When these cities grew, the food produced in the neighbourhood of the

towns no longer sufficed for their inhabitants. This led to the building

of roads, which also facilitated the transport of supplies for great

armies. These roads mainly radiated from the centre of consumption into

the surrounding country, and they were less in use for communication

between one administrative centre and another. For long journeys the

rivers were of more importance, since transport by wagon was always

expensive owing to the shortage of draught animals. Thus we see in this

period the first important construction of canals and a development of

communications. With the canal construction was connected the

construction of irrigation and drainage systems, which further promoted

agricultural production. The cities were places in which often great

luxury developed; music, dance, and other refinements were cultivated;

but the cities also seem to have harboured considerable industries.

Expensive and technically superior silks were woven; painters decorated

the walls of temples and palaces; blacksmiths and bronze-smiths produced

beautiful vessels and implements. It seems certain that the art of

casting iron and the beginnings of the production of steel were already

known at this time. The life of the commoners in these cities was

regulated by laws; the first codes are mentioned in 536 B.C. By the end

of the fourth century B.C. a large body of criminal law existed,

supposedly collected by Li K'uei, which became the foundation of all

later Chinese law. It seems that in this period the states of China

moved quickly towards a money economy, and an observer to whom the later

Chinese history was not known could have predicted the eventual

development of a capitalistic society out of the apparent tendencies.

So far nothing has been said in these chapters about China's foreign

policy. Since the central ruling house was completely powerless, and the

feudal lords were virtually independent rulers, little can be said, of

course, about any "Chinese" foreign policy. There is less than ever to

be said about it for this period of the "Contending States". Chinese

merchants penetrated southwards, and soon settlers moved in increasing

numbers into the plains of the south-east. In the north, there were

continual struggles with Turkish and Mongol tribes, and about 300 B.C.

the name of the Hsiung-nu (who are often described as "The Huns of the

Far East") makes its first appearance. It is known that these northern

peoples had mastered the technique of horseback warfare and were far

ahead of the Chinese, although the Chinese imitated their methods. The

peasants of China, as they penetrated farther and farther north, had to

be protected by their rulers against the northern peoples, and since the

rulers needed their armed forces for their struggles within China, a

beginning was made with the building of frontier walls, to prevent

sudden raids of the northern peoples against the peasant settlements.

Thus came into existence the early forms of the "Great Wall of China".

This provided for the first time a visible frontier between Chinese and

non-Chinese. Along this frontier, just as by the walls of towns, great

markets were held at which Chinese peasants bartered their produce to

non-Chinese nomads. Both partners in this trade became accustomed to it

and drew very substantial profits from it. We even know the names of

several great horse-dealers who bought horses from the nomads and sold

them within China.

3 _Cultural changes_

Together with the economic and social changes in this period, there came

cultural changes. New ideas sprang up in exuberance, as would seem

entirely natural, because in times of change and crisis men always come

forward to offer solutions for pressing problems. We shall refer here

only briefly to the principal philosophers of the period.

Mencius (_c._ 372-289 B.C.) and Hsuen Tzu (_c._ 298-238 B.C.) were both

followers of Confucianism. Both belonged to the so-called "scholars",

and both lived in the present Shantung, that is to say, in eastern

China. Both elaborated the ideas of Confucius, but neither of them

achieved personal success. Mencius (Meng Tzu) recognized that the

removal of the ruling house of the Chou no longer presented any

difficulty. The difficult question for him was when a change of ruler

would be justified. And how could it be ascertained whom Heaven had

destined as successor if the existing dynasty was brought down? Mencius

replied that the voice of the "people", that is to say of the upper

class and its following, would declare the right man, and that this man

would then be Heaven's nominee. This theory persisted throughout the

history of China. Hsuen Tzu's chief importance lies in the fact that he

recognized that the "laws" of nature are unchanging but that man's fate

is determined not by nature alone but, in addition, by his own

activities. Man's nature is basically bad, but by working on himself

within the framework of society, he can change his nature and can

develop. Thus, Hsuen Tzu's philosophy contains a dynamic element, fit for

a dynamic period of history.

In the strongest contrast to these thinkers was the school of Mo Ti (at

some time between 479 and 381 B.C.). The Confucian school held fast to

the old feudal order of society, and was only ready to agree to a few

superficial changes. The school of Mo Ti proposed to alter the

fundamental principles of society. Family ethics must no longer be

retained; the principles of family love must be extended to the whole

upper class, which Mo Ti called the "people". One must love another

member of the upper class just as much as one's own father. Then the

friction between individuals and between states would cease. Instead of

families, large groups of people friendly to one another must be

created. Further one should live frugally and not expend endless money

on effete rites, as the Confucianists demanded. The expenditure on

weddings and funerals under the Confucianist ritual consumed so much

money that many families fell into debt and, if they were unable to pay

off the debt, sank from the upper into the lower class. In order to

maintain the upper class, therefore, there must be more frugality. Mo

Ti's teaching won great influence. He and his successors surrounded

themselves with a private army of supporters which was rigidly organized

and which could be brought into action at any time as its leader wished.

Thus the Mohists came forward everywhere with an approach entirely

different from that of the isolated Confucians. When the Mohists offered

their assistance to a ruler, they brought with them a group of technical

and military experts who had been trained on the same principles. In

consequence of its great influence this teaching was naturally hotly

opposed by the Confucianists.

We see clearly in Mo Ti's and his followers' ideas the influence of the

changed times. His principle of "universal love" reflects the breakdown

of the clans and the general weakening of family bonds which had taken

place. His ideal of social organization resembles organizations of

merchants and craftsmen which we know only of later periods. His stress

upon frugality, too, reflects a line of thought which is typical of

businessmen. The rationality which can also be seen in his metaphysical

ideas and which has induced modern Chinese scholars to call him an early

materialist is fitting to an age in which a developing money economy and

expanding trade required a cool, logical approach to the affairs of this

world.

A similar mentality can be seen in another school which appeared from

the fifth century B.C. on, the "dialecticians". Here are a number of

names to mention: the most important are Kung-sun Lung and Hui Tzu, who

are comparable with the ancient Greek dialecticians and Sophists. They

saw their main task in the development of logic. Since, as we have

mentioned, many "scholars" journeyed from one princely court to another,

and other people came forward, each recommending his own method to the

prince for the increase of his power, it was of great importance to be

able to talk convincingly, so as to defeat a rival in a duel of words on

logical grounds.

Unquestionably, however, the most important school of this period was

that of the so-called Legalists, whose most famous representative was

Shang Yang (or Shang Tzu, died 338 B.C.). The supporters of this school

came principally from old princely families that had lost their feudal

possessions, and not from among the so-called scholars. They were people

belonging to the upper class who possessed political experience and now

offered their knowledge to other princes who still reigned. These men

had entirely given up the old conservative traditions of Confucianism;

they were the first to make their peace with the new social order. They

recognized that little or nothing remained of the old upper class of

feudal lords and their following. The last of the feudal lords collected

around the heads of the last remaining princely courts, or lived quietly

on the estates that still remained to them. Such a class, with its moral

and economic strength broken, could no longer lead. The Legalists

recognized, therefore, only the ruler and next to him, as the really

active and responsible man, the chancellor; under these there were to be

only the common people, consisting of the richer and poorer peasants;

the people's duty was to live and work for the ruler, and to carry out

without question whatever orders they received. They were not to discuss

or think, but to obey. The chancellor was to draft laws which came

automatically into operation. The ruler himself was to have nothing to

do with the government or with the application of the laws. He was only

a symbol, a representative of the equally inactive Heaven. Clearly these

theories were much the best suited to the conditions of the break-up of

feudalism about 300 B.C. Thus they were first adopted by the state in

which the old idea of the feudal state had been least developed, the

state of Ch'in, in which alien peoples were most strongly represented.

Shang Yang became the actual organizer of the state of Ch'in. His ideas

were further developed by Han Fei Tzu (died 233 B.C.). The mentality

which speaks out of his writings has closest similarity to the famous

Indian Arthashastra which originated slightly earlier; both books

exhibit a "Macchiavellian" spirit. It must be observed that these

theories had little or nothing to do with the ideas of the old cult of

Heaven or with family allegiance; on the other hand, the soldierly

element, with the notion of obedience, was well suited to the

militarized peoples of the west. The population of Ch'in, organized

throughout on these principles, was then in a position to remove one

opponent after another. In the middle of the third century B.C. the

greater part of the China of that time was already in the hands of

Ch'in, and in 256 B.C. the last emperor of the Chou dynasty was

compelled, in his complete impotence, to abdicate in favour of the ruler

of Ch'in.

Apart from these more or less political speculations, there came into

existence in this period, by no mere chance, a school of thought which

never succeeded in fully developing in China, concerned with natural

science and comparable with the Greek natural philosophy. We have

already several times pointed to parallels between Chinese and Indian

thoughts. Such similarities may be the result of mere coincidence. But

recent findings in Central Asia indicate that direct connections between

India, Persia, and China may have started at a time much earlier than we

had formerly thought. Sogdian merchants who later played a great role in

commercial contacts might have been active already from 350 or 400 B.C.

on and might have been the transmitters of new ideas. The most important

philosopher of this school was Tsou Yen (flourished between 320 and 295

B.C.); he, as so many other Chinese philosophers of this time, was a

native of Shantung, and the ports of the Shantung coast may well have

been ports of entrance of new ideas from Western Asia as were the roads

through the Turkestan basin into Western China. Tsou Yen's basic ideas

had their root in earlier Chinese speculations: the doctrine that all

that exists is to be explained by the positive, creative, or the

negative, passive action (Yang and Yin) of the five elements, wood,

fire, earth, metal, and water (Wu hsing). But Tsou Yen also considered

the form of the world, and was the first to put forward the theory that

the world consists not of a single continent with China in the middle of

it, but of nine continents. The names of these continents sound like

Indian names, and his idea of a central world-mountain may well have

come from India. The "scholars" of his time were quite unable to

appreciate this beginning of science, which actually led to the

contention of this school, in the first century B.C., that the earth was

of spherical shape. Tsou Yen himself was ridiculed as a dreamer; but

very soon, when the idea of the reciprocal destruction of the elements

was applied, perhaps by Tsou Yen himself, to politics, namely when, in

connection with the astronomical calculations much cultivated by this

school and through the identification of dynasties with the five

elements, the attempt was made to explain and to calculate the duration

and the supersession of dynasties, strong pressure began to be brought

to bear against this school. For hundreds of years its books were

distributed and read only in secret, and many of its members were

executed as revolutionaries. Thus, this school, instead of becoming the

nucleus of a school of natural science, was driven underground. The

secret societies which started to arise clearly from the first century

B.C. on, but which may have been in existence earlier, adopted the

politico-scientific ideas of Tsou Yen's school. Such secret societies

have existed in China down to the present time. They all contained a

strong religious, but heterodox element which can often be traced back

to influences from a foreign religion. In times of peace they were

centres of a true, emotional religiosity. In times of stress, a

"messianic" element tended to become prominent: the world is bad and

degenerating; morality and a just social order have decayed, but the

coming of a savior is close; the saviour will bring a new, fair order

and destroy those who are wicked. Tsou Yen's philosophy seemed to allow

them to calculate when this new order would start; later secret

societies contained ideas from Iranian Mazdaism, Manichaeism and

Buddhism, mixed with traits from the popular religions and often couched

in terms taken from the Taoists. The members of such societies were,

typically, ordinary farmers who here found an emotional outlet for their

frustrations in daily life. In times of stress, members of the leading

_elite_ often but not always established contacts with these societies,

took over their leadership and led them to open rebellion.

The fate of Tsou Yen's school did not mean that the Chinese did not

develop in the field of sciences. At about Tsou Yen's lifetime, the

first mathematical handbook was written. From these books it is obvious

that the interest of the government in calculating the exact size of

fields, the content of measures for grain, and other fiscal problems

stimulated work in this field, just as astronomy developed from the

interest of the government in the fixation of the calendar. Science kept

on developing in other fields, too, but mainly as a hobby of scholars

and in the shops of craftsmen, if it did not have importance for the

administration and especially taxation and budget calculations.

Chapter Five

THE CH'IN DYNASTY (256-207 B.C.)

1 _Towards the unitary State_

In 256 B.C. the last ruler of the Chou dynasty abdicated in favour of

the feudal lord of the state of Ch'in. Some people place the beginning

of the Ch'in dynasty in that year, 256 B.C.; others prefer the date 221

B.C., because it was only in that year that the remaining feudal states

came to their end and Ch'in really ruled all China.

The territories of the state of Ch'in, the present Shensi and eastern

Kansu, were from a geographical point of view transit regions, closed

off in the north by steppes and deserts and in the south by almost

impassable mountains. Only between these barriers, along the rivers Wei

(in Shensi) and T'ao (in Kansu), is there a rich cultivable zone which

is also the only means of transit from east to west. All traffic from

and to Turkestan had to take this route. It is believed that strong

relations with eastern Turkestan began in this period, and the state of

Ch'in must have drawn big profits from its "foreign trade". The merchant

class quickly gained more and more importance. The population was

growing through immigration from the east which the government

encouraged. This growing population with its increasing means of

production, especially the great new irrigation systems, provided a

welcome field for trade which was also furthered by the roads, though

these were actually built for military purposes.

