Ancient Chinese Warfare (11 page)

Based on the oft-suggested estimate that the average five-person household occupied roughly 155 square meters of space,
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20,000 families may have lived within the confines of Cheng-chou’s approximately 3 million square meters. Even excluding the large numbers of slaves,
artisans attached to the workshops, and farmers tending small suburban gardens who would have been housed outside the walls, this translates into 100,000 people. If each family furnished one person for labor service, voluntarily or otherwise, the requisite number could easily have been assembled.

Without further replication efforts, these projections must be deemed highly conjectural. A number of other calculations have resulted in estimates that range from 5 through 8 to 12.5 years for the work at Cheng-chou.
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Even though still requiring massive amounts of labor and great organizational effort, the more reasonable assumption of 0.5 cubic meter per day per worker would significantly cut the likely time from 18 years, depending on how many were actually employed in digging.
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Several complicating factors and technical complexities that stem from the nature of the soil, the design and shape of the wall, and the wall’s exterior surface could also adversely affect the construction rate. Soft, loose soil facilitates excavation work but makes pounding more difficult and complicates the preparation of a sufficiently strong and stable foundation. (Deep excavations for ditches and moats also pose significant risks because of the danger of collapse.) Core walls were sometimes first prepared; many older walls were expanded more than once, often right out over previously excavated defensive ditches or moats; and exterior knee walls were added for strength and protection.

Neither stone, which would have required enormous preparatory work including quarrying, dimensioning, and transporting but constituted an essentially impervious surface (including to enemy diggers), nor mud blocks or bricks were employed for wall facings in the Neolithic period and Shang dynasty. However, sometimes pebbles gathered from nearby rivers and embedded in the face provided minimal additional protection against water’s scouring action, and readily collected stones were employed by peoples in the Northern complex.

In response to these issues, external threats, increasing experience, rising population, and greater wealth, the defensive measures implemented at every level not only became more extensive and complex over time, but also more regularized. The first ditches, whose dirt was often used to raise the entire community or provide early building foundations,
evolved into ditches conjoined with internal ramparts created by simply mounding up the excavated soil. Eventually it was discovered that pounding the earth as it was piled up would compact and harden it, improving its defensive characteristics while simultaneously raising its resilience.

The need for excavated foundations was quickly realized and the practice of layering quickly emerged, possibly because pounding the soil as it is laid down proved the only effective method. Experience taught that intermixing layers of soil with different characteristics could produce a stronger, more stable wall, a practice that was applied to the excavated foundations and the massive building foundations then being constructed. Thereafter, Chinese walls and platforms consistently show improvement in the uniformity and number of their layers right through Erh-li-t’ou and Erh-li-kang, when thin layers of ten to eleven centimeters were routinely pounded to uniform consistency with bundles of small rounded tools. The placement of additional dry ditches and moats on the exterior and occasionally interior ultimately produced the integrated defensive systems visible in the late Hsia and early Shang at such sites as Yen-shih and Cheng-chou.

The earliest fortified towns generally assumed two basic shapes, circular and rectangular, though portions of a wall’s course might be modified to resolve or exploit abnormalities in the terrain, resulting in trapezoids, crushed corners, and odd indentations. In addition, ancient fortified sites invariably took advantage of heights provided by tumuli and mounds and exploited natural depressions, lakes, marshes, and flowing water. In fact, one of the primary conceptualizations of Chinese military science—that configurations of terrain convey strategic advantages—had already been recognized and was being actualized, at least in rudimentary form, in the Lungshan period.
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Moreover, gate openings were fixed neither in number nor in position, but located largely in accord with exigency despite a preference for centering on each of the walls. With the addition of inner citadels or royal quarters demarked by internal walls, the final form of the Chinese capital, one theoretically distinguished by inner and outer walls rather than the thickness of the fortifications or integrity of the moat-encircled defensive compound, would be realized.

4.

T
HE EXISTENCE OF THE HSIA, traditionally regarded as the first of China’s three great founding dynasties and one of the chief progenitors of Chinese civilization, has not only long been questioned but also vehemently rejected by scholars caught up in the skeptical spirit of the past century. Although it is commonly asserted that the Hsia was a literate culture that kept records on bamboo slips, a crucial step in creating a rudimentary administrative system, none have been found, and little other evidence for writing has been recovered apart from a number of recurring symbols that appear to be forerunners of certain common Chinese characters.
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Moreover, despite the evidence for an obviously vibrant civilization having existed at Erh-li-t’ou, no written references to the Hsia appear prior to the Chou, including in Shang oracular inscriptions, where some boastful hints might be expected.
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When not rejected outright, the Hsia has therefore been generally ignored, with even the comprehensive
Cambridge History of Ancient China
commencing its study with the Shang, the earliest dynasty for which literate materials such as oracle bones and bronze inscriptions have been recovered.

