The World

Song, Fujiwara and Chola

DREAM POOL ESSAYS: GUNPOWDER, PAPER MONEY, POETRY – THE SOPHISTICATES OF SONG

Emperor Zhenzong welcomed contact with Egypt along with other trading partners in India and Malaysia, as his China – its population having doubled to 120 million – was becoming the most refined state in the world. But the Song dynasty’s founder, his uncle, Zhao Kuangyin, was a roughhewn horse archer who was so tough that once, riding without stirrups, he was thrown by his horse and concussed but still chased it, caught it and rode on. Rising to the top during fighting between warlords, in 960 he declared himself Emperor Taizu – the Great Forefather. He had fought savagely to defeat multiple contenders but was always innovative. In one battle, he used explosive ‘fire arrows’ to bomb war elephants; in another case his generals ate ‘fat captives’ in front of other, thinner prisoners, who were then released to spread word of Song ferocity. It worked.

An avid martial artist who supposedly invented the Taizu Long Fist technique, he promoted a game called cuju which he was painted playing: football. But once in power this semi-literate conqueror proved constructive and creative. He persuaded his paladins to retire, reassured by marriage into the family, and insisted that ‘my chief counsellors should be men who read books’. He also restored the civil service examinations, founded academies and tried to avoid capricious terror: ‘Officials and scholars must not be executed.’ Choosing his brother Taizong rather than his sons for a smooth succession, he called his reign ‘Nation Restored’. So it was.

Now his nephew Zhenzong ruled from Bianjing (Kaifeng), the biggest city in the world with a million people, on the banks of the Bian River. It was filled with shops, restaurants, tea houses, taverns, palaces, teeming with merchants, shopkeepers, palm readers, hustlers, hucksters, psychics and designers. As Michael Wood writes, this was the ‘first great restaurant culture of the world complete with cookbooks and dining etiquette guides’ – which recommended a variety of meats from quail and venison to badgers and pangolins – for ‘the best-fed people who had lived so far in history’.

Fielding an army of over a million, Taizu and his successors deliberately encouraged technical learning and rewarded inventors, measures that ‘brought about a great number of cases of people presenting technology and techniques’. Taizu’s fire arrows were shot out of the tubes propelled by the Chinese invention, gunpowder, an accidental by-product of the Organic Fire Medicines, immortality elixirs, that had poisoned so many emperors. Now his engineers added extra saltpetre to produce a more powerful gunpowder, and later Song engineers created Thundercrash Bombs fired by trebuchets, and shoulder-fired Sky Erupters, an early firearm.^*

The Song’s standing navy, China’s first, perhaps the world’s first, would be equipped with these weapons while navigating with magnetized compasses, their battleships and paddleboats made safe by watertight compartments not used in the west until the nineteenth century. Their goods were moved along the Grand Canal network improved by the Song, who used pound locks so that boats could travel from Kaifeng all the way to their southern port, Hangzhou; meanwhile a postal service improved communication. Rich aristocrats and merchants lived in exquisite palaces, using paper money to buy books written by male scholars and female poets, whose works were printed on paper using movable type. These works were read by a huge literate fanbase. The dynasty’s silk and porcelain were manufactured in state factories; its foundries produced so much iron – 100,000 tons annually, increasingly using coal in its furnaces – that Britain did not equal that output until the eighteenth century. Its scientists dissected cadavers for cause of death; astronomers mapped the heavens; its ministers created public clinics, welfare systems, paupers’ graveyards and aid for peasantry. The Song illustrate how rulers could deliver economic prosperity and technological advances by centralizing the rule of their vast market and encouraging ingenuity, both of which boosted foreign trade. Wealth and freedom were encouraged, providing they never challenged Song power. But the hierarchy was strict: men wore ornate robes according to their court ranks. The risk was that ultimately political control would crush the ingenuity that had created the Song miracle in the first place.

It was made possible by a succession of capable rulers who appointed some of the most refined statesmen to rule any country. At the time of al-Hakim and Canute, the real ruler of China was Empress Liu. She had started as an orphaned dancing girl married off to an impoverished silversmith who actually sold her to the future emperor. She and her new husband were childless, but she adopted the son of a concubine who was brought up as her own. After Zhenzong’s death in 1022 when she was fifty-two, she effectively made herself emperor, ruling for her supposed son Renzong. Coarse and fierce, she was a competent decision maker while the long-reigning Renzong was cultivated and self-deprecating: ‘I’ve never used the word “death” to threaten others, how dare I abuse the death penalty?’ But he made a fatal decision. The Song ruled only a quarter of today’s China; the north was dominated by a nomadic kingdom, the Khitan, which ruled Manchuria and Mongolia. To avoid constant war, he negotiated a truce by which he conceded vast tribute payments that ultimately destroyed Song from within while empowering deadly nomadic enemies without.

