China

CRADLE, CORE AND BEYOND

While making but a modest contribution on this front, the present work is designed to meet the much more pressing need for an overall history of China that does not take for granted a foreknowledge of the subject or an acquaintance with the Chinese language. A glance at the existing literature in English suggests an international consensus, not to say conspiracy, to make the subject as daunting and incomprehensible as possible. This state of affairs, in part a legacy of competitive scholarship in the colonial era, will be fearlessly addressed; for China’s history is long enough and its culture challenging enough without gratuitous complication. Confronting this challenge may mean taxing the reader, but not, it is earnestly hoped, without rewarding his or her effort.

As lamentable as the obfuscations are the depths of ignorance from which foreigners approach Chinese history. Most people could name half a dozen Roman emperors but few could name a single Chinese emperor. Confronted with an array of Chinese proper names in their Romanised spellings, English-speakers experience a recognition problem, like a selective form of dyslexia, that makes the names all seem the same. Unfamiliarity lies at the root of the problem, particularly in respect of Chinese geography, chronology and translation conventions. It can best be overcome by diligence and long exposure, but at the risk of irritating those already superior to such difficulties, what follows (and the accompanying tabulations) may help as an introduction.

For administrative purposes China is today divided into twenty-eight provinces. A few of these provinces are of quite recent provenance, and in all cases the areas they denote have undergone change. But most have a long pedigree, and it is not therefore unreasonable to employ the provincial terminology retrospectively so as to provide a geographical framework for the whole spread of Chinese history.

Fortunately the names of the provinces often contain helpful clues as to their whereabouts. Bei, dong, nan and xi are Romanised renderings of the Chinese words for ‘north’, ‘east’, ‘south’ and ‘west’, and shan is ‘mountain’. Shandong (‘Mountain-east’, once spelled ‘Shantung’) is therefore the province with a rugged peninsula below Beijing. It originally extended inland as far as the north–south Taihang mountains; hence ‘east of the mountains’ or ‘Mountain-east’. By the same dazzling logic, Shanxi province (‘Mountain-west’) is its counterpart to the west of the Taihang range.

West of Shanxi is the rather easily confused Shaanxi province (here denoting its position to the west of a district called Shaanzhou). All three provinces abut, or once abutted, the fickle Huang He (Yellow River). So too, fingering between Shandong and Shanxi, does the province of Hebei (‘River-north’, the river being the self-same Huang He). Naturally the province to the south of the river is therefore Henan (‘River-south’), although because the river has so often switched course, a bit of Henan is now on the north bank. These five northern provinces (Henan, Hebei, Shaanxi, Shanxi and Shandong) engross the entire extent of the rich alluvial plain of the lower Yellow River basin which, according to textual tradition, was where China’s earliest history was enacted. They have thus been traditionally regarded as the ‘cradle’ provinces of Chinese civilisation and were the focus of those mid-twentieth-century archaeologists.

South of Henan come more provincial twins. In the case of Hubei and Hunan, the Hu- denotes the great ‘lake’, or ‘lakes’ into which the lower Yangzi spills before meandering on to the coast. These two provinces therefore lie respectively north and south of the great lakes and so, roughly, north and south of the Yangzi itself. South again, and completing this spine of ‘core’ China come Guangdong and Guangxi. Guang means something like ‘enlarged (southern) territory’. These two once ‘enlarged’ provinces in the extreme south thus lie respectively east (dong) and west (-xi) of one another. Beyond them in the South China Sea, the island province of Hainan is the country’s southernmost extremity.

Returning north towards the Shandong peninsula by way of the coast, the provinces of Fujian, Zhejiang and Jiangsu plus adjacent Jiangxi and Anhui are smaller, and their names are not so obviously derived from compass bearings. Some contain directional elements, but most have been formed by combining the names of two of their more important centres. Thus Fujian combines Fuzhou, its port-capital, with Jianning, a city at Fujian’s inland extremity.⁹ The -zhou ending, incidentally, once indicated an ‘island’ of ‘Chinese’ settlement in what was otherwise a still unacculturated region; it then came to denote the district that pertained to it, and now more commonly the principal city of the region. This same -zhou was once rendered in English as -chow or -choo; hence nineteenth-century toponyms like ‘Foochow’ (Fuzhou), ‘Soochow’ (Suzhou), ‘Hangchow’ (Hangzhou), etc. More obviously, ‘Beijing’ (Peking, Pekin, etc.), the national metropolis within Hebei province, translates as ‘north-capital’, and Nanjing (Nanking), on the Yangzi in Jiangsu province, as ‘south-capital’ – which until 1937 it was.

