Laotse's Blue Pearl was already shining into poetry. Ch'u Yuan,
the first great poet, belongs to this same fourth century; it is
a long step from the little wistful ballads that Confucius
gathered to the "wild irregular meters," * splendid imagery, and
be it said, deep soul symbolism of his great poem the Li Sao
(Falling into Trouble). The theme of it is this: From earliest
childhood Ch'u Yuan had sought the Tao, but in vain. At last,
banished by the prince whose minister he had been, he retired
into the wilds, and was meditating at the tomb of Shun in Hupeh,
in what was then the far south. There the Phoenix and the Dragon
came to him, and bore him aloft, past the West Pole, past the
Milky Way, past even the Source of the Hoangho, to the Gates of
Heaven. Where, however, there was no admittance for him; and
full of sorrow he returned to earth.
------
* _Chinese Literature,_ by Dr. H. A. Giles. What is said about
the _Li Sao_ here comes from that work--except the suggestions as
to its inner meaning.
------
On the banks of the Mi-lo a fisherman met him, and asked him the
cause of his trouble.--"All the world is foul," answered Ch'u
Yuan, "and I alone am clean."--"If that is so," said the
fisherman, "why not plunge into the current, and make its
foulness clean with the infection of your purity? The Man of Tao
does not quarrel with his surroundings, but adjusts himself to
them." Ch'u Yuan took the hint: leaped into the Mi-lo;--and
yearly since then they have held the Dragon-boat Festival on the
waters of Middle China to commemorate the search for his body.--
Just how much of this is in the _Li Sao,_--where the poem ends,--
I do not clearly gather from Professor Giles's account; but the
whole story appears to me to be a magnificent Soul Symbol: of
that Path which leads you indeed on dragon flights to the borders
of the Infinite, but whose end, rightly considered, is in this
world, and to be as it were drowned in the waters of this world,
with your cleanness infecting them to be clean,--and lighting
them for all future ages with beauty, as with little dragon-boats
luminous with an inner flame. Ch'u Yuan had followers in that
and the next century; but perhaps his greatness was hardly to be
approached for a thousand years.
But we were still in Tiger-time, and with quite the worst of it
to come. Here lay the Blue Pearl scintillating rainbows up
through the heavy atmosphere; but despite its flashing and
up-fountaining those strange dying-dolphin hues and glories, you
could never have told, in Tiger-time, what it really was. The
Dragon was yet a long way off; though indeed it must be allowed
that flight, when Chwangtse wrote and Ch'u Yuan sung, was
surprised with the far churr of startling wings under the stars.
Ears intent to listen were surprised; but only for a moment;--
there was that angry howling again from the northern hills and
the southern forests: the two great Tigers of the world face to
face, tails lashing;--and between them and in their path, Chow
quite prone,--the helpless Black-haired People trembling or
chattering frivolously. Not for such an age as that Chwangtse
and Ch'u Yuan wrote, but indeed you may say for all time. What
light from the Blue Pearl could then shine forth and be seen,
would, in the thick fog and smoke-gloom, take on wild fantastic
guise; which, as we shall see, it did:--but what Chwangtse had
written remained, pure immortality, to kindle up better ages to
come. When China should be ready, Chwangtse and the Pearl would
be found waiting for her. The manvantara had not yet dawned;
but we may hurry on now to its dawning.
The Crest-Wave was still in India when China plunged into the
abyss from which her old order of ages never emerged. Soon after
Asoka came to the throne of Magadha, in 284 B.C., Su Tai, wise
prime minister to the Lord of Chao, took occasion to speak--
seriously to his royal master as to the latter's perennial little
wars with Yen.* "This morning as I crossed the river," said
he, "I saw a mussel open its shell to the sun. Straight an
oyster-catcher thrust in his bill to eat the mussel; which
promptly snapped the shell to and held the bird fast.--'If it
doesn't rain today or tomorrow,' said the oyster-catcher, 'there'll
be a dead mussel here.'--'And if you don't get out of this by
today or tomorrow,' said the mussel, 'there'll be a dead
oyster-catcher.' Meanwhile up came a fisherman and carried
them both off. I fear Ts'in will be our fisherman."
------
* The tale is taken from Dr. H.A. Gile's _Chinese Literature._
------
Which duly came to pass. Even in Liehtse's time Ts'in characteristics
were well understood: he tells a sly story of a neighboring
state much infested by robbers. The king was proud of a great
detective who kept them down; but they soon killed the Pinkerton,
and got to work again. Then he reformed himself,--and the
robbers found his kingdom no place for them. In a body they
crossed the Hoangho into Ts'in;--and bequeathed to its policy
their tendencies and aptitudes.
