Medieval Chinese Warfare 300-900

David Graff

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN: 9781134553525
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

Shortly after 300 AD, barbarian invaders from Inner Asia toppled China's Western Jin dynasty, leaving the country divided and at war for several centuries. Despite this, the empire gradually formed a unified imperial order. Medieval Chinese Warfare, 300-900 explores the military strategies, institutions and wars that reconstructed the Chinese empire that has survived into modern times.
Drawing on classical Chinese sources and the best modern scholarship from China and Japan, David A. Graff connects military affairs with political and social developments to show how China's history was shaped by war.

CHAPTER ONE

The legacy of antiquity

There has long existed a rough-and-ready, generally accepted periodization of the military history of the Western world. Though exact chronological boundaries remain subject to debate, changes in technology, tactics, and military institutions have enabled historians to distinguish between an ancient period dominated by the infantry-based armies of Greece and Rome and a medieval period characterized by political fragmentation, the primacy of cavalry on the battlefield, and the great advantage enjoyed by the defenders of castles and fortresses. This medieval pattern in turn gave way to an early modern warfare marked by the resurgence of effective infantry forces, the use of gunpowder weapons, and the centralization of military authority.¹ In contrast to this familiar picture of historical change, the periodization of Chinese military history remains extremely murky. At the ancient and modern extremes, to be sure, certain changes are fairly obvious. The aristocratic chariot warfare of the seventh century BC was profoundly different from the conflicts waged by disciplined mass armies of infantry and cavalry four centuries later, and, at the other extreme, the struggle to assimilate Western military technology, organization, and ideas in the late nineteenth century marks another obvious watershed. In the more than two thousand years separating these points, however, significant developments are not easy to identify. It is not at all clear that medieval Chinese warfare – however we choose to define the term “medieval” in the Chinese context – differed very much from what came before or followed after. The starting point for this survey, AD 300, coincides very loosely with the appearance of the stirrup in China, while the endpoint of AD 900 falls just prior to the introduction of gunpowder into Chinese warfare. Yet, for a variety of reasons both institutional and technological, neither of these innovations seems to have had the same sweeping impact on the conduct of warfare in China as in the West.² Nor can this period be sharply distinguished on the basis of military institutions or organization, since there was little that did not have an analogue in earlier or later times. The choice of 300 and 900 as the chronological boundaries of this work has less to do with developments in the art of war than with changes in the broader background of Chinese society and the imperial polity.

At the beginning of the fourth century China was a unified empire ruled by the Jin dynasty (house of Sima) from the ancient capital city of Luoyang just south of the Yellow River. The Jin regime was heir to the administrative and political traditions of China’s first unified empire, which had been founded by Qin Shihuangdi of the short-lived Qin dynasty in 221 BC and continued in much the same form under the rulers of the Han dynasty from 202 BC to AD 220. Between the final collapse of Han rule and the advent of the Jin dynasty, China had experienced a half-century-long period of civil war and disunity when the land was divided between the so-called Three Kingdoms – Wei in the north, Wu in the southeast, and Shu in the Sichuan basin of the southwest. Each of these regional regimes claimed imperial legitimacy, but the Wei state, larger and more populous than its rivals, enjoyed a distinct advantage. In 263 Wei armies succeeded in conquering Shu. Two years later the last Wei emperor was deposed by the dominant minister of the Wei court, Sima Yan, who took the throne as the first emperor of the Jin dynasty. The Jin forces completed the conquest of the south by eliminating Wu in 280. The wars of the Three Kingdoms were the longest period of conflict and disorder since the founding of the empire in 221 BC, but their impact was limited by the fact that they were civil wars waged by Chinese against other Chinese with the aim of reconstructing the Han empire. There was actually a great deal of continuity in government during this period, especially in the north, and many of the officials who served the Jin court at the end of the third century came from families that had already been prominent under the Han dynasty.

The crisis that overtook the empire in the first decade of the fourth century was of a very different sort. A new round of internecine conflict initiated by feuding members of the Jin imperial house created an opening for revolts by non-Chinese peoples who had settled within the borders of the empire, and for invasions of North China by their pastoral cousins inhabiting the mountains, deserts, and grasslands beyond the frontier. The Jin rulers retreated south of the Yangzi River, leaving the north to be divided among a number of violent and unstable “barbarian” regimes. Some three centuries passed before the empire was reunited by the founders of the Sui and Tang dynasties, who had themselves emerged from the new, mixed-blood Sino-Turkic elite that had taken root in North China during the age of division. While the Tang dynasty was able to impose a high degree of unity and order on the empire for more than a century, the great rebellion of the frontier general An Lushan in 755 badly weakened the power of the court and ushered in a new period of warlordism and regional autonomy that lasted well beyond the fall of the dynasty in 907. The period from 300 to 900 was a time when disunity and disorder were the dominant themes. China was subjected as never before to invasions by peoples that the Chinese – or more precisely, their literate elites – chose to regard as barbarians. Much of China was conquered and ruled by the invaders, another unprecedented development. And during this period outside influences were felt strongly not only in the political sphere, but also in religion and culture.

