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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Michael Wood
Read between
September 13 - October 15, 2022
In Chinese urban history the Tang dynasty marks the beginning of the transformation of the city from a royal enclosure for the imperial family, their servants, craftsmen and women, to a more open metropolis where ordinary lives are lived, freedoms found and fortunes made.
This was the time when Japan began its assimilation of the Chinese cultural tradition. Direct relations under the Tang from the early seventh century saw the wholesale importation of Chinese ideas, culture, language and texts. From 700 CE the sons of the Japanese aristocracy were trained in Chinese, and Japanese pilgrims went to China.
It is hard to imagine a Daoist or Buddhist embassy arriving in Constantinople in 635 CE being allowed to build a temple in such an open-handed spirit. But, for Taizong, Christianity was beneficial to all human beings and could be propagated in the empire.
The Yellow River valley had been the heartland of prehistoric Chinese civilisation since the Shang. But between the 600s and the 900s the Tang dynasty saw a major shift to the south; in economy, population, food and culture.
Data from the Tang censuses suggest that by the tenth century China’s population had halved in the north and more than doubled in the south. This was facilitated after 605 CE by the building of the Grand Canal to link the two and bring the agricultural produce of the south to the north.
The eight-year An Lushan Rebellion was a turning point in the story of China. Censuses suggest that as many as 30 million people died, comparable to figures from the First World War, and it was accompanied by similar institutional crisis and societal and governmental breakdown.
Confucian belief in the moral advancement of society by ‘transformative education’ and a faith in what we would describe today as consultative autocracy – ‘despotism with Chinese characteristics’.
good institutions run by properly qualified civil servants were the very embodiment of Confucian teaching.
The peasant Li Bang, after all, had founded the Han, and, later, the illiterate Zhu Yuanzhang the Ming. Both had commanded allegiance by sheer force of personality and military prowess, but in the end Huang did not.
But though the Great Tang ended in breakdown and chaos, the dynasty had seen tremendous economic and cultural achievements, including a permanent shift of China’s demographic and economic centre of gravity to the south, setting the stage for new social, political, economic and educational institutions that would shape the future later in the tenth century.
In the late tenth century, China emerged again as the greatest civilisation on earth. Its cities were the world’s largest, and its artists, craftsmen and scientists were unsurpassed. The population doubled in a century – over a quarter of the world may have lived in China at this time; some have thought as many as one third.
In the Song, China’s commercial economy and technological achievements far outstripped the medieval West. Song advances in science in particular were unrivalled between the Hellenistic Age and the eighteenth-century European Enlightenment.
The big question, then, is why, unlike the Roman Empire and every other empire of the ancient world or the Middle Ages, did China stay together in the tenth century and not break up?
Part of the answer lies in the strategic decisions made in 955, to concentrate efforts on the conquest of the south, so large parts of northern China were left under the rule of the neighbouring Liao kingdom, whose territory extended right into the heart of China.
Unlike the Tang, then, the elite of Song China were not hereditary nobles, or warlords, or bankers or merchants (although of course only better-off families could afford to have their young men dedicate themselves to long years of study).
In the late tenth century, the Song rulers presided over the first great flowering of printing in China – and the world. It had massive repercussions on the culture, helping to develop and spread a national consciousness in the Song just as the availability of mass-printed books in nineteenth-century Europe would be a major factor in creating European nationalism.
China was to enter a new age of peace, and there were three key developments in this cultural revival. First was the reassembling of the imperial library collection after its great losses through war. Second, a planned codifying of knowledge by commissioning huge compendia, encyclopaedic compilations containing a vast amount of material from earlier literature, much of it thought lost. Third was a crucial technological change: the transition from manuscript culture to the age of print
The brilliance of the Song Renaissance, with so many achievements unrivalled so far in history, was undermined in the end by a perfect storm of these factors: natural disasters, foreign invasion, and failures of leadership.
The very basis of political power, the Mandate of Heaven, rested on the king’s ability to feed the people. And as we can see from the prayers to the Great River on Shang oracle bones to the reports of Communist Party hydraulic engineers, for a state based in the Yellow River plain, the control of the rivers and water systems was absolutely central.
From autumn 1048 through 1049, standing waters were left in so many places that three seasons of crops were ruined; three harvest failures that led to apocalyptic stories of starvation and cannibalism.
From that point, so locals judged, a heavy silt cover can make the land sterile for twenty years.
Though Sima Qian back in the Han dynasty is viewed as the founding father of Chinese historiography, his namesake Sima Guang’s scope and influence make him the greatest of all Chinese historians.
In the twelfth century, China was divided along its age-old fault line, the fundamental north–south divide in landscape, climate and language which still persists today. And now the shift in the nation’s economic and social centre of gravity, which had begun in the Tang, became permanent. The south became the richest and most populous region of China, probably unrivalled anywhere on earth for its prosperity.
During the Tang, the interests of the great aristocratic families had been paramount, but now the old medieval aristocracy was gone, replaced by a governing class chosen on merit, men with a national sensibility that went beyond clan or even dynastic loyalty.
In the vast plains beyond the Great Wall and the mountains edging the North China Plain, a huge confederation of nomadic tribes had come together in the Mongolian homeland. Their charismatic leader, Genghis Khan, was proclaimed ruler of all the Mongols in 1206.
Imperfect estimates from censuses suggest a third of the Chinese population died in the crisis of the fourteenth century. Many of these deaths must be attributed to disease.