Ts'in had come to be the strongest state in China. Next neighbor
to the Huns, and half Hun herself, she had learned warfare in a
school forever in session. But she had had wise rulers also,
after their fashion of wisdom: who had been greatly at pains to
educate her in all the learning of the Chinese. So now she
stood, an armed camp of a nation, enamored of war, and completely
civilized in all external things. Ts'u, her strongest rival,
stretching southward to the Yangtse and beyond, had had to deal
with barbarians less virile than the Huns; and besides, dwelling
as Ts'u did among the mountains and forests of romance, she had
some heart in her for poetry and mysticism, whereas Ts'in's was
all for sheer fighting. Laotse probably had been a Ts'u man;
and also Chwangtse and Ch'u Yuan; and in after ages it was
nearly always from the forests of Ts'u that the great winds of
poetry were blown. Still--he had immense territories and
resources, and the world looked mainly to her for defense against
the northern Tiger Ts'in. Soon after Su Tai told his master the
parable of the mussel and the oyster-catcher the grand clash
came, and the era of petty wars and raidings was over. Ts'u
gathered to herself most of the rest of China for her allies, and
there was a giant war that fills the whole horizon, nearly, of
the first half of the third century B. C. New territories were
involved: the world had expanded mightily since the days of
Confucius. "First and last," says Ssema Tsien, "the allies
hurled a million men against Ts'in." But to no purpose; one
nation after another went down before those Hun-trained half-Huns
from the north-west. In 257 Chau Tsiang king of Ts'in took the
Chow capital, and relieved Nan Wang, the last of the Chows, of
the Nine Tripods of Ta Yu, the symbols of his sacred sovereignty;
--the mantle of the Caliphate passed from the House of Wen Wang
and the Duke of Chow.
The world had crumbled to pieces: there had been changes of
dynasty before, but never (in known history) a change like this.
The Chows had been reigning nearly nine hundred years; but their
system had been in the main the same as that of the Shangs and
Hias, and of Yao, Shun, and Ta Yu: it was two millenniums, a
century, and a decade old. A Chinaman, in Chau Tsiang's place,
would merely have reshaped the old order and set up a new
feudal-pontifical house instead of Chow; which could not
have lasted, because old age had worn the old system out.
But these barbarians came in with new ideas. A new empire,
a new race, a new nation was to be born.
Chau Tsiang died in 251; and even then one could not clearly
foresee what should follow. In 253 he had performed the significant
sacrifice to Heaven, a prerogative of the King-Pontiff: but he
had not assumed the title. Resistance was still in being.
His son and successor reigned three days only; and _his_
son, another nonentity, five years without claiming to be
more than King of Ts'in. But when this man died in 246, he left
the destinies of the world in the hands of a boy of thirteen;
who very quickly showed the world in whose hands its destinies
lay. Not now a King of Ts'in; not a King-Pontiff of Chow;--not,
if you please, a mere _wang_ or king at all;--but Hwangti, like
that great figure of mythological times, the Yellow Emperor, who
had but to sit on his throne, and all the world was governed and
at peace. The child began by assuming that astounding title:
_Ts'in Shi Hwangti,_ the First August Emperor: peace to the
ages that were past; let them lie in their tomb; time now
should begin again!--Childish boyish swank and braggadocio, said
the world; but very soon the world found itself mistaken.
_Hwangti;_--but no sitting on his throne in meditation, no
letting the world be governed by Tao, for him!
If you have read that delightful book _Through Hidden Shensi,_ by
Mr. F. A. Nichols, the city of Hienfang, or Changan, or, by its
modern name, Singanfu or Sian-fu in Shensi, will be much more
than a name to you. Thither it was that the Dowager Empress fled
with her court from Pekin at the time of the Boxer Rebellion;
there, long ago, Han Wuti's banners flew; there Tang Taitsong
reigned in all his glory and might; there the Banished Angel sang
in the palace gardens of Tang Hsuantsong the luckless: history
has paid such tribute of splendor to few of the cities of the
world. At Hienfang now this barbarian boy and Attila-Napoleon
among kings built his capital;--built it right splendidly,
after such ideas of splendor as a young half-Hun might cherish.
For indeed, he had but little and remote Chinese heredity
in him; was of the race of Attila and Genghiz, of Mahmoud
of Ghazna, Tamerlane, and all the world-shaking Turkish conquerors.
