For thousands of years, the Culture of China has attracted and moved many people from all over the world, being so unique and one-of-a-kind as well as elegant and inspiring. The Chinese Culture, a culture that has evolved for thousands and thousands of years, contains rare beauty and enchantment with history.

From the Qin to the late Qing (221 BC-AD 1840), the Chinese government divided Chinese people into six classes: landlord, peasant, craftsmen, and merchant. Landlords and peasants constituted the two major classes, while merchant and craftsmen were collected into the two minor. Theoretically, except for the position of the Emperor, nothing was hereditary.

During the 361 years of civil war after the Han Dynasty (202 BC-220 AD), there was a partial restoration of feudalism when wealthy and powerful families emerged with large amounts of land and huge numbers of semi-serfs. They dominated important civilian and military positions of the government, making the positions available to members of their own families and clans. After the Tang dynasty's emergence, the government extended the Imperial examination system as an attempt to eradicate this feudalism.

By the 1880s, China's population was between three hundred and fifty million and four hundred million, or about seventy million households. In Beijing, Shanghai, and Hong Kong, the industrial working class emerged in response to the greater usage of modern machines (Smith, 2002; Honig, 1986; Hershatter, 1986). Although the industrial revolution had created a blue collar working class worldwide, it still remained a significant minority amongst China's working class, which mainly included traditional craftsmen and laborers. This meant that the majority of people remained peasant farmers.

However, the small upper class changed dramatically. This was due in part to military reforms carried out in the late Qing. At the beginning of the Qing dynasty, the Manchu conquerors instituted the Eight Banners military system, which organized Han Chinese, Manchus, and Mongols into a bureaucratized military system that atrophied over time. In the nineteenth century, the Qing social system was challenged from within and without. Natural disasters and exorbitant taxes and levies led to peasant rebellions, most notably the Taiping Rebellion. Defeat at the hands of the British and French in the Opium Wars further demonstrated that China was weak militarily and the Eight Banners were not up to the challenge of maintaining order and defending the country.

During the 19th century, the military began a gradual restructuring that would theoretically enable it to fight rebels and foreign invaders alike. Generals Zeng Guofan, Zuo Zongtang, and Li Hongzhang became both field marshals and governors, instituting military schools throughout the provinces. In keeping with traditional practices, their associate generals inherited positions as provincial governors. In 1867, during a period of massive modernization of the educational system, the first naval academy was founded, and by 1910 national military exams were obsolete, as national military schools were institutionalized in the provinces. By 1911, seventy such schools existed.

These military reforms helped to bring about the fall of the Qing dynasty. In late Qing, Yuan Shikai enacted a second generation of military leadership, and later Yuan Shikai was in office as the second president of the Republic of China.

Before his death, Yuan Shikai opened a complex of six exemplary military schools at Baoding (a city a hundred miles south of Beijing), and Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-Shek) was one of its graduates.