The Penguin History of the World

6 Imperial China

For more than 350 years after the inglorious abdication of the last Han emperor in AD 220 China remained divided into separate states. Looked at in a longer perspective, for thirteen centuries, since 700 BC, China had only been united under an imperial project for a little more than 400 years. But still, in the fourth and fifth centuries AD, as three states battled for overlordship, there remained a sense of what it meant to be Chinese. Political disunity and outside invasions had not damaged the foundations of Chinese civilization, which grew as much (some would say even more) when the country was split into different parts.

One has to be very careful with regarding the period of disunity in the middle part of the first millennium AD as an aberration in Chinese history. Even though states and dynasties came and went, the Chinese core experienced little of the wholesale destruction by foreign forces that post-Roman Europe was to live through. Non-Chinese peoples did invade. Some set up their own states or – in a much larger number of cases – joined with Chinese to build countries with a mixed heritage. Referred to in Chinese as the Three Kingdoms and the Northern and Southern dynasties, this was a period of war and rapid political shifts, but it was also an epoch of cultural flourishing and social change.

By far the most important change of the period from 220 to the 580s was the spread of Chinese culture and population to what is today southern China. This entailed no less than a total geographic reconceptualization of what China was. In the late Han period, three-quarters of the Chinese population lived on the plains around the Yellow River; 500 years later three-quarters lived along the Yangzi River or to its south. This fundamental change was set in motion by Chinese driven southwards by invasions from the north. They settled in the south, took or cleared land, and gradually displaced or absorbed the native populations. Within a relatively short period of historical time, the Chinese had almost doubled their territory.

The other big change in China during these centuries was the introduction of Buddhism. We know now that Buddhist missionaries travelled to China along the Silk Routes during the Han dynasty. But it was after the collapse of the Han that this inflow turned into a flood. The Kushan empire, which covered what is today Afghanistan, Pakistan and northern India, was formed by the Yuezhi people, an Indo-European group which had first settled in the middle part of Central Eurasia, around where Xinjiang is now. Having conquered a vast territory, the Kushan emperors ruled over a mixed Indian-Hellenistic-Central Eurasian culture, Buddhist in religion, in which sculptures of the Buddha – in the form of a Greek hero – were everywhere to be seen. Kushan missionaries began translating texts into Chinese, and travelled to China – including along the perilous route across the Karakoram – to spread Mahayana Buddhism. By AD 500 Buddhism was spreading very rapidly in China, and from there to Korea and Japan. The massive numbers of conversions may have had something to do with the restlessness of the era; just as with the simultaneous spread of Christianity in Europe, Buddhism in China filled a need for certainty in a time of change, especially as the wheel of empire again began to turn.

The Sui dynasty, and the Tang empire that later was to build on its brief reign, were two of the most important departures in Chinese history. The dynasty’s advent was very surprising in its own time. In the late sixth century China had been divided for more than 350 years, and even though most Chinese still thought of it as one unit, almost nobody expected it to be politically unified again. The Sui then appeared out of a minor state in the north, the Northern Zhou, and within a brief period of less than forty years it had not only put together again much of what had been Han territory, but it had rebuilt infrastructure, reformed landholdings, re-created the central administration, renovated the economy and restored a massive military power. Not a bad result for a brief reign. And no wonder that the Sui ended up being hated by many Chinese, who thought that their ruthlessness was second only to that of the reviled Qing Shi Huangdi, the man who had led another short-lived dynasty that unified the country in the third century BC.

The origins of the Sui dynasty lay in Northern Zhou, one of many foreign-ruled states that had emerged in north China after the collapse of the Han. The Mongolic Xianbei clan who ruled the state had a number of Chinese generals in their service, and the most brilliant of them was Yang Jian, who had taken the Mongolic name Puliuru and married a Mongolic princess from the powerful Dugu clan. Yang’s daughter married the emperor’s son, and when his son-in-law died soon after acceding to the throne, Yang took power in a palace coup in AD 581. He called his dynasty Sui, and himself Emperor Wen – the cultured emperor (probably to signify that he was Chinese, not a barbarian). He then immediately began exterminating all his enemies, real or imagined, inside and outside his new empire.

The Sui was an empire forged in war, although at first most of the wars were against other Chinese. Wen was smart enough to work out a strategy that avoided major conflict with the eastern Turk empire in the north-east, which the Zhou dynasty had paid tribute to. The new emperor decided to concentrate on conquering the south, and in this he succeeded brilliantly. With a combination of war and diplomacy he outmanoeuvred the southern powerholders one by one, and by the early 590s much of the Han dynasty empire had been reassembled under the Sui. China was again united, under a rather unlikely emperor.

As a commander and administrator Wen was dazzling, but he was given to uncontrollable rages, often followed by bitter remorse. His dedication to Buddhism – a new religion in China – may be seen in light of his personality; Wen was a deep believer in Buddhist principles and a sceptic with regard to old Chinese lines of thought, including aspects of Confucianism. He believed in working very hard; every evening he was seen carrying large cases of paperwork back to his living quarters. He had little interest in the diversions that life at court could offer; instead he had a long and happy marriage to Dugu Qieluo, the Mongolic princess whom he made Empress Wenxian – ‘Wen’s gift’. She was his most important adviser, and it was only after her death in 602 that the emperor’s temper got the better of him.

