Kingdoms in Peril

A Novel of the Ancient Chinese World at War

Olivia Milburn, Olivia Milburn

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780520380523
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Littérature chinoise

This abridged edition introduces readers to the power and drama of the electrifying classic Chinese novel. One of the great works of Chinese literature, beloved in East Asia but virtually unknown in the West, Kingdoms in Peril is an epic historical novel charting the five hundredyears leading to the unification of China under the rule of the legendary First Emperor. Writing some fourteen hundredyears after the unification, the Ming-era author Feng Menglong drew on a vast trove of literary and historical documents to composea gripping narrative account of how China came to be China. Here, translated into English for the first time, Kingdoms in Peril recounts the triumphs and tragedies of those five hundredyears, through stories taken from the lives of the unforgettable characters that defined and shaped the ages in which they lived. This abridged edition distills the novel's distinct style and its most dramatic episodes into a single volume. Maintaining the spirit and excitement of the original novel, this edition weaves together nine of the most pivotal storylines––some extremely famous, others less well known. Readers will glimpse the intensity of tectonic events that shaped everyday lives, loves, and struggles, with powerful women featuring as prominently in the novel as they have in Chinese history. There are many historical works that provide an account of some of these events, but none are as thrilling and breathtakingly memorable as Kingdoms in Peril.

MAP 1. The Zhou Confederacy circa 500 B.C.E. Adapted from Map of the Five Hegemons by SY, CC-BY-SA 4.0.

MAP 2. The Kingdoms of the Warring States Period in circa 260 B.C.E. Adapted from The Warring States of China c. 260 BCE by Philg88, CC-BY-SA 3.0.

Introduction

Kingdoms in Peril is an epic historical novel covering the five hundred and fifty years of the Eastern Zhou dynasty, from the civil wars and invasions that marked the birth of a new regime in 771 B.C.E. to the unification of China in 221 B.C.E. This period saw the numerous states that made up the Zhou confederacy riven by intense and intractable conflict as they lurched from one crisis to the next. Every concept of what constituted a civilized society was tested again and again through centuries of political instability, and any momentary peace was soon threatened by the relentless intriguing of ministers, eunuchs, and harem favorites. It was a time when political life was punctuated with poisonings, assassinations, and sinister conspiracies, and those who escaped other murderous attacks might still fall victim to warfare or the rioting populace. As old certainties crumbled and hierarchies collapsed, it was no longer possible to maintain traditional social norms, and new opportunities opened up for the intelligent and able. Men and women were quick to take advantage of this, testing the boundaries and seeking self-advancement in ways that would have been impossible in a more stable environment. As an international market opened up for talented individuals, clever men increasingly sought to build careers abroad, secure in the knowledge that their social and ethnic background would not be held against them in a foreign country. Women too resisted traditional assumptions that their sphere should be confined to childrearing at home, and found that they were now expected—at least at an elite level—to be able to provide sagacious advice, arrange murders, defuse political conspiracies, and, in the event of a crisis, potentially even to take over the running of the country.

Kingdoms in Peril was written in the 1640s, at the very end of the Ming dynasty, by the great novelist Feng Menglong (1574–1646). An expert in the history of the Eastern Zhou dynasty, he was inspired to write this novel by reading an earlier work on the same subject: Tales of the States (Lieguo zhi) by Yu Shaoyu (active 1522–73). Horrified by the many mistakes and anachronisms this book contained, Feng Menglong decided to produce a new and improved account of the same historical events, which would explore the careers and personalities of the many remarkable individuals who lived through and defined this crucial era of Chinese history. In the course of the one hundred and eight chapters of the complete novel, he documents the collapse of the Zhou confederacy during the Spring and Autumn period (771–475 B.C.E.) and the slow rebuilding of civil society during the Warring States era (475–221 B.C.E.), which culminated in the unification of China under the First Emperor of the Qin dynasty (r. 246–221 B.C.E. as king; r. 221–210 B.C.E. as emperor). Thus, overall, this novel describes a grand arc, from stability to chaos and back again. As a novel about politics, much of the narrative in Kingdoms in Peril concentrates on the exercise of power. During the Eastern Zhou dynasty, there were two words in use to cover different aspects of the concept of power. Quan was used for the power that comes from quantifiable resources: the size of the army, the financial reserves in the treasury, the extent of the tax base, stockpiles of weapons, armor, and so on. Shi, on the other hand, refers to power that comes from taking advantage of the opportunities provided by a developing situation. It is the interplay between quan and shi that provides many of the most dramatic incidents in the history of this period, and therefore of this novel. Power that comes from circumstantial advantage could be utilized in all sorts of different contexts: whether it is a silver-tongued diplomat persuading a king to accept a disadvantageous treaty; a cunning general tricking the enemy commander into an unfavorable situation by playing to his prejudices; or a rival convincing a neglected wife to spy on her husband to set him up for assassination—these chinks in the armor allowed for stunning reversals of fortune.

