China
John Keay

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For Julia

The Master said, ‘Is it not a pleasure, having learned something, to try it out at due intervals? Is it not a joy to have like-minded friends come from afar? Is it not gentlemanly not to take offence when others fail to appreciate your abilities?’

Confucius, The Analects, Book I, i¹

He who does not forget the past is master of the present.

Sima Qian, Shiji²

Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

INTRODUCTION

1 RITES TO WRITING

2 SAGES AND HEROES

3 THE FIRST EMPIRE

4 HAN ASCENDANT

5 WITHIN AND BEYOND

6 WANG MANG AND THE HAN REPRISE

7 FOUR HUNDRED YEARS OF VICISSITUDE

8 SUI, TANG AND THE SECOND EMPIRE

9 HIGH TANG

10 RECONFIGURING THE EMPIRE

11 CAVING IN

12 BY LAND AND SEA

13 THE RITES OF MING

14 THE MANCHU CONQUEST

15 DEATH THROES OF EMPIRE

16 REPUBLICANS AND NATIONALISTS

EPILOGUE

Keep Reading

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

About the Author

By the Same Author

Praise

About the Publisher

INTRODUCTION
REWRITING THE PAST

CHINA’S ECONOMIC RESURGENCE IN THE POST-MAO era has not been without its casualties. Gone are the Chairman’s portraits, the mass parades of flag-waving workers and the hoe-toting brigades on their collectivised farms. Apartment blocks, tightly mustered and regimentally aligned, perform the new choreography; flyovers vault the rice paddies, cable cars abseil the most sacred of mountains, hydrofoils ruffle the lakes beloved of poets. Familiar features in the historical landscape have either disappeared or been reconfigured as visitor attractions. Iconised for a market as much domestic as foreign, they make inviting targets for another demolitionist fraternity, that of international academe. When history itself is being so spectacularly rewritten, nothing is sacred. The Great Wall, the Grand Canal, the Long March, even the Giant Panda? Myths, declare the revisionist scholars, facile conflations, figments of foreign ignorance now appropriated to gratify Chinese chauvinism.

Contrary to the tourist brochures, the Great Wall has been shown to be not ‘over 2,000 years old’, not ‘6,000 miles [9,700 kilometres] long’, not ‘visible from outer space’ – not visible on the ground in many places – and never to have been a single continuous structure.¹ It did not keep out marauding nomads nor was that its original purpose; instead of defending and defining Chinese territory, it was probably designed to augment and project it.² Those sections near Beijing that may conveniently be inspected today have been substantially reconstructed for just such inspection; and the rubble and footings from which they rise are those of Ming fortifications no older than the palaces in the Forbidden City or London’s Hampton Court.

Likewise the Grand Canal. Reaching from the Yangzi delta to the Yellow River (Huang He), a distance of about 1,100 kilometres (700 miles), the canal is supposed to have served as a main artery between China’s productive heartland and its brain of government. Laid out in the seventh century AD, it did indeed connect the rice-surplus south to the often cereal-deficient north, so fusing the two main geographical components of China’s political economy and supplying a much-needed highway for bulk transport and imperial progresses. Yet it, too, was never a single continuous construction, more a series of well-engineered waterways interconnecting the various deltaic arms of the Yangzi, and elsewhere linking that river’s tributaries to those of the Huai River, whose tributaries were in turn linked to the wayward Yellow River. The system was rarely operational throughout its entirety because of variable water flow, the rainy season in the north not coinciding with that in the south; colossal manpower was needed to haul the heavily laden transports and work the locks; dredging and maintenance proved prohibitively expensive; and so frequent were the necessary realignments of the system that there are now almost as many abandoned sections of Grand Canal as there are of Great Wall.³

More controversially, the Long March, that 1934–35 epic of heroic communist endeavour, has been disparaged as neither as long nor as heroic as supposed. It is said the battles and skirmishes en route were exaggerated, if not contrived, for propaganda purposes; and of the 80,000 troops who began the march in Jiangxi in the south-east, only 8,000 actually foot-slogged their way right round China’s mountainous perimeter to Yan’an in the north-west. As for the rest, some perished but most simply dropped out long before the 9,700-kilometre (6,000-mile) march was completed. And of those who did complete it, one at least seldom marched; Mao, we are assured, was borne along on a litter.⁴

Maybe the Giant Panda, a byword for endangered icons if ever there was one, is on safer ground. In the 1960s and ’70s the nearly extinct creature, together with some acrobatic ping-pong players, emerged as a notable asset in the diplomatic arsenal of the beleaguered People’s Republic. Much sought after by zoos worldwide, the pandas, especially females, were freely bestowed on deserving heads of state. The presentations were described as ‘friendship gestures’, and experimental breeding was encouraged as if a successful issue might somehow cement the political entente. But not any more. From sparse references in classic texts such as the ‘Book of Documents’ (Shu-jing or Shangshu, bits of which may date from the second millennium BC) a pedigree of undoubted antiquity has been constructed for the panda and a standard name awarded to it. Now known as the Daxiongmao or ‘Great Bear-Cat’, its habits have been found sufficiently inoffensive to merit its promotion as a ‘universal symbol of peace’; its numbers have stabilised, perhaps increased, thanks to zealous conservation; and lest anyone harbour designs on such a national paragon, no longer may Giant Pandas be expatriated. All are Chinese pandas. Foreign zoos may only lease them, the lease being for ten years, the rental fee around $2 million per annum, and any cubs born during the rental being deemed to inherit the nationality of their mother – and the same terms of contract. Like its piebald image as featured in countless brand logos, the Giant Panda has itself become a franchise.

None of this is particularly surprising or regrettable. All history is subject to revision, and the Chinese having taken a greater interest in their history – and for longer – than any other civilisation, theirs is a history that has been more often rewritten than any other. During the last century alone the history books had to be reconfigured at least four times – to create a Nationalist mythology, to accommodate the Marxist dialectic of class struggle, to conform to Maoist insistence on the dynamics of proletarian revolution, and to justify market socialism’s conviction that wealth creation is compatible with authoritarian rule.

A much-publicised claim that modern China has inherited ‘the longest continuous civilisation in the world’ (its length being anything from 3,000 to 6,000 years, depending on the credibility of the publication) should perhaps be subjected to the same forensic scrutiny as phrases like ‘the Great Wall’ and ‘the Giant Panda’. Though now widely deployed by the Chinese themselves, the claim sounds suspiciously like another glib foreign generalisation. Three to six thousand years of continuous civilisation could simply indicate three to six thousand years of what others have found a continuously perplexing civilisation. Certainly the nature of that civilisation needs careful definition; so do the motives of those who have championed it; and the insistence on continuity seems particularly suspect in the light of the last century’s revolutionary ructions. As with the segmented Great Wall and the surviving snippets of Grand Canal, the discontinuities in China’s record may deserve as much attention as the proud concept into which they have been conflated.

One continuity is obvious: Chinese scholars have been obsessed by their country’s past almost since it had one. Like other societies, the ancient Chinese subscribed to the idea that their land had once hosted a primordial perfection, a prehistoric Eden, characterised in this instance by a virtuous hierarchy in which cosmic, natural and human forces operated in harmonious accord. To guide mankind to a new realisation of this idealised past, it was history, not revelation, which provided directions; and it did so by affording solutions to present dilemmas and insights into the future that were derived from written texts. Ancient compilations, such as the ‘Book of Documents’, thus acquired canonical status and were treated to the respect, as well as the exegetical analysis, reserved in other lands for the scriptures of divine revelation. Familiarity with the standard texts was not just a mark of scholarship but a basic indicator of Chinese identity and a measure of cultural proficiency.

It was also an essential requisite for government service. Precedent and practice, culled from the textual records, came to serve as the currency of political debate. Correctly interpreted, historical precedent could legitimise a ruler, sanction an initiative or forewarn of a disaster. It might also be manipulated so as to legitimise a usurper, sanction repression or forestall reform. Among the educated elite it sometimes served as a coded critique whereby, through reference to the past, unfavourable comment might be passed on current policies without necessarily incurring the wrath of those responsible for them. Conversely it could be officially used to confuse an issue or offload responsibility.

In 1974, by way of discrediting Lin Biao (or Lin Piao, the military man previously named as Mao’s successor), the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party mounted a campaign against Confucius (Kong Qiu), the cultural colossus most closely associated with the whole textual tradition. What the fifth-century BC sage had in common with the twentieth-century revolutionary was, of course, ‘reactionary’ leanings. But since, in the case of Lin Biao, these were not immediately obvious to cadres acccustomed to idolising Lin as the most ‘progressive’ of communist leaders, it was necessary that he be paraded for censure alongside a teacher whose doctrines, in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution, could not be mistaken for other than the rankest form of reaction. The principle, borrowed from ballistics and familiar to all China-watchers, was simply that of aiming at a far target to hit a near one. Becoming an official campaign, this ‘Anti-Lin Biao–anti-Confucius’ linkage duly induced a rush of hot air from Marxist study groups which deflected attention from the otherwise mysterious demise and disgrace of the unfortunate Marshal Lin.⁵

In a century as rife with revolutions (Nationalist, communist, cultural, market-socialist) as the last, the revisionists have sometimes been pushed to keep up with the pace of events; but their predicament is nothing new. The onus of constantly reviewing the historical record, of refining, reinterpreting and extending it, has weighed heavily on every Chinese rulership since time immemorial. At periods of dynastic change it could be particularly acute, but even in the golden age of Tang (AD 618–907) the management of history ranked in terms of political sensitivity on a par with the management of the economy today. Historiography was not some scholarly pastime but a vital function of government. Within the imperial bureaucracy the Director of the Historiographical Office enjoyed all the perquisites of great seniority and commanded a large and highly qualified staff that generated copious paperwork (and before that, woodwork, slivers of bamboo being the earliest form of stationery).

An analysis of official history-writing under the Tang has revealed the painstaking compilation methods employed by the Historiography Office to extend the historical record using near-contemporary sources.⁶ A first stage saw material drawn from the formal Court Diaries and the Record of Administrative Affairs being supplemented by submissions from various government departments to produce the summation of official transactions known as the Daily Calendar. These Daily Calendars were then distilled into the year-on-year Veritable Records, which in turn were used to produce the reign-on-reign National Histories, which in turn formed the basis of each dynasty’s Standard History.

Naturally this cumulative approach involved much repetition; and while, perhaps mercifully, only a fraction of all this material survives, that which is lost can to some extent be reconstructed from its quotation elsewhere. Given the compilation of parallel records by the empire’s numerous provincial governments, given the existence in various forms of other, non-official, texts, and given a tendency to gloss and extrapolate from all these materials for the purpose of compiling encyclopedias, anthologies, biographical dictionaries and other massive compendia, it cannot be said that China’s history is short on documentation.

SPADEWORK

No apology is offered, then, for adding another divot to this tumulus of erudition. The intention here is simply to make China’s history more accessible, while the hope is to make it more relevant.

Those transmitted texts, official or otherwise, deal almost entirely with the activities of China’s ruling elite and are available to us only in a form ready edited and packaged by that elite. More exciting fare, fresh picked from the Chinese landscape and untainted by scholarly processing, was once thought to be at a premium. When in the early twentieth century archaeological explorers from Europe stumbled upon ancient Buddhist sites sand-buried along the Silk Road in Gansu and Xinjiang provinces, an unseemly gold rush ensued to secure for the museums of Britain, France, Germany and Russia a share of what was supposedly China’s last great artistic and documentary treasure trove. In fact, the Silk Road bonanza proved to be just the beginning of an archaeological explosion. Laid bare later in the twentieth century were the Anyang oracle bones, the Tarim Mummies, a whole gamut of neolithic sites, and most famously ‘the terracotta army’ and numerous royal tombs of the Han period (202 BC–AD 220). China’s history, long enough already, has been getting longer by the year. Existing accounts need constant updating; and new discoveries have now become so embarrassingly abundant that the resultant time lag between the dig and the publication of its report leaves works-in-progress, like this one, in danger of being outdated before they are written.