All the provinces mentioned so far, plus those of Guizhou in the southwest and Sichuan, a vast region comprising most of the upper Yangzi basin, are sometimes said to constitute central, inner or ‘core’ China. Terms like ‘central’ and ‘inner’ are highly controversial, no distinction between centre and periphery, or inner and outer China, being either physically convincing, historically consistent or politically acceptable. It may, though, be helpful to adopt this phrasing to distinguish the seventeen productive, populous and long-integrated ‘core’ provinces, which have already been mentioned, from the traditionally less productive, less populous and less historically integrated provinces lying at the extremities of modern China.

Into this latter category fall the remaining eleven provinces, many of them large territories of sharp contrasts and emotive repute. Taiwan, a long island off the coast of Fujian, was once known to Europeans as Formosa. It was subsequently alienated from the mainland by Japanese occupation in the first half of the twentieth century and Nationalist occupation in the second half. About as far from Taiwan as Texas is from Florida, Yunnan in the south-west has also had a chequered relationship with the rest of the country. Straddling the climatic divide between torrid South-East Asia and arid central Asia, its forests are frequented by the odd elephant while yak grunt across its high passes. Farther north and west, the howling wastes and azure skies are those of Qinghai and Xizang, which together comprised the vast plateau region once vaguely known to non-Chinese as Tibet. Today Tibet is usually identified just with Xizang. North and west again, all that remains is Xinjiang. Largely desert though far from deserted, this is the largest of all China’s provinces and the remotest. It was once known to the Chinese as ‘the Western Regions’ and to non-Chinese as Eastern or Chinese Turkestan. The current designation simply means ‘the New Territories’ (Xin-jiang); indigenous activists would prefer ‘Uighuristan’, they being largely Muslim, Turkic-speaking Uighurs.

Returning east along China’s northern perimeter, elongated Gansu province and diminutive Ningxia province offer oasis-dotted access routes from the ‘core’ provinces into Xinjiang and Mongolia respectively. Sandwiched between the swamps of Qinghai and the sands of the Gobi, the east–west ‘Gansu corridor’ has become as much a cliché in Chinese history-writing as ‘the Tibetan plateau’. Ningxia, with a north–south axis, is strung along the upper reaches of the Yellow River and juts into the neighbouring province of Nei Monggol, otherwise Inner Mongolia. Although Outer, or northern, Mongolia is not part of today’s China, its border bisects the Gobi desert in a long east–west arc that leaves all to the south of it as a Chinese province. The sand and steppe of this Nei Monggol thus serves as a glacis to those several sections of ‘long wall’ that have been conflated into the Great Wall. Nei Monggol’s northern perimeter is China’s longest international frontier, and its southern perimeter marches with no less than eight other provinces – Gansu, Ningxia, Shaanxi, Shanxi, Hebei and the three provinces of erstwhile Manchuria.

These last, in the north-eastern appendage that used to be called Manchuria – or by the Japanese ‘Manchukuo’ – are all named after rivers. Heilongjiang, the most northerly province, is also the Chinese name for the Amur river; the Sino-Russian border here follows its course. Jilin province to the south derives from the Manchurian word for ‘alongside (the Songhua River)’; it marches with North Korea. And Liaoning, to the south-west, is named for the Liao River; it adjoins Hebei province and extends to within 300 kilometres (185 miles) of Beijing; south across the gulf of Bohai, Liaoning faces Shandong’s peninsula.

So ends the circuit of the eleven peripheral provinces, within which lie the seventeen core provinces, of which the five most northerly comprise the ‘cradle’ provinces. The administrative patchwork is completed by various smaller entities, such as the municipalities of Beijing and Shanghai and the special-status enclaves of Hong Kong and Macao. Numerous other autonomous entities based on ethnic minority concentrations should also be mentioned; these may be autonomous districts within the provinces, or autonomous regions comprising a whole province, such as Xizang/ Tibet.

