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The Chinese Empire
The Great Unification: The Ch’in, 256-206 BC
The Ch'in
Ancient China had always been a collection of more or less independent states in the
north of China. The Shang and the Chou dominated the political landscape as the most
powerful of those states, but they did not exercise uniform rule over neighboring regions.
When the Chou began to weaken around 500 BC, these independent states began to war
among themselves over territory and influence. So chaotic was this period, that the Chinese
refer to it as The Warring States period, and it did not end until the whole of north China
was unified under a single empire, the Ch'in dynasty.
In Chinese history, the Ch'in are the great, evil dynasty, but Western historians often
stand in awe of the Ch'in. They were repressive, autocratic, and frequently cruel, but they
were also brilliant political theorists and reformers who historically brought about one of the
most energetic periods of Chinese government. Their story, however, is a very brief one. For
from the time the Ch'in unified China in 221 BC, to the time of their fall fifteen years later in
206 BC, not even a generation had passed. For all that, so great was their accomplishment
that our name for China is derived from the Ch'in.
The Ch'in were a small state in the western reaches of the Wei River. As with all
states during the Warring States period, the Ch'in pursued an aggressive policy of territorial
expansion. The Ch'in, however, had one great advantage: they had adopted a new style of
government based on the principles of the Legalists. Ultimately based on Confucianism,
Legalism held that human beings were fundamentally base and selfish and had to be strictly
controlled through laws. These laws were effective only if punishments were severe and
certain, so the Ch'in kingdom was frighteningly autocratic. But Legalist philosophy also
demanded a strong central government, a strong military, a tightly controlled economy, and
the strict regimentation of the citizens of the state. As a result, the Ch'in kingdom grew
powerful and wealthy in a very short time.
Ch’in shih-huang-ti
We traditionally date the start of the Ch'in dynasty to 256 BC, although the
unification of China did not occur until 221 BC. By 256 BC, the Ch'in had become the most
powerful state in China, and in 246 BC, the kingdom fell to a thirteen year old boy, Ch'eng.
As a young man, he surrounded himself with brilliant Legalist ministers. His most powerful
and trusted advisor was Li Ssu, one of the foundational theorists of Legalism. Under their
advice, in 232 BC, King Ch'eng, at the age of twenty-seven, began a vigorous campaign to
unify and centralize all the northern kingdoms. The surrounding kingdoms were no match
for the wealth and military power of the Ch'in, and by 221 BC, Ch'eng conquered all of the
northern kingdoms.
He assumed the title, Ch'in shih-huang-ti, or "The First Exalted Emperor of the
Ch'in." Under his guidance, and the advice of Li Ssu, Ch'in shih-huang-ti created the form of
government which served as the model for all future Chinese dynasties. First, the
government was centralized around the emperor and his ministers. In order to facilitate that
centralization, the Ch'in replaced the old, feudal system in which territory was controlled by
more or less independent nobility with a strong, hierarchical bureaucracy. All the members
of this bureaucracy, as well as the ministers of the state, would be appointed by the central
government. In order to break the power of the aristocracy, he confiscated their lands and
distributed them to the peasants. To facilitate the taxation process, government taxes were
taken directly from the peasants rather than passing through the hands of the aristocracy.
In order to cement the centralization of government, Ch'in shih-huang-ti embarked on
an ambitious campaign of standardizing money and weights and measures. The Ch'in
emperor also put the most severe of Legalist doctrines into practice as well. The laws of the
unified empire were strict and harsh, particularly if you were in government. The penalty for
any corruption at all among government servants was death. The Legalists also believed in
centralization of thinking, fearful that any non-Legalist ways of thinking could lead to
disruption and revolution. So all the other schools of philosophy were outlawed, especially
Confucianism, and their books were burned and their teachers were executed. The Ch'in
were also hard on commerce. Seeing it as a form of infection or parisitism, the Ch'in
severely restricted trade and mercantilism, taxed the merchants heavily, and executed
merchants for the most trivial offenses.
The Ch'in, however, set their eyes on more than the administration of the northern
territories. They turned south and steadily conquered the southern regions of China all the
way to the Red River in north Vietnam. Their greatest enemy, however, was to the north.
Called the Hsiung Nu, these nomadic, Hunnish people, had been making constant incursions
into the northern territories all during the Chou period. The peoples north of China had
originally developed as hunters and fishers, but when the region began to dry out and the
forests receded, they turned to keeping flocks. As a result they learned horsemanship and
began to wander nomadically; they also began to fight among themselves. This constant
fighting made them highly skilled at fighting on horseback, and when they began to wander
into the northern states of China, they made extremely formidable opponents for the
infantry-focussed northern states. In response to these incursions, the northern kingdoms all
during the Chou period built walls and fortifications along their northern borders. The Ch'in
began a massive project of joining many of these walls and fortifications. Although the Ch'in
did not build the "Great Wall" as historians used to claim (the Great Wall was built during
the Ming dynasty), this fortification and building project during the Ch'in period was in itself
truly amazing.
The Fall of the Ch'in
Ch'in shih-huang-ti died in 210 BC at the age of forty-nine; the amazing thing about
the empire he had founded is that it collapsed only four years after his death. While the
Legalist government of Ch'in shih-huang-ti was ruthlessly efficient in its control over the
state and the bureaucracy, that ruthlessness proved to be its undoing. The emperor, who had
hoped to found a dynasty lasting over ten thousand years, had alienated many people,
particularly the landed aristocracy. The building projects of the Ch'in demanded forced labor
and heavy taxation; people all throughout the empire were on the verge of revolt. Finally, the
Ch'in had created a government that virtually ran without the emperor, who remained aloof
from day to day governing. Upon Ch'in shih-huang-ti's death, the two most powerful
administrators, Li Ssu and Chao Kao, covered up his death and took over the government.
They installed a puppet emperor, but for the most part all Chinese government rested in their
hands. Both Li Ssu and Chao Kao ruthlessly enforced penalties on lower administrators;
because of this, regional administrators kept secret the revolts and uprisings in their
territories for fear of punishment. Eventually, Chao Kao eliminated Li Ssu, and the territorial
uprisings became so severe that they could no longer be kept secret. By that point, it was too
late, and the dynasty that was to last ten thousand years disappeared only four years after its
founder died.
The Former Han, 202BC– 8AD
Although the Ch'in pretty much invented Chinese government, or at least the form
that all subsequent dynasties would follow. And, standardized Chinese culture in very vital
ways: standards, weights, measures, and most importantly, writing, in Chinese history it is
the Han, the longest dynasty in Chinese history, that defines Chinese culture. The Chinese
themselves frequently refer to themselves as the "people of the Han."
For all that, the Han were actually two dynasties, but since the second dynasty was
founded by a relative of the first, they are considered a single dynasty. The dynasty itself
was founded by a commoner, a fact that would be vitally important in twentieth century
Chinese politics. Liu Pang was one of the rebel generals who fought the Ch'in; in the process
of his rebellion, he gained control over the area around the Wei River, the traditional
homeland of the Ch'in. After the fall of the Ch'in, China fell again into a series of territorial
conflicts among various rebel generals and nobility. But in four short years, Liu Pang
emerged supreme over all the territories. Taking the name, Han Kao Tsu, or "Exalted
Emperor of Han," he built his capital at Chang'an and began the long process of reunifying
China.
The official policy of the new Han government was to renounce Legalism and all the
administrative policies of the Ch'in, who were hated throughout the land. The laws were
made less harsh and punishments less severe, and the regimentation of the population,
particularly conscripted labor, was softened. They also renounced the centralizing tendencies
of the Ch'in, and divided the Chinese empire into small, somewhat independent, feudal
domains under individual lords.
Centralization and State Confucianism
The reality, however, is that the Han government, though outwardly repudiating
Legalism and Ch'in government, continued largely in the same vein. Although they divided
Chinese government into several principalities, the government remained centralized under
the control of a powerful and large bureaucracy that would eventually end even the illusion
of independent principalities. That bureaucracy, however, changed dramatically under the
Han rulers. The Han "Confucianized" the Legalist government of the Ch'in, eventually
adopting Confucianism as the state philosophy. The first emperor of the Han, Kao Tsu,
despised Confucius and philosophers in general; the later emperors would take to
Confucianism as a lifeline. The essence of Confucianism is that government should be in the
hands of moral people; the purpose of government is the welfare of the people. People,
according to Confucius, are born good and can be taught all the moral virtues necessary for
government. Since morality can be taught, it follows that only people who have been
educated in morality should rule over others. At first, government officials were appointed
on the recommendation of other government officials, but in 165 BC, the Han instituted the
first examination. This examination primarily concerned Confucius, the Five Classics, and
moral questions; admission into government service was possible only through this
examination. The Chinese had invented something brand new: rule by merit.
Confucianism became the center of this new rule by merit, and the Confucian
principle of "jen," or "benevolence, humanity," became the ideological center of Han
government. At the capital in Ch'ang-an, a school was created specifically for teaching
Confucian government. This school became the ideological center of the Later Han dynasty.
The Han, however, combined Confucian philosophy with Legalist government structures,
such as a regimented populace, standardization, and a centralized government. The
combination of Confucianism and Legalism in practical governing during the Han is called
State Confucianism.