Wen was deeply aware of his role as the reconstitutor of China. ‘If one wants to seek fame, one chapter in the history books will suffice,’ he often told his assistants. His main contribution, he thought, should be in administrative reform: it was only if the empire was well run and on a good financial footing that it could survive. The Sui unified the coinage and expanded the financial administration, imposing fees and taxes on different kinds of activities, including income and property tax. A parsimonious man by nature, Wen was always on the lookout for ways to expand government income. By the early seventh century China had a system of public finances that was far superior to any other country in the world, which was one of the main reasons why the Sui and Tang era lasted for more than 300 years.

Wen and his immediate successors repeatedly studied what they believed were the reasons for the collapse of the Han empire and tried to draw lessons from them. Nepotism, Wen believed, was an important reason for the Han collapse. ‘To cut off all feelings of affection for one’s kin is to realize in full the principle of service to one’s prince,’ Sui manuals exhorted. The ideal public servant should be fastidious and almost puritanical in approach. The best men were selected by the emperor himself, or by his most trusted officials at court. They could only serve for four years in any official post, and were usually rotated to another part of the country afterwards. The public exam system was revitalized, and a large inspectorate formed. Both military and civilian posts were open to all men of talent within the empire; most central posts dealing with trade, construction and war tended to go to non-Chinese, while the core civil service itself became predominantly Chinese.

The biggest task the Sui set themselves was, in their mind, to get rid of the main cause for the Han collapse and the weakness of central government since: a system of landownership that entrenched local élites and caused resentment among peasants and the landless. Wen forced through a radical land reform. It divided all landholdings into two categories: distributed land, which was given by the state to individuals between the ages of seventeen and fifty-nine to till and then returned to the authorities for redistribution; and inheritable land, which was that which produced strategic products for the empire or a family’s private garden only. Prominent families, who had supported the resurrection of the empire, would get a quota of land that they had the right to, but which would be shifted around at the emperor’s pleasure, and high officials could retain a part of the income of the lands that came with their office. As in all empires, this was more an ideal than a system, but it gave the state an instrument that could be used against inequity and corruption.

Wen wanted an inclusive empire, but both his own personality and some of his politics stood in his way. He was uncertain about how to integrate his own Buddhism with Confucianism. His dedication of the empire to Buddhist principles, such as in 601, when he – in imitation of the Indian emperor Ashoka – with great ceremony sent monks carrying relics to all the provincial capitals, was seen as over the top. Many leading men never felt at home in the Sui state; the élite was too narrow and the emperor’s rule too harsh. Emperor Yang, who took over when his father died in 604, preferred the south and was uncomfortable with Wen’s northern companions. Towards the second decade of the seventh century problems seemed to pile up for the Sui.

One reason for the trouble was overstretch in terms of wars. A conflict with Vietnam in the first decade of the seventh century ended badly, as conflicts with Vietnam often do. A war in Korea also ended badly. The Sui had clearly overreached themselves; with his coffers empty and his room for manoeuvre shrinking, Emperor Yang became deeply depressed and withdrew from policy-making. Under pressure from Korea, Vietnam and the Turks, and with local commanders rebelling in the north, even the emperor’s courtiers lost patience. Yang was murdered in his bathhouse in 618.

However, instead of falling to pieces, as the empire had done in the third century AD, the Sui really became a precursor dynasty to perhaps the most glorious of all Chinese epochs, the Tang empire, which lasted until AD 907. The Sui in many ways was Qin to Tang’s Han; many of the most important reforms that made Tang glory possible were enacted by Emperor Wen. And when his son was murdered, the man who stepped forward to take over was Li Yuan, who came from the same northern group as Wen had done. Indeed, the new emperor’s mother was the sister of Empress Wenxian. But Li wanted to start over again. He proclaimed the Tang dynasty, with himself as its first emperor, Gaozu.

The Tang became one of the most momentous dynasties in China’s long history. Theirs was a time when China was more open to the world than it had ever been before, and when its position as the centre of eastern Asia was founded. It was also the time during which most of what we today think of as the Chinese core was Sinicized, including the areas south of the Yangzi river and in the south-west, along the Himalaya plateau. The Tang championed art and learning, and its cosmopolitan capital, Chang’an, was by far the biggest city on earth. It extended China’s deep cultural reach to Korea, Japan and South-East Asia, as well as to Central Asia, and it formed a corpus of literature and aesthetics that still dominate China today. It is not surprising, perhaps, that even now people all over south China, and their many descendants overseas, think of themselves as Tang people, basking in the splendour of a dynasty that ended 1,100 years ago.

From its beginning the Tang was even more of a mixed dynasty in terms of ethnic background than the Sui had been. The centuries when foreign groups had entered into or interacted with China were clearly seen in the court’s composition – the imperial family was half Mongolic, and some of its leading officers were Turk, Korean and Khitan. In the civil service there were also Iranians, Tibetans, Indians and people from South-East Asia. The dynasty’s interest in foreign lands was in part a reflection of its cosmopolitan court, but it was also driven by religious zeal and ethnographic curiosity. The Buddhist monk Xuanzang, who lived in the mid-seventh century and is at the centre of countless Chinese legends, went to India, and after staying there for seventeen years came back with valuable Sanskrit texts and much general knowledge. Other travellers went to western parts of Central Eurasia, to the Malay world, to Persia and beyond.