Admittedly, there are more scientific ways of deconstructing China’s geography. In a continental landmass roughly the size of the United States and located within approximately the same degrees of latitude (the Tropic of Cancer, which grazes the Florida Keys, shaves southern China), much the same physical variations may be found. Extremes of climate and altitude result in wildly different average rainfalls, in soil conditions that range from swamp to sand dune and steppe, and in vegetational cover that runs from the riotous to the non-existent.

Rivers and mountains provide a better guide to settlement patterns, although the neat North American sequence of prairie, desert, mountain and coast is not to be found. Most of China’s rivers run west to east, from the high and dry uplands of Qinghai and Xizang to the moister plains towards the coast. Between the Huang He (Yellow River) in the north and the Yangzi in the middle, two rivers, the Han, a major tributary of the latter, and the Huai, whose course has sometimes been borrowed by the former, observe the same eastward trend. So do rivers to the south of the Yangzi, such as those that come together in Guangxi and Guangdong to form the Pearl River estuary off which lies Hong Kong. All these rivers indulge in extravagant contortions, however. The Yangzi, once released by Xizang’s (Tibet’s) ramparts, zigs south towards Vietnam before zagging north back to Sichuan; the Yellow River performs a near-somersault as it arcs towards Mongolia and back.

For such acrobatics, China’s cavalcade of mountains is responsible. As well as the much-photographed karst stacks of the south, the Himalayan giants, the gaunt Pamirs and the shy Tian Shan, numerous less-celebrated ranges corrugate large parts of the country and offer an important corrective to the notion that all those rivers eventually compose themselves to water lush coastal plains. With a few exceptions, such as the Yangzi delta, China’s coast is in fact quite rugged. So are all of its southern provinces. Conversely Sichuan, though riven by mountains of its own and located far inland above the Yangzi gorges, contains some of China’s most fertile plains and is today the fourth most populous of its provinces.

THE DYNASTIC DYNAMIC

While the geography of China’s history could be broken down in numerous ways, there is no such range of options in respect of its chronology. The passage of time, like the spread of space, was carefully studied in ancient China and meticulously ordered. The history of India has scarcely a single unchallenged date prior to the ninth century AD, but China’s history yields dates, verifiable by eclipses, that go back to the ninth century BC; and not just year-dates but also the month, the day and sometimes even the hour may be given. Adjusting clock and calendar to synchronise with the diurnal, planetary and astral cycles was essential to cosmic harmony and so a major preoccupation of all Chinese rulers. History literally told the time; dates, in the form of reign-years, ticked away the minutes, dynasties tolled the hours. A periodisation based on the succession of dynasties has thus invariably been the preferred way of breaking down the long sweep of Chinese history.

The establishment of a dynasty, whose rulers would reign by right of birth and who would care for the tombs and reputation of their founder and his successors, was the ambition of every would-be sovereign, whether pretender, usurper or invader. Even rebellious peasant leaders often assumed imperial rank. Over the course of Chinese history the number of self-declared dynasties must exceed a hundred. But only dozens actually, partly or temporarily realised this ambition; and of these, only a few were favoured by the historians with recognition as part of China’s ‘legitimate’ dynastic succession.

The criteria for inclusion in this august company were not consistent. Until 221 BC dynasties consisted of kings, and only thereafter of emperors. No royal dynasties and few imperial dynasties exercised uncontested sway. Even some of the ‘legitimate’ imperial dynasties controlled only half, or less, of what at the time was regarded as China; they might therefore coincide with another ‘legitimate’ dynasty in the other half of the country. Nevertheless, a single ‘legitimate’ dynasty at any one time was the general rule, and while far-ruling and long-lived dynasties, preferably of distinguished indigenous origin, could expect to be included in the ‘legitimate’ succession, local, short-lived dynasties of foreign or undistinguished origin could only hope for inclusion.

A succession of twenty or so ‘legitimate’ dynasties – not to mention the hundred or so individual dynasts of which they are composed – is still an indigestible mouthful; and it is made more so by some dynasties adopting the same name as that of others whose lustre they claimed to be reviving. In the case of such clones, it is usual to add a geographical determinant (Eastern Zhou, Northern Wei, etc.) or a sequential one (Former Han, also known as Western Han, or Later Han, also known as Eastern Han).

