school that stood for monopolist trade capitalism, the new philosophy
described as Neo-Confucianism or the Sung school. Here Confucianism and
Buddhism were for the first time united. In the last centuries,
Buddhistic ideas had penetrated all of Chinese culture: the slaughtering
of animals and the executions of criminals were allowed only on certain
days, in accordance with Buddhist rules. Formerly, monks and nuns had to
greet the emperor as all citizens had to do; now they were exempt from
this rule. On the other hand, the first Sung emperor was willing to
throw himself to the earth in front of the Buddha statues, but he was
told he did not have to do it because he was the "Buddha of the present
time" and thus equal to the God. Buddhist priests participated in the
celebrations on the emperor's birthday, and emperors from time to time
gave free meals to large crowds of monks. Buddhist thought entered the
field of justice: in Sung time we hear complaints that judges did not
apply the laws and showed laxity, because they hoped to gain religious
merit by sparing the lives of criminals. We had seen how the main
current of Buddhism had changed from a revolutionary to a reactionary
doctrine. The new greater gentry of the eleventh century adopted a
number of elements of this reactionary Buddhism and incorporated them in
the Confucianist system. This brought into Confucianism a metaphysic
which it had lacked in the past, greatly extending its influence on the
people and at the same time taking the wind out of the sails of
Buddhism. The greater gentry never again placed themselves on the side
of the Buddhist Church as they had done in the T'ang period. When they
got tired of Confucianism, they interested themselves in Taoism of the
politically innocent, escapist, meditative Buddhism.
Men like Chou Tun-i (1017-1073) and Chang Tsai (1020-1077) developed a
cosmological theory which could measure up with Buddhistic cosmology and
metaphysics. But perhaps more important was the attempt of the
Neo-Confucianists to explain the problem of evil. Confucius and his
followers had believed that every person could perfect himself by
overcoming the evil in him. As the good persons should be the _elite_
and rule the others, theoretically everybody who was a member of human
society, could move up and become a leader. It was commonly assumed that
human nature is good or indifferent, and that human feelings are evil
and have to be tamed and educated. When in Han time with the
establishment of the gentry society and its social classes, the idea
that any person could move up to become a leader if he only perfected
himself, appeared to be too unrealistic, the theory of different grades
of men was formed which found its clearest formulation by Han Yue: some
people have a good, others a neutral, and still others a bad nature;
therefore, not everybody can become a leader. The Neo-Confucianists,
especially Ch'eng Hao (1032-1085) and Ch'eng I (1033-1107), tried to
find the reasons for this inequality. According to them, nature is
neutral; but physical form originates with the combination of nature
with Material Force (_ch'i_). This combination produces individuals in
which there is a lack of balance or harmony. Man should try to transform
physical form and recover original nature. The creative force by which
such a transformation is possible is _jen_, love, the creative,
life-giving quality of nature itself.
It should be remarked that Neo-Confucianism accepts an inequality of
men, as early Confucianism did; and that _jen_, love, in its practical
application has to be channelled by _li_, the system of rules of
behaviour. The _li_, however, always started from the idea of a
stratified class society. Chu Hsi (1130-1200), the famous scholar and
systematizer of Neo-Confucian thoughts, brought out rules of behaviour
for those burghers who did not belong to the gentry and could not,
therefore, be expected to perform all _li_; his "simplified _li_"
exercized a great influence not only upon contemporary China, but also
upon Korea and Annam and there strengthened a hitherto looser
patriarchal, patrilinear family system.
The Neo-Confucianists also compiled great analytical works of history
and encyclopaedias whose authority continued for many centuries. They
interpreted in these works all history in accordance with their outlook;
they issued new commentaries on all the classics in order to spread
interpretations that served their purposes. In the field of commentary
this school of thought was given perfect expression by Chu Hsi, who also
wrote one of the chief historical works. Chu Hsi's commentaries became
standard works for centuries, until the beginning of the twentieth
century. Yet, although Chu became the symbol of conservativism, he was
quite interested in science, and in this field he had an open eye for
changes.
The Sung period is so important, because it is also the time of the
greatest development of Chinese science and technology. Many new
theories, but also many practical, new inventions were made. Medicine
made substantial progress. About 1145 the first autopsy was made, on the
body of a South Chinese captive. In the field of agriculture, new
varieties of rice were developed, new techniques applied, new plants
introduced.
The Wang An-shih school of political philosophy had opponents also in
the field of literary style, the so-called Shu Group (Shu means the
present province of Szechwan), whose leaders were the famous Three Sus.
The greatest of the three was Su Tung-p'o (1036-1101); the others were
his father, Su Shih, and his brother, Su Che. It is characteristic of
these Shu poets, and also of the Kiangsi school associated with them,
that they made as much use as they could of the vernacular. It had not
been usual to introduce the phrases of everyday life into poetry, but Su
Tung-p'o made use of the most everyday expressions, without diminishing
his artistic effectiveness by so doing; on the contrary, the result was
to give his poems much more genuine feeling than those of other poets.
These poets were in harmony with the writings of the T'ang period poet
Po Chue-i (772-846) and were supported, like Neo-Confucianism, by
representatives of trade capitalism. Politically, in their conservatism
they were sharply opposed to the Wang An-shih group. Midway between the
two stood the so-called Loyang-School, whose greatest leaders were the
historian and poet Ssu-ma Kuang (1019-1086) and the philosopher-poet
Shao Yung (1011-1077).
In addition to its poems, the Sung literature was famous for the
so-called _pi-chi_ or miscellaneous notes. These consist of short notes
of the most various sort, notes on literature, art, politics,
archaeology, all mixed together. The _pi-chi_ are a treasure-house for
the history of the culture of the time; they contain many details, often
of importance, about China's neighbouring peoples. They were intended to
serve as suggestions for learned conversation when scholars came
together; they aimed at showing how wide was a scholar's knowledge. To
this group we must add the accounts of travel, of which some of great
value dating from the Sung period are still extant; they contain
information of the greatest importance about the early Mongols and also
about Turkestan and South China.
While the Sung period was one of perfection in all fields of art,
painting undoubtedly gained its highest development in this time. We
find now two main streams in painting: some painters preferred the
decorative, pompous, but realistic approach, with great attention to the
detail. Later theoreticians brought this school in connection with one
school of meditative Buddhism, the so-called northern school. Men who
belonged to this school of painting often were active court officials or
painted for the court and for other representative purposes. One of the
most famous among them, Li Lung-mien (ca. 1040-1106), for instance
painted the different breeds of horses in the imperial stables. He was
also famous for his Buddhistic figures. Another school, later called the
southern school, regarded painting as an intimate, personal expression.
They tried to paint inner realities and not outer forms. They, too, were
educated, but they did not paint for anybody. They painted in their
country houses when they felt in the mood for expression. Their
paintings did not stress details, but tried to give the spirit of a
landscape, for in this field they excelled most. Best known of them is
Mi Fei (ca. 1051-1107), a painter as well as a calligrapher, art
collector, and art critic. Typically, his paintings were not much liked
by the emperor Hui Tsung (ruled 1101-1125) who was one of the greatest
art collectors and whose catalogue of his collection became very famous.
He created the Painting Academy, an institution which mainly gave
official recognition to painters in form of titles which gave the
painter access to and status at court. Ma Yuean (_c_. 1190-1224), member
of a whole painter's family, and Hsia Kui (_c_. 1180-1230) continued the
more "impressionistic" tradition. Already in Sung time, however, many
painters could and did paint in different styles, "copying", i.e.
painting in the way of T'ang painters, in order to express their
changing emotions by changed styles, a fact which often makes the dating
of Chinese paintings very difficult.
Finally, art craft has left us famous porcelains of the Sung period. The
most characteristic production of that time is the green porcelain known
as "Celadon". It consists usually of a rather solid paste, less like
porcelain than stoneware, covered with a green glaze; decoration is
incised, not painted, under the glaze. In the Sung period, however, came
the first pure white porcelain with incised ornamentation under the
glaze, and also with painting on the glaze. Not until near the end of
the Sung period did the blue and white porcelain begin (blue painting on
a white ground). The cobalt needed for this came from Asia Minor. In
exchange for the cobalt, Chinese porcelain went to Asia Minor. This
trade did not, however, grow greatly until the Mongol epoch; later
really substantial orders were placed in China, the Chinese executing
the patterns wanted in the West.
5 _Military collapse_
In foreign affairs the whole eleventh century was a period of diplomatic
manoeuvring, with every possible effort to avoid war. There was
long-continued fighting with the Kitan, and at times also with the
Turco-Tibetan Hsia, but diplomacy carried the day: tribute was paid to
both enemies, and the effort was made to stir up the Kitan against the
Hsia and vice versa; the other parties also intrigued in like fashion.
In 1110 the situation seemed to improve for the Sung in this game, as a
new enemy appeared in the rear of the Liao (Kitan), the Tungusic Juchen
(Jurchen), who in the past had been more or less subject to the Kitan.
In 1114 the Juchen made themselves independent and became a political
factor. The Kitan were crippled, and it became an easy matter to attack
them. But this pleasant situation did not last long. The Juchen
conquered Peking, and in 1125 the Kitan empire was destroyed; but in the
same year the Juchen marched against the Sung. In 1126 they captured
the Sung capital; the emperor and his art-loving father, who had retired
a little earlier, were taken prisoner, and the Northern Sung dynasty was
at an end.
The collapse came so quickly because the whole edifice of security
between the Kitan and the Sung was based on a policy of balance and of
diplomacy. Neither state was armed in any way, and so both collapsed at
the first assault from a military power.
(2) The Liao (Kitan) dynasty in the north (937-1125)
1 _Social structure. Claim to the Chinese imperial throne_
The Kitan, a league of tribes under the leadership of an apparently
Mongol tribe, had grown steadily stronger in north-eastern Mongolia
during the T'ang epoch. They had gained the allegiance of many tribes in
the west and also in Korea and Manchuria, and in the end, about A.D.
900, had become the dominant power in the north. The process of growth
of this nomad power was the same as that of other nomad states, such as
the Toba state, and therefore need not be described again in any detail
here. When the T'ang dynasty was deposed, the Kitan were among the
claimants to the Chinese throne, feeling fully justified in their claim
as the strongest power in the Far East. Owing to the strength of the
Sha-t'o Turks, who themselves claimed leadership in China, the expansion
of the Kitan empire slowed down. In the many battles the Kitan suffered
several setbacks. They also had enemies in the rear, a state named
Po-hai, ruled by Tunguses, in northern Korea, and the new Korean state
of Kao-li, which liberated itself from Chinese overlordship in 919.
In 927 the Kitan finally destroyed Po-hai. This brought many Tungus
tribes, including the Jurchen (Juchen), under Kitan dominance. Then, in
936, the Kitan gained the allegiance of the Turkish general Shih
Ching-t'ang, and he was set on the Chinese throne as a feudatory of the
Kitan. It was hoped now to secure dominance over China, and accordingly
the Mongol name of the dynasty was altered to "Liao dynasty" in 937,
indicating the claim to the Chinese throne. Considerable regions of
North China came at once under the direct rule of the Liao. As a whole,
however, the plan failed: the feudatory Shih Ching-t'ang tried to make
himself independent; Chinese fought the Liao; and the Chinese sceptre
soon came back into the hands of a Sha-t'o dynasty (947). This ended the
plans of the Liao to conquer the whole of China.
For this there were several reasons. A nomad people was again ruling
the agrarian regions of North China. This time the representatives of
the ruling class remained military commanders, and at the same time
retained their herds of horses. As early as 1100 they had well over
10,000 herds, each of more than a thousand animals. The army commanders
had been awarded large regions which they themselves had conquered. They
collected the taxes in these regions, and passed on to the state only
the yield of the wine tax. On the other hand, in order to feed the
armies, in which there were now many Chinese soldiers, the frontier
regions were settled, the soldiers working as peasants in times of
peace, and peasants being required to contribute to the support of the
army. Both processes increased the interest of the Kitan ruling class in
the maintenance of peace. That class was growing rich, and preferred
living on the income from its properties or settlements to going to war,
which had become a more and more serious matter after the founding of
the great Sung empire, and was bound to be less remunerative. The herds
of horses were a further excellent source of income, for they could be
sold to the Sung, who had no horses. Then, from 1004 onward, came the
tribute payments from China, strengthening the interest in the
maintenance of peace. Thus great wealth accumulated in Peking, the
capital of the Liao; in this wealth the whole Kitan ruling class
participated, but the tribes in the north, owing to their remoteness,
had no share in it. In 988 the Chinese began negotiations, as a move in
their diplomacy, with the ruler of the later realm of the Hsia; in 990
the Kitan also negotiated with him, and they soon became a third partner
in the diplomatic game. Delegations were continually going from one to
another of the three realms, and they were joined by trade missions.
Agreement was soon reached on frontier questions, on armament, on
questions of demobilization, on the demilitarization of particular
regions, and so on, for the last thing anyone wanted was to fight.
Then came the rising of the tribes of the north. They had remained
military tribes; of all the wealth nothing reached them, and they were
given no military employment, so that they had no hope of improving
their position. The leadership was assumed by the tribe of the Juchen
(1114). In a campaign of unprecedented rapidity they captured Peking,
and the Liao dynasty was ended (1125), a year earlier, as we know, than
the end of the Sung.
