Download 16. China`s Influence on Korea and Indo

China’s Influence on Korea and Indo-China
What is a barbarian? Each culture possesses its own definition, and the usual
answer starts where the culture’s territory and ethnicity or ethnicities end. In other
words, barbarian usually meant for one culture any other culture that seemed to be
inferior in the slightest regard. A curious era in East Asian history, however, occurred
when the peoples of Japan, Korea, and Indo-China held Chinese civilization in such high
regard that their definition of barbarian meant “unlike the Chinese.” After centuries of
contact with China, these cultures had attained a level of sophistication of trade,
technology, social and political organization, and even philosophical and religious ideas
that proved they viewed China as the best model. That is not to say that any of China’s
neighbors in East Asia liked being dominated by China. While China influenced
Japanese culture heavily, China ruled both Korea and Indo-China, or Vietnam, directly
for centuries. These latter two cultures will be our main focus for this exercise, and while
they began as simple agricultural societies, the very sophistication they received from
Chinese influence compelled both to strive for independence from China. Even today the
modern nations of North and South Korea and Vietnam bear the signs of having fought to
maintain their societal distinctions while overawed by their giant ancient neighbor.
Chinese influence was nowhere else so long nor so profound as in Korea (even
though rule of Vietnam lasted much longer). Of course geography played a role in this
connection because China and Korea are, well, connected. Koreans are ethnically
distinct, however, a fact that led indigenous Korean rulers to establish dynasties with a
will to keeping their peninsula secure. Koreans originated out of eastern Siberia and
Manchuria rather than out of Mongolia or Asia Minor making them have more in
common, ethnically, with American Indians than with the Chinese. They arrived on the
Korean Peninsula and settled down by the 4th century B. C. having acquired agricultural
and metallurgical knowledge from, of course, China.
The earliest Korean dynasty, the Choson, was conquered by the Han Emperor Wu
Di in 109 B. C. Wu Di immediately began colonizing Korea with Chinese settlers, and
their stay of around four centuries was the beginning of the transmission of Chinese
culture. While some Koreans resisted this influence, Buddhism became the key link
especially after the fall of the Han. The process of Sinification, or the adoption of
Chinese culture, was begun. Buddhism was the impetus to maintaining this connection
as Korean rulers sponsored the importation of Buddhist art and architecture (pagodas)
and the exportation of Korean scholars to China and even to India. At this point Chinese
writing was imposed on the Korean language as was the pattern of Chinese law. Young
Korean scholars studied Confucian texts while their professors focused more on Chinese
history than that of their own society. At this stage the only thing that kept the Korean
monarch from adopting a Chinese bureaucratic system based on Confucian studies was
the fact that Korean aristocrats didn’t want to cooperate.
Three indigenous Korean kingdoms divided the peninsula after the birth of Christ.
The kingdoms of Koguryo, Paekche, and Silla could resist Sui China but their division
kept them from unifying enough to resist Tang China. The Tang figured out that the
three kingdoms could be conquered by allying with one, Silla, to the destruction of the
other two. The alliance was an uneasy one, however, and warfare broke out in which the
Tang were surprised to meet stiff resistance. The independence of the Silla inspired
revolts in the conquered provinces, and in frustration the Tang simply let the Silla
dynasty rule Korea by 668 A. D. as long as the Silla monarch paid tribute and submitted
to being a vassal of the Tang emperor. Korea was thus at last indirectly united, a
condition Koreans maintained until conquered by the Japanese in the 20th century.
The Silla dynasty and the Koryo dynasty that followed eagerly sought to emulate
Tang China. This Sinification included sending Korean scholars to observe the Tang
Emperor’s court and to pick up books and fashions in both dress and manners. Under
these circumstances Korean emissaries actually kowtowed to the Chinese emperors, a
gesture where the ambassadors gave a series of ritualized bows with their faces all the
way on the ground. Submission guaranteed peace but also a reciprocity in gifts not
unlike the obligations of American Indian chiefs (the Tang Emperor had to give better
gifts than he was given). This symbolic and actual tribute opened the channels of cultural
exchange even deeper. As Silla monarchs tried to make their capital city, Kumsong, a
copy of the Forbidden City in China, they fully imposed the Confucian examination
system on Korean nobles who wanted to rise.
