The first emperor of the Liang dynasty, who assumed the name Wu Ti

(502-549), became well known in the Western world owing to his love of

literature and of Buddhism. After he had come to the throne with the aid

of his followers, he took no further interest in politics; he left that

to his court clique. From now on, however, the political initiative

really belonged to the north. At this time there began in the Toba

empire the risings of tribal leaders against the government which we

have fully described above. One of these leaders, Hou Ching, who had

become powerful as a military leader in the north, tried in 547 to

conclude a private alliance with the Liang to strengthen his own

position. At the same time the ruler of the northern state of the

"Northern Ch'i", then in process of formation, himself wanted to

negotiate an alliance with the Liang, in order to be able to get rid of

Hou Ching. There was indecision in Liang. Hou Ching, who had been

getting into difficulties, now negotiated with a dissatisfied prince in

Liang, invaded the country in 548 with the prince's aid, captured the

capital in 549, and killed Emperor Wu. Hou Ching now staged the usual

spectacle: he put a puppet on the imperial throne, deposed him eighteen

months later and made himself emperor.

This man of the Toba on the throne of South China was unable, however,

to maintain his position; he had not sufficient backing. He was at war

with the new rulers in the northern empire, and his own army, which was

not very large, melted away; above all, he proceeded with excessive

harshness against the helpers who had gained access for him to the

Liang, and thereafter he failed to secure a following from among the

leading cliques at court. In 552 he was driven out by a Chinese army led

by one of the princes and was killed.

The new emperor had been a prince in the upper Yangtze region, and his

closest associates were engaged there. They did not want to move to the

distant capital, Nanking, because their private financial interests

would have suffered. The emperor therefore remained in the city now

called Hankow. He left the eastern territory in the hands of two

powerful generals, one of whom belonged to the Ch'en family, which he no

longer had the strength to remove. In this situation the generals in the

east made themselves independent, and this naturally produced tension at

once between the east and the west of the Liang empire; this tension was

now exploited by the leaders of the Chou state then in the making in the

north. On the invitation of a clique in the south and with its support,

the Chou invaded the present province of Hupei and in 555 captured the

Liang emperor's capital. They were now able to achieve their old

ambition: a prince of the Chou dynasty was installed as a feudatory of

the north, reigning until 587 in the present Hankow. He was permitted to

call his quasi-feudal territory a kingdom and his dynasty, as we know

already, the "Later Liang dynasty".

5 _The Ch'en dynasty_ (A.D. 557-588) _and its ending by the Sui_

The more important of the independent generals in the east, Ch'en

Pa-hsien, installed a shadow emperor, forced him to abdicate, and made

himself emperor. The Ch'en dynasty which thus began was even feebler

than the preceding dynasties. Its territory was confined to the lower

Yangtze valley. Once more cliques and rival pretenders were at work and

prevented any sort of constructive home policy. Abroad, certain

advantages were gained in north China over the Northern Ch'i dynasty,

but none of any great importance.

Meanwhile in the north Yang Chien had brought into power the Chinese Sui

dynasty. It began by liquidating the quasi-feudal state of the "Later

Liang". Then followed, in 588-9, the conquest of the Ch'en empire,

almost without any serious resistance. This brought all China once more

under united rule, and a period of 360 years of division was ended.

6 _Cultural achievements of the south_

For nearly three hundred years the southern empire had witnessed

unceasing struggles between important cliques, making impossible any

peaceful development within the country. Culturally, however, the period

was rich in achievement. The court and the palaces of wealthy members of

the gentry attracted scholars and poets, and the gentry themselves had

time for artistic occupations. A large number of the best-known Chinese

poets appeared in this period, and their works plainly reflect the

conditions of that time: they are poems for the small circle of scholars

among the gentry and for cultured patrons, spiced with quotations and

allusions, elaborate in metre and construction, masterpieces of

aesthetic sensitivity--but unintelligible except to highly educated

members of the aristocracy. The works were of the most artificial type,

far removed from all natural feeling.

Music, too, was never so assiduously cultivated as at this time. But the

old Chinese music disappeared in the south as in the north, where

dancing troupes and women musicians in the Sogdian commercial colonies

of the province of Kansu established the music of western Turkestan.

Here in the south, native courtesans brought the aboriginal, non-Chinese

music to the court; Chinese poets wrote songs in Chinese for this music,

and so the old Chinese music became unfashionable and was forgotten. The

upper class, the gentry, bought these girls, often in large numbers, and

organized them in troupes of singers and dancers, who had to appear on

festal occasions and even at the court. For merchants and other people

who lacked full social recognition there were brothels, a quite natural

feature wherever there were considerable commercial colonies or

collections of merchants, including the capital of the southern empire.

In their ideology, as will be remembered, the Chinese gentry were always

in favour of Confucianism. Here in the south, however, the association

with Confucianism was less serious, the southern gentry, with their

relations with the merchant class, having acquired the character of

"colonial" gentry. They were brought up as Confucians, but were

interested in all sorts of different religious movements, and

especially in Buddhism. A different type of Buddhism from that in the

north had spread over most of the south, a meditative Buddhism that was

very close ideologically to the original Taoism, and so fulfilled the

same social functions as Taoism. Those who found the official life with

its intrigues repulsive, occupied themselves with meditative Buddhism.

The monks told of the sad fate of the wicked in the life to come, and

industriously filled the gentry with apprehension, so that they tried to

make up for their evil deeds by rich gifts to the monasteries. Many

emperors in this period, especially Wu Ti of the Liang dynasty, inclined

to Buddhism. Wu Ti turned to it especially in his old age, when he was

shut out entirely from the tasks of a ruler and was no longer satisfied

with the usual pleasures of the court. Several times he instituted

Buddhist ceremonies of purification on a large scale in the hope of so

securing forgiveness for the many murders he had committed.

Genuine Taoism also came to the fore again, and with it the popular

religion with its magic, now amplified with the many local deities that

had been taken over from the indigenous population of the south. For a

time it became the fashion at court to pass the time in learned

discussions between Confucians, Buddhists, and Taoists, which were quite

similar to the debates between learned men centuries earlier at the

wealthy little Indian courts. For the court clique this was more a

matter of pastime than of religious controversy. It seems thoroughly in

harmony with the political events that here, for the first time in the

history of Chinese philosophy, materialist currents made their

appearance, running parallel with Machiavellian theories of power for

the benefit of the wealthiest of the gentry.

Principal dynasties of North and South China

_North and South_

Western Chin dynasty (A.D. 265-317)

_North South_

1. Earlier Chao (Hsiung-nu) 304-329 1. Eastern Chin (Chinese) 317-419

2. Later Chao (Hsiung-nu) 328-352

3. Earlier Ch'in (Tibetans) 351-394

4. Later Ch'in (Tibetans) 384-417

5. Western Ch'in (Hsiung-nu) 385-431

6. Earlier Yen (Hsien-pi) 352-370

7. Later Yen (Hsien-pi) 384-409

8. Western Yen (Hsien-pi) 384-395

9. Southern Yen (Hsien-pi) 398-410

10. Northern Yen (Hsien-pi) 409-436

11. Tai (Toba) 338-376

12. Earlier Liang (Chinese) 313-376

13. Northern Liang (Hsiung-nu) 397-439

14. Western Liang (Chinese?) 400-421

15. Later Liang (Tibetans) 386-403

16. Southern Liang (Hsien-pi) 379-414

17. Hsia (Hsiung-nu) 407-431

18. Toba (Turks) 385-550

2. Liu-Sung 420-478

3. Southern Ch'i 479-501

19. Northern Ch'i (Chinese?) 550-576 4. Liang 502-556

20. Northern Chou (Toba) 557-579 5. Ch'en 557-588

21. Sui (Chinese) 580-618 6. Sui 580-618

Chapter Eight

THE EMPIRES OF THE SUI AND THE T'ANG

(A) The Sui dynasty (A.D. 580-618)

1 _Internal situation in the newly unified empire_

The last of the northern dynasties, the Northern Chou, had been brought

to an end by Yang Chien: rapid campaigns had made an end of the

remaining petty states, and thus the Sui dynasty had come into power.

China, reunited after 360 years, was again under Chinese rule. This

event brought about a new epoch in the history of the Far East. But the

happenings of 360 years could not be wiped out by a change of dynasty.

The short Sui period can only be described as a period of transition to

unified forms.

In the last resort the union of the various parts of China proceeded

from the north. The north had always, beyond question, been militarily

superior, because its ruling class had consisted of warlike peoples. Yet

it was not a northerner who had united China but a Chinese though, owing

to mixed marriages, he was certainly not entirely unrelated to the

northern peoples. The rule, however, of the actual northern peoples was

at an end. The start of the Sui dynasty, while the Chou still held the

north, was evidence, just like the emergence in the north-east some

thirty years earlier of the Northern Ch'i dynasty, that the Chinese

gentry with their landowning basis had gained the upper hand over the

warrior nomads.

The Chinese gentry had not come unchanged out of that struggle.

Culturally they had taken over many things from the foreigners,

beginning with music and the style of their clothing, in which they had

entirely adopted the northern pattern, and including other elements of

daily life. Among the gentry were now many formerly alien families who

had gradually become entirely Chinese. On the other hand, the

foreigners' feudal outlook had influenced the gentry, so that a sense

of distinctions of rank had developed among them. There were Chinese

families who regarded themselves as superior to the rest, just as had

been the case among the northern peoples, and who married only among

themselves or with the ruling house and not with ordinary families of

the gentry. They paid great attention to their genealogies, had the

state keep records of them and insisted that the dynastic histories

mentioned their families and their main family members. Lists of

prominent gentry families were set up which mentioned the home of each

clan, so that pretenders could easily be detected. The rules of giving

personal names were changed so that it became possible to identify a

person's genealogical position within the family. At the same time the

contempt of the military underwent modification; the gentry were even

ready to take over high military posts, and also to profit by them.

The new Sui empire found itself faced with many difficulties. During the

three and a half centuries of division, north and south had developed in

different ways. They no longer spoke the same language in everyday life

(we distinguish to this day between a Nanking and Peking "High Chinese",

to say nothing of dialects). The social and economic structures were

very different in the two parts of the country. How could unity be

restored in these things?

Then there was the problem of population. The north-eastern plain had

always been thickly populated; it had early come under Toba rule and had

been able to develop further. The region round the old northern capital

Ch'ang-an, on the other hand, had suffered greatly from the struggles

before the Toba period and had never entirely recovered. Meanwhile, in

the south the population had greatly increased in the region north of

Nanking, while the regions south of the Yangtze and the upper Yangtze

valley were more thinly peopled. The real South, i.e. the modern

provinces of Fukien, Kwangtung and Kwangsi, was still underdeveloped,

mainly because of the malaria there. In the matter of population the

north unquestionably remained prominent.

The founder of the Sui dynasty, known by his reign name of Wen Ti

(589-604), came from the west, close to Ch'ang-an. There he and his

following had their extensive domains. Owing to the scanty population

there and the resulting shortage of agricultural labourers, these

properties were very much less productive than the small properties in

the north-east. This state of things was well known in the south, and it

was expected, with good reason, that the government would try to

transfer parts of the population to the north-west, in order to settle a

peasantry round the capital for the support of its greatly increasing

staff of officials, and to satisfy the gentry of the region. This

produced several revolts in the south.

As an old soldier who had long been a subject of the Toba, Wen Ti had no

great understanding of theory: he was a practical man. He was

anti-intellectual and emotionally attached to Buddhism; he opposed

Confucianism for emotional reasons and believed that it could give him

no serviceable officials of the sort he wanted. He demanded from his

officials the same obedience and sense of duty as from his soldiers; and

he was above all thrifty, almost miserly, because he realized that the

finances of his state could only be brought into order by the greatest

exertions. The budget had to be drawn up for the vast territory of the

empire without any possibility of saying in advance whether the revenues

would come in and whether the transport of dues to the capital would

function.

This cautious calculation was entirely justified, but it aroused great

opposition. Both east and south were used to a much better style of

living; yet the gentry of both regions were now required to cut down

their consumption. On top of this they were excluded from the conduct of

political affairs. In the past, under the Northern Ch'i empire in the

north-east and under the Ch'en empire in the south, there had been

thousands of positions at court in which the whole of the gentry could

find accommodation of some kind. Now the central government was far in

the west, and other people were its administrators. In the past the

gentry had had a profitable and easily accessible market for their

produce in the neighbouring capital; now the capital was far away,

entailing long-distance transport at heavy risk with little profit.

The dissatisfied circles of the gentry in the north-east and in the

south incited Prince Kuang to rebellion. The prince and his followers

murdered the emperor and set aside the heir-apparent; and Kuang came to

the throne, assuming the name of Yang Ti. His first act was to transfer

the capital back to the east, to Loyang, close to the grain-producing

regions. His second achievement was to order the construction of great

canals, to facilitate the transport of grain to the capital and to

provide a valuable new market for the producers in the north-east and

the south. It was at this time that the first forerunner of the famous

"Imperial Canal" was constructed, the canal that connects the Yangtze

with the Yellow River. Small canals, connecting various streams, had

long been in existence, so that it was possible to travel from north to

south by water, but these canals were not deep enough or broad enough to

take large freight barges. There are records of lighters of 500 and even

800 tons capacity! These are dimensions unheard of in the West in those

times. In addition to a serviceable canal to the south, Yang Ti made

another that went north almost to the present Peking.