Mercifully some dynasties acquired a semi-permanency and soldiered on for centuries, winning a reputation for administrative integration, military endeavour, political stability, cultural distinction and personal magnificence. The five imperial dynasties that lasted longest – each for three to four centuries – constitute the great plateaux of Chinese history and are well worth memorising. Cross-reference to contemporary empires elsewhere may help. They are:

HAN (Former and Later), 202 BC–AD 220, coeval with the Roman republic and early empire

TANG, 618–907, coeval with the expansion of Arab empire

SONG (Northern and Southern), 960–1279, coeval with the Crusades

MING, 1368–1644, coeval with the early Ottoman and Mughal empires

QING (or Manchu), 1644–1912, coeval with Europe’s global expansion.

Many other dynasties of note will be encountered. Ironically the one that most nearly approached the Chinese imperial boast of ruling ‘All under Heaven’ was not Chinese at all but Mongol. This was the Yuan dynasty (1279–1368), under one of whose emperors the Venetian Marco Polo supposedly found employ.

Some dynasties lasted only a decade or two and, achieving little, will scarcely merit mention. Others, though short-lived, changed the whole course of Chinese history. Such a dynasty was the Qin (221–206 BC). Its founder was the first to impose a fragile unity on the whole of ‘core’ China and the first to assume the title of huangdi, or ‘emperor’. In fact he is known to history simply by this title – Qin Shi Huangdi, or the Qin ‘First Emperor’. Like near-identical bookends, the Qin, the first imperial dynasty and one of the shortest, is matched at the other end of the chronological shelf by the Qing, the last imperial dynasty and one of the longest.

Had all subsequent emperors followed Qin Shi Huangdi’s excellent example of being known by a numbered reign – First, Second, Third Emperor, etc. – much confusion would have been avoided. Unfortunately no such custom developed. Although emperors and kings of the same name often occur, they are never distinguished by a number, like Louis I–XVIII or the English Georges, only by name. Nor is there much consistency about which of an emperor’s several names is the one that history has chosen to remember him by. Personal names being too personal for an emperor, the choice lay between the various auspicious titular names assumed during and after his lifetime. For some dynasties it is customary to call individual emperors by their temple names; for others it is their posthumous names which are used: and in the case of the Ming and Qing dynasties, names adopted for their various reign periods have been extended to the emperors themselves. Hence the seeming anomaly of a Qing emperor, such as the long-reigning one (1735–95) whose temple name was Gaozong, being known to history as ‘the Qianlong emperor’, that is ‘the Qianlong period emperor’. Just calling him ‘Emperor Qianlong’ would be like calling Mao Zedong ‘Chairman Great-Leap-Forward’.

For the purposes of this book, emperors will be called by whatever name has gained the widest currency. In addition, purely by way of a reminder, each will be prefaced in italics by the name of the dynasty to which he belonged. Hence ‘Song Renzong’ and ‘the Qing Qianlong emperor’.

THE TRIUMPH OF PINYIN

Sadly – indeed catastrophically for the wider understanding of China – few of these names will be familiar to readers primed on existing works in English. Until recently the Emperor Tang Taizong usually appeared in English translation as T’ang T’ai-tsung, Emperor Song Renzong as Sung Jen-tsung and the Qing Qianlong emperor as the Ch’ing Ch’ien-lung emperor. Hebei and Henan provinces were Hopei and Honan, Beijing was Peking, and the Giant Panda was not Daxiongmao but Ta-hsiung-mao. Something like 75 per cent of all Romanised renderings of Chinese characters have been changed in the last thirty years, often beyond the point of easy recognition. In the long run, the change can only be for the good, although at the present time it remains a challenge and a source of no little confusion.

Previously a system called Wade-Giles (after its two late nineteenth-century creators) governed the spelling of Chinese words in English. Wade-Giles was not straightforward, involving nearly as much diacritic punctuation – hyphens, single inverted commas – as letters. More disastrously, its use was far from universal. Another system was common in the United States, and other European languages had their own systems. To say that linguistic scholarship was failing the student of China would be an understatement. Standardisation became imperative.

