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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Michael Wood
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September 13 - October 15, 2022
This ideal of a centralised, authoritarian bureaucracy ruled by the sage-emperor and his ministers and scholars is one, as we shall see, that continued in the psyche of Chinese culture even after the end of the empire.
North China for much of the year is cold and often grey, while the south is subtropical; one grows millet and wheat, the other rice. The oldest rice in the world has been found in the south on sites dating back to 8000 BCE. With a fundamental divide in ecology and climate, these two great zones of China have been distinct in people, language and culture for millennia, and still are.
To the north is the Yellow River, where the early dynasties grew up; to the south the Yangtze valley, the great centre of population, wealth and culture in later history.
So the Yellow River is a constant, unpredictable and often terrifying character in the story of China, nothing like the benign life-bearing flood of the Egyptian Nile, whose rising was celebrated each year with unerring predictability on 15 August, or the Tigris in Mesopotamia, whose summer rising was greeted into the twentieth century with liturgies and food offerings,
So China’s early civilisations grew up on the banks of the river in the middle plain, where the fear of the breakdown of society due to natural disaster was ever-present, and irrigation could only be managed by a strong state.
There were many distinctive regional cultures in China in prehistory, but the most important grew up in the wide wheat fields of Henan, the central plain, the zhongyuan, of the later Middle Kingdom.
Fuxi is a powerful ancient deity who ‘laid down the laws of humanity’ in the first days of primitive humankind, when, as a Han dynasty text, the Bai Hu Tong, says, ‘there was no moral or social order’. He is the first among the legendary primogenitors of ‘Huaxia’, the culture of the Chinese.
Gu saw the process as the product of continuous institutionalised warfare, the conquest and annexation of one state by another, over many centuries.
Chinese society developed from the Neolithic down to the First Emperor, with the gradual concentration of wealth, technology, writing and coercive power in the hands of powerful lineages.
However, the rise of villages and the development of organised societies in China took place comparatively late in the story, later than in the powerhouses of the western ancient world, Egypt and Mesopotamia, which thrived from the fourth millennium BCE with large-scale monumental architecture, writing and cities.
the common markers of ‘civilisation’ as anthropologists and archaeologists define it. For them it means cities, bronze technology, writing systems, large ceremonial buildings and temples, monumental art and social hierarchies sanctioned by some form of law and held together by coercive power wielded by armed elites.
Shimao is far away from the Yellow River plain where the traditional narrative of Chinese civilisation says the first dynasties arose. So these dramatic finds, which were only announced in a provisional summary in 2014 and are yet to be fully published, call into question the long-accepted idea that Chinese civilisation spread from the central plains of the Yellow River to other regions.
So the emergence of civilisation in China may be the product of an interaction between the Yellow River plain and one or more of half a dozen peripheral prehistoric cultures, among which were the ‘barbarians’ of the high plateau who created the extraordinary culture of Shimao.
The very symbols of governance, ‘caps of office and formal dress for governors’, are traced back to King Yu. In all versions of the tale, after he surveyed the land and created the nine provinces (the phrase will become traditional nomenclature for China), he set up a tribute system. Each region was called a zhou (a territory limited by water borders, usually rivers) and an early tribute list purporting to be his names all nine, with a description of the tribute from each, as well as the waterways or land routes by which the tribute was brought to the king.
which associate the rise of the first dynasty with King Yu’s successful dredging work after the inundation, say it began at a place called Jishi, the name of the gorge where scientists think the historical flood began. While the evidence awaits full publication, what we can say for now is that a series of ecological crises between 2300 and 1900 BCE, including perhaps a great Yellow River flood, appear to coincide with dramatic political changes in the central plain.
these first ‘cities’ were not where the wider population lived; they were enclosures of royal power and ritual, containing palaces, storerooms and workshops where craftsmen produced ritual vessels and weapons of war. A fundamental discovery from this and other digs in the plain is that the Bronze Age transformation in China, the emergence of civilisation, was not, as in Iraq and the Near East, due to sudden technological advances or great social change. The development of centralised power was political and based on a deep-rooted cosmology which would last until the twentieth century.