The state of Ch'in had never been so closely associated with the feudal

communities of the rest of China as the other feudal states. A great

part of its population, including the ruling class, was not purely

Chinese but contained an admixture of Turks and Tibetans. The other

Chinese even called Ch'in a "barbarian state", and the foreign influence

was, indeed, unceasing. This was a favourable soil for the overcoming of

feudalism, and the process was furthered by the factors mentioned in the

preceding chapter, which were leading to a change in the social

structure of China. Especially the recruitment of the whole population,

including the peasantry, for war was entirely in the interest of the

influential nomad fighting peoples within the state. About 250 B.C.,

Ch'in was not only one of the economically strongest among the feudal

states, but had already made an end of its own feudal system.

Every feudal system harbours some seeds of a bureaucratic system of

administration: feudal lords have their personal servants who are not

recruited from the nobility, but who by their easy access to the lord

can easily gain importance. They may, for instance, be put in charge of

estates, workshops, and other properties of the lord and thus acquire

experience in administration and an efficiency which are obviously of

advantage to the lord. When Chinese lords of the preceding period, with

the help of their sub-lords of the nobility, made wars, they tended to

put the newly-conquered areas not into the hands of newly-enfeoffed

noblemen, but to keep them as their property and to put their

administration into the hands of efficient servants; these were the

first bureaucratic officials. Thus, in the course of the later Chou

period, a bureaucratic system of administration had begun to develop,

and terms like "district" or "prefecture" began to appear, indicating

that areas under a bureaucratic administration existed beside and inside

areas under feudal rule. This process had gone furthest in Ch'in and was

sponsored by the representatives of the Legalist School, which was best

adapted to the new economic and social situation.

A son of one of the concubines of the penultimate feudal ruler of Ch'in

was living as a hostage in the neighbouring state of Chao, in what is

now northern Shansi. There he made the acquaintance of an unusual man,

the merchant Lue Pu-wei, a man of education and of great political

influence. Lue Pu-wei persuaded the feudal ruler of Ch'in to declare this

son his successor. He also sold a girl to the prince to be his wife, and

the son of this marriage was to be the famous and notorious Shih

Huang-ti. Lue Pu-wei came with his protege to Ch'in, where he became his

Prime Minister, and after the prince's death in 247 B.C. Lue Pu-wei

became the regent for his young son Shih Huang-ti (then called Cheng).

For the first time in Chinese history a merchant, a commoner, had

reached one of the highest positions in the state. It is not known what

sort of trade Lue Pu-wei had carried on, but probably he dealt in horses,

the principal export of the state of Chao. As horses were an absolute

necessity for the armies of that time, it is easy to imagine that a

horse-dealer might gain great political influence.

Soon after Shih Huang-ti's accession Lue Pu-wei was dismissed, and a new

group of advisers, strong supporters of the Legalist school, came into

power. These new men began an active policy of conquest instead of the

peaceful course which Lue Pu-wei had pursued. One campaign followed

another in the years from 230 to 222, until all the feudal states had

been conquered, annexed, and brought under Shih Huang-ti's rule.

2 _Centralization in every field_

The main task of the now gigantic realm was the organization of

administration. One of the first acts after the conquest of the other

feudal states was to deport all the ruling families and other important

nobles to the capital of Ch'in; they were thus deprived of the basis of

their power, and their land could be sold. These upper-class families

supplied to the capital a class of consumers of luxury goods which

attracted craftsmen and businessmen and changed the character of the

capital from that of a provincial town to a centre of arts and crafts.

It was decided to set up the uniform system of administration throughout

the realm, which had already been successfully introduced in Ch'in: the

realm was split up into provinces and the provinces into prefectures;

and an official was placed in charge of each province or prefecture.

Originally the prefectures in Ch'in had been placed directly under the

central administration, with an official, often a merchant, being

responsible for the collection of taxes; the provinces, on the other

hand, formed a sort of military command area, especially in the

newly-conquered frontier territories. With the growing militarization of

Ch'in, greater importance was assigned to the provinces, and the

prefectures were made subordinate to them. Thus the officials of the

provinces were originally army officers but now, in the reorganization

of the whole realm, the distinction between civil and military

administration was abolished. At the head of the province were a civil

and also a military governor, and both were supervised by a controller

directly responsible to the emperor. Since there was naturally a

continual struggle for power between these three officials, none of them

was supreme and none could develop into a sort of feudal lord. In this

system we can see the essence of the later Chinese administration.

[Illustration: 3 Bronze plaque representing two horses fighting each

other. Ordos region, animal style. _From V. Griessmaier: Sammlung Baron

Eduard von der Heydt, Vienna 1936, illustration No. 6._]

[Illustration: 4 Hunting scene: detail from the reliefs in the tombs at

Wu-liang-tz'u. _From a print in the author's possession._]

[Illustration: 5 Part of the 'Great Wall'. _Photo Eberhard._]

Owing to the centuries of division into independent feudal states, the

various parts of the country had developed differently. Each province

spoke a different dialect which also contained many words borrowed from

the language of the indigenous population; and as these earlier

populations sometimes belonged to different races with different

languages, in each state different words had found their way into the

Chinese dialects. This caused divergences not only in the spoken but in

the written language, and even in the characters in use for writing.

There exist to this day dictionaries in which the borrowed words of that

time are indicated, and keys to the various old forms of writing also

exist. Thus difficulties arose if, for instance, a man from the old

territory of Ch'in was to be transferred as an official to the east: he

could not properly understand the language and could not read the

borrowed words, if he could read at all! For a large number of the

officials of that time, especially the officers who became military

governors, were certainly unable to read. The government therefore

ordered that the language of the whole country should be unified, and

that a definite style of writing should be generally adopted. The words

to be used were set out in lists, so that the first lexicography came

into existence simply through the needs of practical administration, as

had happened much earlier in Babylon. Thus, the few recently found

manuscripts from pre-Ch'in times still contain a high percentage of

Chinese characters which we cannot read because they were local

characters; but all words in texts after the Ch'in time can be read

because they belong to the standardized script. We know now that all

classical texts of pre-Ch'in time as we have them today, have been

re-written in this standardized script in the second century B.C.: we do

not know which words they actually contained at the time when they were

composed, nor how these words were actually pronounced, a fact which

makes the reconstruction of Chinese language before Ch'in very

difficult.

The next requirement for the carrying on of the administration was the

unification of weights and measures and, a surprising thing to us, of

the gauge of the tracks for wagons. In the various feudal states there

had been different weights and measures in use, and this had led to

great difficulties in the centralization of the collection of taxes. The

centre of administration, that is to say the new capital of Ch'in, had

grown through the transfer of nobles and through the enormous size of

the administrative staff into a thickly populated city with very large

requirements of food. The fields of the former state of Ch'in alone

could not feed the city; and the grain supplied in payment of taxation

had to be brought in from far around, partly by cart. The only roads

then existing consisted of deep cart-tracks. If the axles were not of

the same length for all carts, the roads were simply unusable for many

of them. Accordingly a fixed length was laid down for axles. The

advocates of all these reforms were also their beneficiaries, the

merchants.

The first principle of the Legalist school, a principle which had been

applied in Ch'in and which was to be extended to the whole realm, was

that of the training of the population in discipline and obedience, so

that it should become a convenient tool in the hands of the officials.

This requirement was best met by a people composed as far as possible

only of industrious, uneducated, and tax-paying peasants. Scholars and

philosophers were not wanted, in so far as they were not directly

engaged in work commissioned by the state. The Confucianist writings

came under special attack because they kept alive the memory of the old

feudal conditions, preaching the ethic of the old feudal class which had

just been destroyed and must not be allowed to rise again if the state

was not to suffer fresh dissolution or if the central administration was

not to be weakened. In 213 B.C. there took place the great holocaust of

books which destroyed the Confucianist writings with the exception of

one copy of each work for the State Library. Books on practical subjects

were not affected. In the fighting at the end of the Ch'in dynasty the

State Library was burnt down, so that many of the old works have only

come down to us in an imperfect state and with doubtful accuracy. The

real loss arose, however, from the fact that the new generation was

little interested in the Confucianist literature, so that when, fifty

years later, the effort was made to restore some texts from the oral

tradition, there no longer existed any scholars who really knew them by

heart, as had been customary in the past.

In 221 B.C. Shih Huang-ti had become emperor of all China. The judgments

passed on him vary greatly: the official Chinese historiography rejects

him entirely--naturally, for he tried to exterminate Confucianism, while

every later historian was himself a Confucian. Western scholars often

treat him as one of the greatest men in world history. Closer research

has shown that Shih Huang-ti was evidently an average man without any

great gifts, that he was superstitious, and shared the tendency of his

time to mystical and shamanistic notions. His own opinion was that he

was the first of a series of ten thousand emperors of his dynasty (Shih

Huang-ti means "First Emperor"), and this merely suggests megalomania.

The basic principles of his administration had been laid down long

before his time by the philosophers of the Legalist school, and were

given effect by his Chancellor Li Ssu. Li Ssu was the really great

personality of that period. The Legalists taught that the ruler must do

as little as possible himself. His Ministers were there to act for him.

He himself was to be regarded as a symbol of Heaven. In that capacity

Shih Huang-ti undertook periodical journeys into the various parts of

the empire, less for any practical purpose of inspection than for

purposes of public worship. They corresponded to the course of the sun,

and this indicates that Shih Huang-ti had adopted a notion derived from

the older northern culture of the nomad peoples.

He planned the capital in an ambitious style but, although there was

real need for extension of the city, his plans can scarcely be regarded

as of great service. His enormous palace, and also his mausoleum which

was built for him before his death, were constructed in accordance with

astral notions. Within the palace the emperor continually changed his

residential quarters, probably not only from fear of assassination but

also for astral reasons. His mausoleum formed a hemispherical dome, and

all the stars of the sky were painted on its interior.

3 _Frontier defence. Internal collapse_

When the empire had been unified by the destruction of the feudal

states, the central government became responsible for the protection of

the frontiers from attack from without. In the south there were only

peoples in a very low state of civilization, who could offer no serious

menace to the Chinese. The trading colonies that gradually extended to

Canton and still farther south served as Chinese administrative centres

for provinces and prefectures, with small but adequate armies of their

own, so that in case of need they could defend themselves. In the north

the position was much more difficult. In addition to their conquest

within China, the rulers of Ch'in had pushed their frontier far to the

north. The nomad tribes had been pressed back and deprived of their best

pasturage, namely the Ordos region. When the livelihood of nomad peoples

is affected, when they are threatened with starvation, their tribes

often collect round a tribal leader who promises new pasturage and

better conditions of life for all who take part in the common campaigns.

In this way the first great union of tribes in the north of China came

into existence in this period, forming the realm of the Hsiung-nu under

their first leader, T'ou-man. This first realm of the Hsiung-nu was not

yet extensive, but its ambitious and warlike attitude made it a danger

to Ch'in. It was therefore decided to maintain a large permanent army in

the north. In addition to this, the frontier walls already existing in

the mountains were rebuilt and made into a single great system. Thus

came into existence in 214 B.C., out of the blood and sweat of countless

pressed labourers, the famous Great Wall.

On one of his periodical journeys the emperor fell ill and died. His

death was the signal for the rising of many rebellious elements. Nobles

rose in order to regain power and influence; generals rose because they

objected to the permanent pressure from the central administration and

their supervision by controllers; men of the people rose as popular

leaders because the people were more tormented than ever by forced

labour, generally at a distance from their homes. Within a few months

there were six different rebellions and six different "rulers".

Assassinations became the order of the day; the young heir to the throne

was removed in this way and replaced by another young prince. But as

early as 206 B.C. one of the rebels, Liu Chi (also called Liu Pang),

entered the capital and dethroned the nominal emperor. Liu Chi at first

had to retreat and was involved in hard fighting with a rival, but

gradually he succeeded in gaining the upper hand and defeated not only

his rival but also the other eighteen states that had been set up anew

in China in those years.

THE MIDDLE AGES

Chapter Six

THE HAN DYNASTY (206 B.C.-A.D. 220)

1 _Development of the gentry-state_

In 206 B.C. Liu Chi assumed the title of Emperor and gave his dynasty

the name of the Han Dynasty. After his death he was given as emperor the

name of Kao Tsu.[4] The period of the Han dynasty may be described as

the beginning of the Chinese Middle Ages, while that of the Ch'in

dynasty represents the transition from antiquity to the Middle Ages; for

under the Han dynasty we meet in China with a new form of state, the

"gentry state". The feudalism of ancient times has come definitely to

its end.

[4] From then on, every emperor was given after his death an

official name as emperor, under which he appears in the Chinese

sources. We have adopted the original or the official name according

to which of the two has come into the more general use in Western

books.