2 _The State of the Kara-Kitai_
A small troop of Liao, under the command of a member of the ruling
family, fled into the west. They were pursued without cessation, but
they succeeded in fighting their way through. After a few years of
nomad life in the mountains of northern Turkestan, they were able to
gain the collaboration of a few more tribes, and with them they then
invaded western Turkestan. There they founded the "Western Liao" state,
or, as the western sources call it, the "Kara-Kitai" state, with its
capital at Balasagun. This state must not be regarded as a purely Kitan
state. The Kitan formed only a very thin stratum, and the real power was
in the hands of autochthonous Turkish tribes, to whom the Kitan soon
became entirely assimilated in culture. Thus the history of this state
belongs to that of western Asia, especially as the relations of the
Kara-Kitai with the Far East were entirely broken off. In 1211 the state
was finally destroyed.
(3) The Hsi-Hsia State in the north (1038-1227)
1 _Continuation of Turkish traditions_
After the end of the Toba state in North China in 550, some tribes of
the Toba, including members of the ruling tribe with the tribal name
Toba, withdrew to the borderland between Tibet and China, where they
ruled over Tibetan and Tangut tribes. At the beginning of the T'ang
dynasty this tribe of Toba joined the T'ang. The tribal leader received
in return, as a distinction, the family name of the T'ang dynasty, Li.
His dependence on China was, however, only nominal and soon came
entirely to an end. In the tenth century the tribe gained in strength.
It is typical of the long continuance of old tribal traditions that a
leader of the tribe in the tenth century married a woman belonging to
the family to which the khans of the Hsiung-nu and all Turkish ruling
houses had belonged since 200 B.C. With the rise of the Kitan in the
north and of the Tibetan state in the south, the tribe decided to seek
the friendship of China. Its first mission, in 982, was well received.
Presents were sent to the chieftain of the tribe, he was helped against
his enemies, and he was given the status of a feudatory of the Sung; in
988 the family name of the Sung, Chao, was conferred on him. Then the
Kitan took a hand. They over-trumped the Sung by proclaiming the tribal
chieftain king of Hsia (990). Now the small state became interesting. It
was pampered by Liao and Sung in the effort to win it over or to keep
its friendship. The state grew; in 1031 its ruler resumed the old family
name of the Toba, thus proclaiming his intention to continue the Toba
empire; in 1034 he definitely parted from the Sung, and in 1038 he
proclaimed himself emperor in the Hsia dynasty, or, as the Chinese
generally called it, the "HsiHsia", which means the Western Hsia. This
name, too, had associations with the old Hun tradition; it recalled
the state of Ho-lien P'o-p'o in the early fifth century. The state soon
covered the present province of Kansu, small parts of the adjoining
Tibetan territory, and parts of the Ordos region. It attacked the
province of Shensi, but the Chinese and the Liao attached the greatest
importance to that territory. Thus that was the scene of most of the
fighting.
[Illustration: 12 Ancient tiled pagoda at Chengting (Hopei). _Photo H.
Hammer-Morrisson._]
[Illustration: 13 Horse-training. Painting by Li Lung-mien. Late Sung
period. _Manchu Royal House Collection_.]
The Hsia state had a ruling group of Toba, but these Toba had become
entirely tibetanized. The language of the country was Tibetan; the
customs were those of the Tanguts. A script was devised, in imitation of
the Chinese script. Only in recent years has it begun to be studied.
In 1125, when the Tungusic Juchen destroyed the Liao, the Hsia also lost
large territories in the east of their country, especially the province
of Shensi, which they had conquered; but they were still able to hold
their own. Their political importance to China, however, vanished, since
they were now divided from southern China and as partners were no longer
of the same value to it. Not until the Mongols became a power did the
Hsia recover some of their importance; but they were among the first
victims of the Mongols: in 1209 they had to submit to them, and in 1227,
the year of the death of Genghiz Khan, they were annihilated.
(4) The empire of the Southern Sung dynasty (1127-1279)
1 _Foundation_
In the disaster of 1126, when the Juchen captured the Sung capital and
destroyed the Sung empire, a brother of the captive emperor escaped. He
made himself emperor in Nanking and founded the "Southern Sung" dynasty,
whose capital was soon shifted to the present Hangchow. The foundation
of the new dynasty was a relatively easy matter, and the new state was
much more solid than the southern kingdoms of 800 years earlier, for the
south had already been economically supreme, and the great families that
had ruled the state were virtually all from the south. The loss of the
north, i.e. the area north of the Yellow River and of parts of Kiangsu,
was of no importance to this governing group and meant no loss of
estates to it. Thus the transition from the Northern to the Southern
Sung was not of fundamental importance. Consequently the Juchen had no
chance of success when they arranged for Liu Yue, who came of a northern
Chinese family of small peasants and had become an official, to be
proclaimed emperor in the "Ch'i" dynasty in 1130. They hoped that this
puppet might attract the southern Chinese, but seven years later they
dropped him.
2 _Internal situation_
As the social structure of the Southern Sung empire had not been
changed, the country was not affected by the dynastic development. Only
the policy of diplomacy could not be pursued at once, as the Juchen were
bellicose at first and would not negotiate. There were therefore several
battles at the outset (in 1131 and 1134), in which the Chinese were
actually the more successful, but not decisively. The Sung military
group was faced as early as in 1131 with furious opposition from the
greater gentry, led by Ch'in K'ui, one of the largest landowners of all.
His estates were around Nanking, and so in the deployment region and the
region from which most of the soldiers had to be drawn for the defensive
struggle. Ch'in K'ui secured the assassination of the leader of the
military party, General Yo Fei, in 1141, and was able to conclude peace
with the Juchen. The Sung had to accept the status of vassals and to pay
annual tribute to the Juchen. This was the situation that best pleased
the greater gentry. They paid hardly any taxes (in many districts the
greater gentry directly owned more than 30 per cent of the land, in
addition to which they had indirect interests in the soil), and they
were now free from the war peril that ate into their revenues. The
tribute amounted only to 500,000 strings of cash. Popular literature,
however, to this day represents Ch'in K'ui as a traitor and Yo Fei as a
national hero.
In 1165 it was agreed between the Sung and the Juchen to regard each
other as states with equal rights. It is interesting to note here that
in the treaties during the Han time with the Hsiung-nu, the two
countries called one another brothers--with the Chinese ruler as the
older and thus privileged brother; but the treaties since the T'ang time
with northern powers and with Tibetans used the terms father-in-law and
son-in-law. The foreign power was the "father-in-law", i.e. the older
and, therefore, in a certain way the more privileged; the Chinese were
the "son-in-law", the representative of the paternal lineage and,
therefore, in another respect also the more privileged! In spite of such
agreements with the Juchen, fighting continued, but it was mainly of the
character of frontier engagements. Not until 1204 did the military
party, led by Han T'o-wei, regain power; it resolved upon an active
policy against the north. In preparation for this a military reform was
carried out. The campaign proved a disastrous failure, as a result of
which large territories in the north were lost. The Sung sued for
peace; Han T'o-wei's head was cut off and sent to the Juchen. In this
way peace was restored in 1208. The old treaty relationship was now
resumed, but the relations between the two states remained tense.
Meanwhile the Sung observed with malicious pleasure how the Mongols were
growing steadily stronger, first destroying the Hsia state and then
aiming the first heavy blows against the Juchen. In the end the Sung
entered into alliance with the Mongols (1233) and joined them in
attacking the Juchen, thus hastening the end of the Juchen state.
The Sung now faced the Mongols, and were defenceless against them. All
the buffer states had gone. The Sung were quite without adequate
military defence. They hoped to stave off the Mongols in the same way as
they had met the Kitan and the Juchen. This time, however, they
misjudged the situation. In the great operations begun by the Mongols in
1273 the Sung were defeated over and over again. In 1276 their capital
was taken by the Mongols and the emperor was made prisoner. For three
years longer there was a Sung emperor, in flight from the Mongols, until
the last emperor perished near Macao in South China.
3 _Cultural situation; reasons for the collapse_
The Southern Sung period was again one of flourishing culture. The
imperial court was entirely in the power of the greater gentry; several
times the emperors, who personally do not deserve individual mention,
were compelled to abdicate. They then lived on with a court of their
own, devoting themselves to pleasure in much the same way as the
"reigning" emperor. Round them was a countless swarm of poets and
artists. Never was there a time so rich in poets, though hardly one of
them was in any way outstanding. The poets, unlike those of earlier
times, belonged to the lesser gentry who were suffering from the
prevailing inflation. Salaries bore no relation to prices. Food was not
dear, but the things which a man of the upper class ought to have were
far out of reach: a big house cost 2,000 strings of cash, a concubine
800 strings. Thus the lesser gentry and the intelligentsia all lived on
their patrons among the greater gentry--with the result that they were
entirely shut out of politics. This explains why the literature of the
time is so unpolitical, and also why scarcely any philosophical works
appeared. The writers took refuge more and more in romanticism and
flight from realities.
The greater gentry, on the other hand, led a very elegant life, building
themselves magnificent palaces in the capital. They also speculated in
every direction. They speculated in land, in money, and above all in
the paper money that was coming more and more into use. In 1166 the
paper circulation exceeded the value of 10,000,000 strings!
It seems that after 1127 a good number of farmers had left Honan and the
Yellow River plains when the Juchen conquered these places and showed
little interest in fostering agriculture; more left the border areas of
Southern Sung because of permanent war threat. Many of these lived
miserably as tenants on the farms of the gentry between Nanking and
Hangchow. Others migrated farther to the south, across Kiangsi into
southern Fukien. These migrants seem to have been the ancestors of the
Hakka which in the following centuries continued their migration towards
the south and who from the nineteenth century on were most strongly
concentrated in Kwangtung and Kwangsi provinces as free farmers on hill
slopes or as tenants of local landowners in the plains.
The influx of migrants and the increase of tenants and their poverty
seriously threatened the state and cut down its defensive strength more
and more.
At this stage, Chia Ssu-tao drafted a reform law. Chia had come to the
court through his sister becoming the emperor's concubine, but he
himself belonged to the lesser gentry. His proposal was that state funds
should be applied to the purchase of land in the possession of the
greater gentry over and above a fixed maximum. Peasants were to be
settled on this land, and its yield was to belong to the state, which
would be able to use it to meet military expenditure. In this way the
country's military strength was to be restored. Chia's influence lasted
just ten years, until 1275. He began putting the law into effect in the
region south of Nanking, where the principal estates of the greater
gentry were then situated. He brought upon himself, of course, the
mortal hatred of the greater gentry, and paid for his action with his
life. The emperor, in entering upon this policy, no doubt had hoped to
recover some of his power, but the greater gentry brought him down. The
gentry now openly played into the hands of the approaching Mongols, so
hastening the final collapse of the Sung. The peasants and the lesser
gentry would have fought the Mongols if it had been possible; but the
greater gentry enthusiastically went over to the Mongols, hoping to save
their property and so their influence by quickly joining the enemy. On a
long view they had not judged badly. The Mongols removed the members of
the gentry from all political posts, but left them their estates; and
before long the greater gentry reappeared in political life. And when,
later, the Mongol empire in China was brought down by a popular rising,
the greater gentry showed themselves to be the most faithful allies of
the Mongols!
(5) The empire of the Juchen in the north (1115-1234)
1 _Rapid expansion from northern Korea to the Yangtze_
The Juchen in the past had been only a small league of Tungus tribes,
whose name is preserved in that of the present Tungus tribe of the
Jurchen, which came under the domination of the Kitan after the collapse
of the state of Po-hai in northern Korea. We have already briefly
mentioned the reasons for their rise. After their first successes
against the Kitan (1114), their chieftain at once proclaimed himself
emperor (1115), giving his dynasty the name "Chin" (The Golden). The
Chin quickly continued their victorious progress. In 1125 the Kitan
empire was destroyed. It will be remembered that the Sung were at once
attacked, although they had recently been allied with the Chin against
the Kitan. In 1126 the Sung capital was taken. The Chin invasions were
pushed farther south, and in 1130 the Yangtze was crossed. But the Chin
did not hold the whole of these conquests. Their empire was not yet
consolidated. Their partial withdrawal closed the first phase of the
Chin empire.
2 _United front of all Chinese_
But a few years after this maximum expansion, a withdrawal began which
went on much more quickly than usual in such cases. The reasons were to
be found both in external and in internal politics. The Juchen had
gained great agrarian regions in a rapid march of conquest. Once more
great cities with a huge urban population and immense wealth had fallen
to alien conquerors. Now the Juchen wanted to enjoy this wealth as the
Kitan had done before them. All the Juchen people counted as citizens of
the highest class; they were free from taxation and only liable to
military service. They were entitled to take possession of as much
cultivable land as they wanted; this they did, and they took not only
the "state domains" actually granted to them but also peasant
properties, so that Chinese free peasants had nothing left but the worst
fields, unless they became tenants on Juchen estates. A united front was
therefore formed between all Chinese, both peasants and landowning
gentry, against the Chin, such as it had not been possible to form
against the Kitan. This made an important contribution later to the
rapid collapse of the Chin empire.
The Chin who had thus come into possession of the cultivable land and at
the same time of the wealth of the towns, began a sort of competition
with each other for the best winnings, especially after the government
had returned to the old Sung capital, Pien-liang (now K'aifeng, in
eastern Honan). Serious crises developed in their own ranks. In 1149 the
ruler was assassinated by his chancellor (a member of the imperial
family), who in turn was murdered in 1161. The Chin thus failed to
attain what had been secured by all earlier conquerors, a reconciliation
of the various elements of the population and the collaboration of at
least one group of the defeated Chinese.