In Han government, the emperor was the supreme ruler; all authority resided
ultimately in the emperor. Below the emperor were court officials who all attained their
position through merit; ideally, they exhibited the highest abilities in governing. Besides
advising the emperor, their central role was to staff and run the bureaucracy which was the
true authority. In addition, the Ch'in had instituted powerful roles for court eunuchs. These
eunuchs almost always came from common families; as boys, they were castrated and were
servants in the emperor's harem. Because of this, they had close friendships with the
emperor's from their early boyhood, and often served as advisors to the emperor. At various
times in Chinese history, these eunuchs were more powerful than the court officials.
Han Wu Ti
Perhaps the greatest and most powerful of the Han emperors was Han Wu Ti, who
came to power in 141 BC at the age of sixteen and ruled for fifty four years, the second
longest reign in Chinese history. Han Wu Ti is generally regarded as the strongest and most
vigorous of the Chinese emperors. He greatly expanded China's borders south into Vietnam
and north into Korea, and effectively stopped the raids of the Hsiung Nu by invading their
territory south of the Gobi desert and settling Chinese colonists all through the area. He set
up outposts and colonies all the way into the Tarim Basin, extending Chinese influence into
central Asia. This presence in central Asia led to the creation of the Silk Road, a trade route
that brought the Chinese civilization all the way to Rome.
Han Wu Ti presided over some of the most ambitious economic projects in the
history of early China. The most significant was the joining of the Yellow River to the
capital at Chang-an thus joining the two central commercial centers of China. In addition,
Han Wu Ti established a network of "ever-level granaries," which were designed to store
excess grain in order to prevent starvation in times of flood or drought.
The Fall of the Former Han
The Han depended on taxation in order to maintain their control over the territories,
which had grown so large under Han Wu Ti. As the wealthy began to successfully avoid
paying taxes, this heavy tax burden fell more and more on the merchant classes and the
peasants. By 22 BC, the situation was so bad that revolts broke out all over the country.
In the fading years of the former Han dynasty, court officials turned to the Han
regent, Wang Mang, who ruled in place of the infant emperor. They urged him to become
emperor and restore order and when he finally accepted in 8 AD, it was too late. He
undertook to reform the government under more strict Confucian principles, but he made
several well-meaning but disastrous reforms. Among these reforms were land confiscations
which took land from the wealthy and distributed them to the poor peasantry. In addition, a
series of floods destroyed the irrigation system and widespread famine plagued China for
years; the Hsiung Nu, emboldened by the chaos to the south, took over large parts of the
northern Chinese territories. Finally, in 23 AD, a peasant secret society, the Red Eyebrows,
which had begun a revolution five years earlier, captured the capital and executed Wang
Mang. The Former Han dynasty officially ended when Wang Mang declared himself the
emperor; his new dynasty, formed from inside the Han dynasty, had fallen into chaos. For
two years, from 23 to 25 AD, China seethed in chaos and constant warfare.
The Later Han, 25-220AD
When Wang Mang tried to create a new dynasty, the Hsin ("New") dynasty, from
within the Han dynasty, his central concern was addressing the severe inequities in wealth
and property that had grown up between the classes in China. He would have succeeded had
not his military been weak and had not nature, and the Hsiung Nu, conspired to create
widespread starvation and dissatisfaction. When Wang Mang was executed in 23 AD by the
peasant group, the Red Eyebrows, there were no strong candidates to assume the awful
burden of taking over the massive Chinese imperial government. For two years, from 23 to
25 AD, various factions fought among themselves until, in 25 AD, a wealthy landowner led
a rebel army and seized the government. Since he was related to the Han imperial house, he
declared the Han dynasty restored.
However, a pattern of history seems to have been set by the former Han. Beginning
auspiciously with agrarian reforms, the former Han redistributed wealth and solved a rising
agrarian crisis that had been building since the Chou period. Soon, however, the government
grew weak and economic power shifted to wealthy landowners at the expense of the
peasantry. The agrarian crisis caused by these inequities led to the rise of a peasant revolt,
the Red Eyebrows, which overthrew the Han government. The same pattern would be
repeated with astonishing precision in the later Han dynasty as well.
As in the Former Han, a strong centralized government was restored and powerful
reforms were instituted in the early years of the Later Han; these reforms led to an
astonishing recovery of a population that had been devastated by war and famine. As in the
former Han, this period of creative reform and restoration was immediately followed by an
aggressive military expansion. In 50 AD, the Later Han government allied itself with some
Hsiung Nu tribes and, forty years later, marched across the Gobi desert and attacked the
northern Hsiung Nu. So effective was this campaign that it provoked massive migrations of
Hsiung Nu west into central Asia and north into Russia; these migrations eventually pushed
the Hsiung Nu all the way to Europe and finally Rome: the "Huns." The military expansion
of the Chinese empire would push the Chinese all the way to the Caspian Sea; this
mind-boggling control of large parts of inner Asia created the greatest trade route in the
ancient world: the Silk Road.
As in the Former Han, however, economic power soon became concentrated in the
hands of a few wealthy landowners. These wealthy landowners maintained their own private
armies and kept the peasants on their lands at or below subsistence level. As in the Former
Han, they also managed to avoid paying taxes, so the onus fell on the shoulders of merchants
and the poor, many of whom could not even support themselves, let alone the government.
Revolts began to break out in 184 AD spearheaded by secret, religious peasant groups. The
Former Han fell at the hands of the peasant Red Eyebrows society; the Later Han perished
under the weapons of the Yellow Turbans, a new-Taoist secret society based in eastern
China. After decades of weak government, the Han dynasty fell in 220 AD; with it fell the
Chinese Empire itself. The next three hundred years, the period of "The Three Kingdoms"
and "The Six Dynasties," would see the vast Han empire fracture into separate, strong
kingdoms.
The Han Syntheis
After the disastrous period of totalitarian government during the Ch'in dynasty
(221-207 B. C.), the early Han dynasty (207 B.C.-9 A.D.) returned to older forms of
imperial government. However, they adopted from the Ch'in the idea of an absolutely central
government and spent most of their period in power trying to regain the same level of
centrality that the Ch'in and the Legalists had so ruthlessly accomplished. This ideology of
central government, along with the Legalists' attempts to standardize Chinese culture and
Chinese philosophy, led thinkers of the Han to attempt to unify all the rival schools of
Chinese thought and philosophy that had developed over the previous three hundred years.
This unification of Chinese into a single coherent system is the most lasting legacy of the
Han dynasty. Earlier, the Legalists attempted to standardize Chinese thought by burning the
books of rival schools and by making it a capital crime to speak of Confucius, Lao Tzu, or
Mo Tzu. The Han thinkers, who thoroughly despised the Legalists and their methods while
adopting many of their goals, took a different approach. Rather than reject alternate ways of
thinking, they took a syncretic approach and attempted to fuse all the rival schools of
thought into a single system. This syncretic project of the early Han is known as the Han
synthesis. In many ways it was similar to the larger project of unifying Chinese government.
The Han philosophers concentrated specifically on the Five Classics, attempting to
derive from them, particularly the I ching , or Book of Changes, the principle of the
workings of the universe, or Tao. This new theory of the universe they appended to the I
ching ; this appendix explains the metaphysical workings of the entire universe. Once the
overall workings of the universe were understood, then every form of thought could be
directly related to each other by appealing to the basic principles of the universe.
The essentials of the Han synthesis are as follows: the universe is run by a single
principle, the Tao, or Great Ultimate. This principle is divided into two opposite principles,
or two principles which oppose one another in their actions, yin and yang. All the opposites
one perceives in the universe can be reduced to one of the opposite forces. In general, these
forces are distinguished by their role in producing creation and producing degeneration:
yang is the force of creation and yin the force of completion and degeneration. The yin and
yang are further differentiated into five material agents, or wu hsing , which both produce
one another and overcome one another. All change in the universe can be explained by the
workings of yin and yang and the progress of the five material agents as they either produce
one another or overcome one another. This is, I need to stress, a universal explanatory
principle. All phenomena can be understood using yin-yang and the five agents: the
movements of the stars, the workings of the body, the nature of foods, the qualities of music,
the ethical qualities of humans, the progress of time, the operations of government, and even
the nature of historical change. All things follow this order so that all things can be related to
one another in some way: one can use the stars to determine what kind of policy to pursue in
government, for instance.
Since the Han thinkers had come up with a tool to explain historical and political
events, the writing of history took off exponentially during the early Han and later. History
became more than a repository of good and bad examples of government, as it had for the
ancient Chinese, it became the working out of the yin-yang or five agents system as it
applied to human affairs. This meant that the writing of history demanded accuracy, that the
facts be laid out with great precision and indifference so that the workings of yin-yang could
be followed precisely. The Han, then, developed a rigorously factual approach to history at a
very early time in Chinese history. In government, the Han thinkers essentially adapted the
Legalist attitude that human beings fundamentally behave badly, but they changed the
doctrine significantly. The Han thinkers believed that people behaved in a depraved way
because they had no choice; economic and social conditions forced them to behave badly.
For at heart, all human beings desire only material well-being; in order to make people
behave virtuously, the government should make it possible that the ends of virtue (the
well-being of others) and the pursuit of individual well-being should be coterminous, that is,
material benefits should accrue to virtuous acts (that's one-half of the Legalist formula). The
emperor would bring this about through two means. First, the emperor and the government
is responsible for setting up conditions in which people can derive material benefit from
productive labor; the stress on productivity, of course, is derived from the Legalists and Mo
Tzu. Second, the emperor can provide an example. It is the job of the emperor to care for the
welfare of his people (Confucianism), yet at the same time, the Emperor should withdraw
from active rule (Taoism). How did the Emperor rule then? By providing a living example
of benevolence. This model of Chinese government would remain dominant well into the
twentieth century.