Emperor Kao Tsu came from eastern China, and his family seems to have

been a peasant family; in any case it did not belong to the old

nobility. After his destruction of his strongest rival, the removal of

the kings who had made themselves independent in the last years of the

Ch'in dynasty was a relatively easy task for the new autocrat, although

these struggles occupied the greater part of his reign. A much more

difficult question, however, faced him: How was the empire to be

governed? Kao Tsu's old friends and fellow-countrymen, who had helped

him into power, had been rewarded by appointment as generals or high

officials. Gradually he got rid of those who had been his best comrades,

as so many upstart rulers have done before and after him in every

country in the world. An emperor does not like to be reminded of a very

humble past, and he is liable also to fear the rivalry of men who

formerly were his equals. It is evident that little attention was paid

to theories of administration; policy was determined mainly by practical

considerations. Kao Tsu allowed many laws and regulations to remain in

force, including the prohibition of Confucianist writings. On the other

hand, he reverted to the allocation of fiefs, though not to old noble

families but to his relatives and some of his closest adherents,

generally men of inferior social standing. Thus a mixed administration

came into being: part of the empire was governed by new feudal princes,

and another part split up into provinces and prefectures and placed

directly under the central power through its officials.

But whence came the officials? Kao Tsu and his supporters, as farmers

from eastern China, looked down upon the trading population to which

farmers always regard themselves as superior. The merchants were ignored

as potential officials although they had often enough held official

appointments under the former dynasty. The second group from which

officials had been drawn under the Ch'in was that of the army officers,

but their military functions had now, of course, fallen to Kao Tsu's

soldiers. The emperor had little faith, however, in the loyalty of

officers, even of his own, and apart from that he would have had first

to create a new administrative organization for them. Accordingly he

turned to another class which had come into existence, the class later

called the _gentry_, which in practice had the power already in its

hands.

The term "gentry" has no direct parallel in Chinese texts; the later

terms "shen-shih" and "chin-shen" do not quite cover this concept. The

basic unit of the gentry class are families, not individuals. Such

families often derive their origin from branches of the Chou nobility.

But other gentry families were of different and more recent origin in

respect to land ownership. Some late Chou and Ch'in officials of

non-noble origin had become wealthy and had acquired land; the same was

true for wealthy merchants and finally, some non-noble farmers who were

successful in one or another way, bought additional land reaching the

size of large holdings. All "gentry" families owned substantial estates

in the provinces which they leased to tenants on a kind of contract

basis. The tenants, therefore, cannot be called "serfs" although their

factual position often was not different from the position of serfs. The

rents of these tenants, usually about half the gross produce, are the

basis of the livelihood of the gentry. One part of a gentry family

normally lives in the country on a small home farm in order to be able

to collect the rents. If the family can acquire more land and if this

new land is too far away from the home farm to make collection of rents

easy, a new home farm is set up under the control of another branch of

the family. But the original home remains to be regarded as the real

family centre.

In a typical gentry family, another branch of the family is in the

capital or in a provincial administrative centre in official positions.

These officials at the same time are the most highly educated members of

the family and are often called the "literati". There are also always

individual family members who are not interested in official careers or

who failed in their careers and live as free "literati" either in the

big cities or on the home farms. It seems, to judge from much later

sources, that the families assisted their most able members to enter the

official careers, while those individuals who were less able were used

in the administration of the farms. This system in combination with the

strong familism of the Chinese, gave a double security to the gentry

families. If difficulties arose in the estates either by attacks of

bandits or by war or other catastrophes, the family members in official

positions could use their influence and power to restore the property in

the provinces. If, on the other hand, the family members in official

positions lost their positions or even their lives by displeasing the

court, the home branch could always find ways to remain untouched and

could, in a generation or two, recruit new members and regain power and

influence in the government. Thus, as families, the gentry was secure,

although failures could occur to individuals. There are many gentry

families who remained in the ruling _elite_ for many centuries, some

over more than a thousand years, weathering all vicissitudes of life.

Some authors believe that Chinese leading families generally pass

through a three- or four-generation cycle: a family member by his

official position is able to acquire much land, and his family moves

upward. He is able to give the best education and other facilities to

his sons who lead a good life. But either these sons or the grandsons

are spoiled and lazy; they begin to lose their property and status. The

family moves downward, until in the fourth or fifth generation a new

rise begins. Actual study of families seems to indicate that this is not

true. The main branch of the family retains its position over centuries.

But some of the branch families, created often by the less able family

members, show a tendency towards downward social mobility.

It is clear from the above that a gentry family should be interested in

having a fair number of children. The more sons they have, the more

positions of power the family can occupy and thus, the more secure it

will be; the more daughters they have, the more "political" marriages

they can conclude, i.e. marriages with sons of other gentry families in

positions of influence. Therefore, gentry families in China tend to be,

on the average, larger than ordinary families, while in our Western

countries the leading families usually were smaller than the lower class

families. This means that gentry families produced more children than

was necessary to replenish the available leading positions; thus, some

family members had to get into lower positions and had to lose status.

In view of this situation it was very difficult for lower class families

to achieve access into this gentry group. In European countries the

leading _elite_ did not quite replenish their ranks in the next

generation, so that there was always some chance for the lower classes

to move up into leading ranks. The gentry society was, therefore, a

comparably stable society with little upward social mobility but with

some downward mobility. As a whole and for reasons of gentry

self-interest, the gentry stood for stability and against change.

The gentry members in the bureaucracy collaborated closely with one

another because they were tied together by bonds of blood or marriage.

It was easy for them to find good tutors for their children, because a

pupil owed a debt of gratitude to his teacher and a child from a gentry

family could later on nicely repay this debt; often, these teachers

themselves were members of other gentry families. It was easy for sons

of the gentry to get into official positions, because the people who had

to recommend them for office were often related to them or knew the

position of their family. In Han time, local officials had the duty to

recommend young able men; if these men turned out to be good, the

officials were rewarded, if not they were blamed or even punished. An

official took less of a chance, if he recommended a son of an

influential family, and he obliged such a candidate so that he could

later count on his help if he himself should come into difficulties.

When, towards the end of the second century B.C., a kind of examination

system was introduced, this attitude was not basically changed.

The country branch of the family by the fact that it controlled large

tracts of land, supplied also the logical tax collectors: they had the

standing and power required for this job. Even if they were appointed in

areas other than their home country (a rule which later was usually

applied), they knew the gentry families of the other district or were

related to them and got their support by appointing their members as

their assistants.

Gentry society continued from Kao Tsu's time to 1948, but it went

through a number of phases of development and changed considerably in

time. We will later outline some of the most important changes. In

general the number of politically leading gentry families was around one

hundred (texts often speak of "the hundred families" in this time) and

they were concentrated in the capital; the most important home seats of

these families in Han time were close to the capital and east of it or

in the plains of eastern China, at that time the main centre of grain

production.

We regard roughly the first one thousand years of "Gentry Society" as

the period of the Chinese "Middle Ages", beginning with the Han dynasty;

the preceding time of the Ch'in was considered as a period of

transition, a time in which the feudal period of "Antiquity" came to a

formal end and a new organization of society began to become visible.

Even those authors who do not accept a sociological classification of

periods and many authors who use Marxist categories, believe that with

Ch'in and Han a new era in Chinese history began.

2 _Situation of the Hsiung-nu empire; its relation to the Han empire.

Incorporation of South China_

In the time of the Ch'in dynasty there had already come into unpleasant

prominence north of the Chinese frontier the tribal union, then

relatively small, of the Hsiung-nu. Since then, the Hsiung-nu empire had

destroyed the federation of the Yueeh-chih tribes (some of which seem to

have been of Indo-European language stock) and incorporated their people

into their own federation; they had conquered also the less well

organized eastern pastoral tribes, the Tung-hu and thus had become a

formidable power. Everything goes to show that it had close relations

with the territories of northern China. Many Chinese seem to have

migrated to the Hsiung-nu empire, where they were welcome as artisans

and probably also as farmers; but above all they were needed for the

staffing of a new state administration. The scriveners in the newly

introduced state secretariat were Chinese and wrote Chinese, for at that

time the Hsiung-nu apparently had no written language. There were

Chinese serving as administrators and court officials, and even as

instructors in the army administration, teaching the art of warfare

against non-nomads. But what was the purpose of all this? Mao Tun, the

second ruler of the Hsiung-nu, and his first successors undoubtedly

intended ultimately to conquer China, exactly as many other northern

peoples after them planned to do, and a few of them did. The main

purpose of this was always to bring large numbers of peasants under the

rule of the nomad rulers and so to solve, once for all, the problem of

the provision of additional winter food. Everything that was needed, and

everything that seemed to be worth trying to get as they grew more

civilized, would thus be obtained better and more regularly than by

raids or by tedious commercial negotiations. But if China was to be

conquered and ruled there must exist a state organization of equal

authority to hers; the Hsiung-nu ruler must himself come forward as Son

of Heaven and develop a court ceremonial similar to that of a Chinese

emperor. Thus the basis of the organization of the Hsiung-nu state lay

in its rivalry with the neighbouring China; but the details naturally

corresponded to the special nature of the Hsiung-nu social system. The

young Hsiung-nu feudal state differed from the ancient Chinese feudal

state not only in depending on a nomad economy with only supplementary

agriculture, but also in possessing, in addition to a whole class of

nobility and another of commoners, a stratum of slavery to be analysed

further below. Similar to the Chou state, the Hsiung-nu state contained,

especially around the ruler, an element of court bureaucracy which,

however, never developed far enough to replace the basically feudal

character of administration.

Thus Kao Tsu was faced in Mao Tun not with a mere nomad chieftain but

with the most dangerous of enemies, and Kao Tsu's policy had to be

directed to preventing any interference of the Hsiung-nu in North

Chinese affairs, and above all to preventing alliances between Hsiung-nu

and Chinese. Hsiung-nu alone, with their technique of horsemen's

warfare, would scarcely have been equal to the permanent conquest of the

fortified towns of the north and the Great Wall, although they

controlled a population which may have been in excess of 2,000,000

people. But they might have succeeded with Chinese aid. Actually a

Chinese opponent of Kao Tsu had already come to terms with Mao Tun, and

in 200 B.C. Kao Tsu was very near suffering disaster in northern Shansi,

as a result of which China would have come under the rule of the

Hsiung-nu. But it did not come to that, and Mao Tun made no further

attempt, although the opportunity came several times. Apparently the

policy adopted by his court was not imperialistic but national, in the

uncorrupted sense of the word. It was realized that a country so thickly

populated as China could only be administered from a centre within

China. The Hsiung-nu would thus have had to abandon their home territory

and rule in China itself. That would have meant abandoning the flocks,

abandoning nomad life, and turning into Chinese. The main supporters of

the national policy, the first principle of which was loyalty to the old

ways of life, seem to have been the tribal chieftains. Mao Tun fell in

with their view, and the Hsiung-nu maintained their state as long as

they adhered to that principle--for some seven hundred years. Other

nomad peoples, Toba, Mongols, and Manchus, followed the opposite policy,

and before long they were caught in the mechanism of the much more

highly developed Chinese economy and culture, and each of them

disappeared from the political scene in the course of a century or so.

The national line of policy of the Hsiung-nu did not at all mean an end

of hostilities and raids on Chinese territory, so that Kao Tsu declared

himself ready to give the Hsiung-nu the foodstuffs and clothing

materials they needed if they would make an end of their raids. A treaty

to this effect was concluded, and sealed by the marriage of a Chinese

princess with Mao Tun. This was the first international treaty in the

Far East between two independent powers mutually recognized as equals,

and the forms of international diplomacy developed in this time remained

the standard forms for the next thousand years. The agreement was

renewed at the accession of each new ruler, but was never adhered to

entirely by either side. The needs of the Hsiung-nu increased with the

expansion of their empire and the growing luxury of their court; the

Chinese, on the other hand, wanted to give as little as possible, and no

doubt they did all they could to cheat the Hsiung-nu. Thus, in spite of

the treaties the Hsiung-nu raids went on. With China's progressive

consolidation, the voluntary immigration of Chinese into the Hsiung-nu

empire came to an end, and the Hsiung-nu actually began to kidnap

Chinese subjects. These were the main features of the relations between

Chinese and Hsiung-nu almost until 100 B.C.

In the extreme south, around the present-day Canton, another independent

empire had been formed in the years of transition, under the leadership

of a Chinese. The narrow basis of this realm was no doubt provided by

the trading colonies, but the indigenous population of Yueeh tribes was

insufficiently civilized for the building up of a state that could have

maintained itself against China. Kao Tsu sent a diplomatic mission to

the ruler of this state, and invited him to place himself under Chinese

suzerainty (196 B.C.). The ruler realized that he could offer no serious

resistance, while the existing circumstances guaranteed him virtual

independence and he yielded to Kao Tsu without a struggle.

3 _Brief feudal reaction. Consolidation of the gentry_

Kao Tsu died in 195 B.C. From then to 179 the actual ruler was his

widow, the empress Lue, while children were officially styled emperors.

The empress tried to remove all the representatives of the emperor's

family and to replace them with members of her own family. To secure her

position she revived the feudal system, but she met with strong

resistance from the dynasty and its supporters who already belonged in

many cases to the new gentry, and who did not want to find their

position jeopardized by the creation of new feudal lords.

On the death of the empress her opponents rose, under the leadership of

Kao Tsu's family. Every member of the empress's family was exterminated,

and a son of Kao Tsu, known later under the name of Wen Ti (Emperor

Wen), came to the throne. He reigned from 179 to 157 B.C. Under him

there were still many fiefs, but with the limitation which the emperor

Kao Tsu had laid down shortly before his death: only members of the

imperial family should receive fiefs, to which the title of King was

attached. Thus all the more important fiefs were in the hands of the

imperial family, though this did not mean that rivalries came to an end.

