Early Medieval China

A Sourcebook

Wendy Swartz, Robert Ford Campany, Yang Lu, Jessey Choo, Wendy Swartz, Robert Ford Campany, Yang Lu, Jessey Choo

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9780231531009
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia cinese

This innovative sourcebook builds a dynamic understanding of China's early medieval period (220–589) through an original selection and arrangement of literary, historical, religious, and critical texts. A tumultuous and formative era, these centuries saw the longest stretch of political fragmentation in China's imperial history, resulting in new ethnic configurations, the rise of powerful clans, and a pervasive divide between north and south.

Deploying thematic categories, the editors sketch the period in a novel way for students and, by featuring many texts translated into English for the first time, recast the era for specialists. Thematic topics include regional definitions and tensions, governing mechanisms and social reality, ideas of self and other, relations with the unseen world, everyday life, and cultural concepts. Within each section, the editors and translators introduce the selected texts and provide critical commentary on their historical significance, along with suggestions for further reading and research.

PART I

The North and the South

“North” and “South” are used in this book as multivalent, relational terms, designating not only a geographic difference but also two sets of cultural and political attributes distinctive to each region. Throughout the history of early and medieval China, no fixed boundaries separated the two, but the North almost always refers to the Yellow River basin, the heart of the cultural and political realm. The South was commonly defined vis-à-vis the North, the perceived center of the Chinese world. Accordingly, the South denoted the area beyond the southernmost reach of the center’s direct control. Even though the South referred to a series of political entities—among them the powerful states of Wu 吳, Yue 越, and Chu 楚, which more or less occupied the lower reaches of the Yangzi River—it remained the archetypal “other,” whose landscapes, languages, people, and customs were alien and exotic compared with those of the center. In both the cultural imagination and political reality, the transformative teaching (jiaohua 教化) flowed in only one direction, from north to south.

After the Yongjia disorder 永嘉之亂 in 311 C.E. and the removal of the court to Jiankang 建康 in 318 C.E.—a series of events in which the Jin royal house was driven out of Luoyang by advancing Xiongnu forces and was forced to cede its territories in and around the Yellow River basin—the North was no longer the center. Two zones that were different but equal emerged from this cultural and political landscape: the “barbarian”-occupied North and the “Chinese”-dominated South. Neither could conquer the other by force or culture. Therefore, as some scholars have observed, it was during the Northern and Southern Dynasties when the imagination of the North versus that of the South first took shape.¹ The documents translated in part I attest to the shifting cultural interactions between, and perceptions of, the North and the South from the third to the sixth century. These documents illustrate the ways in which the differences between the two were constructed and the preoccupation with forms and standards. Most of these documents were written by Southerners. This is not the preference of the contributors to part I but a result of the unevenness of the surviving sources. This unevenness, in turn, may suggest that the Southerners (including the Northerners who immigrated to the South in the aftermath of the Yongjia disorder) were more obsessed with constructing a cultural identity for themselves along the lines of the North and the South. Although the process by which the images of the North and the South were construed is much too complicated to represent linearly, a chronological examination of these source materials nevertheless yields many clues to the changes as well as continuations.

In chapter 4, Ping Wang points out that since the time of poet Qu Yuan 屈原 (ca. 340–ca. 277 B.C.E.), the South was regarded in literary imagination as a place for the exiled and dispossessed, even though the Southern elites, especially those from the Wu area, actively participated in the culture and governance of the center during the next four hundred years. The South was construed as a region where the civilizing influence of the center encountered lush wilderness and sensual abandonment. At once subversive and seductive, the South was where rites and propriety came undone. The fall of the Han dynasty in 220 C.E. and the splitting of the empire into three competing kingdoms, each occupying an established cultural locus with a long history—Wei 魏 on the Central Plain, Wu 吳 at the Yangzi delta, and Shu 蜀 in Sichuan—did not affect the perceived cultural supremacy of the North. In fact, the subsequent Wei-Jin dominance over the other two states might be seen as reaffirming the cultural and political centrality of the North. Ge Hong 葛洪 (283–343) observed and commented on this in his collection of essays entitled with his sobriquet, The Master Who Embraces Simplicity (Baopuzi 抱朴子). Himself a Southerner whose family had served the Han, Wu, and the conquering Jin regimes, Ge Hong was keenly aware of the deep sense of cultural inferiority felt by his peers. In the excerpts that I translated in chapter 3 from the Outer Chapters (Waipian 外篇), he insists that the Wu area had long upheld the classical tradition and saw no shortage of able and virtuous men steeped in Confucian learning. Ge Hong felt as though he was living in an age of decline in governance and moral cultivation. To follow blindly the latest fashions and social practices at the court in Luoyang, as his fellow Southerners had done, was to deny their own cultural heritage, which itself was rooted in Zhou orthodoxy. Ge Hong was describing and complaining about a universally revered North that was the cultural, geographical, and political center of both the realm and its trendsetting elite, even though its customs and practices deviated from what the classics prescribed. Ge Hong resented the Northerners’ contempt for the Southerners, feeling that he and his countrymen were being treated with only slightly more respect than illiterate barbarians. The North that Ge Hong railed against soon lost its cultural sovereignty as the members of the Jin court fled across the Yangzi River to settle at the old capital of the Wu state. The Northern elites, no longer in possession of the Central Plain, lost geographical support for their claim of cultural superiority. The trendsetters now became the guests of the perceived trend followers.

Several new constructs of the North and the South resulted from the Jin court’s removal to the area south of the Yangzi River. Most immediately noticeable were the cultural and political divides between the non-Chinese regimes in the North and the Chinese regime in the South and that between the émigré Northern elites and the locals in the Southern courts. To the Northerners who took refuge in the South, like Wang Dao 王導 (276–339) and his fellow courtiers partying at the “New Stop” (Xinting 新停) discussed by Ping Wang in chapter 4, the image of the South as the land of the exiled and dispossessed continued, though it did not last long. The changes came as part of the political consolidation of various factions within the Jin court in exile. Hoping to regroup and reclaim lost patrimony, the émigré elites partly sided with the Jin royal house, which was much reduced in stature and prestige, and partly tried to ...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Chronological Contents
• Acknowledgments
• A Note on the Translations
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I: The North and the South
• Part II: Governing Mechanisms and Social Reality
• Part III: Cultural Capital
• Part IV: Imaging Self and Other
• Part V: Everyday Life
• Part VI: Relations with the Unseen World
• List of Contributors
• Premissions
• Index