3 _Start of the Mongol empire_
The cessation of fighting against the Sung brought no real advantage in
external affairs, though the tribute payments appealed to the greed of
the rulers and were therefore welcomed. There could be no question of
further campaigns against the south, for the Hsia empire in the west had
not been destroyed, though some of its territory had been annexed; and a
new peril soon made its appearance in the rear of the Chin. When in the
tenth century the Sha-t'o Turks had had to withdraw from their
dominating position in China, because of their great loss of numbers and
consequently of strength, they went back into Mongolia and there united
with the Ta-tan (Tatars), among whom a new small league of tribes had
formed towards the end of the eleventh century, consisting mainly of
Mongols and Turks. In 1139 one of the chieftains of the Juchen rebelled
and entered into negotiations with the South Chinese. He was killed, but
his sons and his whole tribe then rebelled and went into Mongolia, where
they made common cause with the Mongols. The Chin pursued them, and
fought against them and against the Mongols, but without success.
Accordingly negotiations were begun, and a promise was given to deliver
meat and grain every year and to cede twenty-seven military strongholds.
A high title was conferred on the tribal leader of the Mongols, in the
hope of gaining his favour. He declined it, however, and in 1147 assumed
the title of emperor of the "greater Mongol empire". This was the
beginning of the power of the Mongols, who remained thereafter a
dangerous enemy of the Chin in the north, until in 1189 Genghiz Khan
became their leader and made the Mongols the greatest power of central
Asia. In any case, the Chin had reason to fear the Mongols from 1147
onward, and therefore were the more inclined to leave the Sung in peace.
In 1210 the Mongols began the first great assault against the Chin, the
moment they had conquered the Hsia. In the years 1215-17 the Mongols
took the military key-positions from the Chin. After that there could be
no serious defence of the Chin empire. There came a respite only because
the Mongols had turned against the West. But in 1234 the empire finally
fell to the Mongols.
Many of the Chin entered the service of the Mongols, and with their
permission returned to Manchuria; there they fell back to the cultural
level of a warlike nomad people. Not until the sixteenth century did
these Tunguses recover, reorganize, and appear again in history this
time under the name of Manchus.
The North Chinese under Chin rule did not regard the Mongols as enemies
of their country, but were ready at once to collaborate with them. The
Mongols were even more friendly to them than to the South Chinese, and
treated them rather better.
Chapter Ten
THE PERIOD OF ABSOLUTISM
(A) The Mongol Epoch (1280-1368)
1 _Beginning of new foreign rules_
During more than half of the third period of "Modern Times" which now
began, China was under alien rule. Of the 631 years from 1280 to 1911,
China was under national rulers for 276 years and under alien rule for
355. The alien rulers were first the Mongols, and later the Tungus
Manchus. It is interesting to note that the alien rulers in the earlier
period came mainly from the north-west, and only in modern times did
peoples from the north-east rule over China. This was due in part to the
fact that only peoples who had attained a certain level of civilization
were capable of dominance. In antiquity and the Middle Ages, eastern
Mongolia and Manchuria were at a relatively low level of civilization,
from which they emerged only gradually through permanent contact with
other nomad peoples, especially Turks. We are dealing here, of course,
only with the Mongol epoch in China and not with the great Mongol
empire, so that we need not enter further into these questions.
Yet another point is characteristic: the Mongols were the first alien
people to rule the whole of China; the Manchus, who appeared in the
seventeenth century, were the second and last. All alien peoples before
these two ruled only parts of China. Why was it that the Mongols were
able to be so much more successful than their predecessors? In the first
place the Mongol political league was numerically stronger than those of
the earlier alien peoples; secondly, the military organization and
technical equipment of the Mongols were exceptionally advanced for their
day. It must be borne in mind, for instance, that during their many
years of war against the Sung dynasty in South China the Mongols already
made use of small cannon in laying siege to towns. We have no exact
knowledge of the number of Mongols who invaded and occupied China, but
it is estimated that there were more than a million Mongols living in
China. Not all of them, of course, were really Mongols! The name covered
Turks, Tunguses, and others; among the auxiliaries of the Mongols were
Uighurs, men from Central Asia and the Middle East, and even Europeans.
When the Mongols attacked China they had the advantage of all the arts
and crafts and all the new technical advances of western and central
Asia and of Europe. Thus they had attained a high degree of technical
progress, and at the same time their number was very great.
2 "_Nationality legislation_"
It was only after the Hsia empire in North China, and then the empire of
the Juchen, had been destroyed by the Mongols, and only after long and
remarkably modern tactical preparation, that the Mongols conquered South
China, the empire of the Sung dynasty. They were now faced with the
problem of ruling their great new empire. The conqueror of that empire,
Kublai, himself recognized that China could not be treated in quite the
same way as the Mongols' previous conquests; he therefore separated the
empire in China from the rest of the Mongol empire. Mongol China became
an independent realm within the Mongol empire, a sort of Dominion. The
Mongol rulers were well aware that in spite of their numerical strength
they were still only a minority in China, and this implied certain
dangers. They therefore elaborated a "nationality legislation", the
first of its kind in the Far East. The purpose of this legislation was,
of course, to be the protection of the Mongols. The population of
conquered China was divided into four groups--(1) Mongols, themselves
falling into four sub-groups (the oldest Mongol tribes, the White
Tatars, the Black Tatars, the Wild Tatars); (2) Central Asian
auxiliaries (Naimans, Uighurs, and various other Turkish people,
Tanguts, and so on); (3) North Chinese; (4) South Chinese. The Mongols
formed the privileged ruling class. They remained militarily organized,
and were distributed in garrisons over all the big towns of China as
soldiers, maintained by the state. All the higher government posts were
reserved for them, so that they also formed the heads of the official
staffs. The auxiliary peoples were also admitted into the government
service; they, too, had privileges, but were not all soldiers but in
many cases merchants, who used their privileged position to promote
business. Not a few of these merchants were Uighurs and Mohammedans;
many Uighurs were also employed as clerks, as the Mongols were very
often unable to read and write Chinese, and the government offices were
bilingual, working in Mongolian and Chinese. The clever Uighurs quickly
learned enough of both languages for official purposes, and made
themselves indispensable assistants to the Mongols. Persian, the main
language of administration in the western parts of the Mongol empire
besides Uighuric, also was a _lingua franca_ among the new rulers of
China.
In the Mongol legislation the South Chinese had the lowest status, and
virtually no rights. Intermarriage with them was prohibited. The Chinese
were not allowed to carry arms. For a time they were forbidden even to
learn the Mongol or other foreign languages. In this way they were to be
prevented from gaining official positions and playing any political
part. Their ignorance of the languages of northern, central, and western
Asia also prevented them from engaging in commerce like the foreign
merchants, and every possible difficulty was put in the way of their
travelling for commercial purposes. On the other hand, foreigners were,
of course, able to learn Chinese, and so to gain a footing in Chinese
internal trade.
Through legislation of this type the Mongols tried to build up and to
safeguard their domination over China. Yet their success did not last a
hundred years.
3 _Military position_
In foreign affairs the Mongol epoch was for China something of a
breathing space, for the great wars of the Mongols took place at a
remote distance from China and without any Chinese participation. Only a
few concluding wars were fought under Kublai in the Far East. The first
was his war against Japan (1281): it ended in complete failure, the
fleet being destroyed by a storm. In this campaign the Chinese furnished
ships and also soldiers. The subjection of Japan would have been in the
interest of the Chinese, as it would have opened a market which had been
almost closed against them in the Sung period. Mongol wars followed in
the south. In 1282 began the war against Burma; in 1284 Annam and
Cambodia were conquered; in 1292 a campaign was started against Java. It
proved impossible to hold Java, but almost the whole of Indo-China came
under Mongol rule, to the satisfaction of the Chinese, for Indo-China
had already been one of the principal export markets in the Sung period.
After that, however, there was virtually no more warfare, apart from
small campaigns against rebellious tribes. The Mongol soldiers now lived
on their pay in their garrisons, with nothing to do. The old campaigners
died and were followed by their sons, brought up also as soldiers; but
these young Mongols were born in China, had seen nothing of war, and
learned of the soldiers' trade either nothing or very little; so that
after about 1320 serious things happened. An army nominally 1,000 strong
was sent against a group of barely fifty bandits and failed to defeat
them. Most of the 1,000 soldiers no longer knew how to use their
weapons, and many did not even join the force. Such incidents occurred
again and again.
4 _Social situation_
The results, however, of conditions within the country were of much more
importance than events abroad. The Mongols made Peking their capital as
was entirely natural, for Peking was near their homeland Mongolia. The
emperor and his entourage could return to Mongolia in the summer, when
China became too hot or too humid for them; and from Peking they were
able to maintain contact with the rest of the Mongol empire. But as the
city had become the capital of a vast empire, an enormous staff of
officials had to be housed there, consisting of persons of many
different nationalities. The emperor naturally wanted to have a
magnificent capital, a city really worthy of so vast an empire. As the
many wars had brought in vast booty, there was money for the building of
great palaces, of a size and magnificence never before seen in China.
They were built by Chinese forced labour, and to this end men had to be
brought from all over the empire--poor peasants, whose fields went out
of cultivation while they were held in bondage far away. If they ever
returned home, they were destitute and had lost their land. The rich
gentry, on the other hand, were able to buy immunity from forced labour.
The immense increase in the population of Peking (the huge court with
its enormous expenditure, the mass of officials, the great merchant
community, largely foreigners, and the many servile labourers),
necessitated vast supplies of food. Now, as mentioned in earlier
chapters, since the time of the Later T'ang the region round Nanking had
become the main centre of production in China, and the Chinese
population had gone over more and more to the consumption of rice
instead of pulse or wheat. As rice could not be grown in the north,
practically the whole of the food supplies for the capital had to be
brought from the south. The transport system taken over by the Mongols
had not been created for long-distance traffic of this sort. The capital
of the Sung had lain in the main centre of production. Consequently, a
great fleet had suddenly to be built, canals and rivers had to be
regulated, and some new canals excavated. This again called for a vast
quantity of forced labour, often brought from afar to the points at
which it was needed. The Chinese peasants had suffered in the Sung
period. They had been exploited by the large landowners. The Mongols had
not removed these landowners, as the Chinese gentry had gone over to
their side. The Mongols had deprived them of their political power, but
had left them their estates, the basis of their power. In past changes
of dynasty the gentry had either maintained their position or been
replaced by a new gentry: the total number of their class had remained
virtually unchanged. Now, however, in addition to the original gentry
there were about a million Mongols, for whose maintenance the peasants
had also to provide, and their standard of maintenance was high. This
was an enormous increase in the burdens of the peasantry.
Two other elements further pressed on the peasants in the Mongol
epoch--organized religion and the traders. The upper classes among the
Chinese had in general little interest in religion, but the Mongols,
owing to their historical development, were very religious. Some of them
and some of their allies were Buddhists, some were still shamanists. The
Chinese Buddhists and the representatives of popular Taoism approached
the Mongols and the foreign Buddhist monks trying to enlist the interest
of the Mongols and their allies. The old shamanism was unable to compete
with the higher religions, and the Mongols in China became Buddhist or
interested themselves in popular Taoism. They showed their interest
especially by the endowment of temples and monasteries. The temples were
given great estates, and the peasants on those estates became temple
servants. The land belonging to the temples was free from taxation.
We have as yet no exact statistics of the Mongol epoch, only
approximations. These set the total area under cultivation at some six
million _ch'ing_ (a _ch'ing_ is the ideal size of the farm worked by a
peasant family, but it was rarely held in practice); the population
amounted to fourteen or fifteen million families. Of this total tillage
some 170,000 _ch'ing_ were allotted to the temples; that is to say, the
farms for some 400,000 peasant families were taken from the peasants and
no longer paid taxes to the state. The peasants, however, had to make
payments to the temples. Some 200,000 _ch'ing_ with some 450,000 peasant
families were turned into military settlements; that is to say, these
peasants had to work for the needs of the army. Their taxes went not to
the state but to the army. Moreover, in the event of war they had to
render service to the army. In addition to this, all higher officials
received official properties, the yield of which represented part
payment of their salaries. Then, Mongol nobles and dignitaries received
considerable grants of land, which was taken away from the free
peasants; the peasants had then to work their farms as tenants and to
pay dues to their landlords, no longer to the state. Finally, especially
in North China, many peasants were entirely dispossessed, and their land
was turned into pasturage for the Mongols' horses; the peasants
themselves were put to forced labour. On top of this came the
exploitation of the peasants by the great landowners of the past. All
this meant an enormous diminution in the number of free peasants and
thus of taxpayers. As the state was involved in more expenditure than in
the past owing to the large number of Mongols who were its virtual
pensioners, the taxes had to be continually increased. Meanwhile the
many peasants working as tenants of the great landlords, the temples,
and the Mongol nobles were entirely at their mercy. In this period, a
second migration of farmers into the southern provinces, mainly Fukien
and Kwangtung, took place; it had its main source in the lower Yangtze
valley. A few gentry families whose relatives had accompanied the Sung
emperor on their flight to the south, also settled with their followers
in the Canton basin.
The many merchants from abroad, especially those belonging to the
peoples allied to the Mongols, also had in every respect a privileged
position in China. They were free of taxation, free to travel all over
the country, and received privileged treatment in the use of means of
transport. They were thus able to accumulate great wealth, most of which
went out of China to their own country. This produced a general
impoverishment of China. Chinese merchants fell more and more into
dependence on the foreign merchants; the only field of action really
remaining to them was the local trade within China and the trade with
Indo-China, where the Chinese had the advantage of knowing the language.