Hand in hand with these successes of the north-eastern and southern

gentry went strong support for Confucianism, and a reorganization of the

Confucian examination system. As a rule, however, the examinations were

circumvented as an unimportant formality; the various governors were

ordered each to send annually to the capital three men with the required

education, for whose quality they were held personally responsible;

merchants and artisans were expressly excluded.

2 _Relations with Turks and with Korea_

In foreign affairs an extraordinarily fortunate situation for the Sui

dynasty had come into existence. The T'u-chueeh, the Turks, much the

strongest people of the north, had given support now to one and now to

another of the northern kingdoms, and this, together with their many

armed incursions, had made them the dominant political factor in the

north. But in the first year of the Sui period (581) they split into two

sections, so that the Sui had hopes of gaining influence over them. At

first both sections of the Turks had entered into alliance with China,

but this was not a sufficient safeguard for the Sui, for one of the

Turkish khans was surrounded by Toba who had fled from the vanished

state of the Northern Chou, and who now tried to induce the Turks to

undertake a campaign for the reconquest of North China. The leader of

this agitation was a princess of the Yue-wen family, the ruling family of

the Northern Chou. The Chinese fought the Turks several times; but much

more effective results were gained by their diplomatic missions, which

incited the eastern against the western Turks and vice versa, and also

incited the Turks against the Toba clique. In the end one of the

sections of Turks accepted Chinese overlordship, and some tribes of the

other section were brought over to the Chinese side; also, fresh

disunion was sown among the Turks.

Under the emperor Yang Ti, P'ei Chue carried this policy further. He

induced the Toeloes tribes to attack the T'u-yue-hun, and then himself

attacked the latter, so destroying their power. The T'u-yue-hun were a

people living in the extreme north of Tibet, under a ruling class

apparently of Hsien-pi origin; the people were largely Tibetan. The

purpose of the conquest of the T'u-yue-hun was to safeguard access to

Central Asia. An effective Turkestan policy was, however, impossible so

long as the Turks were still a formidable power. Accordingly, the

intrigues that aimed at keeping the two sections of Turks apart were

continued. In 615 came a decisive counter-attack from the Turks. Their

khan, Shih-pi, made a surprise assault on the emperor himself, with all

his following, in the Ordos region, and succeeded in surrounding them.

They were in just the same desperate situation as when, eight centuries

earlier, the Chinese emperor had been beleaguered by Mao Tun. But the

Chinese again saved themselves by a trick. The young Chinese commander,

Li Shih-min, succeeded in giving the Turks the impression that large

reinforcements were on the way; a Chinese princess who was with the

Turks spread the rumour that the Turks were to be attacked by another

tribe--and Shih-pi raised the siege, although the Chinese had been

entirely defeated.

In the Sui period the Chinese were faced with a further problem. Korea

or, rather, the most important of the three states in Korea, had

generally been on friendly terms with the southern state during the

period of China's division, and for this reason had been more or less

protected from its North Chinese neighbours. After the unification of

China, Korea had reason for seeking an alliance with the Turks, in order

to secure a new counterweight against China.

A Turco-Korean alliance would have meant for China a sort of

encirclement that might have grave consequences. The alliance might be

extended to Japan, who had certain interests in Korea. Accordingly the

Chinese determined to attack Korea, though at the same time negotiations

were set on foot. The fighting, which lasted throughout the Sui period,

involved technical difficulties, as it called for combined land and sea

attacks; in general it brought little success.

3 _Reasons for collapse_

The continual warfare entailed great expense, and so did the intrigues,

because they depended for their success on bribery. Still more expensive

were the great canal works. In addition to this, the emperor Yang Ti,

unlike his father, was very extravagant. He built enormous palaces and

undertook long journeys throughout the empire with an immense following.

All this wrecked the prosperity which his father had built up and had

tried to safeguard. The only productive expenditure was that on the

canals, and they could not begin to pay in so short a period. The

emperor's continual journeys were due, no doubt, in part simply to the

pursuit of pleasure, though they were probably intended at the same time

to hinder risings and to give the emperor direct control over every part

of the country. But the empire was too large and too complex for its

administration to be possible in the midst of journeying. The whole of

the chancellery had to accompany the emperor, and all the transport

necessary for the feeding of the emperor and his government had

continually to be diverted to wherever he happened to be staying. All

this produced disorder and unrest. The gentry, who at first had so

strongly supported the emperor and had been able to obtain anything they

wanted from him, now began to desert him and set up pretenders. From 615

onward, after the defeat at the hands of the Turks, risings broke out

everywhere. The emperor had to establish his government in the south,

where he felt safer. There, however, in 618, he was assassinated by

conspirators led by Toba of the Yue-wen family. Everywhere now

independent governments sprang up, and for five years China was split up

into countless petty states.

[Illustration: Map 5: The T'ang realm _(about A.D. 750)_]

(B) The T'ang dynasty (A.D. 618-906)

1 _Reforms and decentralization_

The hero of the Turkish siege, Li Shih-min, had allied himself with the

Turks in 615-16. There were special reasons for his ability to do this.

In his family it had been a regular custom to marry women belonging to

Toba families, so that he naturally enjoyed the confidence of the Toba

party among the Turks. There are various theories as to the origin of

his family, the Li. The family itself claimed to be descended from the

ruling family of the Western Liang. It is doubtful whether that family

was purely Chinese, and in any case Li Shih-min's descent from it is a

matter of doubt. It is possible that his family was a sinified Toba

family, or at least came from a Toba region. However this may be, Li

Shih-min continued the policy which had been pursued since the beginning

of the Sui dynasty by the members of the deposed Toba ruling family of

the Northern Chou--the policy of collaboration with the Turks in the

effort to remove the Sui.

The nominal leadership in the rising that now began lay in the hands of

Li Shih-min's father, Li Yuean; in practice Li Shih-min saw to

everything. At the end of 617 he was outside the first capital of the

Sui, Ch'ang-an, with a Turkish army that had come to his aid on the

strength of the treaty of alliance. After capturing Ch'ang-an he

installed a puppet emperor there, a grandson of Yang Ti. In 618 the

puppet was dethroned and Li Yuean, the father, was made emperor, in the

T'ang dynasty. Internal fighting went on until 623, and only then was

the whole empire brought under the rule of the T'ang.

Great reforms then began. A new land law aimed at equalizing ownership,

so that as far as possible all peasants should own the same amount of

land and the formation of large estates be prevented. The law aimed also

at protecting the peasants from the loss of their land. The law was,

however, nothing but a modification of the Toba land law (_chuen-t'ien_),

and it was hoped that now it would provide a sound and solid economic

foundation for the empire. From the first, however, members of the

gentry who were connected with the imperial house were given a

privileged position; then officials were excluded from the prohibition

of leasing, so that there continued to be tenant farmers in addition to

the independent peasants. Moreover, the temples enjoyed special

treatment, and were also exempted from taxation. All these exceptions

brought grist to the mills of the gentry, and so did the failure to

carry into effect many of the provisions of the law. Before long a new

gentry had been formed, consisting of the old gentry together with those

who had directly aided the emperor's ascent to the throne. From the

beginning of the eighth century there were repeated complaints that

peasants were "disappearing". They were entering the service of the

gentry as tenant farmers or farm workers, and owing to the privileged

position of the gentry in regard to taxation, the revenue sank in

proportion as the number of independent peasants decreased. One of the

reasons for the flight of farmers may have been the corvee laws

connected with the "equal land" system: small families were much less

affected by the corvee obligation than larger families with many sons.

It may be, therefore, that large families or at least sons of the sons

in large families moved away in order to escape these obligations. In

order to prevent irregularities, the T'ang renewed the old "_pao-chia_"

system, as a part of a general reform of the administration in 624. In

this system groups of five families were collectively responsible for

the payment of taxes, the corvee, for crimes committed by individuals

within one group, and for loans from state agencies. Such a system is

attested for pre-Christian times already; it was re-activated in the

eleventh century and again from time to time, down to the present.

Yet the system of land equalization soon broke down and was abolished

officially around A.D. 780. But the classification of citizens into

different classes, first legalized under the Toba, was retained and even

more refined.

As early as in the Han period there had been a dual administration--the

civil and, independent of it, the military administration. One and the

same area would belong to a particular administrative prefecture

(_chuen_) and at the same time to a particular military prefecture

(_chou_). This dual organization had persisted during the Toba period

and, at first, remained unchanged in the beginning of the T'ang.

The backbone of the military power in the seventh century was the

militia, some six hundred units of an average of a thousand men,

recruited from the general farming population for short-term service:

one month in five in the areas close to the capital. These men formed a

part of the emperor's guards and were under the command of members of

the Shensi gentry. This system which had its direct parallels in the Han

time and evolved out of a Toba system, broke down when short offensive

wars were no longer fought. Other imperial guards were staffed with

young sons of the gentry who were stationed in the most delicate parts

of the palaces. The emperor T'ai-tsung had his personal bodyguard, a

part of his own army of conquest, consisting of his former bondsmen

(_pu-ch'ue_). The ranks of the Army of conquest were later filled by

descendants of the original soldiers and by orphans.

In the provinces, the armies of the military prefectures gradually lost

their importance when wars became longer and militiamen proved

insufficient. Many of the soldiers here were convicts and exiles. It is

interesting to note that the title of the commander of these armies,

_tu-tu_, in the fourth century meant a commander in the church-Taoist

organization; it was used by the Toba and from the seventh century on

became widely accepted as title among the Uigurs, Tibetans, Sogdians,

Turks and Khotanese.

When the prefectural armies and the militia forces weakened, special

regional armies were created (from 678 on); this institution had existed

among the Toba, but they had greatly reduced these armies after 500. The

commanders of these new T'ang armies soon became more important than the

civil administrators, because they commanded a number of districts

making up a whole province. This assured a better functioning of the

military machine, but put the governors-general in a position to pursue

a policy of their own, even against the central government. In addition

to this, the financial administration of their commands was put under

them, whereas in the past it had been in the hands of the civil

administration of the various provinces. The civil administration was

also reorganized (see the table on pages 83-84).

Towards the end of the T'ang period the state secretariat was set up in

two parts: it was in possession of all information about the economic

and political affairs of the empire, and it made the actual decisions.

Moreover, a number of technical departments had been created--in all, a

system that might compare favourably with European systems of the

eighteenth century. At the end of the T'ang period there was added to

this system a section for economic affairs, working quite independently

of it and directly under the emperor; it was staffed entirely with

economic or financial experts, while for the staffing of the other

departments no special qualification was demanded besides the passing of

the state examinations. In addition to these, at the end of the T'ang

period a new department was in preparation, a sort of Privy Council, a

mainly military organization, probably intended to control the generals

(section 3 of the table on page 83), just as the state secretariat

controlled the civil officials. The Privy Council became more and more

important in the tenth century and especially in the Mongol epoch. Its

absence in the early T'ang period gave the military governors much too

great freedom, ultimately with baneful results.

At first, however, the reforms of A.D. 624 worked well. The

administration showed energy, and taxes flowed in. In the middle of the

eighth century the annual budget of the state included the following

items: over a million tons of grain for the consumption of the capital

and the palace and for salaries of civil and military officials;

twenty-seven million pieces of textiles, also for the consumption of

capital and palace and army, and for supplementary purchases of grain;

two million strings of money (a string nominally held a thousand copper

coins) for salaries and for the army. This was much more than the state

budget of the Han period. The population of the empire had also

increased; it seems to have amounted to some fifty millions. In the

capital a large staff of officials had been created to meet all

administrative needs. The capital grew enormously, at times containing

two million people. Great numbers of young members of the gentry

streamed into the capital for the examinations held under the Confucian

system.

The crowding of people into the capital and the accumulation of

resources there promoted a rich cultural life. We know of many poets of

that period whose poems were real masterpieces; and artists whose works

were admired centuries later. These poets and artists were the pioneers

of the flourishing culture of the later T'ang period. Hand in hand with

this went luxury and refinement of manners. For those who retired from

the bustle of the capital to work on their estates and to enjoy the

society of their friends, there was time to occupy themselves with

Taoism and Buddhism, especially meditative Buddhism. Everyone, of

course, was Confucian, as was fitting for a member of the gentry, but

Confucianism was so taken for granted that it was not discussed. It was

the basis of morality for the gentry, but held no problems. It no longer

contained anything of interest.

Conditions had been much the same once before, at the court of the Han

emperors, but with one great difference: at that time everything of

importance took place in the capital; now, in addition to the actual

capital, Ch'ang-an, there was the second capital, Loyang, in no way

inferior to the other in importance; and the great towns in the south

also played their part as commercial and cultural centres that had

developed in the 360 years of division between north and south. There

the local gentry gathered to lead a cultivated life, though not quite in

the grand style of the capital. If an official was transferred to the

Yangtze, it no longer amounted to a punishment as in the past; he would

not meet only uneducated people, but a society resembling that of the

capital. The institution of governors-general further promoted this

decentralization: the governor-general surrounded himself with a little

court of his own, drawn from the local gentry and the local

intelligentsia. This placed the whole edifice of the empire on a much

broader foundation, with lasting results.