In about 1550 BCE the Xia were conquered by a neighbouring people who called themselves the Shang, the second dynasty, and one of the most important in the story of China, who profoundly influenced the shape of the early state over their 500-year existence.
The Shang polity came out of the Neolithic, like its neighbours in other parts of China. But it created the model for later Chinese kingship: the central role of the king as mediator between heaven and earth; the crucial importance of lineage and ancestors; the control of shamanism and divination as a source of authority; and the monopoly of bronze technology, and of writing. In China, from the beginning civilisation was shaped by political necessity, the rituals of power and the interpretation by the elite of the will of heaven.
The Shang state lasted from the 1550s to 1045 BCE, the contemporary of Bronze Age Greece, the world of Mycenae and Troy. The first ancestors of the later Chinese state, they bequeathed central aspects of the culture: rulership, ritual, divination and, crucially, writing, the script itself, of which today’s script is a direct descendant.
The overthrow of the Shang was a turning point in Chinese history to which all later dynasties would look back. The key to this was the Mandate of Heaven: the idea of the succession of dynasties, each of which was believed to have received divinely ordained authority, which in due time was passed on.
After their fall, the surviving Shang clan were coopted by the Zhou into their picture of the way Chinese kingship was understood and handed down.
The pit was one of seventeen that have been excavated in recent years in the ‘eastern capital’ of the Zhou, outliers of the tombs of the kings of the Eastern Zhou, the rulers of the central plain from the eighth century BCE until their destruction by the Qin in 256 BCE.
Horses were introduced into the Bronze Age cultures of Eurasia at the start of the second millennium BCE, from the Central Asian steppe. Chariot warfare rapidly spread west, all the way to Ireland, Mycenaean Greece, Pharaonic Egypt and Vedic India. In China, the use of chariots in war began under the Shang, when they simply carried kings and nobles into battle.
The Zhou dynasty is the first period of Chinese history from which extended texts have survived. Among them are the canonical classics of Chinese culture, which were collected and preserved at this time. The oldest of these is the famous divination text: the Book of Changes (I Ching). Riddling and ruminative, it is one of the great works of world literature and is still used as a practical guide by the people of China and East Asia today. The Book of Songs (Shijing) is a poetic anthology,
originally the tian ming, the celestial mandate, was literally an astronomical sign seen in the sky in 1059 BCE during the reign of King Wen, whose son, Wu, founded the Zhou dynasty. The interpretation of the sign by King Wu and his diviners was that this was the celestial mandate given by the Lord of Heaven and was a ‘great command in the sky … so Heaven [tian] will protect and watch over me, its child, in the manner it had protected the former kings extending to the four quarters’.
The Western Zhou lasted 400 years. During this time, the concept of the Heavenly Sign or Mandate developed from a specific event in 1059 BCE, during the reign of King Wen, to the broad conception of a changing mandate tied to a theory of dynastic cycles.
Political ideology and, indeed, political philosophy begin to be shaped in the service of a monarchical idea, that of the sage-king. Hence, influential thinkers from Confucius to Wang Anshi and Sima Guang in the eleventh century looked back on the Zhou as the ideal.
So the cosmos was perceived as a moral order, and moral values were built into the way the earthly order worked. The virtuous ruler would mediate between heaven and the realm of humans, as the Shang king had done with his diviners. Now, though, there was a moral contract.
As for the role of the intellectual, the key was to determine the Way (dao). When the Way is lost, the sage has a moral duty, above all else, to reform society, to set the Way back on track, to define the tradition and advise the prince. Politics, then, was Confucius’ first and foremost concern, which is also true of Chinese philosophy as a whole. Chinese thought, it might be said, has revolved around two central questions: the harmony of the universe and the harmony of society, cosmology and politics.
In Europe, shaped by Roman and Germanic law, the institution of kingship developed a legal custom separate from political authority. These two paths have marked the traditions of the East and West to this day.
When all power is in the hands of the ruler and there is no independent legal system, the intellectuals place themselves in the hands of the ruler, as they have done in China right through its history down to the People’s Republic. Confucius believed in human nature and mistrusted laws. Legal rules, he thought, were not the best way of creating a just order. This was best achieved through a matrix of ritual and moral conventions, inculcated through education.
