China

A MATTER OF SCALE

C. P. Fitzgerald, the pre-Pinyin author of several works on Chinese history in English, neatly sounded a final caveat, albeit one common to other traditions. China’s dynastic historians, he noted, ‘while indefatigable in the recording and collection of facts, arranged these compendious materials in a manner which makes direct translation of the original texts a baffling and unrewarding task’.

Consequently Chinese history has been very little translated into any European language, and such scholarly works of this kind as exist are so packed with names of individuals and titles of office as to be wholly indigestible to the ordinary reader. Such direct translations, while invaluable to the student and the scholar, can never reach a wide public.¹⁰

Fitzgerald was writing in the 1950s, since when more and better translations have appeared. But his reservations about the difficulty of translation, and about its unedifying product, still hold good. Ancient Chinese texts written in early forms of the Chinese script present major problems of interpretation in themselves, and these are exacerbated by the interpolations and omissions of the writers and copyists responsible for the texts as they now survive. Such editing may sometimes have been deliberate and so can be instructive. But just as often it accidentally resulted from rough handling and the ravages of time. Damp, sunlight or termites could obliterate the ink of the characters; and since the bamboo slivers on which each column of text was written were held together only by a perishable thread, they could rather easily become unstrung and get shuffled or lost. Even the ‘pages’ of near-original texts, such as those found in the caves along the Silk Road or in the tombs of Mawangdui, were in no fit state for instant reading and presented scholars with a major problem of identification and arrangement. The modern translator has thus not only to tease some sense out of his text but also to tease out of it the accumulated errors, accretions, misattributions and random misplacements of centuries. Contested readings of quite important passages may result.

Fitzgerald’s subject was the Empress Wu Zetian (AD 690–705), who, though by no means the only woman to exercise imperial authority, was the only woman ever to assume the imperial title. His book was therefore a biography, possibly the earliest in English of any pre-Qing Chinese ruler, and is still something of a novelty. Chinese histories devote considerable space to biographical material. Typically the first half of any National or Standard History is a chronological account of the reign or reigns in question and the second half a collection of short biographies of the major participants. The information given, however, is often formulaic – forebears, birth, auspicious youthful encounters, career appointments, demise, summational homily. It is not of a sort that lends itself to the subtle characterisation, brilliant insights and narrative thrust expected of the modern biographer.

Similarly the chronological chapters of these histories, while careful with the facts, unsparing of the intrigues and exemplary with the dates, are short on the chance detail, the hint of drama and the trails of causation that make for engrossing history. Relying heavily on the texts, many modern histories of China, in English as well as Chinese, necessarily share their peculiarities. ‘Indefatigable in the recording and collection of facts’, they too present these ‘compendious materials’ to sometimes ‘baffling and unrewarding’ effect. Important events and pronouncements follow one another in orderly succession but without much indication of their significance or the thinking behind them. The not very exciting biographies are reserved till the end of each reign; and because each reign, however brief, is often treated separately, it can be hard to detect those broader lines of policy, economic trends, social changes and external problems that span a longer period.

Also evident is a tendency to emulate the prolixity of the Standard Histories. The Cambridge History of China, though still incomplete at the time of writing, already extends to some sixteen hefty volumes with more required just to keep up with the march of events. Meanwhile Joseph Needham’s Science and Civilisation in China has passed the twenty-volume mark.

Certainly, China merits the grand treatment. A vast country with an interminable pedigree, an idiosyncratic culture, a traumatic recent past and an exciting future can hardly be taken at a canter. But it should not be supposed from all the groaning shelves that China’s history is therefore altogether unlike that of other nations. It is not. In China, too, empires rise and fall, personalities shine, progress is fitful, peace ephemeral, social justice elusive. The difference is one of degree, not kind, of scale, not character. Forewarned of the difficulties, the reader will find China’s history just as instructive and rewarding as any other – only more so.

