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

by Michael Wood

Here we enter a tone in human discourse not heard perhaps since late Roman Neo-Platonists like Porphyry. 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.

Most of all, however, Wang was an observer of history; it is his sharp powers of observation as an eyewitness that help us catch the mood of this momentous time of change.

Charming as the story is, 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.

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. In all, 2,000 men were killed. Akin to the decimation practices in the Roman army, and in Europe in the Thirty Years War, this punishment was intended to ‘stir imposing awe’. It also allowed Zhao to replace the purged officer corps, so now his own officers were the power behind the throne.

Despite the Song dynasty’s reputation as an age of peace and cultural brilliance, therefore, its foundation was achieved by relentless warfare.

As often in history, the great achievements of civilisation have been underpinned by shocking violence, and China was no exception.

The Song would preside over one of the most brilliant epochs in Chinese history, one that has often been compared with ancient Athens for its cultural, artistic and scientific achievements, not to mention its remarkable experiments in governance.

In China, what might be termed a Renaissance took place from the tenth to the twelfth centuries, as the Song recovered from the disasters of the Late Tang and created an astonishingly civilised new Confucian age.

The big question, then, is why, unlike the Roman Empire and every other empire of the ancient world or the Middle Ages, did China stay together in the tenth century and not break up?

As happened later in Western history, increased knowledge of the Other helped to define the meaning of the state to its citizens and developed loyalty to the newly defined idea of China.

The old aristocracy had been destroyed and its place was filled by professional bureaucrats, chosen through a meritocratic entry system of imperial examinations.

Within a few years the Taizu emperor and his advisers began a major cultural project, which over time developed into one of the great creative epochs in the story of China.

There was even a book printed in 1085 entitled How to Make Sure that the Elderly Have Happy, Healthy Retirements – perhaps the first of its kind in history and, astonishingly, still in print.

Small though it may be, Kaifeng’s Jewish community has left a magical trail like the strands of historical DNA.

These letters give us a sense of the stories that lie behind the dimly known history of the early Chinese Jewish communities, who came by sea to Canton and by land through the Silk Road cities of Central Asia, and of which today the Kaifeng Jews appear to be the only survivors.

The Kaifeng Muslim community was much bigger: they also came in the Song, again, so far as we can tell, both by land on the Silk Road to Chang’an and by sea through Canton, China’s earliest centre of Muslim culture.

But, as so often in China, the essential survival of a great historic city is not so much in buildings, in bricks and stone, but in prose, poetry and paint. In the history of the world, few places perhaps have a richer memory in words and in paintings than China.

Among several accounts written about the city in its heyday, the most famous was by a minor official called Meng Yuanlao. Meng’s book, Dreams of Splendour of the Eastern Capital, is that rare thing among historical sources – recalling street-corner conversations, feelings and even tastes.

To recruit an adequate number of such civilian officials, and ensure they were the best candidates, the Song emperors radically expanded China’s civil service examination system.

The Song emperors hugely extended this system, which would essentially direct Chinese government until the beginning of the twentieth century and, indeed, leave its mark up until the present day.

Unlike the Tang, then, the elite of Song China were not hereditary nobles, or warlords, or bankers or merchants (although of course only better-off families could afford to have their young men dedicate themselves to long years of study). They were the Confucian ‘scholar-officials’, a governing elite that was unique in world history and would be for centuries. As the Jesuit Matteo Ricci observed in the early seventeenth century, echoing Plato, ‘it is the best system of governance in the world, for here they really do have the rule of the philosophers’.

In the late tenth century, the Song rulers presided over the first great flowering of printing in China – and the world.

First was the reassembling of the imperial library collection after its great losses through war. Second, a planned codifying of knowledge by commissioning huge compendia, encyclopaedic compilations containing a vast amount of material from earlier literature, much of it thought lost. Third was a crucial technological change: the transition from manuscript culture to the age of print – a change that only began in the West with Gutenberg, Aldus Manutius and Caxton in the fifteenth century.

Then, in 976, Taizong built a new imperial library with a staff and a directorate of books. He then instituted a nationwide search for books containing the lost learning of classical China.

It was the beginning of a cultural project that might justly be compared with the Renaissance humanists in Europe who collected manuscripts of the Greek and Latin classics and made them available through the medium of the printing press.

Su Song is often called the Chinese Leonardo, but in fairness it might be said more accurately that Leonardo is the European Su Song.

As a renaissance of learning and culture through the means of print and education, it was an age without parallel so far in human history.

And so, over 400 years before Gutenberg and Caxton began a similar process in Europe, printing revolutionised the spread of ideas in China.

advance? Did the real divergence between China and the West attributed by Western commentators to the period of the Industrial Revolution and European imperialism actually begin much earlier? To that fundamental question we will return.

In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the age of the Fatimid Caliphate in the Mediterranean, the Cholans in India, and the beginnings of the Gothic in Europe, China stood at the centre of civilisation.

Through China’s history the decline of dynasties has been as much due to climate and environmental change as civil war or foreign invasion.

From autumn 1048 through 1049, standing waters were left in so many places that three seasons of crops were ruined; three harvest failures that led to apocalyptic stories of starvation and cannibalism.

The 1048 flood destroyed the indigenous water systems of huge swathes of northern China, in places erasing centuries of communal channel and dyke building, and in the end undermining the stability of the Song state.

It might have been thought that the silt was good for the fields, but the Yellow River’s silt contains a huge amount of desert sand from the rocky landscapes of the loess plateau, not thick rich black soil as for example in Egypt.

From that point, so locals judged, a heavy silt cover can make the land sterile for twenty years.

In places in the north, twelfth-century travellers had the impression of journeying through a desert, and even two centuries later some counties were still struggling with salinisation and sand.

Conventional explanations of the fall of dynasties and kingdoms tend to highlight revolts and wars, but often take no stock of such cataclysmic natural changes in which society is shaken and the basic capacity of government is undermined.

Wang Anshi

Then, however, disillusioned, he devoted his last years to a search for inner truth. A mind once occupied with great issues of the day now sought a Zen amalgam of Daoism and Buddhism: emptiness, extinction, calm.

Sima Guang came from southeast Henan where his father had served as county magistrate.

Comprehensive Mirror of History,

Yet it remains China’s greatest single piece of historical writing. In a culture where exemplars of history are still everything, it had enormous influence as the fundamental narrative of 1,500 years of Chinese history until the story was transformed by archaeology in the twentieth century.

Such concerns drove his history, but also his politics, especially in his bitter rift with the reformers led by Wang Anshi.

One of our most important witnesses for that time is also one of the most distinctive voices in Chinese history, the poet Li Qingzhao.

Born in 1084 in Kaifeng, in the view of most Chinese people, she is one of China’s greatest poets.

A shadow had fallen across Li Qingzhao’s charmed life. But now a shadow was falling across her China too, troubles into which, as we shall see, she would herself soon be swept up in the most dramatic circumstances.

She won her case, but for her outspokenness she was condemned and disparaged by most male commentators.

Even today the several memorial halls and ‘former residences’ that tell her tale to modern tourists do not give the full story.

Such, then, were the struggles of a woman of genius in medieval China: a scintillating window on women’s real experience.

Dreams of Splendour