--Well, but these people, though by nature and function destroyers,
have been great builders too: building hugely, monumentally,
and to inspire awe, and not with the faery grace and ephemeral
loveliness of the Chinese;--though they learned the trick
of that, too,--as they learned in the west kindred qualities
from the Saracens. Grand Pekin is of their architecture;
which is Chinese with a spaciousness and monumental solemnity
added. Such a capital Ts'in She Hwangti built him at Hien
fang or Changan. In the Hall of audience of his palace within
the walls he set up twelve statues, each (I like this barbarian
touch) weighing twelve thousand pounds. Well; _we_ should
say, each costing so many thousand dollars; you need not
laugh; I am not sure but that the young Hun had the best of
it. And without the walls he built him, too, a Palace of
Delight with many halls and courtyards; in some of which
(I like this too) he could drill ten thousand men.
All of this was but the trappings and the suits of his sovereignty:
he let it be known he had the substance as well. No great
strategist himself, he commanded the services of mighty generals:
one Meng-tien in especial, a bright particular star in the
War-God's firmament. An early step to disarm the nations,
and have all weapons sent to Changan; then, with these, to
furnish forth a great standing army, which he sent out under
Meng-tien to conquer. The Middle Kingdom and the quondam Great
Powers were quieted; then south of the Yangtse the great soldier
swept, adding unknown regions to his master's domain. Then rorth
and west, till the Huns and their like had grown very tame and
wary;--and over all these realms the Emperor spread his network
of fine roads and canals, linking them with Changan: what the
Romans did for Europe in road-building, he did for China.
He had, of course, a host of relatives; and precedent loomed
large to tell him what to do with them: the precedent of the
dynasty-founders of old. Nor were they themselves likely to have
been backward in reminding him. Wu Wang had come into possession
of many feudal dominions, and had made of the members of his
family dukes and marquises to rule them. Ts'in Shi Hwangti's
empire was many times the size of Wu Wang's; so he was in a much
better position to reward the deserving. We must remember that
he was no heir to a single sovereignty, but a Napoleon with a
Europe at his feet. Ts'in and Ts'u and Tsin and the others were
old-established kingdoms, with as long a history behind them as
France or England has now; and that history had been filled with
wars, mutual antagonisms and hatreds. Chow itself was like an
Italy before Garibaldi;--with a papacy more inept, and holding
vaguer sway:--it had been at one time the seat of empire, and it
was the source of all culture. He had to deal, then, with a
heterogeneity as pronounced as that which confronted Napoleon;
but he was not of the stuff for which you prepare Waterloos. No
one dreamed that he would treat the world other than as such a
heterogeneity. His relations expected to be made the Jeromes,
Eugenes, and Murats of the Hollands, Spains, and Sicilies to
hand. The world could have conceived of no other way of dealing
with the situation. But Ts'in Shi Hwangti could, very well.
He abolished the feudal system. He abolished nationalities and
national boundaries. There should be no more Ts'in and Tsin and
Ts'u; no more ruling dukes and marquises. Instead, there should
be an entirely new set of provinces, of which he would appoint
the governors, not hereditary; and they should be responsible to
him: promotable when good, dismissable and beheadable on the
first sign of naughtiness. It was an idea of his own; he had no
foreign history to go to for models and precedents, and there had
been nothing like it in Chinese History. Napoleon hardly
conceived such a tremendous idea, much less had he the force
to carry it out. Even the achievement of Augustus was smaller;
and Augustus had before him models in the history of many
ancient empires.
Now what was the ferment behind this man's mind;--this barbarian
--for so he was--of tremendous schemes and doings? The answer is
astonishing, when one thinks of the crude ruthless human dynamo
he was. It was simply _Taoism:_ it was Laotse's Blue Pearl;--
but shining, of course, as through the heart of a very London
Particular of Hunnish-barbarian fogs. No subtleties of
mysticism; no Chwangtsean spiritual and poetry-breeding ideas,
for him!--It has fallen, this magical Pearl, into turbid and
tremendous waters, a natural potential Niagara; it has stirred,
it has infected their vast bulk into active Niagarahood. He was
on fire for the unknown and the marvelous; could conceive of no
impossible--it should go hard, he thought, but that the subtler
worlds that interpenetrate this one should be as wonderful as
this world under Ts'in Shi Hwangti. Don't argue with him; it is
dangerous!--certainly there was an Elixir of Life, decantable
into goblets, from which Ts'in Shi Hwangti might drink and become
immortal,--the First August Emperor, and the only one forever!
Certainly there were those Golden Islands eastward, where Gods
dispensed that nectar to the fortunate;--out in your ships, you
there, and search the waves for them! And certainly, too, there
were God knew what of fairylands and paradises beyond the western
desert; out, you General Meng-tien, with your great armies and
find them! He did tremendous things, and all the while was thus
dreaming wildly. From the business of state he would seize hours
at intervals to lecture to his courtiers on Tao;--I think _not_
in a way that would have been intelligible to Laotse or Chwangtse.
Those who yawned were beheaded, I believe.