Confucianism itself, however, was not as favored as Buddhism. Buddhist
monasteries became major institutions in Korea and transmitters of Sinified religious art.
Buddhist monks crowded Kumsong and taught the members of the royal family as well
as of the best aristocratic families. Korean art and architecture, therefore, was first
copied from but then in some cases improved upon Chinese designs. The Silla- and
Koryo-era porcelain and stoneware, especially, were considered even by the Chinese to
be admirable masterworks and collected even in China. In printing, Korean artisans
learned wood block printing and the use of metal moveable type from the Chinese, but
improved on the use of metal type by sticking the letters with honey during the printing
process. The result was finer printing and longer-lasting typeset pieces.
All this refined cultural exchange was restricted almost entirely to the aristocratic
Korean elite, however. While the upper classes imported special inks and fine teas with
which to carry on their cultural refinements, tons of Korean raw materials were shipped
to China in the form of forest products and copper. Those Koreans who secured the raw
materials for shipment lived nearly like slaves. The classes of Koreans below the elite,
including merchants and bankers, existed mainly to serve the upper classes. While
workers in the bureaucracy had a little status, most Koreans were peasants or miners, the
“low born.” Buddhism, which was used to elevate the lives of the elite, was used to
pacify the common people with festivals and promises of a better afterlife.
Local revolts were prompted, however, when common Koreans realized just how
much their overlords were focused on their own pleasures. While all of these revolts
were put down brutally by armies in the service of the ruling class, they did weaken both
the Silla and Koryo dynasties. If the aristocratic families ever quarreled among
themselves while there were some revolts while there were some outside invaders like,
say, the Mongols, a dynasty went down. The Mongols came in 1231 and caused 150
years of turmoil, but then the Yi dynasty rose in Korea by 1392 and lasted incredibly
until 1910 when the outside invaders were the Japanese, also bent on removing raw
materials from their neighbors across the Sea of Japan.
Now, to Indo-China, or more familiarly Vietnam. Even this term for the people
of Vietnam was given to them by the Chinese—it means “people in the south.” The Qin
Dynasty made the first contacts as it expanded south and traded silk with people from the
tropical forests for exotic products like ivory, tortoise shells, pearls, peacocks, aromatic
woods, etc. Bolstered by this exchange, the Viets founded a kingdom that blended with
their neighbors the Khmer and Tai peoples through intermarriage. Linguistic and
sociological distinctions marked Southeast Asians as different from the Chinese. Spoken
Vietnamese is not related to Chinese. The people of the Viet kingdom emphasized
village autonomy but also the nuclear family rather than the clan relationships so
powerful in Chinese culture. Vietnamese women wore long skirts as opposed to the
black pants worn by Chinese women (commoners). The Vietnamese enjoyed
cockfighting, gum-chewing, and teeth-blackening, all practices that repulsed the Chinese.
Even when the Vietnamese were conquered by the Chinese and converted to Buddhism,
their Buddhism was different, more fervent, and their art, poetry, and other literature
retained distinctly Vietnamese attributes unlike the nearly wholesale Sinification of
Korean cultural expression.
Then came the Han. For a while the Han emperor was willing to exact tribute
from the Vietnamese, but by 111 B. C. conquering them seemed more expedient. This
attempt at assimilation was permitted by shrewd Vietnamese elites because it was
obvious their people had much to learn from Chinese technology, political organization,
and other ideas. Vietnamese were drawn into the bureaucratic Confucian system and
went to schools to learn how to write Chinese characters and to read Chinese classics.
Vietnam introduced Chinese agricultural techniques which when practiced in their
country made their farms the most productive in Southeast Asia. The Vietnamese
therefore became accustomed to a high population density. Interestingly, the Vietnamese
employed Chinese political and military techniques to expand their control west and
south, something the Koreans could not do since they were cornered on a peninsula. This
expansion was little noticed by China, and the Chinese had every reason to believe they
had civilized some more barbarians who were now peacefully assimilated.
