny tiny bit about me just so you know how it happened.

It only occurred to me in my kind of like 20s that I didn't know enough of an accurate description of American history.

I was, you know, I went to elementary school and then I went to high school and then I went to just a little bit of college and then I went to here school.

Which I love. But I just realized I didn't learn that much about China or any part of Asia really outside of geography maybe.

And I just then I was like Chinese histories probably been around way longer than American history. That is our jackal of Leichu.

So tell me about how much older is China than America?

That's a very good question. I think we really have to define both China and America. Right. I think probably for ordinary listeners that America means United States of America instead of the continent.

So I think in that sense if we talk about the United States of America then much much longer if we talk about there is a state form that has this state level of organization.

Then China has that at least four about let me think I have the count of about over 3000 years and America United States is still in the hundreds. Right.

So but I think if we talk about people that have lived in America and then lived in Asia in East Asia and that's where China is then the history becomes much more comparable because I'm a historian of the past.

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