Tang culture reflected the stimulus of contacts with the outside world, but especially with Central Eurasia, unprecedentedly close under this dynasty. To the capital Chang’an came Persians, Arabs and Central Eurasians who brought their stories, their poetry and their musical instruments. The city contained Nestorian churches, Zoroastrian temples, Muslim mosques, and was without doubt the most splendid and luxurious capital of its day, as the objects which remain to us show. Many of them reflect Chinese recognition of styles other than their own – the imitation of Iranian silverware, for example – while the flavour of a trading entrepôt is preserved in the pottery figures of horsemen and loaded camels, which reveal the life of Central Asia swirling in the streets of Chang’an. These figures were often finished with the new polychromatic glazes achieved by Tang potters; their style was imitated as far away as Japan and Mesopotamia. The presence of the court was as important in stimulating such craftsmanship as the visits of merchants from abroad, and from tomb-paintings something of the life of the court aristocracy can be seen. The men relax in hunting, attended by Central Asian retainers; the women, vacuous in expression, are luxuriously dressed and, if servants, elaborately equipped with fans, cosmetic boxes, back-scratchers and other paraphernalia of the boudoir. Great ladies, too, favour Central Asian styles borrowed from their domestic staff.

As often happens in history, this refined and sophisticated state had its origins in blood and killing. Li Yuan, the Gaozu emperor, ruled until 626, when he was deposed by his son Li Shimin, who had already murdered two of his own brothers. This ruthlessly ambitious man, who as emperor is known as Taizong, turned out to be a capable leader, who – as time went by – became more inclined to listen to the best among his advisers. He reigned for twenty-three years, and some see him as one of the greatest of all Chinese emperors. Taizong not only destroyed Turk power in the East, making China the dominant power in the eastern parts of Central Eurasia, but established a Chinese hegemony over Korea and Tibet, controlling the trade routes towards the west and the south. He laid the foundation for a long-lasting dynasty, not least because his policies – and those of the other early Tang emperors – hit the moment well: they provided both the content and the images that most Chinese of the time wanted.

One of the key aspects of Tang success was its legal reform. After centuries in which most people living in China could never be certain about principles of law, the first Tang emperors built a legal system of great refinement and common sense – not always an easy combination. In administrative terms, the Tang could build on the Sui innovations, which they expanded and solidified. In spite of their Buddhist leanings, most of the early Tang rulers saw the advantages of a Confucian educational system, and developed a syncretic approach to both religion and public ideology. The Tang era is the beginning of a period of more than a thousand years when most emperors were of all religions and none – they worshipped at all altars, as long as religious authorities submitted to the state.

In foreign affairs the Tang emperors emphasized linking their revitalized China with the areas that surrounded it, because they recognized the ‘soft power’ China could exert through its cultural impact and because they valued trade. They also needed allies in their endless campaigns against Central Eurasian upstarts who themselves wanted to found dynasties. Korea became closely linked with China during this period, both culturally and politically, because of the Tang’s alliance with the southern Korean Silla state in its conflict with Koguryo, a powerful empire that held power in northern Korea, eastern Manchuria and parts of the northern Pacific coast. When the Koguryo state was crushed in 668, Silla became dominant in Korea, but a very strong Chinese influence remained.

The strong cultural influence the Tang had, even on regions such as Japan which hitherto had only been vaguely connected with China, had much to do with rapid urbanization and trade within the empire. Traders from all over the region came to the Chinese cities, which began housing societies of growing complexity. Their development fostered a new commercial world; the first Chinese paper money was issued in 650. Prosperity created new demands, among other things for a literature which did not confine itself to the classical models and developed new forms – the Tang-dynasty poets Li Bai and Du Fu are still among the most popular names in Chinese literature. City life thus gradually secreted a literate alternative to the official culture, and because it was literate, it is the first part of unofficial China to which we have some access. Such popular demand could be satisfied because of two enormously important inventions – that of paper in the second century BC, and that of printing before AD 700. This derived from the taking of rubbed impressions from stone under the Han. Printing from wood blocks was taking place under the Tang and movable type appeared in the eleventh century AD. Soon after this large numbers of books were published in China, long before they appeared anywhere else. In the cities, too, flourished imported forms of popular poetry and music which blended with the classical tradition.

The first big crisis of the Tang came at the end of the seventh century, when the most remarkable female ruler of China, Empress Wu, attempted to set up her own dynasty. After the Gaozong emperor suffered a stroke in 655, the young woman – who had entered court as a low-ranking consort – became one of his key advisers, and gradually began making important decisions herself. Although often reviled by Chinese historians for her cold-heartedness and scheming, she was a woman of exceptional talent and vigour who served as head of government herself after Gaozong died in 683. In 690 she was declared emperor and ruled until 705. Her policies were controversial – she much favoured Buddhism as a state religion – but nobody questioned her ability.

After Empress Wu was deposed, the Xuanzong emperor tried to steer Tang politics into calmer waters, and under him the dynasty reached its greatest heights in economic and cultural terms. But at the end of his forty-four-year reign, power-struggles among his top generals brought a close to the period of stability, and the rebellion of An Lushan brought the empire to its knees. An endlessly ambitious general, half Turk and half Sogdian, An and his successors fought for almost ten years against an increasingly powerful coalition raised against them, laying waste to large parts of China in the process. When the empire recovered in the late eighth century it was a pale shadow of its former self; outer territories were lost, the economy was in tatters and its great cities in ruins. Manic avidity, it could be said, had destroyed a great empire and ended perhaps the greatest cultural flowering China has ever known.

