Quote Originally Posted by bossel
A lot of ethnicities ruled China, some Chinese (you forgot that there are different Chinese ethnicities), some foreign. The Mongols were not the 1st foreign rulers in China, though perhaps the 1st who ruled all of it (don't really remember).
Foreign ruler or other ethnic group. Then it depends what you call "ethnic groups" in China. The Chinese government defines 56 ethnic groups (Wikipedia writes "nationality", but their nationality is all "Chinese citizen"). However, many of these are in fact the same ethnic group genetically. The Hui are just like the Hans except that they are Muslim. Could you give me an example of dynasty ruling most of China (not just a small kingdom) that lasted enough to have some influence on the culture (the topic of this thread) ?

Anyhow, if this ethnic group always belonged to historical China, I'd consider them Chinese. Many European countries have not been ethnically pure since the Roman Empire. Spain and Italy have had Celts, Phoenicians/Cathaginians, Greeks, Romans, then Germanic tribes... France has had Celts, Greeks, Romans, (both southern and northern) Germanic tribes... Even if they were ruled by one then the other, they were still all European, with the possible exception of the Phoenicians (depends how one defiens "European"), who didn't leave much behind.

Esp. in Northern China (during the time of South-North division) you have quite a number of foreign rulers.
So, were they foreign or one ethnic group of China ?

There are other foreign influences as well, eg. during Tang there were a number of high officials of Turk origin.
It does not mean that the Turks ruled China. Kaerupop (=miles7tp) said "If you study Chinese history, you can find that some different ethnic people ruled China by turns." Don't forget that the topic of this thread has always been about importing culture from abroad. So to be to the point and relevant, what did Chinese culture inherit from the Turks or other non-Chinese ethnic groups ?

Er..., I think, your linguistic comparisons are limping a bit.
I was not saying that these languages bear any similarity (why would you think that ?). I was just giving very random comparison that if Latin languages in Europe (the big chunk in term of population) were Chinese languages (Mandarin, Wu, Hokkien, Cantonese...), then the relation between Japanese and Chinese is similar to the relation between Latin languages and English, because English comes half from French/Latin and half from Anglo-Saxon/Norse (the same way as Japanese comes half from Chinese and half from the Yamato language, itself possibly a mix of Ainu and Old Korean).

As for Korean, I compared it to German because German also imported many words from Latin/French, like Korean language imported words from Chinese (although probably Korean imported more words). Another similarity is that the English/Anglo-Saxon left their home region of Northern Germany for a big island next to it, and the Japanese left their home region of Korea for another big island (in fact 3, and Hokkaido became Japanese about at the same time as Ireland became British). In what way is that limping ?