How would such a prodigy in time appear to his own age? Such
cataclysmic wars as Ts'in had been waging for the conquest of
China take society first, so to say, upon its circumference,
smash that to atoms, and then go working inwards. The most
conservative and stable elements are the last and least affected.
The peasant is killed, knocked about, transported, enclaved; but
when the storm is over, and he gets back to his plough and hoe
and rice-field again, sun and wind and rain and the earth-breath
soothe him back to and confirm in what he was of old: only some
new definite spiritual impulse or the sweep of the major cycles
can change him much,--and then the change is only modification.
At the other end of society you have the Intellectuals. In
England, Oxford is the home and last refuge of lost causes. A
literary culture three times as old as modern Oxford's, as
China's was then, will be, you may imagine, fixed and conservative.
It is a mental mold petrified with age; the minds participating
must conform to it, solidify, and grow harder in the matrix
it provides than granite or adamant. We have seen how in
recent times the Confucian literati resisted the onset of
westernism. All these steam-engines and telegraphs seemed to
them fearfully crude and vulgar in comparison with the niceties
of literary style, the finesses of time-taking ceremonious
courtesies, that had been to them and to their ancestors time out
of mind the true refinements of life, and even the realities.
China rigid against the West was not a semi-barbarism resisting
civilization, but an excessively perfected culture resisting the
raw energies of one still young and, in its eyes, still with the
taint of savagery: brusque manners, materialistic valuations.
Ts'in Shi Hwangti in his day had to meet a like opposition. The
wars had broken up the structure of society, but not the long
tradition of refined learning. That had always seemed the
quarter from which light and leading must come; but it had long
ceased to be a quarter from which light or leading could come.
Mencius had been used to rate and ridicule the ruling princes;
and scholars now could not understand that Mencius and his ruling
princes and all their order were dead. They could not understand
that they were not Menciuses, nor Ts'in Shi Hwangti a kinglet
such as he had dealt with. Now Mencius had been a great man,--a
Man's son, as they say;--and very likely he and Ts'in Shi Hwangti
might have hit it off well enough. But there was no Mencius, no
Man's son, among the literati now. The whole class was wily,
polite, sarcastic, subtle, unimaginative, refined to a degree,
immovable in conservatism. The Taoist teachers had breathed in a
new spirit, but it had not reached them. How would Ts'in Shi
Hwangti, barbarian, wild Taoist, and man of swift great action,
appear to them?
Of course they could not abide him; and had not the sense to
fear. They were at their old game of wire-pulling: would have
the feudal system back, with all the old inefficiency; in the
name of Ta Yu and the Duke of Chow they would do what they might
to undo the strivings of this Ts'in upstart. So all the
subtleties of the old order were arrayed against him,--pull
devil, pull baker.
He knew it; and knew the extreme difficulty of striking any
ordinary blow to quiet them. He had challenged Time Past to the
conflict, and meant to win. Time Future was knocking at the
doors of the empire, and he intended it should come in and find a
home. His armies had crossed the Gobi, and smelt out unending
possibilities in the fabulous west; they had opened up the
fabulous south, the abode of Romance and genii and dragons. It
was like the discovery of the Americas: a new world brought over
the horizon. His great minister, Li Ssu had invented a new
script, the Lesser Seal, easier and simpler than the old one;
Meng-tien, conqueror of the Gobi, had invented the camel's-hair
brush wherewith to write gracefully on silk or cloth, instead of
difficultly with stylus on bamboo-strips as of old. It was the
morning stir of the new manvantara; and little as the emperor
might care for culture, he heard the Future crying to him. He
heard, too, the opposing murmur of the still unconquered Past.
The literati stood against him as the Papacy against Frederick II
of Sicily: a less open opposition, and one harder to meet.
He did not solve the problem till near the end of his reign. In
213 he called a great meeting in the Hall of Audience at Changan.
See the squat burly figure enthroned in grand splendor; the
twelve weighty statues arranged around; the chief civil and
military officers of the empire, thorough Taoists like himself,
gathered on one side; the Academies and Censorates, all the
leaders of the literati, on the other. The place was big enough
for a largish meeting. Minister Li Ssu rises to describe the
work of the Emperor; whereafter the latter calls for expressions
of opinion. A member of his household opines that he "surpasses
the very greatest of his predecessors": which causes a subdued
sneer to run through the ranks of scholars. One of them takes
the floor and begins to speak. Deprecates flattery guardedly, as
bad for any sovereign; considers who the greatest of these
predecessors were:--Yao, Shun, and Yu, 'Tang the Completer, Wu
Wang; and--implies a good deal. Warms to his work at last, and
grows bitter; almost openly pooh poohs all modern achievements;
respectfully--or perhaps not too respectfully--advocates a return
to the feudal--
"Silence!" roars Attila-Napoleon from his throne; and motions Li
Ssu to make answer. The answer was predetermined, one imagines.
