Review of The Story of China by Michael Wood, pub. Simon & Schuster UK 2020
I saw this book last year in the local bookshop and reflected that I knew next to nothing about the history of China. I’d read Confucius’s Analects, some Tang poets and had vague memories of the unspeakable Mao; in between (and before, but in my ignorance I had no idea how much “before” there would be) was a blank. This seemed unconscionable, given that we were looking at one of the world's great civilizations, so I bought the book and have never regretted it.
The title, “story” rather than “history”, is very deliberate. Though it is a serious scholarly history with all the necessary critical apparatus like notes and index, it is one of those history books you can read many times over, and in huge enjoyable chunks, both because of his writing style and because of his way of coming at the subject. Whenever possible, he gives us accounts of, and by, named individuals, and nothing else can so bring history alive. “Police Procedures in the Qin Dynasty” just isn’t in it with Wood’s account of how Magistrate Chu of Liyang, in the year 242 BC, goes about solving a murder case.
The reason Wood can do this, of course, is the amount of written material from truly ancient times; it sometimes seems as if while Europe was inventing the cart, China was inventing the civil service. Literacy appeared very early, certainly from about 1200 BC and probably earlier, in the Shang dynasty, and both they and the dynasties that succeeded them demonstrated a positive mania for keeping written records of who was doing what and where. Historians of course will bless them for it, but at the time, though it must in many ways have facilitated good government, the main purpose of all this documentation was probably to facilitate control. Over and over, it becomes apparent that these are a people who have often been far more willing than Europeans to cede individual freedom in exchange for order.
One of many Western misconceptions about China which Wood demolishes is that of insularity and resistance to change and outside influence. Possibly this notion grew up in the nineteenth century, when outside influences from the West mostly took the form of bullying, but Wood’s accounts of intrepid Chinese travellers in the Han and Tang eras, and of cosmopolitan cities like the Tang capital Chang’an, clearly show a society anything but insular or hostile to outsiders, though as in any society there were periods of introspection and reaction, notably in the fourteenth century after the Mongol occupation. But in 635 AD, a Syrian Christian monk arrived in Chang’an for audience with Emperor Taizong, who ordered the scriptures to be translated for the imperial library, authorised the building of a church and issued a proclamation beginning “Right principles have no invariable name, holy men have no invariable station; teachings are established in accordance with the values of their own regions and with the object of benefitting the people at large”. As Wood drily remarks, “it is hard to imagine a Daoist or Buddhist embassy arriving in Constantinople in 635 being allowed to build a temple in such an open-handed spirit”.
Taizong was an interesting character in his own right, but it is one of the many virtues of this book that it does not focus on emperors, aristocrats and warlords to the exclusion of the ordinary folk who actually make up a nation and a history. He is particularly careful not to emulate the many male historians who have managed to airbrush women out of the picture. His evocation of a culture includes the animal-loving ninth-century civil servant Wang Renyu ruminating on the social and familial instincts of his pet monkey, Magistrate Chu combing the market for stolen property, the fourteenth-century poet Zheng Yunduan, imagining herself inside painted landscapes she can never visit in reality, crippled by her bound feet and the conventions that keep her indoors, the otherwise unknown diarist Zhang Daye, describing the horrors of his flight as a child from the Taiping rebels in the 1860s, and many more. The book is copiously and beautifully illustrated, but in some ways the most telling illustrations are these pen-portraits of individuals he uses to zoom in, as it were, on moments in a long and fascinating story. At one point, Wood describes (and also includes in the illustrations) the twelfth-century scroll Festival on the River, a 20-foot hand-painted panorama of everyday life in Kaifeng around 1120:
“Around us is bustling city life […] before us is a world of teashops and wine bars, barbers and boatmen, physicians and fortune-tellers. […] We pass Wang’s Funeral Store, hung with paper horses, flower arrangements and other funeral offerings. Further along the street are tea houses and bakeries and a huge restaurant decked out with flags and banners. There’s a sesame pancake stand under a big umbrella with hot pancakes waiting on the tray, just as any traveller in China would see today. Soon our stroll brings us to the banks of the Bian River, which carries cargo and passenger boats right into the middle of the city […] At the wharves there are boats unloading stone, timber and building materials, a camel caravan enters the gates; in the travellers’ inns and teahouses, diners crowd around the tables.”
In essence, this book is a verbal equivalent of the scroll, extended to cover a far greater land area and several millennia.