But this time, unlike after the Han collapse, China as a united empire did recover, even though it took almost two generations to do so. After the last Tang emperor, a seventeen-year-old boy, was forced to abdicate in 907, China seemed well on its way to repeat its previous experience in a period that historians, tellingly, refer to as the ‘five dynasties and ten kingdoms period’. But the Tang experience had been the vital difference from that of post-Roman Europe; China now had a long and successful heritage as a unified state to fall back on. While the Roman empire seemed gone for ever to Europeans in the tenth century, the Chinese were much closer to that ideal. This gave much for the general Zhao Kuangyin to build on when he, suddenly, in 960 was proclaimed emperor by his soldiers, and set out to construct a unified empire.

Zhao founded the Song dynasty. As emperor he is referred to as Taizu (‘Great Ancestor’), and he was a rather dour figure who saw ruling the empire first and foremost as a duty. His troops had proclaimed him emperor against his will, he maintained. His rule was pragmatic and practical; he used models from the Han and Tang as he saw fit and introduced new forms of administration when needed. Having broken the power of all other pretenders, Taizu pacified the country by pensioning them off. He also retired his own leading generals from the era of civil strife; the story of how he invited them to dine with him, and then congratulated them on having honourably and safely reached the end of their fighting days is known to all Chinese. Taizu wanted centralized rule. He knew that great challenges awaited him and his successors.

For even if Song Taizu had outmanoeuvred those of his enemies close at hand, he knew that he ruled a lesser empire than had the Han or the Tang. The Song had a great rival to the north, the Liao empire, which had been put together by the Khitan (from where our ‘Cathay’), a Mongolic tribe that had been strongly influenced by both the Turk and the Chinese. The Liao was a formidable enemy, and it soon became clear that the Song dynasty, even at its peak, could not dislodge it from its territory, which ran to the south of Beijing. On the contrary, by the eleventh century Song emperors paid tribute to the Liao, although they told themselves that this was simply to avoid further attacks and warfare. Of all of China’s great dynasties, the Song was the only one that was never secure against aggression from the outside, even when it was at the pinnacle of its domestic achievement.

The first Song emperors made great efforts to rebuild the administrative system, and they believed that in order to do so fully China had to return to its Confucian roots. They were greatly helped in this process by the rise of neo-Confucian thinking both at court and in the main cities. As with many great reform movements, the neo-Confucians started with a wish to return to an earlier, purer form of Confucian thinking. But in reality their ideas spoke more to the present than the past, and gave rise to great innovations. A man named Ouyang Xiu symbolized much of this development. Ouyang, who lived in the mid-eleventh century, could truly be called a man of the age. He was at the centre of a great ferment of ideas, and helped set models and methods that were to dominate China up to the nineteenth century. Ouyang passed the top-level imperial exams at the ridiculously early age of twenty-three, and was appointed to office at Luoyang, one of the old Tang-dynasty capitals. There he wrote works that transformed Chinese philosophy, compiled a Tang history, penned poems, edited a guide to the principles of strategy and diplomacy and worked out an extensive proposal for reform of the tax system. Ouyang and men like him made the Song the most important of all dynasties in terms of Chinese thinking.

Another reformer, Wang Anshi, drew on Ouyang’s thinking when he issued his ‘10,000 Character Memorial’ in 1058. Wang argued that his country had to return to its glorious past, but had his heart set on change, first and foremost in terms of creating a unified, centralized empire. In order to do so, Wang believed that the Song needed to consolidate the capital’s hold on the provinces through balancing private and public interest. Only if it succeeded in doing so, he argued, would it win the adherence of the people and control the whole empire. He set up an efficient state procurement system, which issued contracts based on price and availability, rather than personal contacts and entitlements. The state recognized the guilds, giving the representatives of key trades an official position that they had never had in China before. The reformers also defined what should be state trade and private trade, began issuing loans to farmers and instituted the baojia system, which has been in place in China up to the present: all households were grouped into tens, and these tens into groups of a hundred, which all would be collectively responsible for maintaining order and providing men for the militia. The Song reformers wanted a reinvigorated economy, an integrated government and well-defined laws based on obligations and responsibilities, and they managed to get many of their ideas put into practice.

Although it had roots much further back in Chinese history, it was during the Song period that a system of imperial examinations was put in place that would last up to the twentieth century. The neo-Confucian scholars of the time also defined the content, which over time would become Chinese orthodoxy. It was also then that administrative posts were confirmed to those trained in this canon. 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 the local gentry acting under the oversight of about 2,000 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.

From the Song dynasty on, the principle of competition ensured that a continuing search for talent was not quite confined to the wealthier and established gentry families; China was a meritocracy in which learning always provided some social mobility. From time to time there was corruption and examples of the buying of places, but such signs of decline usually appear towards the end of a dynastic period. For the most part, the imperial officials showed remarkable independence of their background. They were not the representatives of a class, but a selection from it, an independently recruited élite, renewed and promoted by competition. They made the state a reality.

