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

by Michael Wood

Now the colonisation of the subtropical lands of the Yangtze valley begins, filling unoccupied land, clearing hillsides and forests, draining marshes and developing and expanding the southern rice culture.

By the 500s, the south was the rice basket of China and a major centre of culture, with 40 per cent of the registered population now living in the Yangtze valley.

In the sixth century, China was reunited by a powerful former administrator in the north, Yang Jian, who became Emperor Wen of Sui. An unfamiliar name outside China, Wen was one of its great rulers.

An extraordinarily interesting man, frugal, abstemious in his private life, he was a ‘cautious, solemn, hardworking, conscientious worker’ who decreased tax burdens on the poor and introduced a sch...

he was also suspicious, critical and picky, which lost him many allies and friends, and in...

According to Sima Guang, ‘at the beginning of the reign, the census rolls recorded less than 4 million households, but by the end 9 million. Ji province alone [Hengshui Hebei], had 1 million households’.

Emperor Wen ruled from 581 CE in the north. Then, to reunite China, he began a massive campaign of conquest in 587 CE with fleets on the great rivers and down the coast in a triple-pronged assault. In 588 CE, he occupied present-day Nanjing in one of the most important campaigns in Chinese history.

The Sui also instituted far-reaching economic reforms in agriculture and carried through a gigantic infrastructure project which would have a huge impact on the whole of Chinese history: the construction of the Grand Canal.

The largest manmade waterway in history, the canal would be a major factor in joining the north and south.

However, for all their achievements, the Sui were brought down as they overextended the empire. Wen’s successor was drawn into disastrous wars against Korea, where he was defeated in 614 CE.

It was at this point that Li Yuan, who had been a governor in northern China, declared himself the new emperor, taking the reign name Gaozu, ‘the Great Founder’. He was a member of the Li family, one of the military clans from the far northwest – tough, horse-riding frontier people. Though he had to fight off rivals in the aftermath of the Sui, by his death in 626 CE he had reunited the country. It would be the beginning of one of the most brilliant epochs in Chinese history: the Tang.

even far away in the Mediterranean world, the last historian of late antiquity, Theophylact Simocatta, writing in Constantinople in around 630 CE, on the eve of the Arab conquests, wrote about China’s reunification, ‘in the time of our emperor Maurice under the Sui emperor Wen,

Theophylact also adds information about Chinese geography and culture, which he brings up to date to his own time, portraying China as a great state, ‘idolatrous but wise in government, under their great emperor Taisson, the meaning of which is Son of God’. This is the first Western mention of a Chinese emperor: Taizong of the Tang.

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.

Building on the administrative reforms of their Sui predecessors, they created a centralised empire, with a postal system and an extensive network of roads and canals, radiating from the capital to the far west and the northeast. Their cultural achievements, in the arts, literature and history, were extraordinary; humane and self-aware, full of empathy for the world and for people, their poetry is still regarded as China’s greatest.

In the summer of 632 CE, a Chinese traveller looked out from the Jayendra Vihara monastery, across the soft green Vale of Kashmir and the blue expanses of its lakes, to the sparkling snow peaks of the Himalayas. Even to his Chinese compatriots he was an imposing figure: over 6 feet tall, he wore his customary brown wool robe and broad belt, now with perhaps an extra layer, as even in summer Kashmir can be chilly.

Trained since childhood as a precocious Buddhist oblate in Luoyang, his voice was ‘clear and sonorous’, his speech elegant.

For nearly twenty years Xuanzang had dreamed of India. Born in a village near Luoyang, his family had visited the White Horse monastery during temple fairs and festivals, and he had grown up with magical tales of how Buddhism first came to China more than 500 years before he was born.

they met two Indian monks who agreed to come back with them to China. They arrived in Luoyang on two white horses, carrying their bags of scriptures and precious relics, and were established in what became known as the White Horse Pagoda. There they translated the first Buddhist text to be rendered into Chinese: The Sutra of Forty-Two Chapters, which has had a special place in the hearts of Chinese Buddhists ever since.

The situation around Luoyang was especially desperate. In winter 618 CE, near his native village, there were horrendous stories of cannibalism as famine took hold.

There were many adventures and close shaves; sometimes it was Xuanzang’s charm as much as his nerve and physical courage that got him through. Across Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, friendly courts under Turkic rule helped him on the way from one caravan city to the next.

At that time Afghanistan was still a stronghold of Buddhism, though many places Xuanzang visited were in ruins after the invasions by the Huns in the late fifth century.

Bamiyan was a crossroads of Asia, the meeting place of Hellenistic, Central Asian and Indian cultural traditions.

Recently, the remains of birchbark and palm-leaf texts from this library have been excavated; the earliest surviving manuscripts of the ‘Dead Sea Scrolls of Buddhism’, some of these had hitherto only been known in Chinese translations, many were completely unknown.

the giant stupa erected by the Kushan king Kanishka, a contemporary of Emperor Hadrian. Some 400 feet high, this was the foremost wonder of the Buddhist world; its huge plinth nearly 300 feet square, covered with sculptures, its burnished copper umbrellas glinting in the sun.