Sporadic revolts belied Vietnamese contentment. The disdain Chinese travelers
expressed for what they considered to be still a backward people did not help matters. In
fact, whenever a Vietnamese noble called on common Vietnamese to help him rise up
and throw out the invaders they always came. The most famous of these uprisings was
even led by women, the Trung sisters, in 39 A. D. The clan system buttressed by
Confucian teachings along with ancestor worship that had begun to creep into
Vietnamese society was considered by local women to be a step down from what they
enjoyed as nearly-equal status in their jungle villages. Especially odious to them was the
inevitable polygamy that accompanied Chinese clan life. All of these resentments are
thought to have inspired the Trungs who were children of a deposed nobleman.
The same difficulties that plagued the USA in its war in Vietnam troubled the
Chinese administrators who tried to hang on there for China. Jungles, mountains, tigers,
snakes—all the things you would find in any Vietnam War film—were there when the
Chinese were there, too. Any weakness in a Chinese dynasty was capitalized on by
asserting of independence by Vietnamese uprisings. During the chaos in China that
followed the fall of the Tang in 907, all of the collective animosity of the Vietnamese was
channeled into one massive rebellion that lasted until 939 when they finally won their
independence. While the Mongols and the Ming dynasty of China tried to gain Vietnam
back, they were repulsed and Vietnam remained independent, dominating its neighbors in
good Chinese fashion, until the 19th century.
The Vietnamese had learned well. Starting with the Le dynasty that lasted from
980 to 1009, Vietnamese rulers built stone palaces in cities patterned after Beijing. A
Vietnamese bureaucracy was an abbreviated version of the Chinese bureaucracy that had
been imposed on them complete with civil service exams based on the teachings of
Confucius, of course. Localism, however, held Vietnamese dynasties in check. A return
to the dominance of village-level loyalties even sparked uprisings by the common people.
The devotion peasants had toward Buddhist monks set these two great Asian ideological
systems against each other as the monks struggled against the Confucian scholars over
the welfare of the people. As a result, no Vietnamese dynasty ever accomplished the type
of control possessed by their Chinese prototypes.
Predictably, the level of sophistication produced by Sinification in Vietnam made
the Vietnamese look down on and seek to dominate their neighbors, even the Khmers
with whom they had originally intermarried. The Khmers, the ancestors of modern
Cambodians, and another people known as Chams were both dismissed now as “nude
savages” with whom the Vietnamese alternately waged war or traded according to their
whim. The wars were most successful against the Chams to the south, so from the 11th
through the 18th century Vietnam expanded its influence in that direction. With Chineseinspired military organization and technology the Vietnamese pushed the Chams into the
mountains and pushed the Khmer out of the Mekong Delta into what is today Cambodia.
As Vietnam spread south away from Hanoi, an eerie similarity arose to American
culture in that northerners began to look at their southern brethren as slower of speech
and less energetic, especially as southern Vietnamese again intermarried with the Khmer
and now even with the Chams. As early as the 16th century a southern family, the
Nguyen, rose to challenge the Trinh dynasty of the north. The Nguyen founded a capital
in Hue that dominated the rice agriculture around the Mekong and Red rivers, and a civil
war commenced that lasted at least two centuries, neither side able to dominate the other.
While thus occupied the Vietnamese failed to notice the approach of the French who
came to colonize all of what became known as French Indo-China bringing Roman
Catholicism with them. Herein lay the history that allowed a North-Vietnamese general
in the Vietnam War against the United States to ask Americans, “How long do you want
to fight?” He said the Vietnamese people had been fighting outside invaders their entire
history from the Chinese to the French to the Japanese, then back to the French and then
to the United States. Now Vietnam is independent again although it has imported yet
another cultural idea from China that has entirely shaped its society, communism.
Chinese culture obviously exerted profound influence on East Asia for centuries.
While certain geographical and sociological differences filtered Chinese influence, a
staggeringly sweeping pattern of civilized life was produced and shared by millions of
people, especially through the influence of Buddhism (which even created ties with the
culture of India). The Chinese dominated Korea for a relatively short time in comparison
to their millennium of control over Vietnam, yet one might say the Vietnamese remained
more Vietnamese than the Koreans remained Korean. Yet when the Vietnamese
expanded so far south as to run into more direct contact with Indian culture, they
retreated and reinforced their devotion to Chinese norms. The Chinese model also made
East Asians, including Koreans, Vietnamese, and Japanese suspicious of the culture of
the West, at first. Some East Asians would cling to China; some embraced the West.
You guessed it—tension, conflict, and war were the inevitable result.