The Story of China: The Epic History of a World Power from the Middle Kingdom to Mao and the China Dream

by Michael Wood

China is a huge and incredibly rich, indeed inexhaustible, subject – ‘the other pole of the human mind’, as Simon Leys said in a famous essay.

Among a host of recent major textual finds still being evaluated and published, for example, are extraordinary collections of private letters, law codes and legal cases going back to the Qin and Han dynasties.

China’s early history in particular is a fascinating and constantly evolving field.

Recorded in their precious woodblock printed family books, and still transmitted in the family memory, their stories enable us to understand something of the deep sense of cultural continuity still felt by so many Chinese people despite the vast changes of their time.

farmers from the ‘badlands’ of the Anhui countryside – epicentre of the dramatic events of 1978, when the people turned their backs on Maoism and embraced the market.

China as an inhabited landscape has a very deep history; as the poet Du Fu wrote in 757 amid the horrors of the An Lushan Rebellion, ‘the state has been destroyed, but the rivers and lakes remain’ – that is, the landscape, the country as we might say.

As the great novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms begins: ‘Everything that is united will fall apart, and everything that is fallen apart will come back together again. So it has always been.’

To those Westerners who had seen him in public, it was a troubled face, burdened by the excruciating pressure of rulership, the fear of failure, and by his anxious desire to benefit the people. His expressed desire was ‘to make the Empire wealthy and powerful again’, hoping, as he said, ‘if possible, to inaugurate a glorious era eclipsing our ancestors’.

If the emperor chose to reflect on it, and this was above all a ceremony for reflection, his dynasty, the Great Qing, had been on the throne since 1644, and during that time eleven Manchu emperors had restored and surpassed the glories of earlier dynasties.

When his great-great-grandfather, Qianlong, died in 1799, a century before, the Qing empire had unrivalled power and reach, encompassing Mongolia, Tibet, Central Asia, and reaching to the jungles of Vietnam and northern Burma.

population growth, over-taxation, natural disasters and that indefinable loss of group feeling that can undermine even the most powerful states, had gnawed away at the dynasty’s sense of self. In 1842, the Great Qing had been defeated by the British in the First Opium War, and was then shaken by the cataclysms of the sixteen-year-long Taiping rebellion, in which 20 million people died.

Since the 1840s the European powers had established treaty ports and enclaves all round China’s shores and had begun to undermine the old values of the empire. A brief recovery was halted by humiliation in the Sino-Japanese War in 1894, and three years later Germany exacted m...

In 1898, progressive officials, journalists and democrats, led by the reformer Kang Youwei, began a ‘Self-Strengthening Movement’, and the young emperor had sided with them. But the Hundred Days’ Reform (11 June–21 September) was quashed by the conservatives, led by the ‘Mother Empress Do...

Through 1898 into 1899, famine struck Shandong. Seething at what they saw as foreign provocation, desperate peasants formed what became known as the ‘Militia United in Righteousness’ or the ‘Society of the Righteous and Harmonious Fists’ – the Boxers.

I mean...were they wrong?

Since the crushing of the 1898 Reform movement, the Mother Empress Dowager, Cixi, had seized power and placed her nephew, the emperor, under house arrest. Sixty-four years old, capricious, formidably intelligent, still in full powers, the empress, too, was shaken:

The Son of Heaven was twenty-eight years old now. He’d become emperor at six, under the guardianship of the empress Cixi, and then entered long training in the ancient Confucian curriculum. He had spent a deprived childhood under his tutor, the cold and austere Weng, in the cheerless expanses of the Forbidden City, with a series of bullying eunuchs focusing his mind on the responsibilities of rulership.

After ten years training as a scholar he was ostensibly a sage-emperor, but in reality he was an introverted, brooding man, prone to sudden outbursts and unsuited for the task of making the empire wealthy and powerful again.

That very morning of 20 December, as the emperor prepared himself for the ceremony, the English version of the Peking Gazette carried an extraordinary account of the latest imperial edict in its ‘Capital Report’, reporting bluntly that it was ‘what the emperor has been forced to say’.

Built by the Jiajing emperor in 1530, the altar stood (as it still does) in a huge, square-walled enclosure within a park filled with ancient cypress trees.

The altar was, and still is, a huge, three-stepped circle of white marble 450 feet across, set inside a square – the ancient image of heaven and earth in primordial cosmogony; square earth and round heaven.

In the harsh winters of the 1890s it often snowed at the solstice; the cold so intense that, as one of the officiating priests told an English missionary, ‘even high wadded boots and the thickest furs fail to keep strong men from chilling to the marrow, and even in some cases going to their graves’.

Wooden racks had been erected to carry the carillon of bronze bells and the set of sixteen sonorous hanging stones made of dark green nephrite, whose sounds would facilitate communication with the world of the spirits.

The order of the ritual was to be followed punctiliously according to the Directory of Worship and the Illustrated Guide to Ceremonial Paraphernalia of the Qing Dynasty published by the Manchus in the middle of the previous century.

It was, some found, an arduous job; in his later years the emperor’s great-great-grandfather Qianlong appointed a prince as his deputy. It was important, he said, that everything should be done perfectly with no errors, and Qianlong eventually bowed out, saying, ‘All that ascending and descending, the prostration and bowing, it wears you out: at my age it’s a mistake.’

The antecedents of this beautiful and archaic ritual, the incantations, the burnt offerings and the bovine sacrifices, went back more than 3,000 years to the ceremonies described in the oracle bone divinations of the Bronze Age. The whole splendid performance was designed to express the traditional Chinese relationship between humanity, the heavens, the cosmos and the earth.