Of Song’s refined statesmen, Shen Gua, the polymathic courtier who served Renzong’s son Emperor Yingzong, was one of the most extraordinary. He rose to be chief of the emperor’s Bureau of Astronomy, a reforming Assistant Minister of Imperial Hospitality and ambassador to the Khitans, and as a general he led Song forces against the Tanguts.^* All the while he experimented with the magnetic compass needle and the concept of true north, researched the orbit of planets, designed a water clock, analysed geological history using marine fossils and climate change, improved the designs of drydocks for ships and pound locks for canals, analysed pharmacology, refined iron forging, dissected corpses of executed bandits to study the throat and conceived a pinhole camera. But his luck ran out at court and he was framed for a defeat by the Tanguts. He finally retired to his country estate Dream Pool, where he wrote his collection Dream Pool Essays – enjoying his ‘nine guests’.^*

He was one of many luminaries. At the southern end of the Great Canal, the port of Linan (Hangzhou), briefly administered by a famous poet, Su Shi, was the world’s supreme entrepôt, its canals, restaurants and streets crowded with Persians, Jews and Indians, its ships bearing silk, velvet, porcelain, iron and swords to western Asia and Europe, via Egypt and the Gulf, eastwards to Japan and southwards to Sumatra and India.

In 1033, a delegation arrived in Hangzhou from a Song trading partner, Rajendra Chola, the chakravartin (world emperor) of a Tamil empire who had conquered the eastern coast of India up to Bengal as well as the Maldives and Sri Lanka. Champion of Hinduism, builder of the majestic Brihadishvara temple and his capital Gangaikonda Cholapuram, Rajendra created a powerful Indian navy, based at Nagapattinam, supposedly with 500 enormous ships, some bearing 1,000 sailors and boasting the latest Chinese technology – compartmentalized hulls, compasses and flamethrowers. He also backed the Ainnurruvar – ‘the five hundred [lords] from the four countries and the thousand directions’ – and other piratical Tamil trading guilds whose fleets were precursors of European armed trading corporations. Rajendra’s two embassies to China reflected his frustration that Indian trade had to be mediated through a seafaring kingdom, Srivijaya in Sumatra, that was closer to Huanzong.

Srivijaya was an Indic thalassocracy ruled by a raja who sent traders across a wide mandala – sacred circle – of power, selling spices, camphor (from Borneo), cloves, sandalwood and brazilwood to the Chinese court in return for porcelain and silk and recognition of its rajas as kings. Its people paid tribute to the Chinese but thought in Sanskrit. This mercantile confederacy enjoyed close relations with another Indic power, the Sailendra family, who ruled the Mataram raj, building magnificent temples in Java and presiding over a mandala extending as far as the Philippines and Thailand. Later its Buddhist and Shaivite branches split and fought, a schism in the Indosphere with political consequences: Mataram and Srivijaya separated. Yet both thrived as trading empires: a shipwreck, found in Srivijayan waters, carrying an estimated 70,000 pieces of ceramic shows the scale of this trade to China and Iraq. Riches attract enemies, and the Srivijayan confederacy sanctioned pirates who preyed on Arab, Indian and Chinese convoys, pushing up the prices for Arab horses for the Chola armies.

Rajendra got his pretext in 1025 when the most powerful king in south-east Asia,^* Suryavarman, ruler of the Khmer empire and a fellow Shaivite Hindu, requested Rajendra’s help against the Buddhist Srivijayans. Rajendra sailed with his fleet, sacked their capital, captured their raja. There, much of the Chinese trade was taken over by his Tamil trading companies, which gloried in names such as the Merchants of the Three Worlds (Arab, Indian and Chinese). But Song influence also extended eastwards to Japan, where a female writer was inventing the novel.

‘No matter how amorous or passionate you may be, as long as you are straightforward and refrain from causing others embarrassment, no one will mind,’ wrote Lady Murasaki, a widow aged around thirty, in her diary in 1010 as the all-powerful regent Fujiwara Michinaga, fifty-five years old, flirted with her at the court of the emperor of Japan.

