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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Michael Wood
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January 2 - April 10, 2023
Within six years, like several great dynasties in Chinese history, the Qin was overthrown by massive peasant rebellions.
In 211 BCE, a meteor fell in the lower reaches of the Yellow River. When the stone was recovered, someone had inscribed on it: ‘The First Emperor will die and his lands shall be divided.’
Finally, debilitated by alchemical concoctions devised by his physicians as pills of immortality, he died on 10 September 210 BCE, still not fifty years old.
The transformation of society and culture under the Qin was so great that it can only be described as a thoroughgoing revolution, perhaps the only real revolution until the twentieth century.
Short-lived as it was, the Qin empire bequeathed a legacy that has informed every period of government that followed, through many dynasties, down to the Republic, to Mao and even today’s People’s Republic: the principle that authority over a united China stems from a single source of power, which is both the executive and the dispenser of law.
Mao described himself as a mixture of Marx and Qin Shi Huangdi. The seductive image of Confucius’ ‘sage-ruler’ and the coercive power recommended by the legalist Lord Shang, it would turn out, were both tools in the hands of an autocrat.
From then on, for all its ups and downs, the idea of China as a unitary civilisation persisted as the goal to return to; in the opening words of the famous Ming novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms, written more than fifteen centuries later: ‘The empire that is united will one day fall apart, and what is divided will come back together again. So it has always been.’
Founded by a peasant rebel, Liu Bang, the Han is one of the great dynasties of China.
Covering a 400-year period, there were many great achievements in Han governance and culture. Their empire spans the period of the later Roman Republic and the early empire in the West, with whom China had diplomatic and commercial relations for the first time.
Legend says the royal procession was accompanied by carts of fish to conceal the stink of the decomposing body. As ministers and the royal clan disputed the succession, the atmosphere built up like an electrical storm heavy with the charge of revolt.
When they reached the Huai River, the summer rains burst in a torrential downpour, reducing the countryside to a lake. Faced with rising waters at the way station of Dazexiang, ‘Big Swamp Village’, they could go no further. The harsh Qin law, however, decreed the death penalty for failure to fulfil orders, no matter what the excuse.
Both of these Qin army captains decided to fight rather than meekly give up their lives. They knew that the state was already in turmoil, that the emperor’s eldest son and heir had been forced to commit suicide on his father’s orders, and that though the younger son was now on the throne, allegiance was haemorrhaging in the provinces.
Joined by disaffected local officials and rebellious farmers, they soon numbered 10,000 strong. It was the first rising against the hitherto invincible Qin empire.
Joined by more disgruntled farmers and local garrisons, Chen Sheng and Wu Guang marched their peasant army on the capital, but were crushed by the disciplined Qin army with its chariots and mechanical crossbows.
Nor was their watchword forgotten: ‘Are kings and nobles given their status by birth?’
The risings against the Qin now coalesced into two main rebel movements. The first was led by a former peasant, Liu Bang, who had risen to be a county scribe and a local magistrate.
Towards the end of the First Emperor’s reign, Liu had been ordered to escort a party of convicts to join the labour gangs working on the First Emperor’s mausoleum, but on the road some broke their chains and escaped. As Liu was responsible, the penalty was death under Qin law. So he decided to release the rest of the prisoners and became a fugitive himself, with a price on his head.
Liu joined up with a bigger rebel army under a charismatic and violent warlord, Xiang Yu. Together the two coordinated an attack on the Qin capital. After many reverses, Xiang defeated the Qin army, killed the new emperor and sacked the capital.
Xiang was now in control of a huge swathe of central China and announced himself as the paramount ruler, the ‘Hegemon King’. He made his subordinate, Liu, ‘Lord of Han’, that is, of the valley of the Han River, which meets the Yangtze at Wuhan.
Xiang’s almost supernatural bravery and cruelty ensured him a long afterlife as a hero and villain in folk tales, poetry, novels, opera, and latterly in films, comics and video games.
Seeking validation from heaven, the court astrologers announced that the five-planet alignment of May 205 BCE had announced the conferral of the Mandate on the Han, just as it had the Xia, Shang and Zhou dynasties. In 202 BCE, Liu was declared emperor of the new dynasty, which he named after his own lordship, the Han.
Despite his peasant origins, Liu Bang had some experience in law and administration. Therefore, as emperor, he began by abolishing the most repressive Qin laws, while keeping their bureaucratic structures.
Gradually the Han accrued huge power. Under his successors, new capitals were laid out at Chang’an (today’s Xi’an) and Luoyang with imperial architecture on a vast scale.
The high point of Han military power and cultural achievement came under Emperor Wu (ruled 141–87 BCE), a contemporary of the later Roman Republic in the West.
In terms of the broad ethos of governance, the early Han rulers had followed the lega...
