The New Penguin History of the World (85 page)

The official culture was extraordinarily self-sufficient. Such outside
influences as played upon it did so with little effect and this remains impressive. The fundamental explanation, again, is geographic isolation. China was much further removed from the classical West than the Maurya and Gupta empires. She had little intercourse with it even indirectly, although until the beginning of the seventh century Persia, Byzantium and the Mediterranean depended upon Chinese silk and valued her porcelain. Always, too, China had complicated and close relations with the people of central Asia; yet, once unified, she had for many centuries on her borders no great states with whom relations had to be carried on. This isolation was, if anything, to increase as the centre of gravity of western civilization moved west and north and as the Mediterranean was more and more cut off from East Asia, first by the inheritors of the Hellenistic legacy (the last and most important of which was Sassanid Persia), and then by Islam.

China’s history between the end of the period of Warring States and the beginning of the T’ang in 618 has a chronological backbone of sorts in the waxing and waning of dynasties. Dates can be attached to these, but there is an element of the artificial, or at least a danger of being over-emphatic, in using them. It could take decades for a dynasty to make its power a reality over the whole empire and even longer to lose it. With this reservation, the dynastic reckoning can still be useful. It gives us major divisions of Chinese history down to this century, which are called after the dynasties which reached their peaks during them. The first three which concern us are the Ch’in, the Han, and the Later Han.

The Ch’in ended the disunity of the period of Warring States. They came from a western state still looked upon by some as barbarous as late as the fourth century
BC
. Nevertheless, the Ch’in prospered, perhaps in part because of a radical reorganization carried out by a legalist-minded minister in about 356
BC
; perhaps also because of their soldiers’ use of a new long iron sword. After swallowing Szechuan, the Ch’in claimed the status of a kingdom in 325
BC
. The climax of Ch’in success was the defeat of their last opponent in 221
BC
and the unification of China for the first time under an emperor, and the dynasty which gives the country its name.

Although the Ch’in empire was to last only fifteen years after this, it was a great achievement. China from this time may be considered the seat of a single, self-conscious civilization. There had been earlier signs that such an outcome was likely. Given the potential of their own Neolithic cultures, the stimuli of cultural diffusion and some migration from the north, the first shoots of civilization had appeared in several parts of China before 500
BC
. By the end of the Warring States Period some of them showed marked similarities which offset the differences between them. The political unity achieved by Ch’in conquest over a century was in a sense
the logical corollary of a cultural unification already well under way. Some have claimed that a sense of Chinese nationality can be discerned before 221
BC
; if so, it must have made conquest itself somewhat easier. Fundamental administrative innovations by the Ch’in were to survive that dynasty’s displacement by the Han, who ruled for two hundred years (206
BC
–
AD
9), to be followed after a brief interlude by the almost equally creative Later Han dynasty (
AD
25–220). Though they had their ups and downs, the Han emperors showed unprecedented strength. Their sway extended over almost the whole of modern China, including southern Manchuria and the south-eastern province of Yueh. The Later Han, indeed, went on to create an empire as big as that of their Roman contemporaries. They faced an old threat from Mongolia and a great opportunity towards the south. They handled both with skill aided by the tactical superiority given their armies by the new crossbow. This weapon was probably invented soon after 200
BC
and was both more powerful and more accurate than the bows of the barbarians, who did not for a long time have the ability to cast the bronze locks required. It was the last major achievement of Chinese military technology before the coming of gunpowder.

