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

by Michael Wood

The city’s two huge markets, east and west, were each about a kilometre square with a big open space in the middle for ceremonies, festivals, military shows and public executions.

In the East Market there were more than 200 lanes and alleys, each surrounded by warehouses that held ‘rare and curious goods from all over the country’. There were ironmongers, cloth dealers, butchers, wine shops, brush and ink sellers, not to mention travelling musicians, jugglers, acrobats and storytellers.

The Tang dynasty Chinese were fascinated by the different peoples and ethnic groups with whom they came into contact. They depict them in their paintings and describe them in their novels, even carving their life-size images in stone.

even the fashion-conscious Tang princes wore Turkic clothes and did their hair up Turkic-style.

Reflecting the tastes and contacts of the citizens, the West Market offered a huge array of goods and services: caravan equipment, saddle gear, scales, measures and tools, foreign jewellery and clothes from the Silk Road.

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.

Among the landmarks here was a Buddhist temple with famous murals by a great Tang painter; a sixth-century temple for the royal family stood at the southern gate. Above all, however, it was most famous for the ‘blue houses’ – the residences of the high-class courtesans of the city.

In a world where, in traditional Confucian society, women were rigorously segregated, many courtesans became published writers and poets. But there was a dark side to the life they lived. Many of the girls and women in the entertainment quarters were the daughters of concubines. Many were purchased when children and brought up in that world, first simply serving tea to clients, then, aged twelve or thirteen, given the clothes and adornments of a concubine and initiated with older men.

This teeming urban life was the world to which Xuanzang returned in 645 CE. From Kashmir where we left him, he had made his way down to the Ganges plain and then by boat to Patna, the old Mauryan capital.

Xuanzang spent two years at the university of Nalanda, which in the Tang era became the international university of Buddhism, drawing scholars and pilgrims from all over South and East Asia.

He undertook further journeys to find and copy texts he was still missing, travelling to Bengal, today’s Bangladesh, where Buddhism was a major presence, and journeying down to Kanchi in south India, and to the great Buddhist centres in western India, in Malva, Gujarat and Sind.

He arrived in Chang’an in the early spring of 645 CE, more than sixteen years after he left. News of his approach was carried to the capital in advance and a huge procession greeted him with excited crowds in the streets, gawping to see this traveller who had set his eyes on other worlds.

the emperor Taizong, whose first words to Xuanzang were: ‘Welcome back after seventeen years, Xuanzang. But you never asked permission to go!’ ‘Well,’ Xuanzang replied, ‘I applied for a permit for foreign travel on several occasions, but had no luck.’ The emperor didn’t reproach him, instead expressing surprise to see him alive after such a long time and congratulating him for having risked his life ‘for the benefit of the whole of humanity’.

Xuanzang’s packloads of Buddhist sutras, holy texts, figurines, statues and antiquities were one of the most precious cultural cargoes ever taken from one civilisation to another.

With him Xuanzang brought back the accumulated wisdom of Buddhist India to China. He would then follow up, as he had planned, with a translation project that can only be compared with that of Greek into Arabic and Persian in the Islamic Caliphate, or Greek into Latin during Europe’s three renaissances between the eighth and fifteenth centuries.

He returned with 657 separate Buddhist manuscript rolls, along with portable relics, statues and figurines, carried on twenty packhorses. For the rest of his life he devoted his energies to his translation project.

Still more significant was what it meant for the opening up of relationships between civilisations. The next few decades saw the coming into being of what has been called the ‘Buddhist cosmopolis’ of Central Asia, India, China, Korea and Japan.

Reflecting on the previous thousand years or more of Chinese history, Xuanzang saw that the ancients had built the Chinese state on the foundations of a Confucian ethos whose ideology was key to an ordered cosmos, while Daoism had given them the spiritual dimension of a traditional religion, and that these twin pillars had served the country well.

But both Confucianism and Daoism were uniquely Chinese. Buddhism, on the other hand, was a transnational, universal faith, which opened China to the wider world intellectually, as well as in its spiritual life, directly questioning the hitherto assumed centrality of Chinese culture and her unique civilising mission.

Although there had been many travellers in previous centuries, going all the way back to the Han, and there had been earlier translators, Xuanzang, with the help of lavish and enthusiastic imperial patronage, had initiated a great civilisational shift.

So, by the ninth century, China was a holy land too; Indian and Japanese travellers came to China to see the sacred sites, Mount Wutai became a great pilgrimage centre and ‘the Great River of China united its pure stream with the sacred waters of Bodhgaya’.

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.

Standing back from Western-centric views of history, the establishment of this Buddhist culture over East Asia is one of the most important stories in the history of civilisation.

Among the treasures are also costumes, masks and instruments used for eighth-century ceremonies that show the faces of different peoples along the Silk Road. Few artefacts as astounding as this have survived the vagaries of war and revolution in China, but here in Nara in Japan is the single most powerful symbol of Tang cultural exchanges along the Silk Road during this expansive time.

