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2000 BCE
The Earliest Records
While China is very old by the standards of human civilization, the historical records before around 2000 BCE are more archeological than textual. Accounts from the Han dynasty survive and they do attribute their inspiration to earlier authors, but it is unclear to what extent these are mythology. At any rate, roughly 4,000 years ago the Chinese became interested in categorizing and investigating the wide panoply of human afflictions. Chinese medicine had begun.