This is
a truly epic book. Covering nearly a millennium of Chinese history, Mote takes
you deep into the political machinations, economic changes, social reforms, and
religious revolutions that swept through China. This is the fullest look at
Chinese history that I’ve ever read and is seriously enlightening I took a ton
of notes and will write a summary of the event detailed in the book that stuck
out most to me. I feel like I’ve taken a college class, which is a very good
quality for a book to have.
The book
begins by describing a period of turmoil in China. The years from 907-959 are
known as The Five Dynasties and Ten States, when China was divided and ruling
states rose and fell, rarely lasting more than a few years or controlling more
than a few major cities. The following chapter is simply titled, “Abaoji,” the
name of the founder of the Liao Dynasty. If that name doesn’t sound Chinese to
you, that’s because it isn’t. Abaoji was a Khitan chieftan from the
northwestern steppes who lead his cavalry into northern China, conquering much
of it and founding the Liao dynasty, which imitated much of Chinese government
and culture. His empress, Yingtian, who came from another Khitan tribe, became
extremely powerful after his death. While a Chinese dowager empress would work
from behind the scenes, Yingtian was always prominent and even more after her
husband’s death, when she rejected the traditional self-sacrifice that was
expected of her upon death. She did, however, against the counsel of her
ministers CHOP OFF HER OWN RIGHT ARM, which must have been a very risky move in
a time before modern medicine. She was able to elevate her second son over her
first for the throne, as the first was considered too “sinicized.” That second son, Deguang, had a successful
reign for twenty years, but died in an invasion of Song Dynasty lands. When it
came time to name a successor, Yingtian was finally defeated trying to name her
third son over the second son’s son. It is worth noting that Yingtian’s career
reflects a seemingly universal tendency for women to hold more important roles
in nomadic societies with a weaker state than in sedentary societies.
Unfortunately, while this book does detail the lives of many important women,
it does not analyze the larger role of women in China very much.
The Liao
Dynasty, in which ethnic Khitans ruled over Han Chinese in north China as well
as their own people on the steppe, was a time of major cultural exchange. The Chinese
took up horseback riding and the Khitans gained literacy. The Liao introduced
civil exams by the mid-10th century. Abaoji, the Liao Dynasty
founder, formally continued Confucianism at court but also opened up Daoist
temples. On a mass level however, the Khitans loved Buddhism. This may have
been helped by the fact that is coexists well with other belief systems (East
Asia never really got the memo of “exclusive truth” that is common in the West)
as well as the fact that Buddhist monks acted as international emissaries, using
Chinese as a lingua franca.
The Song
Dynasty emerged out of the five dynasties era through a series of coups that
elevated military commander Zhao Kuangyin to the Chinese throne. He centralized
military power, solidifying his dynasty, which the previous five dynasties had
been unable to do, allowing generals to have all the power, overthrowing the
emperor with ease. Zhao changed his name to Taizu, the traditional Chinese name
for the founding emperor of a dynasty. He was succeeded by his brother, who
took the name Taizong, traditional for the second ruler of a dynasty. There is
no traditional name for third and so on. Their names would have been Song Taizu
and Song Taizong. The second emperor, Taizong, was aggressive and invaded the
Liao in 979 and lost. Then they invaded Liao again in 986, losing again. Song
foreign policy remained very passive for a century after. In 1005, the Song and
Liao signed the Treaty of Shan Yuan, which forced the Song to pay tribute to
the Liao, though the Song would not have called it tribute.
Oral and
written exams that dated from the Tang Dynasty were formalized in the Song
period. There was a Confucian renaissance. Mote stresses that while modern scholars
in China often view the Song with some contempt or its political weakness, one
should recognize its cultural achievements. Buddhism was vital to Chinese life
but would diminish in the 11th and 12th centuries due to
the Muslim conquest of India, cutting off the flow of monks. Song Taizong and
his son Zhanzang were patrons of Daoism., which was seen as complementary to
Buddhism in that Daoism was more human and less pious and abstract. The author
estimates a Chinese population of 100 million people in the year 1100, with six
million living in cities. Rice farming improved during Song, and was maybe responsible
for this high population.