It was an order that five hundred of the chief literati present
should retire and be beheaded, and that thousands more should be
banished. And that all books should be burned. Attila-Napoleon's
orders had a way of being carried out. This was one.
He had meanwhile been busy with the great material monument of
his reign: the Wall of China; and with cautious campaigns
yearly to the north of it; and with personal supervision of the
Commissariat Department of all his armies everywhere; and with
daily long _hikes_ to keep himself in trim. Now the Wall came in
useful. To stretch its fifteen hundred miles of length over wild
mountains and valleys in that bleak north of the world, some
little labor was needed; and scholars and academicians were
many and, for most purposes, useless; and they needed to be
brought into touch with physical realities to round out their
characters;--then let them go and build the wall. He buried
enough of them--alive, it is to be feared: an ugly Ts'in
custom, not a Chinese,--to make melons ripen in mid-winter
over their common grave; the rest he sentenced to four years
of wall-building,--which meant death. That, too, was the penalty
for concealing books. He was now in dead earnest that the Past
should go, and history begin again; to be read forever afterwards
in this order,--the Creation, the Reign of Ts'in Shi Hwangti.
But he spared books on useful subjects: that is to say, on
Medicine, Agriculture, and Magic.
So ancient China is to be seen now only as through a glass
darkly; if his great attempt had been quite successful, it would
not be to be seen at all. His crimes made no karma for China;
they are not a blot on her record;--since they were done by an
outside barbarian,--a mere publican and Ts'inner. From our
standpoint as students of history, he was a malefactor of the
first order; even when you take no account of his ruthless
cruelty to men;--and so China has considered him ever since. Yet
Karma finds ruthless agents for striking its horrible and
beneficial blows; (and woe unto them that it finds!). It seems
that Ts'in Shi Hwangti did draw the bowstring back--by this very
wickedness,--far back--that sent the arrow China tearing and
blazing out through the centuries to come. The fires in which
the books were burned were the pyre of the Phoenix,--the burning
of the astral molds,--the ignition and annihilation of the weight
and the karma of two millenniums. The Secular Bird was to burn
and be consumed to the last feather, and be turned to ashes
utterly, before she might spring up into the ether for her new
flight of ages.
One wonders what would happen if a Ts'in Shi Hwangti were to
arise and do by modern Christendom what this one did by ancient
China. I say nothing about the literati, but only about the
literature. Would burning it be altogether an evil? Nearly all
that is supremely worth keeping would live through; and its
value would be immensely enhanced. First the newspapers would
go, that sow lies broadcast, and the seeds of national hatreds.
The light literature would go, that stands between men and
thought. The books of theology would go, and the dust of
creedalism that lies so thick on men's minds. A thousand bad
precedents that keep us bound to medievalism would go with the
law-books: there would be a chance to pronounce, here and now as
human beings, on such things as capital punishment;--which
remains, though we do not recognise the fact, solely because it
has been in vogue all these centuries, and is a habit hard to
break with. History would go; yes;--but a mort of pernicious
lies would go with it. Well, well; one speaks of course in jest
(partly). But when all is said, China was not unfortunate in
having a strong giant of a man, a foreigner withal, at her head
during those crucial decades. Ts'in Shi Hwangti guarded China
through most of that perilous intermission between the cycles.
It was the good that he did that mostly lived after him.
In 210 he fell ill, took no precautions, and died,--in his
fiftieth year. A marvelous mausoleum was built for him: a
palace, with a mountain heaped on top, and the floor of it a map
of China, with the waters done in quicksilver. Whether his evil
deeds were interred with his bones, who can say?--certainly his
living wives were, and the thousands of living workmen who had
built the mausoleum. Ts'innish doings, not Chinese. In the
_Book of Odes,_ Confucius preserved a Ts'in ballad mourning over
men so buried alive with their dead king.
The strong hand lifted, rebellion broke out, and for awhile it
looked as if Chu Hia must sink into the beast again. His feeble
son got rid of Meng-tien, poisoned Li Ssu, offered the feeblest
resistance to the rebels, and then poisoned himself. After four
years of fighting,--what you might call "unpleasantness all
round,"--one Liu Pang achieved the throne. He had started life
as a beadle; joined Ts'in Shi Hwangti's army, and risen to be a
general; created himself after the emperor's death Prince of
Han; and now had the honor to inaugurate, as Emperor Kaotsu, the
greatest of the Chinese dynasties.