And also at the core of the ritual, as shown by the exclusiveness of the ceremony, hidden from the common gaze, was the division between the rulers and the people, reinforcing a hierarchy in which the ruler-sage commanded the lives of the common people and mediated for them the relationship with the powers of the cosmos.

Encoded in the ritual, then, was a bigger truth, which reached the very heart of the beliefs of Chinese civilisation. In his use of certain words – heaven (tian), ‘the Way’ (dao), monarch (wang) – the emperor embodied Chinese ideas about order and rulership that had developed since the fourth millennium BCE, and which still persisted despite the sudden rapid inroads of Western modernity in his time; the ancient concept of heaven as both a supreme deity that oversees the realm of human affairs, but also the ultimate cosmic reality, the impartial laws of the universe.

A few days later, pressured by the conservatives among her ministers, the empress dowager changed her views on the Boxers and issued an edict that was widely believed to support the Boxers and their slogan ‘Support the Qing, Exterminate the Foreigners’.

In the spring, allied naval commanders began attacks on Chinese forts on the coast and urgent messages were sent to Europe for armed reinforcements. Finally, on 21 June, the empress dowager declared war on the eight foreign powers and fled the capital. A 55-day siege of the Foreign Legation Quarter by the Boxers followed, providing the Western press with ample copy on European heroism, and what they saw as savage oriental acts of irrational barbarism against the ‘civilised world’.

In May 1900 forces of the Eight Powers occupied Beijing and the sacred precinct of the Temple of Heaven became the temporary command base of the alliance, occupied by American troops. The temple and the great altar were desecrated, the buildings defaced, gardens trampled and cypresses felled for firewood. In the stores the ritual paraphernalia were looted and musical instruments broken.

The revolution of 1911 saw the end of the empire after more than 2,000 years, and the founding of a republic, which in its brief life knew no peace. With peasant risings, Japanese invasion, civil war and the communist revolution, the twentieth century was a time of trauma for China, leading on to the catastrophes of the Great Famine, and the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s. In modern times no nation has gone through so much.

The story of China since the Bronze Age is the tale of the rise and fall of many dynasties, through which the idea of a single unified state has been tenaciously maintained, underwritten by an ancient model of political power that has persisted right down to our own time.

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.

What happens when a great ancient civilisation, with the biggest population in the world, breaks down in giant and traumatic spasms of violence? How should it modernise? Indeed, what does modernity mean? There are no parallels in history for such a tremendous and far-reaching cycle of change.

The first fact of Chinese history is geography.

Today’s China is a vast land, stretching from the deserts of Xinjiang and the Tibetan plateau down to the mountains of Burma and Vietnam and up to the wild expanses of Manchuria and the Yalu River on the Korean border. From Kashgar in the far west of Xinjiang to the capital is 4,000 kilometres by road.

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.

Yet vast as these outer lands are, the historic heartland of China is much smaller, lying between the Yellow Sea and the uplands, where two great rivers come down from the high plateaux of Qinghai and Tibet.

Under the Han dynasty, the Roman period in the West, the Chinese state first extended its rule outward into the oases of Central Asia, and there was another period of direct rule in Xinjiang under the Tang empire in the seventh century CE.

For most of its history, however, the heartland of the two rivers was China. It was only in the eighteenth century that the much bigger shape of today’s People’s Republic was determined by the huge multi-racial empire of the Manchus – the Qing dynasty, which spread its rule over Mongolia, Xinjiang and its Tibetan protectorate.

Then, taking a sharp turn southward, it issues from the mountains with sometimes uncontrollable power, rushing down to its confluence with the Wei River and into the plains. There it enters the ‘Middle Land’, where it has changed course on at least thirty occasions in the historical period, bursting its banks in violent floods more than a thousand times, shifting its mouth on the Yellow Sea by as much as 500 kilometres, so that, incredibly, its mouth has been sometimes north, sometimes south of the Shandong peninsula.

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, even in Muslim households.

Vestiges of the cult of the River God survive even today, for example at the ancient village of Chayu near Heyang, next door to the Grand Historian Sima Qian’s hometown, where each year in late summer, on the fifteenth day of the sixth lunar month, ceremonies are still held for the rising.

Today these ceremonies entertain Chinese tourists, but in the past they were a ‘prayer for safety’, offered up by farmers and boatmen hoping to avert loss of life and livelihood from often devastating floods.

Some Yellow River floods were so severe that they changed the course of Chinese history. In 1048, as we will see below (here), a giant inundation profoundly altered the topography of the northern plain, while the catastrophe of 1099–1102 saw ‘corpses of the dead filling the gullies and numbered in their millions’, according to an appalled local administrator who saw ‘no sign of human habitation for over a thousand li’.

Seven million died in the 1332 flood, precipitating the disorder that hastened the fall of the Mongol dynasty; there were 2 million dead in 1887, more than that perhaps in 1931.

The countryside around Zhengzhou is scored by a tracery of old courses, and though the main bed today is still in places five kilometres wide, even during the monsoon it now musters perhaps only a tenth of its pre-1940s flow.

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.

the earliest Chinese myths about state origins converge on stories about the control of water, tales that focus on the mythical king Great Yu, ‘the tamer of the flood’.

Dramatic archaeological discoveries in the twenty-first century suggest that these myths commemorate events that are still written in the landscape and that show how ecology determined the nature of political power.