Imperial China is thus not best seen as an aristocratic polity; political power did not pass by descent within a group of noble families, though noble birth was socially important. Only in the small closed circle of the court was hereditary access to office possible, and there it was a matter of prestige, titles and standing, rather than of power. To the imperial counsellors who had risen through the official hierarchy to its highest levels and had become more than officials, the only rivals of importance were the court eunuchs. These creatures were often trusted with great authority by the emperors because, by definition, they could not found families. They were thus the only political force that escaped the restraints of the official world.

The Song ascendancy also produced great art; the earlier, northern phase of Song history was marked by work still in the coloured, patterned tradition, while southern Song craftsmen came to favour monochromatic, simple products. Significantly, they attached themselves to another tradition: that of the forms evolved by the great bronze-casters of earlier China. For all the beauty of its ceramics, though, Song is more notable for some of the highest achievements of Chinese painting, their subject-matter being, above all, landscape. As a phase of Chinese development, though, the Song era is more remarkable still for a dramatic improvement in the economy.

In part this can be attributed to technological innovation – gunpowder, movable type and the sternpost all can be traced to the Song era – but it was also linked to the exploitation of technology already long available. Technological innovation may indeed have been as much a symptom as a cause of a surge in economic activity between the tenth and thirteenth centuries which appears to have brought most Chinese a real rise in incomes in spite of continuing population growth. For once in the pre-modern world, economic growth seems for a long period to have outstripped demographic trends. One change making this possible was certainly the discovery and adoption of a rice variety which permitted two crops a year to be taken from well-irrigated land and one from hilly ground only watered in the spring. The evidence of rising production in a different sector of the economy has been dramatically distilled into one scholar’s calculation that within a few years of the battle of Hastings, China was producing nearly as much iron as the whole of Europe six centuries later. Textile production, too, underwent dramatic development (notably through the adoption of water-driven spinning machinery), and it is possible to speak of Song ‘industrialization’ as a recognizable phenomenon.

It is not easy (the evidence is still disputed) to say why this remarkable burst of growth took place. Undoubtedly there was a real input to the economy by public – that is, governmental – investment in public works, above all communications. Prolonged periods of freedom from foreign invasion and domestic disorder also must have helped, though the second benefit may be explained as much by economic growth as the other way around. The main explanation, though, seems likely to be an expansion in markets and the rise of a money economy which owed something to factors already mentioned, but which rested fundamentally on a great expansion in agricultural productivity. So long as this kept ahead of population increase, all was well. Capital became available to utilize more labour, and to tap technology by investment in machines. Real incomes rose, as long as there were not political troubles to prevent it.

While the Song is often – and rightly – lauded in Chinese history, the northern dynasty with which it interacted is often overlooked, no doubt because it was not ethnically Chinese in origin. The Liao was a powerful state which contributed significantly to the integration of the rest of north-east Asia into a Chinese sphere. It did so through a distinct model of rule, from which the Song in its later years could have taken note. The Liao principle was to rule the many peoples of its state mainly according to their own principles, thereby avoiding conflict and facilitating allegiance to the ruling dynasty. Similar to the later Yuan and Qing dynasties in China, which also originated from foreign groups, the Liao constructed a multicultural state, which – at its peak – had the most efficient army of its time. When the Liao’s time of troubles began, it was not because of its ethnic pluralism, but because of plans that were being hatched further south, in the Song capital Kaifeng.

Attempting to undermine their Liao rivals, the Song court formed an alliance with the Jurchen tribe (among whom were the ancestors of those who would later found the Qing dynasty). A Siberian group that had moved east, the Jurchen were attempting to break up the Liao empire and replace it with a new state of their own. The Song–Jurchen alliance worked almost too well. By 1125 the Liao empire was fully destroyed. But, as had happened before in history, the appetite of the Jurchen did not stop at the Liao borders. Invading Song territory, they sacked the capital Kaifeng and captured the emperor and most of his court. The remaining Song forces regrouped south of the Yangzi River, re-founding the state under a new emperor of what is called the Southern Song. Much of the gains of the era continued south of the great river for 150 years, but in a much diminished territory.

When the end finally came for the Song, it was in the form of a force that nobody was able to withstand. After crushing the Jurchen state in the north, the Mongols spent almost twenty years continuously attacking the south, until Song resistance finally collapsed in 1279. The last emperor – an eight-year-old boy – committed suicide, together with 800 members of the royal clan. The Mongols proclaimed the Yuan dynasty under Kubilai Khan, a grandson of Chinghis Khan. Kubilai ruled over all of China, and much else; at the beginning of his reign, his power stretched from the Pacific to the Urals. For China – as for much of the world – the Mongols began a completely new era, a break with the past pointing to a more integrated future.

But the development of the Mongol Yuan dynasty also showed China’s continuing seductive power over its conquerors. China changed the Mongols more than the Mongols changed China, and the result was the magnificence reported by the amazed Marco Polo. Kubilai made a break with the old conservatism of the steppes, the distrust of civilization and its works, and his followers slowly succumbed to Chinese culture in spite of their initial wariness of the scholar officials. They were, after all, a tiny minority of rulers in an ocean of Chinese subjects; they needed collaborators to survive. Kubilai spent nearly all his life in China, though his knowledge of Chinese was poor.

