Ancient Web: Friesian Traced Indian, Chinese and Japanese Dynasties

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

Some people start a history site with an outline. The Friesian School's Sangoku page resembles a handwritten map of an entire library, with rulers, dynasties, calendars, and an extraordinary number of cross-links.

Visit the Sangoku rulers and history index.

Sangoku means the Three Kingdoms in Japanese. The author uses it as a loose framework for comparing India, China, and Japan, not as the title of a conventional university course. The index reaches from the Indus Valley through modern political offices, and from China's earliest dynasties through the emperors, shoguns, and regents of Japan.

A chronology with branches everywhere

The main index contains hundreds of links and nested subjects. India's rulers lead into the Mauryas, Guptas, Delhi sultanates, Vijayanagara, Mughal emperors, British governors, and later prime ministers. China branches into Shang and Zhou rulers, Warring States, Han, Tang, Song, Yuan, Ming, and Qing. Japan has separate tables for its emperors and changing institutions.

These are not bare name lists. There are notes on calendar systems, historical eras, coins, transliteration, Buddhist transmission, and the problems of assigning dates to early legendary rulers. The site also links discussions of the Three Kingdoms era in China, Korean history, and the political role of religion.

An important qualification is visible right on the page. Its introduction includes long, opinionated essays about modern politics, economic ideology, and international relations. These arguments are the author's views, not neutral historical consensus. Some generalizations are contentious, and the historical tables should be cross-checked against specialist scholarship before being used for academic work.

The web-historical story is the unusually ambitious architecture. Instead of a database interface or a content-management system, the author builds an interconnected reference book in HTML, with digressions and side notes permitted to become entire branches.

The page was not frozen in the 1990s. References to events and scholarship published during the 2020s show continued revision. Its old-web quality lies in its persistence as an individually organized research project rather than the age of every sentence.

A polished encyclopedia may be easier to consult. This unruly index is more revealing about one scholar's priorities, questions, and attempts to connect enormous stretches of historical time.

Explore the nested dynastic tables and calendar notes.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.