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

by Michael Wood

In mid-December 755, a huge rebellion broke out under a renegade general called An Lushan that would devastate China.

Over the next eight years China was criss-crossed by armies, the land plundered and ravaged. The disruption and loss of life was huge. Movement in the countryside was disrupted as marauding armies tramped to and fro, farmers’ carts commandeered to transport the living and the dead. River and canal travel was also curtailed, attacks from bandits an ever-present fear. Half the nation, it seemed, was on the road, coping with the breakdown of the state, caught up in the swirling vortices of violence.

No great poet in the history of the world perhaps had such experiences. ‘Thinking on what I myself have lived through,’ he wrote, ‘I have lived a life of privilege … but if even I have known such suffering, then the common man must indeed have been shaken by these storms.’

Some of the poems have fantastic immediacy, with a sense of heart-pumping panic as the family struggle through the night, dodging bandits and wolves.

I remember when we first fled the rebellion Hurrying north, passing through hardship and danger, The night was deep on the Pengya Road … We clung together pulling through mud and mire And having made no provision against the rain The paths were slippery, our clothes were cold. At times we went through agonies Making only a few miles in a whole day, Fruits of the wilds our only provisions

In 756, with An Lushan’s forces advancing on Chang’an, the emperor and his entourage fled, but his troops mutinied on the road west.

Among their demands was the death of Lady Yang, she of the ‘mothlike eyebrows’. In the end the emperor gave in and she was strangled in the courtyard of a small Buddhist temple, out in the countryside, at the Mawei postal station on the main road towards the west. The emperor’s heart was broken. Later, in extreme grief, he had her exhumed, but her body had d...

A month later the emperor abdicated and was succeeded by his son, and Chang’an was captured and sacked by the rebels.

The national census of 754 had recorded 52.9 million people in nearly 9 million taxpaying households. Ten years later, it counted 16.9 million in nearly 3 million. This suggests that more than 30 million people had been displaced as refugees, killed in war or died of famine. If so, it was one of the deadliest wars in history.

At the heart of this collective memory was Du Fu’s poetry, which came to be seen as the touchstone of the Confucian voice that speaks with unwavering moral integrity, the embodiment of China’s moral conscience, as it has been for the past 1,000 years.

He died in complete obscurity, believing his name would be forgotten. But in the Confucian revival of the Song dynasty, his voice became the one that spoke for the nation, in its combination of sympathy for the people and Confucian loyalty to the state, and as such he is still taught in the national school curriculum today.

His writings are a sustained articulation of remembrance in the face of loss that that runs right through Chinese literary history: Li Qingzhao at the fall of the Song, a refugee still guarding her precious scrolls of his poetry; Fang Weiyi, another great female writer and educator who wrote of the fall of the Ming with Du Fu in mind; Zheng Zhen, the greatest of the moderns, who made a pilgrimage to Du Fu’s Thatched Cottage in Chengdu amid the horrors of the Taiping; even during the Rape of Nanjing in 1937 the poet’s words appeared in graffiti on fire-scorched walls: ‘the state is destroyed but the country remains’.

A year or so later, Sigmund Freud wrote his great essay on ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, arguing that one may mourn for a culture, a civilisation, as for a beloved. Du Fu’s grief, which perplexed even him (‘why do I still mourn?’), is shot through with this bigger sense not only of personal grief, but of cultural sorrow.

Weeping in the wilderness, how many families know of war and loss, Barbarian songs in scattered places rise from fishermen and woodcutters. Sleeping Dragon Zhuge Liang, Leaping Horse Gongsun Shu, heroes turned to brown dust. All word of events in the human world lost in these vast silent spaces.

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.

In its scope and method Du’s work shows yet again how an outsiders’ view of China is often flawed, partial and monolithic; the keys to understanding the civilisation may be the Confucian classics, but there were always counter thinkers, some of whom we will meet in later chapters.

Brilliant and innovative as the civilisation was in so many ways, China’s political problems were structural, and thus had a habit of recurring.

For Du, institutional history was indispensable for good governance because good institutions run by properly qualified civil servants were the very embodiment of Confucian teaching. So his was a work of transition in more ways than one, emphasising the political and moral importance of the ritual tradition, sceptical of cosmological justifications of state power, preferring instead material and institutional validation.

then in 827 the emperor Jingzong was murdered by a cabal of eunuchs.

Its intellectual and spiritual influence on Chinese culture was regarded by Du as ultimately negative, the product of a ‘Western barbarian’ whose core ideas were ‘nihilistic’.

Ah a right winger

In the early 840s, a massive campaign of temple closures began. It was brutal, sweeping and destructive. The government’s persecution of the Buddhists between 842 and 846 came at time of growing internal and external threats, when marauding private armies threatened the Yellow River heartland and pirate fleets plundered the coasts.

In his diary on 14 November he recorded that an imperial edict had been issued that all monks and nuns in the empire should be forced to return to lay life. Money, estates and grain stocks were to be surrendered.

By then Buddhism was so ingrained in popular culture that people often refused to do the emperor’s bidding.

Megalomaniac projects ran in parallel with massacres. And so China gradually sank into an era of darkness.

the younger Du saw Buddhist persecutions first hand. In his poem on the transience of civilisation, ‘Ice-Blocked Bian River’, the image of the water flowing ‘eastwards day and night under the ice while no one notices’ became a metaphor that would be refracted through the whole of later Chinese literature.