TWO FEMALE WRITERS – MURASAKI AND THE POETESS

A few days after Lady Murasaki’s diary entry, Michinaga – whom Murasaki always calls His Excellency – was visiting his daughter, the empress Shoshi, when he noticed that she was reading a chapter of Murasaki’s novel The Tale of Genji, the story through which she invented the novel. These circulated chapters were parts of a narrative in prose that explore human experience through imagined characters in a new way pioneered by Murasaki. ‘Out came the usual comments,’ wrote Murasaki, meaning flirtatious admiration, ‘and then on a piece of paper that held some plums’ the regent scribbled this poem:

She is known for her tartness

So I am sure no one seeing her

Could pass without a taste.

‘I am shocked,’ she said, in response to his pun on tastiness, a proposition in front of his daughter to her literary mentor. But Murasaki was capable of teasing him back, noting in a poem of her own, ‘You have neither read my book nor won my love.’ Learning that every writer expects their lovers to have read their books, the regent crept into her room and stole a new chapter – and kept chasing her: ‘One night as I lay asleep, there came the sound of someone tapping at the door. I was so frightened that I kept quiet for the rest of the night.’ It is hard to tell if this was the harassment of an ageing sex pest or the flattering attention of a charismatic potentate.

She never admitted to becoming Michinaga’s lover, but it is possible she did. Murasaki,^* lady-in-waiting, novelist and poet, found herself at the very centre of the court in Heian-kyo – Kyoto – during the time of her older suitor, Fujiwara Michinaga, ruler of Japan for thirty years. She too was a Fujiwara, a distant poor cousin grateful for the favour of her relative. Yet her words are still read today.

Murasaki had married late but happily and had a daughter, but her husband died in an epidemic and she did not remarry. From the earliest age, her intelligence and learning had impressed her father, who exclaimed, ‘What a pity she wasn’t born a man!’

Hearing of her talents, Michinaga hired her as an attendant to discuss literature with his daughter Empress Shoshi. In 794, some 200 years earlier, Emperor Kanmu had consolidated a confident state, Nihon – meaning Root of the Sun – based at Heian-kyo. Arriving from Korea, Buddhism had fused with the Japanese system of deities – kami – later known as Shinto. Japan was much influenced by China, but a newly confident Japanese culture now developed.

The Fujiwara were already the leading clan when in 729 one of their daughters became the first non-royal to receive the title empress. In 850, Fujiwara Yoshifusa managed to arrange the imperial succession of Montoku his nephew. After that, the Fujiwara ruled as ‘regents’ for young emperors and ‘spokesmen’ for older ones. Their paramountcy was based on their vast wealth and constant marriage into the royal family, from whom they frequently chose child emperors. Michinaga’s father married three of his daughters to emperors. Michinaga himself introduced his daughter Shoshi into Emperor Ichijo’s harem. There was usually only one empress and many concubines, and Ichijo already had an empress, Teishi, who had delivered a son. But Michinaga demanded that Shoshi also became empress – and he got his way.

The best way to understand their world is through the writings of Michinaga’s protégée, Murasaki. It was male-dominated, calibrated strictly by rank and centred around the Great Imperial Palace compound in a grid-system capital that was similar to the Tang capital Chang’an. Life in the compound was divided between the emperor’s palace and the Court of Government where Michinaga governed. His daughter Shoshi, the empress, lived in the rear palace with her ladies-in-waiting, and lesser consorts, perhaps a thousand women altogether.

Men had more than one wife, while women could have only one husband. In The Tale of Genji, the wives all lived around the courtyard of the husband’s mansion, though more often different wives lived in different houses. Women whitened their faces, rouged their cheeks, painted their eyebrows, scented their hair and blackened their teeth, and they dressed in multilayered robes of silk, damask and brocade, dyed and changed according to the occasion. They shared in the property of their parents. Women had considerable freedom even for sexual trysts, as recounted by Murasaki: ‘All these ladies-in-waiting must have been approached by senior courtiers at one time or another. If anyone is careless there is no hiding the fact but somehow, by taking precautions, they do seem to keep their affairs secret.’ When Michinaga learned Murasaki was sharing a room with another girl, he asked (hopefully), ‘What happens when you entertain someone the other doesn’t know?’

‘A tasteless remark,’ Murasaki notes.