On the whole Wen Ti's period of rule passed in comparative peace. For

the first time since the beginning of Chinese history, great areas of

continuous territory were under unified rule, without unending internal

warfare such as had existed under Shih Huang-ti and Kao Tsu. The

creation of so extensive a region of peace produced great economic

advance. The burdens that had lain on the peasant population were

reduced, especially since under Wen Ti the court was very frugal. The

population grew and cultivated fresh land, so that production increased

and with it the exchange of goods. The most outstanding sign of this was

the abandonment of restrictions on the minting of copper coin, in order

to prevent deflation through insufficiency of payment media. As a

consequence more taxes were brought in, partly in kind, partly in coin,

and this increased the power of the central government. The new gentry

streamed into the towns, their standard of living rose, and they made

themselves more and more into a class apart from the general population.

As people free from material cares, they were able to devote themselves

to scholarship. They went back to the old writings and studied them once

more. They even began to identify themselves with the nobles of feudal

times, to adopt the rules of good behaviour and the ceremonial described

in the Confucianist books, and very gradually, as time went on, to make

these their textbooks of good form. From this point the Confucianist

ideals first began to penetrate the official class recruited from the

gentry, and then the state organization itself. It was expected that an

official should be versed in Confucianism, and schools were set up for

Confucianist education. Around 100 B.C. this led to the introduction of

the examination system, which gradually became the one method of

selection of new officials. The system underwent many changes, but

remained in operation in principle until 1904. The object of the

examinations was not to test job efficiency but command of the ideals of

the gentry and knowledge of the literature inculcating them: this was

regarded as sufficient qualification for any position in the service of

the state.

In theory this path to training of character and to admission to the

state service was open to every "respectable" citizen. Of the

traditional four "classes" of Chinese society, only the first two,

officials (_shih_) and farmers (_nung_) were always regarded as fully

"respectable" (_liang-min_). Members of the other two classes, artisans

(_kung_) and merchants (_shang_), were under numerous restrictions.

Below these were classes of "lowly people" (_ch'ien-min_) and below

these the slaves which were not part of society proper. The privileges

and obligations of these categories were soon legally fixed. In

practice, during the first thousand years of the existence of the

examination system no peasant had a chance to become an official by

means of the examinations. In the Han period the provincial officials

had to propose suitable young persons for examination, and so for

admission to the state service, as was already mentioned. In addition,

schools had been instituted for the sons of officials; it is interesting

to note that there were, again and again, complaints about the low level

of instruction in these schools. Nevertheless, through these schools all

sons of officials, whatever their capacity or lack of capacity, could

become officials in their turn. In spite of its weaknesses, the system

had its good side. It inoculated a class of people with ideals that were

unquestionably of high ethical value. The Confucian moral system gave a

Chinese official or any member of the gentry a spiritual attitude and an

outward bearing which in their best representatives has always commanded

respect, an integrity that has always preserved its possessors, and in

consequence Chinese society as a whole, from moral collapse, from

spiritual nihilism, and has thus contributed to the preservation of

Chinese cultural values in spite of all foreign conquerors.

In the time of Wen Ti and especially of his successors, the revival at

court of the Confucianist ritual and of the earlier Heaven-worship

proceeded steadily. The sacrifices supposed to have been performed in

ancient times, the ritual supposed to have been prescribed for the

emperor in the past, all this was reintroduced. Obviously much of it was

spurious: much of the old texts had been lost, and when fragments were

found they were arbitrarily completed. Moreover, the old writing was

difficult to read and difficult to understand; thus various things were

read into the texts without justification. The new Confucians who came

forward as experts in the moral code were very different men from their

predecessors; above all, like all their contemporaries, they were

strongly influenced by the shamanistic magic that had developed in the

Ch'in period.

Wen Ti's reign had brought economic advance and prosperity;

intellectually it had been a period of renaissance, but like every such

period it did not simply resuscitate what was old, but filled the

ancient moulds with an entirely new content. Socially the period had

witnessed the consolidation of the new upper class, the gentry, who

copied the mode of life of the old nobility. This is seen most clearly

in the field of law. In the time of the Legalists the first steps had

been taken in the codification of the criminal law. They clearly

intended these laws to serve equally for all classes of the people. The

Ch'in code which was supposedly Li K'uei's code, was used in the Han

period, and was extensively elaborated by Siao Ho (died 193 B.C.) and

others. This code consisted of two volumes of the chief laws for grave

cases, one of mixed laws for the less serious cases, and six volumes on

the imposition of penalties. In the Han period "decisions" were added,

so that about A.D. 200 the code had grown to 26,272 paragraphs with over

17,000,000 words. The collection then consisted of 960 volumes. This

colossal code has been continually revised, abbreviated, or expanded,

and under its last name of "Collected Statues of the Manchu Dynasty" it

retained its validity down to the present century.

Alongside this collection there was another book that came to be

regarded and used as a book of precedences. The great Confucianist

philosopher Tung Chung-shu (179-104 B.C.), a firm supporter of the

ideology of the new gentry class, declared that the classic Confucianist

writings, and especially the book _Ch'un-ch'iu_, "Annals of Spring and

Autumn", attributed to Confucius himself, were essentially books of

legal decisions. They contained "cases" and Confucius's decisions of

them. Consequently any case at law that might arise could be decided by

analogy with the cases contained in "Annals of Spring and Autumn". Only

an educated person, of course, a member of the gentry, could claim that

his action should be judged by the decisions of Confucius and not by the

code compiled for the common people, for Confucius had expressly stated

that his rules were intended only for the upper class. Thus, right down

to modern times an educated person could be judged under regulations

different from those applicable to the common people, or if judged on

the basis of the laws, he had to expect a special treatment. The

principle of the "equality before the law" which the Legalists had

advocated and which fitted well into the absolutistic, totalitarian

system of the Ch'in, had been attacked by the feudal nobility at that

time and was attacked by the new gentry of the Han time. Legalist

thinking remained an important undercurrent for many centuries to come,

but application of the equalitarian principle was from now on never

seriously considered.

Against the growing influence of the officials belonging to the gentry

there came a last reaction. It came as a reply to the attempt of a

representative of the gentry to deprive the feudal princes of the whole

of their power. In the time of Wen Ti's successor a number of feudal

kings formed an alliance against the emperor, and even invited the

Hsiung-nu to join them. The Hsiung-nu did not do so, because they saw

that the rising had no prospect of success, and it was quelled. After

that the feudal princes were steadily deprived of rights. They were

divided into two classes, and only privileged ones were permitted to

live in the capital, the others being required to remain in their

domains. At first, the area was controlled by a "minister" of the

prince, an official of the state; later the area remained under normal

administration and the feudal prince kept only an empty title; the tax

income of a certain number of families of an area was assigned to him

and transmitted to him by normal administrative channels. Often, the

number of assigned families was fictional in that the actual income was

from far fewer families. This system differs from the Near Eastern

system in which also no actual enfeoffment took place, but where

deserving men were granted the right to collect themselves the taxes of

a certain area with certain numbers of families.

Soon after this the whole government was given the shape which it

continued to have until A.D. 220, and which formed the point of

departure for all later forms of government. At the head of the state

was the emperor, in theory the holder of absolute power in the state

restricted only by his responsibility towards "Heaven", i.e. he had to

follow and to enforce the basic rules of morality, otherwise "Heaven"

would withdraw its "mandate", the legitimation of the emperor's rule,

and would indicate this withdrawal by sending natural catastrophes. Time

and again we find emperors publicly accusing themselves for their faults

when such catastrophes occurred; and to draw the emperor's attention to

actual or made-up calamities or celestrial irregularities was one way to

criticize an emperor and to force him to change his behaviour. There are

two other indications which show that Chinese emperors--excepting a few

individual cases--at least in the first ten centuries of gentry society

were not despots: it can be proved that in some fields the

responsibility for governmental action did not lie with the emperor but

with some of his ministers. Secondly, the emperor was bound by the law

code: he could not change it nor abolish it. We know of cases in which

the ruler disregarded the code, but then tried to "defend" his arbitrary

action. Each new dynasty developed a new law code, usually changing only

details of the punishment, not the basic regulations. Rulers could issue

additional "regulations", but these, too, had to be in the spirit of

the general code and the existing moral norms. This situation has some

similarity to the situation in Muslim countries. At the ruler's side

were three counsellors who had, however, no active functions. The real

conduct of policy lay in the hands of the "chancellor", or of one of the

"nine ministers". Unlike the practice with which we are familiar in the

West, the activities of the ministries (one of them being the court

secretariat) were concerned primarily with the imperial palace. As,

however, the court secretariat, one of the nine ministries, was at the

same time a sort of imperial statistical office, in which all economic,

financial, and military statistical material was assembled, decisions on

issues of critical importance for the whole country could and did come

from it. The court, through the Ministry of Supplies, operated mines and

workshops in the provinces and organized the labour service for public

constructions. The court also controlled centrally the conscription for

the general military service. Beside the ministries there was an

extensive administration of the capital with its military guards. The

various parts of the country, including the lands given as fiefs to

princes, had a local administration, entirely independent of the central

government and more or less elaborated according to their size. The

regional administration was loosely associated with the central

government through a sort of primitive ministry of the interior, and

similarly the Chinese representatives in the protectorates, that is to

say the foreign states which had submitted to Chinese protective

overlordship, were loosely united with a sort of foreign ministry in the

central government. When a rising or a local war broke out, that was the

affair of the officer of the region concerned. If the regional troops

were insufficient, those of the adjoining regions were drawn upon; if

even these were insufficient, a real "state of war" came into being;

that is to say, the emperor appointed eight generals-in-chief, mobilized

the imperial troops, and intervened. This imperial army then had

authority over the regional and feudal troops, the troops of the

protectorates, the guards of the capital, and those of the imperial

palace. At the end of the war the imperial army was demobilized and the

generals-in-chief were transferred to other posts.

In all this there gradually developed a division into civil and military

administration. A number of regions would make up a province with a

military governor, who was in a sense the representative of the imperial

army, and who was supposed to come into activity only in the event of

war.

This administration of the Han period lacked the tight organization that

would make precise functioning possible. On the other hand, an

extremely important institution had already come into existence in a

primitive form. As central statistical authority, the court secretariat

had a special position within the ministries and supervised the

administration of the other offices. Thus there existed alongside the

executive a means of independent supervision of it, and the resulting

rivalry enabled the emperor or the chancellor to detect and eliminate

irregularities. Later, in the system of the T'ang period (A.D. 618-906),

this institution developed into an independent censorship, and the

system was given a new form as a "State and Court Secretariat", in which

the whole executive was comprised and unified. Towards the end of the

T'ang period the permanent state of war necessitated the permanent

commissioning of the imperial generals-in-chief and of the military

governors, and as a result there came into existence a "Privy Council of

State", which gradually took over functions of the executive. The system

of administration in the Han and in the T'ang period is shown in the

following table:

_Han epoch_ _T'ang epoch_

1. Emperor 1. Emperor

2. Three counsellors to the emperor 2. Three counsellors and three

(with no active functions) assistants (with no active

functions)

3. Eight supreme generals 3. Generals and Governors-General

(only appointed in time of war) (only appointed in time of

war; but in practice

continuously in office)

4. ---- 4. (a) State secretariat

(1) Central secretariat

(2) Secretariat of the Crown

(3) Secretariat of the Palace

and imperial historical

commission

4. (b) Emperor's Secretariat

(1) Private Archives

(2) Court Adjutants' Office

(3) Harem administration

5. Court administration (Ministries) 5. Court administration

(Ministries)

(1) Ministry for state sacrifices (1) Ministry for state

sacrifices

(2) Ministry for imperial coaches (2) Ministry for imperial

and horses coaches and horses

(3) Ministry for justice at court (3) Ministry for justice

at court

(4) Ministry for receptions (4) Ministry for receptions

(i.e. foreign affairs)

(5) Ministry for ancestors' (5) Ministry for ancestors'

temples temples

(6) Ministry for supplies to the (6) Ministry for supplies to

court the court

(7) Ministry for the harem (7) Economic and financial

Ministry

(8) Ministry for the palace (8) Ministry for the payment

guards of salaries

(9) Ministry for the court (9) Ministry for armament

(state secretariat) and magazines

6. Administration of the capital: 6. Administration of the capital:

(1) Crown prince's palace (1) Crown prince's palace

(2) Security service for the capital (2) Palace guards and guards'

office

(3) Capital administration: (3) Arms production

(a) Guards of the capital department

(b) Guards of the city gates

(c) Building department

(4) Labour service

department

(5) Building department

(6) Transport department

(7) Department for education

(of sons of officials!)