2 _Turkish policy_

The foreign policy of this first period of the T'ang, lasting until

about 690, was mainly concerned with the Turks and Turkestan. There were

still two Turkish realms in the Far East, both of considerable strength

but in keen rivalry with each other. The T'ang had come into power with

the aid of the eastern Turks, but they admitted the leader of the

western Turks to their court; he had been at Ch'ang-an in the time of

the Sui. He was murdered, however, by Chinese at the instigation of the

eastern Turks. The next khan of the eastern Turks nevertheless turned

against the T'ang, and gave his support to a still surviving pretender

to the throne representing the Sui dynasty; the khan contended that the

old alliance of the eastern Turks had been with the Sui and not with the

T'ang. The T'ang therefore tried to come to terms once more with the

western Turks, who had been affronted by the assassination; but the

negotiations came to nothing in face of an approach made by the eastern

Turks to the western, and of the distrust of the Chinese with which all

the Turks were filled. About 624 there were strong Turkish invasions,

carried right up to the capital. Suddenly, however, for reasons not

disclosed by the Chinese sources, the Turks withdrew, and the T'ang were

able to conclude a fairly honourable peace. This was the time of the

maximum power of the eastern Turks. Shortly afterwards disturbances

broke out (627), under the leadership of Turkish Uighurs and their

allies. The Chinese took advantage of these disturbances, and in a great

campaign in 629-30 succeeded in overthrowing the eastern Turks; the khan

was taken to the imperial court in Ch'ang-an, and the Chinese emperor

made himself "Heavenly Khan" of the Turks. In spite of the protest of

many of the ministers, who pointed to the result of the settlement

policy of the Later Han dynasty, the eastern Turks were settled in the

bend of the upper Hwang-ho and placed more or less under the

protectorate of two governors-general. Their leaders were admitted into

the Chinese army, and the sons of their nobles lived at the imperial

court. No doubt it was hoped in this way to turn the Turks into Chinese,

as had been done with the Toba, though for entirely different reasons.

More than a million Turks were settled in this way, and some of them

actually became Chinese later and gained important posts.

In general, however, this in no way broke the power of the Turks. The

great Turkish empire, which extended as far as Byzantium, continued to

exist. The Chinese success had done no more than safeguard the frontier

from a direct menace and frustrate the efforts of the supporters of the

Sui dynasty and the Toba dynasty, who had been living among the eastern

Turks and had built on them. The power of the western Turks remained a

lasting menace to China, especially if they should succeed in

co-operating with the Tibetans. After the annihilation of the T'u-yue-hun

by the Sui at the very beginning of the seventh century, a new political

unit had formed in northern Tibet, the T'u-fan, who also seem to have

had an upper class of Turks and Mongols and a Tibetan lower class. Just

as in the Han period, Chinese policy was bound to be directed to

preventing a union between Turks and Tibetans. This, together with

commercial interests, seems to have been the political motive of the

Chinese Turkestan policy under the T'ang.

3 _Conquest of Turkestan and Korea. Summit of power_

The Turkestan wars began in 639 with an attack on the city-state of

Kao-ch'ang (Khocho). This state had been on more or less friendly terms

with North China since the Toba period, and it had succeeded again and

again in preserving a certain independence from the Turks. Now, however,

Kao-ch'ang had to submit to the western Turks, whose power was

constantly increasing. China made that submission a pretext for war. By

640 the whole basin of Turkestan was brought under Chinese dominance.

The whole campaign was really directed against the western Turks, to

whom Turkestan had become subject. The western Turks had been crippled

by two internal events, to the advantage of the Chinese: there had been

a tribal rising, and then came the rebellion and the rise of the Uighurs

(640-650). These events belong to Turkish history, and we shall confine

ourselves here to their effects on Chinese history. The Chinese were

able to rely on the Uighurs; above all, they were furnished by the Toeloes

Turks with a large army, with which they turned once more against

Turkestan in 647-48, and now definitely established their rule there.

The active spirit at the beginning of the T'ang rule had not been the

emperor but his son Li Shih-min, who was not, however, named as heir to

the throne because he was not the eldest son. The result of this was

tension between Li Shih-min and his father and brothers, especially the

heir to the throne. When the brothers learned that Li Shih-min was

claiming the succession, they conspired against him, and in 626, at the

very moment when the western Turks had made a rapid incursion and were

once more threatening the Chinese capital, there came an armed collision

between the brothers, in which Li Shih-min was the victor. The brothers

and their families were exterminated, the father compelled to abdicate,

and Li Shih-min became emperor, assuming the name T'ai Tsung (627-649).

His reign marked the zenith of the power of China and of the T'ang

dynasty. Their inner struggles and the Chinese penetration of Turkestan

had weakened the position of the Turks; the reorganization of the

administration and of the system of taxation, the improved transport

resulting from the canals constructed under the Sui, and the useful

results of the creation of great administrative areas under strong

military control, had brought China inner stability and in consequence

external power and prestige. The reputation which she then obtained as

the most powerful state of the Far East endured when her inner stability

had begun to deteriorate. Thus in 638 the Sassanid ruler Jedzgerd sent a

mission to China asking for her help against the Arabs. Three further

missions came at intervals of a good many years. The Chinese declined,

however, to send a military expedition to such a distance; they merely

conferred on the ruler the title of a Chinese governor; this was of

little help against the Arabs, and in 675 the last ruler, Peruz, fled to

the Chinese court.

The last years of T'ai Tsung's reign were filled with a great war

against Korea, which represented a continuation of the plans of the Sui

emperor Yang Ti. This time Korea came firmly into Chinese possession. In

661, under T'ai Tsung's son, the Korean fighting was resumed, this time

against Japanese who were defending their interests in Korea. This was

the period of great Japanese enthusiasm for China. The Chinese system of

administration was copied, and Buddhism was adopted, together with every

possible element of Chinese culture. This meant increased trade with

Japan, bringing in large profits to China, and so the Korean middleman

was to be eliminated.

T'ai Tsung's son, Kao Tsung (650-683), merely carried to a conclusion

what had been begun. Externally China's prestige continued at its

zenith. The caravans streamed into China from western and central Asia,

bringing great quantities of luxury goods. At this time, however, the

foreign colonies were not confined to the capital but were installed in

all the important trading ports and inland trade centres. The whole

country was covered by a commercial network; foreign merchants who had

come overland to China met others who had come by sea. The foreigners

set up their own counting-houses and warehouses; whole quarters of the

capital were inhabited entirely by foreigners who lived as if they were

in their own country. They brought with them their own religions:

Manichaeism, Mazdaism, and Nestorian Christianity. The first Jews came

into China, apparently as dealers in fabrics, and the first Arabian

Mohammedans made their appearance. In China the the foreigners bought

silkstuffs and collected everything of value that they could find,

especially precious metals. Culturally this influx of foreigners

enriched China; economically, as in earlier periods, it did not; its

disadvantages were only compensated for a time by the very beneficial

results of the trade with Japan, and this benefit did not last long.

4 _The reign of the empress Wu: Buddhism and capitalism_

The pressure of the western Turks had been greatly weakened in this

period, especially as their attention had been diverted to the west,

where the advance of Islam and of the Arabs was a new menace for them.

On the other hand, from 650 onward the Tibetans gained immensely in

power, and pushed from the south into the Tarim basin. In 678 they

inflicted a heavy defeat on the Chinese, and it cost the T'ang decades

of diplomatic effort before they attained, in 699, their aim of breaking

up the Tibetans' realm and destroying their power. In the last year of

Kao Tsung's reign, 683, came the first of the wars of liberation of the

northern Turks, known until then as the western Turks, against the

Chinese. And with the end of Kao Tsung's reign began the decline of the

T'ang regime. Most of the historians attribute it to a woman, the later

empress Wu. She had been a concubine of T'ai Tsung, and after his death

had become a Buddhist nun--a frequent custom of the time--until Kao

Tsung fell in love with her and made her a concubine of his own. In the

end he actually divorced the empress and made the concubine empress

(655). She gained more and more influence, being placed on a par with

the emperor and soon entirely eliminating him in practice; in 680 she

removed the rightful heir to the throne and put her own son in his

place; after Kao Tsung's death in 683 she became regent for her son.

Soon afterward she dethroned him in favour of his twenty-two-year-old

brother; in 690 she deposed him too and made herself empress in the

"Chou dynasty" (690-701). This officially ended the T'ang dynasty.

Matters, however, were not so simple as this might suggest. For

otherwise on the empress's deposition there would not have been a mass

of supporters moving heaven and earth to treat the new empress Wei

(705-712) in the same fashion. There is every reason to suppose that

behind the empress Wu there was a group opposing the ruling clique. In

spite of everything, the T'ang government clique was very pro-Turkish,

and many Turks and members of Toba families had government posts and,

above all, important military commands. No campaign of that period was

undertaken without Turkish auxiliaries. The fear seems to have been felt

in some quarters that this T'ang group might pursue a military policy

hostile to the gentry. The T'ang group had its roots mainly in western

China; thus the eastern Chinese gentry were inclined to be hostile to

it. The first act of the empress Wu had been to transfer the capital to

Loyang in the east. Thus, she tried to rely upon the co-operation of the

eastern gentry which since the Northern Chou and Sui dynasties had been

out of power. While the western gentry brought their children into

government positions by claiming family privileges (a son of a high

official had the right to a certain position without having passed the

regular examinations), the sons of the eastern gentry had to pass

through the examinations. Thus, there were differences in education and

outlook between both groups which continued long after the death of the

empress. In addition, the eastern gentry, who supported the empress Wu

and later the empress Wei, were closely associated with the foreign

merchants of western Asia and the Buddhist Church to which they adhered.

In gratitude for help from the Buddhists, the empress Wu endowed them

with enormous sums of money, and tried to make Buddhism a sort of state

religion. A similar development had taken place in the Toba and also in

the Sui period. Like these earlier rulers, the empress Wu seems to have

aimed at combining spiritual leadership with her position as ruler of

the empire.

In this epoch Buddhism helped to create the first beginnings of

large-scale capitalism. In connection with the growing foreign trade,

the monasteries grew in importance as repositories of capital; the

temples bought more and more land, became more and more wealthy, and so

gained increasing influence over economic affairs. They accumulated

large quantities of metal, which they stored in the form of bronze

figures of Buddha, and with these stocks they exercised controlling

influence over the money market. There is a constant succession of

records of the total weight of the bronze figures, as an indication of

the money value they represented. It is interesting to observe that

temples and monasteries acquired also shops and had rental income from

them. They further operated many mills, as did the owners of private

estates (now called "_chuang_") and thus controlled the price of flour,

and polished rice.

The cultural influence of Buddhism found expression in new and improved

translations of countless texts, and in the passage of pilgrims along

the caravan routes, helped by the merchants, as far as western Asia and

India, like the famous Hsuean-tsang. Translations were made not only from

Indian or other languages into Chinese, but also, for instance, from

Chinese into the Uighur and other Turkish tongues, and into Tibetan,

Korean, and Japanese.

The attitude of the Turks can only be understood when we realize that

the background of events during the time of empress Wu was formed by the

activities of groups of the eastern Chinese gentry. The northern Turks,

who since 630 had been under Chinese overlordship, had fought many wars

of liberation against the Chinese; and through the conquest of

neighbouring Turks they had gradually become once more, in the

decade-and-a-half after the death of Kao Tsung, a great Turkish realm.

In 698 the Turkish khan, at the height of his power, demanded a Chinese

prince for his daughter--not, as had been usual in the past, a princess

for his son. His intention, no doubt, was to conquer China with the

prince's aid, to remove the empress Wu, and to restore the T'ang

dynasty--but under Turkish overlordship! Thus, when the empress Wu sent

a member of her own family, the khan rejected him and demanded the

restoration of the deposed T'ang emperor. To enforce this demand, he

embarked on a great campaign against China. In this the Turks must have

been able to rely on the support of a strong group inside China, for

before the Turkish attack became dangerous the empress Wu recalled the

deposed emperor, at first as "heir to the throne"; thus she yielded to

the khan's principal demand.

In spite of this, the Turkish attacks did not cease. After a series of

imbroglios within the country in which a group under the leadership of

the powerful Ts'ui gentry family had liquidated the supporters of the

empress Wu shortly before her death, a T'ang prince finally succeeded in

killing empress Wei and her clique. At first, his father ascended the

throne, but was soon persuaded to abdicate in favour of his son, now

called emperor Hsueang Tsung (713-755), just as the first ruler of the

T'ang dynasty had done. The practice of abdicating--in contradiction

with the Chinese concept of the ruler as son of Heaven and the duties of

a son towards his father--seems to have impressed Japan where similar

steps later became quite common. With Hsuean Tsung there began now a

period of forty-five years, which the Chinese describe as the second

blossoming of T'ang culture, a period that became famous especially for

its painting and literature.

5 _Second blossoming of T'ang culture_

The T'ang literature shows the co-operation of many favourable factors.

