Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

14

China’s Scholar-Elite,

Lixue

and the Culture of the Brush

The Greek name for the Chinese was Seres, from which the Latin word serica derives, meaning silk. The writer Pliny was just one who railed against the luxurious indulgences of his stylish contemporaries, complaining that enormous quantities of Chinese silk had entered Rome. Chinese textiles travelled west along the so-called Silk Roads from at least 1200 BC because, until AD 200, or thereabouts, only the Chinese knew how to process silkworms.⁷ As late as the seventh century travellers, including monks, carried silk rolls to use as money in the case of medical emergencies. According to legend, the Chinese lost their monopoly on silk production when a Chinese bride smuggled a cocoon out in her hair when she travelled to marry a central Asian prince. Certainly, by the fourth or fifth centuries, silk was made in Persia, India and Byzantium, as well as China, though the Chinese kept their competitive edge because they produced more densely woven silks with more complex weaves.¹

As this implies, by medieval times, the most intellectually sophisticated country in the world, and the most technologically advanced, was China. In fact, China’s pre-eminence was probably greater during the Song dynasty (960–1279) than at any other time. Joseph Needham (1900–1995), the Cambridge scholar who devoted his life to the study of early science in China, said in his massive history of the subject that ‘Whenever one follows any specific piece of scientific or technological history in Chinese literature, it is always at the Song dynasty that one finds the major focal point.’ However, as Endymion Wilkinson points out, this may have something to do with the fact that the development of printing (which we shall soon come to) ensured that more works survive from Song times than any period previously.² One sign of the sophistication and success of China was her population, which was in excess of 70 million in the twelfth century and may have been 100 million a century later, almost double what it was in Europe.³

Since the marvels of the Han age, covered in Chapter 8, several other dynasties had come and gone. China had been divided by barbarian nomads and reunified, divided and reunified again, the great walls and canals that lined the countryside had been built by conscript labour and a measure of stability and brilliance achieved under the Tang dynasty (618–906), whose emperors had ruled, been deposed, and restored, thanks to their massive eighth-century horse-breeding programme for the cavalry, which provided the backbone of their army before the invention of gunpowder. During the dynasty of the two Songs (960–1234 in the north, lasting until 1279 in the south), China reached the edge of modern science and brought about a minor industrial revolution. ‘No country could compare in the application of natural knowledge to practical human needs.’⁴

A number of ideas and impressive technological inventions contributed to this sophistication of the Songs, the first of which was paper, which ultimately led to printing. The Chinese had writings as early as the Zhang dynasty (1765–1045 BC). These consisted of animal bones or tortoise-shells which had been cracked with red-hot pokers, for the purposes of divination, and on which written characters had been inscribed, interpreting the cracks in the bones. Around 3,500 different characters are found on these early scapulae and shells (modern Chinese has about 80,000 characters), which would on occasions be bound together. This practice gradually gave way to books made of bamboo slips, written on with a kind of stylus and using a form of varnish to write with. These too were bound together with strings or thongs. Confucius himself used books of this kind when he was studying the I Ching and he was apparently so earnest a pupil, so hard on his books, that he broke the thong three times.⁵ According to Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, in their history of the book, the oldest Chinese books to survive were excavated at the beginning of the twentieth century in the deserts of central Asia, where they were found to consist of strips of wood and bamboo on which were written vocabularies, calendars, medical prescriptions and official records relating to the daily life of the garrisons guarding the Silk Road. Written in ink brush, they dated from AD 98–137. However, since then books of wooden slips have been discovered in ancient tombs dating from as early as the fifth century BC.

Silk sometimes replaced bamboo – it was lighter, stronger, more resilient, and it could be wrapped around a rod, saving space. In this way, the Chinese word for ‘roll’ became the word for ‘book’ (as happened with volumen in Latin). But silk wasn’t cheap and the Chinese were always on the look-out for alternatives. By a process of trial and error, using at first silk waste, then other forms of refuse (linen rags, old fishing nets, hemp, mulberry bark) they arrived at a paste which, when dry, would take writing. It was the practice then to attribute all innovations to the emperor’s court and so the invention of paper was formally awarded to the director of the imperial workshops, the eunuch Cai Lun (d. AD 121). He it was who wrote the report to the emperor in AD 105 in which the invention of paper is first mentioned, but it must have been in use for some time by then, after being developed by some lesser soul whose name was never recorded.⁶

As it replaced silk (for all but luxury books), paper was produced in sheets about 24 cm × 45 cm (91/2 × 18 in). The sheets were glued together to form long strips which could be rolled around rods. But the practice was cumbersome: if some specific passage were sought, the entire book had to be unrolled. This probably accounts for the division of books into leaves, though many of the sacred books of India had been written on palm leaves, bound together with twine, so a model was to hand. In an ancient Chinese library excavated at Dunhuang, where 15,000 manuscripts dating from the fifth to tenth centuries were found, different types of book were discovered walled up together. Besides rolls there were what the Chinese called ‘whirling books’. These had their vertical edges glued together and they were stored like the folds of an accordion, and opened out in zig-zag formation. This arrangement is still used for calligraphy, certain sacred Buddhist or Taoist texts, and books of paintings, but the edges tore easily and so the next step was made – to fold the sheets down the middle and sew the spines together. This left the leaves free to flutter at will, and gave these books their Chinese name – ‘butterfly books’.⁷

With the coming of paper, so the invention of printing was not far behind. By the time paper arrived, it had long been the practice in China, as elsewhere, to engrave classical texts on great slabs of stone – stelae – in order to preserve the texts as accurately as possible, as well as making them accessible to the public. This led to a practice of carving the texts in reverse so that pilgrim/tourists could take away rubbings. This was of course printing in all but name. But it was in fact the development of the seal engraved in relief which led most directly to the printing of books. By the beginning of the first century AD, it had become the fashion in China for the pious to have seals engraved in relief, often containing lengthy religious texts, prayers and even portraits of the Buddha. These seals sometimes adorned the cells of Buddhist monks but the important breakthrough seems to have come from the capacity for paper to take an impression, something that didn’t happen with silk. Such impressions would have provided people with the reverse images needed to produce proper printed pages that could be read. Experimentation proliferated and, from discoveries made, the earliest woodblock engraved in relief and in reverse is a small portrait of the Buddha discovered by Paul Pelliot, the great French prehistorian, near Kuche in Sinkiang, and dating from the mid-eighth century AD. The oldest printed book in the world is now in the British Library, a long roll printed by a xylographic (woodblock) process in 868. It is a Buddhist text and has a beautiful frontispiece, of such quality that it suggests the technique was already advanced. A book recently discovered in Korea may be older, but for the moment scholars cannot decide whether its origin is Korean or Chinese.⁸

Block printing seems to have emerged along the banks of the Yangtze river, from where it spread, mainly by religious authorities to preserve canonical writings. In AD 932, Feng Dao prepared a report for the emperor, in which he recommended the use of block printing to preserve the classics because the dynasty then in power did not have the financial means to do the job in the traditional way – namely by engraving a series of ‘classics on stone’. The new project was very successful, encouraging literacy, and between 932 and 953 most of the existing literature was put into print. This sanctified the new technology, and Feng Dao was credited with the invention of printing. As before, with Cai Lun and paper, other, earlier anonymous souls were really responsible.

