Welcome to Getting Curious, I'm Jonathan Van Ness, and every week I sit down for a gorgeous conversation with a burrillian expert to learn all about something that makes me curious.

On today's episode, I'm joined by Professor Zhuay Guo, where I ask her, what was everyday life like in early China?

Welcome to Getting Curious, I'm so excited we have a return guest today who is so fascinating. Welcome back, Professor Zhuay Guo, who is a social and cultural historian of early China and a professor at Barnard College of Columbia University. Welcome back, Professor Guo, how are you?

I'm good, Jonathan, thank you for having me back.

Your area of expertise is so fascinating to me just to give everybody a recap. We had Dr. Guo on a few months ago, and it was really about learning about early China.

And my goal, and that was to figure out what was like a day in the life of someone who lived in early China.

But then I realized that I knew so little about the specifics of really the area and the time in which I was talking about, we almost kind of didn't get there. And so I do want to just give people a quick little recap though.

If maybe they didn't hear that episode. So Professor Guo, can you just tell us what time briefly, what time period we're talking about, and what geographic location we're talking about?

Absolutely, so last time I think we went actually a little bit young, what we are going to focus on today. And so last time we kind of gave chronological introduction, particularly to the before time, before common era.

And today I would like to focus on the first millennium before the common era. So we are going from year one back to year 1000, but BCE.

So that's that's kind of our terminology. And geographically speaking, we will be focusing on what we would call today China proper, meaning if you think about the map of China that focusing on the South East part.

So you got Mongolia and the Indian Mongolia to the north and then the Xinjiang, unfortunately, this is an area that actually has been in the news for quite a lot these days, but that's Northwest.

And then we got to bat. So these areas are not going to be the focus geographically speaking for today's conversation. And simply because the time period that we are talking about, that those areas were, I think it would be fair to call they were neighbors.

They were normmatic neighbors, highland neighbors, a two that way, just just to see over simplify things a little bit of the so called the Chinese agrarian society that sat on the Chinese who largely living in village lives and most of them were farmers.

Yes, so we're talking about early China, which the location that we are going to focus on is kind of like if you were to think about what's modern day China, it's kind of like central, like East, correct, right? Yes, yes.

So then in our first conversation, we really talked about like overall, we set the scene for early China, today we're really curious about jobs and what what a day was like there, but then it's like this was, you know, over a thousand years ago, actually two, three thousand years ago, I'm still really bad at the math nothing's changed since then since our first conversation.

But so we're talking about from 1000 BCE before coming here up until like one, so how do you and your colleagues go about discovering what a day was like back then or even just a particular historical moment, what are you all working off of?

That's such a great question. That's a question the historians love because we always need to know what we are working off with.

So to put it in simple terms that will work ways, I would say probably broadly speaking, two types of materials, our so-called our sources of evidence and one large group would be material evidence.

So things actually we can still see, we can still touch well most of the time you cannot touch them anymore because they are very fragile, but or sites you can still visit.

So and everything still exists today we largely get to those sources through archaeology, but we also have a very large amount of written sources, meaning that people particularly the time period,

that we are going to focusing on today, our writing was already a mature technology. It's still very few people knew how to write, how to read, but there were there were writings and increasingly so so we have writings like from some of them were from the time that we will be talking about.

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