The Sui, 589-618 AD
The Three Kingdoms 220-589 AD
The decline and fall of the Later Han dynasty produced a long period of independent
states each contending for hegemony over neighboring states; this period, in fact, lasted so
long that the more or less uniform Chinese culture almost died out completely. Starting in
384 AD, however, the Northern Wei kingdom began the long, arduous process of reuniting
the kingdoms into a single empire. They moved their capital to the ancient site of Loyang,
adopted Chinese as their language, as well as Chinese culture. Although they failed to unify
the kingdom, they had managed to preserve Chinese culture during the fractious centuries of
the Three Kingdoms. By 534, the Northern Wei faded from view, and China fell into a brief
period of short-lived kingdoms. In 589, however, a Turkic-Chinese general, Sui Wen-ti,
would found a new dynasty over a restored empire.
During the period of The Three Kingdoms, Chinese scholarship and thought slowly
faded into insignificance. In its place arose a widespread growth of two religions,
Neo-Taoism, a native religion forged from philosophical Taoism, and Buddhism, a foreign
import from India.
Neo-Taoism, which was called "the mysterious learning" in early China, had grown
during the waning years of the Later Han, had both a scholarly and a popular form. The
scholarly form concentrated on discussing the Taoist classics, as well as general
conversations and a search for immortality. It was the popular form, however, that spread
like wildfire and changed Chinese history. The folk Neo-Taoism was a pantheistic, moral
and salvation religion; all human acts, both good and evil, would be punished or rewarded in
an afterlife. The Neo-Taoist religions had priests, curing shamans, and even churches. These
religions also inspired secret societies; two of these societies, the Yello Turbans and the Five
Pecks of Rice, were mainly responsible for overthrowing the Wang Mang and the remnants
of the Later Han dynasty.
Buddhism entered China in the first century AD; a Indian religion that was initially a
radical form of Hinduism, the dominant religion in ancient India, it was accepted with open
arms in China. This is largely due to the fact that the early Chinese initially thought that
Buddhism was another form of Taoism, particularly since the translators used Taoist terms
to translate Buddhist doctrines. The early Chinese, in fact, believed that Lao Tzu had
travelled to India and that the Buddha was his disciple. Despite this, Buddhism never really
took off during the Later Han period. However, when the Han government collapsed and
China fell into chaos, Buddhism caught fire all over the former empire, primarily among the
common population. Like folk Neo-Taoism, it offered salvation and was a moral religion.
By the time of the rise of the Northern Wei in 384, Buddhism had spread over the whole of
China. Although Buddhists were occassionally persecuted, on the whole they were tolerated.
Some emperors even converted to Buddhism.
The Sui, 589-618 AD
The chaos of the Three Kingdoms finally came to an end under the hand of Sui
Wen-ti, a general of mixed blood. He reunified the northern kingdoms, centralized the
government, reformed the taxation structure, and conquered the south all in a single lifetime.
The government he established was remarkably stable during his lifetime, and he began
ambitious building and economic projects. However, unlike the founders of the Han
dynasties, Sui Wen-ti did not adopt Confucianism as the state philosophy, but rather
embraced Buddhism and Taoism, both of which had spread so rapidly during the Three
Kingdoms period. Sui Wen-ti employed a cadre of Buddhist advisors in his program to unify
the country, and Buddhism would become the government philosophy until the founding the
Sung dynasty several centuries later.
But his son, Sui Yang-ti, who rose to be emperor on the death of his father, soon
overextended himself, meddling first in the politics of the northern tribes and then leading
military expeditions against Korea. Eventually, these wars with Korea, in combination with
a series of unlucky natural disasters, bankrupted the government, which soon suffered under
the weight of widespread rebellion. In the fight for power which followed the assassination
of Sui-Yang-ti, the control of the new, centralized government fell to Li Yuan, one of Sui
Yang-ti's generals. Li Yuan began a new dynasty, the T'ang, which lasted for another three
hundred years.
The T’ang, 618-907 AD
When Li Yuan seized power after the assassination of Sui Yang-ti, he founded the
T'ang dynasty which would rule from 618 to 907 AD. Li Yuan promptly set about building a
powerful central government; in order to do so, however, he had to make concessions to
provincial governments (he himself had been a provincial governor under the Sui). His
efforts, though, were not successful.
T’an T’ai-tsung, 627-649 AD
Although he founded an incredibly long-lived dynasty, Li Yuan himself only reigned
for a few years before he was ousted by his son, Li Shih-min. Upon ascending the throne, Li
Shih-min assumed the title, T'ang T'ai-tsung. He was a vigorous and energetic emperor and
set about solving the internal problems that had so plagued past dynasties. In the process, he
recreated Chinese government. At the top of the hierarchy was the emperor; below him were
three administrations: Council of the State, Military Affairs, and the Censorate. The most
important of these administrations was the Council of the State which drafted policy (the
Secretariat), reviewed policy (the Chancellery), and implementing policy (the State Affairs,
which consisted of six Ministries). The administration of Military Affairs directed the
military under the control of the emperor. The Censorate watched over the government and
government officials to ferret out misgovernance and official corruption.
In order to quash class antagonisms, T'ang T'ai-tsung seized all the property of China
as his own. Property was then distributed to "the most able" cultivators. This attempt,
however, to reform land inequities was sabotaged even before it began. Being an aristocrat
himself and faced with the immense political and economic power of the aristocrats, T'ang
T'ai-tsung simply handed land back to the wealthiest landowners. In addition, although the
civil service examination was reinstituted by T'ang T'ai-tsung, almost all bureaucratic
positions went to aristocrats during the entirety of the T'ang dynasty and only a small
handful went to individuals recruited on the basis of the examination.
The Empress Wu, 684-705 AD
Wu Chao (626-705 AD) was a concubine of the second T'ang emperor. She removed
or killed all of her rivals at court and eventually became his empress. As empress, she
vigorously and brilliantly got the lay of the political landscape and steadily exiled political
opponents in the imperial court. In 660, the emperor was debilitated by a stroke and Wu
Chao took over the government of China. When the emperor died in 684, she then became
the regent of China, ruling in place of her young son, and in 690, she finally deposed her son
and became Emperor herself, the first and only woman ever to occupy that office in Chinese
history. The Chinese tend to vilify Empress Wu and tell (most likely false) stories of her
sexual appetites and her Buddhist fervor, but she was perhaps one of the most able and
brilliant of the Chinese emperors and had a profound influence on Chinese culture. She
oversaw the greatest expansion of T'ang military power, and recruited her government
heavily from the civil service examinations. It is unquestionable that she was a devout
Buddhist, and she contributed greatly to a flowering of Buddhist culture in the T'ang period,
especially through her vigorous founding of Buddhist monasteries. She was the first emperor
of China to assume a Buddhist title, "Divine Empress Who Rules the Universe," but she also
contributed to the ascendancy of state Taoism. In 666 AD, while she reigned in the place of
her incapacitated husband, Lao Tzu was officially recognized as the Most High Emperor of
Mystic Origin.
Hsuan-tsung and Chang-an, 713-756 AD
The T'ang empire reached its military apogee during the reign of Empress Wu; when
she was deposed in 705, the empire soon fell into a series of court schemes and intrigues
which severely weakened the central government. For a brief period, during the reign of
Hsuan-tsung (713-756), the government revivified. Hsuan-tsung greatly reduced the number
of civil-service examination officials, began massive building projects, especially on the
Great Canal connecting the Yellow and the Yangtze rivers that had been built by the Sui,
and generally increased the wealth and power of the court. His capital, at Chang-an, became
incredibly wealthy and a flowering of Chinese culture, such as had never been seen before,
concentrated itself in this captial city during the decades of his rule. The T'ang dynasty is
known as the "golden age" of Chinese culture, and the bulk of the cultural flowering of this
age was concentrated in the reign of Hsuan-tsung and confined to his magnificent capital,
Chang-an.
Because of massive, dynamic trade with other cultures, Chang-an became a meeting
place of many cultures and religions: Christianity, Zoroastrianism, Judaism, and Islam, all of
which entered China during the T'ang and especially influenced Chinese culture in the
heyday of Chang-an. Syrians, Jews, Arabs, Persians, Koreans, Tibetans, and Japanese all
lived side by side with the Chinese of Chang-an. In 636, Nestorian Christians from Syria
were allowed to build in church and hold Christian services barely six hundred years after
the founding of Christianity and less than three hundred years after Christianity had become
the state religion of Rome. The foreigners not only brought in new religions, but new
clothes, cuisine, literature, and music as well. The imperial court itself had several
performing troupes gathered from surrounding nations permanently installed at the court.
Chinese poetry entered its most productive phase and the greatest of the Chinese
poets, Li Po (701-762), came to prominence at this time. Considered one of the most
powerful Chinese lyric poets, Li Po was a large, strong man hopelessly entranced with
sensuality. He wrote over two thousand poems, and over eighteen hundred of them still
exist. His poetry is about immediacy, about seizing the phenomenality of the moment and
communicating it directly through language. While his poetry is Buddhist and is suffused
with the sense of the brevity of life, nonetheless this tragic view of the transience of mortal
leads him rather to embrace desperately experience and phenomenality. It is perhaps this
aspect of his poetry that led to the birth of the legend of his death: he is said to have drowned
while trying to embrace the image of the moon in a pool.
