More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Michael Wood
Read between
February 6 - February 22, 2024
but in China it is not the physical fabric of the building that matters; it is the sense of place that conjures the stories, songs and poems that have been handed down for so long among the people; the riches of what Confucius called ‘this culture of ours’.
This was China’s report to the ancestors, the state of the union as it were.
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.
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.
So 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.
Shrines like this are being restored all over China, their rituals reconstituted by the older generation, for whom the thirty years of Maoism has turned out to be, after all, only a small period of time in Chinese history.
After all the shocks and the wholesale changes of the past eighty years, these stories and myths, ‘old ideas, customs and belief’, are again part of the culture; not as they were once, it is true, for the break was traumatic, but nonetheless real and still evolving – new, yet still the same. A metaphor perhaps for the whole story of the survival of traditional Chinese culture in the twentieth century.
It is worth bearing in mind, however, the common markers of ‘civilisation’ as anthropologists and archaeologists define it. For them it means cities, bronze technology, writing systems, large ceremonial buildings and temples, monumental art and social hierarchies sanctioned by some form of law and held together by coercive power wielded by armed elites.
In around 2300 BCE large walled settlements emerged, most tantalisingly in a spectacular, newly discovered, late Neolithic site currently being excavated at Shimao on a tributary of the Yellow River on the edge of the Ordos Desert, the frontier zone both ecologically and culturally between China and Inner Asia.
Do a Google search and find out more about this.
In the drystone retaining walls across the site, jade plaques were placed between the stones, and skulls from human sacrifices were buried at key points, apparently to imbue the walls with sacral power.
But at its heart is a riddle. Shimao is far away from the Yellow River plain where the traditional narrative of Chinese civilisation says the first dynasties arose.
Nonetheless, the chain reaction of ideas and political power that gave birth to Chinese civilisation resolved itself in the Yellow River plain after 2000 BCE. The narrative of Chinese history was created there, and to see how that happened, we must go to a second seminal discovery at the village of Taosi in Shanxi.
Taosi was the centre of a pre-dynastic kingdom where crucial developments were made in observing the heavens, bequeathing to later generations one of the fundamental ideas in Chinese civilisation that lasted until the end of the empire in the twentieth century.
The coincidence of myth and archaeology is, to say the least, very striking.
The story takes many forms, but in all of them the beginning of ordered society is directly tied to Yu’s success in dredging channels and stabilising the communities of the upper plain.
So, the story certainly comes from the Bronze Age. Yu’s tale was told in a ritual performance, acting out a circuit of the lands of the nine provinces, linked to already existing long-distance pathways of tribute and pilgrimage and crossing its own tracks at Longmen gorge, the place legend said was cut through by Yu to channel the river, and which is still today known as the ‘Gateway of Yu’. What was handed down then was not historical fact but a cultural memory of the process of early state formation. Orally transmitted for many centuries before it was eventually put down in writing, it
...more
But could the memory of a real environmental catastrophe lie behind the myth?
The development of centralised power was political and based on a deep-rooted cosmology which would last until the twentieth century.
In that sense, then, the Shang are not only China’s first political state; they are its first ancestors.
The astonishing finds at Anyang were proof that there was substance in the ancient myths, and that the early Chinese historians had passed down a picture of the Chinese past that had a firm basis in reality.
So the king was not only the one who governed, led the army, commanded the workforce and gave land, bronzes, slaves and treasure to his kinsmen and nobles; he was the key link to the past kings of his lineage. On him auspiciousness and order depended, through his ability to ensure good harvests, bring rain or stave off disaster. And here perhaps is the germ of the ruler’s future role in Chinese history as the sage-monarch, the ultimate repository of power and wisdom. As we shall see, this way of thinking was never forsaken in Chinese civilisation, even into the twentieth century.
But it created the model for later Chinese kingship: the central role of the king as mediator between heaven and earth; the crucial importance of lineage and ancestors; the control of shamanism and divination as a source of authority; and the monopoly of bronze technology, and of writing.
‘Lost Book of Zhou’.
Even in this abbreviated form there are few more dramatic historical narratives. Later Confucians rejected the ‘Lost Book of Zhou’, believing the founding fathers of the Zhou were too virtuous to engage in such violence.
The overthrow of the Shang was a turning point in Chinese history to which all later dynasties would look back. The key to this was the Mandate of Heaven: the idea of the succession of dynasties, each of which was believed to have received divinely ordained authority, which in due time was passed on. The cyclical pattern of the narrative of China’s history was set.
Again, this is a reinvention of tradition, like so much in China today, as they retie the broken thread of their historical narrative.
