Imperial China, 900–1800

F. W. Mote

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9780674256484
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Chinesische Geschichte

This is a history of China for the 900-year time span of the late imperial period. A senior scholar of this epoch, F. W. Mote highlights the personal characteristics of the rulers and dynasties and probes the cultural theme of Chinese adaptations to recurrent alien rule. No other work provides a similar synthesis: generational events, personalities, and the spirit of the age combine to yield a comprehensive history of the civilization, not isolated but shaped by its relation to outsiders.This vast panorama of the civilization of the largest society in human history reveals much about Chinese high and low culture, and the influential role of Confucian philosophical and social ideals. Throughout the Liao Empire, the world of the Song, the Mongol rule, and the early Qing through the Kangxi and Qianlong reigns, culture, ideas, and personalities are richly woven into the fabric of the political order and institutions. This is a monumental work that will stand among the classic accounts of the nature and vibrancy of Chinese civilization before the modern period.

PART ONE

CONQUEST DYNASTIES AND THE NORTHERN SONG, 900–1127

Overleaf:

Stag Hunt

Attributed to Huang Zongdao, active ca. 1120. Handscroll, ink and color on paper. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Edward Elliott Family Collection. The Dillon Fund gift, 1982. Used with permission.

“A handsome Khitan youth riding a menacing dark brown horse charges in full gallop after a fleeing stag that has just been pierced by an arrow . . . The injured victim, a stunning animal with melting features and soft fur, drops to the ground in a final, desperate leap. The treadmill effect of the horse’s hooves, all four spinning in the air, is not unlike the experiments of the Futurists, with simultaneous images to suggest dynamic speed and motion” (Fong 1992, pp. 32–33). Traditionally this painting was attributed to Prince Bei, son of Abaoji, named Prince of Dongdan in 926, also known by the Chinese name Li Zanhua; see Chapters 2 and 3.

1

THE FIVE DYNASTIES

Later imperial China can be said to begin in the half-century of deep changes that occurred between the fall of the Tang dynasty and the subsequent founding of the Song, two of imperial China’s longest and most important dynastic periods. Those changes were hastened by the fragmentation and turbulence that marked this period of political disorder and military conflict. One consequence was that in the age which followed, North China became the object of Inner Asian military expansion. Simultaneously, while resisting that expansion, the Song dynasty gave new shape to the course of Chinese civilization. Despite political disorder and military involvement, the tenth century was an age rich in cultural development. Here the political outlines of the Five Dynasties and the concurrent Ten States are briefly summarized. Finally, as prelude to the profound interaction of China and Inner Asia in the centuries that followed, background information on Inner Asia is introduced.

I. LATER IMPERIAL CHINA’S PLACE IN HISTORY

Imperial China was more than a thousand years old when the great Tang dynasty came to its end in the year 907 of our Common Era (C.E.). Chinese high civilization was much older; its documented history as a literate civilization extends back a thousand years before its “imperial” history began in the third century before our Common Era (B.C.E.). That was when the Qin dynasty’s “First Emperor,” or Shihuangdi, as he insisted on being called, unified all the Chinese states in 221 B.C.E. and launched the new phase in history that we call imperial China.

Throughout the eleven centuries of early imperial China prior to our beginning point in this volume, the imperial Chinese state acquired its characteristic features. The brief Qin dynasty and its successor, the Han (206 B.C.E.–220 C.E.), accomplished the basic steps. Some of early imperial China’s social and political features are rare in the histories of early peoples: all political power was highly centralized; its government was a bureaucracy of highly literate administrators who were men selected in principle for their individual qualifications of learning and ability; and its imperial institution, while linked to no church or organized religion, yet claimed that its right to rule was bestowed by heaven’s mandate—however that might be interpreted. At the very least, it was taken to mean that the mandate to rule had to be earned, and would be withdrawn when the legitimate rulers showed that, by the standard of serving the “popular good,” they were no longer worthy of it. Dynasties, meaning the succession of rulers directly descended from a founding emperor, rose and fell through military action, but the imperial state was a civil government in which, nominally at least, the civil virtues were held to be superior to the military. There was no hereditary military aristocracy in the strict sense of the word, nor even a civil aristocracy. Inherited titles and privileges were, to be sure, more numerous in those earlier centuries, but at no time did they entail fiefs with hereditary political rights. In practice, imperial China was from the beginning largely governed by men (other than the successor emperors themselves) who gained their positions by their individual qualities, not by inheritance. They were drawn from a society that had no legally established class distinctions. Those principles, and the initial experience in practicing them, were clearly established under the radical Qin dynasty in the late third century B.C.E. China’s long subsequent experience in working out ways to maintain and enlarge in practice the basic social conditions which they imply gives its history special interest in the comparative study of human civilizations.