The second great poet of the time was Tu Fu (712-770). Like Li Po, Tu Fu was not a
product of the civil service examination. Li Po refused to take it; Tu Fu failed it. In 751,
however, he was appointed to the imperial court on the strength of his poetry, but lost his
post shortly after the death of Hsuan-tsung. While Li Po strove for immediacy, Tu Fu wrote
a poetry that was about putting obstacles between the reader and the poet's experience. His is
an allusive poetry, one which suggests possibilities and hides immediate experience under
the veils of language rather than trying to communicate a phenomenal or emotional
experience as directly as possible. As with Li Po, his poetry is permeated with the Buddhist
notion of the brevity of life, but his poetry is less about celebrating phenomenal experience
as it is about the tragedy of human suffering.
Hsuan-tsung, who was regarded as a perfect prince in culture, courage, and wisdom,
was himself a talented musician and great patron of music. He greatly expanded the imperial
musical bureau, the Jiaofang ("House of Precepts," founded around 620 AD), which
employed and trained literally thousands of musicians, acrobats, dancers, writers, and actors.
He also founded the first musical academy in China, the Liyuan ("pear garden"), which
produced legions of musicians. The professional training of a musician (Yin Sheng Jen) took
fifteen years and five examinations. After successfully negotiating the training and
memorizing fifty classical pieces, the musician was then appointed automatically to the
imperial court. The Liyuan was unique, however, for it had as its goal the development of
new musical styles under the personal direction of Hsuan-tsung. Together, the Jiaofang and
the Liyuan produced a tremendous synthesis of Chinese arts, setting the lyrics of the major
poets, such as Li Po and Tu Fu, to music, and producing spectacular banquet music. During
this period was developed the daqu , or "grand song and dance," which fused musical
performance with poetry and dance in a large and spectacular format.
The cultural flowering of the T'ang, especially during the reign of Hsuan-tsung, was
characterized by the fusion of several arts and the fecund intermingling of Chinese culture
with an infinity of foreign cultures, religions, and arts. It was a period of unparalleled
cultural synthesis and fusion that saw the great expansion of poetry and music, and the
unprecedented cultural sophistication of a larger part of the non-aristocratic Chinese people.
The Decline of the T’ang
The T'ang in its earliest years expanded its military power greatly, reaching its apogee
under Empress Wu. Like all dynasties before them, the military expansion of the T'ang was
followed by a slow contraction under the pressures of foreign countries. The T'ang were
pushed back primarily by the Mongols in Manchuria, the Turks to the west, and the Tibetans
to the south.
The T'ang met these challenges by sending armies, which always succeeded in the
short-run but failed to keep these foreign powers down for good. Although the T'ang forged
alliances with other foreigners, and built up defensive works, none of these strategies really
worked, and eventually the Empire's borders slowly contracted back to the original T'ang
kingdom.
Disaster struck in the later years of Hsuan-tsung's reign; in 751, T'ang armies were
defeated in western Asia by the Turks, and in 755, An Lu-shan, a general commanding
three northern provinces, led a rebellion that resulted in the capture of Chang-an while the
emperor escaped to Szechwan. Eventually, Chang-an was recovered by Hsuan-tsung's
successor, but at a terrible price. Aided by the Uighur Turks, the forces of the emperor had to
allow the Turks to pillage the city as their reward.
The end result, however, was a century of peace, even though China had severely
retracted its borders. China's population had been devestated by the wars and the An Lu-shan
rebellion: before the rebellion, China had a population of over 53 million people; after the
rebellion, the population had plummeted to seventeen million. The government, which
remained strongly centralized, set about reforming land allocations in order to increase
productivity, but the small size of the population did not permit them to reinstate equal
distribution of land. Instead, they instituted the Twice-A-Year Tax of Yang Yen, which
remained in place up until the end of the Ming dynasty in the sixteenth century. Under the
Twice-A-Year Tax, fixed taxes were levied on each province. This allowed the government
to remain in operation while encouraging economic growth in the decimated provinces.
The centralized government, however, continued to lose authority to the provinces all
through the ninth century. Civil war with the state of Nan Chao in southern China, roving
bands of thieves, wars with border territories, and frequent rebellions slowly converted the
provinces into autonomous kingdoms under the control of warlords. Chang-an itself was
sacked by one of these warlords, Huang Ch'ao, and the remaining decades of the T'ang
dynasty were essentially a period of chaos among small, fractious kingdoms. Finally, in 907,
the dynasty fell and the country fell into a fifty year period of disunion before another strong
dynasty would reunify the country, the Sung.
The Later Empire: The Sung, 960-1279 AD
After the fall of the T'ang dynasty, China entered into a period of disunion which
lasted from 907-960 AD. At the end of the period, a new dynasty, the Sung, partially
reunified the country. Its capital was Kaifeng on the Yellow River, and it managed to rule a
large area more or less effectively for 170 years. This period is called the Northern Sung
(960-1127). In 1127, however, it lost the northern part of China to a new empire, the Chin,
and relocated its capital to the south in Hangchow. For another one hundred and fifty years,
the Sung ruled in the south in the period known as the Southern Sung (1127-1279). But the
southern empire fell to the same forces that swept over northern China in the thirteenth
century: the Mongols. The period of the Sung dynasty is not a period of power or stability.
The Sung never managed to retake the territories that had been lost in the later T'ang, and
they were constantly distracted by warfare with northern tribes.
The Autocratic Emperor
The greatest innovation made during the Sung was the reorientation of power around
the emperor. From the earliest periods, the emperor was by and large the absolute authority.
The T'ang reforms firmly placed the emperor at the absolute top of the government
hierarchy. Under the Sung, however, the power of the emperor was made more concrete.
The Emperor assumed personal control over several offices, and structured the government
offices and ministries so that tasks would be duplicated across those ministries: this allowed
the Emperor to play one administrative unit off of another.
In addition, the fall of the T'ang and the period of disunion witnessed a precipitous
drop in the aristocracy. The aristocracy that remained had their lands confiscated by the
warlords during the period of disunion and so began to congregate in the urban areas. With
the number and power of the aristocracy severely reduced, this profoundly changed
government. In the T'ang dynasty, the emperor was more or less the servant of the
aristocracy and saw to their interests; most of the government positions were staffed by the
aristocracy. The Sung, however, revived and expanded the civil service examination and
drew most of its officials from the examination. They were, by and large, commoners. This
had two effects. It concentrated more power in the bureaucracy and less power among the
aristocrats. It also, however, changed the relationship between government officials and the
emperor. Previously, the emperor was an aristocrat; even though the emperor was divine and
aloof, government officials were from the same class. The new bureaucracy, however, drawn
almost entirely from commoners, had nothing in common with the emperor. The gulf that
opened up between bureaucrats and the emperor served to concentrate more power directly
in the hands of the emperor.
The Agricultural and Commercial Revolution
The drop in the aristocracy and its movement from agricultural to urban areas
precipitated an agricultural revolution in China. The great tinderbox of Chinese history had
always been the agrarian crises constantly seething below the surface. Land and tax
inequities had always created unmanageable poverty on the poorest farmers, who were tied
to the land like slaves. Dynasties had fallen under the sword of agricultural rebellions. Under
the Sung, however, the agrarian picture changed. When the T'ang eliminated the equal field
system under the Twice-A-Year Tax, individual farmers suddenly found themselves with the
right to buy and sell land. Under the Sung, it became possible to pay taxes using money
rather than grain. Finally, the Sung more or less eliminated the conscription of labor which
had been a regular part of Chinese life since the unification under the Ch'in. All of these
factors resulted in a phenomenal increase in agricultural production, and the wealth of the
individual farmer, though by no means large, increased significantly. Two major things
resulted from this agricultural revolution: greater wealth for the general population and for
the government, and more freedom as farmers were no long enslaved to their land.
The most important economic innovation of the Sung was the widespread use of
money. In the form of copper coins and later silver, the use of money greatly accelerated
trade within China and led to the development of credit. In addition, cities slowly converted
from being administrative centers into commercial centers. Along the Yangtze River, the
urban centers grew dramatically and became the cultural and economic centers of China.
While China in the T'ang period and before was largely agrarian, Sung China saw the
explosion of urban populations which grew by factors of four or five. Kaifeng eventually
had a population of 250,000 households; in the Southern Sung, Hangchow had a population
of 391,000 households. Here are some numbers to put this into perspective: during the Sung
period, Rome had an average population of about 35,000 households and London a
population of about 20,000 households. No civilization on earth was comparable. These
cities were buzzing with mercantile activities and services. The demands for goods and
services was so great, that China began an unprecedented acceleration of foreign trade.
Chinese goods were traded as far afield as Africa and the Middle East, and all the major
trade routes and ports were controlled by Chinese merchants.
The Confucian Revival
The Sui and the T'ang dynasties were enamored of Buddhist and Taoist thought.
Confucianism had never really died out, but it began to resurge in the latter half of the T'ang
dynasty. It was during the Sung, however, that Confucianism was revived and reinstalled as
the state philosophy.
During the T'ang dynasty, the civil service examination was restored. Appointments to
government positions, however, went mainly to aristocrats rather than to people who passed
the civil service examination—only ten percent of government officials during the T'ang
were products of the civil service examination. There were two civil service examinations
during the T'ang: the first involved Confucian studies and the Five Classics (which were
regarded as Confucian—they were also called the "Confucian Classics"), but the second
involved Taoism. The Confucian examination was greatly expanded under the Sung. Over
fifty percent of government officials were recruited from the civil service examination. The
examination itself was a lengthy affair. The first examination was the regional examination.