At 1.3 billion, the people of China currently account for about a fifth of the world’s total population. Soon they may consume about a fifth of the world’s natural resources. But if China’s history proves anything, it is that this should cause no surprise. From such statistics as exist it would seem that even in Han/Roman times the Chinese population was vast, probably not much less than a fifth of the world’s total then. Its cities were, and long remained, the most crowded, and its fields the most productive. In science, technology and industry it led the way. Were it to do so again, it would mark a reversion to a precedence among nations that demography justifies, history sanctions, and which the rest of the world might actually find comparatively benign.

In the course of time China’s population has fluctuated wildly as a result of catastrophic natural disasters and appalling conflicts; but recovery has been no less dramatic. Likewise its productive and technical superiority has been much eclipsed, most obviously during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but never to the extent of deterring an inventive, industrious and always numerous people.

Elsewhere such preponderant assets might well have encouraged global ambitions. In the eighth to tenth centuries, a then predominantly Buddhist China was aware that Buddhism in India, the ‘Holy Land’ of its birth, was in crisis. But while a similar crisis in Christianity’s ‘Holy Land’ was about to bring wave after wave of Crusaders from European Christendom to Palestine, not so much as a knight from Chinese ‘Buddhadom’ ventured into northern India. And this despite heart-rending reports of the neglect and devastation to which India’s Buddhist sites were subject and despite a demonstrated capacity for successful military intervention south of the Himalayas.

Five hundred years later the Chinese, like their Spanish and Portuguese contemporaries, were in a position to mobilise the resources and develop the know-how for launching transoceanic armadas. They duly did so, reaching out to South-East Asia and across the Indian Ocean, but not with a view to amassing ‘Christians and spices’ like Vasco da Gama, nor to extract gold and silver, exploit the labour of others or appropriate their lands. Ultimately and perhaps quaintly, their objective was simply to promote and extend that vital cosmic harmony throughout ‘All under Heaven’.

Since this implied recognition of the emperor as the ‘Son of Heaven’, a degree of subservience was indeed involved. It was not, however, onerous or extractive. It could be beneficial. The favourable reception that awaited Vasco da Gama when in 1498 he reached south India was attributed by one of his Portuguese companions to Indian expectations of fair treatment and ample reward from all pale-skinned seafarers, a legacy of earlier contacts with Chinese navigators. No permanent overseas representation or settlement had resulted from these contacts; rather than seek ways to make the voyages pay for themselves, the Ming emperors had discontinued them. Chinese empire would remain restricted to China and its immediate neighbours. A fifth of the world’s population would advance no claim to a fifth of the world’s cultivable surface area.

Admittedly, China’s relations with her inner Asian neighbours were less friendly. Military excursions would reach as far afield as what are now Burma, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrghyzstan and Kazakhstan. Like the great sea voyages, however, they resulted in little or no colonisation; and for every excursion there were usually provocative incursions, often of serious and lasting effect.

Nearer to home the Koreans, Vietnamese and Mongolians, not to mention non-Chinese peoples currently within China’s borders such as those of Tibet, Xinjiang and the south, would certainly contest China’s neighbourly credentials. But the hostility has usually been reciprocal. Across one of the longest and least defensible land frontiers in the world, China (as defined at any given moment) confronted formidable foes. The catalogue of nomadic and semi-nomadic peoples who menaced the settled regions of China’s north and west may seem inexhaustible and included confederations of the most martial peoples in Asian history – Xiongnu, Turkic, Tibetan, Muslim, Mongol and Manchu. To this list could be added later seaborne intruders – the European powers in the nineteenth century and Japanese imperialists in the twentieth. Though no amount of provocation can excuse the recent oppression of, for instance, Tibet, it is a matter of record that the Chinese people have suffered far more militarily from outsiders, and been obliged to stomach far more culturally and economically from them, than outsiders ever have from China. If the idea of the Great Wall as a purely defensive bastion has usually found such favour, it is because it fits so well with this perception. But as what follows may suggest, when history is at its most obliging, the history-writer needs be at his most wary.