Following the Han dynasty, and after a further century of weak governing, a long period of division into simultaneous Northern and Southern Dynasties (317–589) led at last to a new unification. That verified Chinese expectations that their cultural realm constituted one society that should have one ruler. Again, a brief but powerful dynasty like the third-century B.C.E. Qin, in this case the Sui (581–618), accomplished the military reunification, to be followed by the long and glorious flowering of Chinese civilization under the Tang dynasty (618–907).

The year 900 C.E. makes a meaningful beginning point for this volume devoted to the later centuries of China’s imperial rule. True, the idea that there could be a “Common Era” not based on the Chinese calendar is completely foreign to traditional Chinese civilization; China adopted that idea only in the twentieth century, when the term gongyuan, meaning something essentially like “common era,” slowly came into widespread use, and even today has not completely superseded the traditional Chinese dating system. In recent decades many historians have come to use this Western, or “Common Era,” dating for events in Chinese history, so we may do the same here, even though at that time, in the minds of the Chinese and their neighbors in East and Inner Asia, the year that closely matches 900, (actually, it began on February 4, 900, and ended on January 22, 901) was thought of as the third year of the Guanghua reign period of the late Tang dynasty emperor Zhaozong; that year did not begin a century or precisely correspond to any recognized turning point in history. Nevertheless, the year 900 loosely corresponds to a genuine turning point, marked by the end of the Tang dynasty (formally dated to the year 907). In the last decades of the ninth century C.E. and the first decades of the tenth, we clearly see the beginnings of far-reaching changes that have great significance for defining the subsequent age in Chinese as well as Inner Asian history. It is for this reason that I have chosen the year 900 as our arbitrary beginning point.

The Sui and Tang dynasties, coming to power in the sixth and seventh centuries, faced the problem of consolidating the Chinese state after almost three centuries of north-south division, caused by the incursions of Inner Asian peoples long in contact with the Chinese culture area. When the Sui and then the Tang established their dynasties, they were able to fend off those invasions, but China’s interaction with non-Chinese peoples on all of its land borders continued. Other Inner Asian peoples again came to play crucial roles in the life of China after 900, if in a new way. The interplay of China and Inner Asia is a consistent element in the development of both, extending far back into the prehistoric millennia; that is abundantly and ever more clearly revealed by recent systematic archaeological explorations. The Inner Asian peoples occupied regions lying just north of the Chinese cultural area, defined by an ecological boundary that separated the conditions of sedentary farming life of the Chinese people from the harsher conditions farther north and northwest, under which hunting and herding were basic to people’s livelihood. In Tang and later times those northern peoples were predominantly “Turkic,” insofar as we can determine from our knowledge of the languages their descendants spoke, but by the same measure, some also were Aryan peoples whose languages were related to Persian, and some spoke languages with affinities for present-day Tibetan; there probably were others of still different linguistic and cultural identities.

The sedentary Chinese also interacted with non-Chinese (in present-day usage, non-Han) peoples on its other land frontiers in the south, southwest, and southeast. Those non-Chinese were mostly sedentary farming peoples who, like the Chinese, practiced intensive village-based agriculture. The long centuries of interaction with them, and Chinese infiltration into their lands, did not involve crossing any ecological barriers, and went on continuously, more or less unnoticed by writers of history.

It was the martial tribal peoples of Inner Asia, who developed military and organizational skills based on their lives as hunters and herders, who alone among all of China’s neighbors had the power to threaten the existence of the Chinese state. They were always potential raiders, invaders, conquerors, and rulers. Both the Sui and the Tang ruling houses arose in the northwest border zone, having intermarried with Turkic princely families and used warrior skills developed in that interaction to found their dynasties. Through the more than three centuries of Sui and Tang, China remained strongly oriented toward its northern and northwestern frontier. It extended control and influence deep into Inner Asia, and benefited from the cultural and commerical contacts with more distant Central Asia and regions beyond, to India, Persia, and western Asia. It was the age when the ancient Silk Roads came to their greatest importance, connecting the Tang capital to what the Chinese called the Western Regions, to the homeland of Buddhism (which had been present in China from Han times onward), and to the religious and cultural traditions still farther west—Zoroastrian, Manichaean, Islamic, Jewish, Nestorian Christian, among others that came into Tang China. There they established communities of their co-believers. Those immigrant peoples helped to mediate between eastern and western Asia in this most cosmopolitan period of China’s 2,000-year-long imperial era. While Chinese interests in Inner Asia led to an extension of China’s military and political control there, Chinese population was not significantly extended into Inner Asia at that time. An ecological boundary separated China Proper and the Inner Asian territories, whose grasslands, deserts, and oases did not attract Chinese farmers. Throughout the Tang period’s westward extension of Chinese interest and influence, the Chinese presence in Inner Asia was limited to military garrisons and small merchant communities in the oases along the nearer Silk Road routes.

The Tang was, however, a period during which the Chinese people greatly extended the areas of their demographic dominance by migration to the south, where no such ecological barriers existed. Increased numbers of Chinese filled out the Yangzi River drainage basin of Central China and further south, into the Southeast China coastal regions as far as present-day Guangdong (Canton) and Vietnam. The centuries-long process of Chinese southward migration seldom involved large-scale military confrontation, even though it was not always peaceable.