7. Ministry of the Interior 7. Ministry of the Interior

(Provincial administration) (Provincial administration)

8. Foreign Ministry 8. ----

9. Censorship (Audit council)

There is no denying that according to our standard this whole system was

still elementary and "personal", that is to say, attached to the

emperor's person--though it should not be overlooked that we ourselves

are not yet far from a similar phase of development. To this day the

titles of not a few of the highest officers of state--the Lord Privy

Seal, for instance--recall that in the past their offices were conceived

as concerned purely with the personal service of the monarch. In one

point, however, the Han administrative set-up was quite modern: it

already had a clear separation between the emperor's private treasury

and the state treasury; laws determined which of the two received

certain taxes and which had to make certain payments. This separation,

which in Europe occurred not until the late Middle Ages, in China was

abolished at the end of the Han Dynasty.

The picture changes considerably to the advantage of the Chinese as soon

as we consider the provincial administration. The governor of a

province, and each of his district officers or prefects, had a staff

often of more than a hundred officials. These officials were drawn from

the province or prefecture and from the personal friends of the

administrator, and they were appointed by the governor or the prefect.

The staff was made up of officials responsible for communications with

the central or provincial administration (private secretary, controller,

finance officer), and a group of officials who carried on the actual

local administration. There were departments for transport, finance,

education, justice, medicine (hygiene), economic and military affairs,

market control, and presents (which had to be made to the higher

officials at the New Year and on other occasions). In addition to these

offices, organized in a quite modern style, there was an office for

advising the governor and another for drafting official documents and

letters.

The interesting feature of this system is that the provincial

administration was _de facto_ independent of the central administration,

and that the governor and even his prefects could rule like kings in

their regions, appointing and discharging as they chose. This was a

vestige of feudalism, but on the other hand it was a healthy check

against excessive centralization. It is thanks to this system that even

the collapse of the central power or the cutting off of a part of the

empire did not bring the collapse of the country. In a remote frontier

town like Tunhuang, on the border of Turkestan, the life of the local

Chinese went on undisturbed whether communication with the capital was

maintained or was broken through invasions by foreigners. The official

sent from the centre would be liable at any time to be transferred

elsewhere; and he had to depend on the practical knowledge of his

subordinates, the members of the local families of the gentry. These

officials had the local government in their hands, and carried on the

administration of places like Tunhuang through a thousand years and

more. The Hsin family, for instance, was living there in 50 B.C. and was

still there in A.D. 950; and so were the Yin, Ling-hu, Li, and K'ang

families.

All the officials of the various offices or Ministries were appointed

under the state examination system, but they had no special professional

training; only for the more important subordinate posts were there

specialists, such as jurists, physicians, and so on. A change came

towards the end of the T'ang period, when a Department of Commerce and

Monopolies was set up; only specialists were appointed to it, and it was

placed directly under the emperor. Except for this, any official could

be transferred from any ministry to any other without regard to his

experience.

4 _Turkestan policy. End of the Hsiung-nu empire_

In the two decades between 160 and 140 B.C. there had been further

trouble with the Hsiung-nu, though there was no large-scale fighting.

There was a fundamental change of policy under the next emperor, Wu (or

Wu Ti, 141-86 B.C.). The Chinese entered for the first time upon an

active policy against the Hsiung-nu. There seem to have been several

reasons for this policy, and several objectives. The raids of the

Hsiung-nu from the Ordos region and from northern Shansi had shown

themselves to be a direct menace to the capital and to its extremely

important hinterland. Northern Shansi is mountainous, with deep ravines.

A considerable army on horseback could penetrate some distance to the

south before attracting attention. Northern Shensi and the Ordos region

are steppe country, in which there were very few Chinese settlements and

through which an army of horsemen could advance very quickly. It was

therefore determined to push back the Hsiung-nu far enough to remove

this threat. It was also of importance to break the power of the

Hsiung-nu in the province of Kansu, and to separate them as far as

possible from the Tibetans living in that region, to prevent any union

between those two dangerous adversaries. A third point of importance was

the safeguarding of caravan routes. The state, and especially the

capital, had grown rich through Wen Ti's policy. Goods streamed into the

capital from all quarters. Commerce with central Asia had particularly

increased, bringing the products of the Middle East to China. The

caravan routes passed through western Shensi and Kansu to eastern

Turkestan, but at that time the Hsiung-nu dominated the approaches to

Turkestan and were in a position to divert the trade to themselves or

cut it off. The commerce brought profit not only to the caravan traders,

most of whom were probably foreigners, but to the officials in the

provinces and prefectures through which the routes passed. Thus the

officials in western China were interested in the trade routes being

brought under direct control, so that the caravans could arrive

regularly and be immune from robbery. Finally, the Chinese government

may well have regarded it as little to its honour to be still paying

dues to the Hsiung-nu and sending princesses to their rulers, now that

China was incomparably wealthier and stronger than at the time when that

policy of appeasement had begun.

[Illustration: Map 3. China in the struggle with, the Huns or Hsiung Nu

_(roughly 128-100 B.C.)_]

The first active step taken was to try, in 133 B.C., to capture the

head of the Hsiung-nu state, who was called a _shan-yue_; but the

_shan-yue_ saw through the plan and escaped. There followed a period of

continuous fighting until 119 B.C. The Chinese made countless attacks,

without lasting success. But the Hsiung-nu were weakened, one sign of

this being that there were dissensions after the death of the _shan-yue_

Chuen-ch'en, and in 127 B.C. his son went over to the Chinese. Finally

the Chinese altered their tactics, advancing in 119 B.C. with a strong

army of cavalry, which suffered enormous losses but inflicted serious

loss on the Hsiung-nu. After that the Hsiung-nu withdrew farther to the

north, and the Chinese settled peasants in the important region of

Kansu.

Meanwhile, in 125 B.C., the famous Chang Ch'ien had returned. He had

been sent in 138 to conclude an alliance with the Yueeh-chih against the

Hsiung-nu. The Yueeh-chih had formerly been neighbours of the Hsiung-nu

as far as the Ala Shan region, but owing to defeat by the Hsiung-nu

their remnants had migrated to western Turkestan. Chang Ch'ien had

followed them. Politically he had had no success, but he brought back

accurate information about the countries in the far west, concerning

which nothing had been known beyond the vague reports of merchants. Now

it was learnt whence the foreign goods came and whither the Chinese

goods went. Chang Ch'ien's reports (which are one of the principal

sources for the history of central Asia at that remote time)

strengthened the desire to enter into direct and assured commercial

relations with those distant countries. The government evidently thought

of getting this commerce into its own hands. The way to do this was to

impose "tribute" on the countries concerned. The idea was that the

missions bringing the annual "tribute" would be a sort of state

bartering commissions. The state laid under tribute must supply

specified goods at its own cost, and received in return Chinese produce,

the value of which was to be roughly equal to the "tribute". Thus Chang

Ch'ien's reports had the result that, after the first successes against

the Hsiung-nu, there was increased interest in a central Asian policy.

The greatest military success were the campaigns of General Li Kuang-li

to Ferghana in 104 and 102 B.C. The result of the campaigns was to bring

under tribute all the small states in the Tarim basin and some of the

states of western Turkestan. From now on not only foreign consumer goods

came freely into China, but with them a great number of other things,

notably plants such as grape, peach, pomegranate.

In 108 B.C. the western part of Korea was also conquered. Korea was

already an important transit region for the trade with Japan. Thus this

trade also came under the direct influence of the Chinese government.

Although this conquest represented a peril to the eastern flank of the

Hsiung-nu, it did not by any means mean that they were conquered. The

Hsiung-nu while weakened evaded the Chinese pressure, but in 104 B.C.

and again in 91 they inflicted defeats on the Chinese. The Hsiung-nu

were indirectly threatened by Chinese foreign policy, for the Chinese

concluded an alliance with old enemies of the Hsiung-nu, the Wu-sun, in

the north of the Tarim basin. This made the Tarim basin secure for the

Chinese, and threatened the Hsiung-nu with a new danger in their rear.

Finally the Chinese did all they could through intrigue, espionage, and

sabotage to promote disunity and disorder within the Hsiung-nu, though

it cannot be seen from the Chinese accounts how far the Chinese were

responsible for the actual conflicts and the continual changes of

_shan-yue_. Hostilities against the Hsiung-nu continued incessantly,

after the death of Wu Ti, under his successor, so that the Hsiung-nu

were further weakened. In consequence of this it was possible to rouse

against them other tribes who until then had been dependent on them--the

Ting-ling in the north and the Wu-huan in the east. The internal

difficulties of the Hsiung-nu increased further.

Wu Ti's active policy had not been directed only against the Hsiung-nu.

After heavy fighting he brought southern China, with the region round

Canton, and the south-eastern coast, firmly under Chinese dominion--in

this case again on account of trade interests. No doubt there were

already considerable colonies of foreign merchants in Canton and other

coastal towns, trading in Indian and Middle East goods. The traders seem

often to have been Sogdians. The southern wars gave Wu Ti the control of

the revenues from this commerce. He tried several times to advance

through Yuennan in order to secure a better land route to India, but

these attempts failed. Nevertheless, Chinese influence became stronger

in the south-west.

In spite of his long rule, Wu Ti did not leave an adult heir, as the

crown prince was executed, with many other persons, shortly before Wu

Ti's death. The crown prince had been implicated in an alleged attempt

by a large group of people to remove the emperor by various sorts of

magic. It is difficult to determine today what lay behind this affair;

probably it was a struggle between two cliques of the gentry. Thus a

regency council had to be set up for the young heir to the throne; it

included a member of a Hsiung-nu tribe. The actual government was in the

hands of a general and his clique until the death of the heir to the

throne, and at the beginning of his successor's reign.

At this time came the end of the Hsiung-nu empire--a foreign event of

the utmost importance. As a result of the continual disastrous wars

against the Chinese, in which not only many men but, especially, large

quantities of cattle fell into Chinese hands, the livelihood of the

Hsiung-nu was seriously threatened; their troubles were increased by

plagues and by unusually severe winters. To these troubles were added

political difficulties, including unsettled questions in regard to the

succession to the throne. The result of all this was that the Hsiung-nu

could no longer offer effective military resistance to the Chinese.

There were a number of _shan-yue_ ruling contemporaneously as rivals, and

one of them had to yield to the Chinese in 58 B.C.; in 51 he came as a

vassal to the Chinese court. The collapse of the Hsiung-nu empire was

complete. After 58 B.C. the Chinese were freed from all danger from that

quarter and were able, for a time, to impose their authority in Central

Asia.

5 _Impoverishment. Cliques. End of the Dynasty_

In other respects the Chinese were not doing as well as might have been

assumed. The wars carried on by Wu Ti and his successors had been

ruinous. The maintenance of large armies of occupation in the new

regions, especially in Turkestan, also meant a permanent drain on the

national funds. There was a special need for horses, for the people of

the steppes could only be fought by means of cavalry. As the Hsiung-nu

were supplying no horses, and the campaigns were not producing horses

enough as booty, the peasants had to rear horses for the government.

Additional horses were bought at very high prices, and apart from this

the general financing of the wars necessitated increased taxation of the

peasants, a burden on agriculture no less serious than was the enrolment

of many peasants for military service. Finally, the new external trade

did not by any means bring the advantages that had been hoped for. The

tribute missions brought tribute but, to begin with, this meant an

obligation to give presents in return; moreover, these missions had to

be fed and housed in the capital, often for months, as the official

receptions took place only on New Year's Day. Their maintenance entailed

much expense, and meanwhile the members of the missions traded privately

with the inhabitants and the merchants of the capital, buying things

they needed and selling things they had brought in addition to the

tribute. The tribute itself consisted mainly of "precious articles",

which meant strange or rare things of no practical value. The emperor

made use of them as elements of personal luxury, or made presents of

some of them to deserving officials. The gifts offered by the Chinese in

return consisted mainly of silk. Silk was received by the government as

a part of the tax payments and formed an important element of the

revenue of the state. It now went abroad without bringing in any

corresponding return. The private trade carried on by the members of the

missions was equally unserviceable to the Chinese. It, too, took from

them goods of economic value, silk and gold, which went abroad in

exchange for luxury articles of little or no economic importance, such

as glass, precious stones, or stud horses, which in no way benefited the

general population. Thus in this last century B.C. China's economic

situation grew steadily and fairly rapidly worse. The peasants, more

heavily taxed than ever, were impoverished, and yet the exchequer became

not fuller but emptier, so that gold began even to be no longer

available for payments. Wu Ti was aware of the situation and called

different groups together to discuss the problems of economics. Under

the name "Discussions on Salt and Iron" the gist of these talks is

preserved and shows that one group under the leadership of Sang

Hung-yang (143-80 B.C.) was business-oriented and thinking in economic

terms, while their opponents, mainly Confucianists, regarded the

situation mainly as a moral crisis. Sang proposed an "equable

transportation" and a "standardization" system and favoured other state

monopolies and controls; these ideas were taken up later and continued

to be discussed, again and again.

Already under Wu Ti there had been signs of a development which now

appeared constantly in Chinese history. Among the new gentry, families

entered into alliances with each other, sealed their mutual allegiance

by matrimonial unions, and so formed large cliques. Each clique made it

its concern to get the most important government positions into its

hands, so that it should itself control the government. Under Wu Ti, for

example, almost all the important generals had belonged to a certain

clique, which remained dominant under his two successors. Two of the

chief means of attaining power were for such a clique to give the

emperor a girl from its ranks as wife, and to see to it that all the

eunuchs around the emperor should be persons dependent on the clique.