In Xuanzang’s lifetime Muslims would set foot in China, traders who came on the maritime route to Canton where Arabs and Persians had long been in residence. At this time, too, the first Christian mission came to China from the Byzantine world of the Eastern Mediterranean and Syria.

However, the first formal mission to China is described in extraordinary, indeed mesmerising detail on one of the country’s greatest treasures, a stone stele preserved today in Xi’an.

The account begins with a summary of Christianity, looking at Genesis and the Fall and the coming of Christ, but expressed in Daoist Chinese terms – the Yin and Yang and the eight principal virtues of Buddhism.

The stele tells the story of the mission of 635 CE: how a man from the west, a Christian monk called Rabban Olopun, brought the Christian scriptures to China, and how, ‘following the direction of the winds through great perils and difficulties’, he arrived in Chang’an. There followed an audience with Emperor Taizong in which the monk explained the Christian message and the emperor ordered the Christian scriptures to be translated in the imperial library.

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.

No kidding!

The Christians in Chang’an were soon followed by Muslim merchants who came to Canton and Quanzhou, both of which today claim China’s oldest mosque.

As so often in history, the Tang dynasty’s opening up to the world led to a transformation in the mentalities of the civilisation in its own lands.

The period also saw the growth of civic life, with guilds and merchant associations. One crucial development was the invention of woodblock printing, which would reach its fruition with mass printing in the tenth century, making books available to larger numbers of people than at any time before.

In reaction to the traditional tight political control over the drafting of history, controlled, censored and redacted by those in power, Liu’s book marks the start of a long tradition of reflection on the problem of writing history. Liu’s interest in the accurate recording of words, his critical attitude to the classics and his insistence that history should not deal in myths, but only take in human factors, economics, climate and geography, were part of a core concern for objectivity, which would be a recurring issue in Chinese historiography until the present day.

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.

Many Tang families moved there at this time and developed rice culture over the wheat and millet diet of the north. From now on in Chinese history, the south would be the dominant part of China.

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.

This is also the beginning of China as a commercial society and of Chinese cities as great trading places rather than as centres of royal power.

Yangzhou was a commercial city, the first in history to be lit by artificial light at night. There commerce drove growth and the old, strictly controlled idea of urban society began to change into something more akin to an early modern city, where all classes and trades mixed together.

By the eighth century, a Chinese official wrote that ‘every stream in the empire was full of ships, moving constantly back and forth, always circulating. And if they stopped for a single moment ten thousand merchants would be bankrupted.’

There were two ill-advised wars in 751 CE.

That same year, 751 CE, another military disaster took place thousands of miles to the northwest on the Talas River, at today’s Taraz in Kazakhstan, an ancient Sogdian trading city. An ill-prepared Chinese expedition was caught between the forces of the Caliphate and their Turkic allies and suffered a heavy defeat that led to the Tang drawing back on their ambitions in the west.

Sometimes there is no one cause for great changes in history. However, from that moment, things went precipitously from bad to worse in a way that shows how even an advanced state can find itself unable to cope with a combination of natural and manmade disasters.

In 750, a severe drought led to poor harvests. In spring 751, the imperial grain fleet caught fire in harbour and 200 shiploads of grain were destroyed, so the government storehouses were ill stocked to meet the supply crisis.

Later that same year a typhoon destroyed thousands of boats, large and small, at Yangzhou where the Grand Canal intersects with the Yangtze, losing more precious grain and rice. Almost incredibly, at that same time, a fire in the capital’s main weapons arsenal destroyed 500,000 weapons, crossbows, swords and spears. In the autumn it rained for weeks on end and floods caused havoc as far inland as the Wei River and the environs of Chang’an.

In the capital, the population of nearly a million stared starvation in the face. In summer 752, a great hurricane caused huge damage in Luoyang...

In the first half of his reign, Emperor Xuanzong had been a brilliant and gifted leader, a patron of artists and writers, and was credited with bringing Tang China to the pinnacle of its power and achievements. But after a glorious reign of forty-two years, at nearly seventy years old, his powers were fading, and he was finally brought down by his weakness for women.

His impetuous love for Lady Yang Guifei became legendary, and the famous tale of the emperor’s concubine is known to every Chinese person from childhood.

A perfect storm was unfolding on a scale which could have shaken even a modern state. Then, in autumn 755 it rained for sixty days. In Chang’an, the lower part of the city, where the poorest lived, was under water; in Luoyang, nineteen wards were flooded and huge numbers were housed in temporary camps. With the destruction of the harvest, prices soared. The government was forced to empty its grain stores to help alleviate the suffering.

Setting out from Chang’an in the dead of night to visit his family, his fingers were so cold that, when his frozen belt string snapped, he could not retie it. At dawn, Du Fu saw the imperial war flag ‘blocking out the pale sun’ as he passed the Huaqing hot springs. The Emperor had arrived with his courtiers and his concubine Lady Yang the week before. While the nation froze and starved, staring into an ever-grimmer winter, the court enjoyed the hot springs and ate the finest food.

Though the government had tried its best to deal with the food shortages, fury with the luxury of the court intensified.