Armed conflict, in contrast, was a constant feature on the northern borders with Inner Asia, where the non-Chinese peoples possessed the means to sorely test Chinese military capacities. Their striking force enabled the northern peoples to take active parts in Tang China’s internal power struggles: they supplied the Tang government, or its domestic opponents, with cavalry forces in return for political rewards. Inner Asian military power became a component of Tang internal politics, of increasing importance from the mid-eighth century onward. When the later Tang emperors chose to strengthen their rule by granting military governorships both in the provinces and along the northern borders, these often went to the non-Chinese tribal leaders. During the rebellion of Huang Chao that grew out of widespread bandit operations in the 870s, the capital was sacked and half the provinces of China, as far south as Guangdong, were ravaged by Huang Chao’s roaming armies. That massive rebellion was finally suppressed in 884 with the aid of a chieftain of the Shatuo Turks. The Shatuo were one of several Turkic nations with whom the Tang court had been involved. This man bore the Chinese name Li Keyong. His reward for intervening with the might of Turkic cavalry was the grant of a base in northern Shanxi, which he turned into a bastion of Turkic military power, using it to play a major role in the struggles among regional warlords to impose control over the Tang imperial court. Forced to grant local authority to the regional military leaders, whether Chinese or Turkic, including authority for civil governing and tax collection, in return for unreliable professions of loyalty, the later Tang emperors never regained full control over their country. The character of governing was changed. Among those holders of real power who were Chinese (as most were), they had come from the defeated forces of Huang Chao or from other bandit uprisings. The great families of the Tang civil and bureaucratic elite played almost no part in the final struggles of the Tang to survive. As a sector of elite society, they had been largely nullified if not eliminated.

The later Tang emperors were thus little more than pawns of contesting military leaders. One such leader, a Chinese named Zhu Wen, a former captain in Huang Chao’s rebel armies, seized the capital in 901. Then in 905 he killed the emperor and most of the Tang imperial family and placed a teenage imperial prince on the throne as his puppet. Finally, in 907 he abandoned all pretenses and declared himself the founding emperor of a new dynasty. In 908 he killed the deposed last Tang emperor, a boy of sixteen. That cycle of violence began the Liang (Later Liang), the first of the Five Dynasties. The fall of the Tang dynasty is one of the more obvious reasons for taking the year 900, more precisely 907, to mark the beginning of the long period that in this volume is called later imperial China.

The half-century-long Five Dynasties period, from the Later Liang in 907 to the founding of the Song dynasty in 960, appears on the surface to have been an age of utter chaos, violence, and political disorder. None of the Five Dynasties, based in North China, was able to reunify China; all coexisted with province-size Chinese states in Central and South China. Three of the five were established by non-Chinese leaders who had become part of the Chinese military and political scene. Despite that surface appearance of unending disorder, the reality underlying this half-century is one of deep and transforming change. A new structure of state power emerged, and a new relationship of military power to civil administrative authority took shape in reaction against the long-accumulated political weaknesses of the late Tang. In civil society, the centuries-long dominance of the established “great families” within officialdom and in the society of their home localities was utterly broken, to be replaced by a new class of civil bureaucrats who used office to gain social status, not the other way around. In economic spheres, the “commercial revolution” of late Tang times continued to alter patterns of trade and economic behavior throughout society, and to provide the state with the means to a strengthened fiscal base.

Also starting in the late Tang, a new understanding of what should constitute the Confucian ethical basis of governing and of social life was forcefully demanded by a few thinkers and statesmen.¹ That became a full-scale movement in Confucian thought in early Northern Song times, some 200 years later, when it produced the flowering of philosophical debate and speculation that we call Neo-Confucianism. That reorientation of the ancient Confucian thought system dominated Chinese civilization for a millennium. It complemented and reinforced other changes in the social development of post-Tang China. These included a spread of learning aided by the Tang invention of printing from engraved wooden blocks, a technology that reached great heights from the Five Dynasties period onward, with profound social consequences, and one that invites comparison with the appearance of printing technology in fifteenth-century Europe. Amidst those profound changes, the flamboyant, cosmopolitan, outward-looking, and expansive age of Sui and Tang was succeeded by a markedly different cultural tone and outlook in the Song dynasty, including both the earlier Northern Song phase (960–1126) and the Southern Song continuation of that long dynasty (to 1279). The implications of that cultural change, leading to the “new culture of Song” that followed, will be an important focus of the chapters to come.

There also are strong elements of continuity through the transition from Tang to Song. I have noted that one important element of continuity from the late Tang into the next several centuries is China’s involvement with Inner Asia. Just as the Tang was being brutally terminated, a rival dynasty was being created on China’s northern borders, the Liao dynasty, formed by the Khitan tribal nation,² taking Tang China’s “universal” imperial system as its ...