The ancient Chinese classical style of official reports and decrees

which the Toba had already revived, now led to the clear prose style of

the essayists, of whom Han Yue (768-825) and Liu Tsung-yuean (747-796)

call for special mention. But entirely new forms of sentences make their

appearance in prose writing, with new pictures and similes brought from

India through the medium of the Buddhist translations. Poetry was also

enriched by the simple songs that spread in the north under Turkish

influence, and by southern influences. The great poets of the T'ang

period adopted the rules of form laid down by the poetic art of the

south in the fifth century; but while at that time the writing of poetry

was a learned pastime, precious and formalistic, the T'ang poets brought

to it genuine feeling. Widespread fame came to Li T'ai-po (701-762) and

Tu Fu (712-770); in China two poets almost equal to these two in

popularity were Po Chue-i (772-846) and Yuean Chen (779-831), who in their

works kept as close as possible to the vernacular.

New forms of poetry rarely made their appearance in the T'ang period,

but the existing forms were brought to the highest perfection. Not until

the very end of the T'ang period did there appear the form of a "free"

versification, with lines of no fixed length. This form came from the

indigenous folk-songs of south-western China, and was spread through the

agency of the _filles de joie_ in the tea-houses. Before long it became

the custom to string such songs together in a continuous series--the

first step towards opera. For these song sequences were sung by way of

accompaniment to the theatrical productions. The Chinese theatre had

developed from two sources--from religious games, bullfights and

wrestling, among Turkish and Mongol peoples, which developed into

dancing displays; and from sacrificial games of South Chinese origin.

Thus the Chinese theatre, with its union with music, should rather be

called opera, although it offers a sort of pantomimic show. What

amounted to a court conservatoire trained actors and musicians as early

as in the T'ang period for this court opera. These actors and musicians

were selected from the best-looking "commoners", but they soon tended to

become a special caste with a legal status just below that of

"burghers".

In plastic art there are fine sculptures in stone and bronze, and we

have also technically excellent fabrics, the finest of lacquer, and

remains of artistic buildings; but the principal achievement of the

T'ang period lies undoubtedly in the field of painting. As in poetry, in

painting there are strong traces of alien influences; even before the

T'ang period, the painter Hsieh Ho laid down the six fundamental laws of

painting, in all probability drawn from Indian practice. Foreigners were

continually brought into China as decorators of Buddhist temples, since

the Chinese could not know at first how the new gods had to be

presented. The Chinese regarded these painters as craftsmen, but admired

their skill and their technique and learned from them.

The most famous Chinese painter of the T'ang period is Wu Tao-tzu, who

was also the painter most strongly influenced by Central Asian works. As

a pious Buddhist he painted pictures for temples among others. Among the

landscape painters, Wang Wei (721-759) ranks first; he was also a famous

poet and aimed at uniting poem and painting into an integral whole. With

him begins the great tradition of Chinese landscape painting, which

attained its zenith later, in the Sung epoch.

Porcelain had been invented in China long ago. There was as yet none of

the white porcelain that is preferred today; the inside was a

brownish-yellow; but on the whole it was already technically and

artistically of a very high quality. Since porcelain was at first

produced only for the requirements of the court and of high

dignitaries--mostly in state factories--a few centuries later the T'ang

porcelain had become a great rarity. But in the centuries that followed,

porcelain became an important new article of Chinese export. The Chinese

prisoners taken by the Arabs in the great battle of Samarkand (751), the

first clash between the world of Islam and China, brought to the West

the knowledge of Chinese culture, of several Chinese crafts, of the art

of papermaking, and also of porcelain.

The emperor Hsuean Tsung gave active encouragement to all things

artistic. Poets and painters contributed to the elegance of his

magnificent court ceremonial. As time went on he showed less and less

interest in public affairs, and grew increasingly inclined to Taoism and

mysticism in general--an outcome of the fact that the conduct of matters

of state was gradually taken out of his hands. On the whole, however,

Buddhism was pushed into the background in favour of Confucianism, as a

reaction from the unusual privileges that had been accorded to the

Buddhists in the past fifteen years under the empress Wu.

6 _Revolt of a military governor_

At the beginning of Hsuean Tsung's reign the capital had been in the east

at Loyang; then it was transferred once more to Ch'ang-an in the west

due to pressure of the western gentry. The emperor soon came under the

influence of the unscrupulous but capable and energetic Li Lin-fu, a

distant relative of the ruler. Li was a virtual dictator at the court

from 736 to 752, who had first advanced in power by helping the

concubine Wu, a relative of the famous empress Wu, and by continually

playing the eastern against the western gentry. After the death of the

concubine Wu, he procured for the emperor a new concubine named Yang, of

a western family. This woman, usually called "Concubine Yang" (Yang

Kui-fei), became the heroine of countless stage-plays and stories and

even films; all the misfortunes that marked the end of Hsuean Tsung's

reign were attributed solely to her. This is incorrect, as she was but a

link in the chain of influences that played upon the emperor. Naturally

she found important official posts for her brothers and all her

relatives; but more important than these was a military governor named

An Lu-shan (703-757). His mother was a Turkish shamaness, his father, a

foreigner probably of Sogdian origin. An Lu-shan succeeded in gaining

favour with the Li clique, which hoped to make use of him for its own

ends. Chinese sources describe him as a prodigy of evil, and it will be

very difficult today to gain a true picture of his personality. In any

case, he was certainly a very capable officer. His rise started from a

victory over the Kitan in 744. He spent some time establishing relations

with the court and then went back to resume operations against the

Kitan. He made so much of the Kitan peril that he was permitted a larger

army than usual, and he had command of 150,000 troops in the

neighbourhood of Peking. Meanwhile Li Lin-fu died. He had sponsored An

as a counterbalance against the western gentry. When now, within the

clique of Li Lin-fu, the Yang family tried to seize power, they turned

against An Lu-shan. But he marched against the capital, Ch'ang-an, with

200,000 men; on his way he conquered Loyang and made himself emperor

(756: Yen dynasty). T'ang troops were sent against him under the

leadership of the Chinese Kuo Tzu-i, a Kitan commander, and a Turk,

Ko-shu Han.

The first two generals had considerable success, but Ko-shu Han, whose

task was to prevent access to the western capital, was quickly defeated

and taken prisoner. The emperor fled betimes, and An Lu-shan captured

Ch'ang-an. The emperor now abdicated; his son, emperor Su Tsung

(756-762), also fled, though not with him into Szechwan, but into

north-western Shensi. There he defended himself against An Lu-shan and

his capable general Shih Ssu-ming (himself a Turk), and sought aid in

Central Asia. A small Arab troop came from the caliph Abu-Jafar, and

also small bands from Turkestan; of more importance was the arrival of

Uighur cavalry in substantial strength. At the end of 757 there was a

great battle in the neighbourhood of the capital, in which An Lu-shan

was defeated by the Uighurs; shortly afterwards he was murdered by one

of his eunuchs. His followers fled; Loyang was captured and looted by

the Uighurs. The victors further received in payment from the T'ang

government 10,000 rolls of silk with a promise of 20,000 rolls a year;

the Uighur khan was given a daughter of the emperor as his wife. An

Lu-shan's general, the Turk Shih Ssu-ming, entered into An Lu-shan's

heritage, and dominated so large a part of eastern China that the

Chinese once more made use of the Uighurs to bring him down. The

commanders in the fighting against Shih Ssu-ming this time were once

more Kuo Tzu-i and the Kitan general, together with P'u-ku Huai-en, a

member of a Toeloes family that had long been living in China. At first

Shih Ssu-ming was victorious, and he won back Loyang, but then he was

murdered by his own son, and only by taking advantage of the

disturbances that now arose were the government troops able to quell the

dangerous rising.

In all this, two things seem interesting and important. To begin with,

An Lu-shan had been a military governor. His rising showed that while

this new office, with its great command of power, was of value in

attacking external enemies, it became dangerous, especially if the

central power was weak, the moment there were no external enemies of any

importance. An Lu-shan's rising was the first of many similar ones in

the later T'ang period. The gentry of eastern China had shown themselves

entirely ready to support An Lu-shan against the government, because

they had hoped to gain advantage as in the past from a realm with its

centre once more in the east. In the second place, the important part

played by aliens in events within China calls for notice: not only were

the rebels An Lu-shan and Shih Ssu-ming non-Chinese, but so also were

most of the generals opposed to them. But they regarded themselves as

Chinese, not as members of another national group. The Turkish Uighurs

brought in to help against them were fighting actually against Turks,

though they regarded those Turks as Chinese. We must not bring to the

circumstances of those times the present-day notions with regard to

national feeling.

7 _The role of the Uighurs. Confiscation of the capital of the

monasteries_

This rising and its sequels broke the power of the dynasty, and also of

the empire. The extremely sanguinary wars had brought fearful suffering

upon the population. During the years of the rising, no taxes came in

from the greater part of the empire, but great sums had to be paid to

the peoples who had lent aid to the empire. And the looting by

government troops and by the auxiliaries injured the population as much

as the war itself did.

When the emperor Su Tsung died, in 762, Tengri, the khan of the Uighurs,

decided to make himself ruler over China. The events of the preceding

years had shown him that China alone was entirely defenceless. Part of

the court clique supported him, and only by the intervention of P'u-ku

Huai-en, who was related to Tengri by marriage, was his plan frustrated.

Naturally there were countless intrigues against P'u-ku Huai-en. He

entered into alliance with the Tibetan T'u-fan, and in this way the

union of Turks and Tibetans, always feared by the Chinese, had come into

existence. In 763 the Tibetans captured and burned down the western

capital, while P'u-ku Huai-en with the Uighurs advanced from the north.

Undoubtedly this campaign would have been successful, giving an entirely

different turn to China's destiny, if P'u-ku Huai-en had not died in 765

and the Chinese under Kuo Tzu-i had not succeeded in breaking up the

alliance. The Uighurs now came over into an alliance with the Chinese,

and the two allies fell upon the Tibetans and robbed them of their

booty. China was saved once more.

Friendship with the Uighurs had to be paid for this time even more

dearly. They crowded into the capital and compelled the Chinese to buy

horses, in payment for which they demanded enormous quantities of

silkstuffs. They behaved in the capital like lords, and expected to be

maintained at the expense of the government. The system of military

governors was adhered to in spite of the country's experience of them,

while the difficult situation throughout the empire, and especially

along the western and northern frontiers, facing the Tibetans and the

more and more powerful Kitan, made it necessary to keep considerable

numbers of soldiers permanently with the colours. This made the military

governors stronger and stronger; ultimately they no longer remitted any

taxes to the central government, but spent them mainly on their armies.

Thus from 750 onward the empire consisted of an impotent central

government and powerful military governors, who handed on their

positions to their sons as a further proof of their independence. When

in 781 the government proposed to interfere with the inheriting of the

posts, there was a great new rising, which in 783 again extended as far

as the capital; in 784 the T'ang government at last succeeded in

overcoming it. A compromise was arrived at between the government and

the governors, but it in no way improved the situation. Life became more

and more difficult for the central government. In 780, the "equal land"

system was finally officially given up and with it a tax system which

was based upon the idea that every citizen had the same amount of land

and, therefore, paid the same amount of taxes. The new system tried to

equalize the tax burden and the corvee obligation, but not the land.

This change may indicate a step towards greater freedom for private

enterprise. Yet it did not benefit the government, as most of the tax

income was retained by the governors and was used for their armies and

their own court.

In the capital, eunuchs ruled in the interests of various cliques.

Several emperors fell victim to them or to the drinking of "elixirs of

long life".

Abroad, the Chinese lost their dominion over Turkestan, for which

Uighurs and Tibetans competed. There is nothing to gain from any full

description of events at court. The struggle between cliques soon became

a struggle between eunuchs and literati, in much the same way as at the

end of the second Han dynasty. Trade steadily diminished, and the state

became impoverished because no taxes were coming in and great armies had

to be maintained, though they did not even obey the government.

Events that exerted on the internal situation an influence not to be

belittled were the break-up of the Uighurs (from 832 onward) the

appearance of the Turkish Sha-t'o, and almost at the same time, the

dissolution of the Tibetan empire (from 842). Many other foreigners had

placed themselves under the Uighurs living in China, in order to be able

to do business under the political protection of the Uighur embassy, but

the Uighurs no longer counted, and the T'ang government decided to seize

the capital sums which these foreigners had accumulated. It was hoped in

this way especially to remedy the financial troubles of the moment,

which were partly due to a shortage of metal for minting. As the trading

capital was still placed with the temples as banks, the government

attacked the religion of the Uighurs, Manichaeism, and also the

religions of the other foreigners, Mazdaism, Nestorianism, and

apparently also Islam. In 843 alien religions were prohibited; aliens

were also ordered to dress like Chinese. This gave them the status of

Chinese citizens and no longer of foreigners, so that Chinese justice

had a hold over them. That this law abolishing foreign religions was

aimed solely at the foreigners' capital is shown by the proceedings at

the same time against Buddhism which had long become a completely

Chinese Church. Four thousand, six hundred Buddhist temples, 40,000

shrines and monasteries were secularized, and all statues were required

to be melted down and delivered to the government, even those in private

possession. Two hundred and sixty thousand, five hundred monks were to

become ordinary citizens once more. Until then monks had been free of

taxation, as had millions of acres of land belonging to the temples and

leased to tenants or some 150,000 temple slaves.