Along
with the Liao and Song dynasties, there was a third Chinese dynasty at the
time, in northwest China, squeezed between the other two, called Xi Xia, or
Western Xia. The dynasty was created by Tangut people, a civilization that bridged
Inner Asian and Tibetan culture. Their dynasty was recognized by the Song in
967 and submitted to the Liao in 986. Unfortunately we have no written history
from the Tangut point of view, making what we read about them biased by
outsiders. The Xia played off both the Song and Liao, but became drawn closer
into the Liao orbit after the decisively gained the upper hand in their 1004
invasion of Liao and the 1005 Treaty of Shan Yuan. They developed a script based
on Chinese and were in a constant struggle between whether to embrace Chinese
culture or nativism.
I love
the title of Chapter 9, which is, “The ‘Wild Jurchens’ Erupt into History”. The
Jurchens were a steppe people from modern day Manchuria who were submitted to
the Liao. However, some groups less so that others. The Liao used a Chinese
concept, considering those that were tame to be “cooked” and those that were wild
to be “raw” (this is the literal Chinese: cooked/raw). It was the “wild Jurchen”
population, led by chieftain Aguda, that rebelled agains the Liao, declaring
the Jin (gold) Dynasty in 1115. They found huge and quick success, though Aguda
died in 1123. The Jin defeated the Liao and captured their emperor in 1125 under
the leadership of Jin Taizong, Aguda’s brother, Wuqimai. Then they immediately
invaded the Song Dynasty, penetrating far further than the Liao Dynasty ever
had, essentially splitting China in half. However, the Jin did not eliminate
either the Liao or the Song or the Xia. The Liao named another emperor in the
west, in the Tian Shan Range and the Taklamakan Desert. The Song became known
as the Southern Song, with the division falling between the Yangzi and Yellow
Rivers. The Xia were forced into an alliance with the Jin when the Liao emperor
was captured and mostly left alone. The Jin Dynasty and Jurchen people were
interesting in that they copied the Khitan horse archers within one to two
generations but not the nomadism. They engaged in a coordinated migration into
the northern half of China, which the Khitans had never dreamed of under Liao.
Within one to two more generations, the Jin had copied Chinese social
organizations. The Jurchens owed their success to the Meng’an and Mouke system,
which mobilized the population into fighting units of 100 and 1,000. These were
family units that were “required to supply one able-bodied fighting man, his
weapons and armor, and two to four mounts.” The impressive thing is not that
this is a genius system, but that chieftains were able to implement this level
of social control on a population of hunters and fishers that had never
previously been a part of a state. By 1135, just two decades after Aguda
decrlared their independence from the Liao Dynasty, they were done conquering
and had stabilized the borders of their massive empire (which was even bigger
and richer than the Liao).
The Jin Dynasty would last from
1115 until 1234, a very satisfyingly numbered year, which happened to be the
year that they were invaded by Mongolians. From the 1120’s to the 1140’s, about
3 million Jurchens moved south, with about half that number being slaves.
Unlike the Khitans, the Jurchens did not strengthen their homeland, opting
instead for a Great Migration. Mote gives us four stages of the Jin Dynasty:
1.
1115-1135: The Period of Dual Institutions (The
Jin adopt two law codes for the sedentary and nomadic peoples. They try and
fail to get the Chinese to shave their foreheads, a traditional way of showing
submission among inner Asian peoples. Many Jurchens illegally intermarry and many
become bilingual.)
2.
1135-1161: The Era of Centralization (Tribal
institutions gradually disappear and are replaced by a strong, Chinese-style emperor
role. Jin invade Southern Song in 1161 and fail terribly. They adopt many
Chinese ways of government and culture.)
3.
1161-1208: The Period of Nativist Reaction (Emperor
Wulu encourages a Jurchen cultural renaissance among elites. Jurchen continue
to dominate Southern Song.)
4.
1208-1234: The End of the Jin Dynasty (The
Mongols begin to invade and the Jin fight them for 20 years, eventually
losing.)