In Mongolia at the beginning of Han times lived the Hsiung-Nu, whom we have already met as the forerunners of the Huns. The Ch’in had sought to protect their domains on this frontier by unifying a number of existing earthworks into a new Great Wall, to be further elaborated by later dynasties. The Han emperors took the offensive, driving the Hsiung-Nu north of the Gobi desert and then seizing control of the caravan routes of central Asia, and sending armies far west into Kashgaria in the first century
BC
. They even won tribute from the Kusharas, whose own power straddled the Pamirs. To the south, they occupied the coasts as far as the Gulf of Tonkin; Annam accepted their suzerainty and Indo-China has been regarded by Chinese statesmen as part of their proper sphere ever since. To the north-east they penetrated Korea. All this was the work of the later or ‘eastern’ Han whose capital was at Loyang. From there they continued to press forward in Turkestan and raised tribute from the oases of central Asia. One general in
AD
97 may have got as far as the Caspian. No real settlement, though, followed these military successes.

Tentative diplomatic encounters with Rome in Han times suggest that expansion gave China much more contact with the rest of the world. Until the nineteenth century this was in the main by land, and besides the silk trade which linked her regularly with the Near East (caravans were leaving for the West with silk from about 100
BC
), China also developed more elaborate exchanges with her nomadic neighbours. Sometimes this was within the fictional framework of tribute acknowledged in turn by gifts,
sometimes within official monopolies which were the foundation of great merchant families. Nomadic contacts may explain one of the most astonishing works of Chinese art, the great series of bronze horses found in tombs at Wu-Wei. These were only one among many fine works of Han bronze-workers; they evidently broke more readily with tradition than the Han potters, who showed more antiquarian respect for past forms. At a different level, though, Han pottery provides some of the earliest exploitations in art of the subject-matter of the daily life of most Chinese in the form of collections of tiny figures of peasant families and their livestock.

This was a brilliant culture, centred on a court with huge, rich palaces built in the main of timber – unhappily, for the result is that they have disappeared, like the bulk of the Han collections of paintings on silk. Much of this cultural capital was dissipated or destroyed during the fourth and fifth centuries, when the barbarians returned to the frontiers. Failing at last to provide China’s defence from her own manpower, the Han emperors fell back on a policy tried elsewhere, that of bringing within the Wall some of the tribes who pressed on it from outside and then deploying them in its defence. This raised problems of relations between the newcomers and the native Chinese. The Han emperors could not prolong their empire for ever, and after four hundred years China once more dissolved into a congeries of kingdoms.

Some of these had barbarian dynasties, but in this crisis there is observable for the first time China’s striking powers of cultural digestion. Gradually the barbarians were swallowed by Chinese society, losing their own identity and becoming only another kind of Chinese. The prestige which Chinese civilization enjoyed among the peoples of Central Asia was already very great. There was a disposition among the uncivilized to see China as the centre of the world, a cultural pinnacle, somewhat in the way in which the Germanic peoples of the West had seen Rome. One Tatar ruler actually imposed Chinese customs and dress on his people by decree in 500. The central Asian threat was not over; far from it, there appeared in Mongolia in the fifth century the first Mongol empire. None the less, when the T’ang, a northern dynasty, came to receive the mandate of heaven in 618 China’s essential unity was in no greater danger than it had been at any time in the preceding two or three centuries.

Political disunity (the T’ang dynasty was in origin a rebel regime which came out on top) and barbarian invasion had not damaged the foundations of Chinese civilization, which entered its classical phase under the T’ang. Among those foundations, the deepest continued to lie in kinship. Throughout historical times the clan retained its importance because it was the mobilized power of many linked families, enjoying common institutions
of a religious and sometimes of an economic kind. The diffusion and ramification of family influence were all the easier because China did not have primogeniture; the paternal inheritance was usually divided at death. Over a social ocean in which families were the fish that mattered presided one Leviathan, the state. To it and to the family the Confucians looked for authority; those institutions were unchallenged by others, for in China there were no entities such as Church or communes which confused questions of right and government so fruitfully in Europe.