However, the relationship of Mongol and Chinese was long ambiguous. Like the British in nineteenth-century India, who set up social conventions to prevent their assimilation by their subjects, so the Mongols sought by positive prohibition to keep themselves apart. Chinese were forbidden to learn the Mongol language or marry Mongols. They were not allowed to carry arms. Foreigners, rather than Chinese, were employed in administration where possible, a device paralleled in the western khanates of the Mongol empire: Marco Polo was for three years an official of the Great Khan; a Nestorian presided over the imperial bureau of astronomy; Muslims from Transoxiana administered Yunan. For some years the traditional examination system was also suspended. Some of the persistent Chinese hostility to the Mongols may be explained by such facts, especially in the south. When Mongol rule in China collapsed, seventy years after Kubilai’s death, there appeared an even more exaggerated respect for tradition and a renewed distrust of foreigners among the Chinese ruling class.

The short-term achievement of the Mongols was, none the less, very impressive. It was most obvious in the re-establishment of China’s unity and the realization of its potential as a great military and diplomatic power. The conquest of the Song south had not been easy, but once it was achieved Kubilai’s resources were more than doubled (they included an important fleet) and he began to rebuild the Chinese sphere of influence in Asia. Only in Japan was he totally unsuccessful. In the south, Vietnam was invaded (Hanoi was captured three times) and after Kubilai’s death Burma was occupied for a time. These conquests were not, it is true, to prove long-lasting and they resulted in tribute rather than prolonged occupation. In Java, too, success was qualified; a landing was made there and the capital of the island taken in 1292, but it proved impossible to hold. There was also further development of the maritime trade with India, Arabia and the Persian Gulf, which had been begun under the Song.

Since it failed to survive, the Mongol regime cannot be considered wholly successful, but this does not take us far. Much that was positive was done in just over a century. Foreign trade flourished as never before; Marco Polo reports that the poor of the new capital, Beijing, were fed by the largesse of the Great Khan, and it was a big city. A modern eye finds something attractive, too, about the Mongols’ treatment of religion. Even though some religions – Islam and Judaism especially – ran into trouble with the Yuan because of their assumed ‘separateness’, most religious practices were positively encouraged, for example Buddhist monasteries were relieved of taxes (this, of course, meant heavier impositions on others, as any state support for religion must; the peasants paid for religious enlightenment).

In the fourteenth century, natural disasters combined with Mongol exactions to produce a fresh wave of rural rebellions, the telling symptom of a dynasty in decline. They may have been made worse by Mongol concessions to the Chinese gentry. Giving landlords new rights over their peasants can hardly have won the regime popular support. Secret societies began to appear again and one of them, the ‘Red Turbans’, attracted support from gentry and officials. One of its leaders, Zhu Yuanzhang, a monk, seized Nanjing in 1356. Twelve years later he drove the Mongol rulers from Beijing, proclaimed himself the Hongwu (‘Vastly Martial’) emperor, and began the Ming dynasty.

The Ming differed from its three great predecessors, Yuan, Song and Tang, and from its successor, Qing, in the sense that it was culturally more fully Chinese, and (perhaps therefore) ideologically more preoccupied with stability and balance. It is during the Ming that many came to see China as immobile, never changing and always correct. The emphasis on procedure, hierarchy and status became more pronounced than in many other eras of China’s history. Like other Chinese revolutionary leaders, the Hongwu emperor became an upholder of the traditional order. The dynasty he founded, though it presided over a great cultural flowering and managed to maintain the political unity of China, which was to last from Mongol times to the twentieth century, at most times imposed conservative rule on a country in which social and economic development had been intense since the tenth century. The Ming was in many ways a reaction against what was seen as the negative effects of instability.

The closing down of the Chinese mind was never complete, of course, and it was also very gradual. The Yongle emperor – Zhu Yuanzhang’s son who came to power after a brief civil war in 1402 – authorized a naval commander, the Muslim admiral Zheng He, to build a gigantic new fleet for missions overseas. In name a mission to collect tribute from the four corners of the world, Zheng’s expeditions became de facto explorations of foreign waters, which collected much useful information for the government. Sailing in the largest navel vessels ever constructed – his flagship was 440 feet long – Zheng reached as far as the coasts of East Africa in altogether seven journeys, the final one ending in 1433, the year before the first Portuguese sea-captain rounded Cape Bojador south of Morocco. It is open to speculation what would have happened if the Chinese voyages of discovery had continued; Zheng He’s fleet comprised 250 ships and more than 10,000 seamen and soldiers. When Vasco da Gama reached Malindi in today’s Kenya eighty years after Zheng, the Portuguese commander had 4 ships and 170 men.

But the emperors who followed Yongle had little interest in foreign expeditions. They wanted to perfect the empire at home and defend its land-borders. The main parts of the Great Wall that we see today are from the Ming dynasty; not surprising, perhaps, in terms of where threats were likely to come from. In order to control the northern border, Yongle moved the capital north, to Beijing, the ‘northern capital’, where it has mostly remained since. While the Ming took over a surprising amount of regulations and administrative systems from the Yuan, they were also innovators, developing a centralized bureaucracy that was superior to anything China had seen before. Even so, their reforms were, in the main, conservative reforms – the later Ming emperors firmly believed that they were there to restore an ideal China that had gone to seed through domestic negligence and barbarian invasions.