The exam was closely proctored, recopied, assigned a number, and then graded. Only a very
small number of candidates passed this first exam. The second exam was the metropolitan
exam taken at the capital city, which was also closely proctored, recopied, assigned a
number, and graded. About 15-20% of the candidates passed this second exam (around 200
per year).
The Sung exam was based entirely on the Confucian Classics. The candidates had to
memorize the Five Classics (wow!), interpret passages, master their literary style, and use
Confucian philosophy to interpret the Classics and construct political advice. The Taoist
examination was eliminated totally. The examinations were so rigorous that the candidates
that passed represented the very best minds in the country. Statistically, it would be
monumentally easier for you to be admitted into Harvard University than it would be to pass
the civil service exam in Sung China. Imagine the following: suppose that one half of all the
federal government bureaucracy and elected officials represented the top one percent of the
top one percent of our population in terms of talent, education, intelligence, and, above all,
ethical training. That is what Sung government looked like.
Passing the exam required some wealth, since the poorest could not afford to spend
years and years acquiring the education. It also required education. Massive amounts of
education. That education was focused almost entirely on Confucian thought; the importance
of the civil service examination, then, led to a vitally creative revival of Confucian thought.
This revival was more than just antiquarianism. The new Confucianists fused
centuries of Chinese culture and thought onto the old forms. In particular, they fused
Buddhist principles onto Confucian studies. Hu Yüan, one of the principle forces behind the
Confucian revival, believed that the Classics were more than repositories of ancient
knowledge. He believed also that they were repositories of universal truths or principles and
that it was the job of scholarship to ferret out those universal principles. Once those
universal principles were grasped, then one could use them to solve any moral or political
problem—any approach to moral or political problems not grounded in universal principles
was doomed to failure. The Buddhists had a concept of Three Treasures: Buddha (Truth),
Dharma (Law), and Sangha (the Discipline of the Monk). The Sung Confucianists
constructed their own version of this set-up, the Three Treasures of Confucianism:
Substance (T'i), Function (Yung), and Literary Expression (Wen). Substance corresponds
more or less with the universal principles the scholar studies; function is putting those
principles into action; and literary expression is the form in which these principles are
articulated.
The Confucianists believed that the failures and chaos of the Sui and T'ang dynasties
were due to Buddhism and the abandonment of Confucian principles. The T'ang
Confucianist, Han Y7uuml; (786-824), had proposed the active suppression of Buddhism in
order to save the state. The Sung Confucianists, however, believed that Confucianism should
be a positive and proseletyzing program of reform, and the Sung government, under the
guidance of the civil service officials, actively set about this program of reform. This began
very early in the Sung dynasty under the direction of Fan Chung-yen (989-1052), a
Confucian military leader, who, as prime minister, instituted a series of sweeping changes to
Chinese government. These changes included the elimination of bureaucrats, examination
reform, land reclamation, and the curtailing of conscripted labor. All of these, as discussed
above, contributed to a massive economic boom in agriculture and commerce. His most
important reform, however, was the establishment of a public school system which trained
the most intelligent and moral boys for government service. The national school system
instituted by Fan Chung-yen represents the first public school system in history.
The greatest Confucian reforms, however, came under the New Laws of Wang
An-Shih (1021-1086) during the reign of Emperor Shen-tsung (1068-1085). The New Laws
were the most ambitious program of reform and reorganization in Chinese history until the
Communist Revolution. Most of the reforms were economic in nature; Wang An-Shih was
the first political theorist in China who tied the economic health of the country with the
economic health of the government and believed, as John Maynard Keynes concluded in the
twentieth century, that government expenditures should be specifically tied to promoting
economic growth generally. As in Keynesian economics, the first of the new laws concerned
price controls by involving the government in distributing and selling food and grains. His
establishment of regional militias and an equal tax system greatly reduced taxes for the
poorest farmers and contributed significantly to the economic growth of the Sung. Finally, it
was Wang An-Shih that rewrote the civil service examination so that it was more about the
"meaning" of the Classics, and less about memorization.
Neo-Confucianism
The Confucian revival eventually split into two central Confucian schools, the School
of Mind or Intuition, whose greatest thinker was Wang Yang-ming, and the School of
Principle, which culminated in the thought of Chu Hsi (1130-1200). These two schools
make up what is called Neo-Confucianism, which would dominate Chinese (and later
Japanese) thought for the next several centuries. Both schools agreed that the world
consisted of two realms: the realm of principle (li ) (which we might call "laws") and the
realm of material force(ch'i ). Principle, ultimately derived from the Sung Confucian
concern with universal principles embedded in the classics, governs material force and
material force makes manifest principle; the ultimate origin of principle is a single, unifying
principle, called the Great Ultimate (tao ch'i ), which emanates from Heaven. The School
of Mind, founded by Ch'eng Hao (1032-1085), emphasized that the human mind is
completely unified and reflects perfectly in itself the principle of the universe. Since the
human mind is perfectly identical with the Universal Mind or the Ultimate Principle, the
duty of any philosopher is to investigate the nature of the human mind to the exclusion of all
other investigations. The School of Principle believed that there was an immaterial and
immutable principle or law that inheres in all things, giving them form, motion, and change.
The mind of humanity is essentially the same as the mind of the universe and can be
perfected to reflect that higher mind; however, the principle inhering in the human mind
applied to everything, so that any investigation into any phenomenon whatsoever would
reveal the principle of the human and the Universal mind. Studying the heavens or an insect
will lead you eventually to that same principle which characterizes the human mind and the
Universal mind. The scholars of the School of Principle believed in empirical investigation,
for they believed that to find the principle of any material process was to find the principle
inherent in all material and intellectual processes.
The Fall of the Sung
The great weakness of the Sung was holding back the northern tribes. Northern China
was overrun in 1127 and the Sung emperors were forced to pay tribute to the new northern
dyansty, the Chin, who were Manchurian. In order to secure their borders, the Sung allied
themselves with a new peoples in the northern regions, the Mongols, who had migrated out
of the Gobi Desert. Their new allies were far more dangerous than the Chin. After
conquering the Chin empire, the Mongols then set their sights on the Southern Sung and
quickly overran the empire. A new dynasty was erected over China, a foreign dynasty, a
Mongol dynasty: the Yuan.
The Mongolian Empire: The Yuan Dynasty, 1279-1368 AD
The Mongols
The Mongols were an obscure peoples who lived in the outer reaches of the Gobi
Desert in what is now Outer Mongolia. They were a pastoral and tribal people that did not
really seem to be of any consequence to neighboring peoples. The Mongols were in fact a
group of disunified tribes that would gather regularly during annual migrations; although
they elected chiefs over the tribes at these meetings, they never unified into a single people.
Their religion focused on a sky-god that ruled over nature deities, similar to Japanese Shinto,
and the gods communicated to them through shamans. All that would change however,
under the leadership of a powerful and vigorous leader named Timuchin or Genghis Khan.
Genghis Khan
Timuchin was the son of a poor noble in his tribe. Born sometime in the 1160's, he
gradually unified the disparate Mongol tribes and, in 1206, was elected Genghis Khan, or
"Universal Ruler" (also spelled Chingghis or Jenghiz Khan). He began to vigorously
organize the Mongols into a military force through conscription and taxes on the tribes. With
his small army (no more than one hundred and twenty thousand men), he managed to
conquer far larger armies in densely populated areas.
Genghis Khan was perhaps one of the greatest military innovators in human history,
and his army was perhaps the best-trained horsemen in all of human history. They fought on
horseback with incredible efficiency; they could hit targets with a superhuman precision
while running at a full gallop. Their speed and efficiency struck terror in their opponents
who frequently broke ranks. In addition, Genghis Khan organized his troops into decimal
units (one hundred, one thousand, ten thousand), and would send hand signals through the
fighting to these decimal units. The result in battle was simply mind-boggling. Genghis
Khan could literally move troops around in the heat of a battle as easily as he would move
chess pieces. Moreover, his armies were incredibly mobile and could cover superhuman
distances with numbing speed. Finally, Genghis Khan was ruthless towards people who
resisted the advances of his army. If a town or city fought back, he laid siege to the town
and, at its conclusion, would exterminate its inhabitants. When news of these tactics spread,
Mongol armies easily and successfully took over towns that would surrender as soon as the
Mongols showed their faces. The Mongols literally decimated populations in Western Asia
and China as they advanced. As a result of all these tactics, the Mongol armies spread out
like wildfire. They marched inexorably south into Chin territory and west into Asia and even
Europe. When Genghis Khan died, Mongol armies were poised to conquer Hungary, which
they would have accomplished had not their leader died.
The Mongolian Empire was perhaps the largest empire in human history in terms of
geographical expanse. It extended west to east from Poland to Siberia, and north to south
from Moscow to the Arabian peninsula and Siberia to Vietnam. For all that, Genghis Khan
was primarily interested in conquering China because of its great wealth. While Mongol
armies spread quickly west, Genghis Khan preceded cautiously in expanding southward,
conquering first the northern Tibetan kingdom and later the Chin empire. When he died in
1227, he had just finished conquering the northern city of Beijing. By 1241, the Mongols
had conquered all of northern China.