‘When digging into the soil of the North China plain or northern Chekiang [Zhejiang], centres of Chinese civilisation from the earliest times onward,’ remarked Erik Zurcher in the 1950s, ‘it is actually difficult not to find anything’.⁷ Zurcher was writing about the spread of Buddhism in the fourth and fifth centuries AD. Adherents of the new faith evidently had an uncanny knack of unearthing Buddhist relics in Chinese soil just when opponents were deploring the Indian, and so non-Chinese, origins of their faith. Such finds, besides supposedly authenticating Buddhism’s long association with China, were considered highly auspicious. Just as the fall of an imperial dynasty was usually accompanied by a series of depressing portents – floods, drought, locusts, etc. – so the rise of a new dynasty was heralded by a rash of favourable omens, none more so than the excavation of some hoary artefact. Since antiquity itself was so highly regarded, the discovery of, say, a Bronze Age urn clearly signified Heaven’s approval of whatever new dispensation laid claim to its discovery.

Something of the same thinking may have influenced Chinese archaeology in the mid-twentieth century. The Nationalist revival had its own need of historical legitimisation, and so did the Republic of China, declared in 1912, and the People’s Republic, in 1949. Scholars and officials brought up on the Standard Histories of the historiographical tradition and now fired by the spirit of national reassertion knew to look for the origins of Chinese civilisation in the north of the country. Resources were duly directed there and, as noted by Zurcher, diggers in that region could hardly fail to be rewarded. To general delight, the spadework yielded ample corroboration of the authenticity and antiquity of an ancient Chinese civilisation in the northern provinces, especially the Yellow River (Huang He) basin, which corresponded to that described in the earliest texts and histories. Only incorrigible sceptics, mostly from outside China, wondered whether devoting as much archaeological attention and resources to other parts of China, such as the Yangzi basin or the south, might not yield comparable finds that would necessarily qualify this northern bias in early Chinese history.

Such doubts have since been vindicated. By the end of the twentieth century the expansion in archaeological activity compared well with the exponential growth being enjoyed by the economy. Indeed, the two were related. Funds were now available for more widespread excavation, and because so much of the Chinese landscape was being torn up anyway for construction projects, the finds came thick and fast. On the other hand, their study and conservation acquired still greater urgency. Mechanical excavators might unearth in minutes what spadework might not turn up in years, and just as quickly they might destroy it.

A typical example was provided by a 1970s hospital extension at Mawangdui on the outskirts of Changsha, capital of the southern province of Hunan. Construction of the hospital’s new ward ‘accidentally disturbed’ an adjacent mound that archaeologists had earmarked for attention back in the 1950s.⁸ The matter was reported to the provincial authorities, and when orders were issued for immediate excavation, a swarm of Mao-suited archaeologists descended on the site and duly reclaimed one of the greatest hoards of modern times. There were three immense tombs dating from the second century BC, and each contained a nest of monumental coffins, within one of which were found a well-preserved female corpse and the oldest silk paintings and maps ever to have been discovered in China. Also recovered were texts containing early versions of some of the Chinese classics and enough artefacts, apparel, insignia, lacquerware, jades, weapons and other grave goods to justify the construction of Changsha’s grand new museum – and then fill it. In 1983 another mound, this time in the middle of Guangzhou (Canton), the capital of neighbouring Guangdong province, yielded magnificent tombs of similar period that prompted presentation of the site itself as an imaginative museum within walking distance of the city’s main railway station. Elsewhere in Guangzhou, site clearance for the erection of a plaza has lately revealed a 2,000-year-old wooden watergate. The oldest in the world and now comfortably encased within the gleaming new plaza, it may be reached by taking the elevator down to floor B1.

Opulent finds like these located far from the supposed epicentre of ancient Chinese civilisation in the Yellow River basin call for radical revision of received ideas about what the rest of China was like before, and immediately after, the birth of Christ. But with more new discoveries being reported every week, no such bold reappraisal has yet been presented. The Cambridge History of Ancient China, published in 1999, frankly admitted defeat. Unable to reconcile the literary sources with these new ‘material’ sources – or unable to find a contributor prepared to have a go – the editors compromised by commissioning parallel chapters for the same periods, one based on textual sources and the next on archaeological sources. Sometimes they support one another, sometimes not. Early Chinese history still awaits a convincing rewrite.

CRADLE, CORE AND BEYOND

While making but a modest contribution on this front, the present work is designed to meet the much more pressing need for an overall history of China that does not take for granted a foreknowledge of the subject or an acquaintance with the Chinese language. A glance at the existing literature in English suggests an international consensus, not to say conspiracy, to make the subject as daunting and incomprehensible as possible. This state of affairs, in part a legacy of competitive scholarship in the colonial era, will be fearlessly addressed; for China’s history is long enough and its culture challenging enough without gratuitous complication. Confronting this challenge may mean taxing the reader, but not, it is earnestly hoped, without rewarding his or her effort.

As lamentable as the obfuscations are the depths of ignorance from which foreigners approach Chinese history. Most people could name half a dozen Roman emperors but few could name a single Chinese emperor. Confronted with an array of Chinese proper names in their Romanised spellings, English-speakers experience a recognition problem, like a selective form of dyslexia, that makes the names all seem the same. Unfamiliarity lies at the root of the problem, particularly in respect of Chinese geography, chronology and translation conventions. It can best be overcome by diligence and long exposure, but at the risk of irritating those already superior to such difficulties, what follows (and the accompanying tabulations) may help as an introduction.

For administrative purposes China is today divided into twenty-eight provinces. A few of these provinces are of quite recent provenance, and in all cases the areas they denote have undergone change. But most have a long pedigree, and it is not therefore unreasonable to employ the provincial terminology retrospectively so as to provide a geographical framework for the whole spread of Chinese history.

Fortunately the names of the provinces often contain helpful clues as to their whereabouts. Bei, dong, nan and xi are Romanised renderings of the Chinese words for ‘north’, ‘east’, ‘south’ and ‘west’, and shan is ‘mountain’. Shandong (‘Mountain-east’, once spelled ‘Shantung’) is therefore the province with a rugged peninsula below Beijing. It originally extended inland as far as the north–south Taihang mountains; hence ‘east of the mountains’ or ‘Mountain-east’. By the same dazzling logic, Shanxi province (‘Mountain-west’) is its counterpart to the west of the Taihang range.

West of Shanxi is the rather easily confused Shaanxi province (here denoting its position to the west of a district called Shaanzhou). All three provinces abut, or once abutted, the fickle Huang He (Yellow River). So too, fingering between Shandong and Shanxi, does the province of Hebei (‘River-north’, the river being the self-same Huang He). Naturally the province to the south of the river is therefore Henan (‘River-south’), although because the river has so often switched course, a bit of Henan is now on the north bank. These five northern provinces (Henan, Hebei, Shaanxi, Shanxi and Shandong) engross the entire extent of the rich alluvial plain of the lower Yellow River basin which, according to textual tradition, was where China’s earliest history was enacted. They have thus been traditionally regarded as the ‘cradle’ provinces of Chinese civilisation and were the focus of those mid-twentieth-century archaeologists.

South of Henan come more provincial twins. In the case of Hubei and Hunan, the Hu- denotes the great ‘lake’, or ‘lakes’ into which the lower Yangzi spills before meandering on to the coast. These two provinces therefore lie respectively north and south of the great lakes and so, roughly, north and south of the Yangzi itself. South again, and completing this spine of ‘core’ China come Guangdong and Guangxi. Guang means something like ‘enlarged (southern) territory’. These two once ‘enlarged’ provinces in the extreme south thus lie respectively east (dong) and west (-xi) of one another. Beyond them in the South China Sea, the island province of Hainan is the country’s southernmost extremity.

Returning north towards the Shandong peninsula by way of the coast, the provinces of Fujian, Zhejiang and Jiangsu plus adjacent Jiangxi and Anhui are smaller, and their names are not so obviously derived from compass bearings. Some contain directional elements, but most have been formed by combining the names of two of their more important centres. Thus Fujian combines Fuzhou, its port-capital, with Jianning, a city at Fujian’s inland extremity.⁹ The -zhou ending, incidentally, once indicated an ‘island’ of ‘Chinese’ settlement in what was otherwise a still unacculturated region; it then came to denote the district that pertained to it, and now more commonly the principal city of the region. This same -zhou was once rendered in English as -chow or -choo; hence nineteenth-century toponyms like ‘Foochow’ (Fuzhou), ‘Soochow’ (Suzhou), ‘Hangchow’ (Hangzhou), etc. More obviously, ‘Beijing’ (Peking, Pekin, etc.), the national metropolis within Hebei province, translates as ‘north-capital’, and Nanjing (Nanking), on the Yangzi in Jiangsu province, as ‘south-capital’ – which until 1937 it was.

All the provinces mentioned so far, plus those of Guizhou in the southwest and Sichuan, a vast region comprising most of the upper Yangzi basin, are sometimes said to constitute central, inner or ‘core’ China. Terms like ‘central’ and ‘inner’ are highly controversial, no distinction between centre and periphery, or inner and outer China, being either physically convincing, historically consistent or politically acceptable. It may, though, be helpful to adopt this phrasing to distinguish the seventeen productive, populous and long-integrated ‘core’ provinces, which have already been mentioned, from the traditionally less productive, less populous and less historically integrated provinces lying at the extremities of modern China.

Into this latter category fall the remaining eleven provinces, many of them large territories of sharp contrasts and emotive repute. Taiwan, a long island off the coast of Fujian, was once known to Europeans as Formosa. It was subsequently alienated from the mainland by Japanese occupation in the first half of the twentieth century and Nationalist occupation in the second half. About as far from Taiwan as Texas is from Florida, Yunnan in the south-west has also had a chequered relationship with the rest of the country. Straddling the climatic divide between torrid South-East Asia and arid central Asia, its forests are frequented by the odd elephant while yak grunt across its high passes. Farther north and west, the howling wastes and azure skies are those of Qinghai and Xizang, which together comprised the vast plateau region once vaguely known to non-Chinese as Tibet. Today Tibet is usually identified just with Xizang. North and west again, all that remains is Xinjiang. Largely desert though far from deserted, this is the largest of all China’s provinces and the remotest. It was once known to the Chinese as ‘the Western Regions’ and to non-Chinese as Eastern or Chinese Turkestan. The current designation simply means ‘the New Territories’ (Xin-jiang); indigenous activists would prefer ‘Uighuristan’, they being largely Muslim, Turkic-speaking Uighurs.

Returning east along China’s northern perimeter, elongated Gansu province and diminutive Ningxia province offer oasis-dotted access routes from the ‘core’ provinces into Xinjiang and Mongolia respectively. Sandwiched between the swamps of Qinghai and the sands of the Gobi, the east–west ‘Gansu corridor’ has become as much a cliché in Chinese history-writing as ‘the Tibetan plateau’. Ningxia, with a north–south axis, is strung along the upper reaches of the Yellow River and juts into the neighbouring province of Nei Monggol, otherwise Inner Mongolia. Although Outer, or northern, Mongolia is not part of today’s China, its border bisects the Gobi desert in a long east–west arc that leaves all to the south of it as a Chinese province. The sand and steppe of this Nei Monggol thus serves as a glacis to those several sections of ‘long wall’ that have been conflated into the Great Wall. Nei Monggol’s northern perimeter is China’s longest international frontier, and its southern perimeter marches with no less than eight other provinces – Gansu, Ningxia, Shaanxi, Shanxi, Hebei and the three provinces of erstwhile Manchuria.

These last, in the north-eastern appendage that used to be called Manchuria – or by the Japanese ‘Manchukuo’ – are all named after rivers. Heilongjiang, the most northerly province, is also the Chinese name for the Amur river; the Sino-Russian border here follows its course. Jilin province to the south derives from the Manchurian word for ‘alongside (the Songhua River)’; it marches with North Korea. And Liaoning, to the south-west, is named for the Liao River; it adjoins Hebei province and extends to within 300 kilometres (185 miles) of Beijing; south across the gulf of Bohai, Liaoning faces Shandong’s peninsula.

So ends the circuit of the eleven peripheral provinces, within which lie the seventeen core provinces, of which the five most northerly comprise the ‘cradle’ provinces. The administrative patchwork is completed by various smaller entities, such as the municipalities of Beijing and Shanghai and the special-status enclaves of Hong Kong and Macao. Numerous other autonomous entities based on ethnic minority concentrations should also be mentioned; these may be autonomous districts within the provinces, or autonomous regions comprising a whole province, such as Xizang/ Tibet.