Experimentation continued but early attempts at copper engraving and the use of movable type were not successful. The first real attempts to make movable type came in the eleventh century and are attributed to Bi Sheng, a blacksmith and alchemist who used a soft paste to make the letters, which he then hardened in fire. They were then attached to an iron plate with a glue made of wax and resin which congealed when cold. By reheating, the letters could be detached and rearranged for a new text.⁹ Hard woods, lead, copper and tin were also tried as founts for the letters but were never very successful. In one treatise of the time it was suggested that the characters be stored according to sound: that is, characters which rhymed would be boxed together.¹⁰

It is now clear, however, that printing with movable type went ahead fastest in China’s neighbour, Korea. This was due to the intervention of a benevolent ruler, King Sejong, who in 1403 issued an extraordinary decree, which sounds enlightened even today and must have been extremely so at the time. ‘To govern well,’ he said, ‘it is necessary to spread knowledge of the laws and the books, so as to satisfy reason and to reform men’s evil nature; in this way peace and order may be maintained. Our country is in the east beyond the sea and books from China are scarce. Wood-blocks wear out easily and besides, it is difficult to engrave all the books in the world. I want letters to be made from copper to be used for printing so that more books will be made available. This would produce benefits too extensive to measure. It is not fitting that the people should bear the cost of such work, which will be borne by the Treasury.’ Some 100,000 sorts (letters) were cast as a result of this edict, and ten more founts were made during the course of the century, the first three of which (1403, 1420 and 1434), we now know, preceded the invention of printing by Gutenberg.¹¹ But neither the Korean nor Chinese system seems to have travelled west quickly enough to influence the invention of printing in Europe.¹²

Though a good deal of the Song renaissance depended on the wider availability of texts, the Chinese themselves never regarded printing as the revolutionary process it was considered in Europe. One important reason for this was that the Chinese language did not possess an alphabet; instead it consisted of thousands of different characters. Movable type did not therefore confer the same advantages. Furthermore, Europeans in China during Renaissance and Reformation times noted that woodblock carvers could engrave a page of Chinese characters just as quickly as a European compositor could set up a page of, say, Latin text. And there were two other advantages to woodblock printing: the blocks could be kept and stored, for later editions; and they could be carved just as easily for illustrations as for text. Chinese books therefore had illustrations, and in colour, several hundred years before books in the West.¹³

Printing raises the issue of writing and language. The Chinese language, and script, are based on rather different ideas from, say, the Indo-European languages. Although there are many dialects of Chinese, Mandarin – the native tongue of north China – comprises about 70 per cent of what is spoken today. All its characters are monosyllabic so that, for example, in Mandarin ‘China’ is Zhong guo, which literally means ‘middle country’. Moreover there are only about 420 syllables in Mandarin, as compared with, say, 1,200 in English, and because there are about 50,000 words in a Chinese dictionary there are many words pronounced using the same sound or syllable. To obtain the diversity of meaning that is needed, therefore, all syllables may be pronounced in one of four tones: high, high-rising, high-falling, low-dipping. To use the English example given by Zhou Youguang, think of the way English-speakers say ‘Yes’ under various circumstances – for example, when answering a knock on the door while immersed in a task, or when agreeing to something doubtful while still questioning it in one’s head. Such differences in tone completely change the meaning of Chinese words. Ma, for instance, can mean ‘mother’, ‘horse’ or ‘scold’ according to the tone in which it is pronounced.¹⁴ More complex still, there are forty-one meanings of the Chinese character yi pronounced in the fourth tone, including ‘easy’, ‘righteousness’, ‘difference’ and ‘art’. Meaning must be inferred from context.

Because Chinese is a non-inflectional language, words do not change according to number, gender, case, tense, voice or mood. Relationships are indicated either by word order or the use of auxiliary words. Take for example this sentence as it would be delivered in Chinese: ‘Yesterday he give I two literature revolution book.’ ‘Yesterday’ indicates that ‘give’ means ‘gave’ (as we would say in English). Word order indicates that ‘I’ means me, and ‘two’ indicates that ‘book’ means ‘books’. The most difficult interpretation in this sentence is ‘literature revolution’. But the word order indicates that it must mean ‘literary revolution’ and not ‘revolutionary literature’. And so the full sentence means ‘Yesterday, he gave me two books on [the] literary revolution.’¹⁵ Auxiliary words like le indicate a completed tense of a verb and ‘I’ followed by wen means ‘we’. Words are also classified as ‘solid’ or ‘empty’. Solid words have meaning in themselves, while empty ones are used in a grammatical sense, to fulfil prepositional, connective or interrogative functions. ‘You are an Englishman ma’, for example, means ‘Are you an Englishman?’¹⁶

In the same way that the Chinese language is based on a different set of ideas from the Indo-European languages, so its script is very different from the Western alphabets. It recalls much more the early pictographs used in Mesopotamia at the birth of writing. All Chinese dialects use the same script, on which others such as Korean and Japanese are based. According to tradition, Chinese script was invented by Cang Re, an official at the court of the semi-mythical emperor, Huang Di, who lived at the beginning of the third millennium BC, though there is no archaeological evidence for the Chinese script older than 1400 BC on oracle bones and bronze vessels. The script is based on four ideas. The first is pictorial representation. The sun, for instance, was first written as a circle with a dot inside. This was later schematised as a rectangle with a short stroke in the middle. Three peaks stood for a mountain. (See Figure 11 overleaf for several examples.) The second principle was the use of diagrams. Numbers, for example, were simple strokes and the concepts ‘above’ and ‘below’ were represented by a dot above and below a horizontal stroke (again, see Figure 11.) The third principle was suggestion (and a certain sense of humour). ‘Hear’, for example, was shown by an ear between two panels of a door, and ‘forest’ was two trees side-by-side. The fourth principle is to combine signification and phonetics. For example, the character for ‘ocean’ and ‘sheep’ are both yang, with the same tone. So ocean became yang plus the character for ‘water’. This is only a beginning, of course. Chinese characters are classified in dictionaries according to 214 ‘radicals’, or identifying roots. These indicate the general characteristics of meaning, on which various embellishments have been added.¹⁷

Chinese script, traditionally written with a brush, rather than a pen, exists in various styles – such as the regular style, the running style, and the ‘grass’ style. In the regular style, each stroke is separate, comparable to manuscript writing in English or Latin. In the running style, separate strokes tend to merge into flowing lines, much more so than cursive script in English. The grass style is much abbreviated, like shorthand. For example, the character li (ritual, propriety) is written with seventeen strokes in regular style, nine in running style and just four in grass style.¹⁸ The regular style is used in formal writing but running style is preferred in art, which includes calligraphy.