Eunuchs came generally from the poorer classes; they were launched at

court by members of the great cliques, or quite openly presented to the

emperor.

The chief influence of the cliques lay, however, in the selection of

officials. It is not surprising that the officials recommended only sons

of people in their own clique--their family or its closest associates.

On top of all this, the examiners were in most cases themselves members

of the same families to which the provincial officials belonged. Thus it

was made doubly certain that only those candidates who were to the

liking of the dominant group among the gentry should pass.

Surrounded by these cliques, the emperors became in most cases powerless

figureheads. At times energetic rulers were able to play off various

cliques against each other, and so to acquire personal power; but the

weaker emperors found themselves entirely in the hands of cliques. Not a

few emperors in China were removed by cliques which they had attempted

to resist; and various dynasties were brought to their end by the

cliques; this was the fate of the Han dynasty.

The beginning of its fall came with the activities of the widow of the

emperor Yuean Ti. She virtually ruled in the name of her

eighteen-year-old son, the emperor Ch'eng Ti (32-7 B.C.), and placed all

her brothers, and also her nephew, Wang Mang, in the principal

government posts. They succeeded at first in either removing the

strongest of the other cliques or bringing them into dependence. Within

the Wang family the nephew Wang Mang steadily advanced, securing direct

supporters even in some branches of the imperial family; these

personages declared their readiness to join him in removing the existing

line of the imperial house. When Ch'eng Ti died without issue, a young

nephew of his (Ai Ti, 6-1 B.C.) was placed on the throne by Wang Mang,

and during this period the power of the Wangs and their allies grew

further, until all their opponents had been removed and the influence of

the imperial family very greatly reduced. When Ai Ti died, Wang Mang

placed an eight-year-old boy on the throne, himself acting as regent;

four years later the boy fell ill and died, probably with Wang Mang's

aid. Wang Mang now chose a one-year-old baby, but soon after he felt

that the time had come for officially assuming the rulership. In A.D. 8

he dethroned the baby, ostensibly at Heaven's command, and declared

himself emperor and first of the Hsin ("new") dynasty. All the members

of the old imperial family in the capital were removed from office and

degraded to commoners, with the exception of those who had already been

supporting Wang Mang. Only those members who held unimportant posts at a

distance remained untouched.

Wang Mang's "usurpation" is unusual from two points of view. First, he

paid great attention to public opinion and induced large masses of the

population to write petitions to the court asking the Han ruler to

abdicate; he even fabricated "heavenly omina" in his own favour and

against the Han dynasty in order to get wide support even from

intellectuals. Secondly, he inaugurated a formal abdication ceremony,

culminating in the transfer of the imperial seal to himself. This

ceremony became standard for the next centuries. The seal was made of a

precious stone, once presented to the Ch'in dynasty ruler before he

ascended the throne. From now on, the possessor of this seal was the

legitimate ruler.

6 _The pseudo-socialistic dictatorship. Revolt of the "Red Eyebrows"_

Wang Mang's dynasty lasted only from A.D. 9 to 23; but it was one of the

most stirring periods of Chinese history. It is difficult to evaluate

Wang Mang, because all we know about him stems from sources hostile

towards him. Yet we gain the impression that some of his innovations,

such as the legalization of enthronement through the transfer of the

seal; the changes in the administration of provinces and in the

bureaucratic set-up in the capital; and even some of his economic

measures were so highly regarded that they were retained or

re-introduced, although this happened in some instances centuries later

and without mentioning Wang Mang's name. But most of his policies and

actions were certainly neither accepted nor acceptable. He made use of

every conceivable resource in order to secure power to his clique. As

far as possible he avoided using open force, and resorted to a

high-level propaganda. Confucianism, the philosophic basis of the power

of the gentry, served him as a bait; he made use of the so-called "old

character school" for his purposes. When, after the holocaust of books,

it was desired to collect the ancient classics again, texts were found

under strange circumstances in the walls of Confucius's house; they were

written in an archaic script. The people who occupied themselves with

these books were called the old character school. The texts came under

suspicion; most scholars had little belief in their genuineness. Wang

Mang, however, and his creatures energetically supported the cult of

these ancient writings. The texts were edited and issued, and in the

process, as can now be seen, certain things were smuggled into them that

fitted in well with Wang Mang's intentions. He even had other texts

reissued with falsifications. He now represented himself in all his

actions as a man who did with the utmost precision the things which the

books reported of rulers or ministers of ancient times. As regent he had

declared that his model was the brother of the first emperor of the Chou

dynasty; as emperor he took for his exemplar one of the mythical

emperors of ancient China; of his new laws he claimed that they were

simply revivals of decrees of the golden age. In all this he appealed to

the authority of literature that had been tampered with to suit his

aims. Actually, such laws had never before been customary; either Wang

Mang completely misinterpreted passages in an ancient text to suit his

purpose, or he had dicta that suited him smuggled into the text. There

can be no question that Wang Mang and his accomplices began by

deliberately falsifying and deceiving. However, as time went on, he

probably began to believe in his own frauds.

Wang Mang's great series of certain laws has brought him the name of

"the first Socialist on the throne of China". But closer consideration

reveals that these measures, ostensibly and especially aimed at the good

of the poor, were in reality devised simply in order to fill the

imperial exchequer and to consolidate the imperial power. When we read

of the turning over of great landed estates to the state, do we not

imagine that we are faced with a modern land reform? But this applied

only to the wealthiest of all the landowners, who were to be deprived in

this way of their power. The prohibition of private slave-owning had a

similar purpose, the state reserving to itself the right to keep slaves.

Moreover, landless peasants were to receive land to till, at the expense

of those who possessed too much. This admirable law, however, was not

intended seriously to be carried into effect. Instead, the setting up of

a system of state credits for peasants held out the promise, in spite of

rather reduced interest rates, of important revenue. The peasants had

never been in a position to pay back their private debts together with

the usurious interest, but there were at least opportunities of coming

to terms with a private usurer, whereas the state proved a merciless

creditor. It could dispossess the peasant, and either turn his property

into a state farm, convey it to another owner, or make the peasant a

state slave. Thus this measure worked against the interest of the

peasants, as did the state monopoly of the exploitation of mountains and

lakes. "Mountains and lakes" meant the uncultivated land around

settlements, the "village commons", where people collected firewood or

went fishing. They now had to pay money for fishing rights and for the

right to collect wood, money for the emperor's exchequer. The same

purpose lay behind the wine, salt, and iron tool monopolies. Enormous

revenues came to the state from the monopoly of minting coin, when old

metal coin of full value was called in and exchanged for debased coin.

Another modern-sounding institution, that of the "equalization offices",

was supposed to buy cheap goods in times of plenty in order to sell them

to the people in times of scarcity at similarly low prices, so

preventing want and also preventing excessive price fluctuations. In

actual fact these state offices formed a new source of profit, buying

cheaply and selling as dearly as possible.

Thus the character of these laws was in no way socialistic; nor,

however, did they provide an El Dorado for the state finances, for Wang

Mang's officials turned all the laws to their private advantage. The

revenues rarely reached the capital; they vanished into the pockets of

subordinate officials. The result was a further serious lowering of the

level of existence of the peasant population, with no addition to the

financial resources of the state. Yet Wang Mang had great need of money,

because he attached importance to display and because he was planning a

new war. He aimed at the final destruction of the Hsiung-nu, so that

access to central Asia should no longer be precarious and it should thus

be possible to reduce the expense of the military administration of

Turkestan. The war would also distract popular attention from the

troubles at home. By way of preparation for war, Wang Mang sent a

mission to the Hsiung-nu with dishonouring proposals, including changes

in the name of the Hsiung-nu and in the title of the _shan-yue_. The name

Hsiung-nu was to be given the insulting change of Hsiang-nu, meaning

"subjugated slaves". The result was that risings of the Hsiung-nu took

place, whereupon Wang Mang commanded that the whole of their country

should be partitioned among fifteen _shan-yue_ and declared the country

to be a Chinese province. Since this declaration had no practical

result, it robbed Wang Mang of the increased prestige he had sought and

only further infuriated the Hsiung-nu. Wang Mang concentrated a vast

army on the frontier. Meanwhile he lost the whole of the possessions in

Turkestan.

But before Wang Mang's campaign against the Hsiung-nu could begin, the

difficulties at home grew steadily worse. In A.D. 12 Wang Mang felt

obliged to abrogate all his reform legislation because it could not be

carried into effect; and the economic situation proved more lamentable

than ever. There were continual risings, which culminated in A.D. 18 in

a great popular insurrection, a genuine revolutionary rising of the

peasants, whose distress had grown beyond bearing through Wang Mang's

ill-judged measures. The rebels called themselves "Red Eyebrows"; they

had painted their eyebrows red by way of badge and in order to bind

their members indissolubly to their movement. The nucleus of this rising

was a secret society. Such secret societies, usually are harmless, but

may, in emergency situations, become an immensely effective instrument

in the hands of the rural population. The secret societies then organize

the peasants, in order to achieve a forcible settlement of the matter in

dispute. Occasionally, however, the movement grows far beyond its

leaders' original objective and becomes a popular revolutionary

movement, directed against the whole ruling class. That is what happened

on this occasion. Vast swarms of peasants marched to the capital,

killing all officials and people of position on their way. The troops

sent against them by Wang Mang either went over to the Red Eyebrows or

copied them, plundering wherever they could and killing officials. Owing

to the appalling mass murders and the fighting, the forces placed by

Wang Mang along the frontier against the Hsiung-nu received no

reinforcements and, instead of attacking the Hsiung-nu, themselves went

over to plundering, so that ultimately the army simply disintegrated.

Fortunately for China, the _shan-yue_ of the time did not take advantage

of his opportunity, perhaps because his position within the Hsiung-nu

empire was too insecure.

Scarcely had the popular rising begun when descendants of the deposed

Han dynasty appeared and tried to secure the support of the upper class.

They came forward as fighters against the usurper Wang Mang and as

defenders of the old social order against the revolutionary masses. But

the armies which these Han princes were able to collect were no better

than those of the other sides. They, too, consisted of poor and hungry

peasants, whose aim was to get money or goods by robbery; they too,

plundered and murdered more than they fought.

However, one prince by the name of Liu Hsiu gradually gained the upper

hand. The basis of his power was the district of Nanyang in Honan, one

of the wealthiest agricultural centres of China at that time and also

the centre of iron and steel production. The big landowners, the gentry

of Nanyang, joined him, and the prince's party conquered the capital.

Wang Mang, placing entire faith in his sanctity, did not flee; he sat in

his robes in the throne-room and recited the ancient writings, convinced

that he would overcome his adversaries by the power of his words. But a

soldier cut off his head (A.D. 22). The skull was kept for two hundred

years in the imperial treasury. The fighting, nevertheless, went on.

Various branches of the prince's party fought one another, and all of

them fought the Red Eyebrows. In those years millions of men came to

their end. Finally, in A.D. 24, Liu Hsiu prevailed, becoming the first

emperor of the second Han dynasty, also called the Later Han dynasty;

his name as emperor was Kuang-wu Ti (A.D. 25-57).

7 _Reaction and Restoration: the Later Han dynasty_

Within the country the period that followed was one of reaction and

restoration. The massacres of the preceding years had so reduced the

population that there was land enough for the peasants who remained

alive. Moreover, their lords and the money-lenders of the towns were

generally no longer alive, so that many peasants had become free of

debt. The government was transferred from Sian to Loyang, in the present

province of Honan. This brought the capital nearer to the great

wheat-producing regions, so that the transport of grain and other taxes

in kind to the capital was cheapened. Soon this cleared foundation was

covered by a new stratum, a very sparse one, of great landowners who

were supporters and members of the new imperial house, largely

descendants of the landowners of the earlier Han period. At first they

were not much in evidence, but they gained power more and more rapidly.

In spite of this, the first half-century of the Later Han period was one

of good conditions on the land and economic recovery.

8 _Hsiung-nu policy_

In foreign policy the first period of the Later Han dynasty was one of

extraordinary success, both in the extreme south and in the question of

the Hsiung-nu. During the period of Wang Mang's rule and the fighting

connected with it, there had been extensive migration to the south and

south-west. Considerable regions of Chinese settlement had come into

existence in Yuennan and even in Annam and Tongking, and a series of

campaigns under General Ma Yuean (14 B.C.-A.D. 49) now added these

regions to the territory of the empire. These wars were carried on with

relatively small forces, as previously in the Canton region, the natives

being unable to offer serious resistance owing to their inferiority in

equipment and civilization. The hot climate, however, to which the

Chinese soldiers were unused, was hard for them to endure.

The Hsiung-nu, in spite of internal difficulties, had regained

considerable influence in Turkestan during the reign of Wang Mang. But

the king of the city state of Yarkand had increased his power by

shrewdly playing off Chinese and Hsiung-nu against each other, so that

before long he was able to attack the Hsiung-nu. The small states in

Turkestan, however, regarded the overlordship of the distant China as

preferable to that of Yarkand or the Hsiung-nu both of whom, being

nearer, were able to bring their power more effectively into play.