The grandiose reign title may be translated as meaning ‘Abundant Martial Virtue’ or ‘Great in War’ (The Terminator?). The name Zhu took for his dynasty reflected the Manichean cosmology of the rebels from whose forces he had arisen. He chose the word for ‘brightness’: Ming.
Between 1405 and 1433, initiated by Yongle, the Chinese sent seven great voyages to Southeast Asia and across the Indian Ocean, visiting the Persian Gulf, India and East Africa. Their leader, Zheng He, was a high-ranking Muslim courtier, a eunuch of huge diplomatic experience.
The monotheism of European civilisation was not only a theological construct; it was a civilisational and cultural order, a completely different way of seeing not just the divine, but the whole relationship of humanity to the world and the universe.
It would be the son of one of the Donglin members who died in prison, Huang Zongxi, who wrote the single most remarkable political tract in Chinese history, the anti-authoritarian Waiting for the Dawn, whose central idea was that ‘All Under Heaven’ should belong to the people. One day, Huang even suggested, the imperial system might be replaced.
equating traditional Chinese scholarship anachronistically with Western democratic values and processes. If they appear so, perhaps this is because we overestimate the uniqueness of Early Modern modes of thought in the West, and at the same time underestimate the possibilities of intellectual reformation and revival within traditional Chinese thinking?
China’s last empire, the Qing (1644–1911), has been ill served until recently in historical writing, and in the popular imagination, especially in the West. The predominant image is one of decline in the face of European industry and innovation; of an inability to meet the demands of modernity as it is defined by Western culture. Yet, in the eighteenth century, foreign travellers and writers described China as the most prosperous and best-governed state on earth.
Like the Mongols, the Manchus would always be seen as foreigners, and there would be risings urging the restoration of the Ming until the very end of the Qing empire.
a state ruled by the principles of wenli: the rule of reason and civility. In China, this was society’s response to profound social, cultural and demographic change. In such a populous, diverse and meritocratic society, there was an erosion of status and distinctions, along with growing social and geographical mobility and cultural pluralism that we began to glimpse in the Late Ming. The need, then, was both to redefine the world and to get back to basics.
Could a great traditional civilisation incorporate some of the benefits of modernity without the wholesale acceptance of modernity itself? Or were the habits of the civilisation so ingrained that only wholesale revolution could bring about that change?
1842. But by then the war had reached its crisis. On 29 August, resigned to defeat, the Qing government signed the Treaty of Nanjing on the British flagship HMS Cornwallis in the Yangtze River. The treaty abolished the old Canton trading system and gave the British favoured nation trading status and four ‘treaty ports’ – Xiamen, Fuzhou, Ningbo and Shanghai – where they could engage in commerce with whomsoever they wished.
So ended the First Opium War – the first of what the Chinese later called the unequal treaties, which would ensure a British presence on Chinese soil for the next hundred years, and in Hong Kong until 1997.
Indeed, when we look at the successive blows of the Japanese invasion, the civil war and the Cultural Revolution in the twentieth century, it could be said that China is only now recovering.
This period from the 1860s to the 1870s is known as the Tongzhi Restoration, named after the emperor who reigned from 1861 to 1875. It saw the growth of the so-called ‘Foreign Matters’ or ‘SelfStrengthening Movement’, whose origins go back to before the First Opium War.
the old Confucian belief that goodness and virtue, not law, governance and an effective state, were the keys to social justice.
Arguing for a constitutional monarchy like Meiji Japan, Kang was able to persuade the young Guangxu emperor to support his ideas, and in the summer of 1898 the emperor initiated the Hundred Days’ Reform.
In the I Ching, the great Chinese book of divination whose beginnings can be traced back to the oracle bone divinations of the Bronze Age, there is a passage about great crises. It says that there are always two warnings of an impending crisis, then with the third it materialises. For China, after the Taiping, the Boxers were the second great sign.
Believing themselves to be possessed by the ancient spirits of China, the Boxers were thoroughly anti-imperialist, anti-colonial and anti-Christian.
Qiu Jin was beheaded on 15 July 1907 in the centre of Shaoxing, China’s greatest literary city. A monument now marks the spot, opposite the shopping mall where the women of today’s China can buy commodities from across the world. Still her words are not forgotten, as she wrote: ‘Don’t tell me women are not the stuff of heroes.’
The Chinese famine of 1907 was a short-lived event, but still took the lives of nearly 25 million people. Then, while east-central China was still reeling from the series of poor harvests, a massive storm flooded 40,000 square miles of lush agricultural territory, destroying all the crops in the region.
China’s first elected provisional president, Sun Yat-sen, in his formulation of three ‘people’s principles’ which should guide the new republic: nationalism, socialism and democracy.
the Japanese occupation of Manchuria in 1932 and full-scale invasion of the mainland in 1937, which was defeated after huge destruction and loss of life in 1945. After less than forty years, the republic fell apart in the civil war that followed, leading to the triumph of the communists in 1949.
In the First World War, the Republic of China initially stayed neutral, but as part of its effort to join the international community, from 1916 China provided hundreds of thousands of workers to the Allies:
After the Indians, they were the largest non-European contingent on the Western Front: digging trenches, repairing tanks, assembling artillery shells and transporting munitions.
In 1917, China joined the war on the side of the Allies, and when the fighting ended, an issue arose of deep contention to the Chinese. Among the many foreign colonies in China, the Germans had held much of Shandong, including Qufu, the birthplace of Confucius. It had been assumed that after the war, in recognition of its help to the Allies, this would return to China.