Finally, an apology. Histories like this usually award priority to the recent. The narrative slows, like a train drawing into a station, as it approaches the platform of the present. Braking hard through the nineteenth century, it crawls obligingly through the twentieth towards the buffers of the twenty-first. This book, in devoting more space to the distant past and less to the recent past, may go to the other extreme. But since no culture is so historically conscious as China’s, the remote is often more relevant. To the Chinese the First Emperor (r. 221–210 BC) is a colossus, while the Last Emperor (r. 1909–11) is largely unknown. That he ended his days mulching the flower beds in a Beijing park might seem to justify this ignorance. The centuries of greatest interest to foreigners – post-1500 in the case of Europeans, post-1750 in the case of Americans – reflect their own historical perspectives, not those of the Chinese. And as you, the reader, know full well, the train of history does not in fact stop for the convenience of a book. This book’s ‘now’ is already your ‘then’. Histories themselves become history before they reach the shelves. What seemed immediate at the time of writing is already being swallowed up by the distance ahead like a tail-light disappearing down the track of futurity.

1 RITES TO WRITING

PRE C. 1050 BC

THE GREAT BEGINNING

THOUGH BY NO MEANS A GODLESS people, the ancient Chinese were reluctant to credit their gods – or God – with anything so manifestly implausible as the act of creation. In the beginning, therefore, God did not create heaven and earth; they happened. Instead of creation myths, China’s history begins with inception myths and in place of a creator it has a ‘happening situation’. Suggestive of a scientific reaction, part black hole, part Big Bang, this was known as the Great Beginning.

Before Heaven and Earth had taken form all was vague and amorphous [declares the third-century BC Huainanzi]. Therefore it was called The Great Beginning. The Great Beginning produced emptiness, and emptiness produced the universe. The universe produced qi [vital force or energy], which had limits. That which was clear and light drifted up to become Heaven while that which was heavy and turbid solidified to become earth…The combined essences of Heaven and Earth became the yin and yang.¹

A more popular, though later, version of this genesis myth describes the primordial environment as not just amorphous but ‘opaque, like the inside of an egg’; and it actually was an egg to the extent that, when broken, white and yolk separated. The clear white, or yang, ascended to become Heaven and the murky yolk, or yin, descended to become Earth. Interposed between the two was the egg’s incubus, a spirit called Pan Gu. Pan Gu kept his feet firmly in the earth and his head in the heavens as the two drew apart. ‘Heaven was exceedingly high, Earth exceedingly deep, and Pan Gu exceedingly tall,’ says the Huainanzi.² Though not the creator of the universe, Pan Gu evidently served as some kind of agent in the arrangement of it.

Further evidence of agency in the ordering and supporting of the self-created cosmos came to light quite recently when a silk manuscript, stolen from a tomb near Changsha in the southern province of Hunan in 1942, passed into the possession of the Sackler Collection in Washington, DC. The manuscript features both text and drawings and is laid out diagramatically in the form of a cosmograph. This is a common device that uses a model of the cosmos and its various phases to assist the reader in divining the best time of year for a particular course of action. Dating from about 300 BC, the silk stationery of the manuscript, though carefully folded within a bamboo box, has suffered much wear and a little tear. Not all of the text is legible, and not all of what is legible is intelligible. But one section appears to contain a variation on the same cosmogony theme. In this case a whole family – husband and wife ably assisted by their four children – take on the task of sorting out the universe. First they ‘put things in motion making the transformations arrive’; then, after a well-earned rest, they calculate the divisions of time, separate heaven and earth, and name the mountains (‘since the mountains were out of order’) and likewise the rivers and the four seas.³

It is still dark at the time, the sun and the moon having not yet appeared. Sorting out the mountains and rivers is only possible thanks to enlightening guidance provided by four gods, who also reveal the four seasons. The gods have to intervene again when, ‘after hundreds and thousands of years’, the sun and the moon are finally born. For by their light it becomes apparent that something is wrong with the Nine Continents: they are not level; mountains keep toppling over on top of them. The gods therefore devise as protection a canopy, or sky-dome, and to hold it up they erect five poles, each of a different colour. The colours – green, red, yellow, white and black – are those of the Five Phases or Five Elements, an important (if not always consistent) sequence that will recur in Chinese history and philosophy almost as often as those complementary opposites of yin and yang.