Accordingly many of the small states appealed for Chinese aid. Kuang-wu

Ti met this appeal with a blank refusal, implying that order had only

just been restored in China and that he now simply had not the resources

for a campaign in Turkestan. Thus, the king of Yarkand was able to

extend his power over the remainder of the small states of Turkestan,

since the Hsiung-nu had been obliged to withdraw. Kuang-wu Ti had had

several frontier wars with the Hsiung-nu without any decisive result.

But in the years around A.D. 45 the Hsiung-nu had suffered several

severe droughts and also great plagues of locusts, so that they had lost

a large part of their cattle. They were no longer able to assert

themselves in Turkestan and at the same time to fight the Chinese in the

south and the Hsien-pi and the Wu-huan in the east. These two peoples,

apparently largely of Mongol origin, had been subject in the past to

Hsiung-nu overlordship. They had spread steadily in the territories

bordering Manchuria and Mongolia, beyond the eastern frontier of the

Hsiung-nu empire. Living there in relative peace and at the same time in

possession of very fertile pasturage, these two peoples had grown in

strength. And since the great political collapse of 58 B.C. the

Hsiung-nu had not only lost their best pasturage in the north of the

provinces of Shensi and Shansi, but had largely grown used to living in

co-operation with the Chinese. They had become much more accustomed to

trade with China, exchanging animals for textiles and grain, than to

warfare, so that in the end they were defeated by the Hsien-pi and

Wu-huan, who had held to the older form of purely war-like nomad life.

Weakened by famine and by the wars against Wu-huan and Hsien-pi, the

Hsiung-nu split into two, one section withdrawing to the north.

The southern Hsiung-nu were compelled to submit to the Chinese in order

to gain security from their other enemies. Thus the Chinese were able to

gain a great success without moving a finger: the Hsiung-nu, who for

centuries had shown themselves again and again to be the most dangerous

enemies of China, were reduced to political insignificance. About a

hundred years earlier the Hsiung-nu empire had suffered defeat; now half

of what remained of it became part of the Chinese state. Its place was

taken by the Hsien-pi and Wu-huan, but at first they were of much less

importance.

In spite of the partition, the northern Hsiung-nu attempted in the years

between A.D. 60 and 70 to regain a sphere of influence in Turkestan;

this seemed the easier for them since the king of Yarkand had been

captured and murdered, and Turkestan was more or less in a state of

confusion. The Chinese did their utmost to play off the northern against

the southern Hsiung-nu and to maintain a political balance of power in

the west and north. So long as there were a number of small states in

Turkestan, of which at least some were friendly to China, Chinese trade

caravans suffered relatively little disturbance on their journeys.

Independent states in Turkestan had proved more profitable for trade

than when a large army of occupation had to be maintained there. When,

however, there appeared to be the danger of a new union of the two

parts of the Hsiung-nu as a restoration of a large empire also

comprising all Turkestan, the Chinese trading monopoly was endangered.

Any great power would secure the best goods for itself, and there would

be no good business remaining for China.

For these reasons a great Chinese campaign was undertaken against

Turkestan in A.D. 73 under Tou Ku. Mainly owing to the ability of the

Chinese deputy commander Pan Ch'ao, the whole of Turkestan was quickly

conquered. Meanwhile the emperor Ming Ti (A.D. 58-75) had died, and under

the new emperor Chang Ti (76-88) the "isolationist" party gained the

upper hand against the clique of Tou Ku and Pan Ch'ao: the danger of the

restoration of a Hsiung-nu empire, the isolationists contended, no

longer existed; Turkestan should be left to itself; the small states

would favour trade with China of their own accord. Meanwhile, a

considerable part of Turkestan had fallen away from China, for Chang Ti

sent neither money nor troops to hold the conquered territories. Pan

Ch'ao nevertheless remained in Turkestan (at Kashgar and Khotan) where

he held on amid countless difficulties. Although he reported (A.D. 78)

that the troops could feed themselves in Turkestan and needed neither

supplies nor money from home, no reinforcements of any importance were

sent; only a few hundred or perhaps a thousand men, mostly released

criminals, reached him. Not until A.D. 89 did the Pan Ch'ao clique

return to power when the mother of the young emperor Ho Ti (89-105) took

over the government during his minority: she was a member of the family

of Tou Ku. She was interested in bringing to a successful conclusion the

enterprise which had been started by members of her family and its

followers. In addition, it can be shown that a number of other members

of the "war party" had direct interests in the west, mainly in form of

landed estates. Accordingly, a campaign was started in 89 under her

brother against the northern Hsiung-nu, and it decided the fate of

Turkestan in China's favour. Turkestan remained firmly in Chinese

possession until the death of Pan Ch'ao in 102. Shortly afterwards heavy

fighting broke out again: the Tanguts advanced from the south in an

attempt to cut off Chinese access to Turkestan. The Chinese drove back

the Tanguts and maintained their hold on Turkestan, though no longer

absolutely.

9 _Economic situation. Rebellion of the "Yellow Turbans". Collapse of

the Han dynasty_

The economic results of the Turkestan trade in this period were not so

unfavourable as in the earlier Han period. The army of occupation was

incomparably smaller, and under Pan Ch'ao's policy the soldiers were fed

and paid in Turkestan itself, so that the cost to China remained small.

Moreover, the drain on the national income was no longer serious

because, in the intervening period, regular Chinese settlements had been

planted in Turkestan including Chinese merchants, so that the trade no

longer remained entirely in the hands of foreigners.

In spite of the economic consolidation at the beginning of the Later Han

dynasty, and in spite of the more balanced trade, the political

situation within China steadily worsened from A.D. 80 onwards. Although

the class of great landowners was small, a number of cliques formed

within it, and their mutual struggle for power soon went beyond the

limits of court intrigue. New actors now came upon the stage, namely the

eunuchs. With the economic improvement there had been a general increase

in the luxury at the court of the Han emperors, and the court steadily

increased in size. The many hundred wives and concubines in the palace

made necessary a great army of eunuchs. As they had the ear of the

emperor and so could influence him, the eunuchs formed an important

political factor. For a time the main struggle was between the group of

eunuchs and the group of scholars. The eunuchs served a particular

clique to which some of the emperor's wives belonged. The scholars, that

is to say the ministers, together with members of the ministries and the

administrative staff, served the interests of another clique. The

struggles grew more and more sanguinary in the middle of the second

century A.D. It soon proved that the group with the firmest hold in the

provinces had the advantage, because it was not easy to control the

provinces from a distance. The result was that, from about A.D. 150,

events at court steadily lost importance, the lead being taken by the

generals commanding the provincial troops. It would carry us too far to

give the details of all these struggles. The provincial generals were at

first Ts'ao Ts'ao, Lue Pu, Yuean Shao, and Sun Ts'e; later came Liu Pei.

All were striving to gain control of the government, and all were

engaged in mutual hostilities from about 180 onwards. Each general was

also trying to get the emperor into his hands. Several times the last

emperor of the Later Han dynasty, Hsien Ti (190-220), was captured by

one or another of the generals. As the successful general was usually

unable to maintain his hold on the capital, he dragged the poor emperor

with him from place to place until he finally had to give him up to

another general. The point of this chase after the emperor was that

according to the idea introduced earlier by Wang Mang the first ruler of

a new dynasty had to receive the imperial seals from the last emperor

of the previous dynasty. The last emperor must abdicate in proper form.

Accordingly, each general had to get possession of the emperor to begin

with, in order at the proper time to take over the seals.

By about A.D. 200 the new conditions had more or less crystallized.

There remained only three great parties. The most powerful was that of

Ts'ao Ts'ao, who controlled the north and was able to keep permanent

hold of the emperor. In the west, in the province of Szechwan, Liu Pei

had established himself, and in the south-east Sun Ts'e's brother.

But we must not limit our view to these generals' struggles. At this

time there were two other series of events of equal importance with

those. The incessant struggles of the cliques against each other

continued at the expense of the people, who had to fight them and pay

for them. Thus, after A.D. 150 the distress of the country population

grew beyond all limits. Conditions were as disastrous as in the time of

Wang Mang. And once more, as then, a popular movement broke out, that of

the so-called "Yellow Turbans". This was the first of the two important

events. This popular movement had a characteristic which from now on

became typical of all these risings of the people. The intellectual

leaders of the movement, Chang Ling and others, were members of a

particular religious sect. This sect was influenced by Iranian Mazdaism

on the one side and by certain ideas from Lao Tzu; on the other side;

and these influences were superimposed on popular rural as well as,

perhaps, local tribal religious beliefs and superstitions. The sect had

roots along the coastal settlements of Eastern China, where it seems to

have gained the support of the peasantry and their local priests. These

priests of the people were opposed to the representatives of the

official religion, that is to say the officials drawn from the gentry.

In small towns and villages the temples of the gods of the fruits of the

field, of the soil, and so on, were administered by authorized local

officials, and these officials also carried out the prescribed

sacrifices. The old temples of the people were either done away with (we

have many edicts of the Han period concerning the abolition of popular

forms of religious worship), or their worship was converted into an

official cult: the all-powerful gentry extended their domination over

religion as well as all else. But the peasants regarded their local

unauthorized priests as their natural leaders against the gentry and

against gentry forms of religion. One branch, probably the main branch

of this movement, developed a stronghold in Eastern Szechwan province,

where its members succeeded to create a state of their own which

retained its independence for a while. It is the only group which

developed real religious communities in which men and women

participated, extensive welfare schemes existed and class differences

were discouraged. It had a real church organization with dioceses,

communal friendship meals and a confession ritual; in short, real piety

developed as it could not develop in the official religions. After the

annihilation of this state, remnants of the organization can be traced

through several centuries, mainly in central and south China. It may

well be that the many "Taoistic" traits which can be found in the

religions of late and present-day Mongolian and Tibetan tribes, can be

derived from this movement of the Yellow Turbans.

The rising of the Yellow Turbans began in 184; all parties, cliques and

generals alike, were equally afraid of the revolutionaries, since these

were a threat to the gentry as such, and so to all parties. Consequently

a combined army of considerable size was got together and sent against

the rebels. The Yellow Turbans were beaten.

During these struggles it became evident that Ts'ao Ts'ao with his

troops had become the strongest of all the generals. His troops seem to

have consisted not of Chinese soldiers alone, but also of Hsiung-nu. It

is understandable that the annals say nothing about this, and it can

only be inferred from the facts. It appears that in order to reinforce

their armies the generals recruited not only Chinese but foreigners. The

generals operating in the region of the present-day Peking had soldiers

of the Wu-huan and Hsien-pi, and even of the Ting-ling; Liu Pei, in the

west, made use of Tanguts, and Ts'ao Ts'ao clearly went farthest of all

in this direction; he seems to have been responsible for settling

nineteen tribes of Hsiung-nu in the Chinese province of Shansi between

180 and 200, in return for their armed aid. In this way Ts'ao Ts'ao

gained permanent power in the empire by means of these troops, so that

immediately after his death his son Ts'ao P'ei, with the support of

powerful allied families, was able to force the emperor to abdicate and

to found a new dynasty, the Wei dynasty (A.D. 220).

This meant, however, that a part of China which for several centuries

had been Chinese was given up to the Hsiung-nu. This was not, of course,

what Ts'ao Ts'ao had intended; he had given the Hsiung-nu some area of

pasturage in Shansi with the idea that they should be controlled and

administered by the officials of the surrounding district. His plan had

been similar to what the Chinese had often done with success: aliens

were admitted into the territory of the empire in a body, but then the

influence of the surrounding administrative centres was steadily

extended over them, until the immigrants completely lost their own

nationality and became Chinese. The nineteen tribes of Hsiung-nu,

however, were much too numerous, and after the prolonged struggles in

China the provincial administration proved much too weak to be able to

carry out the plan. Thus there came into existence here, within China, a

small Hsiung-nu realm ruled by several _shan-yue_. This was the second

major development, and it became of the utmost importance to the history

of the next four centuries.

10 _Literature and Art_

With the development of the new class of the gentry in the Han period,

there was an increase in the number of those who were anxious to

participate in what had been in the past an exclusively aristocratic

possession--education. Thus it is by no mere chance that in this period

many encyclopaedias were compiled. Encyclopaedias convey knowledge in an

easily grasped and easily found form. The first compilation of this sort

dates from the third century B.C. It was the work of Lue Pu-wei, the

merchant who was prime minister and regent during the minority of Shih

Huang-ti. It contains general information concerning ceremonies,

customs, historic events, and other things the knowledge of which was

part of a general education. Soon afterwards other encyclopaedias

appeared, of which the best known is the Book of the Mountains and Seas

_(Shan Hai Ching)_. This book, arranged according to regions of the

world, contains everything known at the time about geography, natural

philosophy, and the animal and plant world, and also about popular

myths. This tendency to systemization is shown also in the historical

works. The famous _Shih Chi_, one of our main sources for Chinese

history, is the first historical work of the modern type, that is to

say, built up on a definite plan, and it was also the model for all

later official historiography. Its author, Ssu-ma Ch'ien (born 135

B.C.), and his father, made use of the material in the state archives

and of private documents, old historical and philosophical books,

inscriptions, and the results of their own travels. The philosophical

and historical books of earlier times (with the exception of those of

the nature of chronicles) consisted merely of a few dicta or reports of

particular events, but the _Shih Chi_ is a compendium of a mass of

source-material. The documents were abbreviated, but the text of the

extracts was altered as little as possible, so that the general result

retains in a sense the value of an original source. In its arrangement

the _Shih Chi_ became a model for all later historians: the first part

is in the form of annals, and there follow tables concerning the

occupants of official posts and fiefs, and then biographies of various

important personalities, though the type of the comprehensive biography

did not appear till later. The _Shih Chi_ also, like later historical

works, contains many monographs dealing with particular fields of

knowledge, such as astronomy, the calendar, music, economics, official

dress at court, and much else. The whole type of construction differs

fundamentally from such works as those of Thucydides or Herodotus. The

Chinese historical works have the advantage that the section of annals

gives at once the events of a particular year, the monographs describe

the development of a particular field of knowledge, and the biographical

section offers information concerning particular personalities. The

mental attitude is that of the gentry: shortly after the time of Ssu-ma

Ch'ien an historical department was founded, in which members of the

gentry worked as historians upon the documents prepared by

representatives of the gentry in the various government offices.