Xuanzang was now on the great route later known as the Grand Trunk Road. He crossed the Indus and entered the plains of India, pushing on to reach Kashmir at the end of 630 CE. The valley was a great centre of Buddhist studies, with over 100 monasteries and more than 5,000 monks.

To help him on his mission, he was allotted servants and twenty scribes to copy some of the sacred books, embodying centuries of teaching: not only in the shastras, but in logic, epistemology and learned commentaries on the ancient canon.

All this was preparation for the grand translation project he had in mind for when he got back to China (he seems to have never doubted that he would return).

Sometimes the synchronicities of history are eye-catching. That same summer of 632 the Prophet Muhammad died in Medina, enjoining his followers to ‘seek knowledge even as far as China’. Within three years Arab armies burst out of the Arabian Peninsula, across Syria and North Africa. In China, the Tang dynasty was about to expand westwards into Central Asia and to spread Chinese culture eastwards to Japan and Korea and into Southeast Asia.

In the Eastern Mediterranean heartland of Western Classical civilisation, the Byzantine Empire would soon be fighting desperate wars of survival against Arab armies, which expanded Islamic civilisation as far as Spain and Central Asia in less than a century.

in the eighth century, the Arabs would clash with the Tang on the Talas River in Kazakhstan.

At home in China, the Tang, with their capital at Chang’an (today’s Xi’an), became perhaps the greatest and most cosmopolitan civilisation on earth. They welcomed Persians, Indians, Sogdians and Arabs, Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians and Muslims, along with their goods and luxuries, their food and fashions, and their religions, art and ideas.

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.

It is an extraordinary fact, then, that in the modern Western world an idea has taken root that China has been a monolithic and unchanging civilisation, inward-looking and resistant to outside influence.

In the Tang, for example, international links in diplomacy and trade were extraordinarily wide. Temples and monasteries were built in China for Buddhists, Christians, Muslims and Manichaeans. On the Silk Road, manuscript finds have been made in Persian, Sogdian, Syriac and even Hebrew; in the other direction, in Japanese and Korean.

Though, like all cultures, it knew periods of retrenchment, China, in fact, has always been a civilisation open to outside influences.

What choice did it have?

The Sogdians were the great intermediaries on the Tang Silk Road, and their letters give us a vivid sense of daily life in this vast region.

In the 640s, the Tang emperor Taizong sent his armies out west. The long-distance caravan trade was becoming so important to the empire that their routes had to be secured and protected.

By now, the Chinese could not allow trade, run by Sogdian middlemen, to be disrupted. In the new world of Tang urban civilisation, with enormous consumption in the capital and other great cities, important trade was not in essentials, but in luxuries.

Suyab was absorbed into the loose suzerainty of the Tang empire as a western military outpost, and Chinese civilians along with garrison soldiers moved out beyond the long walls to populate it.

Cen’s view of expatriate life out in Central Asia was realistic; his enthusiasm for the place always tempered by the harshness of conditions; the monotony of sunrise and sunset over the featureless desert.

Riding the shifts in regime as middlemen is always a precarious existence. Yet their riches in jade, nephrite, silks, carpets, embroideries, herbs, spices and dried fruits flowed into the markets of the Tang capital, where in the dynasty’s heyday there were perhaps as many as 30,000 Sogdian residents.

They came from a horse culture; a military aristocracy under the Sui, on the one hand pretending a descent from the legendary Daoist sage Laozi himself, on the other hand claiming, more plausibly, kinship with the Khan of the Kyrgyz.

From the Qin Long Walls and Han beacon sites and postal stations; beyond the deserts of Xinjiang and the high plateau of Qinghai and Tibet; past the great mountain chains of the Himalayas and the Pamirs, whose passes lead to the plains of India, China’s horizons were opening out.

Even into the ninth century, when the situation at the centre was less stable, it was a well-governed country with complex long-distance supply chains for food and raw materials, where life and property were protected by a code of law administered by trained local magistrates; one could travel the length and breadth of the land on reliable roads, or using the canal system, and always find a place to stay at night and a meal to eat, the administration providing service industries and security from bandits and violence.

Chang’an lay at the Chinese end of the Silk Road; the first of the five great capitals that have exerted such an influence in the story of China.

Home to nearly a million people, according to the Tang censuses, the great city of Chang’an was an agent of change, giving birth to a new kind of urban life.

The main part of the city was divided by a grid pattern into 108 wards, each of which had its own walls. Inside the walls, straight lanes divided the wards, with smaller winding alleys between the temples and houses.

The guidebooks to the Tang dynasty city describe scenic beauty spots adorned with peonies and peaches, lotus and apricot gardens, fruit orchards and parks that ran along the Serpentine River and lake.

There were also large areas of cultivation inside the walls, gardens, orchards and farm fields.