These various aspects of Chinese language and script have had a major influence on Chinese thought. There is not only the pictorial quality of the characters themselves, but the various tones in which words are pronounced, which in particular, for example, give Chinese poetry added elements or dimensions that are quite lacking in Western languages. ‘Movement’, for example, is rendered in Chinese as ‘advance-retreat’, and ‘politics’ as ‘rule-chaos’. The experience of Chinese is, in some circumstances, quite different from other languages, often reflecting the Confucian idea of antonyms, ying/yang. To give another example, ‘Mountain big’ is a complete sentence in Chinese. It is not necessary to use the verb ‘to be’. ‘Without the subject-predicate pattern of sentence structure,’ says Zhou Youguang, ‘the Chinese did not develop the idea of the law of identity in logic or the concept of substance in philosophy. And without these concepts, there could be no idea of causality or science. Instead, the Chinese develop[ed] correlational logic, analogical thought, and relational thinking, which, though inappropriate to science, are highly useful in socio-political theory. That is why the bulk of Chinese philosophy is philosophy of life.’¹⁹

Figure 11: The development of Chinese characters

[Source: John Meskill et al. (editors), An Introduction to Chinese Civilisation, 1973 © Columbia University Press. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher]

Always, however, in considering China, one comes back to the practical. Whatever the relationship between paper, printing, the Chinese script and Chinese thinking, paper and print had other, more down-to-earth uses. The banknote, for example, which was another invention of the Song. This, in effect, represented two new ideas: printed paper, and a written promise, an advance beyond coins which embodied, in their very selves, the value they represented in one metal or another. Banknotes are first recorded in the early eleventh century and seem to have been a response to several simultaneous crises. In the first place, in the tenth century in China, just before the Song, the country had been divided into ten or more independent states, each of which minted its own coins, using copper in the north, iron or lead in the south. When the Song achieved a kind of political unity at the end of the century, they imposed a single currency – of copper coin. However, this coincided with an increase in warfare, which in turn required enormous expenditure. In response, the state boosted the production of copper coins far more than hitherto but this was still not enough. And so, beginning with the merchants who supplied the military, the government started to issue certificates of deposit. These were called fei qian, or ‘flying money’.²⁰ They were the precursors of true banknotes, which appeared in 1024 and spread rapidly, at least for a time, remaining important until the end of the Mongol period (mid-fourteenth century), when they fell into disrepute. Known as jiao zi, qian yin, or guan zi, paper money also stimulated other forms of negotiable instruments – promissory notes, bills of exchange, and so on, all of which first appeared in the eleventh century. To begin with, the government’s newly-founded Bureau of Exchange Medium proposed that paper money be traded in every three years but, gradually, this rule was relaxed.²¹

In addition to its innovations in paper and printing technology, Chinese advances in iron and steel manufacture were several hundred years ahead of Europe. Coal was being mined from the eighth century on, and used in furnaces that produced high-quality iron and even steel. Some idea of Chinese success in this field is given by one calculation, that, in the eleventh century, China was already producing 70 per cent of the iron that would be manufactured in Great Britain at the beginning of the industrial revolution in the eighteenth century.²² During the Mongol invasions and occupation (mid-thirteenth to mid-fourteenth centuries), the production of iron and steel dropped precipitously, never to recover.²³

Some of the inventions we attribute to the Chinese – in particular the saddle and the stirrup (fifth century) – were probably conceived by the steppe nomads on her borders, and then taken up by the Chinese. But a whole raft of new technology was invented inside China²⁴ and two inventions in particular caught the imagination of the rest of the world, gunpowder and porcelain.²⁵ The discovery of the incendiary/explosive capacities of coal, saltpetre and sulphur originated in alchemical circles in the Tang age but was not used in anger until 904–906.²⁶ To begin with it was used as a flying, flaming projectile, called ‘flying fires’ (fei huo). But the technology soon proliferated, to produce both smoking and incendiary grenades, and finally explosive grenades. These were certainly used in 1161 at the battle of Anhui, where they helped the Song secure victory over the Nuzhen, ancestors of the Manchu, known also as the Jin, who occupied territory to the north-west of the Song lands. In other words, although gunpowder began as an incendiary device, its most useful property, in terms of warfare, was its explosiveness.²⁷

The third and most deadly development was the explosion of gunpowder in a tube, use of which dates from 1132. The first tubes, which formed a sort of mortar or rocket, in effect the first gun, were made of wood or bamboo, and gunpowder was used twice over, once as a propellant for the arrows, and secondly for adding fire to the tip. The first use of a metal tube in this context was made around 1280 in the wars between the Song and the Mongols, where a new term, chong, was invented to describe the new horror. By the time gunpowder reached the West, therefore, it was not just an explosive, but the basics of the gun had already been developed. Like paper, it reached the West via the Muslims, in this case the writings of the Andalusian botanist Ibn al-Baytar, who died in Damascus in 1248. The Arabic term for saltpetre is ‘Chinese snow’ while the Persian usage is ‘Chinese salt’.²⁸ In the West the historic importance of gunpowder has been well documented and it is generally credited with helping to close the Middle Ages, by contributing to the downfall of the knightly class, ending the dominance of the sword and the horse.

Simultaneously with the rise of gunpowder, the production of porcelain also reached great heights under the Song dynasty, in terms of both quantity and quality.²⁹ The most important areas of porcelain production in the eleventh century were the imperial kilns at Kaifeng, on the Yellow river, and other towns in Henan and Hebei. Later, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, they were replaced by workshops further east, near the coast at Hangchow, and at Fujian and Jiangxi (north-east of Hong Kong, opposite Taiwan). This was one reason why, from the outside, China was looked upon as the ‘land of luxury’, producing coveted goods. Besides porcelain, the spread of hemp, the mulberry tree – for breeding silkworms – and cotton, began to take off in the thirteenth century, and the tea bush also began to spread in the uplands of Szechwan. Lacquer-producing trees likewise became more common in Hebei, Hunan and Chekiang.³⁰

The last of the great inventions of the Chinese Middle Ages concern the development of the country’s extraordinary seafaring activities, from the eleventh century on, which culminated in the great maritime expeditions of the Ming period in the years 1405–1433, which ventured as far as the Red Sea and the east coast of Africa. The early development of sailing in China owes a great deal to the pattern of winds in that part of the world.³¹ The monsoons are regular winds where unexpected changes of direction, or flat calm, are much less common than in, say, the Atlantic or Mediterranean. As a result, there was much less need for rows of slaves, manning banks of oars: instead, different types of sail were perfected much in advance of the rest of the world. The regularity of the monsoon winds, and their seasonal change of direction – north-east in winter, south-west in summer – meant that an annual rhythm of long journeys was possible without ports of call, followed by a long stop-over until return was practicable. This made for substantial foreign colonies on the coasts of south-east Asia and India, affecting the traffic in ideas.³² All this seems to have played a role in the appearance of the big Chinese high-seas junk in the tenth and eleventh centuries.³³