It was not only the bureaucracy that was centralized under the Ming. There was also a substantial concentration of wealth in the hands of a few clans or families, and these often had official connections at the regional or central level. As members of the imperial family took precedence in terms of influence at court over high officials or generals, competence was in short supply towards the end of the dynasty. A succession of emperors virtually confined to their palaces while favourites and imperial princes disputed around them the enjoyment of the imperial estates registered the decline, and eunuchs emerged as dominant figures in government. Except in Korea, where the Japanese were beaten off at the end of the sixteenth century, the Ming could not maintain the peripheral zones of Chinese empire. Indo-China fell away from the Chinese sphere, Tibet went more or less out of Chinese control, and in 1544 the Mongols burnt the suburbs of Beijing.

Under the Ming, too, came the first Europeans to seek more than a voyage of trade or discovery. In 1557 Portuguese traders established themselves at Macao; they had little to offer that China wanted, except silver. Jesuit missionaries followed and the official tolerance of Confucian tradition gave them opportunities they successfully exploited. They became very influential at the Ming court after one of them, Matteo Ricci, established himself there in 1602. But while he and other Jesuits were admired for their learning by some Chinese officials, others began to feel alarmed. By then, though, besides the mechanical toys and clocks which the missionaries had added to the imperial collections, the Jesuits’ scientific and cosmographical learning had begun to interest Chinese intellectuals. The correction of the Chinese calendar, which one Jesuit carried out, was of great importance, for the authenticity of the emperor’s sacrifices depended on accurate dating. From the Jesuits the Chinese learnt also to cast heavy cannon, another useful art.

Throughout these centuries of Chinese state-building – whether there were several states or one empire – a few general observations can be made. In spite of the significance of the state, the deepest roots of Chineseness 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 consequences of family influence were all the easier and greater because China did not have primogeniture; the paternal inheritance was usually divided at death. But over a social ocean in which families were the fish that mattered, one Leviathan presided – 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 Tang times. They were to last until the twentieth 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 Qin 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 sacrifices 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. Many hundred prefectures provided its administrative armature.

This had begun a long way back. Already in Zhou 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 Qin emperor had been able to link together the sections of the Great Wall in 1,400 miles of continuous barrier against the outsiders (according to legend, 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 Tang 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. Literacy and political culture were thus wedded in China as nowhere else.

Clearly, in the Chinese state there was little sense of the European distinction between government and society. Official, scholar and gentleman were usually the same man, combining many roles which in Europe were increasingly to be divided between governmental specialists and the informal authorities of society. He combined them, too, within the framework of an ideology which was much more obviously central to society than any to be found elsewhere, except perhaps in Islam. The preservation of Confucian values was not a light matter, nor could it be satisfied by lip-service. The bureaucracy maintained those values by exercising a moral supremacy somewhat like that long exercised by the clergy in Europe – and in China there was no Church to rival the state. The ideas which inspired it were often conservative; the predominant administrative task was seen to be the maintenance of the established order; the aim of Chinese government was to oversee, conserve and consolidate, and occasionally to innovate in practical matters by carrying out large public works. Its overriding goals were regularity and the maintenance of common standards in a huge and diverse empire, where many district magistrates were divided from the people in their charge even by language. In achieving its aims, the bureaucracy was spectacularly successful and its ethos survived intact across all the crises of the dynasties.

Below the Confucian orthodoxy of the officials and gentry, it is true, other creeds were important. Even some who were high in the social scale turned to Daoism or Buddhism. The latter was to be very successful after the Han collapse, when disunity gave it an opportunity to penetrate China. In its Mahayana variety it posed more of a threat to China than any other ideological force before Christianity, for, unlike Confucianism, it posited the rejection of worldly values. It was never to be eradicated altogether, in spite of persecution under the Tang; attacks on it were, in any case, probably mounted for financial rather than ideological reasons. Unlike the persecuting Roman empire, the Chinese state was more interested in property than in the correction of individual religious eccentricity. Under the fiercest of the persecuting emperors (who is said to have been a Daoist) over 4,000 monasteries were dissolved, and over a quarter of a million monks and nuns dispersed from them. Nevertheless, in spite of such material damage to Buddhism, Confucianism had to come to terms with it. No other foreign belief system influenced China’s rulers so strongly until Marxism in the twentieth century; emperors and empresses right up to the twentieth century were sometimes Buddhist.

Well before this, Daoism had developed into a mystical cult (borrowing something from Buddhism in the process), appealing both to those who sought personal immortality and to those who felt the appeal of a quietistic movement as an outlet from the growing complexity of Chinese life. As such it would have enduring significance. Its recognition of the subjectivity of human thought gives it an appearance of humility which some people in different cultures with more aggressive intellectual attitudes find attractive today. Such religious and philosophical notions, important as they were, touched the life of the peasant directly only a little more than Confucianism, except in debased forms. Prey to the insecurities of war and famine, his outlet lay in magic or superstition. What little can be discerned of his life suggests that it was often intolerable, sometimes terrible. A significant symptom is the appearance under the Han of peasant rebellion, a phenomenon which became a major theme of Chinese history, punctuating it almost as rhythmically as the passing of dynasties. Oppressed by officials acting either on behalf of an imperial government seeking taxes for its campaigns abroad or in their own interest as grain speculators, the peasants turned to secret societies, another recurrent theme. Their revolts often took religious forms. A millenarian, Manichaean strain has run through Chinese revolution, bursting out in many guises but always positing a world dualistically divided into good and evil, the righteous and the demons. Sometimes this threatened the social fabric, but the peasants were rarely successful for long.