The chaos and violence of the age set streams of refugees in motion, especially from north to south, and gave rise – at some times and in some places – to autarkic, manorial systems of production. This period was also an aristocratic age, when hereditary status counted far more than had been the case in Han times. A distinguished pedigree could command popular respect and access to government office, and high birth was among the most important qualifications for leadership. China’s “medieval” period was also an age of religious faith, as disorder and insecurity created fertile conditions for the spread of Buddhism with its otherworldly promises to people of all classes and conditions in all parts of the country. Buddhism was first introduced to China from India during the Han, but it was during the age of disunion and under the Sui and Tang dynasties that this foreign faith was fully accepted by the Chinese and enjoyed its greatest influence over thought and behavior, politics and the arts. As others have pointed out, parallels for many of the characterics of China’s “medieval” period can be found in the Europe of the Middle Ages. The resemblance should not be pushed too far, however. Buddhist monasteries could be locally powerful, for example, but the Buddhist clergy was never able to claim the same monopolistic position that the Catholic church enjoyed in medieval Europe. Literacy, the written heritage of antiquity, and traditions of public administration were far better preserved in China than in the Latin West.

Just as the period after 300 was in many ways distinct from what came before, Chinese society of the Song dynasty (960–1279) and later was very different from the “medieval” world that preceded it. Sinologists have long regarded the transition from Tang to Song as one of the most important divides in all of Chinese history. It would be absurd to try to date this transition, based as it was on gradual processes of social and cultural change, to a single year such as 900, 907, or 960, but the changes that occurred in China between the middle of the eighth century and the end of the tenth were no less profound for being so difficult to locate precisely in time. These two and a half centuries saw the replacement of the old aristocracy with its hereditary claims to office by a more broadly based elite of landholders and bureaucrats recruited on the basis of merit rather than birth. The rise of the civil service examination system over the course of the Tang period certainly played a major part in this development, as did the rampant provincial warlordism of late Tang which opened many local government positions to men of humble origins, the chaos of the late ninth-century rebellions and civil wars which destroyed many of the aristocratic families, and the emergence of a free market in land which enabled newly risen bureaucratic elites to secure their family fortunes as landed gentry. The same period saw the burgeoning of a market economy and increasing urbanization, the invention of woodblock printing leading to a much wider distribution of reading materials and correspondingly greater literacy, and a decline in the fortunes of Buddhism coupled with a revival of Confucian philosophy. One of the most influential Japanese sinologists of the twentieth century went so far as to label the Song dynasty as the beginning of “modern” China, primarily on account of the disappearance of aristocratic privilege and the enhanced power of the emperor, no longer first among equals, over all of his subjects.³

Of course, any scheme of periodization must inevitably do violence to a complex historical reality. Political and military turning points cannot be assumed to coincide with significant social and economic developments, and none of these are necessarily connected to new intellectual departures or innovations in technology. Some phenomena change quickly and others, the stuff of Braudel’s longue durée, change slowly or not at all. The basic agrarian pattern of Chinese life and the family-oriented Confucian value system must be counted as part of this relatively static substrate, as must a number of ideas and practices that were already quite well established by the beginning of the medieval period. One of these was the ideal of imperial unity, the belief that China – the lands and peoples that had been ruled by the Qin and Han dynasties – should form a single political entity under a single legitimate ruler who would serve as ritual intermediary between the human world, nature, and the cosmos. Even before Qin’s creation of an administratively unified empire, the relatively loose hegemony exercised by the earlier Zhou kings had planted the notion that a single paramount ruler for all the Chinese lands was both desirable and necessary. Under the Qin and Han regimes, this craving for unity attached itself to the structures and pretenses of the centralized, bureaucratic empire. Imperial unity acquired an aura of legitimacy that became a valuable ideological resource for would-be unifiers. After the fall of Han, each of the Three Kingdoms claimed sole legitimacy for itself and dreamed of reuniting the empire under its own mandate, though only Wei–Jin had the strength to realize this ambition.