Admittedly, there are more scientific ways of deconstructing China’s geography. In a continental landmass roughly the size of the United States and located within approximately the same degrees of latitude (the Tropic of Cancer, which grazes the Florida Keys, shaves southern China), much the same physical variations may be found. Extremes of climate and altitude result in wildly different average rainfalls, in soil conditions that range from swamp to sand dune and steppe, and in vegetational cover that runs from the riotous to the non-existent.

Rivers and mountains provide a better guide to settlement patterns, although the neat North American sequence of prairie, desert, mountain and coast is not to be found. Most of China’s rivers run west to east, from the high and dry uplands of Qinghai and Xizang to the moister plains towards the coast. Between the Huang He (Yellow River) in the north and the Yangzi in the middle, two rivers, the Han, a major tributary of the latter, and the Huai, whose course has sometimes been borrowed by the former, observe the same eastward trend. So do rivers to the south of the Yangzi, such as those that come together in Guangxi and Guangdong to form the Pearl River estuary off which lies Hong Kong. All these rivers indulge in extravagant contortions, however. The Yangzi, once released by Xizang’s (Tibet’s) ramparts, zigs south towards Vietnam before zagging north back to Sichuan; the Yellow River performs a near-somersault as it arcs towards Mongolia and back.

For such acrobatics, China’s cavalcade of mountains is responsible. As well as the much-photographed karst stacks of the south, the Himalayan giants, the gaunt Pamirs and the shy Tian Shan, numerous less-celebrated ranges corrugate large parts of the country and offer an important corrective to the notion that all those rivers eventually compose themselves to water lush coastal plains. With a few exceptions, such as the Yangzi delta, China’s coast is in fact quite rugged. So are all of its southern provinces. Conversely Sichuan, though riven by mountains of its own and located far inland above the Yangzi gorges, contains some of China’s most fertile plains and is today the fourth most populous of its provinces.

THE DYNASTIC DYNAMIC

While the geography of China’s history could be broken down in numerous ways, there is no such range of options in respect of its chronology. The passage of time, like the spread of space, was carefully studied in ancient China and meticulously ordered. The history of India has scarcely a single unchallenged date prior to the ninth century AD, but China’s history yields dates, verifiable by eclipses, that go back to the ninth century BC; and not just year-dates but also the month, the day and sometimes even the hour may be given. Adjusting clock and calendar to synchronise with the diurnal, planetary and astral cycles was essential to cosmic harmony and so a major preoccupation of all Chinese rulers. History literally told the time; dates, in the form of reign-years, ticked away the minutes, dynasties tolled the hours. A periodisation based on the succession of dynasties has thus invariably been the preferred way of breaking down the long sweep of Chinese history.

The establishment of a dynasty, whose rulers would reign by right of birth and who would care for the tombs and reputation of their founder and his successors, was the ambition of every would-be sovereign, whether pretender, usurper or invader. Even rebellious peasant leaders often assumed imperial rank. Over the course of Chinese history the number of self-declared dynasties must exceed a hundred. But only dozens actually, partly or temporarily realised this ambition; and of these, only a few were favoured by the historians with recognition as part of China’s ‘legitimate’ dynastic succession.

The criteria for inclusion in this august company were not consistent. Until 221 BC dynasties consisted of kings, and only thereafter of emperors. No royal dynasties and few imperial dynasties exercised uncontested sway. Even some of the ‘legitimate’ imperial dynasties controlled only half, or less, of what at the time was regarded as China; they might therefore coincide with another ‘legitimate’ dynasty in the other half of the country. Nevertheless, a single ‘legitimate’ dynasty at any one time was the general rule, and while far-ruling and long-lived dynasties, preferably of distinguished indigenous origin, could expect to be included in the ‘legitimate’ succession, local, short-lived dynasties of foreign or undistinguished origin could only hope for inclusion.

A succession of twenty or so ‘legitimate’ dynasties – not to mention the hundred or so individual dynasts of which they are composed – is still an indigestible mouthful; and it is made more so by some dynasties adopting the same name as that of others whose lustre they claimed to be reviving. In the case of such clones, it is usual to add a geographical determinant (Eastern Zhou, Northern Wei, etc.) or a sequential one (Former Han, also known as Western Han, or Later Han, also known as Eastern Han).

Mercifully some dynasties acquired a semi-permanency and soldiered on for centuries, winning a reputation for administrative integration, military endeavour, political stablility, cultural distinction and personal magnificence. The five imperial dynasties that lasted longest – each for three to four centuries – constitute the great plateaux of Chinese history and are well worth memorising. Cross-reference to contemporary empires elsewhere may help. They are:

HAN (Former and Later), 202 BC–AD 220, coeval with the Roman republic and early empire

TANG, 618–907, coeval with the expansion of Arab empire

SONG (Northern and Southern), 960–1279, coeval with the Crusades

MING, 1368–1644, coeval with the early Ottoman and Mughal empires

QING (or Manchu), 1644–1912, coeval with Europe’s global expansion.

Many other dynasties of note will be encountered. Ironically the one that most nearly approached the Chinese imperial boast of ruling ‘All under Heaven’ was not Chinese at all but Mongol. This was the Yuan dynasty (1279–1368), under one of whose emperors the Venetian Marco Polo supposedly found employ.

Some dynasties lasted only a decade or two and, achieving little, will scarcely merit mention. Others, though short-lived, changed the whole course of Chinese history. Such a dynasty was the Qin (221–206 BC). Its founder was the first to impose a fragile unity on the whole of ‘core’ China and the first to assume the title of huangdi, or ‘emperor’. In fact he is known to history simply by this title – Qin Shi Huangdi, or the Qin ‘First Emperor’. Like near-identical bookends, the Qin, the first imperial dynasty and one of the shortest, is matched at the other end of the chronological shelf by the Qing, the last imperial dynasty and one of the longest.

Had all subsequent emperors followed Qin Shi Huangdi’s excellent example of being known by a numbered reign – First, Second, Third Emperor, etc. – much confusion would have been avoided. Unfortunately no such custom developed. Although emperors and kings of the same name often occur, they are never distinguished by a number, like Louis I–XVIII or the English Georges, only by name. Nor is there much consistency about which of an emperor’s several names is the one that history has chosen to remember him by. Personal names being too personal for an emperor, the choice lay between the various auspicious titular names assumed during and after his lifetime. For some dynasties it is customary to call individual emperors by their temple names; for others it is their posthumous names which are used: and in the case of the Ming and Qing dynasties, names adopted for their various reign periods have been extended to the emperors themselves. Hence the seeming anomaly of a Qing emperor, such as the long-reigning one (1735–95) whose temple name was Gaozong, being known to history as ‘the Qianlong emperor’, that is ‘the Qianlong period emperor’. Just calling him ‘Emperor Qianlong’ would be like calling Mao Zedong ‘Chairman Great-Leap-Forward’.

For the purposes of this book, emperors will be called by whatever name has gained the widest currency. In addition, purely by way of a reminder, each will be prefaced in italics by the name of the dynasty to which he belonged. Hence ‘Song Renzong’ and ‘the Qing Qianlong emperor’.

THE TRIUMPH OF PINYIN

Sadly – indeed catastrophically for the wider understanding of China – few of these names will be familiar to readers primed on existing works in English. Until recently the Emperor Tang Taizong usually appeared in English translation as T’ang T’ai-tsung, Emperor Song Renzong as Sung Jen-tsung and the Qing Qianlong emperor as the Ch’ing Ch’ien-lung emperor. Hebei and Henan provinces were Hopei and Honan, Beijing was Peking, and the Giant Panda was not Daxiongmao but Ta-hsiung-mao. Something like 75 per cent of all Romanised renderings of Chinese characters have been changed in the last thirty years, often beyond the point of easy recognition. In the long run, the change can only be for the good, although at the present time it remains a challenge and a source of no little confusion.

Previously a system called Wade-Giles (after its two late nineteenth-century creators) governed the spelling of Chinese words in English. Wade-Giles was not straightforward, involving nearly as much diacritic punctuation – hyphens, single inverted commas – as letters. More disastrously, its use was far from universal. Another system was common in the United States, and other European languages had their own systems. To say that linguistic scholarship was failing the student of China would be an understatement. Standardisation became imperative.

But because Chinese characters are not made up of individual letters and so are not alphabetical, their rendition into scripts that use letters (alphabetical scripts) has always been fraught. While Arabic script, for instance, can be rendered letter by letter into Roman script without much attention to its sound, the letter-less Chinese script can be rendered in Roman script only by replicating its sound, that is its pronunciation, not the script itself. This raises other problems. Roman script has no way of indicating the five tones used in Chinese speech. Additionally, many Chinese words that are quite different when written in Chinese script may read as exactly the same when their sound is spelled out in English. The names of two Tang emperors, for instance, when written in Chinese involve totally different characters, but when rendered in the latest Romanised script become indistinguishable; both appear as ‘Xuanzong’.

Worse still, the pronunciation of Chinese written characters varies in different parts of China. All literate Chinese can read the characters; the script is indeed common throughout China. But they pronounce the characters in accordance with their local or regional dialect (technically ‘topolect’ or ‘regionalect’). Thus strangers on a train may happily share the same newspaper though quite unable to converse with one another. Foreigners, mostly European, who began arriving on the China coast in numbers from the late sixteenth century, found spoken Chinese a lot easier than written Chinese. A recent authority has calculated that, for an English-speaker, learning to speak Chinese is twenty per cent more difficult than learning to speak French; on the other hand, learning to read and write Chinese is five hundred per cent more difficult than learning to read and write French. Foreign scholars, armed with a quickly won understanding of spoken Chinese, proceeded to tackle the written characters by representing them in their own languages using the Chinese pronunciation with which they were now familiar. Unfortunately this pronunciation was almost exclusively that of the Guangdong and Fujian provinces to which foreign contacts were at the time largely restricted. The topolects were thus those of Cantonese (Canton = Guangzhou, capital of Guangdong) and of the Hakka and Hokkien people of Fujian. They were barely recognisable to the majority of Chinese, who, living in the Yangzi basin or the north, mostly spoke a topolect that foreigners called Mandarin. Not unnaturally, northerners came to resent finding even their place-names being mispronounced and mistranslated.

And there was yet another complication. The foreigners in question were Portuguese, Spanish and Italian, then Dutch, English, French, American and Russian, each of whose languages rendered some vowel sounds and consonants quite differently. ‘J’, for instance, is pronounced one way in Spanish, another way in French and yet another in English. Any representation of Chinese speech had to take account of such inconsistency, and hence that variety of different Romanising systems, each tailored to a different European language; hence too the absurdity of what purported to be transcriptions of Chinese characters being in fact English, French, Spanish, etc., renderings of Chinese regional speech as spoken by only a provincial minority of the Chinese nation.

To standardise the rendering of Chinese characters in all alphabetical languages, and to supersede this chaos, yet another system was developed in the 1950s. This was Pinyin, the form used throughout this book. China being at the time dependent on the Soviet Union for much technical assistance, the task involved Russian scholars and originally envisaged the possibility of Pinyin using not the Roman (or Latin) script but the Cyrillic script of Russia. Only slowly, at Chinese insistence and as Sino-Soviet relations deteriorated from the late 1950s, did Pinyin settle for the Roman script; and only after strong Chinese promotion and the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC’s) admission to the UN in 1971 did it win international recognition. But as of the 1980s Pinyin may claim to have been universally accepted and as of the 1990s most (though by no means all) works on China have used it. It is taught and displayed, albeit discreetly, along with the Chinese characters throughout China; it could conceivably one day supersede them.

It is not perfect. Pinyin’s Marxist inventors seem to have projected their belief in equality of opportunity on to the letters of the keyboard. Keys such as ‘q’, ‘x’, ‘y’ and ‘z’, for which Western languages have little use, are awarded major roles. ‘Z’ has never been so busy, while ‘r’, that most useful of consonants in English, is practically redundant. More seriously, the subtleties of the Chinese characters, hinted at in Wade-Giles’ scatter of diacritic punctuation marks, is largely lost; tonal marks, though available, rarely appear: the number of quite different Chinese words rendered by the same jangling word of Pinyin is increased; and on the pronunciation front, in trying to meet all national variations, Pinyin ends up by satisfying none. Officially it is said to indicate how a word should be pronounced in the ‘common speech’ (or Putonghua) of the people of the People’s Republic. In reality Putonghua, being approximately a down-classed version of ‘Mandarin’, is spoken largely in the north. Elsewhere in China, Pinyin spellings may prove a poor guide to pronunciation. Even in the north the visitor would do well to study how all those ‘q’s, ‘x’s and ‘z’s are actually enunciated before trying them out on a Beijing bus conductor.