The impoverishment of China began with the flow abroad of her metallic
currency. To make up for this loss, the government was compelled to
issue great quantities of paper money, which very quickly depreciated,
because after a few years the government would no longer accept the
money at its face value, so that the population could place no faith in
it. The depreciation further impoverished the people.
Thus we have in the Mongol epoch in China the imposing picture of a
commerce made possible with every country from Europe to the Pacific;
this, however, led to the impoverishment of China. We also see the
rising of mighty temples and monumental buildings, but this again only
contributed to the denudation of the country. The Mongol epoch was thus
one of continual and rapid impoverishment in China, simultaneously with
a great display of magnificence. The enthusiastic descriptions of the
Mongol empire in China offered by travellers from the Near East or from
Europe, such as Marco Polo, give an entirely false picture: as
foreigners they had a privileged position, living in the cities and
seeing nothing of the situation of the general population.
5 _Popular risings: National rising_
It took time for the effects of all these factors to become evident. The
first popular rising came in 1325. Statistics of 1329 show that there
were then some 7,600,000 persons in the empire who were starving; as
this was only the figure of the officially admitted sufferers, the
figure may have been higher. In any case, seven-and-a-half millions were
a substantial percentage of the total population, estimated at
45,000,000. The risings that now came incessantly were led by men of the
lower orders--a cloth-seller, a fisherman, a peasant, a salt smuggler,
the son of a soldier serving a sentence, an office messenger, and so on.
They never attacked the Mongols as aliens, but always the rich in
general, whether Chinese or foreign. Wherever they came, they killed all
the rich and distributed their money and possessions.
As already mentioned, the Mongol garrisons were unable to cope with
these risings. But how was it that the Mongol rule did not collapse
until some forty years later? The Mongols parried the risings by raising
loans from the rich and using the money to recruit volunteers to fight
the rebels. The state revenues would not have sufficed for these
payments, and the item was not one that could be included in the
military budget. What was of much more importance was that the gentry
themselves recruited volunteers and fought the rebels on their own
account, without the authority or the support of the government. Thus it
was the Chinese gentry, in their fear of being killed by the insurgents,
who fought them and so bolstered up the Mongol rule.
In 1351 the dykes along the Yellow River burst. The dykes had to be
reconstructed and further measures of conservancy undertaken. To this
end the government impressed 170,000 men. Following this action, great
new revolts broke out. Everywhere in Honan, Kiangsu, and Shantung, the
regions from which the labourers were summoned, revolutionary groups
were formed, some of them amounting to 100,000 men. Some groups had a
religious tinge; others declared their intention to restore the emperors
of the Sung dynasty. Before long great parts of central China were
wrested from the hands of the government. The government recognized the
menace to its existence, but resorted to contradictory measures. In 1352
southern Chinese were permitted to take over certain official positions.
In this way it was hoped to gain the full support of the gentry, who had
a certain interest in combating the rebel movements. On the other hand,
the government tightened up its nationality laws. All the old
segregation laws were brought back into force, with the result that in a
few years the aim of the rebels became no longer merely the expulsion of
the rich but also the expulsion of the Mongols: a social movement thus
became a national one. A second element contributed to the change in the
character of the popular rising. The rebels captured many towns. Some of
these towns refused to fight and negotiated terms of submission. In
these cases the rebels did not murder the whole of the gentry, but took
some of them into their service. The gentry did not agree to this out of
sympathy with the rebels, but simply in order to save their own lives.
Once they had taken the step, however, they could not go back; they had
no alternative but to remain on the side of the rebels.
In 1352 Kuo Tzu-hsing rose in southern Honan. Kuo was the son of a
wandering soothsayer and a blind beggar-woman. He had success; his group
gained control of a considerable region round his home. There was no
longer any serious resistance from the Mongols, for at this time the
whole of eastern China was in full revolt. In 1353 Kuo was joined by a
man named Chu Yuean-chang, the son of a small peasant, probably a tenant
farmer. Chu's parents and all his relatives had died from a plague,
leaving him destitute. He had first entered a monastery and become a
monk. This was a favourite resource--and has been almost to the present
day--for poor sons of peasants who were threatened with starvation. As a
monk he had gone about begging, until in 1353 he returned to his home
and collected a group, mostly men from his own village, sons of peasants
and young fellows who had already been peasant leaders. Monks were often
peasant leaders. They were trusted because they promised divine aid, and
because they were usually rather better educated than the rest of the
peasants. Chu at first also had contacts with a secret society, a branch
of the White Lotos Society which several times in the course of Chinese
history has been the nucleus of rebellious movements. Chu took his small
group which identified itself by a red turban and a red banner to Kuo,
who received him gladly, entered into alliance with him, and in sign of
friendship gave him his daughter in marriage. In 1355 Kuo died, and Chu
took over his army, now many thousands strong. In his campaigns against
towns in eastern China, Chu succeeded in winning over some capable
members of the gentry. One was the chairman of a committee that yielded
a town to Chu; another was a scholar whose family had always been
opposed to the Mongols, and who had himself suffered injustice several
times in his official career, so that he was glad to join Chu out of
hatred of the Mongols.
These men gained great influence over Chu, and persuaded him to give up
attacking rich individuals, and instead to establish an assured control
over large parts of the country. He would then, they pointed out, be
permanently enriched, while otherwise he would only be in funds at the
moment of the plundering of a town. They set before him strategic plans
with that aim. Through their counsel Chu changed from the leader of a
popular rising into a fighter against the dynasty. Of all the peasant
leaders he was now the only one pursuing a definite aim. He marched
first against Nanking, the great city of central China, and captured it
with ease. He then crossed the Yangtze, and conquered the rich provinces
of the south-east. He was a rebel who no longer slaughtered the rich or
plundered the towns, and the whole of the gentry with all their
followers came over to him _en masse_. The armies of volunteers went
over to Chu, and the whole edifice of the dynasty collapsed.
The years 1355-1368 were full of small battles. After his conquest of
the whole of the south, Chu went north. In 1368 his generals captured
Peking almost without a blow. The Mongol ruler fled on horseback with
his immediate entourage into the north of China, and soon after into
Mongolia. The Mongol dynasty had been brought down, almost without
resistance. The Mongols in the isolated garrisons marched northward
wherever they could. A few surrendered to the Chinese and were used in
southern China as professional soldiers, though they were always
regarded with suspicion. The only serious resistance offered came from
the regions in which other Chinese popular leaders had established
themselves, especially the remote provinces in the west and south-west,
which had a different social structure and had been relatively little
affected by the Mongol regime.
Thus the collapse of the Mongols came for the following reasons: (1)
They had not succeeded in maintaining their armed strength or that of
their allies during the period of peace that followed Kublai's conquest.
The Mongol soldiers had become effeminate through their life of idleness
in the towns. (2) The attempt to rule the empire through Mongols or
other aliens, and to exclude the Chinese gentry entirely from the
administration, failed through insufficient knowledge of the sources of
revenue and through the abuses due to the favoured treatment of aliens.
The whole country, and especially the peasantry, was completely
impoverished and so driven into revolt. (3) There was also a
psychological reason. In the middle of the fourteenth century it was
obvious to the Mongols that their hold over China was growing more and
more precarious, and that there was little to be got out of the
impoverished country: they seem in consequence to have lost interest in
the troublesome task of maintaining their rule, preferring, in so far as
they had not already entirely degenerated, to return to their old home
in the north. It is important to bear in mind these reasons for the
collapse of the Mongols, so that we may compare them later with the
reasons for the collapse of the Manchus.
No mention need be made here of the names of the Mongol rulers in China
after Kublai. After his death in 1294, grandsons and great-grandsons of
his followed each other in rapid succession on the throne; not one of
them was of any personal significance. They had no influence on the
government of China. Their life was spent in intriguing against one
another. There were seven Mongol emperors after Kublai.
6 _Cultural_
During the Mongol epoch a large number of the Chinese scholars withdrew
from official life. They lived in retirement among their friends, and
devoted themselves mainly to the pursuit of the art of poetry, which had
been elaborated in the Later Sung epoch, without themselves arriving at
any important innovations in form. Their poems were built up
meticulously on the rules laid down by the various schools; they were
routine productions rather than the outcome of any true poetic
inspiration. In the realm of prose the best achievements were the
"miscellaneous notes" already mentioned, collections of learned essays.
The foreigners who wrote in Chinese during this epoch are credited with
no better achievements by the Chinese historians of literature. Chief of
them were a statesman named Yeh-lue Ch'u-ts'ai, a Kitan in the service of
the Mongols; and a Mongol named T'o-t'o (Tokto). The former accompanied
Genghiz Khan in his great campaign against Turkestan, and left a very
interesting account of his journeys, together with many poems about
Samarkand and Turkestan. His other works were mainly letters and poems
addressed to friends. They differ in no way in style from the Chinese
literary works of the time, and are neither better nor worse than those
works. He shows strong traces of Taoist influence, as do other
contemporary writers. We know that Genghiz Khan was more or less
inclined to Taoism, and admitted a Taoist monk to his camp (1221-1224).
This man's account of his travels has also been preserved, and with the
numerous European accounts of Central Asia written at this time it forms
an important source. The Mongol Tokto was the head of an historical
commission that issued the annals of the Sung dynasty, the Kitan, and
the Juchen dynasty. The annals of the Sung dynasty became the largest of
all the historical works, but they were fiercely attacked from the first
by Chinese critics on account of their style and their hasty
composition, and, together with the annals of the Mongol dynasty, they
are regarded as the worst of the annals preserved. Tokto himself is less
to blame for this than the circumstance that he was compelled to work in
great haste, and had not time to put into order the overwhelming mass of
his material.
The greatest literary achievements, however, of the Mongol period belong
beyond question to the theatre (or, rather, opera). The emperors were
great theatre-goers, and the wealthy private families were also
enthusiasts, so that gradually people of education devoted themselves to
writing librettos for the operas, where in the past this work had been
left to others. Most of the authors of these librettos remained unknown:
they used pseudonyms, partly because playwriting was not an occupation
that befitted a scholar, and partly because in these works they
criticized the conditions of their day. These works are divided in
regard to style into two groups, those of the "southern" and the
"northern" drama; these are distinguished from each other in musical
construction and in their intellectual attitude: in general the northern
works are more heroic and the southern more sentimental, though there
are exceptions. The most famous northern works of the Mongol epoch are
_P'i-p'a-chi_ ("The Story of a Lute"), written about 1356, probably by
Kao Ming, and _Chao-shih ku-erh-chi_ ("The Story of the Orphan of
Chao"), a work that enthralled Voltaire, who made a paraphrase of it;
its author was the otherwise unknown Chi Chuen-hsiang. One of the most
famous of the southern dramas is _Hsi-hsiang-chi_ ("The Romance of the
Western Chamber"), by Wang Shih-fu and Kuan Han-ch'ing. Kuan lived under
the Juchen dynasty as a physician, and then among the Mongol. He is said
to have written fifty-eight dramas, many of which became famous.
In the fine arts, foreign influence made itself felt during the Mongol
epoch much more than in literature. This was due in part to the Mongol
rulers' predilection for the Lamaism that was widespread in their
homeland. Lamaism is a special form of Buddhism which developed in
Tibet, where remnants of the old national Tibetan cult (_Bon_) were
fused with Buddhism into a distinctive religion. During the rise of the
Mongols this religion, which closely resembled the shamanism of the
ancient Mongols, spread in Mongolia, and through the Mongols it made
great progress in China, where it had been insignificant until their
time. Religious sculpture especially came entirely under Tibetan
influence (particularly that of the sculptor Aniko, who came from Nepal,
where he was born in 1244). This influence was noticeable in the Chinese
sculptor Liu Yuean; after him it became stronger and stronger, lasting
until the Manchu epoch.
In architecture, too, Indian and Tibetan influence was felt in this
period. The Tibetan pagodas came into special prominence alongside the
previously known form of pagoda, which has many storeys, growing smaller
as they go upward; these towers originally contained relics of Buddha
and his disciples. The Tibetan pagoda has not this division into
storeys, and its lower part is much larger in circumference, and often
round. To this day Peking is rich in pagodas in the Tibetan style.
The Mongols also developed in China the art of carpet-knotting, which to
this day is found only in North China in the zone of northern influence.
There were carpets before these, but they were mainly of felt. The
knotted carpets were produced in imperial workshops--only, of course,
for the Mongols, who were used to carpets. A further development
probably also due to West Asian influence was that of cloisonne
technique in China in this period.
Painting, on the other hand, remained free from alien influence, with
the exception of the craft painting for the temples. The most famous
painters of the Mongol epoch were Chao Meng-fu (also called Chao
Chung-mu, 1254-1322), a relative of the deposed imperial family of the
Sung dynasty, and Ni Tsan (1301-1374).
(B) The Ming Epoch (1368-1644)
1 _Start. National feeling_
It was necessary to give special attention to the reasons for the
downfall of Mongol rule in China, in order to make clear the cause and
the character of the Ming epoch that followed it. It is possible that
the erroneous impression might be gained that the Mongol epoch in China
was entirely without merits, and that the Mongol rule over China
differed entirely from the Mongol rule over other countries of Asia.