Since antiquity, Chinese boats had their hulls divided up into separate watertight compartments, an arrangement not adopted by Western ships until the beginning of the nineteenth century, but this was by no means the only advanced feature of Chinese naval technology. The most important, before the magnetic compass, was the stern-post rudder, which dates from the fourth century AD. This was made possible by the rectangular hulls of Chinese junks, which enabled a rudder to be fitted down the back of the ship. Until about 1180, when the stern-post rudder appeared in the West, European ships were steered by a rear oar. This offered much less control, and almost none at all in storms on the high seas. And it limited the size of ships that could risk ocean travel. By Song times, on the other hand, Chinese junks were huge (up to 400 feet long; Columbus’ ships were barely eighty). They were the product of a long series of inventions and innovations, and were capable of carrying a thousand men on four decks, with four masts rigging twelve sails. Such ships would be provisioned for up to two years at sea. Among the other maritime inventions credited to the Chinese are the anchor, the drop-keel, the capstan, canvas sails and pivoting sails, and of course the magnetic compass. This was first referred to in a Chinese work, the Pingzhou ketan, by Zhu Yu, dated to 1119, which says it was used on Cantonese ships at the end of the previous century. The compass was not used on European ships before 1280, two hundred years later.³⁴

Each of these inventions confirms the fact that the Chinese were not only an immensely creative people at this time, but also fiercely practical. All the innovations we have considered added to Chinese prosperity, and to their enjoyment of the world around them. But there was, at the same time, another side to medieval Chinese life, a more abstract, philosophical and metaphysical cast of mind which also produced many innovations of a very different kind. Underlying these was the Chinese idea of the scholar-bureaucrat, a concept which would find echoes in Europe, but reached much further, much earlier, in China.

During the classical age, arising from the struggle for power between warring states, a new social level had emerged in China. This, as introduced in Chapter 5, was the shih.³⁵ During the times of turmoil, the rights of birth had begun to count for less, and those of talent for more. A growing number of younger sons of noble families, who were educated but lacked rank, therefore took it upon themselves to exploit their education and offer themselves as scribes or secretariat for the central administration of whatever states had need of them. For some, whose advice was successful, political advancement followed: the shih began to form an influential social class. By Song times, this class had been through several changes, with access to it becoming more sophisticated and elaborate in the process. Its most important introduction was the written examination by means of which the scholar-elite was now chosen, to create what was in effect a civil service, and which administered the country. Before the examination was introduced, the shih had for many years been identified and selected by individuals who possessed some sort of credibility, though this at times had led to serious and/or absurd mistakes.³⁶ Because of this, it then became the practice for the shih to serve as apprentices in regional government offices but, naturally, such a system was also open to abuse as particular classes of people sought to perpetuate themselves. The result was that during the Sui and Tang dynasties (581–906) dissatisfaction grew. The first attempts at revision tried to make the nominators of scholars legally responsible for the performance of their candidates. But that didn’t work either and, beginning in the late sixth century, attempts were made to introduce a system of oral and written examinations to supplement the recommendation system.³⁷

Gradually, throughout Tang times, the examination system won out over the apprentice/nomination alternative, and was formally institutionalised by the Song emperors. By then, the system consisted of three phases. Examinations, called Keju, were in general held every three years, and the first round was taken at the zhou or prefectural level, and were open to students of almost any background.³⁸ Typically, examinees prepared for the examination by enrolling in local academies, private establishments not dissimilar from modern ‘crammers’.³⁹ Modern researchers have calculated that between 20,000 and 80,000 students sat the examinations and that pass rates were seldom above 10 per cent and often as low as 1 per cent: the examinations were hard.⁴⁰ Candidates who passed the qualifying examination were accepted for enrolment in the county or prefectural Confucian schools, which ensured that the candidates were prepared for the next level. The second-level examinations took place in the imperial capital (which had moved from Changʾan under the Tang to Kaifeng under the Song) and were organised by the Ministry of Rites. Successful candidates remained in the capital to sit for the highest-level examinations, sometimes regarded by Western historians as the equivalent of the PhD degree. Again, not more than one in ten passed the third round, and no stigma attached to failure. It was quite normal for students to begin sitting the examination at eighteen and not to pass until they were in their thirties – some did not pass until they were in their fifties. In fact, simply having been deemed suitable to sit the Ministry examinations, these candidates were called juren, ‘elevated men’, which set them apart. Originally, this third round was the end of the system but in 975 the first Song emperor saw the name of someone he felt lacked ability on the list of those who had passed and he ordered all the juren to be re-examined under his personal supervision. This practice stuck, in the process giving the system even greater prestige because of the emperor’s personal involvement. From then on, only candidates who had passed at the zhou level and all three phases in the capital were considered to have graduated with the full degree.⁴¹

The examinations were divided into four sections, each section lasting for a whole day. Candidates could choose their subjects, between classics, history, ritual, law and mathematics. The four days were spread out over a couple of weeks, and the examinations were conducted in large public halls, later in rows of tiny cells to prevent cheating. Extraordinary attempts were made to be fair. Candidates’ names were removed or pasted over and replaced by numbers, so that examiners could not identify who was who. In 1015 a bureau of copyists was established to make uniform copies of the answers so that candidates could not be identified by their handwriting. Each paper was read by two examiners and if they disagreed widely in their assessment, they had to reconcile their views before reporting to the chief examiner.⁴² The main criticism of the examinations was that they were too academic, as we would say, too much concerned with book-learning. In general, candidates were tested on their ability to memorise the classics in their chosen field and in their ability to compose poetry in various genres, though there was also a requirement to compose essays on political and social issues of the day. Even here, however, candidates were expected to know history, to compose in ancient historical prose styles, and to use the past to predict what might happen in the future. Critics felt that not enough credit was given to practical solutions to current problems.⁴³

And in fact the way the examinations affected Song society is one of the most contentious issues in Chinese scholarship even today, in particular the extent to which the examinations were truly open and encouraged social mobility. Whether or not the system did stimulate social mobility (modern studies have produced results which both support and refute such a claim), it was designed to do so, and, as we have seen, elaborate rules were constructed in order to attain that ideal. ‘The law of the land proclaimed that the recruitment system was open to virtually every male subject in the realm, holding up the ideal of success through individual achievement as an incentive to the entire society.’ In this, China was far ahead of the rest of the world.⁴⁴ The examinations were not abolished until 1905.

