The Story of China: A portrait of a civilisation and its people

by Michael Wood

The interplay of these elements has been at the heart of Chinese civilisation to this day.

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. There had already been Nestorian Christians from Persia and Central Asia living along the Silk Road. 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 stele even quotes the Dao De Jing, the great Daoist classic of Laozi: ‘The ever truthful and ever unchanging way is mysterious and almost unnameable.’

Right principles have no invariable name, holy men have no invariable station; teachings are established in accordance with the values of their own regions, and with the object of benefiting the people at large.

The Tang was an age of high culture: in poetry, novels, art, architecture and ceramics. There were also great scientific advances, including cast iron technology, long before the Western world.

Liu Zhiji in his General Remarks on History (710 CE).

From now on in Chinese history, the south would be the dominant part of China. Data from the Tang censuses suggest that by the tenth century China’s population had halved in the north and more than doubled in the south.

The poet Li Bai,

Generals schemed in vain. Know therefore war is a cursed thing Which the wise man uses only if he must.

the poet Bai Juyi

Then, in autumn 755 it rained for sixty days.

The poet Du Fu,

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

Running through his poems is a constant critique of corruption and incompetence, but always from the idealist standpoint of a loyal Confucian.

A month later the emperor abdicated and was succeeded by his son, and Chang’an was captured and sacked by the rebels. Despite An Lushan’s death, the war carried on, but the Tang fought back and eventually recaptured the city.

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.

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’. At the heart of his poetry was grief for what was, and for what could have been.

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.

Weeping in the wilderness, how many families know of war and loss,

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. But its effects on the culture were also psychological.

the Tongdian,

The book was the first great history of institutions since Aristotle, and the first in China, a work little known outside the country (indeed it still awaits a full translation) but one that has been compared to Ibn Khaldun’s Introduction to History, written six centuries later.

Optimism was a key theme in the book, along with a Confucian belief in the moral advancement of society by ‘transformative education’ and a faith in what we would describe today as consultative autocracy – ‘despotism with Chinese characteristics’.

When he presented the book to the emperor in 801, Grandad Du was still optimistic, but the strains in Chinese society he reflected were evident for all to see.

What went wrong? Why is it that great ages decline? The historian Ibn Khaldun thought the key was the loss of the ethos that binds the rulers to their aristocracies; that luxury, wealth and overconsumption fatally undermine ‘group feeling’. For Gibbon it had been the Christian religion, with its otherworldly eschatology, that eroded the old virtues of Rome. In China, too, there were some, like Du and his contemporary Han Yu, who felt that the ethos had been eroded and that religion was the problem.

Buddhism, so enthusiastically embraced in the first Tang century, with vast investment in land, buildings, art and treasure, was actually an alien intrusion. 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’.

Du Mu

But Buddhism would at least survive in China, and, as we shall see, thrive again under the Song dynasty. Zoroastrianism and Manichaeism, on the other hand, were virtually destroyed, and for Nestorian Christianity, too, Wuzong’s persecutions would prove to be a near-fatal blow, though it would revive for a time under the Mongols.

At least with history he could feel like a fish back in water; in Chinese culture, poets have always been historians too.

More than any other Tang writer he is the poet of lost idyll: the world as it might have been. How that moment arrives in a civilisation, with the loss of group feeling, is often a mystery until it suddenly becomes visible to all. It is hard for the historian, working through administrative documents, memorials and annals, to touch on the real lived experience, but poets can.

In the beginning Huang’s motivation was hunger. Looking back, the next generation remembered those days as a time of desperate famine, when hordes of famished people, from the subtropical south up the eastern coast to the central plains of Henan, became robbers, and bands of robbers coalesced into armies.

Then, in winter 879, claiming the title of the ‘Heaven-Storming Generalissimo’, he attacked the Tang’s richest port of Canton, whose warehouses were crammed with the accumulated goods of merchants who traded with Sumatra, India and the Persian Gulf. 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.

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. As famine gripped the countryside, it was later claimed that Huang’s army killed more than 1,000 people every day for food.

‘In some places’, wrote one contemporary, ‘it was said human flesh was more plentiful than dog meat. Eating it was known as the “unnatural practices of bandits”.’

The poet Wei Zhuang,

As so often in history, at first rebellions are borne on a high tide of rage, class hatred and a sense of injustice, but once power is gained, what then is to be done?

The revolution had a devastating effect on the several hundred old families who had been the ruling aristocracy of China for 300 years or more.

The intense drama of the Tang’s final decline is overshadowed by the sheer violence of the events, but deeper causes lie in what historians and anthropologists have termed systems collapse, pointing to the other great breakdowns in Chinese history: the collapse of the Mongol Yuan dynasty in the early fourteenth century; the decline and fall of the Ming between the late sixteenth and mid-seventeenth centuries; and the fall of the Qing which led to China’s twentieth-century revolutions. These four giant crises are deep-rooted in China’s cultural memory, in historiography, literature, poetry and in popular culture.

But though the Great Tang ended in breakdown and chaos, the dynasty had seen tremendous economic and cultural achievements, including a permanent shift of China’s demographic and economic centre of gravity to the south, setting the stage for new social, political, economic and educational institutions that would shape the future later in the tenth century.

Historical narratives sometimes resist easy divisions into periods and dynasties.

That age of division has found few admirers among historians, but is as fascinating as any in China’s story.

The political chaos saw the artist Jing Hao, for example, taking refuge in the Zhongtiao Mountains north of the Yellow River in Shanxi, where he lived as a farmer.

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.

Wang Renyu was born in 880 in the middle of the Huang rebellion.

His autobiography, lost for centuries, has recently been partially reconstructed from fragments by Glen Dudbridge (who made the translations that follow) and it offers an intimate portrait of a tenth-century man, a warrior, a governor, who lived a life of scholarship, poetry, music and war.

Its subjectivity is not a literary construct but a record of real feeling – what we really hope for when we study the people of the past.

From then he felt the importance of learning and began ‘eagerly exerting himself’ in the Confucian scriptures – ‘and with one reading it was as if he had always known them’.

The surviving fragments of his memoirs are distinguished by his wide intellectual interests, including a remarkable and even philosophical concern about the life of animals.