Category talk:Ancient Chinese military writers

How are we defining "Ancient China" for this category?

Across most of the wiki, we seem to use "Ancient" as a synonym for "pre-imperial" (Template: History of China and History of China are probably the most authoritative representations of this periodisation). I saw today that Cao Cao, postdating the period in question by close to four centuries, was placed in this category. I just removed Hun Jian, who lived during the Tang dynasty.

I appreciate that the term "ancient" doesn't necessarily have a specific reading – especially as 古 in Chinese – and it's not entirely unreasonable to consider the Han dynasty as "ancient", especially for the non-specialist. I feel like we should maintain consistency and keep only the pre-Qin writers in this category, but I'm sure there could be reasonable disagreement, so I'm checking in here before making further changes that would leave us with only five articles in the category. Folly Mox (talk) 11:45, 15 June 2023 (UTC)

The Cambridge History of Ancient China covers the pre-imperial period, but other books apply the term differently. Perhaps the solution is to give the category a more precise name. Similar considerations apply to the parent category, which has a Qing subcategory. There is a related discussion at Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2023 March_26#Imperial Chinese people by occupation. Kanguole 13:17, 15 June 2023 (UTC)

A more precise category name seems like a reasonable idea. The word "ancient" is used with widely varying meanings when talking about Chinese history – I've even heard it used to mean any time before 1911. —Mx. Granger (talk · contribs) 13:42, 15 June 2023 (UTC)

The category's current membership matches the description "Category:Pre-Tang Chinese military writers". Pretty arbitrary though. The parent category has two or three articles each for Tang, Song, and Ming era people. Folly Mox (talk) 14:03, 15 June 2023 (UTC)

I would concur that the term "ancient" specifically should apply to pre-Qin. Han through Tang dynasties may be something of a gray area but there's enough periodicity in the records of the early imperial dynasties to make "ancient" an unnecessary inaccuracy. Simonm223 (talk) 16:22, 6 July 2023 (UTC)