Kublai Khan
The Mongolian Empire, so vast in its reach, was separated into four khanates eached
ruled by a separate khan and overruled by a Great Khan. The Kipchak Khanate, or Golden
Horde, ruled Russia; the Ilkhanate ruled Persia and the Middle East, the Chagatai Khanate
ruled over western Asia, and the Great Khanate controlled Mongolia and China.
In 1260, Kublai Khan, a grandson of Genghis Khan, became Great Khan. Four years
later he relocated his capital from Mongolia to Beijing in northern China, and in 1271 he
adopted a Chinese dynastic name, the Yuan. Kublai Khan had decided to become the
emperor of China and start a new dynasty; within a few short years, the Mongols had
conquered all of southern China.
Initially, the Mongols pretty much ruled over China as bandits, sucking out as much
wealth as they could. But Kublai Khan slowly adopted Chinese political structures and
political theories. In particular, Kublai Khan built a strong central government in order to
cement his authority as a foreign ruler over China. During the T'ang dynasty, the Emperor
had slowly become an absolute ruler; Kublai Khan finished that process and made the
Emperorship absolutely autocratic.
Kublai Khan established his capital at Beijing and built a magnificent palace complex
for himself, the Forbidden City. An architectural triumph, the Forbidden City contained
elements of Arabic, Mongolian, western Asian, and Chinese architectural styles; it also
contained a vast area of Mongolian nomadic tents and a playing field for Mongolian
horsemanship. The Forbidden City of Kublai Khan, then, was in many ways a protected
sanctuary of Mongolian culture. This aloofness from the Chinese exemplified by the
Forbidden City was carried over into almost every other aspect of Mongolian rule. Although
they adopted some aspects of Chinese culture, the Mongols pretty much refused to learn
Chinese. The government, however, was run by Chinese officials selected under the civil
service examination. Communication between the upper and lower reaches of government,
then, was possible only through translators.
Yuan Philosophy
The single most striking aspect of the Yuan is not only the survival of Chinese culture
under a vastly foreign rule, but its singular vitality and growth. To be sure, the Yuan had
steadily adopted Chinese ways of thinking. Before the conquest of China, Yeh-lü Ch'u-ts'ai
(1189-1243), an advisor to the Mongol Khan Ögödei, reformed the financial adminstration
along the lines of its Chinese form. In 1271, Kublai Khan adopted a Chinese dynastic name,
and in 1315, under the Emperor Ayurbarwada (Jen-tsung, 1311-1320), the civil service
examination was reinstituted. All of these indicate a steady sinicization of the Mongolian
rule. At the same time, the Mongols did not impose their own pastoral lifestyle, social
structure, or religion on the Chinese.
The traditional philosophies and religions of China continued unabated under Mongol
rule. Buddhism in particular found a welcome home among the Mongols who had in part
adopted it. Taoism remained vital throughout China, and Confucianism continued. However,
the foreign rule of the Mongols allowed for a certain amount of revolution and renewal in
Chinese thought. Because the Mongols held Confucianism in contempt in the early years of
their rule, the new philosophy of Neo-Confucians, founded in the last century of Sung rule,
took hold in China and eventually eclipsed the older forms of Confucianism. The new
examination system of 1315 was based entirely on Neo-Confucianism thus enshrining it as
the state philosophy for many centuries.
Curiously, the Mongols, though Buddhist, did not really support or patronize
Buddhism, which was largely left to its own devices. They favored Tibetan Buddhism but
really did not financially support the monasteries. When the Mongol rulers decided that too
many Buddhists were escaping military service, they instituted a literacy test on Buddhist
scriptures. Anyone who couldn't demonstrate literacy in the scriptures lost their military
exemption. This put the Mongol rulers in direct conflict with the major Buddhist masters;
the central school of Buddhism was Ch'an, or "Meditation" Buddhism. It stressed the
primacy of the master over scripture and the silent transmission of religious truth. For that
reason, Ch'an Buddhism had no written doctrine. Under pressure from the Mongols, the
Ch'an Buddhists began to record their doctrine in a series formulations called kung-an or, in
Japanese, the koan.
Nonetheless, the Mongol rulers were very preoccupied with religions. Kublai Khan in
particular invited all sorts of faiths to debate at his court. He allowed Nestorian Christians
and Roman Catholics to set up missions, as well as Tibetan lamas, Muslims, and Hindus.
The Yuan period, in fact, is one of vital cultural transmission between China and the rest of
the world. Europe formally met China during the reign of Kublai Khan with the arriuval of
Marco Polo, an Italian adventurer, who served as an official in Kublai's court from
1275-1291. For all this vital interaction with foreign cultures, very little seems to have
rubbed off on Chinese culture. The cultural interaction was not really a cultural exchange,
for the situation was perhaps too unstable. The Yuan and the Chinese had no cultural
direction, no syncretic goal that they were aiming at, so the cultural interaction never really
got beyond the formal practice of simple disagreement and argument.
The Fall of the Yuan
The Yuan was the shortest lived of the major dynasties. From the time that Kublai
occupied Beijing in 1264 to the fall of the dynasty in 1368, a mere hundred years had
passed. Kublai was a highly successful emperor as was his son, but the later Yuan emperors
could not stop the slide into powerlessness. For one thing, the Beijing Khans lost legitimacy
among the Mongols still in Mongolia who thought they had become too Chinese. The
fourteenth century is punctuated by Mongolian rebellions against the Yuan. On the other
hand, the Chinese never accepted the Yuan as a legitimate dynasty but regarded them rather
as bandits or an occupying army. The failure to learn Chinese and integrate themselves into
Chinese culture greatly undermined the Mongol rulers. As with all Chinese dynasties, nature
conspired in the downfall; the Yellow River changed course and flooded irrigation canals
and so brought on massive famine in the 1340's. The decline of the Yuan coincided with
similar declines in all the other Khanates throughout Asia. Finally, a peasant, Chu
Yuan-chang, led a rebel army against the Yuan. He had lost most of his family in the famine,
and had spent part of his life as a monk and then as a bandit leader. He took Beijing in 1368
and the Yuan emperor fled to Shangtu. When he drove the Yuan from Shangtu back to
Mongolia, he declared himself the founder of a new dynasty: the Ming (1369-1644).
Chinese Philosophy
Legalism
Though they are largely considered the great Satans of Chinese history, the group of
philosophers and administrators known as the Legalists represent a first in Chinese
government: the application of a philosophical system to government. And despite their
dismal failure and subsequent demonization throughout posterity, the philosophical and
political innovations they practiced had a lasting effect on the nature of Chinese government.
The basic starting point for the early Confucianists (Confucius and Mencius) was that
human beings were fundamentally good; every human was born with te , or "moral virtue."
The third great Confucianist of antiquity, Hsün Tzu (fl. 298-238 B.C.), believed exactly the
opposite, that all human beings were born fundamentally depraved, selfish, greedy, and
lustful. However, this was not some dark and pessimistic view of humanity, for Hsün Tzu
believed that humans could be made good through acculturation and education (which is the
basic view of society in Europe and America from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries:
humans are fundamentally base and vulgar but can be taught to be good and refined). His
pupil, Han Fei Tzu, began from the same starting point, but determined that humans are
made good by state laws. The only way to check human selfishness and depravity was to
establish laws that bountifully rewarded actions that benefit others and the state and
ruthlessly punish all actions that harmed others or the state. For Confucius, power was
something to be wielded for the benefit of the people, but for Han Fei, the benefit of the
people lay in the ruthless control of individual selfishness. Since even the emperor cannot be
counted on to behave in the interests of the people, that is, since even the emperor can be
selfish, it is necessary that the laws be supreme over even the emperor. Ideally, if the laws
are written well enough and enforced aggressively, there is no need of individual leadership,
for the laws alone are sufficient to govern a state.
When the Ch'in gained imperial power after decades of civil war, they adopted the
ideas of the Legalists as their political theory. In practice, under legalists such as Li Ssu (d.
208 B.C.) and Chao Kao, the Legalism of the Ch'in dynasty (221-207) involved a uniform
totalitarianism. People were conscripted to labor for long periods of time on state projects,
such as irrigation projects or the series of defensive walls in northern China which we know
as the Great Wall; all disagreement with the government was made a capital crime; all
alternative ways of thinking, which the Legalists saw as encouraging the natural
fractiousness of humanity, were banned. The policies eventually led to the downfall of the
dynasty itself after only fourteen years in power. Local peoples began to revolt and the
government did nothing about it, for local officials feared to bring these revolts to the
attention of the authorities since the reports themselves might be construed as a criticism of
the government and so result in their executions. The emperor's court did not discover these
revolts until it was far too late, and the Ch'in and the policies they pursued were discredited
for the rest of Chinese history.
But it is not so easy to dismiss Legalism as this short, anomalous, unpleasant period
of totalitarianism in Chinese history, for the Legalists established ways of doing government
that would profoundly influence later governments. First, they adopted Mo Tzu's ideas about
utilitarianism; the only occupations that people should be engaged in should be occupations
that materially benefitted others, particularly agriculture. Most of the Ch'in laws were
attempts to move people from useless activities, such as scholarship or philosophy, to useful
ones. This utilitarianism would survive as a dynamic strain of Chinese political theory up to
and including the Maoist revolution. Second, the Legalists invented what we call "rule of
law," that is, the notion that the law is supreme over every individual, including individual
rulers. The law should rule rather than individuals, who have authority only to administer the
law. Third, the Legalists adopted Mo Tzu's ideas of uniform standardization of law and
culture. In order to be effective, the law has to be uniformly applied; no-one is to be
punished more or less severely because of their social standing. This notion of "equality
before the law" would, with some changes, remain a central concept in theories of Chinese
government. In their quest for uniform standards, the Ch'in undertook a project of
standardizing Chinese culture: the writing system, the monetary system, weights and
measures, the philosophical systems (which they mainly accomplished by destroying rival
schools of thought). This standardization profoundly affected the coherence of Chinese
culture and the centralization of government; the attempt to standardize Chinese thought
would lead in the early Han dynasty (202 B.C.-9 A.D.) to the fusion of the rival schools into
one system of thought, the so-called Han Synthesis.
