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

by Michael Wood

Zhu Xi.

Very soon after his death in 1200, Zhu Xi’s reinterpretation of the fundamental concepts of Confucius began to be taught nationwide in private academies and public schools. It then became the basis of the imperial civil service examinations from 1313 until their end in 1905, making Zhu one of the most influential of all the world’s philosophers.

For Zhu, empathy, an understanding of the interconnectedness of life, was the basis of good human interaction.

Zhu is the most important Chinese thinker after Confucius, and is enjoying a major revival today; indeed it has been said that his range of inquiry from the philosophical to the scientific is unmatched in the whole Chinese intellectual tradition, and in the West is comparable only to that of Aristotle.

Their charismatic leader, Genghis Khan, was proclaimed ruler of all the Mongols in 1206.

It was 19 March 1279: a dark day in the story of China.

The emperor Huaizong, a seven-year-old child, was on a large junk flying the imperial flag, at the very centre of the fleet. Understanding that all was lost, the emperor’s loyal minister Lu Xiufu made a famous speech to the little boy. ‘The affairs of our state have come to this,’ he said, ‘we must not disgrace the nation.’ Then, taking the boy in his arms, he jumped into the sea, to commit suicide.

The glory of the Song had ended in shattering defeat. Its achievements had been huge and its inventions had outstripped those of the West. Its artists and scientists were without rival in the world, while mass printing had spread its ethos and its ideas as never before in history. It had been poised, or so it appears today, to become the world’s first modern society. But, as so often in Chinese history, before and since, the world beyond China burst over her frontiers and disrupted the development of civilisation and society. Mongol dominion, the first completely foreign rule in Chinese history, was such a shock to the Chinese psyche that when it ended in the fourteenth century, as we shall see, it was followed by a native dynasty, the Ming, which retreated from the open society of the Song, turned its back on the commercialisation of China, and created a bureaucratic autocracy that looked back to older despotisms, setting China on a course that would cast its shadow until the present day.

To the Chinese literati and governing class, alien rule was a profound shock. This experience would lead to a deeply conservative and inward-looking reaction in the later fourteenth century, under the Ming dynasty. What then could have been a post-Song early modernity would turn out to be Ming despotism, shaped by the experience of conquest and foreign occupation.

The first Chinese person to go to Western Europe travelled from Beijing to Bordeaux in the 1280s, attempting to negotiate an alliance between the rulers of Christian Europe and the Mongols against the Muslim Caliphate.

The Mongols’ first great achievement was to reunite China, which had long been divided.

Neo-Confucian philosophy and political autocracy were therefore brought together through the examinations for the bureaucracy, and would remain so until the end of the empire.

It was not, however, all a matter of self-preservation. In many areas, including popular culture, the Mongol period was an extraordinarily expansive time.

Dadu, immortalised later in Europe as Xanadu,

Built between 1267 and 1285, Dadu swiftly became one of the largest and grand...

Like all international ages, the Yuan was also a very creative time in art, culture and, in particular, drama.

Perhaps influenced by models from India and Iran, writers began to produce dramas in four or five acts, with dialogue in language that was close to the daily speech of the people.

The best-known Yuan playwright was Guan Hanqing, who was active either side of the year 1300. He wrote over sixty plays, of which fourteen survive, including the famous Snow in Midsummer.

In the huge multi-racial Yuan empire, all religions were accepted. Edward Gibbon made a telling comparison between the cruelty and irrationality of the Catholic inquisition in Europe and the ‘pure theism and perfect toleration of the religious laws of Zingis Khan’.

The Mongols favoured Muslims from Central Asia as administrators in many cities, especially the big ports. In Beijing, several great mosques and temples still standing today owe their origins to the Mongols.

There were also Christian places of worship, including a Franciscan church that could seat more than 200 people, with a tower and three bells that rang across Dadu at prayer time.

The Mongols also oversaw the construction of a state shrine, the famous Confucius Temple, which still stands next to the Yuan Imperial College.

The Mongol period left many important legacies in the arts and painting, in philosophy and history. One area of especial interest was astronomy.

Kublai Khan founded the predecessor of today’s Beijing observatory under the mathematician and scientist Guo Shoujing, who founded many observation sites across China.

The world was opening up – so much so that in 1339 Francesco Balducci Pegolotti, a Florentine merchant who worked in Antwerp and London, produced an itinerary of travel, a handbook on the ‘Practice of Commerce’ from Fife in Scotland and across Europe to Asia. The handbook included a route map to Beijing, details of business practice terminology and data on the comparative value of money. For the first time in world history, Scotland and China were part of the same story.

The accession of the Ming dynasty in 1368 curtailed such freedom of movement.

