The revolution of 1911 saw the end of the empire after more than 2,000 years, and the founding of a republic, which in its brief life knew no peace. With peasant risings, Japanese invasion, civil war and the communist revolution, the twentieth century was a time of trauma for China, leading on to the catastrophes of the Great Famine, and the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s. In modern times no nation has gone through so much.