Whether or not the examination system encouraged social mobility, it certainly played a part in helping to ensure that China continued as a relatively highly literate and well-educated civilisation in comparison with its rivals and neighbours. Education and learning were held as the keys to advancement in China from the earliest times, and by the Song age the process was institutionalised. In the realm of more abstract ideas, this produced some remarkable changes and advances.

The most general of these changes was that from Buddhism to Neo-Confucianism, known in Chinese as Lixue. The expansion of Buddhism in Asia was virtually contemporary with the spread of Christianity in Europe, but in fact Buddhism spread much further than the western faith, taking in a greater geographical range and a greater diversity of people: in terms of sheer numbers, it influenced more lives.⁴⁵ There were essentially three phases. From the birth of the first century AD until the fifth century there was a slow growth, as Buddhism gradually changed its nature, to accommodate the Chinese cast of mind and Chinese traditions; the fifth to the ninth centuries was the highpoint of Chinese Buddhism, a religious fervour reflected not only in the practice of the faith but in a great efflorescence of Buddhist art, architecture and thinking; and the period from the early ninth century, when Buddhism was proscribed, and the Chinese world reverted to Confucianism, albeit adapted to the needs of contemporary society.

Buddhism first conquered the Chinese world by following the trade routes and winning over the merchants but also because it became less an abstract search for nirvana, which is how it had begun, and more like a religion as we would recognise the term today. This form of Buddhism, as was mentioned in an earlier chapter, was known as Mahayana, the Greater Vehicle. Mahayana Buddhism proposed that salvation was open to all, whereas Hinayana – the Lesser Vehicle – proposed that only those who devoted their lives exclusively to Buddhism, such as monks, could be saved. Mahayana Buddhism was a Buddhism which stressed the Buddha himself (rather than the Way) and concerned itself with other Buddha-like figures, in particular the figure of the Maitreya, the saviour to come. This involved a cult of relics, of the great Buddha himself, and of immortalised Buddhist saints, the arhats. It was probably on the great trade routes out of India into China, across ‘the roof of the world’ in and around Pakistan, that the Buddha was first represented as a human figure, at which time Hellenistic influences in, perhaps, Gandhara, showed themselves in the folds of the drapery of the seated figure. The new religion caught on first in the countries at the edge of China – the first translators of Buddhist texts into Chinese were not Indians but Parthians, Sogdians and Indo-Scythians (the area around modern Uzbekistan). The first allusion to a Buddhist community dates from AD 65, at Beng Zheng, a commercial centre in Jiangsu, and its early appeal seemed to lie partly in its emphasis on new techniques of concentration (yoga, for instance) and partly because some of its traditions seemed to overlap with Taoism, therefore making it seem less new. Three doctrines in particular seemed reminiscent of Taoism. These were the Buddhist doctrine of karma (the idea that our performance in this life determines the form of our existence in the next life), which was reminiscent of the Chinese concept of the individual lot, or fen, and destiny, or ming. Second was the Mahayana idea of the fundamental emptiness of the world, which linked to the School of Mysteries and its concern with being and non-being. (The School of Mysteries is considered in the next paragraph.) And thirdly, the practice of yoga, leading to trance, was not dissimilar from Taoist techniques of inducing trances and ecstasies.⁴⁶

Despite this, Buddhism was at first restricted to a very limited range of people – merchants on the trade routes which the monks followed, and the local aristocracy. One reason for the aristocratic interest was the vogue for what were called ‘pure conversations’. ‘These conversations, in which the interlocutors vied with each other in producing witty remarks, amusing repartee, and polished epigrams, were gradually to extend their range . . . to literary, artistic, moral and philosophical problems.’ The members of the School of Mysteries, who were also concerned with the writings of Laotzu, were fascinated by metaphysical problems, in particular the relation between being and non-being. Traditionally, these were not conceived as opposites, as we might think of them today. Instead, and this is hard to get across in the modern world, ‘non-being’ was seen as the reverse of ‘being’, an alternative and shadowy form of existence. To the School of Mysteries, the Buddhist idea of ‘not being’ as nothingness, sheer emptiness, was fascinating because it was entirely new.⁴⁷

In this sense then, the Chinese interest in Buddhism began as a philosophical/ metaphysical activity on the part of the literate aristocracy, and only then in the southern part of the country. It continued that way pretty much until the end of the fourth century after which it began to grow in influence in the north of China. But this was in some ways a different form of Buddhism, sparked by the actions of monks who both worked magic tricks and helped induce trances and ecstasies, through yoga, which had a much greater popular appeal. A number of monks managed to enlist the support of a range of sovereigns, who funded monasteries and, in particular, the translation of some of the great Buddhist texts, at the same time sponsoring the journeys of Chinese Buddhist monks to India. Two of the great names in Chinese Buddhism were Huiyuan (334–417) and Kumarajiva (350–413), through whom Buddhism came of age there. Thanks to their translations and teachings which, among other things, turned into Chinese the great treatises on monastic discipline (Vinaya), an organised priesthood, endowed with its own rules, began to develop in China. This made Buddhism an even greater religion of salvation and stimulated a demand for more pilgrimages to India, with Chinese monks going to ‘seek the law’. In 402 Huiyuan assembled his whole community, both monks and lay people, in front of an image of the Buddha Amitabha (the Buddha of Infinite Light), and together they vowed to be reborn in the western paradise (Sukhavati, the Pure Land, jing du) which is the habitation of this great figure of Mahayana Buddhism. ‘This was the first demonstration of a belief shared by all the faithful, the first context in which Buddhism appears as a religion of universal salvation.’⁴⁸

From the late fourth century on, China began to be dotted with storeyed towers (stupas, da) and sanctuaries. At the same time, Buddhist caves began to be carved out of rock, and the number of converts mushroomed. Conversion at this stage was no longer a matter of individual belief or conscience, but part of a group – even a mass – movement. Proof of the success of Buddhism at this time can be found in a striking parallel with Christianity in medieval Europe: the claim that the priesthood was autonomous. In 404 Huiyuan wrote his Treatise Explaining the Reasons Why Monks Are Not Obliged to Pay Homage to Sovereigns. As in Europe, church property was held to be inalienable, as were certain Buddhist practices, such as tonsure, celibacy and the observation of religious prohibitions.⁴⁹ The upsurge of faith was so great after the fifth century that a number of problems arose which were peculiar to this situation. There was, for example, an excessively large number of ‘fictitious ordinations’ (so that people could avoid paying taxes, or serving in the army), and many simulated gifts of land to monasteries, again to avoid paying taxes. So many bells and statues were cast that there was a shortage of metal for coins and ploughs. Central government also worried about the disruption to family life caused by the excessive number of sons leaving home to be itinerant and/or mendicant monks. Here lay the seeds of future dissatisfaction with Buddhism.