In the two-fifties strong barbarous Ts'in had swallowed unmanly
worn-out China, and for half a century had been digesting the
feast. Then--to mix my metaphors a little--China flopped up to
the surface again, pale, but smiling blandly. In the sunlight
she gathered strength and cohesion, and proceeded presently to
swallow Ts'in and everything else in sight; and emerged soon
young, strong, vigorous, and glowing-hearted to the conquest of
many worlds in the unknown. What was Ts'in, now is Shensi
Province, the very Heart of Han: the Shensi man today is the Son
of Han, _Ts'in_ Englished; but in Shensi, the old Ts'in, in
their tenderest moods, they call it _Han_ still,--the proudest
most patriotic name there is for it.
Not at once was the Golden Age of Han to dawn: half a
thirteen-decade cycle from the opening of the manvantara in
the two-forties had to pass first. Ts'in Shi Hwangti had mapped
out a great empire; it fell to the Hans to consolidate it.
Han Kaotsu followed somewhat in the footsteps of his predecessor,
less the cruelty and barbarism, and most of the strength.
The sentiment of the empire was Chinese, not Ts'innish; so,
though not a brilliant or always a fortunate soldier, he
was able to assert his sway over the greater part of China
Proper. Chinesism had spread over territories never before
Chinese, and wherever it had spread, the people were glad
of a Chinese dynasty; besides, his rule was tactful and
kindly. They were glad that the Gods of the Soil of Han
were to be worshipped now, and those of Ts'in disthroned;
and that the Ts'in edicts were annulled;--as they were with
one important exception: those relating to literature. A
cultureless son of the proletariat himself. Han Kaotsu felt no
urge towards resurrecting that; and perhaps it was as well that
the sleeping dogs should be let lie awhile. The wonder is that
the old nationalities did not reassert themselves; but they did
not, to any extent worth mentioning; and perhaps this is the
best proof of Han Kaotsu's real strength. Ts'in Shi Hwangti had
dealt soundly with the everlasting Hun in his time; but when he
died, the Hun recovered. They kept Han Kaotsu busy, so that his
saddle, as he said, was his throne. They raided past the
capital and down into Ssechuan; once very nearly captured the
emperor; and had to be brought out at last with a Chinese
princess for the Hun king. Generally speaking, the Hans would
have lived at peace with them if they could, and were ready to
try better means of solving the problem than war. But it
certainly was a problem; for in these Huns we find little traces
of human nature that you could work upon. But China was a big
country by that time, and only a part of it, comparatively small,
suffered from the Huns. For the rest, Han Kaotsu was popular,
his people were happy, and his reign of twelve years was a
breathing-time in which they gathered strength. He kept a
hundred thousand workmen busy on public works, largely road- and
bridge-building: a suspension bridge that he built, a hundred
and fifty yards long, and crossing a valley five hundred feet
below, is still in use,--or was during the last century. He died
in 194.
He was succeeded, nominally, by his son Han Hweiti; really by
his widow, the empress Liu Chi: one of the three great women who
have ruled China. At this time the Huns, under their great Khan
Mehteh, were at the height of their power. Khan Mehteh made
advances to the Empress: "I should like," said he, "to exchange
what I have for what I have not." You and I may think he meant
merely a suggestion for mutual trade; but she interpreted it
differently, thanked him kindly, but declined the flattering
proposal on the score of her age and ugliness. Her hair and
teeth, she begged him to believe, were quite inadequate, and made
it impossible for her to think of changing her condition.--I do
not know whether it was vanity or policy.
But it was she, or perhaps her puppet son the emperor, who
started the great Renaissance. A commission was appointed for
restoring the literature: among its members, K'ung An-kuo,
twelfth in descent from Confucius. Books were found, that
devotion had hidden in dry wells and in the walls of houses; one
Fu Sheng, ninety years old, repeated the Classics word for word
to the Commissioner, all from his memory. The restrictions gone,
a mighty reaction set in; and China was on fire to be her
literary self again. A great ball was set rolling; learning
went forward by leaps and bounds. The enthusiasm, it must be
said, took directions legitimate and the reverse;--bless you, why
should any written page at all be considered lost, when there
were men in Han with inventive genius of their own, and a pretty
skill at forgery? The Son of Heaven was paying well; to it,
then, minds and calligraphic fingers!
So there are false chapters of Chwangtse, while many true ones
have been lost. And I can never feel sure of Confucius' own
_Spring and Autumn Annals,_ wherein he thought lay his highest
claim to human gratitude, and the composition of which the really
brilliant-minded Mencius considered equal to the work of Ta Yu in
bridling China's Sorrow;--but which, as they come down to us,
are not impressive.--The tide rolled on under Han Wenti, from 179
to 156: a poet himself, a man of peace, and a reformer of the
laws in the direction of mercy. Another prosperous reign
followed; then came the culmination of the age in the Golden
Reign of Han Wuti, from 140 to 86.