Chinese historians have no good word to say of the Mongol epoch and
avoid the subject as far as they can. It is true that the union of the
national Mongol culture with Chinese culture, as envisaged by the Mongol
rulers, was not a sound conception, and consequently did not endure for
long. Nevertheless, the Mongol epoch in China left indelible traces, and
without it China's further development would certainly have taken a
different course.
The many popular risings during the latter half of the period of Mongol
rule in China were all of a purely economic and social character, and at
first they were not directed at all against the Mongols as
representatives of an alien people. The rising under Chu Yuean-chang,
which steadily gained impetus, was at first a purely social movement;
indeed, it may fairly be called revolutionary. Chu was of the humblest
origin; he became a monk and a peasant leader at one and the same time.
Only three times in Chinese history has a man of the peasantry become
emperor and founder of a dynasty. The first of these three men founded
the Han dynasty; the second founded the first of the so-called "Five
Dynasties" in the tenth century; Chu was the third.
Not until the Mongols had answered Chu's rising with a tightening of the
nationality laws did the revolutionary movement become a national
movement, directed against the foreigners as such. And only when Chu
came under the influence of the first people of the gentry who joined
him, whether voluntarily or perforce, did what had been a revolutionary
movement become a struggle for the substitution of one dynasty for
another without interfering with the existing social system. Both these
points were of the utmost importance to the whole development of the
Ming epoch.
The Mongols were driven out fairly quickly and without great difficulty.
The Chinese drew from the ease of their success a sense of superiority
and a clear feeling of nationalism. This feeling should not be
confounded with the very old feeling of Chinese as a culturally superior
group according to which, at least in theory though rarely in practice,
every person who assimilated Chinese cultural values and traits was a
"Chinese". The roots of nationalism seem to lie in the Southern Sung
period, growing up in the course of contacts with the Juchen and
Mongols; but the discriminatory laws of the Mongols greatly fostered
this feeling. From now on, it was regarded a shame to serve a foreigner
as official, even if he was a ruler of China.
2 _Wars against Mongols and Japanese_
It had been easy to drive the Mongols out of China, but they were never
really beaten in their own country. On the contrary, they seem to have
regained strength after their withdrawal from China: they reorganized
themselves and were soon capable of counter-thrusts, while Chinese
offensives had as a rule very little success, and at all events no
decisive success. In the course of time, however, the Chinese gained a
certain influence over Turkestan, but it was never absolute, always
challenged. After the Mongol empire had fallen to pieces, small states
came into existence in Turkestan, for a long time with varying fortunes;
the most important one during the Ming epoch was that of Hami, until in
1473 it was occupied by the city-state of Turfan. At this time China
actively intervened in the policy of Turkestan in a number of combats
with the Mongols. As the situation changed from time to time, these
city-states united more or less closely with China or fell away from her
altogether. In this period, however, Turkestan was of no military or
economic importance to China.
In the time of the Ming there also began in the east and south the
plague of Japanese piracy. Japanese contacts with the coastal provinces
of China (Kiangsu, Chekiang and Fukien) had a very long history:
pilgrims from Japan often went to these places in order to study
Buddhism in the famous monasteries of Central China; businessmen sold at
high prices Japanese swords and other Japanese products here and bought
Chinese products; they also tried to get Chinese copper coins which had
a higher value in Japan. Chinese merchants co-operated with Japanese
merchants and also with pirates in the guise of merchants. Some Chinese
who were or felt persecuted by the government, became pirates
themselves. This trade-piracy had started already at the end of the Sung
dynasty, when Japanese navigation had become superior to Korean shipping
which had in earlier times dominated the eastern seaboard. These
conditions may even have been one of the reasons why the Mongols tried
to subdue Japan. As early as 1387 the Chinese had to begin the building
of fortifications along the eastern and southern coasts of the country.
The Japanese attacks now often took the character of organized raids: a
small, fast-sailing flotilla would land in a bay, as far as possible
without attracting notice; the soldiers would march against the nearest
town, generally overcoming it, looting, and withdrawing. The defensive
measures adopted from time to time during the Ming epoch were of little
avail, as it was impossible effectively to garrison the whole coast.
Some of the coastal settlements were transferred inland, to prevent the
Chinese from co-operating with the Japanese, and to give the Japanese so
long a march inland as to allow time for defensive measures. The
Japanese pirates prevented the creation of a Chinese navy in this period
by their continual threats to the coastal cities in which the shipyards
lay. Not until much later, at a time of unrest in Japan in 1467, was
there any peace from the Japanese pirates.
The Japanese attacks were especially embarrassing for the Chinese
government for one other reason. Large armies had to be kept all along
China's northern border, from Manchuria to Central Asia. Food supplies
could not be collected in north China which did not have enough
surplusses. Canal transportation from Central China was not reliable, as
the canals did not always have enough water and were often clogged by
hundreds of ships. And even if canals were used, grain still had to be
transported by land from the end of the canals to the frontier. The Ming
government therefore, had organized an overseas flotilla of grain ships
which brought grain from Central China directly to the front in
Liao-tung and Manchuria. And these ships, vitally important, were so
often attacked by the pirates, that this plan later had to be given up
again.
These activities along the coast led the Chinese to the belief that
basically all foreigners who came by ships were "barbarians"; when
towards the end of the Ming epoch the Japanese were replaced by
Europeans who did not behave much differently and were also
pirate-merchants, the nations of Western Europe, too, were regarded as
"barbarians" and were looked upon with great suspicion. On the other
side, continental powers, even if they were enemies, had long been
regarded as "states", sometimes even as equals. Therefore, when at a
much later time the Chinese came into contact with Russians, their
attitude towards them was similar to that which they had taken towards
other Asian continental powers.
3 _Social legislation within the existing order_
At the time when Chu Yuean-chang conquered Peking, in 1368, becoming the
recognized emperor of China (Ming dynasty), it seemed as though he would
remain a revolutionary in spite of everything. His first laws were
directed against the rich. Many of the rich were compelled to migrate to
the capital, Nanking, thus losing their land and the power based on it.
Land was redistributed among poor peasants; new land registers were also
compiled, in order to prevent the rich from evading taxation. The number
of monks living in idleness was cut down and precisely determined; the
possessions of the temples were reduced, land exempted from taxation
being thus made taxable--all this, incidentally, although Chu had
himself been a monk! These laws might have paved the way to social
harmony and removed the worst of the poverty of the Mongol epoch. But
all this was frustrated in the very first years of Chu's reign. The laws
were only half carried into effect or not at all, especially in the
hinterland of the present Shanghai. That region had been conquered by
Chu at the very beginning of the Ming epoch; in it lived the wealthy
landowners who had already been paying the bulk of the taxes under the
Mongols. The emperor depended on this wealthy class for the financing of
his great armies, and so could not be too hard on it.
Chu Yuean-chang and his entourage were also unable to free themselves
from some of the ideas of the Mongol epoch. Neither Chu, nor anybody
else before and long after him discussed the possibility of a form of
government other than that of a monarchy. The first ever to discuss this
question, although very timidly, was Huang Tsung-hsi (1610-1695), at the
end of the Ming dynasty. Chu's conception of an emperor was that of an
absolute monarch, master over life and death of his subjects; it was
formed by the Mongol emperors with their magnificence and the huge
expenditure of their life in Peking; Chu was oblivious of the fact that
Peking had been the capital of a vast empire embracing almost the whole
of Asia, and expenses could well be higher than for a capital only of
China. It did not occur to Chu and his supporters that they could have
done without imperial state and splendour; on the contrary, they felt
compelled to display it. At first Chu personally showed no excessive
signs of this tendency, though they emerged later; but he conferred
great land grants on all his relatives, friends, and supporters; he
would give to a single person land sufficient for 20,000 peasant
families; he ordered the payment of state pensions to members of the
imperial family, just as the Mongols had done, and the total of these
pension payments was often higher than the revenue of the region
involved. For the capital alone over eight million _shih_ of grain had
to be provided in payment of pensions--that is to say, more than 160,000
tons! These pension payments were in themselves a heavy burden on the
state; not only that, but they formed a difficult transport problem! We
have no close figure of the total population at the beginning of the
Ming epoch; about 1500 it is estimated to have been 53,280,000, and this
population had to provide some 266,000,000 _shih_ in taxes. At the
beginning of the Ming epoch the population and revenue must, however,
have been smaller.
The laws against the merchants and the restrictions under which the
craftsmen worked, remained essentially as they had been under the Sung,
but now the remaining foreign merchants of Mongol time also fell under
these laws, and their influence quickly diminished. All craftsmen, a
total of some 300,000 men with families, were still registered and had
to serve the government in the capital for three months once every three
years; others had to serve ten days per month, if they lived close by.
They were a hereditary caste as were the professional soldiers, and not
allowed to change their occupation except by special imperial
permission. When a craftsman or soldier died, another family member had
to replace him; therefore, families of craftsmen were not allowed to
separate into small nuclear families, in which there might not always be
a suitable male. Yet, in an empire as large as that of the Ming, this
system did not work too well: craftsmen lost too much time in travelling
and often succeeded in running away while travelling. Therefore, from
1505 on, they had to pay a tax instead of working for the government,
and from then on the craftsmen became relatively free.
4 _Colonization and agricultural developments_
As already mentioned, the Ming had to keep a large army along the
northern frontiers. But they also had to keep armies in south China,
especially in Yuennan. Here, the Mongol invasions of Burma and Thailand
had brought unrest among the tribes, especially the Shan. The Ming did
not hold Burma but kept it in a loose dependency as "tributary nation".
In order to supply armies so far away from all agricultural surplus
centres, the Ming resorted to the old system of "military colonies"
which seems to have been invented in the second century B.C. and is
still used even today (in Sinkiang). Soldiers were settled in camps
called _ying_, and therefore there are so many place names ending with
_ying_ in the outlying areas of China. They worked as state farmers and
accumulated surplusses which were used in case of war in which these
same farmers turned soldiers again. Many criminals were sent to these
state farms, too. This system, especially in south China, transformed
territories formerly inhabited by native tribes or uninhabited, into
solidly Chinese areas. In addition to these military colonies, a steady
stream of settlers from Central China and the coast continued to move
into Kwangtung and Hunan provinces. They felt protected by the army
against attacks by natives. Yet Ming texts are full of reports on major
and minor clashes with the natives, from Kiangsi and Fukien to Kwangtung
and Kwanghsi.
But the production of military colonies was still not enough to feed the
armies, and the government in Chu's time resorted to a new design. It
promised to give merchants who transported grain from Central China to
the borders, government salt certificates. Upon the receipt, the
merchants could acquire a certain amount of salt and sell it with high
profits. Soon, these merchants began to invest some of their capital in
local land which was naturally cheap. They then attracted farmers from
their home countries as tenants. The rent of the tenants, paid in form
of grain, was then sold to the army, and the merchant's gains
increased. Tenants could easily be found: the density of population in
the Yangtze plains had further increased since the Sung time. This
system of merchant colonization did not last long, because soon, in
order to curb the profits of the merchants, money was given instead of
salt certificates, and the merchants lost interest in grain transports.
Thus, grain prices along the frontiers rose and the effectiveness of the
armies was diminished.
Although the history of Chinese agriculture is as yet only partially
known, a number of changes in this field, which began to show up from
Sung time on, seem to have produced an "agricultural revolution" in Ming
time. We have already mentioned the Sung attempts to increase production
near the big cities by deep-lying fields, cultivation on and in lakes.
At the same time, there was an increase in cultivation of mountain
slopes by terracing and by distributing water over the terraces in
balanced systems. New irrigation machines, especially the so-called
Persian wheel, were introduced in the Ming time. Perhaps the most
important innovation, however, was the introduction of rice from
Indo-China's kingdom Champa in 1012 into Fukien from where it soon
spread. This rice had three advantages over ordinary Chinese rice: it
was drought-resistant and could, therefore, be planted in areas with
poor or even no irrigation. It had a great productivity, and it could be
sown very early in the year. At first it had the disadvantage that it
had a vegetation period of a hundred days. But soon, the Chinese
developed a quick-growing Champa rice, and the speediest varieties took
only sixty days from transplantation into the fields to the harvest.
This made it possible to grow two rice harvests instead of only one and
more than doubled the production. Rice varieties which grew again after
being cut and produced a second, but very much smaller harvest,
disappeared from now on. Furthermore, fish were kept in the ricefields
and produced not only food for the farmers but also fertilized the
fields, so that continuous cultivation of ricefields without any
decrease in fertility became possible. Incidentally, fish control the
malaria mosquitoes; although the Chinese did not know this fact, large
areas in South China which had formerly been avoided by Chinese because
of malaria, gradually became inhabitable.
The importance of alternating crops was also discovered and from now on,
the old system of fallow cultivation was given up and continuous
cultivation with, in some areas, even more than one harvest per field
per year, was introduced even in wheat-growing areas. Considering that
under the fallow system from one half to one third of all fields
remained uncultivated each year, the increase in production under the
new system must have been tremendous. We believe that the population
revolution which in China started about 1550, was the result of this
earlier agrarian revolution. From the eighteenth century on we get
reports on depletion of fields due to wrong application of the new
system.
Another plant deeply affected Chinese agriculture: cotton. It is often
forgotten that, from very early times, the Chinese in the south had used
kapok and similar fibres, and that the cocoons of different kinds of
worms had been used for silk. Real cotton probably came from Bengal over
South-East Asia first to the coastal provinces of China and spread
quickly into Fukien and Kwangtung in Sung time.