F.W. Mote credits the Jurchens and their Jin Dynasty with
putting up a very strong fight against the Mongols at the end, more than most
peoples were able to do. They had ruled over 40 million people while the
Southern Song had China’s other 100 million. They made money from coal, iron,
and crafts as well as seized wealth from the Song and trade with Southern Song.
The Jin
conquest of Liao had given the Xi Xia Dynasty a little more breathing room in
1127. From the 1140’s onward, the Tanguts grew closer to China and continued to
play a role that had them choosing between closeness with the Song or the other
dynasty, which was now the Jin instead of Liao. The Mongols attacked Xia in 1205,
1207, and 1209, until the formation of a Xia-Mongol alliance from 1209-1217.
The alliance ended when Xia refused to allow a Mongol levy of soldiers,
prompting the Mongols to invade and destroy the Xia in 1227, though Chinggis
Khan (how it’s spelled in the book) died during the siege of the Xia capital.
The Tanguts had maintained regional autonomy from 881-1227 and even had a true
Dynasty from 1038-1227, forming a significant Central Asian state. Like so
many, they were wiped out by the Mongols in the 13th century. While
Confucianism was their state religion, Tanguts also practiced Manichaeism,
Nestorian Christianity, Daoism, and Islam. Above all else on the local level,
however, was Buddhism, which Inner Asians loved because it wasn’t Chinese.
The Song
faced extinction from 1126-31 when the Jurchens invaded but were led out of it
by Prince Kang (Emperor Gaozong) until 1162. Gaozong made a crazy escape from
the Jurchens to the south during the initial invasion and then managed to
resist their incursions further during a three-decade reign. He made the
crucial decision not to counterattack the Jin, essentially accepting that the
Song Dynasty would continue to exist in a truncated form. After his death, the
Southern Song would continue politically until 1279, being led by weak emperors
with powerful chief councilors. The Song had some success at increasing
imperial control over their government, but it is unclear if this was a good
thing, as it reduced initiative at all levels. They used lots of internal taxes
and held monopolies on salt, iron, and steel. That said, the farming population
of China remained strong and very different from the poor, nearly enslaved
serfs of Europe. Chinese farmers were generally small landowners who developed
what Mote calls an “achieving society,” wherein within a few generations a
family could enter the elite. There was a high rate of interaction between urban
centers and rural villages, where most people lived. The urbanites were even ruled
by the agricultural calendar. Government was not very visible to the average
Chinese and they had a good amount of social mobility relative to other regions
at the time.
In
chapter 16, Mote gives us a “Mid-Thirteenth Century Overview” before he dives
into the Mongol invasions. He stresses the importance of Chinese diplomatic
ritual culture, which forced border states to acknowledge China as the center
of the world and became very awkward during the Song Dynasty, when the Song
were not very powerful. Inter-state relations formed a powerful conduit for the
Confucian values of order and all of the non-Song Dynasties became more
culturally Chinese over time. Chinese culture continued to spread, helped along
by Buddhism and commerce. One thing to note is that there was no concept of the
“rule of law,” as the emperors of China “governed by laws.” That is to say that
the emperor was the complete power in the dynasty, even if bureaucratic
officials and courtesans exercised influence. There was no higher concept of
law that even the emperor had to follow, only rituals and customs as ways of
expressing his infinite power. The emperor was the law.
The
Mongols, whose nomadic culture was dominated by the horse and mobility, were a
group of Inner Asian peoples of little consequence living on the border of the
Jin Dynasty’s northern steppe lands. They had a relatively strong role for
women compared to the Chinese, much like the Khitans and other nomadic groups.
In the late 1180’s, tribal leaders rallied around a man named Temujin against
another Mongol leader (Jemukha) and named him “Chinggis,” or boundless/universal
leader. He reformed the military into decimal groups, noting that the
inter-personal relationships that dominated steppe-politics were not stable,
and he began to conquer. In 1203, he destroyed the Keraits and then the
Merkits. He did not just conquered them, but destroyed them, killing many and
forcing many more to call themselves Mongols. He destroyed the Naimans in Kang
Khitan (Western Liao) and in 1206 he defeated an anti-Chinggis alliance. Unlike
the Khitans, the Mongols led by Chinggis did not allow defeated peoples to
retain their old tribal identities, they were forced to become Mongols, giving
the leadership more power. Chinggis was an extremely effective leader and he
got results.