In addition to encyclopaedias and historical works, many books of

philosophy were written in the Han period, but most of them offer no

fundamentally new ideas. They were the product of the leisure of rich

members of the gentry, and only three of them are of importance. One is

the work of Tung Chung-shu, already mentioned. The second is a book by

Liu An called _Huai-nan Tzu_. Prince Liu An occupied himself with Taoism

and allied problems, gathered around him scholars of different schools,

and carried on discussions with them. Many of his writings are lost, but

enough is extant to show that he was one of the earliest Chinese

alchemists. The question has not yet been settled, but it is probable

that alchemy first appeared in China, together with the cult of the

"art" of prolonging life, and was later carried to the West, where it

flourished among the Arabs and in medieval Europe.

The third important book of the Han period was the _Lun Heng_ (Critique

of Opinions) of Wang Ch'ung, which appeared in the first century of the

Christian era. Wang Ch'ung advocated rational thinking and tried to pave

the way for a free natural science, in continuation of the beginnings

which the natural philosophers of the later Chou period had made. The

book analyses reports in ancient literature and customs of daily life,

and shows how much they were influenced by superstition and by ignorance

of the facts of nature. From this attitude a modern science might have

developed, as in Europe towards the end of the Middle Ages; but the

gentry had every reason to play down this tendency which, with its

criticism of all that was traditional, might have proceeded to an attack

on the dominance of the gentry and their oppression especially of the

merchants and artisans. It is fascinating to observe how it was the

needs of the merchants and seafarers of Asia Minor and Greece that

provided the stimulus for the growth of the classic sciences, and how on

the contrary the growth of Chinese science was stifled because the

gentry were so strongly hostile to commerce and navigation, though both

had always existed.

There were great literary innovations in the field of poetry. The

splendour and elegance at the new imperial court of the Han dynasty

attracted many poets who sang the praises of the emperor and his court

and were given official posts and dignities. These praises were in the

form of grandiloquent, overloaded poetry, full of strange similes and

allusions, but with little real feeling. In contrast, the many women

singers and dancers at the court, mostly slaves from southern China,

introduced at the court southern Chinese forms of song and poem, which

were soon adopted and elaborated by poets. Poems and dance songs were

composed which belonged to the finest that Chinese poetry can show--full

of natural feeling, simple in language, moving in content.

Our knowledge of the arts is drawn from two sources--literature, and the

actual discoveries in the excavations. Thus we know that most of the

painting was done on silk, of which plenty came into the market through

the control of silk-producing southern China. Paper had meanwhile been

invented in the second century B.C., by perfecting the techniques of

making bark-cloth and felt. Unfortunately nothing remains of the actual

works that were the first examples of what the Chinese everywhere were

beginning to call "art". "People", that is to say the gentry, painted as

a social pastime, just as they assembled together for poetry,

discussion, or performances of song and dance; they painted as an

aesthetic pleasure and rarely as a means of earning. We find philosophic

ideas or greetings, emotions, and experiences represented by

paintings--paintings with fanciful or ideal landscapes; paintings

representing life and environment of the cultured class in idealized

form, never naturalistic either in fact or in intention. Until recently

it was an indispensable condition in the Chinese view that an artist

must be "cultured" and be a member of the gentry--distinguished,

unoccupied, wealthy. A man who was paid for his work, for instance for a

portrait for the ancestral cult, was until late time regarded as a

craftsman, not as an artist. Yet, these "craftsmen" have produced in Han

time and even earlier, many works which, in our view, undoubtedly belong

to the realm of art. In the tombs have been found reliefs whose

technique is generally intermediate between simple outline engraving and

intaglio. The lining-in is most frequently executed in scratched lines.

The representations, mostly in strips placed one above another, are of

lively historical scenes, scenes from the life of the dead, great ritual

ceremonies, or adventurous scenes from mythology. Bronze vessels have

representations in inlaid gold and silver, mostly of animals. The most

important documents of the painting of the Han period have also been

found in tombs. We see especially ladies and gentlemen of society, with

richly ornamented, elegant, expensive clothing that is very reminiscent

of the clothing customary to this day in Japan. There are also artistic

representations of human figures on lacquer caskets. While sculpture was

not strongly developed, the architecture of the Han must have been

magnificent and technically highly complex. Sculpture and temple

architecture received a great stimulus with the spread of Buddhism in

China. According to our present knowledge, Buddhism entered China from

the south coast and through Central Asia at latest in the first century

B.C.; it came with foreign merchants from India or Central Asia.

According to Indian customs, Brahmans, the Hindu caste providing all

Hindu priests, could not leave their homes. As merchants on their trips

which lasted often several years, did not want to go without religious

services, they turned to Buddhist priests as well as to priests of Near

Eastern religions. These priests were not prevented from travelling and

used this opportunity for missionary purposes. Thus, for a long time

after the first arrival of Buddhists, the Buddhist priests in China were

foreigners who served foreign merchant colonies. The depressed

conditions of the people in the second century A.D. drove members of the

lower classes into their arms, while the parts of Indian science which

these priests brought with them from India aroused some interest in

certain educated circles. Buddhism, therefore, undeniably exercised an

influence at the end of the Han dynasty, although no Chinese were

priests and few, if any, gentry members were adherents of the religious

teachings.

With the end of the Han period a further epoch of Chinese history comes

to its close. The Han period was that of the final completion and

consolidation of the social order of the gentry. The period that

followed was that of the conflicts of the Chinese with the populations

on their northern borders.

Chapter Seven

THE EPOCH OF THE FIRST DIVISION OF CHINA (A.D. 220-580)

(A) The three kingdoms (220-265)

1 _Social, intellectual, and economic problems during the first

division_

The end of the Han period was followed by the three and a half centuries

of the first division of China into several kingdoms, each with its own

dynasty. In fact, once before during the period of the Contending

States, China had been divided into a number of states, but at least in

theory they had been subject to the Chou dynasty, and none of the

contending states had made the claim to be the legitimate ruler of all

China. In this period of the "first division" several states claimed to

be legitimate rulers, and later Chinese historians tried to decide which

of these had "more right" to this claim. At the outset (220-280) there

were three kingdoms (Wei, Wu, Shu Han); then came an unstable reunion

during twenty-seven years (280-307) under the rule of the Western Chin.

This was followed by a still sharper division between north and south:

while a wave of non-Chinese nomad dynasties poured over the north, in

the south one Chinese clique after another seized power, so that dynasty

followed dynasty until finally, in 580, a united China came again into

existence, adopting the culture of the north and the traditions of the

gentry.

In some ways, the period from 220 to 580 can be compared with the period

of the coincidentally synchronous breakdown of the Roman Empire: in both

cases there was no great increase in population, although in China

perhaps no over-all decrease in population as in the Roman Empire;

decrease occurred, however, in the population of the great Chinese

cities, especially of the capital; furthermore we witness, in both

empires, a disorganization of the monetary system, i.e. in China the

reversal to a predominance of natural economy after some 400 years of

money economy. Yet, this period cannot be simply dismissed as a

transition period, as was usually done by the older European works on

China. The social order of the gentry, whose birth and development

inside China we followed, had for the first time to defend itself

against views and systems entirely opposed to it; for the Turkish and

Mongol peoples who ruled northern China brought with them their

traditions of a feudal nobility with privileges of birth and all that

they implied. Thus this period, socially regarded, is especially that of

the struggle between the Chinese gentry and the northern nobility, the

gentry being excluded at first as a direct political factor in the

northern and more important part of China. In the south the gentry

continued in the old style with a constant struggle between cliques, the

only difference being that the class assumed a sort of "colonial"

character through the formation of gigantic estates and through

association with the merchant class.

To throw light on the scale of events, we need to have figures of

population. There are no figures for the years around A.D. 220, and we

must make do with those of 140; but in order to show the relative

strength of the three states it is the ratio between the figures that

matters. In 140 the regions which later belonged to Wei had roughly

29,000,000 inhabitants; those later belonging to Wu had 11,700,000;

those which belonged later to Shu Han had a bare 7,500,000. (The figures

take no account of the primitive native population, which was not yet

included in the taxation lists.) The Hsiung-nu formed only a small part

of the population, as there were only the nineteen tribes which had

abandoned one of the parts, already reduced, of the Hsiung-nu empire.

The whole Hsiung-nu empire may never have counted more than some

3,000,000. At the time when the population of what became the Wei

territory totalled 29,000,000 the capital with its immediate environment

had over a million inhabitants. The figure is exclusive of most of the

officials and soldiers, as these were taxable in their homes and so were

counted there. It is clear that this was a disproportionate

concentration round the capital.

It was at this time that both South and North China felt the influence

of Buddhism, which until A.D. 220 had no more real effect on China than

had, for instance, the penetration of European civilization between 1580

and 1842. Buddhism offered new notions, new ideals, foreign science, and

many other elements of culture, with which the old Chinese philosophy

and science had to contend. At the same time there came with Buddhism

the first direct knowledge of the great civilized countries west of

China. Until then China had regarded herself as the only existing

civilized country, and all other countries had been regarded as

barbaric, for a civilized country was then taken to mean a country with

urban industrial crafts and agriculture. In our present period, however,

China's relations with the Middle East and with southern Asia were so

close that the existence of civilized countries outside China had to be

admitted. Consequently, when alien dynasties ruled in northern China and

a new high civilization came into existence there, it was impossible to

speak of its rulers as barbarians any longer. Even the theory that the

Chinese emperor was the Son of Heaven and enthroned at the centre of the

world was no longer tenable. Thus a vast widening of China's

intellectual horizon took place.

Economically, our present period witnessed an adjustment in South China

between the Chinese way of life, which had penetrated from the north,

and that of the natives of the south. Large groups of Chinese had to

turn over from wheat culture in dry fields to rice culture in wet

fields, and from field culture to market gardening. In North China the

conflict went on between Chinese agriculture and the cattle breeding of

Central Asia. Was the will of the ruler to prevail and North China to

become a country of pasturage, or was the country to keep to the

agrarian tradition of the people under this rule? The Turkish and Mongol

conquerors had recently given up their old supplementary agriculture and

had turned into pure nomads, obtaining the agricultural produce they

needed by raiding or trade. The conquerors of North China were now faced

with a different question: if they were to remain nomads, they must

either drive the peasants into the south, or make them into slave

herdsmen, or exterminate them. There was one more possibility: they

might install themselves as a ruling upper class, as nobles over the

subjugated native peasants. The same question was faced much later by

the Mongols, and at first they answered it differently from the peoples

of our present period. Only by attention to this problem shall we be in

a position to explain why the rule of the Turkish peoples did not last,

why these peoples were gradually absorbed and disappeared.

2 _Status of the two southern Kingdoms_

When the last emperor of the Han period had to abdicate in favour of

Ts'ao P'ei and the Wei dynasty began, China was in no way a unified

realm. Almost immediately, in 221, two other army commanders, who had

long been independent, declared themselves emperors. In the south-west

of China, in the present province of Szechwan, the Shu Han dynasty was

founded in this way, and in the south-east, in the region of the present

Nanking, the Wu dynasty.

The situation of the southern kingdom of Shu Han (221-263) corresponded

more or less to that of the Chungking regime in the Second World War.

West of it the high Tibetan mountains towered up; there was very little

reason to fear any major attack from that direction. In the north and

east the realm was also protected by difficult mountain country. The

south lay relatively open, but at that time there were few Chinese

living there, but only natives with a relatively low civilization. The

kingdom could only be seriously attacked from two corners--through the

north-west, where there was a negotiable plateau, between the Ch'in-ling

mountains in the north and the Tibetan mountains in the west, a plateau

inhabited by fairly highly developed Tibetan tribes; and secondly

through the south-east corner, where it would be possible to penetrate

up the Yangtze. There was in fact incessant fighting at both these

dangerous corners.

Economically, Shu Han was not in a bad position. The country had long

been part of the Chinese wheat lands, and had a fairly large Chinese

peasant population in the well irrigated plain of Ch'engtu. There was

also a wealthy merchant class, supplying grain to the surrounding

mountain peoples and buying medicaments and other profitable Tibetan

products. And there were trade routes from here through the present

province of Yuennan to India.