If there was did it change with the rise and fall of each dynasty?
Did the Chinese see themselves as one great nation before modern times or was their identity more based on the region and the people they shared the most cultural aspects with?
I have trouble understanding figures like Mao and Chiang Kai Shek and they lived so close to modern times isn't a prevailing common language key to form a nation with a strong national identity like China? Even to this day there are so many incongruities between the north and south. With modern day Mandarin and Cantonese from what I can understand having more disparity than Portuguese and Spanish.
How did people from different regions communicate? Was a peasant traveling from one region to another common? How did the government even function? Was there a standard court language? There are so many dialects that are literally like another language Its impossible to have a translator for every occasion and there are so many provinces its crazy.
It's not like the emperors were unable to centralize their power they weren't acting as the figurehead of a loose federation but a highly centralized and powerful empire. If I’m understanding this correctly some emperors were almost like a living god during these times and many had huge impacts on religion and culture.
China is a large country even in dynastic times. It confuses me how they are able to even stay unified with so much diversity Why did warlords and uprisings all reform China in the end instead of becoming separate nations.
Why would the common man in China fight for the dream of a unified China in so many conflicts over and over again when they don’t even share a common language with their neighbors having long standing cultural differences to this day?
10 different warlords? 10 different dialects it just sounds like a nightmare from logistics to diplomacy.
I guess all I'm really wondering is how is China able to unify over and over again with such a strong national identity despite having so many different dialects acting as a barrier.
Absolutely. But initially, the task wasn't always as complicated. Middle Chinese was the most widely spoken language in the mid-Empire, from possibly the middle of the Han dynasty (but definitively used by the 4th century), all the way up into the Song dynasty (that's possibly over a thousand years of continuous use). One of the most famous of all Rime tables depicting this early progenitor of modern Chinese was the Qieyun, written in the Sui dynasty. The dictionary was a speech standard, showing a sort of koine for Imperial officials throughout the Sui and Tang empires, even though it was originally believed to have been a speech standard from the capital.^(1) Even then, the speech standard is believed to have originated during the beginning of the three kingdoms period in the mid-3rd century. However, even after 300+ years, it seems that middle Chinese (from the end of the Han, to the beginning of the Sui) remained very much conservative in its changes. There were of course changes, and the Qieyun itself is a sort of hybrid pronunciation dictionary, but Sinologist Edwin Pulleybank likens it to Mandarin spoken in Beijing, versus Mandarin spoken in Taiwan. Yeah the standard accents are a little different, but you generally won't have much difficulty understanding Beijing mandarin if you live in Taipei. Fast forward some 700 years into the mid-Song dynasty, and a new series of rime dictionaries come about, probably from the Guangyun. The Guangyun was compiled in the Northern Song, and it is just basically a more refined, and revised Qieyun, but not really quite a new language. Probably similar to someone speaking older, Jiang-huai Mandarin as opposed to the modern koine that is Putonghua.
After the Song is when things start to get spicy. While middle Chinese had been pretty universal in China, the Mongol conquests, as well as time itself were beginning to force phonological differences between different areas of China, and so the old speech standard of Middle Chinese began to give way to more varied dialects of Chinese. It is here that we begin to see the rise of Mandarin. Originally, Mandarin wasn't really even a language. As we know it today, it is largely artificial, created to serve as a lingua franca within the Chinese empire. Its name is literally Guanhua or Official's Language, indicating it as a speech standard of imperial officials.
By the time to Ming dynasty came about in 1368, Mandarin was probably already in use. Mandarin was first reliably recorded in a Yuan dynasty rime table, the Zhongyuan Yinyun, published in 1324^(2) during the mid-Yuan dynasty. By now, it seems to have been very hard for the emperor to recruit officials from certain areas of the empire due to the linguistic differences that were taking hold. When the Yuan fell, the Ming dynasty seems to have quickly adopted Mandarin as their official standard language. I say this because in 1375, the Hongwu emperor commissioned the Hongwu Zhengyun, or the Correct Pronunciations, and a few decades later, a Korean scholar named Shin Sukju published a revised edition, the Hongwu Zhengyun Yinxi, using Hangul.^(3) These represented some of the earliest attempts to standardize the speech of Imperial officials, all largely based of of southern, Nanjing Mandarin, or Jiang-huai Mandarin. As a cool aside, here's a dude presenting some of the characteristics of this early Mandarin, using period pronunciations, and even 600+ years ago, it's still easily intelligible. When the Ming fell in 1644, the Qing replaced them, bringing into the Imperial court their own, Northern dialect of Mandarin. This Beijing Mandarin as we call it was a bit different from the southern Mandarin that had dominated the Ming court, but it would take 2 centuries before the officialdom also switched over to using this northern dialect. In fact, before the speech standard shifted to the northern version, southern officials had accents so thick that the Yongzheng emperor ordered academies for correct pronunciation be established in order to teach his officials how to properly speak Mandarin.
So TL;DR: The entire language of Mandarin was basically created as we know it today to standardize speech after the end of middle Chinese.
Also, another aside. Literary Chinese, a purely written language, persisted as a universal, written language in China and the Sinosphere for nearly 2,000 years. I think Taiwan used it to a certain extent up into the late 20th century, and it was only relatively recently that the language was replaced by written vernacular in the PRC. I have no clue when the Koreans, Vietnamese and Japanese did away with it. But a cool side effect of this universal written standard is that there are letters between Mongol emperors and Japanese emperors corresponding with one another written in WenYan Wen, or Literary Chinese, so I guess in that regard, there was also an official, posh written standard.
Sources (poorly organized, sorry):
Pulleybank, Edwin. " Qieyun and Yunjing: The Essential Foundation for Chinese Historical Linguistics" in Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 118
Coblin, W. "A Brief History of Mandarin" in Journal of the American Oriental Society
Pulleybank, Edwin. A Study of Middle Chinese Phonology, UBC Press.
Wang, William and Sun, Chaofen. Oxford Handbook of Chinese Linguistics. Oxford University Press.
Huang, C., Li, Y., and Simpson, A. The Handbook of Chinese Linguistics. Wiley and Sons.
Don't mind the superscripts, that was just for my own organization.