In the West, the inheritors of Roman law and Germanic custom came to believe that the government of men is always flawed, unless limited by a strong legal system. They gradually developed the idea that states should be ruled with the informed consent of the governed. This is a major divergence, even by the time of the Song dynasty, when in England, for example, the law was already something the king should obey.
the Qin state was a ‘barbarian’ kingdom on the edge of mainstream civilisation and was seen by its neighbours as a ‘land of wolves and jackals’. But in the 240s BCE, under their leader King Zhang, they burst onto the stage of history, ended Zhou rule and unified China. Zhang then became the First Emperor. Though they only ruled all China for fifteen years, the Qin were the superpower that changed the story of China for ever, leaving structures of governance and contours of thought that still exist today.
The philosopher Mozi (468–390 BCE) first proposed that the remedy for universal disorder was the establishment of a universal ruler. He envisioned meritocratic appointments of state officers, supervision of office holders and the unification of thought and behaviour, but with ideological conformity enforced within a strongly ordered society.
To facilitate this new order, Lord Shang recommended practical reforms which, in essence, have survived through Chinese history. First was the division of society into counties, districts and villages.
This was linked to a system of universal registration for all people, from birth to death.
In China, however, the ‘Great Unity’ was an almost inbred ideological myth from the pre-Qin past, which was never abandoned, even in times of catastrophic breakdown.
The Western name for China is derived from the word Qin, and it was most likely transmitted via the Mauryans through Sanskrit and Persian into Greek.)
History was political in the truest sense. In no Chinese epoch of imperial times, therefore, are there historians like Herodotus or Thucydides, who were writing for themselves. In China, history was written to endorse the assumption of the Mandate of Heaven. It was also written to uphold the timeless values of the canonical tradition,
In China, history is mainly optimistic, even if the lesson of history was that disorder, cruelty and violence were more the norm than periods of peace. For Sima Qian, if evil may triumph in the short term, it is the historians who ensure that in the long term the record of good deeds, human values and justice is passed on. Preserving the memory, then, is also a moral task.
Sima’s legacy was a base text on which later Chinese historians would build. First there was the conceptual framework, the narrative of prehistory and the first three dynasties painstakingly reconstructed from pre-Qin sources, oral tradition and even material survivals, including bronzes. Then there was the history of the successive dynasties which followed, culminating in the Han peace. Following that was the idea of morality as the driving force of history.
In all early agricultural societies this was the condition of the masses, whose labour sustained the incredible riches of the upper classes. By the end of the Han era, wealthy families had come to own huge numbers of once independent small farms.
The spread of these private manors begin to mark the rise of a landed aristocracy who will become powerful over the next few centuries and dominate the heartland of China until their demise at the end of the Tang dynasty.
The government of the Han was therefore a continuation of the Qin, albeit less oppressive. If Confucius and his followers had laid down the ideal of moral rulership, and if the Qin had created a model of administration run on legalist principles, then the Han rulers took these ideas and bent them to their will over a 400-year period, and all later empires rested on its foundation.
The Red Cliffs battle would go down in legend as the end of the Han dynasty. This is another of those moments when China threatened to break apart for ever. When the warlord Cao Cao died, he left instructions that he should be buried with no treasures and no ceremony, ‘for the country is not at peace’. China broke into two on the old north and south divide, initiating the longest period of division in its history, over 350 years.
Beginning in 584 CE in the north and expanded between 605 CE and 609 CE, the canal crossed the countryside from north to south. It involved the labour of up to 5 million conscripts, men and women. The largest manmade waterway in history, the canal would be a major factor in joining the north and south.
In the seventh century CE, the axis of China’s history shifted as new elements came into Chinese civilisation from other cultures, from the Near East, Persia and Central Asia, and from India. Japan, too, was now drawn into the Chinese orbit. The Tang dynasty created the largest Chinese empire before the eighteenth century.
The Tang bequeathed to the modern world a Chinese cultural empire across East Asia, Korea and Japan, as Rome would hand down Latin culture across the West.
The Silk Road through Xinjiang came under Tang rule in 648 CE when the Chinese established their ‘Protectorate General to Pacify the West’.
By the late eighth century, the population numbered 50 million people, by far the world’s biggest state.