So, with a combination of local legends, inscriptions, texts and archaeology, Shangqiu is a test case for how traditions have been passed down in China. How the scholars and seers and ritualists of previous dynasties transmit their ideas of kingship and history to their descendants, underwriting their legitimacy with the royal ancestors.
Indeed, as we shall see, Confucius himself, the greatest cultural influence in Chinese civilisation, will claim descent from Weizi’s clan at Shangqiu. As he said five centuries later: ‘The Zhou based themselves on the rites of Yin [Shang], what they discarded and what they added can be known.’
In the eight centuries between the fall of the Shang and the rise of the First Emperor, there were many important developments in Chinese civilisation as a patchwork of kingdoms coalesced towards a single state. The period saw the emergence of a distinctive political philosophy based on older historical traditions and rituals of rulership. At its heart was one great and enduring idea, that of the king who ruled by virtue, the sage-monarch mandated by heaven, to whom all allegiance was due. The key figure in shaping this ideology, the most important person in Chinese civilisation, was
...more
The chariots were buried in what the Chinese call the Spring and Autumn period (c. 700–600 BCE), and they belong to the Iron Age warrior culture that flourished here at the time Homer composed the Iliad.
Horses were introduced into the Bronze Age cultures of Eurasia at the start of the second millennium BCE, from the Central Asian steppe.
There we have the Chinese equivalent of Hector and Achilles in the Trojan War. In Zhou heroic poetry, chariot warfare is as lovingly described as in the hymns of the Rig Veda, the Mahabharata or in Homer.
Writing about this period down to the unification of China in 221 BCE, the historian Sima Qian said that ‘the ages before the Qin dynasty are too far away and the material on them too scanty to permit a detailed account of them’. Remarkably, though, discoveries over the past forty years have revolutionised the picture.
The Zhou dynasty is the first period of Chinese history from which extended texts have survived.
Book of Changes (I Ching).
Book of Songs (Shijing)
Book of Documents (Shujing)
From now on, the control of history is linked to the control of writing, which the state monopolised through its scribes and ritual specialists. Through the written word came the possession of history. A second key idea is bound to this: the Zhou conception of the Mandate of Heaven.
The rule of the Zhou, then, was linked to heaven. A king and his dynasty could only rule so long as they had heaven’s favour. A king who neglected his sacred duties, or who acted tyrannically, would arouse the displeasure of heaven, disturbing cosmic harmony. Disorder would follow and society would descend into chaos: the great fear of Chinese culture even today. In the end, heaven could withdraw its mandate and eventually reveal a new mandate, usually by a visible sign.
So what we see in this period is the creation of a paradigm. Political ideology and, indeed, political philosophy begin to be shaped in the service of a monarchical idea, that of the sage-king. Hence, influential thinkers from Confucius to Wang Anshi and Sima Guang in the eleventh century looked back on the Zhou as the ideal.
So the cosmos was perceived as a moral order, and moral values were built into the way the earthly order worked.
Mao’s personality cult in the Cultural Revolution still invited the people to trust in the virtue of the Great Helmsman and Teacher.
Still, out of this age of conflict and political instability arose a golden age of Chinese philosophy that would define the Chinese political tradition.
‘A transmitter who invented nothing’, as he described himself, Confucius is one of the most influential and famous figures in history. It has been said that no book, not even the Bible, has influenced so many people for so long as his Analects, his ‘Sayings’, which have shaped the intellectual and cultural life of the whole of East Asia, Japan and Korea.
This, then, is the background of Confucius. He came from a provincial Iron Age city-state and his origins offer clues to who he was.
Still, on his father’s side the Zang family were famous for steadfastly maintaining the ancient rituals. The teaching Confucius got from his family may account for the intense loyalty he felt, all his life, to the ancient ideal of Zhou kingship, though his fate was to be ‘a wanderer in many lands’.
With a group of followers, he began a fourteen-year journey around China, before finally returning to Lu to study and teach. This journey is a crucial part of the biography – a mind-changing experience he shares with other great figures in Chinese history, such as the historian Sima Qian and the poet Du Fu.
In Confucius’ lifetime, the war-torn multi-state system under Zhou lordship was breaking down, and it became clear that long-term stability lay in some kind of political unity. It is in this context that Confucius’ career as a thinker is to be understood. He was probably the first to suggest the advantages of a unified rule over ‘All Under Heaven’. Referring to a violent usurpation in his native state of Lu in 505–502 BCE, Confucius said this: When the Way prevails under Heaven, rites, music and punitive expeditions are ordered by the Son of Heaven. When there is no Way under Heaven, rites,
...more
At the core of royal conduct is virtue (de in Chinese), so the ideal ruler must be humane and learned – a sage in fact.