Uncle Maffeo had a house in the Genoese colony on the Black Sea at Sudak in the Crimea, from where he mounted his journeys to Iran, Central Asia and Mongolia.

If Marco Polo stayed in Yangzhou for three years, we may well ask, why there? And with whom? In 1951, a chance find opened an unexpected window on Yangzhou’s Italian community in his day.

Yangzhou, with its overseas commercial links, had long had its foreign communities. The Franciscans had come here in the thirteenth century and by 1322 there were three churches serving the 200 or so Christians who lived here.

Marco Polo returned to Europe in 1295 and dictated the story of his adventures from memory, while in prison in Genoa.

The most extraordinary was Rabban Sawma. A Mongolian convert to Nestorian Christianity, Sawma travelled from China nearly 8,000 miles by land and sea across the entire Eurasian world.

Then he journeyed south to meet King Edward I of England, who by chance was in Gascony. In Bordeaux Cathedral, at the king’s request, Sawma performed the mass in the Nestorian ritual, surely one of the most extraordinary meetings in history.

So far as we know, Rabban Sawma was the first person from China to visit the West.

Chaotic, terrifying and dangerous times, yet catalysts for a new era, when, almost as if by a centripetal force, the broken fragments of old worlds are drawn back together to create a new one.

This was a troubled period across Eurasia, as climate change exacerbated political instability. A mini ice age brought unheard-of conditions from lowland England to rural Anhui. In Europe, the Great Famine of 1314–22 killed a tenth of the population. In China, beginning in the 1320s, repeated Yellow River floods caused failed harvests, famines and massive movements of refugees.

In the early 1330s the famines and floods were followed by a deadly outbreak of plague. It began in the northern province of Hebei, where, one source claims, nine tenths of the people died.

In 1334, 13 million people died, according to an official government source. Further outbreaks of a ‘great pestilence’ occurred in 1344–6 down the coast, from Shandong to Fujian.

So the population loss in the last three decades of Mongol rule could easily have matched the estimate that one third of the population died during the Black Death in Europe.

There were various sects like the White Lotus, the Red Turbans, the Holy Lodge and the followers of the Kingdom of Light, some touched by the strange afterglow of Manichaeism, the Near Eastern sect which had become the state religion of the Uighur kingdom in the seventh century. It had vanished as an organised religion in the ninth century during the Buddhist persecutions, but still survived in the countryside during the Yuan, when Marco Polo reported 700,000 followers in Fujian (where a Manichaean temple with its cult image still survives near Quanzhou). Though long gone now, Manichaeism left a persistent marker in the psychology of popular revolt in south China, with its vision of a cosmic split between good and evil, yin and yang.

Yet in grey light, under storm clouds, the blossom can look like a blood red snowfall, staining the hillsides crimson, conjuring the old nickname ‘Bloody Dabieshan’, which comes not from flowers but from killing. Out here there is a long history of civil conflict and rebellion, a persistent strand of extreme cruelty and violence.

As a Ming dynasty local historian put it: ‘Macheng has always been a battleground.’

In 1338 a rebellion broke out just over the mountain passes to the north. Its leader was a peasant called Peng Hu, ‘Peng the Virtuous’.

Peng came from the highlands on the Jiangxi–Hunan border. He’d been a monk in a local temple and became an expert in the occult arts, sorcery, healing medicine and prophecy.

In this seething atmosphere of discontent, one of Peng’s converts was another itinerant monk, a son of poor peasants from the famine lands of Anhui. This convert would become the founder of the Ming dynasty, one of the most remarkable figures in Chinese history: Zhu Yuanzhang (to whom we will return in due course).

In the Macheng region, the wandering healer Peng and the monk beggar Zhu were joined by a third, the self-proclaimed emperor Xu Shouhui. Xu Shouhui was a former cloth vendor who claimed to be Maitreya, the Buddha of future times, and promised to ‘destroy the rich to help the poor’.

At the same time, other leaders arose to the east claiming descent from the Song royal family. Han Shantong’s Red Turban Army, ‘the Greater King of Light’, made a confederation with ‘the Southern Red Turbans’, or the ‘Red Army’. In 1351 they launched attacks that led to the collapse of Yuan power in the Yangtze valley.

This was not only a class war, poor against rich, but also a Han nationalist revolt against alien rule, and it was waged with extreme violence and cruelty.

They were killed with great savagery, flaying alive, disembowelling and even, it was said, ‘mincing and pickling’ them.

This would happen again, in the same region, at the fall of the Ming in the seventeenth century and in the savage pogroms against the communists in the 1930s.

As Yuan Mongol rule collapsed, eight rival contenders for power grew powerful enough to challenge for the throne of China. For seventeen years, there would be civil war. At root these were essentially class wars, eyewitnesses speaking of a consistent thread of the peasants waging war against the rich and powerful.