Thus the edict of 843 must not be described as concerned with religion:

it was a measure of compulsion aimed at filling the government coffers.

All the property of foreigners and a large part of the property of the

Buddhist Church came into the hands of the government. The law was not

applied to Taoism, because the ruling gentry of the time were, as so

often before, Confucianist and at the same time Taoist. As early as 846

there came a reaction: with the new emperor, Confucians came into power

who were at the same time Buddhists and who now evicted some of the

Taoists. From this time one may observe closer co-operation between

Confucianism and Buddhism; not only with meditative Buddhism (Dhyana) as

at the beginning of the T'ang epoch and earlier, but with the main

branch of Buddhism, monastery Buddhism (Vinaya). From now onward the

Buddhist doctrines of transmigration and retribution, which had been

really directed against the gentry and in favour of the common people,

were turned into an instrument serving the gentry: everyone who was

unfortunate in this life must show such amenability to the government

and the gentry that he would have a chance of a better existence at

least in the next life. Thus the revolutionary Buddhist doctrine of

retribution became a reactionary doctrine that was of great service to

the gentry. One of the Buddhist Confucians in whose works this revised

version makes its appearance most clearly was Niu Seng-yu, who was at

once summoned back to court in 846 by the new emperor. Three new large

Buddhist sects came into existence in the T'ang period. One of them, the

school of the Pure Land (_Ching-t'u tsung_, since 641) required of its

mainly lower class adherents only the permanent invocation of the Buddha

Amithabha who would secure them a place in the "Western Paradise"--a

place without social classes and economic troubles. The cult of

Maitreya, which was always more revolutionary, receded for a while.

8 _First successful peasant revolt. Collapse of the empire_

The chief sufferers from the continual warfare of the military

governors, the sanguinary struggles between the cliques, and the

universal impoverishment which all this fighting produced, were, of

course, the common people. The Chinese annals are filled with records of

popular risings, but not one of these had attained any wide extent, for

want of organization. In 860 began the first great popular rising, a

revolt caused by famine in the province of Chekiang. Government troops

suppressed it with bloodshed. Further popular risings followed. In 874

began a great rising in the south of the present province of Hopei, the

chief agrarian region.

The rising was led by a peasant, Wang Hsien-chih, together with Huang

Ch'ao, a salt merchant, who had fallen into poverty and had joined the

hungry peasants, forming a fighting group of his own. It is important to

note that Huang was well educated. It is said that he failed in the

state examination. Huang is not the first merchant who became rebel. An

Lu-shan, too, had been a businessman for a while. It was pointed out

that trade had greatly developed in the T'ang period; of the lower

Yangtze region people it was said that "they were so much interested in

business that they paid no attention to agriculture". Yet merchants were

subject to many humiliating conditions. They could not enter the

examinations, except by illegal means. In various periods, from the Han

time on, they had to wear special dress. Thus, a law from _c_. A.D. 300

required them to wear a white turban on which name and type of business

was written, and to wear one white and one black shoe. They were subject

to various taxes, but were either not allowed to own land, or were

allotted less land than ordinary citizens. Thus they could not easily

invest in land, the safest investment at that time. Finally, the

government occasionally resorted to the method which was often used in

the Near East: when in 782 the emperor ran out of money, he requested

the merchants of the capital to "loan" him a large sum--a request which

in fact was a special tax.

Wang and Huang both proved good organizers of the peasant masses, and in

a short time they had captured the whole of eastern China, without the

military governors being able to do anything against them, for the

provincial troops were more inclined to show sympathy to the peasant

armies than to fight them. The terrified government issued an order to

arm the people of the other parts of the country against the rebels;

naturally this helped the rebels more than the government, since the

peasants thus armed went over to the rebels. Finally Wang was offered a

high office. But Huang urged him not to betray his own people, and Wang

declined the offer. In the end the government, with the aid of the

troops of the Turkish Sha-t'o, defeated Wang and beheaded him (878).

Huang Ch'ao now moved into the south-east and the south, where in 879 he

captured and burned down Canton; according to an Arab source, over

120,000 foreign merchants lost their lives in addition to the Chinese.

From Canton Huang Ch'ao returned to the north, laden with loot from that

wealthy commercial city. His advance was held up again by the Sha-t'o

troops; he turned away to the lower Yangtze, and from there marched

north again. At the end of 880 he captured the eastern capital. The

emperor fled from the western capital, Ch'ang-an, into Szechwan, and

Huang Ch'ao now captured with ease the western capital as well, and

removed every member of the ruling family on whom he could lay hands. He

then made himself emperor, in a Ch'i dynasty. It was the first time that

a peasant rising had succeeded against the gentry.

There was still, however, the greatest disorder in the empire. There

were other peasant armies on the move, armies that had deserted their

governors and were fighting for themselves; finally, there were still a

few supporters of the imperial house and, above all, the Turkish

Sha-t'o, who had a competent commander with the sinified name of Li

K'o-yung. The Sha-t'o, who had remained loyal to the government,

revolted the moment the government had been overthrown. They ran the

risk, however, of defeat at the hands of an alien army of the Chinese

government's, commanded by an Uighur, and they therefore fled to the

Tatars. In spite of this, the Chinese entered again into relations with

the Sha-t'o, as without them there could be no possibility of getting

rid of Huang Ch'ao. At the end of 881 Li K'o-yung fell upon the capital;

there was a fearful battle. Huang Ch'ao was able to hold out, but a

further attack was made in 883 and he was defeated and forced to flee;

in 884 he was killed by the Sha-t'o.

This popular rising, which had only been overcome with the aid of

foreign troops, brought the end of the T'ang dynasty. In 885 the T'ang

emperor was able to return to the capital, but the only question now was

whether China should be ruled by the Sha-t'o under Li K'o-yung or by

some other military commander. In a short time Chu Ch'uean-chung, a

former follower of Huang Ch'ao, proved to be the strongest of the

commanders. In 890 open war began between the two leaders. Li K'o-yung

was based on Shansi; Chu Ch'uean-chung had control of the plains in the

east. Meanwhile the governors of Szechwan in the west and Chekiang in

the south-east made themselves independent. Both declared themselves

kings or emperors and set up dynasties of their own (from 895).

Within the capital, the emperor was threatened several times by revolts,

so that he had to flee and place himself in the hands of Li K'o-yung as

the only leader on whose loyalty he could count. Soon after this,

however, the emperor fell into the hands of Chu Ch'uean-chung, who killed

the whole entourage of the emperor, particularly the eunuchs; after a

time he had the emperor himself killed, set a puppet--as had become

customary--on the throne, and at the beginning of 907 took over the rule

from him, becoming emperor in the "Later Liang dynasty".

That was the end of the T'ang dynasty, at the beginning of which China

had risen to unprecedented power. Its downfall had been brought about by

the military governors, who had built up their power and had become

independent hereditary satraps, exploiting the people for their own

purposes, and by their continual mutual struggles undermining the

economic structure of the empire. In addition to this, the empire had

been weakened first by its foreign trade and then by the dependence on

foreigners, especially Turks, into which it had fallen owing to internal

conditions. A large part of the national income had gone abroad. Such is

the explanation of the great popular risings which ultimately brought

the dynasty to its end.

MODERN TIMES

Chapter Nine

THE EPOCH OF THE SECOND DIVISION OF CHINA

(A) The period of transition: the Five Dynasties (A.D. 906-960)

1 _Beginning of a new epoch_

The rebellion of Huang Ch'ao in fact meant the end of the T'ang dynasty

and the division of China into a number of independent states. Only for

reasons of convenience we keep the traditional division into dynasties

and have our new period begin with the official end of the T'ang dynasty

in 906. We decided to call the new thousand years of Chinese history

"Modern Times" in order to indicate that from _c_. 860 on changes in

China's social structure came about which set this epoch off from the

earlier thousand years which we called "The Middle Ages". Any division

into periods is arbitrary as changes do not happen from one year to the

next. The first beginnings of the changes which lead to the "Modern

Times" actually can be seen from the end of An Lu-shan's rebellion on,

from _c_. A.D. 780 on, and the transformation was more or less completed

only in the middle of the eleventh century.

If we want to characterize the "Modern Times" by one concept, we would

have to call this epoch the time of the emergence of a middle class, and

it will be remembered that the growth of the middle class in Europe was

also the decisive change between the Middle Ages and Modern Times in

Europe. The parallelism should, however, not be overdone. The gentry

continued to play a role in China during the Modern Times, much more

than the aristocracy did in Europe. The middle class did not ever really

get into power during the whole period.

While we will discuss the individual developments later in some detail,

a few words about the changes in general might be given already here.

The wars which followed Huang Ch'ao's rebellion greatly affected the

ruling gentry. A number of families were so strongly affected that they

lost their importance and disappeared. Commoners from the followers of

Huang Ch'ao or other armies succeeded to get into power, to acquire

property and to enter the ranks of the gentry. At about A.D. 1000 almost

half of the gentry families were new families of low origin. The state,

often ruled by men who had just moved up, was no more interested in the

aristocratic manners of the old gentry families, especially no more

interested in their genealogies. When conditions began to improve after

A.D. 1000, and when the new families felt themselves as real gentry

families, they tried to set up a mechanism to protect the status of

their families. In the eleventh century private genealogies began to be

kept, so that any claim against the clan could be checked. Clans set up

rules of behaviour and procedure to regulate all affairs of the clan

without the necessity of asking the state to interfere in case of

conflict. Many such "clan rules" exist in China and also in Japan which

took over this innovation. Clans set apart special pieces of land as

clan land; the income of this land was to be used to secure a minimum of

support for every clan member and his own family, so that no member ever

could fall into utter poverty. Clan schools which were run by income

from special pieces of clan land were established to guarantee an

education for the members of the clan, again in order to make sure that

the clan would remain a part of the _elite_. Many clans set up special

marriage rules for clan members, and after some time cross-cousin

marriages between two or three families were legally allowed; such

marriages tended to fasten bonds between clans and to prevent the loss

of property by marriage. While on the one hand, a new "clan

consciousness" grew up among the gentry families in order to secure

their power, tax and corvee legislation especially in the eleventh

century induced many families to split up into small families.

It can be shown that over the next centuries, the power of the family

head increased. He was now regarded as owner of the property, not only

mere administrator of family property. He got power over life and death

of his children. This increase of power went together with a change of

the position of the ruler. The period transition (until _c_. A.D. 1000)

was followed by a period of "moderate absolutism" (until 1278) in which

emperors as persons played a greater role than before, and some

emperors, such as Shen Tsung (in 1071), even declared that they regarded

the welfare of the masses as more important than the profit of the

gentry. After 1278, however, the personal influence of the emperors grew

further towards absolutism and in times became pure despotism.

Individuals, especially family heads, gained more freedom in "Modern

Times". Not only the period of transition, but also the following period

was a time of much greater social mobility than existed in the Middle

Ages. By various legal and/or illegal means people could move up into

positions of power and wealth: we know of many merchants who succeeded

in being allowed to enter the state examina and thus got access to jobs

in the administration. Large, influential gentry families in the capital

protected sons from less important families and thus gave them a chance

to move into the gentry. Thus, these families built up a clientele of

lesser gentry families which assisted them and upon the loyalty of which

they could count. The gentry can from now on be divided into two parts.

First, there was a "big gentry" which consisted of much fewer families

than in earlier times and which directed the policy in the capital; and

secondly, there was a "small gentry" which was operating mainly in the

provincial cities, directing local affairs and bound by ties of loyalty

to big gentry families. Gentry cliques now extended into the provinces

and it often became possible to identify a clique with a geographical

area, which, however, usually did not indicate particularistic

tendencies.

Individual freedom did not show itself only in greater social mobility.

The restrictions which, for instance, had made the craftsmen and

artisans almost into serfs, were gradually lifted. From the early

sixteenth century on, craftsmen were free and no more subject to forced

labour services for the state. Most craftsmen in this epoch still had

their shops in one lane or street and lived above their shops, as they

had done in the earlier period. But from now on, they began to organize

in guilds of an essentially religious character, as similar guilds in

other parts of Asia at the same time also did. They provided welfare

services for their members, made some attempts towards standardization

of products and prices, imposed taxes upon their members, kept their

streets clean and tried to regulate salaries. Apprentices were initiated

in a kind of semi-religious ceremony, and often meetings took place in

temples. No guild, however, connected people of the same craft living in

different cities. Thus, they did not achieve political power.

Furthermore, each trade had its own guild; in Peking in the nineteenth

century there existed over 420 different guilds. Thus, guilds failed to

achieve political influence even within individual cities.

Probably at the same time, regional associations, the so-called

"_hui-kuan_" originated. Such associations united people from one city

or one area who lived in another city. People of different trades, but

mainly businessmen, came together under elected chiefs and councillors.

Sometimes, such regional associations could function as pressure groups,

especially as they were usually financially stronger than the guilds.

They often owned city property or farm land. Not all merchants, however,

were so organized. Although merchants remained under humiliating

restrictions as to the colour and material of their dress and the

prohibition to ride a horse, they could more often circumvent such

restrictions and in general had much more freedom in this epoch.