On the other side, cotton reached China through Central Asia, and
already in the thirteenth century we find it in Shensi in north-western
China. Farmers in the north could in many places grow cotton in summer
and wheat in winter, and cotton was a high-priced product. They ginned
the cotton with iron rods; a mechanical cotton gin was introduced not
until later. The raw cotton was sold to merchants who transported it
into the industrial centre of the time, the Yangtze valley, and who
re-exported cotton cloth to the north. Raw cotton, loosened by the
string of the bow (a method which was known since Sung), could now in
the north also be used for quilts and padded winter garments.
5 _Commercial and industrial developments_
Intensivation and modernization of agriculture led to strong population
increases especially in the Yangtze valley from Sung time on. Thus, in
this area commerce and industry also developed most quickly.
Urbanization was greatest here. Nanking, the new Ming capital, grew
tremendously because of the presence of the court and administration,
and even when later the capital was moved, Nanking continued to remain
the cultural capital of China. The urban population needed textiles and
food. From Ming time on, fashions changed quickly as soon as government
regulations which determined colour and material of the dress of each
social class were relaxed or as soon as they could be circumvented by
bribery or ingenious devices. Now, only factories could produce the
amounts which the consumers wanted. We hear of many men who started out
with one loom and later ended up with over forty looms, employing many
weavers. Shanghai began to emerge as a centre of cotton cloth
production. A system of middle-men developed who bought raw cotton and
raw silk from the producers and sold it to factories.
Consumption in the Yangtze cities raised the value of the land around
the cities. The small farmers who were squeezed out, migrated to the
south. Absentee landlords in cities relied partly on migratory, seasonal
labour supplied by small farmers from Chekiang who came to the Yangtze
area after they had finished their own harvest. More and more,
vegetables and mulberries or cotton were planted in the vicinity of the
cities. As rice prices went up quickly a large organization of rice
merchants grew up. They ran large ships up to Hankow where they bought
rice which was brought down from Hunan in river boats by smaller
merchants. The small merchants again made contracts with the local
gentry who bought as much rice from the producers as they could and sold
it to these grain merchants. Thus, local grain prices went up and we
hear of cases where the local population attacked the grain boats in
order to prevent the depletion of local markets.
Next to these grain merchants, the above-mentioned salt merchants have
to be mentioned again. Their centre soon became the city of Hsin-an, a
city on the border of Chekiang and Anhuei, or in more general terms, the
cities in the district of Hui-chou. When the grain transportation to the
frontiers came to an end in early Ming time, the Hsin-an merchants
specialized first in silver trade. Later in Ming time, they spread their
activities all over China and often monopolized the salt, silver, rice,
cotton, silk or tea businesses. In the sixteenth century they had
well-established contacts with smugglers on the Fukien coast and brought
foreign goods into the interior. Their home was also close to the main
centres of porcelain production in Kiangsi which was exported to
overseas and to the urban centres. The demand for porcelain had
increased so much that state factories could not fulfil it. The state
factories seem often to have suffered from a lack of labour: indented
artisans were imported from other provinces and later sent back on state
expenses or were taken away from other state industries. Thus, private
porcelain factories began to develop, and in connection with quickly
changing fashions a great diversification of porcelain occurred.
One other industry should also be mentioned. With the development of
printing, which will be discussed below, the paper industry was greatly
stimulated. The state also needed special types of paper for the paper
currency. Printing and book selling became a profitable business, and
with the application of block print to textiles (probably first used in
Sung time) another new field of commercial activity was opened.
As already mentioned, silver in form of bars had been increasingly used
as currency in Sung time. The yearly government production of silver was
c. 10,000 kg. Mongol currency was actually based upon silver. The Ming,
however, reverted to copper as basic unit, in addition to the use of
paper money. This encouraged the use of silver for speculative purposes.
The development of business changed the face of cities. From Sung time
on, the division of cities into wards with gates which were closed
during the night, began to break down. Ming cities had no more wards.
Business was no more restricted to official markets but grew up in all
parts of the cities. The individual trades were no more necessarily all
in one street. Shops did not have to close at sunset. The guilds
developed and in some cases were able to exercise locally some influence
upon the officials.
6 _Growth of the small gentry_
With the spread of book printing, all kinds of books became easily
accessible, including reprints of examination papers. Even businessmen
and farmers increasingly learned to read and to write, and many people
now could prepare themselves for the examinations. Attendance, however,
at the examinations cost a good deal. The candidate had to travel to the
local or provincial capital, and for the higher examinations to the
capital of the country; he had to live there for several months and, as
a rule, had to bribe the examiners or at least to gain the favour of
influential people. There were many cases of candidates becoming
destitute. Most of them were heavily in debt when at last they gained a
position. They naturally set to work at once to pay their debts out of
their salary, and to accumulate fresh capital to meet future
emergencies. The salaries of officials were, however, so small that it
was impossible to make ends meet; and at the same time every official
was liable with his own capital for the receipt in full of the taxes for
the collection of which he was responsible. Consequently every official
began at once to collect more taxes than were really due, so as to be
able to cover any deficits, and also to cover his own cost of
living--including not only the repayment of his debts but the
acquisition of capital or land so as to rise in the social scale. The
old gentry had been rich landowners, and had had no need to exploit the
peasants on such a scale.
The Chinese empire was greater than it had been before the Mongol epoch,
and the population was also greater, so that more officials were needed.
Thus in the Ming epoch there began a certain democratization, larger
sections of the population having the opportunity of gaining government
positions; but this democratization brought no benefit to the general
population but resulted in further exploitation of the peasants.
The new "small gentry" did not consist of great families like the
original gentry. When, therefore, people of that class wanted to play a
political part in the central government, or to gain a position there,
they had either to get into close touch with one of the families of the
gentry, or to try to approach the emperor directly. In the immediate
entourage of the emperor, however, were the eunuchs. A good many members
of the new class had themselves castrated after they had passed their
state examination. Originally eunuchs were forbidden to acquire
education. But soon the Ming emperors used the eunuchs as a tool to
counteract the power of gentry cliques and thus to strengthen their
personal power. When, later, eunuchs controlled appointments to
government posts, long established practices of bureaucratic
administration were eliminated and the court, i.e. the emperor and his
tools, the eunuchs, could create a rule by way of arbitrary decisions, a
despotic rule. For such purposes, eunuchs had to have education, and
these new educated eunuchs, when they had once secured a position, were
able to gain great influence in the immediate entourage of the emperor;
later such educated eunuchs were preferred, especially as many offices
were created which were only filled by eunuchs and for which educated
eunuchs were needed. Whole departments of eunuchs came into existence at
court, and these were soon made use of for confidential business of the
emperor's outside the palace.
These eunuchs worked, of course, in the interest of their families. On
the other hand, they were very ready to accept large bribes from the
gentry for placing the desires of people of the gentry before the
emperor and gaining his consent. Thus the eunuchs generally accumulated
great wealth, which they shared with their small gentry relatives. The
rise of the small gentry class was therefore connected with the
increased influence of the eunuchs at court.
7 _Literature, art, crafts_
The growth of the small gentry which had its stronghold in the
provincial towns and cities, as well as the rise of the merchant class
and the liberation of the artisans, are reflected in the new literature
of Ming time. While the Mongols had developed the theatre, the novel may
be regarded as the typical Ming creation. Its precursors were the
stories of story-tellers centuries ago. They had developed many styles,
one of which, for instance, consisted of prose with intercalated poetic
parts (_pien-wen_). Buddhists monks had used these forms of popular
literature and spread their teachings in similar forms; due to them,
many Indian stories and tales found their way into the Chinese
folklore. Soon, these stories of story-tellers or monks were written
down, and out of them developed the Chinese classical novel. It
preserved many traits of the stories: it was cut into chapters
corresponding with the interruptions which the story-teller made in
order to collect money; it was interspersed with poems. But most of all,
it was written in everyday language, not in the language of the gentry.
To this day every Chinese knows and reads with enthusiasm
_Shui-hu-chuan_ ("The Story of the River Bank"), probably written about
1550 by Wang Tao-k'un, in which the ruling class was first described in
its decay. Against it are held up as ideals representatives of the
middle class in the guise of the gentleman brigand. Every Chinese also
knows the great satirical novel _Hsi-yu-chi_ ("The Westward Journey"),
by Feng Meng-lung (1574-1645), in which ironical treatment is meted out
to all religions and sects against a mythological background, with a
freedom that would not have been possible earlier. The characters are
not presented as individuals but as representatives of human types: the
intellectual, the hedonist, the pious man, and the simpleton, are drawn
with incomparable skill, with their merits and defects. A third famous
novel is _San-kuo yen-i_ ("The Tale of the Three Kingdoms"), by Lo
Kuan-chung. Just as the European middle class read with avidity the
romances of chivalry, so the comfortable class in China was enthusiastic
over romanticized pictures of the struggle of the gentry in the third
century. "The Tale of the Three Kingdoms" became the model for countless
historical novels of its own and subsequent periods. Later, mainly in
the sixteenth century, the sensational and erotic novel developed, most
of all in Nanking. It has deeply influenced Japanese writers, but was
mercilessly suppressed by the Chinese gentry which resented the
frivolity of this wealthy and luxurious urban class of middle or small
gentry families who associated with rich merchants, actors, artists and
musicians. Censorship of printed books had started almost with the
beginning of book printing as a private enterprise: to the famous
historian, anti-Buddhist and conservative Ou-yang Hsiu (1007-1072), the
enemy of Wang An-shih, belongs the sad glory of having developed the
first censorship rules. Since Ming time, it became a permanent feature
of Chinese governments.
The best known of the erotic novels is the _Chin-p'ing-mei_ which, for
reasons of our own censors can be published only in expurgated
translations. It was written probably towards the end of the sixteenth
century. This novel, as all others, has been written and re-written by
many authors, so that many different versions exist. It might be pointed
out that many novels were printed in Hui-chou, the commercial centre of
the time.
The short story which formerly served the entertainment of the educated
only and which was, therefore, written in classical Chinese, now also
became a literary form appreciated by the middle classes. The collection
_Chin-ku ch'i-kuan_ ("Strange Stories of New Times and Old"), compiled
by Feng Meng-lung, is the best-known of these collections in vernacular
Chinese.
Little original work was done in the Ming epoch in the fields generally
regarded as "literature" by educated Chinese, those of poetry and the
essay. There are some admirable essays, but these are only isolated
examples out of thousands. So also with poetry: the poets of the gentry,
united in "clubs", chose the poets of the Sung epoch as their models to
emulate.
The Chinese drama made further progress in the Ming epoch. Many of the
finest Chinese dramas were written under the Ming; they are still
produced again and again to this day. The most famous dramatists of the
Ming epoch are Wang Shih-chen (1526-1590) and T'ang Hsien-tsu
(1556-1617). T'ang wrote the well-known drama _Mu-tan-t'ing_ ("The Peony
Pavillion"), one of the finest love-stories of Chinese literature, full
of romance and remote from all reality. This is true also of the other
dramas by T'ang, especially his "Four Dreams", a series of four plays.
In them a man lives in dream through many years of his future life, with
the result that he realizes the worthlessness of life and decides to
become a monk.
Together with the development of the drama (or, rather, the opera) in
the Ming epoch went an important endeavour in the modernization of
music, the attempt to create a "well-tempered scale" made in 1584 by Chu
Tsai-yue. This solved in China a problem which was not tackled till later
in Europe. The first Chinese theorists of music who occupied themselves
with this problem were Ching Fang (77-37 B.C.) and Ho Ch'eng-t'ien (A.D.
370-447).
In the Mongol epoch, most of the Chinese painters had lived in central
China; this remained so in the Ming epoch. Of the many painters of the
Ming epoch, all held in high esteem in China, mention must be made
especially of Ch'iu Ying (_c._ 1525), T'ang Yin (1470-1523), and Tung
Ch'i-ch'ang (1555-1636). Ch'iu Ying painted in the Academic Style,
indicating every detail, however small, and showing preference for a
turquoise-green ground. T'ang Yin was the painter of elegant women; Tung
became famous especially as a calligraphist and a theoretician of the
art of painting; a textbook of the art was written by him.
Just as puppet plays and shadow theatre are the "opera of the common
man" and took a new development in Ming time, the wood-cut and
block-printing developed largely as a cheap substitute of real
paintings. The new urbanites wanted to have paintings of the masters and
found in the wood-cut which soon became a multi-colour print a cheap
mass medium. Block printing in colours, developed in the Yangtze valley,
was adopted by Japan and found its highest refinement there. But the
Ming are also famous for their monumental architecture which largely
followed Mongol patterns. Among the most famous examples is the famous
Great Wall which had been in dilapidation and was rebuilt; the great
city walls of Peking; and large parts of the palaces of Peking, begun in
the Mongol epoch. It was at this time that the official style which we
may observe to this day in North China was developed, the style employed
everywhere, until in the age of concrete it lost its justification.
In the Ming epoch the porcelain with blue decoration on a white ground
became general; the first examples, from the famous kilns in
Ching-te-chen, in the province of Kiangsi, were relatively coarse, but
in the fifteenth century the production was much finer. In the sixteenth
century the quality deteriorated, owing to the disuse of the cobalt from
the Middle East (perhaps from Persia) in favour of Sumatra cobalt, which
did not yield the same brilliant colour. In the Ming epoch there also
appeared the first brilliant red colour, a product of iron, and a start
was then made with three-colour porcelain (with lead glaze) or
five-colour (enamel). The many porcelains exported to western Asia and
Europe first influenced European ceramics (Delft), and then were
imitated in Europe (Boettger); the early European porcelains long showed
Chinese influence (the so-called onion pattern, blue on a white ground).