Whether they were making history or being crushed by it, the characters of Kingdoms in Peril are presented in a way that reminds us of their human qualities. There are no heroes and villains here, just flawed individuals trying their best to survive in often impossible circumstances, all too often discovering that the choices available to them ranged from bad to worse. One of the key features of this novel is the emphasis on the terrible conflicts many of its characters faced—raised in an ethical system that valued loyalty, justice, benevolence, and filial duty and yet placed in circumstances in which they were torn between their duty to the ruler or the country, and their love for family and friends. Regardless of whether they were monarchs, aristocrats, hereditary ministers, or clan leaders, members of the Eastern Zhou ruling elite almost always had complicated private lives, surrounded as they were by wives, concubines, mistresses, cronies, bodyguards, hangers-on, and hordes of servants, male and female. The ties of affection created within these households did not necessarily run neatly according to rank and status, where sons of the main wife held priority in the inheritance, followed by the children of concubines, while illegitimate offspring were generally treated little better than slaves. Although this social hierarchy might appear rigid, it could always be overturned by the intelligent, while ruthless ambition and violence occasionally found themselves tempered by loving relationships strong enough to withstand the brutality of the age. Kingdoms in Peril has long been recognized as a masterpiece for its exploration of the personalities of individuals caught up in momentous historical events.

KINGDOMS IN PERIL: HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

Kingdoms in Peril opens with a brief account of the political problems at the end of the Western Zhou dynasty, which were allayed with the accession of the highly competent King Xuan of Zhou (r. 827–782 B.C.E.). However, though the reign of King Xuan offered a temporary respite, the dynasty would collapse in a civil war during the reign of his son, King You (r. 781–771 B.C.E.). The fall of the Western Zhou dynasty is today understood as the result of multiple factors: natural disasters created enormous social disruption and forced many people to become refugees; attacks by powerful northern nomadic peoples increased; and the ensuing humanitarian crisis was exacerbated by an incompetent government riven with internal dissension. However, this is not how ancient Chinese people regarded these events. For them, the key figure in the fall of the Western Zhou was an accursed woman, Bao Si, the favorite slave-girl of the last king. She was believed to be the living embodiment of an ancient malediction, imposed upon the people of Zhou by the Bao lords, and hence predestined to bring about the fall of the dynasty. As a result, Bao Si came to represent a counterpart and antithesis to Hou Ji, the mythical founder of the Zhou royal house. Just as Hou Ji was born after his mother stepped in the footprint of a giant, and survived thanks to the protection of various birds and animals when his mother attempted to abandon her baby, Bao Si was born after her mother stepped in the footprint of a magical turtle, and survived an attempt to drown her as a baby through the intervention of the local wildlife. To an ancient Chinese audience, Heaven created Hou Ji to bring civilization to the world as the ancestor of the Zhou ruling house, and Bao Si was sent down to destroy everything that they had worked so hard to create.

In the year 771 B.C.E., Crown Prince Yijiu of Zhou, furious at having been dispossessed by his father, launched a rebellion against him. In the ensuing carnage King You and Bao Si were killed, together with vast numbers of government officials. The ordinary inhabitants of the capital were massacred, women were raped, and the city was pillaged by the crown prince’s self-declared supporters. Faced with a burned palace and a ruined city, the newly enthroned Yijiu, now King Ping of Zhou (r. 770–720 B.C.E.), decided to move the seat of government permanently to the secondary capital at Luoyang. The immediate consequences of this decision were not necessarily apparent; however, it would gradually become clear that these events had completely destroyed the authority of the Zhou kings. With the center crumbling, violence began to spiral out of control. Over the course of the next few centuries, the states of the Zhou confederacy suffered social collapse and political cataclysm, from which no one would emerge unscathed. The violence spread outwards from each epicenter like the ripples when a stone is dropped into water. An assassination in one state would lead to further revenge killings, sucking more and more people into the maelstrom. The resulting political vacuum would result in popular uprisings, innocent people were slain, and foreign enemies invaded. Occasionally, an individual ruler and his ministers would try to make a stand and preserve the peace, but all too soon, that regime would pass away and the fighting would break out again. At the same time, centrifugal forces ripped the Central States apart, as power increasingly came to be vested in regimes more and more remote from the old center: the Zhou Royal Domain. This was a function of the way in which territory had been allocated since the founding of the Western Zhou in 1045 B.C.E. The political center consisted mainly of city-states, with limited opportunities for expansion. Over time it proved to be the peripheral regimes—sometimes even foreign kingdoms—that showed they had the capacity to expand rapidly, conquering their neighbors and recruiting ever vaster armies. The precise number of states within the Zhou confederacy at the beginning of the Eastern Zhou dynasty is not known, since not all are mentioned in surviving historical records and some appear only in inscriptions on ceremonial bronze v...