Another overarching historical theme is demography. There was an important shift of the demographic centre of gravity towards the south during the period of disunity after the fall of the Han, and from the Tang dynasty many more Chinese were to live in the Yangzi valley rather than the old Yellow River plain. The devastation of the southern forests and exploitation of new lands to grow rice fed them, but new crops became available, too. Together they made possible an overall growth of population which accelerated further under the Mongols and the Ming. Estimates have been made that a population of perhaps 80 million in the fourteenth century more than doubled in the next 200 years, so that in 1600 there were about 160 million subjects of the empire. This was a huge number, given populations elsewhere, but there was still great increase to come.

The weight of this fact is great. Apart from the enormous potential importance it gives to China in world population history, it puts in perspective the great manifestations of Chinese culture and imperial power, which rested on the huge mass of desperately poor peasants utterly unconcerned with such things. For the most part their lives were confined to their villages; only a few could hope to escape from this, or can have envisaged doing so. Most could have dreamt only of obtaining the precarious, but best, security available to them: the possession of a little land. Yet this became more and more difficult as numbers grew and gradually all available land was occupied. It was farmed more and more intensively in smaller and smaller plots. The two ways out of the trap of famine were to fight or flee – rebel or migrate. At a certain level of intensity and success these might win support from the gentry and officials, from prudence or sympathy. When that happened, the end of a dynasty was probably approaching, for Confucian principles taught that, although rebellion or relocation was wrong if a true king reigned, a government which provoked insurrection and could not control it ought to be replaced, for it was, ipso facto, illegitimate.

Some of those who suffered most in times of trouble or famine were women. We hear little of them, even in literature, except in sad little poems and love stories. Yet they were half the population, or perhaps slightly less, for in hard times girl babies were exposed by poor families to die. That fact, perhaps, characterizes women’s place in China until very recent times even better than the more familiar and superficially striking practice of foot-binding, practised from the tenth century, which produced grotesque deformations and could leave a high-born lady almost incapable of walking. Though there were, at times, strong women leaders, from empresses to clan chiefs, like in Europe females were supposed to be subservient to men. Though there are important regional variations in this regard – women in the south of China have mostly had a stronger position in society than those in the north – the pattern is depressingly similar across time and place.

It is even harder to say why, after temporary and local regression at the end of the Song era and the subsequent resumption of growth, this intensive economic growth, which made possible rising consumption by greater numbers, came to an end. None the less, it did, and was not resumed on anything like the same scale as before until the twentieth century. But the economic relapse after Song times is not the only factor to be taken into account in explaining why China did not go on to produce the kind of revolution in economic and technological affairs seen in Europe. In spite of printing, the mass of Chinese remained illiterate down to the late twentieth century. China’s great cities, for all their growth and commercial vitality, did not produce the freedom and immunities which sheltered men and ideas in Europe, nor the cultural and intellectual life which in the end revolutionized European civilization, nor the effective questioning of the established order.

One has to be careful with extending these divergencies to the total economy. New research finds, for instance, that as late as the eighteenth century China’s agricultural productivity compared well with that of any other major part of the world. Likewise, the rural standard of living in the most productive section of China (the lower Yangzi river area) was approximately the same as that in the most productive regions in Europe (England and the Low Countries) in the same period. While economic growth and population growth put pressure on available resources, the ecological situation in China was not much worse than that in Europe (and in some areas far better, in part due to efficient and cheap transport). And the technology available to farmers and artisans was advanced to the point of sustaining both high productivity (in global comparative terms) and a high level of output in agriculture and handicrafts. Even though China was not to retake its position as the most dynamic economy in the world again until the twenty-first century, its technology and productive powers were generally able to supply its population at higher overall standards than in Europe well beyond the Ming dynasty.

However, what is clear is that the period from Tang to Song had been an era of particular dynamism in Chinese history. Perhaps the explanation lies in the very success of Chinese civilization in pursuit of a different goal, the assurance of continuity and the prevention of fundamental change. Neither officialdom nor the social system favoured the innovator. Moreover, pride in the Confucian tradition and the confidence generated by great wealth and remoteness made it difficult to learn from the outside. This was not because the Chinese were intolerant. Jews, Nestorian Christians, Zoroastrian Persians and Arab Muslims long practised their own religion freely, and the last even made some converts, creating an enduring Muslim minority. Even when official interest in the foreign was proclaimed to be non-existent – such as during the late Ming – China remained an open empire, to ideas, to technologies and to people.

Early in the seventeenth century, the Ming needed any new ideas they could procure, especially in the military field. They were threatened from the north by a group being formed in Manchuria, a province to which they later gave its name, but who were not known as Manchu until after their conquest of China. The way was opened to them in the 1640s by peasant revolt and an attempted usurpation of the Chinese throne. An imperial general asked the Manchu to help him and they came through the Wall, but only to place their own dynasty, the Qing, on the throne in 1644 (and, incidentally, to wipe out the general’s own clan). Like other outsiders, the Manchu had long been fascinated by the civilization they threatened and were already culturally Sinicized before their arrival. They knew the Chinese administrative system, which they had imitated at their own capital of Shenyang, and saw their mission as returning the empire to Confucian rectitude. In time, the Qing would build the first modern era in China, and an empire bigger than any dynasty had seen before.