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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Michael Wood
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February 6 - February 22, 2024
Sima’s legacy was a base text on which later Chinese historians would build.
For Sima Qian, then, as for Confucius, history becomes a guide to the present, as it still is in China, more than in any other country.
In recent years, remarkable archaeological discoveries have begun to reveal details of the Han order at the grassroots level.
The new documentary finds allow us to see the lives of such peasants in some detail for the first time in Chinese history.
Among them is a group of bamboo slips called the ‘Granary records of Zheng village’. These are as mesmerising a record of subjection as the fragmentary Roman estate surveys, or Domesday Book from the medieval West.
The average Han farmer, then, if this is anything to go by, had a small amount of land by Western standards, especially if compared with the Roman estate surveys or Anglo-Saxon England, where, though admittedly in a much more sparsely populated land, one family had a notional 120 acres. With such pressure on people in daily life in Han China, there was no room for failure, especially in times of famine.
Like later Chinese farmers before modern agribusiness took over the countryside, the Chinese system of agriculture was more like market gardening.
Book of Songs.
By the end of the Han era, wealthy families had come to own huge numbers of once independent small farms. Some of these are depicted on the walls of Han tombs, with their manor house, barns and stables, fruit and vegetable gardens, industrial workshops and outhouses making beer and wine. The spread of these private manors begin to mark the rise of a landed aristocracy who will become powerful over the next few centuries and dominate the heartland of China until their demise at the end of the Tang dynasty.
This is the unseen presence behind the great empire visited by the Antonines in the 160s, though we should not pretend that slaves on estates in Roman Britain, or under the Saca in India, or the Kushans, were any less severely treated. Indeed, parallel texts to that of Hu Sheng, listing their various skills along with names, survive from as late as the eighteenth century in the Caribbean and the nineteenth century in the Southern United States.
Such a far-reaching administration, that could extend down to and record the lives of Farmer Ye and the slave Hu Sheng, was only made possible by writing. As standardised by the Qin, writing was now used by the state at every level, and so scribes were essential components of an increasingly complex bureaucracy. They were the people who carried the reach of the government into the provinces, towns and villages of the empire. Through them, the state could supervise the population, exploit its labour, control and punish.
Specifically, more than 120,000 professional scribes were needed in the Han, all of whom had to be trained and examined.
The control of writing as an instrument of governance, therefore, was central to the Han system of rule. In early China, as anthropologists and social scientists have often noted in all early societies, ‘writing favoured the exploitation rather than the enlightenment of mankind… its primary function, as a means of communication, being to facilitate the enslavement of other human beings’.
It was inevitable that they would make contact with the Han in Central Asia, and from now on, continuous links begin that would bring Roman embassies to China in the Antonine period.
But the opening of what would later be known as the Silk Road changed the geopolitics of Eurasia. From then on, contacts were unbroken with the lands of West Asia.
The postal system already existed under the Qin, but by the Han it extended across vast distances into Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia. The network of postal stations delivered official documents and private mail by relays of runners and mounted carriers. The letters were of bamboo or wooden slips and boards, but also paper and silk. Letters in silk envelopes have been found in the dry climate with the address and delivery instructions still on the package. The wealth of new finds out here in the past twenty years is still being processed, but they give us a remarkable insight into the feelings of
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Other letters are about festivals and celebration days, just like the Roman birthday party invitations from Hadrian’s Wall.
‘It is a truth universally acknowledged’, as we might loosely paraphrase the famous opening of the novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms, ‘that an empire long united will fall apart.’
China broke into two on the old north and south divide, initiating the longest period of division in its history, over 350 years. Wei, Jin, Northern and Southern dynasties – there is no agreed name for this time of disunity.
First was demographic change.
China’s population rose perhaps as much as four- or fivefold between 280 and 464 CE. 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.
So this is another case in China’s history where a dynasty that was short-lived but full of innovation laid the foundations for the success of a much longer-lived and more glamorous period, in this case the Tang.
In 588 CE, he occupied present-day Nanjing in one of the most important campaigns in Chinese history. News of these events even reached the Mediterranean, where the capture of the south was described in Constantinople.
The Sui lasted only three and a half decades, but in this short time they reunited the northern and southern lands after the civil wars of the sixth century and pushed out along the Silk Road into Central Asia, where they encouraged the spread of Buddhism, which Emperor Wen himself embraced. It was perhaps at this point that he made contacts with the Byzantine world.
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.
Li Yuan,
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.
In terms of the culture and history of Eurasia, it is as if a light had been switched on. The impact of the new dynasty was such that, 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, with their conquest of the rival Chen dynasty in southern China, ‘when the northerners crossed the Great River [Yangtze] southwards.’
Reaching out almost as far west as the Aral Sea and the Karakoram, down to Vietnam and up to the northern part of the Korean peninsula, the Tang represented a new orientation in Chinese history: China’s first cosmopolitan age.
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. The Tang dynasty created the largest Chinese empire before the eighteenth century. 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,
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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.
Xuanzang
Through 631 and 632 CE he studied in Kashmir with the great teachers. Seminars with senior monks helped him assimilate the traditional exegesis. He needed to master the complex and often conflicting ideas behind the different traditions; the Great Vehicle and Lesser Vehicle, the exoteric and the esoteric.
Indeed, in this next part of the story of China, we will see one of the great epochs of civilisation that laid the foundations of the medieval and early modern world, driving social and economic, as well as cultural, change. 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. This, it might be said, is the age in which the modern pattern of human cultures across the Eurasian landmass began to crystallise.
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.
Such assumptions are flawed. 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. During the Tang, the Silk Road extended west to the Mediterranean and east to Japan. Its influence on
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The Tang poet Cen Shen,
These western landscapes were the familiar world of the Tang dynasty rulers.
When their clan rose to prominence out of the fighting of 617 CE, they deposed and killed the last of the Sui and announced their new dynasty, naming it after the region in Shanxi, which legend said had been bequeathed to them by the Yellow Emperor himself. With that, the centre of gravity of the empire began to shift away from the Yellow River heartland of Chinese history to the Taklamakan and Central Asia.
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. A political and ritual centre for over 1,000 years, it was the centre of the bureaucracy, the headquarters of main army units and the place where the examinations for entry to the Tang civil service were held.
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.
Above all, however, it was most famous for the ‘blue houses’ – the residences of the high-class courtesans of the city. Like everything in Tang Chang’an, the world of these women was highly regulated. They were licensed, inspected and taxed. Following the official edicts and timetables they were careful to observe all the big feast days and imperial ceremonies, with painted panels hung in their entrance halls marking the death days of emperors when no music could be played. They were experts in the calendar, accomplished in the I Ching, trained in music, poetry, dance and the preparation of
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Xuanzang
finally came to the tree under which the Buddha had sat and received illumination. He could not contain his feelings: ‘I simply sat down and wept.’
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.
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.
People and ideas flowed east to Japan and Korea too. This was the time when Japan began its assimilation of the Chinese cultural tradition.
From 700 CE the sons of the Japanese aristocracy were trained in Chinese, and Japanese pilgrims went to China. 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.
But what we might call China’s main cultural strands are in place now.