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And so began what would turn out to be a two-millennia-long linkage between the Confucian classics and Chinese political discourse that exerted huge influence over political ideas and personal behaviour in traditional China. The Han scholar Dong Zhongshu argued that the Han had proved themselves the legitimate successors to the true models of kingship, the Zhou.
the big geopolitical issue for the Han was their relations with people beyond their borders who did not acknowledge Han rule and Han law.
the Han period, this perennial historic confrontation between the sedentary and nomadic focused on the vast semi-nomadic confederation of the Xiongnu.
After that, the Chinese adopted a policy of ‘peace and alliance’, with diplomacy instead of war. This would be accomplished through dynastic marriage and gift giving, in effect a tributary relationship.
From the 130s BCE, Wu mounted several huge military expeditions into Xiongnu territory, with massive attacks by tens of thousands of cavalry, forcing his enemies to retreat beyond the Gobi Desert. These ‘Northern Desert Wars’ were on a scale never seen before in world history, dwarfing the armies with which Alexander the Great invaded Persia and India. From then on, the upper hand lay with the Han.
For Sima, this spectacle of the realities of war and of the military power of the Han must have been a telling and exhilarating experience, providing him with raw material and an exemplar that would help shape his approach to writing a new kind of history.
History is one of the keys to Chinese culture; in all states, the rulers create the narrative of a common past with which people can identify and which helps create allegiance, but in no state has this been more important.
In no Chinese epoch of imperial times, therefore, are there historians like Herodotus or Thucydides, who were writing for themselves.
In China, history was written to endorse the assumption of the Mandate of Heaven. It was also written to uphold the timeless values of the canonical tradition, as determined by Confucius and his followers, at the centre of which were ritual, morality and history.
A younger contemporary of the Greek historian Polybius, Sima was born in around 145 BCE, seventy-five years after the death of the Qin emperor.
Sima’s father had been a court servant under Emperor Wu, but had fallen from favour. He too is often called ‘Grand Historian’, but that is to give the wrong impression of what his job was.
In other words, they were interpreters of the fluid relationship between humanity and the cosmos; court astrologers akin to Roman augurs. Since the early days of the Zhou, the keepers of the calendar had recorded the deeds and journeys, the proclamations and sacrifices of the kings, and these were read out at ritual occasions.
Travelling gave Sima a feeling for the diverse culture and geography of China and for the antiquity of its story. He visited the burial places of legendary founders like King Yu and King Shun, but also the sites of recent history, including Qufu, the birthplace of Confucius, where he immersed himself in the living Confucian tradition first hand through the Kong clan.
Then Sima Qian’s father, Sima Tan, fell ill. On his desk Sima Tan left unfinished, or in note form, a privately compiled work of history.
Sima started his task after his father’s death in 109 BCE. Three years later he was made court astrologer. In 105 BCE, he was also one of the scholars chosen to reform the Qin calendar and produce a new Han calendar.
Li was not a friend, but Sima respected him as a loyal servant and defended him. However, he was alone in doing so. A man swift to anger, Emperor Wu was enraged at Sima’s boldness in speaking out and sentenced him to death. The sentence could only be commuted by an enormous sum of money, or by castration, faced with which any gentleman would ask to be ‘permitted to commit suicide’. Sima, though, had sworn an inviolable oath to his father that he would finish his great work of history. So, in filial piety, he ‘submitted to the knife’ in the hothouse warmth of the ‘Silkworm Chamber’.
Already in draft when disaster struck, the book was finished in 94 BCE.
The problem for Sima Qian, as for all historians, was how to organise his picture of the past.
intuitively, and perhaps consciously, Sima perceived that, in history, no one approach will do.
Sima solved the problem for himself by forsaking an integrated narrative for five main sections in an encyclopaedic form which consider the calendar, religion and music, as well as biography. That said, we should be wary of assuming that anyone in China before the middle of the first millennium CE had any sense of history in a modern sense.
In China, history is mainly optimistic, even if the lesson of history was that disorder, cruelty and violence were more the norm than periods of peace.
Sima’s legacy was a base text on which later Chinese historians would build. First there was the conceptual framework, the narrative of prehistory and the first three dynasties painstakingly reconstructed from pre-Qin sources, oral tradition and even material survivals, including bronzes.
the Zhou conception of history was now the model. Heaven-inspired, the Mandate was working itself out in history and can be understood in the past and defined by the historian as a model for the future.
Han China was an agricultural civilisation, as it was up to the late twentieth century (in the 1980s, four fifths of the population was still rural, compared to only one quarter today).
In agriculture, the legacy of the brutal extortion and exploitation under the Qin had been widespread rural unrest. The punishments in the Han lawbook would remain, essentially, the same as what we saw in the Qin.