The cyclic impulse had been working mainly on spiritual and
intellectual planes: Ssema Tsien, the Father of Chinese History,
gives gloomy pictures of things economic.*
"When the House of Han arose," says Ssema, "the evils of their
predecessors had not passed away. Husbands still went off to the
wars; old and young were employed in transporting food,
production was almost at a standstill, and money was scarce. The
Son of Heaven had not even carriage horses of the same color;
the highest civil and military authorities rode in bullock carts;
the people at large knew not where to lay their heads. The
coinage was so heavy and cumbersome that the people themselves
started a new issue at a fixed standard of value. But the laws
were lax, and it was impossible to prevent the grasping from
coining largely, buying largely, and then holding for a rise in
the market. Prices went up enormously:"--it sounds quite modern
and civilized, doesn't it?--"rice sold at a thousand cash per
picul; a horse cost a hundred ounces of silver."
------
* The passages quoted are taken from Dr. Giles's work on
_Chinese Literature._
------
Under the Empress Liu Chi and her successors these conditions
were bettered; until, when a half cycle had run its course, and
Han Wuti had been some twenty years on the throne, prosperity
came to a culmination. Says Ssema Tsien:
"The public granaries were well-stocked; the government
treasuries full... The streets were thronged with the horses of
the people, and on the highroads, whole droves were to be seen,
so that it became necessary to forbid the public use of mares.
Village elders ate meat and drank wine. Petty government
clerkships lapsed from father to son, and the higher offices of
state were treated as family heirlooms. For a spirit of
self-respect and reverence for the law had gone abroad, and a
sense of charity and duty towards one's neighbor kept men
aloof from disgrace and crime."
There had been in Kansuh, the north-westernmost province of China
Proper, a people called the Yueh Chi or White Scythians, whom the
Huns had driven into the far west; by this time they were
carving themselves an empire out of the domains of the Parthians,
and penetrating into north-west India, but Han Wuti knew nothing
of that. All that was known of them was, that somewhere on the
limits of the world they existed, and were likely to be still at
loggerheads with their ancient foes the Huns. Han Wuti had now
been on the throne seven years, and was and had been much
troubled by the Hun problem: he thought it might help to solve
it if those lost Yueh Chi could be raked up out of the unknown
and made active allies. To show the spirit of the age, I will
tell you the story of Chang Ch'ien, the general whom he sent to
find them.
Chang Ch'ien set out in 139; traversed the desert, and was duly
captured by the Huns. Ten years they held him prisoner; then he
escaped. During those ten years he had heard no news from home:
a new emperor might be reigning, for aught he knew; or Han Wuti
might have changed his plans. Such questions, however, never
troubled him: he was out to find the Yueh Chi for his master,
and find them he would. He simply went forward; came presently
to the kingdom of Tawan, in the neighborhood of Yarkand; and
there preached a crusade against the Huns. Unsuccessfully: the
men of Tawn knew the Huns, but not Han wuti, who was too far away
for a safe ally; and they proposed to do nothing in the matter.
Chang Ch'ien considered. Go back to China?--Oh dear no! there
must be real Yueh C'hi somewhere, even if these Tawanians were
not they. On he went, and searched that lonely world until he
did find them. They liked the idea of Hun-hurting; but again,
considered China too far away for practical purposes. He struck
down into Tibet; was captured again; held prisoner a year;
escaped again,--and got back to Changan in 126. A sadder and a
wiser man, you might suppose; but nothing of the kind! Full, on
the contrary, of brilliant schemes; full of the wonder and rumor
of the immense west. These he poured into Han Wuti's most
sympathetic ears; and the emperor started now in real earnest
upon his Napoleonic career.
The frontier was no longer at the Great Wall. Only the
other day Sir Aurel Stein discovered, in the far west, the
long straight furrows traced by the feet of Han Wuti's sentinels
on guard; the piles of reed-stalks, at regular intervals,
set along the road for fire-signals; documents giving details
as to the encampments, the clothes and arrows served out
to the soldiers, the provisions made for transforming armies
of conquest into peaceful colonies. All these things the
sands covered and preserved.
And behind these outposts was a wide empire full of splendor
outward and inward; full of immense activities, in literature,
in engineering, in commerce. New things and ideas came in from
the west: international influences to reinforce the flaming up
of Chinese life.