In addition to the porcelain of the Ming epoch, of which the finest
specimens are in the palace at Istanbul, especially famous are the
lacquers (carved lacquer, lacquer painting, gold lacquer) of the Ming
epoch and the cloisonne work of the same period. These are closely
associated with the contemporary work in Japan.
8 _Politics at court_
After the founding of the dynasty by Chu Yuean-chang, important questions
had to be dealt with apart from the social legislation. What was to be
done, for instance, with Chu's helpers? Chu, like many revolutionaries
before and after him, recognized that these people had been serviceable
in the years of struggle but could no longer remain useful. He got rid
of them by the simple device of setting one against another so that they
murdered one another. In the first decades of his rule the dangerous
cliques of gentry had formed again, and were engaged in mutual
struggles. The most formidable clique was led by Hu Wei-yung. Hu was a
man of the gentry of Chu's old homeland, and one of his oldest
supporters. Hu and his relations controlled the country after 1370,
until in 1380 Chu succeeded in beheading Hu and exterminating his
clique. New cliques formed before long and were exterminated in turn.
Chu had founded Nanking in the years of revolution, and he made it his
capital. In so doing he met the wishes of the rich grain producers of
the Yangtze delta. But the north was the most threatened part of his
empire, so that troops had to be permanently stationed there in
considerable strength. Thus Peking, where Chu placed one of his sons as
"king", was a post of exceptional importance.
In Chu Yuean-chang's last years (he was named T'ai Tsu as emperor)
difficulties arose in regard to the dynasty. The heir to the throne died
in 1391; and when the emperor himself died in 1398, the son of the late
heir-apparent was installed as emperor (Hui Ti, 1399-1402). This choice
had the support of some of the influential Confucian gentry families of
the south. But a protest against his enthronement came from the other
son of Chu Yuean-chang, who as king in Peking had hoped to become
emperor. With his strong army this prince, Ch'eng Tsu, marched south and
captured Nanking, where the palaces were burnt down. There was a great
massacre of supporters of the young emperor, and the victor made himself
emperor (better known under his reign name, Yung-lo). As he had
established himself in Peking, he transferred the capital to Peking,
where it remained throughout the Ming epoch. Nanking became a sort of
subsidiary capital.
This transfer of the capital to the north, as the result of the victory
of the military party and Buddhists allied to them, produced a new
element of instability: the north was of military importance, but the
Yangtze region remained the economic centre of the country. The
interests of the gentry of the Yangtze region were injured by the
transfer. The first Ming emperor had taken care to make his court
resemble the court of the Mongol rulers, but on the whole had exercised
relative economy. Yung-lo (1403-1424), however, lived in the actual
palaces of the Mongol rulers, and all the luxury of the Mongol epoch was
revived. This made the reign of Yung-lo the most magnificent period of
the Ming epoch, but beneath the surface decay had begun. Typical of the
unmitigated absolutism which developed now, was the word of one of the
emperor's political and military advisors, significantly a Buddhist
monk: "I know the way of heaven. Why discuss the hearts of the people?"
9 _Navy. Southward expansion_
After the collapse of Mongol rule in Indo-China, partly through the
simple withdrawal of the Mongols, and partly through attacks from
various Chinese generals, there were independence movements in
south-west China and Indo-China. In 1393 wars broke out in Annam.
Yung-lo considered that the time had come to annex these regions to
China and so to open a new field for Chinese trade, which was suffering
continual disturbance from the Japanese. He sent armies to Yuennan and
Indo-China; at the same time he had a fleet built by one of his eunuchs,
Cheng Ho. The fleet was successfully protected from attack by the
Japanese. Cheng Ho, who had promoted the plan and also carried it out,
began in 1405 his famous mission to Indo-China, which had been envisaged
as giving at least moral support to the land operations, but was also
intended to renew trade connections with Indo-China, where they had been
interrupted by the collapse of Mongol rule. Cheng Ho sailed past
Indo-China and ultimately reached the coast of Arabia. His account of
his voyage is an important source of information about conditions in
southern Asia early in the fifteenth century. Cheng Ho and his fleet
made some further cruises, but they were discontinued. There may have
been several reasons. (1) As state enterprises, the expeditions were
very costly. Foreign goods could be obtained more cheaply and with less
trouble if foreign merchants came themselves to China or Chinese
merchants travelled at their own risk. (2) The moral success of the
naval enterprises was assured. China was recognized as a power
throughout southern Asia, and Annam had been reconquered. (3) After the
collapse of the Mongol emperor Timur, who died in 1406, there no longer
existed any great power in Central Asia, so that trade missions from the
kingdom of the Shahruk in North Persia were able to make their way to
China, including the famous mission of 1409-1411. (4) Finally, the fleet
would have had to be permanently guarded against the Japanese, as it had
been stationed not in South China but in the Yangtze region. As early as
1411 the canals had been repaired, and from 1415 onward all the traffic
of the country went by the canals, so evading the Japanese peril. This
ended the short chapter of Chinese naval history.
These travels of Cheng Ho seem to have had one more cultural result: a
large number of fairy-tales from the Middle East were brought to China,
or at all events reached China at that time. The Chinese, being a
realistically-minded people, have produced few fairy-tales of their own.
The bulk of their finest fairy-tales were brought by Buddhist monks, in
the course of the first millennium A.D., from India by way of Central
Asia. The Buddhists made use of them to render their sermons more
interesting and impressive. As time went on, these stories spread all
over China, modified in harmony with the spirit of the people and
adapted to the Chinese environment. Only the fables failed to strike
root in China: the matter-of-fact Chinese was not interested in animals
that talked and behaved to each other like human beings. In addition,
however, to these early fairy-tales, there was another group of stories
that did not spread throughout China, but were found only in the
south-eastern coastal provinces. These came from the Middle East,
especially from Persia. The fairy-tales of Indian origin spread not only
to Central Asia but at the same time to Persia, where they found a very
congenial soil. The Persians made radical changes in the stories and
gave them the form in which they came to Europe by various
routes--through North Africa to Spain and France; through
Constantinople, Venice, or Genoa to France; through Russian Turkestan to
Russia, Finland, and Sweden; through Turkey and the Balkans to Hungary
and Germany. Thus the stories found a European home. And this same
Persian form was carried by sea in Cheng Ho's time to South China. Thus
we have the strange experience of finding some of our own finest
fairy-tales in almost the same form in South China.
10 _Struggles between cliques_
Yung-lo's successor died early. Under the latter's son, the emperor
Hsuean Tsung (1426-1435; reign name Hsuean-te), fixed numbers of
candidates were assigned for the state examinations. It had been found
that almost the whole of the gentry in the Yangtze region sat at the
examinations; and that at these examinations their representatives made
sure, through their mutual relations, that only their members should
pass, so that the candidates from the north were virtually excluded. The
important military clique in the north protested against this, and a
compromise was arrived at: at every examination one-third of the
candidates must come from the north and two-thirds from the south. This
system lasted for a long time, and led to many disputes.
At his death Hsuean Tsung left the empire to his eight-year-old son Ying
Tsung (1436-49 and 1459-64), who was entirely in the hands of the Yang
clique, which was associated with his grandmother. Soon, however,
another clique, led by the eunuch Wang Chen, gained the upper hand at
court. The Mongols were very active at this time, and made several raids
on the province of Shansi; Wang Chen proposed a great campaign against
them, and in this campaign he took with him the young emperor, who had
reached his twenty-first birthday in 1449. The emperor had grown up in
the palace and knew nothing of the world outside; he was therefore glad
to go with Wang Chen; but that eunuch had also lived in the palace and
also knew nothing of the world, and in particular of war. Consequently
he failed in the organization of reinforcements for his army, some
100,000 strong; after a few brief engagements the Oirat-Mongol prince
Esen had the imperial army surrounded and the emperor a prisoner. The
eunuch Wang Chen came to his end, and his clique, of course, no longer
counted. The Mongols had no intention of killing the emperor; they
proposed to hold him to ransom, at a high price. The various cliques at
court cared little, however, about their ruler. After the fall of the
Wang clique there were two others, of which one, that of General Yue,
became particularly powerful, as he had been able to repel a Mongol
attack on Peking. Yue proclaimed a new emperor--not the captive emperor's
son, a baby, but his brother, who became the emperor Ching Tsung. The
Yang clique insisted on the rights of the imperial baby. From all this
the Mongols saw that the Chinese were not inclined to spend a lot of
money on their imperial captive. Accordingly they made an enormous
reduction in the ransom demanded, and more or less forced the Chinese to
take back their former emperor. The Mongols hoped that this would at
least produce political disturbances by which they might profit, once
the old emperor was back in Peking. And this did soon happen. At first
the ransomed emperor was pushed out of sight into a palace, and Ching
Tsung continued to reign. But in 1456 Ching Tsung fell ill, and a
successor to him had to be chosen. The Yue clique wanted to have the son
of Ching Tsung; the Yang clique wanted the son of the deposed emperor
Ying Tsung. No agreement was reached, so that in the end a third clique,
led by the soldier Shih Heng, who had helped to defend Peking against
the Mongols, found its opportunity, and by a _coup d' etat_ reinstated
the deposed emperor Ying Tsung.
This was not done out of love for the emperor, but because Shih Heng
hoped that under the rule of the completely incompetent Ying Tsung he
could best carry out a plan of his own, to set up his own dynasty. It is
not so easy, however, to carry a conspiracy to success when there are
several rival parties, each of which is ready to betray any of the
others. Shih Heng's plan became known before long, and he himself was
beheaded (1460).
The next forty years were filled with struggles between cliques, which
steadily grew in ferocity, particularly since a special office, a sort
of secret police headquarters, was set up in the palace, with functions
which it extended beyond the palace, with the result that many people
were arrested and disappeared. This office was set up by the eunuchs and
the clique at their back, and was the first dictatorial organ created in
the course of a development towards despotism that made steady progress
in these years.
In 1505 Wu Tsung came to the throne, an inexperienced youth of fifteen
who was entirely controlled by the eunuchs who had brought him up. The
leader of the eunuchs was Liu Chin, who had the support of a group of
people of the gentry and the middle class. Liu Chin succeeded within a
year in getting rid of the eunuchs at court who belonged to other
cliques and were working against him. After that he proceeded to
establish his power. He secured in entirely official form the emperor's
permission for him to issue all commands himself; the emperor devoted
himself only to his pleasures, and care was taken that they should keep
him sufficiently occupied to have no chance to notice what was going on
in the country. The first important decree issued by Liu Chin resulted
in the removal from office or the punishment or murder of over three
hundred prominent persons, the leaders of the cliques opposed to him. He
filled their posts with his own supporters, until all the higher posts
in every department were in the hands of members of his group. He
collected large sums of money which he quite openly extracted from the
provinces as a special tax for his own benefit. When later his house was
searched there were found 240,000 bars and 57,800 pieces of gold (a bar
was equivalent of ten pieces), 791,800 ounces and 5,000,000 bars of
silver (a bar was five ounces), three bushels of precious stones, two
gold cuirasses, 3,000 gold rings, and much else--of a total value
exceeding the annual budget of the state! The treasure was to have been
used to finance a revolt planned by Liu Chin and his supporters.
Among the people whom Liu Chin had punished were several members of the
former clique of the Yang, and also the philosopher Wang Yang-ming, who
later became so famous, a member of the Wang family which was allied to
the Yang. In 1510 the Yang won over one of the eunuchs in the palace and
so became acquainted with Liu Chin's plans. When a revolt broke out in
western China, this eunuch (whose political allegiance was, of course,
unknown to Liu Chin) secured appointment as army commander. With the
army intended for the crushing of the revolt, Liu Chin's palace was
attacked when he was asleep, and he and all his supporters were
arrested. Thus the other group came into power in the palace, including
the philosopher Wang Yang-ming (1473-1529). Liu Chin's rule had done
great harm to the country, as enormous taxation had been expended for
the private benefit of his clique. On top of this had been the young
emperor's extravagance: his latest pleasures had been the building of
palaces and the carrying out of military games; he constantly assumed
new military titles and was burning to go to war.
11 _Risings_
The emperor might have had a good opportunity for fighting, for his
misrule had resulted in a great popular rising which began in the west,
in Szechwan, and then spread to the east. As always, the rising was
joined by some ruined scholars, and the movement, which had at first
been directed against the gentry as such, was turned into a movement
against the government of the moment. No longer were all the wealthy and
all officials murdered, but only those who did not join the movement. In
1512 the rebels were finally overcome, not so much by any military
capacity of the government armies as through the loss of the rebels'
fleet of boats in a typhoon.
In 1517 a new favourite of the emperor's induced him to make a great
tour in the north, to which the favourite belonged. The tour and the
hunting greatly pleased the emperor, so that he continued his
journeying. This was the year in which the Portuguese Fernao Pires de
Andrade landed in Canton--the first modern European to enter China.
In 1518 Wang Yang-ming, the philosopher general, crushed a rising in
Kiangsi. The rising had been the outcome of years of unrest, which had
had two causes: native risings of the sort we described above, and loss
for the gentry due to the transfer of the capital. The province of
Kiangsi was a part of the Yangtze region, and the great landowners there
had lived on the profit from their supplies to Nanking. When the capital
was moved to Peking, their takings fell. They placed themselves under a
prince who lived in Nanking. This prince regarded Wang Yang-ming's move
into Kiangsi as a threat to him, and so rose openly against the
government and supported the Kiangsi gentry. Wang Yang-ming defeated
him, and so came into the highest favour with the incompetent emperor.