A MATTER OF SCALE

C. P. Fitzgerald, the pre-Pinyin author of several works on Chinese history in English, neatly sounded a final caveat, albeit one common to other traditions. China’s dynastic historians, he noted, ‘while indefatigable in the recording and collection of facts, arranged these compendious materials in a manner which makes direct translation of the original texts a baffling and unrewarding task’.

Consequently Chinese history has been very little translated into any European language, and such scholarly works of this kind as exist are so packed with names of individuals and titles of office as to be wholly indigestible to the ordinary reader. Such direct translations, while invaluable to the student and the scholar, can never reach a wide public.¹⁰

Fitzgerald was writing in the 1950s, since when more and better translations have appeared. But his reservations about the difficulty of translation, and about its unedifying product, still hold good. Ancient Chinese texts written in early forms of the Chinese script present major problems of interpretation in themselves, and these are exacerbated by the interpolations and omissions of the writers and copyists responsible for the texts as they now survive. Such editing may sometimes have been deliberate and so can be instructive. But just as often it accidentally resulted from rough handling and the ravages of time. Damp, sunlight or termites could obliterate the ink of the characters; and since the bamboo slivers on which each column of text was written were held together only by a perishable thread, they could rather easily become unstrung and get shuffled or lost. Even the ‘pages’ of near-original texts, such as those found in the caves along the Silk Road or in the tombs of Mawangdui, were in no fit state for instant reading and presented scholars with a major problem of identification and arrangement. The modern translator has thus not only to tease some sense out of his text but also to tease out of it the accumulated errors, accretions, misattributions and random misplacements of centuries. Contested readings of quite important passages may result.

Fitzgerald’s subject was the Empress Wu Zetian (AD 690–705), who, though by no means the only woman to exercise imperial authority, was the only woman ever to assume the imperial title. His book was therefore a biography, possibly the earliest in English of any pre-Qing Chinese ruler, and is still something of a novelty. Chinese histories devote considerable space to biographical material. Typically the first half of any National or Standard History is a chronological account of the reign or reigns in question and the second half a collection of short biographies of the major participants. The information given, however, is often formulaic – forebears, birth, auspicious youthful encounters, career appointments, demise, summational homily. It is not of a sort that lends itself to the subtle characterisation, brilliant insights and narrative thrust expected of the modern biographer.

Similarly the chronological chapters of these histories, while careful with the facts, unsparing of the intrigues and exemplary with the dates, are short on the chance detail, the hint of drama and the trails of causation that make for engrossing history. Relying heavily on the texts, many modern histories of China, in English as well as Chinese, necessarily share their peculiarities. ‘Indefatigable in the recording and collection of facts’, they too present these ‘compendious materials’ to sometimes ‘baffling and unrewarding’ effect. Important events and pronouncements follow one another in orderly succession but without much indication of their significance or the thinking behind them. The not very exciting biographies are reserved till the end of each reign; and because each reign, however brief, is often treated separately, it can be hard to detect those broader lines of policy, economic trends, social changes and external problems that span a longer period.

Also evident is a tendency to emulate the prolixity of the Standard Histories. The Cambridge History of China, though still incomplete at the time of writing, already extends to some sixteen hefty volumes with more required just to keep up with the march of events. Meanwhile Joseph Needham’s Science and Civilisation in China has passed the twenty-volume mark.

Certainly, China merits the grand treatment. A vast country with an interminable pedigree, an idiosyncratic culture, a traumatic recent past and an exciting future can hardly be taken at a canter. But it should not be supposed from all the groaning shelves that China’s history is therefore altogether unlike that of other nations. It is not. In China, too, empires rise and fall, personalities shine, progress is fitful, peace ephemeral, social justice elusive. The difference is one of degree, not kind, of scale, not character. Forewarned of the difficulties, the reader will find China’s history just as instructive and rewarding as any other – only more so.

At 1.3 billion, the people of China currently account for about a fifth of the world’s total population. Soon they may consume about a fifth of the world’s natural resources. But if China’s history proves anything, it is that this should cause no surprise. From such statistics as exist it would seem that even in Han/Roman times the Chinese population was vast, probably not much less than a fifth of the world’s total then. Its cities were, and long remained, the most crowded, and its fields the most productive. In science, technology and industry it led the way. Were it to do so again, it would mark a reversion to a precedence among nations that demography justifies, history sanctions, and which the rest of the world might actually find comparatively benign.

In the course of time China’s population has fluctuated wildly as a result of catastrophic natural disasters and appalling conflicts; but recovery has been no less dramatic. Likewise its productive and technical superiority has been much eclipsed, most obviously during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but never to the extent of deterring an inventive, industrious and always numerous people.

Elsewhere such preponderant assets might well have encouraged global ambitions. In the eighth to tenth centuries, a then predominantly Buddhist China was aware that Buddhism in India, the ‘Holy Land’ of its birth, was in crisis. But while a similar crisis in Christianity’s ‘Holy Land’ was about to bring wave after wave of Crusaders from European Christendom to Palestine, not so much as a knight from Chinese ‘Buddhadom’ ventured into northern India. And this despite heart-rending reports of the neglect and devastation to which India’s Buddhist sites were subject and despite a demonstrated capacity for successful military intervention south of the Himalayas.

Five hundred years later the Chinese, like their Spanish and Portuguese contemporaries, were in a position to mobilise the resources and develop the know-how for launching transoceanic armadas. They duly did so, reaching out to South-East Asia and across the Indian Ocean, but not with a view to amassing ‘Christians and spices’ like Vasco da Gama, nor to extract gold and silver, exploit the labour of others or appropriate their lands. Ultimately and perhaps quaintly, their objective was simply to promote and extend that vital cosmic harmony throughout ‘All under Heaven’.

Since this implied recognition of the emperor as the ‘Son of Heaven’, a degree of subservience was indeed involved. It was not, however, onerous or extractive. It could be beneficial. The favourable reception that awaited Vasco da Gama when in 1498 he reached south India was attributed by one of his Portuguese companions to Indian expectations of fair treatment and ample reward from all pale-skinned seafarers, a legacy of earlier contacts with Chinese navigators. No permanent overseas representation or settlement had resulted from these contacts; rather than seek ways to make the voyages pay for themselves, the Ming emperors had discontinued them. Chinese empire would remain restricted to China and its immediate neighbours. A fifth of the world’s population would advance no claim to a fifth of the world’s cultivable surface area.

Admittedly, China’s relations with her inner Asian neighbours were less friendly. Military excursions would reach as far afield as what are now Burma, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrghyzstan and Kazakhstan. Like the great sea voyages, however, they resulted in little or no colonisation; and for every excursion there were usually provocative incursions, often of serious and lasting effect.

Nearer to home the Koreans, Vietnamese and Mongolians, not to mention non-Chinese peoples currently within China’s borders such as those of Tibet, Xinjiang and the south, would certainly contest China’s neighbourly credentials. But the hostility has usually been reciprocal. Across one of the longest and least defensible land frontiers in the world, China (as defined at any given moment) confronted formidable foes. The catalogue of nomadic and semi-nomadic peoples who menaced the settled regions of China’s north and west may seem inexhaustible and included confederations of the most martial peoples in Asian history – Xiongnu, Turkic, Tibetan, Muslim, Mongol and Manchu. To this list could be added later seaborne intruders – the European powers in the nineteenth century and Japanese imperialists in the twentieth. Though no amount of provocation can excuse the recent oppression of, for instance, Tibet, it is a matter of record that the Chinese people have suffered far more militarily from outsiders, and been obliged to stomach far more culturally and economically from them, than outsiders ever have from China. If the idea of the Great Wall as a purely defensive bastion has usually found such favour, it is because it fits so well with this perception. But as what follows may suggest, when history is at its most obliging, the history-writer needs be at his most wary.

Finally, an apology. Histories like this usually award priority to the recent. The narrative slows, like a train drawing into a station, as it approaches the platform of the present. Braking hard through the nineteenth century, it crawls obligingly through the twentieth towards the buffers of the twenty-first. This book, in devoting more space to the distant past and less to the recent past, may go to the other extreme. But since no culture is so historically conscious as China’s, the remote is often more relevant. To the Chinese the First Emperor (r. 221–210 BC) is a colossus, while the Last Emperor (r. 1909–11) is largely unknown. That he ended his days mulching the flower beds in a Beijing park might seem to justify this ignorance. The centuries of greatest interest to foreigners – post-1500 in the case of Europeans, post-1750 in the case of Americans – reflect their own historical perspectives, not those of the Chinese. And as you, the reader, know full well, the train of history does not in fact stop for the convenience of a book. This book’s ‘now’ is already your ‘then’. Histories themselves become history before they reach the shelves. What seemed immediate at the time of writing is already being swallowed up by the distance ahead like a tail-light disappearing down the track of futurity.

1 RITES TO WRITING

PRE C. 1050 BC

THE GREAT BEGINNING

THOUGH BY NO MEANS A GODLESS people, the ancient Chinese were reluctant to credit their gods – or God – with anything so manifestly implausible as the act of creation. In the beginning, therefore, God did not create heaven and earth; they happened. Instead of creation myths, China’s history begins with inception myths and in place of a creator it has a ‘happening situation’. Suggestive of a scientific reaction, part black hole, part Big Bang, this was known as the Great Beginning.

Before Heaven and Earth had taken form all was vague and amorphous [declares the third-century BC Huainanzi]. Therefore it was called The Great Beginning. The Great Beginning produced emptiness, and emptiness produced the universe. The universe produced qi [vital force or energy], which had limits. That which was clear and light drifted up to become Heaven while that which was heavy and turbid solidified to become earth…The combined essences of Heaven and Earth became the yin and yang.¹

A more popular, though later, version of this genesis myth describes the primordial environment as not just amorphous but ‘opaque, like the inside of an egg’; and it actually was an egg to the extent that, when broken, white and yolk separated. The clear white, or yang, ascended to become Heaven and the murky yolk, or yin, descended to become Earth. Interposed between the two was the egg’s incubus, a spirit called Pan Gu. Pan Gu kept his feet firmly in the earth and his head in the heavens as the two drew apart. ‘Heaven was exceedingly high, Earth exceedingly deep, and Pan Gu exceedingly tall,’ says the Huainanzi.² Though not the creator of the universe, Pan Gu evidently served as some kind of agent in the arrangement of it.

Further evidence of agency in the ordering and supporting of the self-created cosmos came to light quite recently when a silk manuscript, stolen from a tomb near Changsha in the southern province of Hunan in 1942, passed into the possession of the Sackler Collection in Washington, DC. The manuscript features both text and drawings and is laid out diagramatically in the form of a cosmograph. This is a common device that uses a model of the cosmos and its various phases to assist the reader in divining the best time of year for a particular course of action. Dating from about 300 BC, the silk stationery of the manuscript, though carefully folded within a bamboo box, has suffered much wear and a little tear. Not all of the text is legible, and not all of what is legible is intelligible. But one section appears to contain a variation on the same cosmogony theme. In this case a whole family – husband and wife ably assisted by their four children – take on the task of sorting out the universe. First they ‘put things in motion making the transformations arrive’; then, after a well-earned rest, they calculate the divisions of time, separate heaven and earth, and name the mountains (‘since the mountains were out of order’) and likewise the rivers and the four seas.³

It is still dark at the time, the sun and the moon having not yet appeared. Sorting out the mountains and rivers is only possible thanks to enlightening guidance provided by four gods, who also reveal the four seasons. The gods have to intervene again when, ‘after hundreds and thousands of years’, the sun and the moon are finally born. For by their light it becomes apparent that something is wrong with the Nine Continents: they are not level; mountains keep toppling over on top of them. The gods therefore devise as protection a canopy, or sky-dome, and to hold it up they erect five poles, each of a different colour. The colours – green, red, yellow, white and black – are those of the Five Phases or Five Elements, an important (if not always consistent) sequence that will recur in Chinese history and philosophy almost as often as those complementary opposites of yin and yang.