The pilgrimage movement was also at its height between the fifth and the ninth centuries. Many monks made the journey to India and wrote accounts. By far the most famous was that by Faxian, who left Changʾan in 399 when he was over sixty and was away for fifteen years. His account, Fo guo ji (Report on the Buddhist Kingdoms), was supplemented by a number of manuscripts he also brought back and translated. These accounts by monastic pilgrims were prodigiously accurate and together now provide much of the history of the Asian region at that time. In all, according to Jacques Gernet, 1,692 different texts are known, and include the richest source of sermons attributed to the Buddha. Between 515 and 946 some fourteen bibliographical catalogues of Buddhist translations into Chinese were prepared and these too allow us to reconstruct the transfer of ideas and practices when Buddhist influence was at its height. The most prolific translating team in all China was that directed by Xuan Zang (602–664), who went to India and spent five years studying at the famous monastery/university of Nalanda. He then returned home where, in the course of eighteen years, he and his team translated about a quarter of all Indian texts into Chinese – some 1,350 chapters out of a total of 5,100 translated in six centuries by 185 teams of translators.⁵⁰

In tandem with the religious ideas that made the transition from India to China and Japan, Buddhist art also exercised a wide influence. This art was already imbued with Greek and Iranian influences.⁵¹ The practice of hollowing caves out of rock also followed the Buddhist monks, and the first caves of the Thousand Buddha complex (Qian Fo Fong) near Dunhuang (at the western end of the Great Wall, near the Silk Road) were started in 366. But between then and the eighth century colossal statues were built all over China, the most notable being the caves of Yungang, where the biggest figures are 160 feet tall. Aside from the statues themselves, the walls of the caves were decorated with Buddhist paintings, almost all of which have been lost. The scenes were usually taken from the life of the Buddha, images of Buddhist hell, and so on. Religious frescoes also decorated the walls of prominent monasteries. The classical Chinese style was for purity, simplicity, exactness: the traditional Chinese artist stripped away inessentials to achieve a concise expression of what he aimed at. Buddhism was more exuberant than that: it was an art of sumptuousness, of exaggeration, repetition and ornamentation. The same qualities affected Buddhist literature, which not only produced new subjects (again exploring the Buddha’s previous lives, descents into hell, pilgrimages) but produced new forms – sermons, conversations between masters and pupils, edifying narratives – which helped the development in China of the novel and the drama.⁵² In many ways this made Chinese literature for a time more similar to that elsewhere: the worlds of men, gods, animals, demons and beings from the underworld were all intermingled. This, we should remember, was quite alien to the Chinese experience, which hitherto had imagined no creator god, no hell, no world of spirits or demons.

And so, for half a millennium, beginning in the last half of the fourth century, Buddhism flourished in China (and, in turn, in Japan). The monasteries became great centres of learning and culture, with the monk – poet, painter and calligrapher – paralleled by the learned layman, interested in Buddhist philosophy and practising techniques of concentration.⁵³ Great sects grew up, of which the most important were the eclectic school of Tiantai (a mountain in north-west Zhejiang), founded by Zhi Yi (538–597), whose main text was the famous Lotus of the True Law, ‘the very essence of Buddhism’, and the zhan sect (Japanese zen), which began in the eighth century and became especially popular among the literati. This group rejected the long ascetic training so typical of many Buddhist sects, and by means of which, through ever-more difficult techniques of concentration, one could attain the ‘extremity of being’. The zhan system instead aimed at ‘sudden illumination’ and sought to achieve this by detaching the mind from any discursive thought and from dwelling on the self. Recourse was therefore had to anything that would, as we say, take people out of themselves – paradox, ‘meditation on absurd subjects’, baffling exchanges, even shouts.

But then, in the years 842–845, there was a massive turnaround. Buddhism was proscribed and the religious communities dispersed.

Such a momentous change never happens that abruptly, of course. Opposition to Buddhism had been growing for some time, and it had two sources. One stemmed from an important difference between the aristocracy and commoners. The aristocracy in China had always been more open to foreign influence, and indeed that class contained more foreigners than the population at large – Turks, Sogdians, Tibetans. Wars of one kind and another increasingly cut off Buddhist channels of communication, and that had an effect, too. But a more important second influence was the educated literati who had risen in society by means of the examination system. That system encouraged the study of the Chinese classics and, slowly, the view formed among this class that China had been diverted from its true roots of simplicity and conciseness. One of the great Chinese writers, Han Yu (768–824), wrote a fierce diatribe in 819 when there was an outbreak of mass hysteria because a relic of the Buddha was due to be moved. This diatribe became famous and helped promote anti-Buddhist (and anti-foreigner) feeling, which gradually spread from the literati to the rest of the people. A final complicating twist was that the monasteries held most of the stock of precious metals, in the form of bells and statues. When the bells were melted down for coins, many people refused to use them: knowing they had once formed sacred objects, they felt such coins were sacrilegious. This, too, did not endear the Buddhists to the educated scholar-bureaucrats. In 836 a decree was published forbidding the Chinese to have relations with ‘people of colour’ – i.e., foreigners. This was widely seen as an attack on foreign ideas and, soon enough, the Buddhist monasteries were purged of the hypocritical elements – uneducated monks, fictitious ordinations, fraudulent land deals. The noose was tightened a little further when the monasteries were made to conform to their vows: Buddhist monks took a vow of poverty, so all rich monasteries were stripped of their assets. In this way, eventually, some 260,000 monks and nuns were secularised, meaning they now had to pay taxes, and 4,600 monasteries were either demolished or converted into public buildings. (Another 40,000 smaller places of worship were also pulled down or converted.⁵⁴) In the Song period, monasticism regained some strength, but it never returned to its former glory; it was cut off from India, which was itself threatened by Islam, and only zhan (or Zen) Buddhism retained any vigour, and that mainly in Japan. Instead, in Song times, there was a new enthusiasm: what became known as Neo-Confucianism.

Neo-Confucianism is in fact a Western word for what the Chinese called either xin lixue (school of human nature and universal order), or li qi xue (school of universal order and cosmic energy). In some ways these are better terms, since they convey the central concern of Neo-Confucianism, which was for li, the central rational principle of (order in) the universe, and the way – when understood – it explains both moral behaviour and matter. This linking of moral behaviour and matter is a very Chinese way of thinking, alien to (but not necessarily unattractive to) Western ways of thinking.