Confirmed
by the khuriltai (big Mongol meeting) as khan in 1206, Chinggis Khan was
building his Mongol empire by unifying the steppe tribes into one people.
However, he needed to augment his forces with auxiliary infantry, which he took
from conquered and allied peoples. In 1218, after Khwarezm kills Mongol envoys,
they head east from 1218-1225, conquering through Otrar, Bukhara, Samarkand, Kabul,
and Tabriz. Chinggis died as they returned back and destroyed Xi Xia and his
son Ogodei becomes khan. The Mongols conquer Sichuan and Jin led by Ogodei.
They would also invade and conquer Korea in 1259. They would have conquered
Europe and made it to Hungary before Ogodei died and all of the Mongol leaders
had to hold a khuriltai to choose a new leader. Women would play a major
role in selecting the new leader, who would be Mongke, son of Tului, Ogodei’s
younger brother, the fourth son of Chinggis khan.
When
Mongke died in 1260, the Mongol empire fractured into several parts and China
fell to Kubilai. Kubilai collected top Chinese advisors and while he did not
adopt Chinese culture in any serious way himself, he saw the benefits that
Chinese institutions and culture could offer. He names Shangdu as his capital,
the source of the word “Xanadu.” Kubilai conquered China, which no other Mongol
leader, not even Chinggis, had been able to do in 1276. There were lots of
innovations in Mongol fighting, as the many rivers in china required a
green-water navy. Kubilai was a strong and powerful leader, though he made
mistakes in his two attempted invasions of Japan. The dynasty he founded and
named Yuan would last under 100 years, from 1276 to 1368.
The Yuan
favored Mongols, giving them special privileges under law and special rights in
appointment to office. Normal Chinese people were banned from owning weapons.
Even when civil service exams were restored in 1315, they still gave
preferences to the Mongols. The Yuan also enforced hereditary jobs, which was
the opposite of the “achievement society” that the Chinese were used to.
Chinese people had long had the tradition of setting out to achieve great
things, and while many followed in their fathers’ footsteps, being forced to do
so was upsetting. The Chinese obviously resisted and did not like these
policies, but there was little they could do to oppose Mongol power. On the cultural
side, the Yuan favored Buddhism, as steppe people always had, and the high level
of cultural achievement carried over from Song. The Yuan Dynasty is noted for
its scientific achievements as well as ceramics.
The
Mongols went though lots of factionalism and instability but it was during the
long reign of Shun Di (he who complied), that the dynasty fell to civil war. He
was a weak ruler, dominated by factions at court, and his reign was marked by
natural disasters: floods, disease, and a period of abnormal cold. In the decade
of the 30s, there were small social disturbances. In the 40s, there were people
turning to banditry and attacking defenseless towns. By the 50s, there was huge
disorder and the countryside had broken out into war. There were many groups
vying for power that fell broadly under four categories:
1.
Yuan Loyalists- Led by Koko Temur, a culturally Mongolian
Chinese, these forces had little moral connection to the dynasty but saw it as
a way to profit.
2.
Local militias- These self-defense organizations
became important despite a traditional warrior class like knights in Europe as
common people banded together to protect themselves from other groups, usually
bandits or the government.
3.
Bandits and Smugglers- These groups were divided
between Zhang Shicheng and Fang Guozhen and concentrated around the central and
southern coasts, where they were able to control serious portions of trade as
well as parts of the Grand Canal.
4.
Sectarian Rebels- These groups had a very big
impact, as the leader of one of them would win the civil war and found the Ming
Dynasty. One messianic group, the White Lotus Society, developed into the Red
Turban Movement, a religious movement led in the south by Chen Youliang and in
the North by Liu Foutong, who tried to lead some sort of “Song revival.”
This period is known as the “Era of Rival Contenders.” It is
the most complex and interesting part of the book and the section where I took
by far the most notes. Here is how the era played out in an extremely simplified
way.