The relevant section of the Changsha silk manuscript concludes with the words: ‘The God then finally made the movement of the sun and the moon’. This enigmatic statement is about as near to creationism as the Chinese texts get. But it should be noted that the spirits, gods, even God, never actually create things; they only set them in motion, support them, organise them, adjust them and name them. In Chinese tradition the origin of the universe is less relevant than its correct orientation and operation, since it is by these that time and space can be calculated and the likely outcome of any human endeavour assessed.

Less relevant still in Chinese tradition is the origin of man. In another version of the Pan Gu story, it is not Pan Gu’s lanky adolescence which suggests a degree of personal agency in the creative process but his posthumous putrescence. In what might be called a decomposition myth, as Pan Gu lay dying, it is said that:

[his] breath became the wind and the clouds; his voice became the thunder; his left eye became the sun, and his right the moon; his four limbs and five torsos became the four poles and the five mountains; his blood became the rivers; his sinews became geographic features; his muscles became the soils in the field; his hair and beard became stars and planets; his skin and its hairs became grasses and trees; his teeth and bones became bronzes and jades; his essence and marrow became pearls and gemstones; his sweat became rain and lakes; and the various worms in his body, touched by the wind, became the black-haired commoners.⁴

India’s mythology matches this with a dismemberment myth. Out of the corpse of a sacrificial victim the Vedic gods supposedly hacked a hierarchy of caste, with the priestly Brahmin being born of the victim’s mouth, the martial ksatriya of his arms, the house-proud vaisya of his thighs, and the wretched sudra of his feet. The Brahminical imagination responsible for this conceit overlooked the possibility of a section of the human race being derived from an intestinal infestation. Perhaps only an elite as sublimely superior as China’s could have assigned to their raven-haired countrymen an origin so abject. When in later times foreigners came to resent the arrogance of Chinese officialdom, their grounds for complaint were as nothing compared to those of China’s unregarded masses.

From both of the above examples an early insistence on social stratification – on a superior ‘us’ and an inferior ‘them’ – is inferred; and it is thought to be corroborated in China by the numerous other myths emphasising that heaven and earth had to be physically separated. While Pan Gu could bridge the gap between them because he was so ‘exceedingly tall’, and while both men and gods later managed excursions back and forth, the distance eventually became too great. Only those possessed of magical powers, or able to attach such a medium to their persons or families, could hope to make the trip. Celestial intercourse, in other words, was reserved for the privileged few and this set them apart from the toiling many.

In the Shangshu, the fourth-century BC ‘Book of Documents’ that provided twentieth-century etymologists with a Chinese word for ‘panda’, such myths slowly begin to gel into history. Here a named ‘emperor’ is credited with having separated Heaven and Earth by commanding an end to all unauthorised communication between the two. The link was duly severed by a couple of gods who were in his service. There was to be, as he put it, ‘no more ascending and descending’; and ‘after this was done’, we are told, ‘order was restored and the people returned to virtue’.

The ‘emperor’ in question was Zhuan Xu, the second of the mythical ‘Five Emperors’ whom tradition places at the apex of China’s great family tree of legitimate sovereigns. All of the ‘Five Emperors’ combined in their persons both divine and human attributes. Their majesty was awesome and their conduct so exemplary that it would inform political debate throughout the millennia to come. In fact, providing an unassailable example of virtuous and unitary rule seems to have been their prime function. Of the five, the first was the revered ‘Yellow Emperor’; Zhuan Xu was second; the third and fourth were the much-cited Yao and Shun; and the last was Yu. Unlike his precursors, each of whom had deferred to a successor who was not his own son, Yu yielded to the principle of hereditary succession, named his son as his heir, and so founded China’s first recognised dynasty, the Xia.⁵

The Xia were kings; the title of ‘emperor’ is not given them and would remain in abeyance for the next 1,400 years. They have, however, been given approximate dates (traditionally c. 2100 BC – c. 1600 BC but probably a few centuries later) and a rough location in the lower Yellow River basin, otherwise the Zhongyuan or ‘Central Plain’ that stretches across northern China from Shandong province to Shaanxi province. Unlike ‘the Five Emperors’ the Xia are not considered semi-divine; they may have actually existed. They left no documentary evidence or any material remains that can certainly be attributed to them; even China’s earliest historians could find comparatively little to say about them. But archaeologists have unearthed cultures one of which could have been Xia, and there is evidence of what may be some early form of writing that could have been in use at the Xia court.

On the other hand, excavation has failed to substantiate a unitary kingdom or culture that was anything like as unique, widespread, dominant and long-lasting as that which later textual tradition awards to the Xia; and with important reservations, the same may be said of the still more illustrious Shang (r. c. 1750–c. 1040 BC) and Zhou⁶ (r. c. 1040–256 BC), who, together with the Xia, comprise the first ‘Three Dynasties’. Rather, all the material evidence now points to a plethora of localised Neolithic and Bronze Age cultures, some distinct and some less so, that arose and coexisted both within the Central Plain and far beyond it. The dawn of Chinese history is thus badly obscured by a major contradiction. The written record contained in classic texts dating from the fourth and third century BC (and generally accepted ever since) does not always coincide with the material record as excavated and analysed by the highest standards of modern scholarship in the twentieth century.

This contradiction has fundamental implications for the whole understanding of China’s civilisation, of its dynamics, and even of who the Chinese were and are. The stakes are so high that protagonists have occasionally overstated their case; scholarship may have been sullied by partisanship as a result. Basically all the written texts imply a single linear pedigree of rulership; it is comprised of successive ‘dynasties’ centred geographically on the north’s Central Plain, whence their superior and quintessentially ‘Chinese’ culture supposedly spread outwards; and it stretched chronologically, like an apostolic succession, from ‘the Five Emperors’ to ‘the Three Dynasties’ of Xia, Shang and Zhou and on into less contentious times. Archaeology, on the other hand, recognises no such neat pedigree. Chronologically the Three Dynasties appear more probably to have overlapped with one another; geographically the kingdoms of the Central Plain were not as central nor as influential as once supposed; and as for the developments that led to a distinct ‘Chinese’ culture, instead of radiating outwards from the Central Plain they germinated and interacted over a much wider area and among peoples who were by no means racially uniform.

It is as if, standing in some outer portal of the Forbidden City or any other traditional Chinese architectural complex, one group of scholars were to focus on the inward vista of solemn grey courtyards, airy halls and grand stairways all centrally aligned in receding order, while another group, looking outwards, were to gaze down on the real world with its typically urban profusion of competing vistas, all traffic-clogged, architecturally chaotic and equally intriguing. Reconciling the two seems scarcely possible, although recent moves in that direction offer some encouragement.

Archaeologists have become more mindful of the limitations of their discipline as new finds overturn confidence in their own earlier hypotheses; the survival of relics from the remotest past is acknowledged as being as arbitrary as their often accidental discovery; and such evidence as may be lacking is not taken as proof of its never having existed – or of its never one day coming to light. Meanwhile the textual scholars have been coming round to the idea that their sources may be selective and that those who compiled them long after the times they describe may have had their own agendas. For instance, ‘Xia’, the name of the first dynasty, is the same as that used by the people of the Central Plain in the last centuries BC (when the historiographical tradition was taking shape) to distinguish themselves from other less ‘Chinese’ peoples (often described as di, man, rong or yi, words that are habitually translated into English as ‘barbarian’). Much later the word ‘Han’ would make a similar transition from dynastic name to ethnic tag and is now used as the official term for China’s supposedly mono-ethnic majority. Both examples suggest that the validity of the ethnic tag derives substantially from the prominence accorded to the original dynasty. Thus talking up the Xia dynasty in the texts may have been a way of enhancing a sense of privileged identity among those who regarded themselves as inheritors of the Xia kingdom and so the ‘Xia people’.

Modern scholarship is well placed to recognise such special pleading. It cannot be a coincidence that throughout the Nationalist and communist era champions of the linear textual tradition have generally been resident in China and employed there, while those who emphasise a regional and pluralist interpretation of Chinese identity have generally been foreigners, often Westerners, Japanese or Chinese residing outside China. Deconstructing China, questioning its cohesion and puncturing its presumption, has a history of its own – which of course in no way vitiates the research or invalidates the findings of its scholars.

GLINT OF BRONZE

Hangzhou, a city of 6 million, lies south-west of Shanghai and about 150 kilometres (90 miles) south of the Yangzi delta. As the capital of Zhejiang province, it hosts a provincial museum, which is located on an island in West Lake, the most celebrated of many so-named water features in China, all of them rich in cultural associations and now ringed with modern amenities. Sidestepping the ice-cream sellers and the curio stalls, visitors step ashore to be greeted in the museum’s foyer by a shiny brass plaque with an English text introducing the ‘Hemudu Relics’. Hemudu is the name given to a local Neolithic culture that flourished from about 5000 BC. A whole floor of the museum is devoted to it, with window-dressed tableaux of Hemudu mannequins whittling and grinding among the artfully scattered ‘relics’ of their Stone Age settlements. But the new plaque also has a general point to make. After outlining the achievements of the Hemudu people in house-building, the firing of fine black pottery and the carving of jade and ivory, it concludes with a bold statement: ‘The excavations at Hemudu Relics have proved that the Yangzi River Valley was also the birthplace of Chinese nation as well as the Yellow River Valley [sic]’.

Until recently this would have been heresy. The Yangzi valley and the whole of southern China were held to be alien environments in prehistoric times, populated by non-Sinitic (non-Chinese-type) hunter-gatherers and too pestilential for settled agriculturalists. Rather were the more favoured (in ancient times) plains and valleys of the north the obvious candidates for the birthplace of China’s prehistoric culture; that was where fossils of an erect hominid known as ‘Peking man’ had been discovered in the 1920s; it was where a Chinese form of Homo sapiens was supposed to have developed, and where some of the earliest crop seeds had been sown. It was also where, much later, China’s recorded history would begin and whence its achievements would spread and its rulers project their authority. Not unreasonably, then, the same was taken to be true of the intervening Neolithic and Chalcolithic periods.

It was only in the early 1980s, and then not without misgivings, that a Chinese scholar first publicly questioned this accepted view. He suggested it was ‘incomplete’, though one might now call it downright mistaken. Examples of dozens of distinct Neolithic cultures, like the ‘Hemudu Relics’, have been excavated at sites ranging from Manchuria in the extreme north-east to Sichuan in the west and Guangdong and Fujian in the deep south. None is significantly more ‘advanced’ than the others; and many more sites undoubtedly remain to be discovered. Indeed, later references to this period as being that of ‘Ten Thousand States’ (or ‘Chiefdoms’) may not be too wide of the mark.

As usual with Neolithic peoples, pottery provides a ready means of classification and so is used to distinguish them. Burial sites can also be revealing. But graveyards and ceramic workshops presume the existence of a settled population. The first conclusion to be drawn from the new discoveries is that settlement based on growing crops and husbanding domesticated animals was a development common to many regions of China and not just the north’s Central Plain. If millet was grown in the Yellow River region from perhaps 8000 BC, so was rice grown in the Yangzi region from about the same time. Silk production based on silkworm rearing, a form of animal husbandry unique to China, also has a remote provenance and is now known to have been practised in the Yangzi valley from at least the third millennium BC.

The links, if any, between these Neolithic cultures are as yet unclear. For the Indian subcontinent and for inner Asia, trails of diffusion have been proposed to fit the distribution patterns of pottery types and other distinctive artefacts; population movement in the form of migration, colonisation or conquest has often been inferred from them. But such theorising may owe something to retrospective assumptions. In both cases the incidence in later times of migrations, mostly inward in India, both inward and outward in inner Asia and Siberia, may have been projected back into prehistory. Consequently early settlement in these regions is supposedly fluid, with levels of technology uneven and population shifts frequent.

The more static model preferred in China may likewise reflect later historical orthodoxy. Neolithic cultures are grouped into regional ‘spheres of interaction’ rather than into peripatetic societies tracking across the face of the country; and attention is directed to those cultures and sites exhibiting the most in the way of continuity and internal development. Perhaps because so much archaeological effort was initially expended on the Yellow River basin in the north’s Central Plain, the key locations in this context are indeed concentrated in the north. Here, notable for their red pottery, often with painted designs, the so-called ‘Yangshao’ settlements (c. 5000–3000 BC and so contemporary with Hemudu), were succeeded by larger concentrations of the black-pottery ‘Longshan’ culture from about 3000 BC. Some ‘Longshan’ sites have urban proportions. Though centred in Shandong they are scattered over a much greater area than the Yangshao settlements. They introduce a building material called hangtu that was produced by pounding the friable loess soil into a concrete consistency; it would remain in use for the construction of foundations and walls until replaced by concrete itself in the twentieth century. And to the delight of archaeologists the ‘Longshan’ people honoured their dead with lavishly furnished tombs.