When Empress Shoshi, Murasaki’s patroness, became pregnant at the age of twenty-one, Michinaga moved the empress into his own Tsuchimikado mansion where, soothed by readings from the Buddhist Lotus Sutra, she awaited the birth with Murasaki. The chaotic birth was every woman’s nightmare. Shoshi lay on a raised dais in the suffocatingly hot upper gallery surrounded by curtains; courtiers peered into the chamber; rice was thrown to expel evil spirits; Michinaga shouted orders; priests and exorcists competed and jostled to chant ‘loud spells cast to transfer evil influences’. A preceptor ‘was thrown to the ground in spasms by the spirits’. Murasaki notes wryly, ‘You can imagine every Buddha in the universe flying down to respond.’ When the poor empress went into labour, she ‘was in great distress’. Childbirth was dangerous – Shoshi’s rival empress had just died that way – and child mortality high.

Then, suddenly, the baby arrived. ‘Our delight knew no bounds,’ wrote Murasaki, and when the baby was seen to be a boy, they were ‘ecstatic’. It was the triumph of Michinaga’s policy of marrying his daughters to emperors. In 1017, after the birth of another prince, he celebrated his power: ‘No waning in the glory of the full moon – this world is indeed my world.’

Michinaga possibly asked Murasaki to keep her diary to celebrate the birth. Many women were keeping diaries; everyone wrote poetry, men in Chinese, women in Japanese, in this refined and literary world where ‘sensitivity’, notes Murasaki, ‘is a precious gift’.

Murasaki divided her capacious novel The Tale of Genji into chapters that were read around the court like serializations. At its heart is the character of Genji, an emperor’s son (possibly based on Michinaga), and his relationships with women, not just romantic but also familial. While he philanders with younger women, his second wife, Lady Murasaki – Wisteria – provides real friendship. ‘Coming from the presence of younger women,’ she writes, ‘Genji always expected Murasaki would appear a little bit jaded … He had lived with her so long … yet it was just these younger women who failed to provide any element of surprise whereas Murasaki was continually astounding him, her person more radiant this year than last year.’

Murasaki described herself as a melancholic ‘old fossil’. ‘No one liked her,’ she writes about herself. ‘They all said she was pretentious, awkward, difficult to approach, prickly, too fond of her tales, haughty … but when you meet her, she is strangely meek.’ No wonder the other girls were jealous. No one knows when Murasaki died, but in 1019 her patron Michinaga retired to a Buddhist monastery, handing over the regency to his son and arranging the succession of his grandsons as emperors, ensuring Fujiwara rule for two more generations. As Fujiwara power started to wane, the Song emperors were facing a catastrophe that was narrated by the other great writer of the time, who was also a woman.

Born in 1084 in Shandong, Li Qingzhao was the clever daughter of a scholar-official who had studied under the poet Su Shi: at a young age, she started to write poetry of ‘delicate restraint’. At seventeen, she married Zhao Mingcheng, a well-connected connoisseur of epigraphy, literature and antiques with whom she collected books and period pieces, co-wrote essays, ate at restaurants and played board games, living in Shandong – a life of provincial Song refinement.

As parents could afford to pay higher dowries, the status of Song women increased, perhaps aided by the competent rule of Empress Liu. Women could own and inherit property, but now they were so highly educated that they published poetry and often tutored sons. Shen Gua was taught military strategy by his mother, something unimaginable anywhere else for many centuries.^*

Li was enjoying the zenith of Song prosperity: ‘we lived happy together’ – though she could not have children. Instead she worked on her art. ‘Concentration leads to refined skill,’ she writes, which means ‘everything you do can reach a level of real excellence’. But the course of her marriage mirrored the trajectory of the Song. Her husband fell for a concubine with whom he had children. The marriage deteriorated:

A cold window, broken table and no books.

How pitiful to be brought to this …

Writing poetry I turn down all invitations, shutting my door for now.

In my isolation I have found perfect friends:

Mr Nobody and Sir Emptiness.

Then came the invasion.