Trade, including overseas trade, developed greatly from now on. Soon we

find in the coastal ports a special office which handled custom and

registration affairs, supplied interpreters for foreigners, received

them officially and gave good-bye dinners when they left. Down to the

thirteenth century, most of this overseas trade was still in the hands

of foreigners, mainly Indians. Entrepreneurs hired ships, if they were

not ship-owners, hired trained merchants who in turn hired sailors

mainly from the South-East Asian countries, and sold their own

merchandise as well as took goods on commission. Wealthy Chinese gentry

families invested money in such foreign enterprises and in some cases

even gave their daughters in marriage to foreigners in order to profit

from this business.

We also see an emergence of industry from the eleventh century on. We

find men who were running almost monopolistic enterprises, such as

preparing charcoal for iron production and producing iron and steel at

the same time; some of these men had several factories, operating under

hired and qualified managers with more than 500 labourers. We find

beginnings of a labour legislation and the first strikes (A.D. 782 the

first strike of merchants in the capital; 1601 first strike of textile

workers).

Some of these labourers were so-called "vagrants", farmers who had

secretly left their land or their landlord's land for various reasons,

and had shifted to other regions where they did not register and thus

did not pay taxes. Entrepreneurs liked to hire them for industries

outside the towns where supervision by the government was not so strong;

naturally, these "vagrants" were completely at the mercy of their

employers.

Since _c._ 780 the economy can again be called a money economy; more and

more taxes were imposed in form of money instead of in kind. This

pressure forced farmers out of the land and into the cities in order to

earn there the cash they needed for their tax payments. These men

provided the labour force for industries, and this in turn led to the

strong growth of the cities, especially in Central China where trade and

industries developed most.

Wealthy people not only invested in industrial enterprises, but also

began to make heavy investments in agriculture in the vicinity of

cities in order to increase production and thus income. We find men who

drained lakes in order to create fields below the water level for easy

irrigation; others made floating fields on lakes and avoided land tax

payments; still others combined pig and fish breeding in one operation.

The introduction of money economy and money taxes led to a need for more

coinage. As metal was scarce and minting very expensive, iron coins were

introduced, silver became more and more common as means of exchange, and

paper money was issued. As the relative value of these moneys changed

with supply and demand, speculation became a flourishing business which

led to further enrichment of people in business. Even the government

became more money-minded: costs of operations and even of wars were

carefully calculated in order to achieve savings; financial specialists

were appointed by the government, just as clans appointed such men for

the efficient administration of their clan properties.

Yet no real capitalism or industrialism developed until towards the end

of this epoch, although at the end of the twelfth century almost all

conditions for such a development seemed to be given.

2 _Political situation in the tenth century_

The Chinese call the period from 906 to 960 the "period of the Five

Dynasties" (_Wu Tai_). This is not quite accurate. It is true that there

were five dynasties in rapid succession in North China; but at the same

time there were ten other dynasties in South China. The ten southern

dynasties, however, are regarded as not legitimate. The south was much

better off with its illegitimate dynasties than the north with the

legitimate ones. The dynasties in the south (we may dispense with giving

their names) were the realms of some of the military governors so often

mentioned above. These governors had already become independent at the

end of the T'ang epoch; they declared themselves kings or emperors and

ruled particular provinces in the south, the chief of which covered the

territory of the present provinces of Szechwan, Kwangtung and Chekiang.

In these territories there was comparative peace and economic

prosperity, since they were able to control their own affairs and were

no longer dependent on a corrupt central government. They also made

great cultural progress, and they did not lose their importance later

when they were annexed in the period of the Sung dynasty.

As an example of these states one may mention the small state of Ch'u in

the present province of Hunan. Here, Ma Yin, a former carpenter (died

931), had made himself a king. He controlled some of the main trade

routes, set up a clean administration, bought up all merchandise which

the merchants brought, but allowed them to export only local products,

mainly tea, iron and lead. This regulation gave him a personal income of

several millions every year, and in addition fostered the exploitation

of the natural resources of this hitherto retarded area.

3 _Monopolistic trade in South China. Printing and paper money in the

north_

The prosperity of the small states of South China was largely due to the

growth of trade, especially the tea trade. The habit of drinking tea

seems to have been an ancient Tibetan custom, which spread to

south-eastern China in the third century A.D. Since then there had been

two main centres of production, Szechwan and south-eastern China. Until

the eleventh century Szechwan had remained the leading producer, and tea

had been drunk in the Tibetan fashion, mixed with flour, salt, and

ginger. It then began to be drunk without admixture. In the T'ang epoch

tea drinking spread all over China, and there sprang up a class of

wholesalers who bought the tea from the peasants, accumulated stocks,

and distributed them. From 783 date the first attempts of the state to

monopolize the tea trade and to make it a source of revenue; but it

failed in an attempt to make the cultivation a state monopoly. A tea

commissariat was accordingly set up to buy the tea from the producers

and supply it to traders in possession of a state licence. There

naturally developed then a pernicious collaboration between state

officials and the wholesalers. The latter soon eliminated the small

traders, so that they themselves secured all the profit; official

support was secured by bribery. The state and the wholesalers alike were

keenly interested in the prevention of tea smuggling, which was strictly

prohibited.

The position was much the same with regard to salt. We have here for the

first time the association of officials with wholesalers or even with a

monopoly trade. This was of the utmost importance in all later times.

Monopoly progressed most rapidly in Szechwan, where there had always

been a numerous commercial community. In the period of political

fragmentation Szechwan, as the principal tea-producing region and at the

same time an important producer of salt, was much better off than any

other part of China. Salt in Szechwan was largely produced by,

technically, very interesting salt wells which existed there since _c._

the first century B.C. The importance of salt will be understood if we

remember that a grown-up person in China uses an average of twelve

pounds of salt per year. The salt tax was the top budget item around

A.D. 900.

South-eastern China was also the chief centre of porcelain production,

although china clay is found also in North China. The use of porcelain

spread more and more widely. The first translucent porcelain made its

appearance, and porcelain became an important article of commerce both

within the country and for export. Already the Muslim rulers of Baghdad

around 800 used imported Chinese porcelain, and by the end of the

fourteenth century porcelain was known in Eastern Africa. Exports to

South-East Asia and Indonesia, and also to Japan gained more and more

importance in later centuries. Manufacture of high quality porcelain

calls for considerable amounts of capital investment and working

capital; small manufacturers produce too many second-rate pieces; thus

we have here the first beginnings of an industry that developed

industrial towns such as Ching-te, in which the majority of the

population were workers and merchants, with some 10,000 families alone

producing porcelain. Yet, for many centuries to come, the state

controlled the production and even the design of porcelain and

appropriated most of the production for use at court or as gifts.

The third important new development to be mentioned was that of

printing, which since _c_. 770 was known in the form of wood-block

printing. The first reference to a printed book dated from 835, and the

most important event in this field was the first printing of the

Classics by the orders of Feng Tao (882-954) around 940. The first

attempts to use movable type in China occurred around 1045, although

this invention did not get general acceptance in China. It was more

commonly used in Korea from the thirteenth century on and revolutionized

Europe from 1538 on. It seems to me that from the middle of the

twentieth century on, the West, too, shows a tendency to come back to

the printing of whole pages, but replacing the wood blocks by

photographic plates or other means. In the Far East, just as in Europe,

the invention of printing had far-reaching consequences. Books, which

until then had been very dear, because they had had to be produced by

copyists, could now be produced cheaply and in quantity. It became

possible for a scholar to accumulate a library of his own and to work in

a wide field, where earlier he had been confined to a few books or even

a single text. The results were the spread of education, beginning with

reading and writing, among wider groups, and the broadening of

education: a large number of texts were read and compared, and no longer

only a few. Private libraries came into existence, so that the imperial

libraries were no longer the only ones. Publishing soon grew in extent,

and in private enterprise works were printed that were not so serious

and politically important as the classic books of the past. Thus a new

type of literature, the literature of entertainment, could come into

existence. Not all these consequences showed themselves at once; some

made their first appearance later, in the Sung period.

A fourth important innovation, this time in North China, was the

introduction of prototypes of paper money. The Chinese copper "cash" was

difficult or expensive to transport, simply because of its weight. It

thus presented great obstacles to trade. Occasionally a region with an

adverse balance of trade would lose all its copper money, with the

result of a local deflation. From time to time, iron money was

introduced in such deficit areas; it had for the first time been used in

Szechwan in the first century B.C., and was there extensively used in

the tenth century when after the conquest of the local state all copper

was taken to the east by the conquerors. So long as there was an orderly

administration, the government could send it money, though at

considerable cost; but if the administration was not functioning well,

the deflation continued. For this reason some provinces prohibited the

export of copper money from their territory at the end of the eighth

century. As the provinces were in the hands of military governors, the

central government could do next to nothing to prevent this. On the

other hand, the prohibition automatically made an end of all external

trade. The merchants accordingly began to prepare deposit certificates,

and in this way to set up a sort of transfer system. Soon these deposit

certificates entered into circulation as a sort of medium of payment at

first again in Szechwan, and gradually this led to a banking system and

the linking of wholesale trade with it. This made possible a much

greater volume of trade. Towards the end of the T'ang period the

government began to issue deposit certificates of its own: the merchant

deposited his copper money with a government agency, receiving in

exchange a certificate which he could put into circulation like money.

Meanwhile the government could put out the deposited money at interest,

or throw it into general circulation. The government's deposit

certificates were now printed. They were the predecessors of the paper

money used from the time of the Sung.

4 _Political history of the Five Dynasties_

The southern states were a factor not to be ignored in the calculations

of the northern dynasties. Although the southern kingdoms were involved

in a confusion of mutual hostilities, any one of them might come to the

fore as the ally of Turks or other northern powers. The capital of the

first of the five northern dynasties (once more a Liang dynasty, but not

to be confused with the Liang dynasty of the south in the sixth century)

was, moreover, quite close to the territories of the southern dynasties,

close to the site of the present K'aifeng, in the fertile plain of

eastern China with its good means of transport. Militarily the town

could not be held, for its one and only defence was the Yellow River.

The founder of this Later Liang dynasty, Chu Ch'uean-chung (906), was

himself an eastern Chinese and, as will be remembered, a past supporter

of the revolutionary Huang Ch'ao, but he had then gone over to the T'ang

and had gained high military rank.

His northern frontier remained still more insecure than the southern,

for Chu Ch'uean-chung did not succeed in destroying the Turkish general

Li K'o-yung; on the contrary, the latter continually widened the range

of his power. Fortunately he, too, had an enemy at his back--the Kitan

(or Khitan), whose ruler had made himself emperor in 916, and so staked

a claim to reign over all China. The first Kitan emperor held a middle

course between Chu and Li, and so was able to establish and expand his

empire in peace. The striking power of his empire, which from 937 onward

was officially called the Liao empire, grew steadily, because the old

tribal league of the Kitan was transformed into a centrally commanded

military organization.

To these dangers from abroad threatening the Later Liang state internal

troubles were added. Chu Ch'uean-chung's dynasty was one of the three

Chinese dynasties that have ever come to power through a popular rising.

He himself was of peasant origin, and so were a large part of his

subordinates and helpers. Many of them had originally been independent

peasant leaders; others had been under Huang Ch'ao. All of them were

opposed to the gentry, and the great slaughter of the gentry of the

capital, shortly before the beginning of Chu's rule, had been welcomed

by Chu and his followers. The gentry therefore would not co-operate with

Chu and preferred to join the Turk Li K'o-yung. But Chu could not

confidently rely on his old comrades. They were jealous of his success

in gaining the place they all coveted, and were ready to join in any

independent enterprise as opportunity offered. All of them, moreover, as

soon as they were given any administrative post, busied themselves with

the acquisition of money and wealth as quickly as possible. These abuses

not only ate into the revenues of the state but actually produced a

common front between the peasantry and the remnants of the gentry

against the upstarts.

In 917, after Li K'o-yung's death, the Sha-t'o Turks beat off an attack

from the Kitan, and so were safe for a time from the northern menace.

They then marched against the Liang state, where a crisis had been

produced in 912 after the murder of Chu Ch'uean-chung by one of his sons.

The Liang generals saw no reason why they should fight for the dynasty,

and all of them went over to the enemy. Thus the "Later T'ang dynasty"

(923-936) came into power in North China, under the son of Li K'o-yung.

The dominant element at this time was quite clearly the Chinese gentry,

especially in western and central China. The Sha-t'o themselves must

have been extraordinarily few in number, probably little more than

100,000 men. Most of them, moreover, were politically passive, being

simple soldiers. Only the ruling family and its following played any

active part, together with a few families related to it by marriage. The

whole state was regarded by the Sha-t'o rulers as a sort of family

enterprise, members of the family being placed in the most important

positions. As there were not enough of them, they adopted into the

family large numbers of aliens of all nationalities. Military posts were

given to faithful members of Li K'o-yung's or his successor's bodyguard,

and also to domestic servants and other clients of the family. Thus,

while in the Later Liang state elements from the peasantry had risen in

the world, some of these neo-gentry reaching the top of the social

pyramid in the centuries that followed, in the Sha-t'o state some of its

warriors, drawn from the most various peoples, entered the gentry class

through their personal relations with the ruler. But in spite of all

this the bulk of the officials came once more from the Chinese. These

educated Chinese not only succeeded in winning over the rulers

themselves to the Chinese cultural ideal, but persuaded them to adopt

laws that substantially restricted the privileges of the Sha-t'o and

brought advantages only to the Chinese gentry. Consequently all the

Chinese historians are enthusiastic about the "Later T'ang", and

especially about the emperor Ming Ti, who reigned from 927 onward, after

the assassination of his predecessor. They also abused the Liang because

they were against the gentry.