The size of some ‘Longshan’ tombs and the wealth and nature of their grave goods betray a highly stratified society. Privileged clans (or ‘lineages’) evidently exalted their ancestors in order to legitimise their own position, and through the mediation of this ancestry enjoyed a monopoly on contact with the gods. In this context they lavished on their dead both exotica, such as carved ivories, and a great variety of ritual objects ranging from vessels for food and drink to musical instruments and jade objects. Many such items incorporate pictorial devices known to have been used in shamanic intercourse with the supernatural world of ancestors and gods.

It all sounds mildly familiar. ‘Longshan’ society, or some part of it, could well have been that over which the Xia kings ruled. Erlitou, a Longshan type-site near Luoyang on the south side of the Yellow River in Henan province, has been confidently dated to c. 1900–c. 1350 BC, which roughly synchronises with the revised dates deduced for the Xia dynasty from later textual sources. Erlitou has therefore been tentatively assigned to the Xia. Moreover the site has yielded two types of material evidence, one apparently primitive, the other highly sophisticated, that connect its culture unmistakably to that of the later (or more probably overlapping) Shang and Zhou dynasties. In fact these material finds constitute prime sources for the social, cultural and political history of the second and early first millennia BC.

The first of them is burnt bones, mostly the shoulder blades of various animals that have been subjected to fire so as to produce a cracking. The cracking was ‘read’, much like entrails by the Greeks, to discover supernatural responses to human predicaments. More will be said of the practice, for it led to the earliest extant form of documentation and the first certain appearance of a written script in China. The other source material encountered at Erlitou, however, is even more sensational. For here were discovered some of the earliest examples of bronze-casting, a technology that more than any other defines ancient China’s culture and whose hefty products – urns, tureens, jugs – age-blackened or verdigris-tinged but otherwise deceptively pristine, still grace the galleries of the world’s museums.

Robert Bagley puts it better in the Cambridge History of Ancient China: ‘Artifacts of cast bronze are technologically and typologically the most distinctive traits of material culture in second millennium [BC] China…[and furnish] a revealing index of cultural development.’⁷ Indeed, bronze came to occupy much the same position in ancient China as stone in the contemporary civilisation of Egypt or, later, those of Iran (Persia) and Greece. Enormous effort was devoted to producing bronze-ware, highly sophisticated ideas were expressed through it, some of the earliest inscriptions are found on it, and its durability has ensured that plentiful examples have survived. Bronze production in China, though inferior in its labour requirement to, say, the great megalithic constructions of pharaonic Egypt, was yet on a sufficiently large scale to be rated an ‘industry’. Single vessels weighing close to three-quarters of a tonne have been excavated at Anyang in Henan province; elsewhere the total bronze component in one fifth-century BC tomb (at Suizhou) was found to amount to 10 tonnes. ‘Nothing remotely comparable is known elsewhere in the ancient world.’⁸

Compared to quarrying and carving stone, the technology involved in casting bronze was infinitely more demanding. Earlier small-scale production in Gansu province suggests that China’s metallurgical skills may have actually originated in China; certainly the abundance of suitable ores argues for an indigenous development, as do the advanced ceramic skills needed to create the moulds and achieve the high furnace temperatures for bronze-casting. The most impressive products were large vessels, often incorporating an udder-like tripod base but taking a variety of different shapes – known as ding, gue, jia, etc. – depending on their function as food containers, cooking pots, ale jugs, etc.

All at first replicated pottery designs but were then subjected to increasing elaboration in both shape and decoration. The ceramic moulds in which they were cast were themselves considerable achievements, with the decoration being incised on the inner side of the outer mould so that it emerged as raised on the finished product. (Engraving of the finished surface came later.) The moulds, both inner and outer, were cut into sections for the first pourings, typically three sections for the three-legged urn known as a ding but many more for more complex shapes. The vertical joins of the moulds ran up through the legs to the top of the vessel. Each section, including devices like spouts and handles, was cast separately but was recast as part of the whole in the final pouring. This eliminated any need for soldering or jointing while encouraging decorative designs, patterns and inlays, often with an animal motif, that were repeated within the subdivisions which resulted from the use of sectional moulds.

Ingenious as well as skilful, the technique underwent rapid development; so did the vessel shapes and the often fantastic ornamentation given them. Studying these variations, art historians have been able to chart the whole development of bronze-casting, to place surviving examples in a sequence of styles, assign rough dates to each style-type, and draw important conclusions from the distribution of the find-sites.

These find-sites are not, as once seemed likely, confined to the north’s Central Plain. Although the earliest style associated with Erlitou (1900–1350 BC) is little found outside the Yellow River basin, later styles, especially those associated with the Erligang culture (c. 1500–1300 BC), achieved a wide distribution. Some bronze-ware may have been gifted or traded; but the discovery of foundries producing almost identical vessels as far afield as Hubei province and the Yangzi argues for some more fundamental contact. It is reasonable to assume that where such a specialised and prestigious technology was transferred, cultural beliefs and social assumptions must also have been transferred, and this in turn could imply some form of political hegemony. The bronze record thus suggests that in the fifteenth to thirteenth centuries BC ‘a state’ in the north’s Central Plain with a highly sophisticated culture expanded its influence over a large part of the region immediately to its south and east.

Archaeologically this expansive entity is known as Erligang after the name of its type-site at Zhengzhou, a city on the Yellow River in Henan province. Focusing exclusively on such excavated sources, Bagley declares Erligang ‘the first great civilisation of East Asia’;⁹ and most historians, latching on to its dates and location, take their cue from this and gratefully identify Erligang culture with the dynasty known in written sources as the Shang. But as with Erlitou and the Xia dynasty, so with Erligang and the Shang dynasty: the two do not quite fit. Erligang’s expansion and primacy look to have been shorter-lived than Shang’s. Although bronze production continued to increase, and nowhere more so than in the north, elsewhere as of about 1300 BC distinctive individual styles emerged, suggesting a resurgence of cultural and political autonomy in the Yangzi region, Sichuan and the north-east at a time when the texts would suggest that Shang reigned supreme.

Besides such tantalising glimpses of political activity, the bronze industry reveals something of the nature of Erligang, and so perhaps Shang, society. Since bronze is an alloy, deposits of copper and tin (plus some lead) had first to be located, mined and then, in the casting process, carefully combined to ensure an ore ratio suitable to the size and type of vessel desired. Abundant fuel for the furnaces was also essential; and because foundries were located within the oversight of the supposed ‘capital’, the transport requirement must have been considerable. Society was by now, therefore, not just hierarchically stratified but organised into productive functional groups, reasonably stable and closely controlled. Skilled artisans had to be trained and maintained, a labour force that was both servile and surplus had to be mobilised, and a ruling lineage clique with a steady demand for finished products of exceptional quality had to direct operations. Only sparingly were metals used for weapons and scarcely at all for tools or agricultural implements. Bronze-casting was the prestige monopoly of a demanding elite. The bulk of all production went to the manufacture of the vessels required for ritual purposes by this elite; and to judge by their find-sites, many of these vessels were ultimately or specifically destined to accompany deceased members of the elite to their graves.

The vast complex of tombs at Anyang, north of the Yellow River but still in Henan province, has been dated to around 1200 BC. Although Erligang’s cultural reach had by then retracted, this indisputably late Shang centre betrays no signs of decline. More thoroughly explored than any other site, Anyang’s necropolis and the cyclopean foundations of its adjacent city convey a compelling, if gruesome, impression of late Shang might. The largest tomb occupies an area nearly as big as a football pitch. As if from each opposing goal and touchline, four sloping subways or ramps converge on a central vertical shaft, at the base of which lies the collapsed burial chamber. This was cruciform, about 200 square metres (240 square yards) in area, 3 metres (10 feet) high and 10.5 metres (34 feet) below ground. Five sacrificial pits were found within it, and the central area had been floored with timbers to accommodate the sarcophagus. Unfortunately tomb robbers had got there long before the archaeologists. The site had been largely cleared of grave goods, and the same fate had befallen most of the other Anyang tombs. To date there is only one notable exception.

Dying just 150 years after Tutankhamun, a Shang royal consort called Fu Hao was interred at the Anyang site around 1200 BC and remained undisturbed until AD 1976. The tomb is a small one, without ramps. ‘Lady Hao’ – her name is found engraved on her bronzes – may have been cherished but she was too gender-handicapped to merit more than ‘a lesser tomb’ with a simple shaft of room-size dimensions about 7.5 metres (25 feet) deep. Her burial chamber was nevertheless richly furnished. The nested coffins, though badly decayed by seepage, had once been lacquered red and black; the walls had probably been painted and textiles draped over the coffin. Most of the surviving grave goods must have originally been inside the outer coffin. Yet the inventory for this fairly small space included 195 bronze vessels (the largest of which weighed 120 kilograms – 265 pounds), more than 271 smaller bronze items, 564 objects of carved bone and an extraordinary 755 of jade, the largest such collection ever found. ‘If the [bigger] tombs were richer than this, their contents are beyond imagining,’ says Bagley.¹⁰

Sixteen skeletons were also found in the tomb. They were distributed within, around and above the coffin. The Shang elite did not like its members to leave this world alone; relatives, retainers, guards, servants and pets accompanied them as part of the grave offering. Ritual demanded, and spectacle no doubt encouraged, human sacrifice on a grand scale. In the larger tombs the victims have been counted in their hundreds. Some skeletons are complete, others dismembered or decapitated, the cranium often having been sawn off, perhaps for bone carving. Some of the mutilated victims may have been convicts or captives taken in war. The killing of prisoners is thought to have been common practice, and the skeletons include different racial types. The quality of Shang mercy, if such a thing existed, was ever strained and made no clear distinction between friend and foe. Men (and occasionally women and children) were as conspicuously expended in the cause of ritual as were bronze and jade.

How all this extravagance was funded is unclear. No great agricultural revolution occurred at the time, no major irrigation effort is known, and no significant introduction – the ox-drawn plough once had its champions – has been generally accepted. Nor do trade or conquest seem to have been important contributory factors. The Shang apparently just used existing resources of land and labour to greater effect. ‘This leads to the inevitable conclusion’, writes Kwang-chih Chang of the Academia Sinica, ‘that the Shang period witnessed the beginning in this part of the world of organised large-scale exploitation of one group of people by another within the same society’; it also witnessed ‘the beginning of an oppressive governmental system to make such exploitation possible’.¹¹

While members of the ruling clans frequented the great buildings whose pounded earth foundations testify to ambitious architecture and gracious living, the ‘black-haired commoners’ lived in covered pits, used crude clay utensils, and laboured in the fields with Stone Age tools of wood and flint. Malnutrition has been noted in many skeletons. Leisure must have been rare, insubordination fatal. Cultural excellence came at a price in Bronze Age China; the bright burnish of civilisation was down to the hard rub of despotic power.

FINDING FAMILY

This somewhat harsh picture of second-millennium BC China may be tempered by further research at those sites that have lately come to light in more distant parts of the country. The Qijia culture of Gansu and Qinghai provinces, for instance, besides providing examples of pre-Erlitou bronze working, was reported in 2005 to have yielded evidence of another abiding ingredient in Chinese civilisation, namely ‘the oldest intact noodles yet discovered’. Dated to about 2000 BC, they were found at a site called Lajia and had been made from millet flour.¹²

More elaborate artefacts, including several enormous bronze bells, from sites in Hubei and Hunan provide early testimony of the more vibrant art and culture of the Yangzi region; but they have been eclipsed by finds from further upriver in Sichuan. There two recent discoveries made in and around Chengdu, today a megalopolis of about 12 million, have confounded art historians and left any notion of a single bronze tradition teetering on the edge of the melting pot. Sacrificial pits accidentally discovered at Sanxingdui in 1986, and the site at Jinsha uncovered during road construction in 2001, produced large quantities of animal bones and elephant tusks but not one human skeleton. More sensationally, they yielded an array of bronze busts and figures, gold masks and jades quite unlike anything discovered elsewhere in China. A bronze statue, 2.6 metres (8.5 feet) tall (including its pedestal) and dated to about 1200 BC, is of an elongated and gesticulating figure with stylised features more Aztec than Chinese. Likewise some disassembled bronze fruit trees, like gigantic table decorations complete with foliage, peach-like fruit and frugivorous birds, all of bronze, have no known counterpart.