However, other historians have concluded that the increasingly massive and detailed archaeological evidence uncovered in recent decades incontrovertibly indicates that the Hsia not only constituted a powerful political entity, but also controlled or otherwise influenced a substantial area in central China from an original administrative center around Mt. Sung in Chung-yüeh.
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Once they emerged as a dynastic state, their core domain ranged from Yü-hsi in Henan, especially the Luo-yang plains and Yi, Luo, and (the upper reach of the) Ying river areas, through Chin-nan in Shanxi and westward into the eastern part of Kuan-chung, including the Fen, Hui, and Su river basins, as well as
northern parts of Hubei and southern parts of Hebei.
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Moreover, by identifying the Hsia with the late Lungshan, Hsin-chai, and Erh-li-t’ou cultural layers, these historians believe an essentially reliable history can be compiled that coherently integrates Warring States written accounts of the thirteen generations and sixteen kings with site reports and recovered artifacts.
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The resulting portrait depicts a transition from scattered Neolithic settlements to a few dominant fortified towns accompanied by social stratification, economic differentiation, and gradual immersion in warfare of unspecified character. Thus, given the current startling discoveries and plethora of references to the Hsia throughout Chinese history, it seems more reasonable to assume that a proto-state known as the Hsia emerged through vigorous, aggressive action than to dogmatically assert its nonexistence and then examine the era’s military history. Moreover, despite being dubious or perhaps even worthless, it is also necessary to scrutinize traditional historical accounts and conceptions because of their impact on military and political thought in subsequent ages.

Interesting myths and fascinating legends about Yü and the origins of the Hsia, largely irrelevant to the study of China’s military history, abound. However, Yü has always been accorded universal recognition as the Hsia’s first monarch, founder of the line that ruled the state and controlled its domain until the Shang finally ousted the tyrant Chieh. Some accounts identify him as a fourth-generation descendant of the Yellow Emperor, thereby implying a sanctified authority rivaling the other two Sage emperors, Yao and Shun, but most assert that Shun voluntarily ceded the emperorship to him because he was the most virtuous and qualified person in the realm.
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Yü, however, apparently contravened this virtuous precedent by passing the throne to his son and thus established clan rule marked by lineal descent, an act for which his detractors have condemned him. In response, his admirers have rationalized, if not justified, this blatantly selfish lapse by claiming that the people voluntarily flocked to his son rather than to Yi, the righteous figure to whom he purportedly yielded, or that the mandate had been decreed by Heaven and therefore no man, not even Yü, could contravene it.
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No matter how disparate and steeped in myth these depictions may be, the Hsia’s founding figures have always been defined by their achievements in water management and China’s fabled bureaucracy envisioned as originating in the quest to master the associated administrative difficulties.
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Undertaken at Shun’s behest, Yü’s ultimate, perhaps sole, achievement was taming the floods that periodically inundated the Yellow River basin by planning and overseeing the construction of ditches and canals to disperse them. His method differed radically from that of his father, Kun, whom Emperor Yao, Shun’s predecessor, had similarly saddled with taming the rampant waters but who had failed because his levees and dams ultimately impeded their flow, resulting in disaster whenever seasonal surges from rain or melting snow burst through them. The dikes also caused silt to be deposited in the river’s channel rather than allowing it to refertilize the fields, blocking the flow and raising the riverbed.
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According to the classic account found in
Mencius
:

Since water has always been crucial for irrigation and daily life, as well as exploitable for defense and occasionally offense, the Hsia’s entwinement with hydraulic engineering may have many unexplored implications for military history.

Even though the techniques for constructing earthen fortifications were already well advanced in the Yangshao and Lungshan periods, because he tried to constrain the rampant waters by “walling” them with dikes, Kun has traditionally been credited with building the first walls and sometimes condemned for thereby antagonizing the people. For example, in a chapter devoted to warning about the perils entailed in abandoning the Great Tao (synonymous with the true, natural Way) and instead relying on the “minor techniques” that governments and administrations invariably employ to their own detriment, the
Huai-nan Tzu
observed:

In the same spirit the passage concludes: “When armor is made solid, weapons become sharp; when walls are erected, assaults are born.” This sort of thinking represents a divergent but crucial trend in Chinese political thought that believed artifice provokes retaliation and warfare and therefore envisioned a return to primary Virtues implemented in selfless fashion as the only solution.
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Although legends clearly speak of three Sage emperors, Yü may simply have been an emblematic clan figure who symbolized the tribe’s devotion to water management, a focus that resulted in ameliorating dramatic river fluctuations, reducing the catastrophes that apparently plagued the realm from 4000 to 3000 BCE while increasing agricultural productivity.
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Although a millennium or more before Yü’s purported era, this would be particularly appropriate considering that the Hsia’s progenitor has always been said to be Hou Chi, Lord of the Millet, and the Hsia itself is thought to have emerged through agricultural strength,
including perhaps irrigation measures that ensured surpluses sufficient to support diverting vital manpower to military tasks.

Yü’s achievements were naturally magnified as these legends evolved in the Warring States and beyond, resulting in the evolution of alternative interpretations. For example, Yü’s father had supposedly been banished, imprisoned, or even executed for failing in this same task despite laboring for nine exhausting years, but his fate may have stemmed from other causes, such as irreverently criticizing Yao for ceding the throne to Shun, or may simply represent the result of two clans, both descended from the Yellow Emperor, clashing. Remarkably, Yü still accepted Shun’s mandate to undertake the onerous task, thereby submitting to the newly established emperor and acting to reduce the people’s misery:
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