In 936 the Later T'ang dynasty gave place to the Later Chin dynasty

(936-946), but this involved no change in the structure of the empire.

The change of dynasty meant no more than that instead of the son

following the father the son-in-law had ascended the throne. It was of

more importance that the son-in-law, the Sha-t'o Turk Shih Ching-t'ang,

succeeded in doing this by allying himself with the Kitan and ceding to

them some of the northern provinces. The youthful successor, however, of

the first ruler of this dynasty was soon made to realize that the Kitan

regarded the founding of his dynasty as no more than a transition stage

on the way to their annexation of the whole of North China. The old

Sha-t'o nobles, who had not been sinified in the slightest, suggested a

preventive war; the actual court group, strongly sinified, hesitated,

but ultimately were unable to avoid war. The war was very quickly

decided by several governors in eastern China going over to the Kitan,

who had promised them the imperial title. In the course of 946-7 the

Kitan occupied the capital and almost the whole of the country. In 947

the Kitan ruler proclaimed himself emperor of the Kitan and the Chinese.

[Illustration: Map 6: The State of the later Tang dynasty]

The Chinese gentry seem to have accepted this situation because a Kitan

emperor was just as acceptable to them as a Sha-t'o emperor; but the

Sha-t'o were not prepared to submit to the Kitan regime, because under

it they would have lost their position of privilege. At the head of this

opposition group stood the Sha-t'o general Liu Chih-yuean, who founded

the "Later Han dynasty" (947-950). He was able to hold out against the

Kitan only because in 947 the Kitan emperor died and his son had to

leave China and retreat to the north; fighting had broken out between

the empress dowager, who had some Chinese support, and the young heir to

the throne. The new Turkish dynasty, however, was unable to withstand

the internal Chinese resistance. Its founder died in 948, and his son,

owing to his youth, was entirely in the hands of a court clique. In his

effort to free himself from the tutelage of this group he made a

miscalculation, for the men on whom he thought he could depend were

largely supporters of the clique. So he lost his throne and his life,

and a Chinese general, Kuo Wei, took his place, founding the "Later Chou

dynasty" (951-959).

A feature of importance was that in the years of the short-lived "Later

Han dynasty" a tendency showed itself among the Chinese military leaders

to work with the states in the south. The increase in the political

influence of the south was due to its economic advance while the north

was reduced to economic chaos by the continual heavy fighting, and by

the complete irresponsibility of the Sha-t'o ruler in financial matters:

several times in this period the whole of the money in the state

treasury was handed out to soldiers to prevent them from going over to

some enemy or other. On the other hand, there was a tendency in the

south for the many neighbouring states to amalgamate, and as this

process took place close to the frontier of North China the northern

states could not passively look on. During the "Later Han" period there

were wars and risings, which continued in the time of the "Later Chou".

On the whole, the few years of the rule of the second emperor of the

"Later Chou" (954-958) form a bright spot in those dismal fifty-five

years. Sociologically regarded, that dynasty formed merely a transition

stage on the way to the Sung dynasty that now followed: the Chinese

gentry ruled under the leadership of an upstart who had risen from the

ranks, and they ruled in accordance with the old principles of gentry

rule. The Sha-t'o, who had formed the three preceding dynasties, had

been so reduced that they were now a tiny minority and no longer

counted. This minority had only been able to maintain its position

through the special social conditions created by the "Later Liang"

dynasty: the Liang, who had come from the lower classes of the

population, had driven the gentry into the arms of the Sha-t'o Turks. As

soon as the upstarts, in so far as they had not fallen again or been

exterminated, had more or less assimilated themselves to the old gentry,

and on the other hand the leaders of the Sha-t'o had become numerically

too weak, there was a possibility of resuming the old form of rule.

There had been certain changes in this period. The north-west of China,

the region of the old capital Ch'ang-an, had been so ruined by the

fighting that had gone on mainly there and farther north, that it was

eliminated as a centre of power for a hundred years to come; it had been

largely depopulated. The north was under the rule of the Kitan: its

trade, which in the past had been with the Huang-ho basin, was now

perforce diverted to Peking, which soon became the main centre of the

power of the Kitan. The south, particularly the lower Yangtze region and

the province of Szechwan, had made economic progress, at least in

comparison with the north; consequently it had gained in political

importance.

One other event of this time has to be mentioned: the great persecution

of Buddhism in 955, but not only because 30,336 temples and monasteries

were secularized and only some 2,700 with 61,200 monks were left.

Although the immediate reason for this action seems to have been that

too many men entered the monasteries in order to avoid being taken as

soldiers, the effect of the law of 955 was that from now on the

Buddhists were put under regulations which clarified once and for ever

their position within the framework of a society which had as its aim to

define clearly the status of each individual within each social class.

Private persons were no more allowed to erect temples and monasteries.

The number of temples per district was legally fixed. A person could

become monk only if the head of the family gave its permission. He had

to be over fifteen years of age and had to know by heart at least one

hundred pages of texts. The state took over the control of the

ordinations which could be performed only after a successful

examination. Each year a list of all monks had to be submitted to the

government in two copies. Monks had to carry six identification cards

with them, one of which was the ordination diploma for which a fee had

to be paid to the government (already since 755). The diploma was, in

the eleventh century, issued by the Bureau of Sacrifices, but the money

was collected by the Ministry of Agriculture. It can be regarded as a

payment _in lieu_ of land tax. The price was in the eleventh century 130

strings, which represented the value of a small farm or the value of

some 17,000 litres of grain. The price of the diploma went up to 220

strings in 1101, and the then government sold 30,000 diplomas per year

in order to get still more cash. But as diplomas could be traded, a

black market developed, on which they were sold for as little as twenty

strings.

(B) Period of Moderate Absolutism

(1) The Northern Sung dynasty

1 _Southward expansion_

The founder of the Sung dynasty, Chao K'uang-yin, came of a Chinese

military family living to the south of Peking. He advanced from general

to emperor, and so differed in no way from the emperors who had preceded

him. But his dynasty did not disappear as quickly as the others; for

this there were several reasons. To begin with, there was the simple

fact that he remained alive longer than the other founders of dynasties,

and so was able to place his rule on a firmer foundation. But in

addition to this he followed a new course, which in certain ways

smoothed matters for him and for his successors, in foreign policy.

This Sung dynasty, as Chao K'uang-yin named it, no longer turned against

the northern peoples, particularly the Kitan, but against the south.

This was not exactly an heroic policy: the north of China remained in

the hands of the Kitan. There were frequent clashes, but no real effort

was made to destroy the Kitan, whose dynasty was now called "Liao". The

second emperor of the Sung was actually heavily defeated several times

by the Kitan. But they, for their part, made no attempt to conquer the

whole of China, especially since the task would have become more and

more burdensome the farther south the Sung expanded. And very soon there

were other reasons why the Kitan should refrain from turning their whole

strength against the Chinese.

[Illustration: 10 Ladies of the Court: clay models which accompanied the

dead person to the grave. T'ang period. _In the collection of the Museum

fuer Voelkerkunde, Berlin_.]

[Illustration: 11 Distinguished founder: a temple banner found at

Khotcho, Turkestan. _Museum fuer Voelkerkunde, Berlin, No. 1B_ 4524,

_illustration B_ 408.]

As we said, the Sung turned at once against the states in the south.

Some of the many small southern states had made substantial economic and

cultural advance, but militarily they were not strong. Chao

K'uang-yin (named as emperor T'ai Tsu) attacked them in succession. Most

of them fell very quickly and without any heavy fighting, especially

since the Sung dealt mildly with the defeated rulers and their

following. The gentry and the merchants in these small states could not

but realize the advantages of a widened and well-ordered economic field,

and they were therefore entirely in favour of the annexation of their

country so soon as it proved to be tolerable. And the Sung empire could

only endure and gain strength if it had control of the regions along the

Yangtze and around Canton, with their great economic resources. The

process of absorbing the small states in the south continued until 980.

Before it was ended, the Sung tried to extend their influence in the

south beyond the Chinese border, and secured a sort of protectorate over

parts of Annam (973). This sphere of influence was politically

insignificant and not directly of any economic importance; but it

fulfilled for the Sung the same functions which colonial territories

fulfilled for Europeans, serving as a field of operation for the

commercial class, who imported raw materials from it--mainly, it is

true, luxury articles such as special sorts of wood, perfumes, ivory,

and so on--and exported Chinese manufactures. As the power of the empire

grew, this zone of influence extended as far as Indonesia: the process

had begun in the T'ang period. The trade with the south had not the

deleterious effects of the trade with Central Asia. There was no sale of

refined metals, and none of fabrics, as the natives produced their own

textiles which sufficed for their needs. And the export of porcelain

brought no economic injury to China, but the reverse.

This Sung policy was entirely in the interest of the gentry and of the

trading community which was now closely connected with them. Undoubtedly

it strengthened China. The policy of nonintervention in the north was

endurable even when peace with the Kitan had to be bought by the payment

of an annual tribute. From 1004 onwards, 100,000 ounces of silver and

200,000 bales of silk were paid annually to the Kitan, amounting in

value to about 270,000 strings of cash, each of 1,000 coins. The state

budget amounted to some 20,000,000 strings of cash. In 1038 the payments

amounted to 500,000 strings, but the budget was by then much larger. One

is liable to get a false impression when reading of these big payments

if one does not take into account what percentage they formed of the

total revenues of the state. The tribute to the Kitan amounted to less

than 2 per cent of the revenue, while the expenditure on the army

accounted for 25 per cent of the budget. It cost much less to pay

tribute than to maintain large armies and go to war. Financial

considerations played a great part during the Sung epoch. The taxation

revenue of the empire rose rapidly after the pacification of the south;

soon after the beginning of the dynasty the state budget was double that

of the T'ang. If the state expenditure in the eleventh century had not

continually grown through the increase in military expenditure--in spite

of everything!--there would have come a period of great prosperity in

the empire.

2 _Administration and army. Inflation_

The Sung emperor, like the rulers of the transition period, had gained

the throne by his personal abilities as military leader; in fact, he had

been made emperor by his soldiers as had happened to so many emperors in

later Imperial Rome. For the next 300 years we observe a change in the

position of the emperor. On the one hand, if he was active and

intelligent enough, he exercised much more personal influence than the

rulers of the Middle Ages. On the other hand, at the same time, the

emperors were much closer to their ministers as before. We hear of

ministers who patted the ruler on the shoulders when they retired from

an audience; another one fell asleep on the emperor's knee and was not

punished for this familiarity. The emperor was called "_kuan-chia_"

(Administrator) and even called himself so. And in the early twelfth

century an emperor stated "I do not regard the empire as my personal

property; my job is to guide the people". Financially-minded as the Sung

dynasty was, the cost of the operation of the palace was calculated, so

that the emperor had a budget: in 1068 the salaries of all officials in

the capital amounted to 40,000 strings of money per month, the armies

100,000, and the emperor's ordinary monthly budget was 70,000 strings.

For festivals, imperial birthdays, weddings and burials extra allowances

were made. Thus, the Sung rulers may be called "moderate absolutists"

and not despots.

One of the first acts of the new Sung emperor, in 963, was a fundamental

reorganization of the administration of the country. The old system of a

civil administration and a military administration independent of it was

brought to an end and the whole administration of the country placed in

the hands of civil officials. The gentry welcomed this measure and gave

it full support, because it enabled the influence of the gentry to grow

and removed the fear of competition from the military, some of whom did

not belong by birth to the gentry. The generals by whose aid the empire

had been created were put on pension, or transferred to civil

employment, as quickly as possible. The army was demobilized, and this

measure was bound up with the settlement of peasants in the regions

which war had depopulated, or on new land. Soon after this the revenue

noticeably increased. Above all, the army was placed directly under the

central administration, and the system of military governors was thus

brought to an end. The soldiers became mercenaries of the state, whereas

in the past there had been conscription. In 975 the army had numbered

only 378,000, and its cost had not been insupportable. Although the

numbers increased greatly, reaching 912,000 in 1017 and 1,259,000 in

1045, this implied no increase in military strength; for men who had

once been soldiers remained with the army even when they were too old

for service. Moreover, the soldiers grew more and more exacting; when

detachments were transferred to another region, for instance, the

soldiers would not carry their baggage; an army of porters had to be

assembled. The soldiers also refused to go to regions remote from their

homes until they were given extra pay. Such allowances gradually became

customary, and so the military expenditure grew by leaps and bounds

without any corresponding increase in the striking power of the army.

The government was unable to meet the whole cost of the army out of

taxation revenue. The attempt was made to cover the expenditure by

coining fresh money. In connection with the increase in commercial

capital described above, and the consequent beginning of an industry,

China's metal production had greatly increased. In 1050 thirteen times

as much silver, eight times as much copper, and fourteen times as much

iron was produced as in 800. Thus the circulation of the copper currency

was increased. The cost of minting, however, amounted in China to about

75 per cent and often over 100 per cent of the value of the money

coined. In addition to this, the metal was produced in the south, while

the capital was in the north. The coin had therefore to be carried a

long distance to reach the capital and to be sent on to the soldiers in

the north.