Han Synthesis
After the disastrous period of totalitarian government during the Ch'in dynasty
(221-207 B. C.), the early Han dynasty (207 B.C.-9 A.D.) returned to older forms of
imperial government. However, they adopted from the Ch'in the idea of an absolutely central
government and spent most of their period in power trying to regain the same level of
centrality that the Ch'in and the Legalists had so ruthlessly accomplished. This ideology of
central government, along with the Legalists' attempts to standardize Chinese culture and
Chinese philosophy, led thinkers of the Han to attempt to unify all the rival schools of
Chinese thought and philosophy that had developed over the previous three hundred years.
This unification of Chinese into a single coherent system is the most lasting legacy of the
Han dynasty. Earlier, the Legalists attempted to standardize Chinese thought by burning the
books of rival schools and by making it a capital crime to speak of Confucius, Lao Tzu, or
Mo Tzu. The Han thinkers, who thoroughly despised the Legalists and their methods while
adopting many of their goals, took a different approach. Rather than reject alternate ways of
thinking, they took a syncretic approach and attempted to fuse all the rival schools of
thought into a single system. This syncretic project of the early Han is known as the Han
synthesis. In many ways it was similar to the larger project of unifying Chinese government.
The Han philosophers concentrated specifically on the Five Classics, attempting to
derive from them, particularly the I <NOBR>ching ,</NOBR> or Book of Changes, the
principle of the workings of the universe, or Tao. This new theory of the universe they
appended to the I <NOBR>ching ;</NOBR> this appendix explains the metaphysical
workings of the entire universe. Once the overall workings of the unverse were understood,
then every form of thought could be directly related to each other by appealing to the basic
principles of the universe.
The essentials of the Han synthesis are as follows: the universe is run by a single
principle, the Tao, or Great Ultimate. This principle is divided into two opposite principles,
or two principles which oppose one another in their actions, yin and yang. All the opposites
one perceives in the universe can be reduced to one of the opposite forces. In general, these
forces are distinguished by their role in producing creation and producing degeneration:
yang is the force of creation and yin the force of completion and degeneration. The yin and
yang are further differentiated into five material agents, or wu hsing , which both produce
one another and overcome one another. All change in the universe can be explained by the
workings of yin and yang and the progress of the five material agents as they either produce
one another or overcome one another. This is, I need to stress, a universal explanatory
principle. All phenomena can be understood using yin-yang and the five agents: the
movements of the stars, the workings of the body, the nature of foods, the qualities of music,
the ethical qualities of humans, the progress of time, the operations of government, and even
the nature of historical change. All things follow this order so that all things can be related to
one another in some way: one can use the stars to determine what kind of policy to pursue in
government, for instance.
Since the Han thinkers had come up with a tool to explain historical and political
events, the writing of history took off exponentially during the early Han and later. History
became more than a repository of good and bad examples of government, as it had for the
ancient Chinese, it became the working out of the yin-yang or five agents system as it
applied to human affairs. This meant that the writing of history demanded accuracy, that the
facts be laid out with great precision and indifference so that the workings of yin-yang could
be followed precisely. The Han, then, developed a rigorously factual approach to history at a
very early time in Chinese history. In government, the Han thinkers essentially adapted the
Legalist attitude that human beings fundamentally behave badly, but they changed the
doctrine significantly. The Han thinkers believed that people behaved in a depraved way
because they had no choice; economic and social conditions forced them to behave badly.
For at heart, all human beings desire only material well-being; in order to make people
behave virtuously, the government should make it possible that the ends of virtue (the
well-being of others) and the pursuit of individual well-being should be coterminous, that is,
material benefits should accrue to virtuous acts (that's one-half of the Legalist formula). The
emperor would bring this about through two means. First, the emperor and the government
is responsible for setting up conditions in which people can derive material benefit from
productive labor; the stress on productivity, of course, is derived from the Legalists and Mo
Tzu. Second, the emperor can provide an example. It is the job of the emperor to care for the
welfare of his people (Confucianism), yet at the same time, the Emperor should withdraw
from active rule (Taoism). How did the Emperor rule then? By providing a living example
of benevolence. This model of Chinese government would remain dominant well into the
twentieth century.
Wu Husing: The Five Material Agents
The thinkers of the early Han dynasty attempted to fuse many of the strains of
Chinese thought to come up with a syncretic and systematic explanation of the universe, the
changes that occur in the universe, and the relation of the human world to the physical and
divine worlds. Their thought focused on two inventions, both designed to explain the
changing world in much the same way Aristotle's four causes were designed as a universal
explanatory framework for explaining change. The first of these inventions, the principles of
yin and yang, opposite forces of change which complement and cyclically give rise to one
another, operated through the physical mechanism of "the five material agents," or
<NOBR>wu-hsing .
These five material agents are wood-fire-earth-metal-water and are grouped either in
the order by which they produce one another (wood gives rise to fire, fire gives rise to earth,
earth gives rise to metal, metal gives rise to water, water gives rise to earth, etc.) or the order
by which they are conquered by one another: fire is conquered by water, water is conquered
by earth, earth is conquered by wood, wood is conquered by metal, and metal is conquered
by fire, etc. Each of these orders can be used to explain the progression of change in just
about everything. When the modern western physicist talks about the unification of the five
forces (electromagnetic force, strong force, weak force, gravity, color force), that person is
not conceiving these five forces as spilling into or conquering one another; this physicist
would consider it absurd to apply any of these forces to anything other than mechanical or
atomic physics. The five agents, however, is a metaphysical explanation of the progression
of change that is meant to be applied to every phenomenon one encounters in this changing
universe: politics, ethics, music, biology, time, seasons, history, etc.
Associated with the agent wood is the season spring, fire is summer, metal is autumn,
and water is winter. The color green is the color of the wood agent, red the color of fire,
yellow the color of earth, white the color of metal, and black the color of water. In human
anatomy, the spleen is ruled by wood, the lungs by fire, the heart by earth, the liver by metal,
and the kidneys by water. If one has a disease of the liver, it is because the liver is being
overcome by a fire agent or pathogen—since fire is overcome by water, one would treat the
liver pathogen with a water agent. See how the system works?
One could endlessly list how the various categories of phenomenon fit into this
schema. What is important to understand is that the five agents explain everything including
the progress of change in the universe. And the progress that interests most human beings is
history since human history paradoxically appears to be both in human control and out of
human control. The Han thinkers began to reinterpret Chinese history and dynastic
successions by reverting to this model of the five agents; dynastic successions could be
explained by using either the order by which the agents produce one another or the order by
which they are overcome by one another. In the early Han the latter model was adopted,
which aligned the Han dynasty with the agent earth. Since the color associated with earth as
yellow, the Han emperors adopted yellow as their imperial color. With the overthrow of the
Han by Wang Mang, the former model was adopted and lasted as the standard model to this
day. Every dynasty associated itself with a particular agent according to this model and
adopted the colors appropriate to that agent. What this system did was make history a
coherent whole; it also made the future predictable.
Neo-Confucianism
In the Sung dynasty (960-1279), Confucianism became a powerful force of thought in
what is generally called the Sung Confucian Revival. In the centuries preceding, Buddhism
was the dominant force in China; the intellectual centers of China were the Buddhist
temples. But in the Sung, the center of intellectual activity again devolved on the scholar.
The most important of these new scholars was Hu Yüan (993-1059) who almost
single-handedly is responsible for the revival of Confucianism at this time. Like Confucius
and his followers, Hu Yüan is primarily concerned with ethics rather than abstract religious
or metaphysical speculation; his overwhelming concern lies in the concerns of government
and the ethics of day to day living. As a result of this Confucian revival, the government
itself undertook massive reforms according to Confucian principles; part of this reform was
the extension of the examination system for choosing government officials (see your
textbook).
Eventually, this revival would split into two central Confucian schools, the School of
Mind or Intuition, whose greatest thinker was Wang Yang-ming, and the School of
Principle, which culminated in the great thought of Chu Hsi (1130-1200). Both schools
agreed that the world consisted of two realms: the realm of principle (li ) (which we might
call "laws") and the realm of material force(ch'i ). Principle governs material force and
material force makes manifest principle; the ultimate origin of principle is in a single
principle, called the Great Ultimate (tao ch'i ), which emanates from Heaven. The School
of Mind, founded by Ch'eng Hao (1032-1085), emphasized that the human mind is
completely unified and reflects perfectly in itself the principle of the universe. Since the
human mind is perfectly identical with the Universal Mind or the Ultimate Principle, the
duty of any philosopher is to investigate the nature of the human mind to the exclusion of all
other investigations. The School of Principle believed that there was an immaterial and
immutable principle or law that inheres in all things, giving them form, motion, and change.