But because Chinese characters are not made up of individual letters and so are not alphabetical, their rendition into scripts that use letters (alphabetical scripts) has always been fraught. While Arabic script, for instance, can be rendered letter by letter into Roman script without much attention to its sound, the letter-less Chinese script can be rendered in Roman script only by replicating its sound, that is its pronunciation, not the script itself. This raises other problems. Roman script has no way of indicating the five tones used in Chinese speech. Additionally, many Chinese words that are quite different when written in Chinese script may read as exactly the same when their sound is spelled out in English. The names of two Tang emperors, for instance, when written in Chinese involve totally different characters, but when rendered in the latest Romanised script become indistinguishable; both appear as ‘Xuanzong’.

Worse still, the pronunciation of Chinese written characters varies in different parts of China. All literate Chinese can read the characters; the script is indeed common throughout China. But they pronounce the characters in accordance with their local or regional dialect (technically ‘topolect’ or ‘regionalect’). Thus strangers on a train may happily share the same newspaper though quite unable to converse with one another. Foreigners, mostly European, who began arriving on the China coast in numbers from the late sixteenth century, found spoken Chinese a lot easier than written Chinese. A recent authority has calculated that, for an English-speaker, learning to speak Chinese is twenty per cent more difficult than learning to speak French; on the other hand, learning to read and write Chinese is five hundred per cent more difficult than learning to read and write French. Foreign scholars, armed with a quickly won understanding of spoken Chinese, proceeded to tackle the written characters by representing them in their own languages using the Chinese pronunciation with which they were now familiar. Unfortunately this pronunciation was almost exclusively that of the Guangdong and Fujian provinces to which foreign contacts were at the time largely restricted. The topolects were thus those of Cantonese (Canton = Guangzhou, capital of Guangdong) and of the Hakka and Hokkien people of Fujian. They were barely recognisable to the majority of Chinese, who, living in the Yangzi basin or the north, mostly spoke a topolect that foreigners called Mandarin. Not unnaturally, northerners came to resent finding even their place-names being mispronounced and mistranslated.

And there was yet another complication. The foreigners in question were Portuguese, Spanish and Italian, then Dutch, English, French, American and Russian, each of whose languages rendered some vowel sounds and consonants quite differently. ‘J’, for instance, is pronounced one way in Spanish, another way in French and yet another in English. Any representation of Chinese speech had to take account of such inconsistency, and hence that variety of different Romanising systems, each tailored to a different European language; hence too the absurdity of what purported to be transcriptions of Chinese characters being in fact English, French, Spanish, etc., renderings of Chinese regional speech as spoken by only a provincial minority of the Chinese nation.

To standardise the rendering of Chinese characters in all alphabetical languages, and to supersede this chaos, yet another system was developed in the 1950s. This was Pinyin, the form used throughout this book. China being at the time dependent on the Soviet Union for much technical assistance, the task involved Russian scholars and originally envisaged the possibility of Pinyin using not the Roman (or Latin) script but the Cyrillic script of Russia. Only slowly, at Chinese insistence and as Sino-Soviet relations deteriorated from the late 1950s, did Pinyin settle for the Roman script; and only after strong Chinese promotion and the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC’s) admission to the UN in 1971 did it win international recognition. But as of the 1980s Pinyin may claim to have been universally accepted and as of the 1990s most (though by no means all) works on China have used it. It is taught and displayed, albeit discreetly, along with the Chinese characters throughout China; it could conceivably one day supersede them.

It is not perfect. Pinyin’s Marxist inventors seem to have projected their belief in equality of opportunity on to the letters of the keyboard. Keys such as ‘q’, ‘x’, ‘y’ and ‘z’, for which Western languages have little use, are awarded major roles. ‘Z’ has never been so busy, while ‘r’, that most useful of consonants in English, is practically redundant. More seriously, the subtleties of the Chinese characters, hinted at in Wade-Giles’ scatter of diacritic punctuation marks, is largely lost; tonal marks, though available, rarely appear: the number of quite different Chinese words rendered by the same jangling word of Pinyin is increased; and on the pronunciation front, in trying to meet all national variations, Pinyin ends up by satisfying none. Officially it is said to indicate how a word should be pronounced in the ‘common speech’ (or Putonghua) of the people of the People’s Republic. In reality Putonghua, being approximately a down-classed version of ‘Mandarin’, is spoken largely in the north. Elsewhere in China, Pinyin spellings may prove a poor guide to pronunciation. Even in the north the visitor would do well to study how all those ‘q’s, ‘x’s and ‘z’s are actually enunciated before trying them out on a Beijing bus conductor.