The development of Neo-Confucian thought in Song times is regarded as the greatest of intellectual triumphs, the jewel in the crown of what is now known as the Chinese renaissance. It affected all walks of life, from politics to religion to law (in the Tang Code, the first Chinese code to survive in full, murder of a father by a son was much more serious than the other way around, which might, in some circumstances, not be a crime at all.)⁵⁵ The achievements of Neo-Confucianism remained important down to the twentieth century. It was synthesised in the twelfth century by Zhu Xi, who listed five major thinkers – Zhou Dunyi, Shao Yong, Zhang Zai, Zheng Hao and his brother Zheng Yi – all of whom were eleventh-century figures, related to each other, pupils of one another or friends with each other, and whose concern, in one way or the other, was with the concept of the ‘Great Ultimate’, the force or power or principle which explained both the operation and development of the universe – time – and the emergence of ethical behaviour, and which ensured that this development continued in civilised fashion. All of these thinkers were scholar-bureaucrats, jinshi, graduates of the examination system, who thus shared a common education grounded in the great classics, Confucius and Mencius in particular. There were two important divisions within the Neo-Confucians. On the one hand, there were those who emphasised statecraft and ethics, and, on the other, those who emphasised li, rational principle, and xin or mind, intuitionism. Those who emphasised statecraft argued that the Song philosophers were too divorced from reality, and that the intellectual’s true role was to help achieve ethical behaviour within the boundaries of political reality, that the vast majority of men were less than ideal and that government must acknowledge this fact.

The best-known of the intuitionists, the principal spokesman for the idealist School of Mind, as it was known, was Lu Xiangshan (1139–1191). This school held a great appeal for many people because its adherents believed that one should acknowledge only those truths gained through one’s own subjective awareness, that in effect one became one’s own authority on what is right and wrong, true and false.⁵⁶ ‘The universe is my mind and my mind is the universe’ was Lu’s most popular sentence, endlessly repeated. The rationalists opposed this view, seeing that it could undermine all authority, in both ethics and social behaviour.

The most distinguished rationalist Neo-Confucian thinker, indeed the man who is often spoken of as ‘the most influential figure in Chinese intellectual history after Confucius himself’, who some say ‘completed’ Confucianism, was Zhu Xi (1130–1200). He too graduated as jinshi, at only eighteen, and had a series of posts, and a series of political ups and downs, dying in exile but being completely exonerated two years later. While he was alive, his brand of Neo-Confucianism was denounced as ‘false learning’ (hence his disgrace and exile) but after his exoneration his views became overwhelmingly influential, so much so that he was vilified by the Communists in the twentieth century and blamed for the way China after the Middle Ages dropped behind other civilisations. His ideas are difficult to appreciate today, since they are so bland by later standards (this may account for the Communist attitude). But no one can deny their influence over many centuries.⁵⁷

Zhu drew together a number of ideas of his immediate forerunners, such as Zheng Yi and Zhou Dunyi. Contrary to what the Buddhists and others had said, Zhu downplayed the role of the supernatural in man’s affairs. The elements – rain, thunder, wind – now became again natural forces, expressions of the principle or principles underlying the universe. Wisdom, happiness, ethical living together was to be achieved, he said, by attunement to lixue, the pattern of nature that encompassed the entire world, and which explained both its existence and development.⁵⁸ Only when man pursued such a course of lixue could he discover the pre-established harmony of the world and approach perfection. Postulating that there were two ultimate forces or entities in the universe, the Supreme Ultimate and the Principle (li), Zhu said that the former, in essence, explained the existence of matter (and the absence of nothing, important since the advent of Buddhism), while the latter, li, explained the form and development (the ontology) of matter, leading to the development of humans and then of ethics. Zhu believed, as Confucius had before him, that the universe was self-renewing and to explain man’s presence in the universe he said that there was a benevolent, generative element, ren, humaneness. This explained why, as Confucius and Mencius had argued, the universe is good and man’s nature is to be, and do, good.⁵⁹ Zhu’s authority partly lay in the elegance of his synthesis, but also in the great depth of his classical learning, for he was able to show, in a section called Dao Tong, the ‘Transmission of the Way’, how similar ideas had been transmitted from antiquity all the way through to Song times. In doing this, he was asserting the truly Chinese nature of these ideas, a further element in the turning away from Buddhism. One of his favourite metaphors was that between man and a pearl in a bowl of dirty water. The pearl may appear dim and lustreless (to the man) but if taken from the water it still shines brilliantly. Evil conduct, Zhu thought, was the product of neglect or the lack of a proper education.⁶⁰

With this in mind, he compiled The Four Books. This was his way of ensuring that Neo-Confucianism, his approach to lixue, was maintained and spread. He grouped together four books: the Analects of Confucius, the Mencius, and two chapters called The Great Learning (Daxue) and The Doctrine of the Mean (Zhongyong), excerpted from the Han compilation known as The Book of Rites. These four works, he said, should form the basis of education, together with interpretive commentaries which he provided, and the nine other Confucian classics. And indeed, this system soon dominated education. A few short years after his death, his editings of the Confucian classics were officially designated the standard for the civil service examinations and remained so until the examinations were abolished in 1905.

The return to Confucianism was more than a change in philosophy: it marked a change in sensibility, too, and one that helped to create the Song renaissance. The ornate, fantastic, otherworldly aspect of Buddhism disappeared, to be replaced by a more practical rationalism, a more purely intellectual world – contemplative and learned and suspicious of all that had gone before. It was a freedom, a freedom that resulted not just in an efflorescence of the civilised arts but, more relevant to the subject of this book, new forms of art and learning: poems set to music, a series of great encyclopaedias and anthologies, landscape painting, the garden, the first known treatise on forensic medicine, archaeology, critical history, social history and, eventually, the novel.

The Painting Academy, which had been founded as a section of the imperial university during the Five Dynasties period (a series of brief military dictatorships, 907–960, which saw incursions from the outside), was made an independent institution by the emperor Song Huizong (r. 1101–1126).⁶¹ He also improved the status of the visual artist by introducing painting as one of the examinations for entry into the civil service. The question invariably consisted of a line from the classics, which had to be illustrated in an original way. Marks were awarded for ingenuity of composition rather than for life-like reproduction of natural objects. One has always to remember that, in China, where writing was carried out with a brush, rather than a pen, literature and painting were much closer to each other than they were in, say, the West of a later age. Each activity was a different form of brushmanship. Endymion Wilkinson says that at one point calligraphy (shufa) was regarded as more important than painting.

Landscape painting began to replace animal and figure painting towards the end of the Five Dynasties period, and by the late tenth and eleventh centuries it was the dominant art form. This partly had to do with the growth of cities in Song China, where country (and particularly mountain) landscapes were a distant rarity. But their attraction for the literati, the educated jinshi, was in their evocation of the contemplative life, emphasising the clear austerity and harshness of Chinese mountains, with their snow and clouds. It was, in effect, a romantic, nostalgic and deliberate return to the Confucian ideals of simplicity, conciseness, calm.