The relevant section of the Changsha silk manuscript concludes with the words: ‘The God then finally made the movement of the sun and the moon’. This enigmatic statement is about as near to creationism as the Chinese texts get. But it should be noted that the spirits, gods, even God, never actually create things; they only set them in motion, support them, organise them, adjust them and name them. In Chinese tradition the origin of the universe is less relevant than its correct orientation and operation, since it is by these that time and space can be calculated and the likely outcome of any human endeavour assessed.

Less relevant still in Chinese tradition is the origin of man. In another version of the Pan Gu story, it is not Pan Gu’s lanky adolescence which suggests a degree of personal agency in the creative process but his posthumous putrescence. In what might be called a decomposition myth, as Pan Gu lay dying, it is said that:

[his] breath became the wind and the clouds; his voice became the thunder; his left eye became the sun, and his right the moon; his four limbs and five torsos became the four poles and the five mountains; his blood became the rivers; his sinews became geographic features; his muscles became the soils in the field; his hair and beard became stars and planets; his skin and its hairs became grasses and trees; his teeth and bones became bronzes and jades; his essence and marrow became pearls and gemstones; his sweat became rain and lakes; and the various worms in his body, touched by the wind, became the black-haired commoners.⁴

India’s mythology matches this with a dismemberment myth. Out of the corpse of a sacrificial victim the Vedic gods supposedly hacked a hierarchy of caste, with the priestly Brahmin being born of the victim’s mouth, the martial ksatriya of his arms, the house-proud vaisya of his thighs, and the wretched sudra of his feet. The Brahminical imagination responsible for this conceit overlooked the possibility of a section of the human race being derived from an intestinal infestation. Perhaps only an elite as sublimely superior as China’s could have assigned to their raven-haired countrymen an origin so abject. When in later times foreigners came to resent the arrogance of Chinese officialdom, their grounds for complaint were as nothing compared to those of China’s unregarded masses.

From both of the above examples an early insistence on social stratification – on a superior ‘us’ and an inferior ‘them’ – is inferred; and it is thought to be corroborated in China by the numerous other myths emphasising that heaven and earth had to be physically separated. While Pan Gu could bridge the gap between them because he was so ‘exceedingly tall’, and while both men and gods later managed excursions back and forth, the distance eventually became too great. Only those possessed of magical powers, or able to attach such a medium to their persons or families, could hope to make the trip. Celestial intercourse, in other words, was reserved for the privileged few and this set them apart from the toiling many.

In the Shangshu, the fourth-century BC ‘Book of Documents’ that provided twentieth-century etymologists with a Chinese word for ‘panda’, such myths slowly begin to gel into history. Here a named ‘emperor’ is credited with having separated Heaven and Earth by commanding an end to all unauthorised communication between the two. The link was duly severed by a couple of gods who were in his service. There was to be, as he put it, ‘no more ascending and descending’; and ‘after this was done’, we are told, ‘order was restored and the people returned to virtue’.

The ‘emperor’ in question was Zhuan Xu, the second of the mythical ‘Five Emperors’ whom tradition places at the apex of China’s great family tree of legitimate sovereigns. All of the ‘Five Emperors’ combined in their persons both divine and human attributes. Their majesty was awesome and their conduct so exemplary that it would inform political debate throughout the millennia to come. In fact, providing an unassailable example of virtuous and unitary rule seems to have been their prime function. Of the five, the first was the revered ‘Yellow Emperor’; Zhuan Xu was second; the third and fourth were the much-cited Yao and Shun; and the last was Yu. Unlike his precursors, each of whom had deferred to a successor who was not his own son, Yu yielded to the principle of hereditary succession, named his son as his heir, and so founded China’s first recognised dynasty, the Xia.⁵

The Xia were kings; the title of ‘emperor’ is not given them and would remain in abeyance for the next 1,400 years. They have, however, been given approximate dates (traditionally c. 2100 BC – c. 1600 BC but probably a few centuries later) and a rough location in the lower Yellow River basin, otherwise the Zhongyuan or ‘Central Plain’ that stretches across northern China from Shandong province to Shaanxi province. Unlike ‘the Five Emperors’ the Xia are not considered semi-divine; they may have actually existed. They left no documentary evidence or any material remains that can certainly be attributed to them; even China’s earliest historians could find comparatively little to say about them. But archaeologists have unearthed cultures one of which could have been Xia, and there is evidence of what may be some early form of writing that could have been in use at the Xia court.