When peace had been restored in Nanking, the emperor dressed himself up
as an army commander, marched south, and made a triumphal entry into
Nanking.
One other aspect of Wang Yang-ming's expeditions has not yet been
studied: he crushed also the so-called salt-merchant rebels in the
southernmost part of Kiangsi and adjoining Kwangtung. These
merchants-turned-rebels had dominated a small area, off and on since
the eleventh century. At this moment, they seem to have had connections
with the rich inland merchants of Hsin-an and perhaps also with
foreigners. Information is still too scanty to give more details, but a
local movement as persistent as this one deserves attention.
Wang Yang-ming became acquainted as early as 1519 with the first
European rifles, imported by the Portuguese who had landed in 1517. (The
Chinese then called them Fu-lang-chi, meaning Franks. Wang was the first
Chinese who spoke of the "Franks".) The Chinese had already had mortars
which hurled stones, as early as the second century A.D. In the seventh
or eighth century their mortars had sent stones of a couple of
hundredweights some four hundred yards. There is mention in the eleventh
century of cannon which apparently shot with a charge of a sort of
gunpowder. The Mongols were already using true cannon in their sieges.
In 1519, the first Portuguese were presented to the Chinese emperor in
Nanking, where they were entertained for about a year in a hostel, a
certain Lin Hsuen learned about their rifles and copied them for Wang
Yang-ming. In general, however, the Chinese had no respect for the
Europeans, whom they described as "bandits" who had expelled the lawful
king of Malacca and had now come to China as its representatives. Later
they were regarded as a sort of Japanese, because they, too, practised
piracy.
12 _Machiavellism_
All main schools of Chinese philosophy were still based on Confucius.
Wang Yang-ming's philosophy also followed Confucius, but he liberated
himself from the Neo-Confucian tendency as represented by Chu Hsi, which
started in the Sung epoch and continued to rule in China in his time and
after him; he introduced into Confucian philosophy the conception of
"intuition". He regarded intuition as the decisive philosophic
experience; only through intuition could man come to true knowledge.
This idea shows an element of meditative Buddhism along lines which the
philosopher Lu Hsiang-shan (1139-1192) had first developed, while
classical Neo-Confucianism was more an integration of monastic Buddhism
into Confucianism. Lu had felt himself close to Wang An-shih
(1021-1086), and this whole school, representing the small gentry of the
Yangtze area, was called the Southern or the Lin-ch'uan school,
Lin-ch'uan in Kiangsi being Wang An-shih's home. During the Mongol
period, a Taoist group, the _Cheng-i-chiao_ (Correct Unity Sect) had
developed in Lin-ch'uan and had accepted some of the Lin-ch'uan
school's ideas. Originally, this group was a continuation of Chang
Ling's church Taosim. Through the _Cheng-i_ adherents, the Southern
school had gained political influence on the despotic Mongol rulers. The
despotic Yung-lo emperor had favoured the monk Tao-yen (_c_. 1338-1418)
who had also Taoist training and proposed a philosophy which also
stressed intuition. He was, incidentally, in charge of the compilation
of the largest encyclopaedia ever written, the _Yung-lo ta-tien_,
commissioned by the Yung-lo emperor.
Wang Yang-ming followed the Lin-ch'uan tradition. The introduction of
the conception of intuition, a highly subjective conception, into the
system of a practical state philosophy like Confucianism could not but
lead in the practice of the statesman to machiavellism. The statesman
who followed the teaching of Wang Yang-ming had the opportunity of
justifying whatever he did by his intuition.
Wang Yang-ming failed to gain acceptance for his philosophy. His
disciples also failed to establish his doctrine in China, because it
served the interests of an individual despot against those of the gentry
as a class, and the middle class, which might have formed a
counterweight against them, was not yet politically ripe for the seizure
of the opportunity here offered to it. In Japan, however, Wang's
doctrine gained many followers, because it admirably served the
dictatorial state system which had developed in that country.
Incidentally, Chiang Kai-shek in those years in which he showed Fascist
tendencies, also got interested in Wang Yang-ming.
13 _Foreign relations in the sixteenth century_
The feeble emperor Wu Tsung died in 1521, after an ineffective reign,
without leaving an heir. The clique then in power at court looked among
the possible pretenders for the one who seemed least likely to do
anything, and their choice fell on the fifteen-year-old Shih Tsung, who
was made emperor. The forty-five years of his reign were filled in home
affairs with intrigues between the cliques at court, with growing
distress in the country, and with revolts on a larger and larger scale.
Abroad there were wars with Annam, increasing raids by the Japanese,
and, above all, long-continued fighting against the famous Mongol ruler
Yen-ta, from 1549 onward. At one time Yen-ta reached Peking and laid
siege to it. The emperor, who had no knowledge of affairs, and to whom
Yen-ta had been represented as a petty bandit, was utterly dismayed and
ready to do whatever Yen-ta asked; in the end he was dissuaded from
this, and an agreement was arrived at with Yen-ta for state-controlled
markets to be set up along the frontier, where the Mongols could
dispose of their goods against Chinese goods on very favourable terms.
After further difficulties lasting many years, a compromise was arrived
at: the Mongols were earning good profits from the markets, and in 1571
Yen-ta accepted a Chinese title. On the Chinese side, this Mongol trade,
which continued in rather different form in the Manchu epoch, led to the
formation of a local merchant class in the frontier province of Shansi,
with great experience in credit business; later the first Chinese
bankers came almost entirely from this quarter.
After a brief interregnum there came once more to the throne a
ten-year-old boy, the emperor Shen Tsung (reign name Wan-li; 1573-1619).
He, too, was entirely under the influence of various cliques, at first
that of his tutor, the scholar Chang Chue-chan. About the time of the
death, in 1582, of Yen-ta we hear for the first time of a new people. In
1581 there had been unrest in southern Manchuria. The Mongolian tribal
federation of the Tuemet attacked China, and there resulted collisions
not only with the Chinese but between the different tribes living there.
In southern and central Manchuria were remnants of the Tungus Juchen.
The Mongols had subjugated the Juchen, but the latter had virtually
become independent after the collapse of Mongol rule over China. They
had formed several tribal alliances, but in 1581-83 these fought each
other, so that one of the alliances to all intents was destroyed. The
Chinese intervened as mediators in these struggles, and drew a
demarcation line between the territories of the various Tungus tribes.
All this is only worth mention because it was from these tribes that
there developed the tribal league of the Manchus, who were then to rule
China for some three hundred years.
In 1592 the Japanese invaded Korea. This was their first real effort to
set foot on the continent, a purely imperialistic move. Korea, as a
Chinese vassal, appealed for Chinese aid. At first the Chinese army had
no success, but in 1598 the Japanese were forced to abandon Korea. They
revenged themselves by intensifying their raids on the coast of central
China; they often massacred whole towns, and burned down the looted
houses. The fighting in Korea had its influence on the Tungus tribes: as
they were not directly involved, it contributed to their further
strengthening.
The East India Company was founded in 1600. At this time, while the
English were trying to establish themselves in India, the Chinese tried
to gain increased influence in the south by wars in Annam, Burma, and
Thailand (1594-1604). These wars were for China colonial wars, similar
to the colonial fighting by the British in India. But there began to be
defined already at that time in the south of Asia the outlines of the
states as they exist at the present time.
In 1601 the first European, the Jesuit Matteo Ricci, succeeded in
gaining access to the Chinese court, through the agency of a eunuch. He
made some presents, and the Chinese regarded his visit as a mission from
Europe bringing tribute. Ricci was therefore permitted to remain in
Peking. He was an astronomer and was able to demonstrate to his Chinese
colleagues the latest achievements of European astronomy. In 1613, after
Ricci's death, the Jesuits and some Chinese whom they had converted were
commissioned to reform the Chinese calendar. In the time of the Mongols,
Arabs had been at work in Peking as astronomers, and their influence had
continued under the Ming until the Europeans came. By his astronomical
labours Ricci won a place of honour in Chinese literature; he is the
European most often mentioned.
The missionary work was less effective. The missionaries penetrated by
the old trade routes from Canton and Macao into the province of Kiangsi
and then into Nanking. Kiangsi and Nanking were their chief centres.
They soon realized that missionary activity that began in the lower
strata would have no success; it was necessary to work from above,
beginning with the emperor, and then, they hoped, the whole country
could be converted to Christianity. When later the emperors of the Ming
dynasty were expelled and fugitives in South China, one of the
pretenders to the throne was actually converted--but it was politically
too late. The missionaries had, moreover, mistaken ideas as to the
nature of Chinese religion; we know today that a universal adoption of
Christianity in China would have been impossible even if an emperor had
personally adopted that foreign faith: there were emperors who had been
interested in Buddhism or in Taoism, but that had been their private
affair and had never prevented them, as heads of the state, from
promoting the religious system which politically was the most
expedient--that is to say, usually Confucianism. What we have said here
in regard to the Christian mission at the Ming court is applicable also
to the missionaries at the court of the first Manchu emperors, in the
seventeenth century. Early in the eighteenth century missionary activity
was prohibited--not for religious but for political reasons, and only
under the pressure of the Capitulations in the nineteenth century were
the missionaries enabled to resume their labours.
14 _External and internal perils_
Towards the end of the reign of Wan-li, about 1620, the danger that
threatened the empire became more and more evident. The Manchus
complained, no doubt with justice, of excesses on the part of Chinese
officials; the friction constantly increased, and the Manchus began to
attack the Chinese cities in Manchuria. In 1616, after his first
considerable successes, their leader Nurhachu assumed the imperial
title; the name of the dynasty was Tai Ch'ing (interpreted as "The great
clarity", but probably a transliteration of a Manchurian word meaning
"hero"). In 1618, the year in which the Thirty Years War started in
Europe, the Manchus conquered the greater part of Manchuria, and in 1621
their capital was Liaoyang, then the largest town in Manchuria.
But the Manchu menace was far from being the only one. On the south-east
coast a pirate made himself independent; later, with his family, he
dominated Formosa and fought many battles with the Europeans there
(European sources call him Coxinga). In western China there came a great
popular rising, in which some of the natives joined, and which spread
through a large part of the southern provinces. This rising was
particularly sanguinary, and when it was ultimately crushed by the
Manchus the province of Szechwan, formerly so populous, was almost
depopulated, so that it had later to be resettled. And in the province
of Shantung in the east there came another great rising, also very
sanguinary, that of the secret society of the "White Lotus". We have
already pointed out that these risings of secret societies were always a
sign of intolerable conditions among the peasantry. This was now the
case once more. All the elements of danger which we mentioned at the
outset of this chapter began during this period, between 1610 and 1640,
to develop to the full.
Then there were the conditions in the capital itself. The struggles
between cliques came to a climax. On the death of Shen Tsung (or Wan-li;
1573-1619), he was succeeded by his son, who died scarcely a month
later, and then by his sixteen-year-old grandson. The grandson had been
from his earliest youth under the influence of a eunuch, Wei
Chung-hsien, who had castrated himself. With the emperor's wet-nurse and
other people, mostly of the middle class, this man formed a powerful
group. The moment the new emperor ascended the throne, Wei was
all-powerful. He began by murdering every eunuch who did not belong to
his clique, and then murdered the rest of his opponents. Meanwhile the
gentry had concluded among themselves a defensive alliance that was a
sort of party; this party was called the Tung-lin Academy. It was
confined to literati among the gentry, and included in particular the
literati who had failed to make their way at court, and who lived on
their estates in Central China and were trying to gain power themselves.
This group was opposed to Wei Chung-hsien, who ruthlessly had every
discoverable member murdered. The remainder went into hiding and
organized themselves secretly under another name. As the new emperor had
no son, the attempt was made to foist a son upon him; at his death in
1627, eight women of the harem were suddenly found to be pregnant! He
was succeeded by his brother, who was one of the opponents of Wei
Chung-hsien and, with the aid of the opposing clique, was able to bring
him to his end. The new emperor tried to restore order at court and in
the capital by means of political and economic decrees, but in spite of
his good intentions and his unquestionable capacity he was unable to
cope with the universal confusion. There was insurrection in every part
of the country. The gentry, organized in their "Academies", and secretly
at work in the provinces, no longer supported the government; the
central power no longer had adequate revenues, so that it was unable to
pay the armies that should have marched against all the rebels and also
against external enemies. It was clear that the dynasty was approaching
its end, and the only uncertainty was as to its successor. The various
insurgents negotiated or fought with each other; generals loyal to the
government won occasional successes against the rebels; other generals
went over to the rebels or to the Manchus. The two most successful
leaders of bands were Li Tzu-ch'eng and Chang Hsien-chung. Li came from
the province of Shensi; he had come to the fore during a disastrous
famine in his country. The years around 1640 brought several widespread
droughts in North China, a natural phenomenon that was repeated in the
nineteenth century, when unrest again ensued. Chang Hsien-chung returned
for a time to the support of the government, but later established
himself in western China. It was typical, however, of all these
insurgents that none of them had any great objective in view. They
wanted to get enough to eat for themselves and their followers; they
wanted to enrich themselves by conquest; but they were incapable of
building up an ordered and new administration. Li ultimately made
himself "king" in the province of Shensi and called his dynasty "Shun",
but this made no difference: there was no distribution of land among the
peasants serving in Li's army; no plan was set into operation for the
collection of taxes; not one of the pressing problems was faced.