Related to landscape painting was the wholly Chinese idea of the designed garden. The rise of gardening, Yong Yap and Arthur Cotterell tell us, ran parallel to the art of landscape painting. ‘Its roots lie in Taoism, that perennial call to return to nature, in both an inner and an outer sense, but Buddhism also encouraged the trend.’⁶² Many Buddhist areas of instruction included parks and wealthy converts began a tradition of leaving their gardens to the faith.⁶³ By Song times, the Chinese garden had become an attempt at a genuine work of art, an expression of man’s relation with the natural world. There were certain rules that were supposed to lie behind the design of a garden but, unlike later European gardens, say, this did not lead to conformity. There must be shan shui, or mountains and water (wild rocks and a pond), plus flowers, trees and some form of decorative architecture – bridges, a pavilion, or even just walls. The garden also formed part of the house – the ‘Well of Heaven’, the inner courtyard, was integral to daily life, which moved inside and outside without a thought. All palaces faced south.⁶⁴ The objects in the garden also had a symbolic quality, as aids to meditation. Water was central. There were no lawns, flowers were never patterned – instead, individual plants were placed next to craggy rocks. And there was a complex symbolism of flowers. For example, the chrysanthemum, the flower of autumn, ‘stands for retirement and culture’; the water lily, ‘rising stainless from its bed of slime’, stands for purity and truth; the bamboo, ‘unbroken by the fiercest storm’, represents suppleness and strength but also lasting friendship and hardy age.⁶⁵ ‘Asymmetrical and spontaneous, the Chinese garden is a statement of faith in Nature as well as an admission of the lowly place that mankind has in the natural order of things.’⁶⁶

Like landscape painting and gardening, archaeology became an organised activity much earlier in China than elsewhere. Bronzes and jades dating from the second millennium BC were discovered during the reign of Huizong in Anyang, the chief Shang city, north of what is now the Yellow river in Hebei. This fostered a fashion in antiquities but it also stimulated an interest in the ancient inscriptions found on the objects, both for the information contained and for the styles of writing and how they changed. This led to the practice of critical archaeology and epigraphy. A treatise on ancient bells and tripods was published at this time and, in 1092, Lu Dalin released his Archaeological Plates, which attempted to classify and date a series of bronzes from the second and first millennia BC.⁶⁷ Books on ancient coins also started to appear and a husband and wife team produced their Catalogue of the Inscriptions on Stone and Bronze, a record of two thousand ancient inscriptions.

There was a resurgence of historical writing under the Song but here too, under Neo-Confucian influence, it involved a return to an earlier literary sensibility. This was the so-called ‘ancient style’ (gu wen), which embodied a recognition of earlier literary qualities and wasn’t ashamed to resurrect them. In doing so, however, authors such as Ouyang Xiu (1007–1072) rewrote earlier histories, such as the History of the Tang (which became the New History of the Tang, 1060) but in the process turned what had been fairly routine, official (and largely anonymous) records into far more rigorous, evaluative and scientific works, of far more value than the earlier varieties. The most impressive and famous of these critical histories was that written between 1072 and 1084 by Sima Guang, the Complete Mirror of the Illustration of Government. This is a history of China from 403 BC to AD 959, but it was less the extraordinary range of the book which impressed later scholars than its use of sources: of its 354 chapters, no fewer than thirty consisted of critical notes discussing the reasons why the author drew the conclusions he did, when different sources said different things. Sima Guang went to extraordinary lengths to check the grounding for all the events he recorded, in the process putting Herodotus to shame.

The overall impact of the examination system, and the scholar-elite which it engendered, may ultimately be gauged from the fact that the Northern Song is now famed as an age of ‘consummate poetry and strong bellestric and historical prose writing, of magnificent painting and calligraphy, of matchless ceramics, and of a full complement of what the Chinese looked upon as minor arts’.⁶⁸ The same is true of book production, ‘Song printings’ being the most sought-after examples. It was a time when scholarship began to acquire some of its modern rigour, when the first encyclopaedias appeared which are valuable even today. ‘The Song elite had progressed far beyond the “cabinet of curiosities” stage, still current in Europe at a much later date, and were engaged in intelligent research concerned with identification, etymology, dating and interpretation.’⁶⁹ The Song was also a high point in mathematics, science, medicine and technology. Maritime technology, bridges, military apparatus – all these made great strides under the Song.⁷⁰

As F. W. Mote describes Song culture, all those things done with the writing brush, from poetry to painting to calligraphy, to writing history or critical studies of the classics, from governing and even writing out medical prescriptions ‘were the proper activities for the scholars . . . They lived by the brush, and all that came from their brushes belonged to high culture.’⁷¹ While this may not be a surprise, what was surprising was the fact that many other activities of mind and hand – sculpture, ceramics, lacquer-work – were regarded as the work of artisans and craftsmen, and thus did not belong to high culture. Later Chinese shared the Song hierarchy of cultural values well on into the twentieth century.

Nevertheless, the Song age did see fantastic new developments right across the board: the arts, technology, the natural sciences (an astronomical clock in the eighth century), social institutions, philosophy. This approach was epitomised by the career of Shen Gua (1031–1095), whom Mote calls ‘perhaps the most interesting character in all of Chinese scientific history’.⁷² Shen was a widely travelled careful observer who took particular note of fossilised sea creatures in the Daihang mountains, and realised that mountains had once been sea beds. But he also made advances in astronomy, mathematics, metallurgy, pharmacology and cartography. He produced the first detailed atlas of China, calculated contours to within an inch of absolute accuracy and was the first to write a meticulous account of the magnetic compass as it came to be applied to maritime navigation.⁷³

Shen highlights the fact that, as we approach the end of this second section of the book, we can see that the great civilisations, the most important sources of ideas and inventions, at the end of what Westerners call the Middle Ages, were China, India and Islam. Asia was the dominant landmass, in terms of both political power, size of population, technological ingenuity and abstract thought. Europe was a long way from both the currents of civilisation and the great trade routes. But long-term, systemic change was under way. The thirteenth century was remarkable for many things, as we shall presently see, but as the American scholar Janet Abu-Lughod has pointed out, it was remarkable in particular for being a ‘hinge’ century. ‘In region after region there was an efflorescence of cultural and artistic achievement. Never before had so many parts of the Old World simultaneously reached cultural maturity. In China, the most glorious pottery ever produced, Song celadon-ware, was being created, and in Persia glowing turquoise-glazed bowls constituted the only serious rival. In Mamluk Egypt, craftsmen were fashioning elaborate furniture inlaid with complex arabesques of silver and gold . . . The great Hindu temple complexes of south India climaxed at the same time. Almost everywhere there was evidence of a surfeit of wealth being devoted to ornamentation and symbolic display . . . In all areas, prosperity . . . yielded high culture.’⁷⁴

Yet, as she also points out, this was the century when, in western Europe, the great cathedral-building movement reached its apex. In other words, Europe was on the rise. Why the East faltered after the thirteenth century, and then fell steadily behind, is a question that still taxes historians of all nations. In the wake of the events at the World Trade Center in New York City on 11 September 2001, it is arguably the most important historical legacy facing the world today.