The state’s essential characteristics were all in place by T’ang times. They were to last until this century and the attitudes they built up linger on still. In their making, the consolidating work of the Han had been especially important, but the office of the emperor, holder of the mandate of heaven, could be taken for granted even in Ch’in times. The comings and goings of dynasties did not compromise the standing of the office since they could always be ascribed to the withdrawal of the heavenly mandate. The emperor’s liturgical importance was, if anything, enhanced by the inauguration under the Han of a sacrifice only he could make. Yet his position also changed in a positive sense. Gradually, a ruler who was essentially a great feudal magnate, his power an extension of that of the family or the manor, was replaced by one who presided over a centralized and bureaucratic state. Three hundred prefectures provided its administrative armature.

This had begun a long way back. Already in Chou times a big effort was made to build canals for transport. Great competence in organization and large human resources were required for this and only a potent state could have deployed them. A few centuries later the first Ch’in emperor had been able to link together the existing sections of the Great Wall in 1400 miles of continuous barrier against the barbarians (legendarily, his achievement cost a million lives; true or not, the story is revealing of the way the empire was seen). His dynasty went on to standardize weights and measures and impose a degree of disarmament on its subjects while itself putting in the field perhaps a million soldiers. The Han were able to impose a monopoly of coining and standardized the currency. Under them, too, entry to the civil service by competitive examination began; though it was to fade out again, not to be resumed until T’ang times, it was very important. Territorial expansion had required more administrators. The resulting bureaucracy was to survive many periods of disunion (a proof of its vigour) and remained to the end one of the most striking and characteristic institutions of imperial China. It was probably the key to China’s successful emergence from the era when collapsing dynasties were followed by competing petty and local states which broke up the unity already
achieved. It linked China together by an ideology as well as by administration. The civil servants were trained and examined in the Confucian classics; under the Han, legalism finally lost its grip after a lively ideological struggle. Literacy and political culture were thus wedded in China as nowhere else.

The scholars had been deeply offended by the Ch’in. Though a few of them had been favoured and gave the dynasty advice, there had been a nasty moment in 213
BC
when the emperor turned on scholars who had criticized the despotic and militaristic character of his regime. Books were burned and only ‘useful’ works on divination, medicine or agriculture were spared; more than four hundred scholars perished. What was really at stake is not clear; some historians have seen this attack as an offensive aimed at ‘feudal’ tendencies opposed to Ch’in centralization. If so, it was far from the end of the confusion of cultural and political struggle with which China has gone on mystifying foreign observers even in this century. Whatever the sources of this policy, the Han took a different tack and sought to conciliate the intellectuals.

This led first to the formalization of Confucian doctrine into what quickly became an orthodoxy. The canonical texts were established soon after 200
BC
. True, Han Confucianism was a syncretic matter; it had absorbed much of legalism. But the important fact was that Confucianism had been the absorbing force. Its ethical precepts remained dominant in the philosophy which formed China’s future rulers. In
AD
58 sacrifices to Confucius were ordered in all government schools. Eventually, under the T’ang, administrative posts were confirmed to those trained in this orthodoxy. For over a thousand years it provided China’s governors with a set of moral principles and a literary culture doggedly acquired by rote-learning. The examinations they underwent were designed to show which candidates had the best grasp of the moral tradition discernible in the classical texts as well as to test mechanical abilities and the capacity to excel under pressure. It made them one of the most effective and ideologically homogeneous bureaucracies the world has ever seen and also offered great rewards to those who successfully made the values of Confucian orthodoxy their own.

The official class was in principle distinguished from the rest of society only by educational qualification (the possession of a degree, as it were). Most civil servants came from the landowning gentry, but they were set apart from them. Their office once achieved by success in the test of examination, they enjoyed a status only lower than that of the imperial family, and great material and social privileges besides. Officials’ duties were general rather than specific, but they had two crucial annual tasks, the
compilation of the census returns and the land registers on which Chinese taxation rested. Their other main work was judicial and supervisory, for local affairs were very much left to local gentlemen acting under the oversight of about two thousand or so district magistrates from the official class. Each of these lived in an official compound, the
yamen
, with his clerks, runners and household staff about him.