On the other hand, excavation has failed to substantiate a unitary kingdom or culture that was anything like as unique, widespread, dominant and long-lasting as that which later textual tradition awards to the Xia; and with important reservations, the same may be said of the still more illustrious Shang (r. c. 1750–c. 1040 BC) and Zhou⁶ (r. c. 1040–256 BC), who, together with the Xia, comprise the first ‘Three Dynasties’. Rather, all the material evidence now points to a plethora of localised Neolithic and Bronze Age cultures, some distinct and some less so, that arose and coexisted both within the Central Plain and far beyond it. The dawn of Chinese history is thus badly obscured by a major contradiction. The written record contained in classic texts dating from the fourth and third century BC (and generally accepted ever since) does not always coincide with the material record as excavated and analysed by the highest standards of modern scholarship in the twentieth century.

This contradiction has fundamental implications for the whole understanding of China’s civilisation, of its dynamics, and even of who the Chinese were and are. The stakes are so high that protagonists have occasionally overstated their case; scholarship may have been sullied by partisanship as a result. Basically all the written texts imply a single linear pedigree of rulership; it is comprised of successive ‘dynasties’ centred geographically on the north’s Central Plain, whence their superior and quintessentially ‘Chinese’ culture supposedly spread outwards; and it stretched chronologically, like an apostolic succession, from ‘the Five Emperors’ to ‘the Three Dynasties’ of Xia, Shang and Zhou and on into less contentious times. Archaeology, on the other hand, recognises no such neat pedigree. Chronologically the Three Dynasties appear more probably to have overlapped with one another; geographically the kingdoms of the Central Plain were not as central nor as influential as once supposed; and as for the developments that led to a distinct ‘Chinese’ culture, instead of radiating outwards from the Central Plain they germinated and interacted over a much wider area and among peoples who were by no means racially uniform.

It is as if, standing in some outer portal of the Forbidden City or any other traditional Chinese architectural complex, one group of scholars were to focus on the inward vista of solemn grey courtyards, airy halls and grand stairways all centrally aligned in receding order, while another group, looking outwards, were to gaze down on the real world with its typically urban profusion of competing vistas, all traffic-clogged, architecturally chaotic and equally intriguing. Reconciling the two seems scarcely possible, although recent moves in that direction offer some encouragement.

Archaeologists have become more mindful of the limitations of their discipline as new finds overturn confidence in their own earlier hypotheses; the survival of relics from the remotest past is acknowledged as being as arbitrary as their often accidental discovery; and such evidence as may be lacking is not taken as proof of its never having existed – or of its never one day coming to light. Meanwhile the textual scholars have been coming round to the idea that their sources may be selective and that those who compiled them long after the times they describe may have had their own agendas. For instance, ‘Xia’, the name of the first dynasty, is the same as that used by the people of the Central Plain in the last centuries BC (when the historiographical tradition was taking shape) to distinguish themselves from other less ‘Chinese’ peoples (often described as di, man, rong or yi, words that are habitually translated into English as ‘barbarian’). Much later the word ‘Han’ would make a similar transition from dynastic name to ethnic tag and is now used as the official term for China’s supposedly mono-ethnic majority. Both examples suggest that the validity of the ethnic tag derives substantially from the prominence accorded to the original dynasty. Thus talking up the Xia dynasty in the texts may have been a way of enhancing a sense of privileged identity among those who regarded themselves as inheritors of the Xia kingdom and so the ‘Xia people’.

Modern scholarship is well placed to recognise such special pleading. It cannot be a coincidence that throughout the Nationalist and communist era champions of the linear textual tradition have generally been resident in China and employed there, while those who emphasise a regional and pluralist interpretation of Chinese identity have generally been foreigners, often Westerners, Japanese or Chinese residing outside China. Deconstructing China, questioning its cohesion and puncturing its presumption, has a history of its own – which of course in no way vitiates the research or invalidates the findings of its scholars.