Emperor Huizong had neglected the frontiers and the armies, admitting, ‘I inherited a great flourishing empire but I myself was a mediocre person not up to the job.’ In 1125, after a twenty-year war, Jurchen semi-nomads from Manchuria destroyed and replaced the Khitan as the rulers of northern China, declared their own Jin empire and invaded Song. The unthinkable happened quickly: the barbarians, using Song military technology learned from prisoners, besieged the capital Kaifeng. In 1127, they stormed the city, rounding up princesses, concubines and actor-singers of the court, mass-raping women and then forcing Emperor Huizong, 14,000 courtiers and women on a snowy death march northwards. The emperor’s consort was raped and miscarried, then was forced to sing before the Jurchen commander. ‘Once I lived in heaven above in pearl palaces and jade towers,’ she wrote. ‘Now I live among grass and brambles, my blue robe soaked in tears.’ But she refused to perform. She had nothing left to lose. The empress committed suicide; princesses were sold for ten ounces of gold.

As the Jurchen advanced, the poetess Li and her husband loaded fifteen carts of antiques and books and headed southwards. But the Jurchens burned much of their collection. As they trudged among crowds of refugees, her husband Zhao, in an unconscious statement of Song delicacy, told her to ‘discard furniture, then clothes, then books, then antiques’ but to ‘carry the most treasured items with you’ so ‘you can live or die with them’. But he died of dysentery while writing a poem and still holding his writing brush.

The emperor also died; a world was dying, but one of the emperor’s sons escaped to the south. Gaozong re-established the Mandate of Heaven. He had lost of much of China but crossed the Yangtse and established the Song at a new capital, Linan (Hangzhou), where many of the poets and polymaths of Kaifeng now settled. The poetess Li joined them. Aged forty-eight, she remarried disastrously. Her new husband was a mendacious mountebank and their union lasted just a hundred days. ‘At my advanced age, I’d married a worthless shyster,’ who beat her. She won a divorce (not because of his violence but because of his social lies). Finally liberated, she wrote disdainfully of the useless politicians of her time:

Our high-ranking ministers still run away in all directions;

Images of the great steeds of the old heroes fill my eyes.

In these dangerous times where can we find real horses like them?

As the Song developed new paddle-powered battleships that used the latest bomb-throwing trebuchets and specially trained marines, they defeated the Jurchens. Guangzhou (Canton) and their southern ports sent huge dhows filled with luxuries to Egypt and to Iraq, where an upstart family of Turks was taking over the caliphate.

* In 1044, a printed technical guide the Wujing Zongyao specified formulae for manufacturing appropriate gunpowder for different bombs.

* A people from Tibetan-Burman marches who had moved into north-western China.

* The nine guests of Chinese culture were good wine, poetry, zither music, calligraphy, the boardgame weiqi (Go), Buddhist meditation, tea, alchemy and talking with close friends. As a man devoted to scientific enquiry Shen Gua observed that there were phenomena that could not be easily defined: ‘Most people can only judge of things by the experiences of ordinary life, but phenomena outside the scope of this are really quite numerous. How insecure it is to investigate natural principles using only the light of common knowledge …’

* In the 780s, King Indra, the Sailendra maharaja of both Mataram and Srivijaya, a Buddhist who may have planned the great Javan temple of Borobudur, ruled much of mainland south-east Asia as well as Indonesia. A Cambodian prince may have served as Indra’s general, having perhaps started as a hostage or prisoner. Either set up by Indra or having escaped from his clutches, the prince established himself as ruler of Kambujadesa (Cambodia) around 781 – just as Haroun was dominating western Asia and Charlemagne was conquering Europe. In 802, on a sacred hill, and now styling himself Jayavarman II, he crowned himself chakravartin. A devout Shaivite, he threw off the yoke of the Buddhist Sailendras, but channelled their cult of the god-king – devaraja – around himself as Shiva. Ruling from the capitals Hariharalaya and Mahendraparvata, he embarked on a series of campaigns to unite the Cambodian principalities and so conquered a Khmer empire that extended from ‘China, Champa [Vietnam] and the land of cardamoms and mangoes [Thailand?]’. The Khmers, ruling from ever more elaborate and massive cities, would be the dominant power for the next five centuries. The chakravartins had already started building royal palaces and temples at Angkor: now Suryavarman I built the three-terraced pyramid at Phimeanakas within the Angkor Thom palace.

* Female names were not preserved in Japan. Lady Murasaki was a descriptive nickname, based on the character in her novel, but her real name may have been Fujiwara no Kaoruko, one of the ladies-in-waiting mentioned in Michinaga’s diary.

* Yet everything revolved around male power; men had several wives and concubines. As Li’s experience shows, it was a struggle to be an independent woman – and even that freedom did not last as later women less lucky than Li became confined to the house, their movement agonizingly confined by a new practice designed to emphasize female delicacy: foot-binding.