Another core normative principle was the centrality of China and the superiority of its civilization. Peoples who existed outside of the community of Chinese culture (as defined by customs, rituals, written language, and selfidentification) were regarded by the Chinese as “barbarians.” The pastoral peoples of the northern steppes were characterized as having the faces of humans but the hearts of wild beasts, creatures for whom armed robbery directed against China was the natural way of life, while the aboriginal peoples of the south were viewed as simple, primitive types who could be brought around to a Chinese way of life through the transforming influence of benevolent local officials.

The ideology and practice of government were also very firmly established during the centuries of Han rule. Alongside the well-publicized official endorsement of the Confucian emphasis on government by ritual and moral suasion, there was also a lasting inheritance from the Legalist statesmen of the Qin dynasty in the form of a penal code providing harsh punishments for lawbreakers and detailed regulations governing the conduct of government business. The administrative structure inherited from Qin and Han reached down to the local level, the county (xian) with a population of several thousand or several tens of thousands; it relied heavily on written records and documents, and sought to maintain a very high degree of control over the population. The state counted the population on a regular basis (the census of AD 2 recorded 57,671,400 individuals⁴) and kept detailed household registers recording family members and landholdings to facilitate the extraction of taxes, corvée labor, and military service from the populace. Though many individuals and families were surely able to slip through the cracks, the state’s intention was uncompromising.⁵

Just as the underlying framework for medieval statecraft was established in the Han dynasty and earlier, so too were the basic tools and techniques of medieval Chinese warfare. The Warring States period (453–221 BC) in particular saw a number of new developments that would permanently alter the shape of Chinese warfare. These included the rise of large infantry armies, the introduction of cavalry, the adoption of new weapons such as the crossbow, and the development of new techniques of siegecraft. During this period there was a vast increase in the scale of armed conflict, reflecting the greatly enhanced power of the state to mobilize resources for war.

This picture differed greatly from the style of warfare that had been practiced during the Spring and Autumn period (722–481 BC), when North China was divided among a large number of competing city-states ruled by a warrior aristocracy. Although small forces of infantry were present on the battlefield, most of the fighting was done by chariot-borne noblemen. Wars were fought for prestige and honor more often than for territory, and combat was hedged about by ceremonial and ritual restrictions. Divination and sacrifices were performed before battle, and it was customary for the two sides to agree on the time and place before the action began.⁶ The Zuo zhuan, a narrative history dealing with this period but committed to writing several centuries later, contains many examples of restraint and what might be described as chivalrous behavior on the part of the combatants. Commanders often refused to take unfair advantage of their opponents. In a famous case from 638 BC, the Duke of Song refused to attack an enemy force in the midst of a river crossing but waited until it had completed its deployment on the opposite bank, and in 554 BC an invading army withdrew from the state of Qi when it learned of the death of the Qi ruler.⁷ On the battlefield, warriors prized heroic feats and gallant gestures. Winning was by no means irrelevant, but the battle narratives of the Zuo zhuan often give the impression that the most important thing was to show off one’s bravery and individual style.

However, the increasingly intense interstate conflicts of the late Spring and Autumn period precipitated significant changes in both the state and its approach to waging war. In a process that spread over several centuries, the stronger principalities gradually succeeded in annexing their weaker neighbors and transforming themselves into centralized territorial states, of which only seven remained standing by the middle of the third century BC. As Mark Lewis has pointed out, a key step in this process was the tightening of administrative control over the rural population which was now called upon to perform compulsory military service.⁸ This, together with population growth and increases in agricultural output stemming from the introduction of iron tools, permitted states to raise much larger armies than had been the case in earlier days, and the chariot component of armies came to be dwarfed by the growing mass of foot soldiers. By the late Warring States period military obligations were nearly universal for males; the state of Qin, for example, is supposed to have mobilized all of its men over the age of fifteen for a campaign against Zhao in 260 BC.⁹ The new mass armies fielded by the warring states were also equipped with new and deadlier tools. Iron weapons and iron armor first came into widespread use during this period, and crossbows were being employed in large numbers on the battlefield by the middle of the fourth century BC. Some two centuries later, the crossbow had become, in the opinion of one authority, “nothing less than the standard weapon of the Han armies.”¹⁰

Another major development of the Warring States pe...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Maps
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter One
• Chapter Two
• Chapter Three
• Chapter Four
• Chapter Five
• Chapter Six
• Chapter Seven
• Chapter Eight
• Chapter Nine
• Chapter Ten
• Chapter Eleven
• Conclusion
• Bibliography