The mind of humanity is essentially the same as the mind of the universe and can be
perfected to reflect that higher mind; however, the principle inhering in the human mind
applied to everything, so that any investigation into any phenomenon whatsoever would
reveal the principle of the human and the Universal mind. Studying the heavens or an insect
will lead you eventually to that same principle which characterizes the human mind and the
Universal mind. The scholars of the School of Principle believed in empirical investigation,
for they believed that to find the principle of any material process was to find the principle
inherent in all material and intellectual processes.
Yuan Thought and Philosophy
The Mongols
The Mongols were an obscure peoples who lived in the outer reaches of the Gobi
Desert in what is now Outer Mongolia. They were a pastoral and tribal people that did not
really seem to be of any consequence to neighboring peoples. The Mongols were in fact a
group of disunified tribes that would gather regularly during annual migrations; although
they elected chiefs over the tribes at these meetings, they never unified into a single people.
Their religion focused on a sky-god that ruled over nature deities, similar to Japanese Shinto,
and the gods communicated to them through shamans. All that would change however,
under the leadership of a powerful and vigorous leader named Timuchin or Genghis Khan.
Genghis Khan
Timuchin was the son of a poor noble in his tribe. Born sometime in the 1160's, he
gradually unified the disparate Mongol tribes and, in 1206, was elected Genghis Khan, or
"Universal Ruler" (also spelled Chingghis or Jenghiz Khan). He began to vigorously
organize the Mongols into a military force through conscription and taxes on the tribes. With
his small army (no more than one hundred and twenty thousand men), he managed to
conquer far larger armies in densely populated areas.
Genghis Khan was perhaps one of the greatest military innovators in human history,
and his army was perhaps the best-trained horsemen in all of human history. They fought on
horseback with incredible efficiency; they could hit targets with a superhuman precision
while running at a full gallop. Their speed and efficiency struck terror in their opponents
who frequently broke ranks. In addition, Genghis Khan organized his troops into decimal
units (one hundred, one thousand, ten thousand), and would send hand signals through the
fighting to these decimal units. The result in battle was simply mind-boggling. Genghis
Khan could literally move troops around in the heat of a battle as easily as he would move
chess pieces. Moreover, his armies were incredibly mobile and could cover superhuman
distances with numbing speed. Finally, Genghis Khan was ruthless towards people who
resisted the advances of his army. If a town or city fought back, he laid siege to the town
and, at its conclusion, would exterminate its inhabitants. When news of these tactics spread,
Mongol armies easily and successfully took over towns that would surrender as soon as the
Mongols showed their faces. The Mongols literally decimated populations in Western Asia
and China as they advanced. As a result of all these tactics, the Mongol armies spread out
like wildfire. They marched inexorably south into Chin territory and west into Asia and even
Europe. When Genghis Khan died, Mongol armies were poised to conquer Hungary, which
they would have accomplished had not their leader died.
The Mongolian Empire was perhaps the largest empire in human history in terms of
geographical expanse. It extended west to east from Poland to Siberia, and north to south
from Moscow to the Arabian peninsula and Siberia to Vietnam. For all that, Genghis Khan
was primarily interested in conquering China because of its great wealth. While Mongol
armies spread quickly west, Genghis Khan preceded cautiously in expanding southward,
conquering first the northern Tibetan kingdom and later the Chin empire. When he died in
1227, he had just finished conquering the northern city of Beijing. By 1241, the Mongols
had conquered all of northern China.
Kublai Khan
The Mongolian Empire, so vast in its reach, was separated into four khanates eached
ruled by a separate khan and overruled by a Great Khan. The Kipchak Khanate, or Golden
Horde, ruled Russia; the Ilkhanate ruled Persia and the Middle East, the Chagatai Khanate
ruled over western Asia, and the Great Khanate controlled Mongolia and China.
In 1260, Kublai Khan, a grandson of Genghis Khan, became Great Khan. Four years
later he relocated his capital from Mongolia to Beijing in northern China, and in 1271 he
adopted a Chinese dynastic name, the Yuan. Kublai Khan had decided to become the
emperor of China and start a new dynasty; within a few short years, the Mongols had
conquered all of southern China.
Initially, the Mongols pretty much ruled over China as bandits, sucking out as much
wealth as they could. But Kublai Khan slowly adopted Chinese political structures and
political theories. In particular, Kublai Khan built a strong central government in order to
cement his authority as a foreign ruler over China. During the T'ang dynasty, the Emperor
had slowly become an absolute ruler; Kublai Khan finished that process and made the
Emperorship absolutely autocratic.
Kublai Khan established his capital at Beijing and built a magnificent palace complex
for himself, the Forbidden City. An architectural triumph, the Forbidden City contained
elements of Arabic, Mongolian, western Asian, and Chinese architectural styles; it also
contained a vast area of Mongolian nomadic tents and a playing field for Mongolian
horsemanship. The Forbidden City of Kublai Khan, then, was in many ways a protected
sanctuary of Mongolian culture. This aloofness from the Chinese exemplified by the
Forbidden City was carried over into almost every other aspect of Mongolian rule. Although
they adopted some aspects of Chinese culture, the Mongols pretty much refused to learn
Chinese. The government, however, was run by Chinese officials selected under the civil
service examination. Communication between the upper and lower reaches of government,
then, was possible only through translators.
Yuan Philosophy
The single most striking aspect of the Yuan is not only the survival of Chinese culture
under a vastly foreign rule, but its singular vitality and growth. To be sure, the Yuan had
steadily adopted Chinese ways of thinking. Before the conquest of China, Yeh-lü Ch'u-ts'ai
(1189-1243), an advisor to the Mongol Khan Ögödei, reformed the financial administration
along the lines of its Chinese form. In 1271, Kublai Khan adopted a Chinese dynastic name,
and in 1315, under the Emperor Ayurbarwada (Jen-tsung, 1311-1320), the civil service
examination was reinstituted. All of these indicate a steady sinicization of the Mongolian
rule. At the same time, the Mongols did not impose their own pastoral lifestyle, social
structure, or religion on the Chinese.
The traditional philosophies and religions of China continued unabated under Mongol
rule. Buddhism in particular found a welcome home among the Mongols who had in part
adopted it. Taoism remained vital throughout China, and Confucianism continued. However,
the foreign rule of the Mongols allowed for a certain amount of revolution and renewal in
Chinese thought. Because the Mongols held Confucianism in contempt in the early years of
their rule, the new philosophy of Neo-Confucians, founded in the last century of Sung rule,
took hold in China and eventually eclipsed the older forms of Confucianism. The new
examination system of 1315 was based entirely on Neo-Confucianism thus enshrining it as
the state philosophy for many centuries.
Curiously, the Mongols, though Buddhist, did not really support or patronize
Buddhism, which was largely left to its own devices. They favored Tibetan Buddhism but
really did not financially support the monasteries. When the Mongol rulers decided that too
many Buddhists were escaping military service, they instituted a literacy test on Buddhist
scriptures. Anyone who couldn't demonstrate literacy in the scriptures lost their military
exemption. This put the Mongol rulers in direct conflict with the major Buddhist masters;
the central school of Buddhism was Ch'an, or "Meditation" Buddhism. It stressed the
primacy of the master over scripture and the silent transmission of religious truth. For that
reason, Ch'an Buddhism had no written doctrine. Under pressure from the Mongols, the
Ch'an Buddhists began to record their doctrine in a series formulations called kung-an or, in
Japanese, the koan.
Nonetheless, the Mongol rulers were very preoccupied with religions. Kublai Khan in
particular invited all sorts of faiths to debate at his court. He allowed Nestorian Christians
and Roman Catholics to set up missions, as well as Tibetan lamas, Muslims, and Hindus.
The Yuan period, in fact, is one of vital cultural transmission between China and the rest of
the world. Europe formally met China during the reign of Kublai Khan with the arriuval of
Marco Polo, an Italian adventurer, who served as an official in Kublai's court from
1275-1291. For all this vital interaction with foreign cultures, very little seems to have
rubbed off on Chinese culture. The cultural interaction was not really a cultural exchange,
for the situation was perhaps too unstable. The Yuan and the Chinese had no cultural
direction, no syncretic goal that they were aiming at, so the cultural interaction never really
got beyond the formal practice of simple disagreement and argument.
The Fall of the Yuan
The Yuan was the shortest lived of the major dynasties. From the time that Kublai
occupied Beijing in 1264 to the fall of the dynasty in 1368, a mere hundred years had
passed. Kublai was a highly successful emperor as was his son, but the later Yuan emperors
could not stop the slide into powerlessness. For one thing, the Beijing Khans lost legitimacy
among the Mongols still in Mongolia who thought they had become too Chinese. The
fourteenth century is punctuated by Mongolian rebellions against the Yuan. On the other
hand, the Chinese never accepted the Yuan as a legitimate dynasty but regarded them rather
as bandits or an occupying army. The failure to learn Chinese and integrate themselves into
Chinese culture greatly undermined the Mongol rulers. As with all Chinese dynasties, nature
conspired in the downfall; the Yellow River changed course and flooded irrigation canals
and so brought on massive famine in the 1340's. The decline of the Yuan coincided with
similar declines in all the other Khanates throughout Asia. Finally, a peasant, Chu
Yuan-chang, led a rebel army against the Yuan. He had lost most of his family in the famine,
and had spent part of his life as a monk and then as a bandit leader. He took Beijing in 1368
and the Yuan emperor fled to Shangtu. When he drove the Yuan from Shangtu back to
Mongolia, he declared himself the founder of a new dynasty: the Ming (1369-1644).