The moving force was still Taoism; the Blue Pearl, sunk deep in
the now sunlit waters of the common consciousness, was flashing
its rainbows. Ts'in Shi Hwangti, for all his greatness, had been
an uncouth barbarian; Han Wuti was a very cultured gentleman of
literary tastes,--a poet, and no mean one. He too was a Taoist;
an initiate of the Taoism of the day; which might mean in part
that he had an eye to the Elixir of Life; but it also meant
(at least) that he had a restless, exorbitant, and gorgeous
imagination. Such, indeed, inflamed the whole nation; which was
rich, prosperous, energetic, progressive, and happy. Ts'in ideas
of bigness in architecture had taken on refinement in Chinese
hands; the palaces and temples of Han Wuti are of course all
lost, but by all accounts they must have been wonderful and
splendid. Very little of the art comes down: there are some
bas-reliefs of horses, fine and strong work, realistic, but with
redeeming nobleness. How literature had revived may be gathered
from this: in Han Wuti's Imperial Library there were 3123
volumes of the Classics and commentaries thereupon; 2705 on
Philosophy; 1318 of Poetry; 2528 on Mathematics; 868 on
Medicine; 790 on the Science of War. His gardens at Changan
were famous; he had collectors wandering the world for new and
ornamental things to stock them; very likely we owe many of our
garden plants and shrubs to him. He consecrated mountains and
magnificent ceremonies; and for the sake of the gods and genii
appeared as flaming splendors over Tai-hsing and the other sacred
heights. For the light of Romance falls on him; he is a shining
half faery figure.--Outwardly there was pomp, stately manners,
pageantry, high magnificence; inwardly, a burning-up of the
national imagination to ensoul it. The Unseen, with all its
mystery and awe or loveliness, was the very nearly visible: not
a pass nor lake nor moor nor forest but was crowded with the
things of which wonder is made. Muh Wang, the Chow king, eight
centuries before, had ridden into the West and found the garden
of that Faery Queen whose Azure Birds of Compassion fly out into
this world to sweeten the thoughts of men. Bless you, Han Wuti
married the lady, and had her to abide peaceably in his palace,
and to watch with him
"The lanterns glow vermeil and gold,
Azure and green, the Spring nights through,
When loud the pageant galeons drew
To clash in mimic combating,
And their dark shooting flames to strew
Over the lake at Kouen Ming."
From about 130 to 110 Han Wuti was Napoleonizing: bringing
in the north-west; giving the Huns a long quietus in 119;
conquering the south with Tonquin; the southern coast provinces,
and the lands towards Tibet. Ssema Tsien tells us that "mountains
were hewn through for many miles to establish a trade-route
through the south-west and open up those remote regions";
that was a scheme of Chang Ch'ien's, who had ever an eye to
penetrating to India.
There was a dark side to it. Vast sums of money were eaten up,
and estravagance in private life was encouraged. Says Ssema:
"From the highest to the lowest, everyone vied with his neighbor
in lavishing money on houses and appointments and apparel,
altogether beyond his means. Such is the everlasting law of the
sequence of prosperity and decay.... Merit had to give way to
money; shame and scruples of conscience were laid aside; laws
and punishments were administered with severer hand."
It is a very common thing to see signs of decline and darkness in
one's own age; and Ssema himself had no cause to love the
administration of Han Wuti; under which he had been punished
rather severely for some offense. Still, what he says is more or
less what you would expect the truth to be. And you will note
him historian of the life of the people; not mere recounter of
court scandals and chronicler of wars: conscious, too, of the
law of cycles;--all told, something a truer historian than we
have seen too much of in the West.--Where, indeed, we are wedded
to politics, and must have our annalists chronicle above all
things what we call political growth; not seeing that it is but
a circle, and squirreling round valiantly in a cage to get
perpetually in high triumph to the place you started from; a
foolish externality at best. But real History mirrors for us the
motions of the Human Spirit and the Eternal.
I said that what Ssema tells us is what you would expect the
truth to be; this way:--After half a cycle of that adventurous
and imaginative spirit, eyes jaundiced a little would surely find
excuse enough for querulous vision. There is, is there not,
something Elizabethan in that Chang Ch'ien, taking the vast void
so gaily, and not to be quenched by all those fusty years
imprisoned among the Huns, but returning only the more fired and
heady of imagination? If he was a type of Han Wuti's China, we
may guess Ssema was not far out, and that vaulting ambition was
overleaping itself a little; that men were buying automobiles
who by good rights should have ridden in a wheelbarrow. Things
did not go quite so well with the great emperor after his twenty
flaming Napoleonic years; his vast mountain-cleaving schemes
were left unfinished; Central Asia grew more troublesome again,
and he had to call off Chang Ch'ien from an expedition into India
by way of Yunnan and Tibet and the half-cleaved mountains, to
fight the old enemy in the north-west. But until the thirteen
decades were passed, and Han Chaoti, his successor, had died in
63 B.C., the vast designs were still upspringing; high and
daring enterprise was still the characteristic of the Chinese
mind. The thirteen decades, that is, from the accession of Han
Hueiti and the beginning of the Revival of Literature in 194.