Also uncovered at Sanxingdui were the hangtu (pounded earth) foundations of a large city. This method of construction has suggested some contact with either Erlitou or Erligang. On the other hand, the temptation to link Sichuan’s sites, however weird and wonderful, with later kingdoms in the same region known in the texts as Shu and Ba has proved irresistible. A similar connection has been proposed between the Hubei/Hunan bronze sites and the Yangzi region’s later kingdom of Chu. Inconvenient data is thus yoked to the orthodoxies of textual tradition, and unaccountable art forms accommodated within the framework of existing research.

No such accommodation, however, has yet been extended to the most controversial discovery of all. In 1978 the Chinese archaeologist Wang Binghua unearthed a large collection of graves at Hami in the deserts of eastern Xinjiang province. It was not where one would expect to find an ancient culture of any relevance to the more favoured parts of China; if Chengdu is as far from Beijing as Denver from New York, Hami might be likened to some place in remotest Idaho.

Similar graves had been noted thereabouts by European travellers earlier in the twentieth century, though without exciting their interest. The new graves were dated to about 1200 BC, but of their contents little was heard until ten years after Wang’s discovery. It was then, in 1988, that Victor Mair, an American academic who was guiding a tour for the Smithsonian Institute, wandered into a new section of the provincial museum in Urumqi, the Xinjiang capital. Parting the hanging curtains that served as a door, he pushed inside and thus famously ‘entered another world’.

The room was full of mummies! Life-like mummies! These were not the wizened and eviscerated pharaohs wrappped in yards of dusty gauze that one normally pictures when mummies are mentioned. Instead they were everyday people dressed in their everyday clothes. Each one of the half dozen bodies in the room, whether man, woman or child, looked as if it had merely gone to sleep for a while and might sit up at any moment and begin to talk to whomever happened to be standing next to its glass case.¹³

Mair was transfixed; as a scholar of early Eastern linguistics and literature, he might actually have understood any rasped utterances coming from the desiccated corpses. He gave them all names and called one after his brother; the resemblance was uncanny. This ‘Ur-David’ (‘the first David’), or ‘Charchan Man’, lay with his head on a pillow and ‘his expressive hands placed gently upon his abdomen’. His woollen shirt and trousers were in a fetching shade of maroon ‘trimmed with fine red piping’. Inside his white thigh-length boots he wore felt socks ‘as brightly coloured as a rainbow’.

With further such imaginative licence the well-preserved female corpse discovered at a neighbouring site became ‘the Beauty of Kroran’ (or ‘the Beauty of Loulan’). She had gone to her grave in tartan plaid of Celtic weave, and when a copy of her head was re-fleshed by a plastic surgeon for a TV documentary, she looked almost presentable. Personalising the mummies in this way was irresistible; for to Mair they were not only ‘life-like’ but decidedly Mair-like. It was a case of instant recognition, then ardent adoption. The American had found family.

And therein, for the Chinese, lay the problem. ‘The Tarim Mummies’ (Tarim being the name of the river that once drained the now waterless Tarim basin of eastern Xinjiang) are mostly not of Mongoloid race but of now DNA-certified Caucasoid or Europoid descent. Some had brown hair; at least one stood 2 metres (6.5 feet) tall. They are similar to the Cro-Magnon peoples of eastern Europe. So are their clothes and so probably was their language. It is thought to have been ‘proto-Tocharian’, an early branch of the great Indo-European language family that includes the Celtic, Germanic, Greek and Latin tongues as well as Sanskrit and Early Iranian.

But Mair and his disciples would not be content to stop there. Several hundred mummies have now been discovered, their preservation being the result of the region’s extreme aridity and the high alkaline content of the desert sands. The graves span a long period, from c. 2000 BC to AD 300, but the forebears of their inmates are thought most probably to have migrated from the Altai region to the north, where there flourished around 2000 BC another Europoid culture, that of Afanasevo. Such a migration would have consisted of several waves and must have involved contact with Indo-European-speaking Iranian peoples as well as Altaic peoples. Since both were acquainted with basic metallurgy and had domesticated numerous animals, including horses and sheep, the mummy people must themselves have acquired such knowledge and may have passed it on to the cultures of eastern China.

According to Mair and his colleagues, therefore, the horse, the sheep, the wheel, the horse-drawn chariot, supplies of uncut jade and probably both bronze and iron technology may have reached ‘core’ China courtesy of these Europoid ‘proto-Tocharians’. By implication, it followed that the Europeans who in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries AD would so embarrass China with their superior technology were not the first. ‘Foreign Devils on the Silk Road’ had been active 4,000 years ago; and thanks to them, China’s ancient civilisation need not be regarded as quite so ‘of itself’. It could in fact be just as derivative, and no more indigenous, than most others.

Needless to say, scholars in China have had some difficulty with all this. Patriotic sentiment apart, national integration has also seemed to be at stake. ‘Xinjiang separatists’ – who would prefer to be called ‘Uighur nationalists’ – were reported to have readily adopted Mair’s findings in order to contest Beijing’s claim that their province was historically part of China and so bolster their own claim to autonomy. The mummies had become heavily politicised, and the Chinese authorities found themselves suspected of wilfully neglecting the conservation of mummy sites, obstructing research, suppressing its findings and concealing such evidence, including the mummies themselves, as was already available.

Feelings ran high, though they may now be subsiding. The Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking people who have been settled in Xinjiang since no earlier than c. AD 600, and who then adopted Islam, can scarcely claim to have much in common with Chalcolithic Europoids of the second and first millennia BC who spoke an Indo-European language and of whose beliefs next to nothing is known. Uighur ancestors could have intermarried with later Tocharian-speakers; equally they could have obliterated them. Moreover, the People’s Republic of China is not postulated on the basis of there being a single Chinese race or a historically defined territory. The Uighurs, like the Tibetans and other minority groups, may have good reason to resent ‘Han’ supremacism, but history can be an unreliable ally.

Whether the mummy people played a part in the transfer of technologies and raw materials is more worthy of debate. Certainly China’s main source of jade has always been in the Kun Lun mountains in southern Xinjiang. Jade objects, like those cut for the tomb of ‘Lady Hao’, have been geologically sourced to the Kun Lun, and any people occupying the intervening region may well have been involved in the supply of jade. Metallurgy is less certain. Though the Afanasevo people produced small copper implements, according to the latest research ‘they did not know how to melt or cast metal’.¹⁴ Judging from the artefacts so far credited to the mummy people, neither did they, although around 900 BC it would be in Xinjiang that iron would make its Chinese debut.

Horses, horsemanship and chariots are a different matter. They, like jade, were almost certainly acquired by the Chinese from their central Asian neighbours. Chariots first appear in burials, sometimes complete with horses and charioteers, at Anyang (c. 1240–c. 1040 BC) and other Shang sites. Their large many-spoked wheels have been declared the first wheels to be found in China and their horses the first draught animals found in China. There is no Chinese evidence for the earlier development of wheeled transport or of horsemanship. But the assumption that these skills were indeed acquired from outside China does not mean that they came from Xinjiang. As will be seen, China’s equestrian neighbours in Mongolia are a more likely source.

IN THE ORACULAR

Until such time as sites like those in Xinjiang and Sichuan have been more extensively explored, the uncertainties outweigh the certainties and speculation has free rein. By way of contrast, the sprawling city-site located at modern Anyang in Henan has been subjected to exhaustive excavation. It lies at the heart of what was ‘core’ China, and at Anyang, more than anywhere else, the archaeologists could be reasonably confident of exciting finds.

Interest was first stirred, so the story goes, when in 1899 a pharmacist in Beijing was found to be supplying malaria sufferers with a medicinal powder supposedly ground from old ‘dragon bones’. Dragons never having been that plentiful, the bones were in fact an assortment of flat scapulas (shoulder blades) from cattle plus numerous plastrons (ventral or underbelly shells) from turtles; but they looked old, and some had what appeared to be writing scratched on them. This discovery was made by a malaria patient whose brother happened to be a noted scholar of ancient Chinese scripts. When the latter recognised the scratched characters on the bones as similar to those found on some of the later Shang bronzes, the hunt was on.

After much prevarication and long sleuthing, the bones and shells were traced back to villagers living in the vicinity of Anyang. Stocks from there seemed inexhaustible. Amateur collectors, many of them foreigners, found a surprising number for sale in Beijing’s antique stores; and since the scratched characters could be transferred to paper in the manner of brass-rubbings, scholars worldwide found ample employment in trying to decipher them. Meanwhile suppliers, instead of scraping off the squiggles that devalued good ‘dragon bones’, had begun scratching them on to take advantage of the curio market. ‘A hundred forgeries for every genuine piece’ was how the historian H. G. Creel described the situation in 1935; collections of bones, ‘not one of which was genuine’, were ‘being bought for many hundreds of dollars’.¹⁵

Happily this did not deter the archaeologists. Excavations at Anyang got under way in the late 1920s, and with interruptions for wars and revolutions, continued in the 1930s, the 1950s and the 1970s. Expectations that the site would prove to be a Shang ‘cult-centre’ were confirmed by uncovering the monumental foundations of more than fifty large buildings and by sensational finds like those football-pitch-size tombs and the opulent grave goods of ‘Lady Hao’. The Shang, whose historicity had previously been as suspect as that of the Xia, were thus handsomely authenticated; textual tradition was vindicated, and archaeology was acknowledged as the key to further validation of the supposed centrality and superiority of north China’s remotest past.

As noted, these hopes have not yet been fully realised. Subsequent discoveries elsewhere in China have undercut cherished traditions as often as they have corroborated them. But at least the ‘dragon bones’ did not disappoint. More finds and painstaking analysis of their incised characters established that the Shang elite was indeed literate and that the Chinese script of today is unique in being the direct descendant of one used in the second millennium BC. Moreover, China’s documented history is found to begin not with a collection of cryptic runes, not with some interminable Homeric epic, but much as it intended to go on – with an official and distinctly bureaucratic archive, albeit inscribed on shells and bones. Additionally the inscriptions have afforded telling insights into the complex world of Shang ritual and governance, which, by anticipating later trends, add further weight to that contentious claim about China’s three to four (if not six) thousand years of continuous civilisation.

More than 100,000 fragments constituting about 7,000 scapulas and plastrons, most of them considered genuine, have now been recovered. Over a quarter came from a single location, suggesting deliberate ‘safe-deposit’ storage. The bones span some 3,000 years, from the late-fourth-millennium BC Longshan culture to that of the Zhou dynasty in the early first millennium BC. But it was the Shang, while based at Anyang in c. 1240–1040 BC, who standardised their use and valued them as instruments of record. It was also they who first introduced turtle plastrons to supplement, and increasingly replace, scapulas. Perhaps plastrons, being rarer, were better suited to a royal art like divination; perhaps turtles, being exceptionally long-lived, offered a more appropriate symbolism; or perhaps shells simply produced a more articulate cracking. Additionally it was the Shang who established the practice of pre-boring small indentations in orderly sequence down the length of the bones and shells and sometimes numbering them, each such ‘bullet-point’ being thus readied for the application of the crack-producing fire. And finally it was the Shang who adopted the custom of engraving alongside each cracking a written summary of the divination, including the date and the name of the diviner, and of then storing – one might almost say ‘filing’ – the completed ‘documents’.