As a public official, Du Mu had to approve and enact policy, but as a poet he was deeply troubled by the disruption, destruction and social dislocation.

There were reports of massacres of civilian populations, even common peasants out in the west, while among the imperial armies cannibalism reared its head. In 844, 3,000 disaffected troops, who had fought continuously for three years and now asked to be relieved, were disarmed and executed in the East Market in Chang’an, blood drenching the sandy plaza between the market streets.

The emperor himself had died in 846, his health destroyed by the elixirs his Daoist alchemists thought would procure long life.

Today in Chinese Buddhist temples, very little statuary and art has survived from before this time – a measure of the extent of the vandalism. But Buddhism would at least survive in China, and, as we shall see, thrive again under the Song dynasty.

The plunder of the immense wealth of the Buddhist establishment had helped the imperial family and the nobility pay their armies and survive in the short term, but it did not address the continuing economic crisis.

The empire was now hugely overstretched geographically and secession wars began in frontier provinces. Then droughts, floods and famine struck. In the 870s and ’80s, there was widespread belief that heaven was displeased, that the dynasty had lost its Mandate.

Huang had some skill as a writer as well as a swordsman. He came from the coast of Shandong, where his family had been salt smugglers and privateers for several generations – effectively a wide and powerful mafia clan.

After a prolonged siege, the city’s resistance was broken and punished by a horrendous massacre, the death toll estimated at 120,000 by Arab chroniclers, who noted the deliberate targeting of resident aliens, foreign merchants, Arabs, Persians and Jews. But above all this was a class war.

Increasingly the peasant armies took revenge on the scholar classes and the old landed families whose estates and prosperous farmlands, like those of the Du clan, clustered around the wealthiest towns and cities, making them easy targets.

What followed is one of the grimmest moments in Chinese history. Supplies for the huge rebel army were hard to come by as civil order in the countryside collapsed, and in 883, faced with starvation, they turned to cannibalism as a deliberate policy.

In Chinese history, cannibalism casts a long and dark shadow, but no society in history is immune to it, especially in times of starvation.

Despite the staggering violence, modern communist historians found it easy to excuse mass killing in the name of what they saw as class war, and praised Huang as a champion of the peasants against the rulers.

Not only because of the violence and destruction, but because the institutions, customs and rituals which had ensured clan identity and allegiance to the state were destroyed. These, as we shall see, were created anew in the Song dynasty in ways that would influence the whole of later Chinese history.

As the tenth century dawned, central order fragmented, local self-defence militias proliferated, the provinces were militarised and regional armies formed. As local generalissimos vied to found dynasties, north and south China split apart.

After the Tang, the pattern of the Chinese past reasserted itself – great order followed by disorder, with some eighteen kingdoms and dynasties supplanting each other, or uneasily coexisting, in a mere seventy years.

There he painted and wrote on the Chinese landscape, depicting its grandeur and immemorial beauty, its precipitous crags, waterfalls and rushing streams; a natural world in which human beings are so tiny as to be almost invisible and their deeds merely transient. It was here that Jing developed the ideas that would underpin China’s most influential school of painting, articulating a debate on the nature of reality and the rejection of worldly desires in sublime landscapes.

How should a traditional Confucian follow the Way when the state no longer cohered? How should one’s talents be used to serve the state and hand on the values of civilisation?

One story concerns a monkey given to him by a trapper, which he kept and attempted to tame. Intrigued by its ‘sly intelligence’, he named the monkey Ye Ke, ‘Wild Guest’.

Eventually running out of patience with his feral companion, Wang had him released into the countryside, 30 miles away, only for Ye Ke to return to his door within hours. Then Wang took him up to the headwaters of the Han River, so far away that he couldn’t find his way back. Tying a red silk string round his neck, Wang composed a poem about their relationship before the final parting. Then, a year later, at the end of his time of service, on his way up the Han River valley, Wang encountered a troop of monkeys drinking in a stream; and there, hanging in a tree, was Ye Ke, still wearing the tattered strip of red silk.

In the West, Aristotle had earlier denied any kind of moral equivalence between humans and animals, as did the Hebrew Bible, saying that ‘animals exist for human use as plants do for animals’. But in ancient China there were other views.

Sometimes his survival was almost miraculous. When the Later Tang fell, the captured royal family were dispatched on a safe conduct which was actually a death warrant for the whole party, not just the royal clan – in all, a couple of thousand people.

there was nothing preordained about the arrival of the Song dynasty. Reunification happened through prolonged warfare, the accidents of history and strokes of luck in battle at crucial moments.

The military leader of the so-called Later Zhou, Shizong, had pronounced himself emperor. His kingdom based in the Kaifeng region faced hostile states on all sides and in 954 it was invaded by an alliance of its northern enemies, the Northern Han and the Liao.

The battle was fought on the old north–south route (today’s G55) between the Yellow River and north China. It changed the course of Chinese history, breaking the cycle of chaos that had persisted for over a century.

At a crucial moment one wing of the army gave way, most of its leaders fled and 1,000 troops surrendered. General Zhao, the commander of the other wing, fought on and finally swung the balance the other way; by nightfall the roads north were blocked with thousands of fugitives. Afterwards, in a ruthless collective act of military discipline, Zhao ordered all those on his own side who fled to be beheaded, along with cavalry and infantry commanders who had failed, and seventy-two senior commanders of the imperial guard.