To meet the increasing expenditure, an unexampled quantity of new money

was put into circulation. The state budget increased from 22,200,000 in

A.D. 1000 to 150,800,000 in 1021. The Kitan state coined a great deal of

silver, and some of the tribute was paid to it in silver. The greatly

increased production of silver led to its being put into circulation in

China itself. And this provided a new field of speculation, through the

variations in the rates for silver and for copper. Speculation was also

possible with the deposit certificates, which were issued in quantities

by the state from the beginning of the eleventh century, and to which

the first true paper money was soon added. The paper money and the

certificates were redeemable at a definite date, but at a reduction of

at least 3 per cent of their value; this, too, yielded a certain revenue

to the state.

The inflation that resulted from all these measures brought profit to

the big merchants in spite of the fact that they had to supply directly

or indirectly all non-agricultural taxes (in 1160 some 40,000,000

strings annually), especially the salt tax (50 per cent), wine tax (36

per cent), tea tax (7 per cent) and customs (7 per cent). Although the

official economic thinking remained Confucian, i.e. anti-business and

pro-agrarian, we find in this time insight in price laws, for instance,

that peace times and/or decrease of population induce deflation. The

government had always attempted to manipulate the prices by

interference. Already in much earlier times, again and again, attempts

had been made to lower the prices by the so-called "ever-normal

granaries" of the government which threw grain on the market when prices

were too high and bought grain when prices were low. But now, in

addition to such measures, we also find others which exhibit a deeper

insight: in a period of starvation, the scholar and official Fan

Chung-yen instead of officially reducing grain prices, raised the prices

in his district considerably. Although the population got angry,

merchants started to import large amounts of grain; as soon as this

happened, Fan (himself a big landowner) reduced the price again. Similar

results were achieved by others by just stimulating merchants to import

grain into deficit areas.

With the social structure of medieval Europe, similar financial and

fiscal developments which gave new chances to merchants, eventually led

to industrial capitalism and industrial society. In China, however, the

gentry in their capacity of officials hindered the growth of independent

trade, and permitted its existence only in association with themselves.

As they also represented landed property, it was in land that the

newly-formed capital was invested. Thus we see in the Sung period, and

especially in the eleventh century, the greatest accumulation of estates

that there had ever been up to then in China.

Many of these estates came into origin as gifts of the emperor to

individuals or to temples, others were created on hillsides on land

which belonged to the villages. From this time on, the rest of the

village commons in China proper disappeared. Villagers could no longer

use the top-soil of the hills as fertilizer, or the trees as firewood

and building material. In addition, the hillside estates diverted the

water of springs and creeks, thus damaging severely the irrigation works

of the villagers in the plains. The estates _(chuang)_ were controlled

by appointed managers who often became hereditary managers. The tenants

on the estates were quite often non-registered migrants, of whom we

spoke previously as "vagrants", and as such they depended upon the

managers who could always denounce them to the authorities which would

lead to punishment because nobody was allowed to leave his home without

officially changing his registration. Many estates operated mills and

even textile factories with non-registered weavers. Others seem to have

specialized in sheep breeding. Present-day village names ending with

_-chuang_ indicate such former estates. A new development in this period

were the "clan estates" _(i-chuang)_, created by Fan Chung-yen

(989-1052) in 1048. The income of these clan estates were used for the

benefit of the whole clan, were controlled by clan-appointed managers

and had tax-free status, guaranteed by the government which regarded

them as welfare institutions. Technically, they might better be called

corporations because they were similar in structure to some of our

industrial corporations. Under the Chinese economic system, large-scale

landowning always proved socially and politically injurious. Up to very

recent times the peasant who rented his land paid 40-50 per cent of the

produce to the landowner, who was responsible for payment of the normal

land tax. The landlord, however, had always found means of evading

payment. As each district had to yield a definite amount of taxation,

the more the big landowners succeeded in evading payment the more had to

be paid by the independent small farmers. These independent peasants

could then either "give" their land to the big landowner and pay rent to

him, thus escaping from the attentions of the tax-officer, or simply

leave the district and secretly enter another one where they were not

registered. In either case the government lost taxes.

Large-scale landowning proved especially injurious in the Sung period,

for two reasons. To begin with, the official salaries, which had always

been small in China, were now totally inadequate, and so the officials

were given a fixed quantity of land, the yield of which was regarded as

an addition to salary. This land was free from part of the taxes. Before

long the officials had secured the liberation of the whole of their land

from the chief taxes. In the second place, the taxation system was

simplified by making the amount of tax proportional to the amount of

land owned. The lowest bracket, however, in this new system of taxation

comprised more land than a poor peasant would actually own, and this was

a heavy blow to the small peasant-owners, who in the past had paid a

proportion of their produce. Most of them had so little land that they

could barely live on its yield. Their liability to taxation was at all

times a very heavy burden to them while the big landowners got off

lightly. Thus this measure, though administratively a saving of

expense, proved unsocial.

All this made itself felt especially in the south with its great estates

of tax-evading landowners. Here the remaining small peasant-owners had

to pay the new taxes or to become tenants of the landowners and lose

their property. The north was still suffering from the war-devastation

of the tenth century. As the landlords were always the first sufferers

from popular uprisings as well as from war, they had disappeared,

leaving their former tenants as free peasants. From this period on, we

have enough data to observe a social "law": as the capital was the

largest consumer, especially of high-priced products such as vegetables

which could not be transported over long distances, the gentry always

tried to control the land around the capital. Here, we find the highest

concentration of landlords and tenants. Production in this circle

shifted from rice and wheat to mulberry trees for silk, and vegetables

grown under the trees. These urban demands resulted in the growth of an

"industrial" quarter on the outskirts of the capital, in which

especially silk for the upper classes was produced. The next circle also

contained many landlords, but production was more in staple foods such

as wheat and rice which could be transported. Exploitation in this

second circle was not much less than in the first circle, because of

less close supervision by the authorities. In the third circle we find

independent subsistence farmers. Some provincial capitals, especially in

Szechwan, exhibited a similar pattern of circles. With the shift of the

capital, a complete reorganization appeared: landlords and officials

gave up their properties, cultivation changed, and a new system of

circles began to form around the new capital. We find, therefore, the

grotesque result that the thinly populated province of Shensi in the

north-west yielded about a quarter of the total revenues of the state:

it had no large landowners, no wealthy gentry, with their evasion of

taxation, only a mass of newly-settled small peasants' holdings. For

this reason the government was particularly interested in that province,

and closely watched the political changes in its neighbourhood. In 990 a

man belonging to a sinified Toba family, living on the border of Shensi,

had made himself king with the support of remnants of Toba tribes. In

1034 came severe fighting, and in 1038 the king proclaimed himself

emperor, in the Hsia dynasty, and threatened the whole of north-western

China. Tribute was now also paid to this state (250,000 strings), but

the fight against it continued, to save that important province.

These were the main events in internal and external affairs during the

Sung period until 1068. It will be seen that foreign affairs were of

much less importance than developments in the country.

3 _Reforms and Welfare schemes_

The situation just described was bound to produce a reaction. In spite

of the inflationary measures the revenue fell, partly in consequence of

the tax evasions of the great landowners. It fell from 150,000,000 in

1021 to 116,000,000 in 1065. Expenditure did not fall, and there was a

constant succession of budget deficits. The young emperor Shen Tsung

(1068-1085) became convinced that the policy followed by the ruling

clique of officials and gentry was bad, and he gave his adhesion to a

small group led by Wang An-shih (1021-1086). The ruling gentry clique

represented especially the interests of the large tea producers and

merchants in Szechwan and Kiangsi. It advocated a policy

of _laisser-faire_ in trade: it held that everything would adjust itself.

Wang An-shih himself came from Kiangsi and was therefore supported at

first by the government clique, within which the Kiangsi group was

trying to gain predominance over the Szechwan group. But Wang An-shih

came from a poor family, as did his supporters, for whom he quickly

secured posts. They represented the interests of the small landholders

and the small dealers. This group succeeded in gaining power, and in

carrying out a number of reforms, all directed against the monopolist

merchants. Credits for small peasants were introduced, and officials

were given bigger salaries, in order to make them independent and to

recruit officials who were not big landowners. The army was greatly

reduced, and in addition to the paid soldiery a national militia was

created. Special attention was paid to the province of Shensi, whose

conditions were taken more or less as a model.

It seems that one consequence of Wang's reforms was a strong fall in the

prices, i.e. a deflation; therefore, as soon as the first decrees were

issued, the large plantation owners and the merchants who were allied to

them, offered furious opposition. A group of officials and landlords who

still had large properties in the vicinity of Loyang--at that time a

quiet cultural centre--also joined them. Even some of Wang An-shih's

former adherents came out against him. After a few years the emperor was

no longer able to retain Wang An-shih and had to abandon the new policy.

How really economic interests were here at issue may be seen from the

fact that for many of the new decrees which were not directly concerned

with economic affairs, such, for instance, as the reform of the

examination system, Wang An-shih was strongly attacked though his

opponents had themselves advocated them in the past and had no practical

objection to offer to them. The contest, however, between the two groups

was not over. The monopolistic landowners and their merchants had the

upper hand from 1086 to 1102, but then the advocates of the policy

represented by Wang again came into power for a short time. They had but

little success to show, as they did not remain in power long enough and,

owing to the strong opposition, they were never able to make their

control really effective.

Basically, both groups were against allowing the developing middle class

and especially the merchants to gain too much freedom, and whatever

freedom they in fact gained, came through extra-legal or illegal

practices. A proverb of the time said "People hate their ruler as

animals hate the net (of the hunter)". The basic laws of medieval times

which had attempted to create stable social classes remained: down to

the nineteenth century there were slaves, different classes of serfs or

"commoners", and free burghers. Craftsmen remained under work

obligation. Merchants were second-class people. Each class had to wear

dresses of special colour and material, so that the social status of a

person, even if he was not an official and thus recognizable by his

insignia, was immediately clear when one saw him. The houses of

different classes differed from one another by the type of tiles, the

decorations of the doors and gates; the size of the main reception room

of the house was prescribed and was kept small for all non-officials;

and even size and form of the tombs was prescribed in detail for each

class. Once a person had a certain privilege, he and his descendants

even if they had lost their position in the bureaucracy, retained these

privileges over generations. All burghers were admitted to the

examinations and, thus, there was a certain social mobility allowed

within the leading class of the society, and a new "small gentry"

developed by this system.

Yet, the wars of the transition period had created a feeling of

insecurity within the gentry. The eleventh and twelfth centuries were

periods of extensive social legislation in order to give the lower

classes some degree of security and thus prevent them from attempting to

upset the status quo. In addition to the "ever-normal granaries" of the

state, "social granaries" were revived, into which all farmers of a

village had to deliver grain for periods of need. In 1098 a bureau for

housing and care was created which created homes for the old and

destitute; 1102 a bureau for medical care sent state doctors to homes

and hospitals as well as to private homes to care for poor patients;

from 1104 a bureau of burials took charge of the costs of burials of

poor persons. Doctors as craftsmen were under corvee obligation and

could easily be ordered by the state. Often, however, Buddhist priests

took charge of medical care, burial costs and hospitalization. The state

gave them premiums if they did good work. The Ministry of Civil Affairs

made the surveys of cases and costs, while the Ministry of Finances paid

the costs. We hear of state orphanages in 1247, a free pharmacy in 1248,

state hospitals were reorganized in 1143. In 1167 the government gave

low-interest loans to poor persons and (from 1159 on) sold cheap grain

from state granaries. Fire protection services in large cities were

organized. Finally, from 1141 on, the government opened up to

twenty-three geisha houses for the entertainment of soldiers who were

far from home in the capital and had no possibility for other

amusements. Public baths had existed already some centuries ago; now

Buddhist temples opened public baths as social service.

Social services for the officials were also extended. Already from the

eighth century on, offices were closed every tenth day and during

holidays, a total of almost eighty days per year. Even criminals got

some leave and exilees had the right of a home leave once every three

years. The pensions for retired officials after the age of seventy which

amounted to 50 per cent of the salary from the eighth century on, were

again raised, though widows did not receive benefits.

4 _Cultural situation (philosophy, religion, literature, painting)_

Culturally the eleventh century was the most active period China had so

far experienced, apart from the fourth century B.C. As a consequence of

the immensely increased number of educated people resulting from the

invention of printing, circles of scholars and private schools set up by

scholars were scattered all over the country. The various philosophical

schools differed in their political attitude and in the choice of

literary models with which they were politically in sympathy. Thus Wang

An-shih and his followers preferred the rigid classic style of Han Yue

(768-825) who lived in the T'ang period and had also been an opponent of

the monopolistic tendencies of pre-capitalism. For the Wang An-shih

group formed itself into a school with a philosophy of its own and with

its own commentaries on the classics. As the representative of the small

merchants and the small landholders, this school advocated policies of

state control and specialized in the study and annotation of classical

books which seemed to favour their ideas.