None of these advances should be underestimated. The skill involved in getting bones and shells to produce a tidy cracking may have been no less than that involved in interpreting the result. Recent experiments, mostly with bones, have rarely been reassuring. A Japanese scholar, while hosting an academic barbeque, tried charcoal briquets, then a red-hot poker, on a scapula pre-drilled with indentations to the standard depth. Nothing happened. ‘I got rather fed up,’ he says, ‘and threw the whole damn thing in the whole mess of charcoal…Divination was not auspicious.’ Later, because of the smell, he removed the smouldering bone. As he did so, it began to crack. ‘“Pak! pak! pak!” It was terrific. We had truly reconstructed the Archaic Chinese [character] pak.’ Pace the pak, though, this was obviously not how the Shang did it; the barbequed facsimile was burnt to a cinder and quite incapable of being either ‘read’ or annotated. Shang bones, it was concluded, must have been much drier and the heat source, possibly some oleaginous hardwood, much hotter.¹⁶

On the reasonable assumption that today’s recovered hoard of bones and shells represents only a small fraction of the original archive, another scholar has suggested that the Shang may have consulted their gods daily.¹⁷ The solemnity of a ritual that would usually have been performed in one of the ancestral halls to the accompaniment of music, incense, offerings of food and drink, and perhaps animal sacrifice, was apparently undiminished either by frequent repetition or by the seemingly trivial nature of the information that was sometimes sought.

Since ‘reading’ the oracular cracks themselves is a skill quite lost to posterity, all that is known about these transactions comes from what scholars have been able to make of the inscriptions recording them. These inscriptions were added to the bones and shells after the firing and were positioned as close to the relevant cracking as possible. They were often first painted on with a fine brush, then inscribed with a knife, and the resulting incisions were sometimes filled with a pigment. Whether for future reference or display, the Shang clearly intended their records to look impressive.

In the modern quest to understand them, about 4,000 individual characters of ‘Archaic Chinese’ script have been isolated, and around half of these have been ‘translated or identified with varying degrees of certainty’. ‘There is no question that the language [as] written is Chinese’, according to a leading authority.¹⁸ Some of the characters contain a pictorial element, many anticipate later forms of the same character, and like classical Chinese they are arranged in columns to be read from top to bottom; crucially each character represents a meaning, not (as in most other scripts) the sound, alphabetically represented, of the word used to express that meaning. Finally there is sufficient evidence in the characters themselves and in their grammatical relationships to suggest that this writing had been practised for some time. Presumably it was used on more perishable materials such as bamboo, bark or textiles that have not survived. It seems, then, that the importance attached to literacy in China and the use of a recognisably Chinese script, perhaps the two most characteristic features of ‘Chinese civilisation’, had a long pre-Anyang (c. 1240–c. 1040 BC), and probably pre-Shang (c. 1750–c. 1040 BC), history. A few tentatively identified characters found on stone and dated to Neolithic times may yet substantiate this.

Considering the difficulties of translation, and considering the ‘shorthand’ form of expression necessitated by the cramped confines of a corner of bone, it is surprising how many of the inscriptions are intelligible. Perhaps the most frequently asked ‘charges’ (that is ‘questions’, but phrased as statements) merely invite reassurance from the other world: ‘Tonight there will be no disasters’ or ‘In the next ten days [i.e. a Shang ‘week’] there will be no disasters’. To these the desired ‘answer’ is the character meaning ‘auspicious’, that is ‘affirmative’; the cracking has been ‘read’ as approving the ‘charge’; no disasters tonight. Often the charge is formulated in a ‘will it/won’t it’ form for double reassurance: ‘On the next day…[we] should not make offering to Ancestor Yi’ is followed by ‘On the next day…we should make offering to Ancestor Yi’. In asking the same question twice any ambiguity in one cracked response might be clarified by the other. Sometimes multiple-choice charges are posed – Fu is to inspect the district of Lin; it should be Qin who does it; it should be Bing who does it. An ‘auspicious’ endorsement of any of these settles the matter.¹⁹

‘One reason the king divined so much was precisely because he had so much to divine about,’ says David Keightley.²⁰ Everything, from the vagaries of the weather to the likely source of the royal toothache, the best day for a successful hunt or the prospects of victory over an enemy, had to be submitted for consideration by the supernatural concourse of gods and ancestors. It was as if the king conceived of himself as the pivotal persona in a transcendental bureaucratic hierarchy; its lower, earthly, departments were comprised of clan subordinates with their own local jurisdictions and its higher, celestial, departments of those ancestors and deities with a superior and sometimes specialised knowledge whom only the king, via divination, could approach. ‘The living and the dead were thus engaged in a communal, ritually structured conversation in which, just as the king’s allies and officers made reports to him, so the Shang king made reports to his ancestors…’²¹

Though constituting a hierarchy of their own, ancestors, spirits and deities are not easy to distinguish. Di, the supreme deity equivalent to the king, was usually invoked indirectly and may or may not have been equated with the progenitor of the Shang lineage. But he seems to have fallen out of favour towards the end of the Anyang period and would disappear altogether under the Zhou dynasty. Other spirits responsible for the crops and the rivers were also consulted, as were once-ruling ancestors of the direct lineage plus a few Great Lords who were not royal ancestors. All these might be asked to intercede with Di or to act on their own. The ancestors, in particular, were expected to show loyalty to their lineage and to engage in its temporal concerns as actively as they had in life. Thus the stocking of royal tombs with food and drink in ritual bronze or ceramic vessels may not have been intended simply to provide sustenance for the deceased but also to ensure that they had the means to fulfil this inter-cessionary role by conducting their own ritual offerings.

Many such ancestors are named in the divinatory inscriptions. It was by identifying the names of some of them with those of kings as given in later texts that scholars were able to corroborate the Shang’s historicity. But if the ancestors were usually on the side of the Shang, the supernatural concourse as a whole was far from being a rubber stamp. Royal proposals were not invariably endorsed, and Di especially could be a stern master. He might incite the Shang’s enemies rather than connive with the Shang against them, or inflict catastrophe rather than avert it. A famous example concerned ‘Lady Hao’, who is identified in the inscriptions as a consort of King Wu Ding and who is presumed to be she of the extravagantly furnished tomb excavated intact at Anyang. When Lady Hao became pregnant, Wu Ding hoped for a male heir – the Shang succession was patrilinear – and duly lobbied the gods to that effect. His ‘charge’ that ‘Lady Hao’s child-bearing will be good’ did not, however, bring the desired response. As ‘read’ by Wu Ding from the cracking, it said only that ‘If it be on a ding day that she gives birth, there will be prolonged luck’. This was much too vague, so the king tried again. The response was still ambiguous: all now depended on the baby being born on either a ding day or a geng day, these being like, say, Thursday and Saturday in the Shang’s ten-day week. The odds were still stacked against a happy outcome, and sure enough, ‘After 31 days, on jiayin day, she gave birth and it was not good; it was a girl.’

Verificatory comments like this, added some time after the divination, are comparatively rare. Occasionally a weather forecast proved accurate – ‘It really did rain’ – or a hunt productive – the whole bag is listed. But the outcome of weightier matters, such as wars, is often uncertain and has to be inferred. Evidently the solemn performance of ritual consultation was more important than the efficacy or accuracy of the response. The object of the exercise was to exalt the Shang lineage, both living and dead, by demonstrating to dependants, subjects and enemies alike how long and distinguished this lineage was and how diligently the king strove to engage and mobilise it.

Such reassurance was needed in an environment that was both physically and politically hostile to the formation of a proto-state and a sophisticated culture. It has been deduced that the climate of the Yellow River basin was warmer and wetter in the second millennium BC than it is today. Average temperatures could have been as much as 2–4 degrees Celsius higher and scrub and woodland that much thicker. But the winters must still have been harsh. The usual grains were millets and perhaps wheat, rarely rice. Presumably because of the frosts, freshwater turtles were in short supply and plastrons had to be solicited from the Shang’s southern neighbours; when some arrived alive, they were kept in ponds, but it does not appear that they bred. Other game was plentiful; buffalo, boar, deer and tigers are specified. But the tigers were probably of the Siberian species; and tropical trophies such as elephants and peacocks are rarely mentioned. Written sources from the succeeding Zhou period describe rivers so frozen that armies could march across the ice. Early autumn snowfalls and late spring frosts were accounted occupational hazards, critical for farmers and dynasts alike since no natural disaster was devoid of political portent.

Elsewhere in the ancient world, the famous zones of precocious literacy and urbanisation in the Nile, Tigris/Euphrates and Indus valleys were spared such conditions; there, as the weather warmed, the rising rivers obligingly irrigated the fields; when it cooled, gentle rains watered winter crops; the living was easy and the seeds of civilisation might germinate almost spontaneously. But five to ten latitudinal degrees farther north, upper China was no such incubator. Here life was precarious and survival laborious. Irrigation was almost unknown in Shang times, harvests were hit and miss, and meat, both hunted and reared, figured prominently in the dietary and sacrificial regimen. It may not be fanciful to suggest that the confidence with which the Shang used fire to melt bronze and crack bones owed something to discrimination acquired in fuel foraging and to long cold nights huddled round a glowing hearth.

The political climate was no more benign. The late Shang polity is usually described as ‘a segmentary state’, meaning that those under its direct rule were few while those under its outlying subordinates could be many. Subordinates and allies were usually joined to the Shang lineage by ties of kinship; they were the sons or brothers of kings, or descendants of such. They upheld Shang ritual observance and were in turn upheld by it. They revered the same divine-cum-ancestral host, followed the same mortuary customs and doubtless used the same script and calendar. Yet such shared interests did not guarantee their unflinching loyalty nor preclude their taking independent local action.

In between these centres of Shang power, numerous scattered and despised communities, probably speaking a different language, retained a full and sometimes formidable autonomy. Because of this presence, the Shang territories were neither contiguous nor easily defined. Kinship, not territory, linked the Shang domains. But from place-names and lineages mentioned in the oracular inscriptions it seems that at the end of the second millennium BC the Shang realm reached no farther than what is now northern Henan province and south-eastern Shanxi. Beyond were other ‘segmentary states’, some of them just as powerful with, as already noted, their own bronze-casting capacity and perhaps their own literature. Small and vulnerable, both within and without, the Shang were at best ‘first among equals’ and by the eleventh century BC possibly not that.

More ‘segmented’ than ‘state’, then, Shang rule depended heavily on the energy of the sovereign. Judging by their divinations, the late Shang kings well appreciated this. As well as fulfilling their hectic ritual schedule, they ‘went out’, as the bones put it, repeatedly – to hunt, to fight, to oversee agriculture and to inspect their subordinate domains. They also removed their ‘capital’ (or cult centre) whenever it was thought to have become inauspicious, usually by reason of an enemy threat or some natural visitation. How often it moved is unclear since the site of the ‘capital’ was always called just ‘this place’ or ‘Shang’ (and latterly ‘Yin’) regardless of its location. Later texts mention seven removals, of which the Anyang site was certainly not the first but possibly the last. In fact Shang kingship has been well described as ‘peripatetic’.²²

For all the lineage boasting, for all the mortuary consumption, the technological precocity, the ritual rectitude and the despotic power, the late Shang kingdom was but a local proto-state and one among many. It may have enjoyed greater dominion prior to 1200 BC but not thereafter. In no way did it anticipate the great unitary empire of ten centuries later. Yet by 1045 BC, the currently preferred date for Shang’s defeat by the Zhou, it had demonstrated many of the cultural traits that have come to be seen as typically, even peculiarly, Chinese; and it may well have been for this reason that later textual tradition selected the Shang for inclusion in that apostolic succession of dynasties.

The emphasis on kinship and lineage, on ancestor-worship, ritual observance and a calendrical system based on these, is obvious. Keightley also notes in the Shang’s ritual dealings what he calls ‘a characteristic this-worldliness’ that would colour later Chinese philosophy and religion.²³ The ancestors and the gods had a practical part to play in human affairs; they were not so removed and transcendent as to be credited with impossible responsibilities like the creation of the world or the imposition of moral ‘commandments’; they were there, in and about their tombs and temple-tablets, to be consulted, activated and used – for their example, their wisdom and their considerable influence.

Shang bronze-casting and its astounding artistic achievements provide early evidence of China’s technological genius and aesthetic sophistication; but as is now clear, these skills and sensitivities were not exclusive to the Shang. Writing, on the other hand, may have been. It is remarkable enough that over three thousand years ago the Shang used a script that is recognisably Chinese today; that this script must have had a long pre-Anyang history is even more remarkable; and the use the Shang made of it is especially relevant. From the first, literacy was put to bureaucratic purpose. It was used to record official transactions and so, in effect, to produce historical documentation. Into the new era of textual record in the first millennium BC, literacy, authority and history went hand in hand.

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