First of
all, factionalism within Yuan caused a total lack of Mongol coordination
against their enemies, especially coastal smugglers. This made Yuan loyalists almost
a non-player right away, as they were barely able to launch attacks and when
they did they could not follow through and hold together until victory. The Red
Turbans of the north tried to install a boy emperor but were nearly defeated by
smuggler Zheng Shicheng until saved by someone named Zhu Yuanzhang, who coopted
their movement. Zhu then goes west and defeats Chen Youliang in a major naval
battle at Boyang Lake, making him very powerful. He then turned east and wiped
out the smugglers on the coast before wrapping things up in the north. Who was
this guy? Well it’s a pretty wild story.
Zhu
Yuanzhang was born into rural poverty, and both of his parents and his older brother
died of illness within a month of each other when he was a boy. He was cared
for by neighbors until he moved to a Buddhist temple, where he was going to train
to become a monk. He had not learned many blessings or rituals however and
spent most of his time begging on the street. Then, one day, returning to the
temple from begging, he finds that government troops have destroyed the temple.
With nowhere else to turn, he joins the Red Turban movement at 24 years old in
1352. He joined the Red turban rebels of Guo Zixing, who had taken over Liu Foutong’s
movement when he died. He was immediately made a squad leader, so he must have
shown some promise, and he rose quickly through the ranks, even marrying Guo’s adopted
daughter. He ends up leading a semi-independent force of a few hundred men and keeps
bringing on more, many as fighters, but some who would become key advisers. He had
become chief of staff to Guo Zixing before Guo’s death in 1355 and took over
the movement from then on. He had to attack Nanjing twice, but took it at 28 years
old in 1356 and made it his main base. He ended up winning the war due to the
high motivation of the Red Turban movement, a strong physical presence, and
good judgment of others’ character, giving him talented, loyal subordinates. By
1368, he had won the Era of Rival Contenders and became Ming Taizu, expelling
the steppe nomads and founding the Ming Dynasty.
As a ruler,
he was initially good, but became increasingly paranoid and despotic. He ruled
that none of his descendants would ever work (causing problems down the road
for his thousands upon thousands of descendants). He made lots of reforms and
even reformed his reforms but commanded his successors not to do so, making it
very difficult to change the institutions he created and re-created. He created
Confucian schools to educate appointees, but then often purged those
appointees, killing lots of his court officials. He must have regretted it, as
he commanded his successors not to purge so often.
In 1398, Ming Taizu AKA Zhu
Yuanzhang died and his grandson Hui Di came to the throne. While it appeared to
many that he would be a good, active ruler, his uncle, the Prince of Yan, rebelled
in 1399. He had no legitimacy but won anyway in 1402, killing Hui Di and his
son. Officials committed mass suicide, opposed to recognizing him. His victory
really institutionalized violence in the Ming Dynasty, as he and his father both
used it regularly. Mote comments that if the Prince of Yan was a character in
English history, Shakespeare would have surely written about him, as he was
tortured by his cruel actions towards his nephew. He would be known as Ming
Chenzu. He moved the capital from Nanjing to Beijing, maybe because he was
disturbed to live in the city where his great crime had taken place. During his
reign, eunuchs grew in power and he put them in charge of the Eastern Depot, a
sort of secret police force that investigated and attacked his enemies. Chengzu
was heavily occupied with Mongolia and the northern border, fighting the Mongolians
five times between 1410 and 1424, though he also got into a debacle in the southwestern
region of Annam, where the war outlived him, lasting from 1407 to 1427. One
really interesting thing that happened during his reign was the voyaging career
of the eunuch admiral Zheng He, who sailed the South China Sea and the Indian
Ocean in massive ships, going as far as Arabia and Somalia. They were mainly
diplomatic and only visited places that the Chinese had gone before, not
conquering navally, but showing off the treasure fleet of the emperor, Chengzu,
and asking for recognition from foreign rulers. His ships were massive. The
largest of them “had 2,500 tons cargo capacity and 3,100 tons displacement; by
comparison, the largest of the three ships which brought Columbus to the New
World in 1492 was 125 feet long and had a capacity of only 280 tons.” Zheng He’s
longest was 440 feet long. However, unlike Columbus’ ships, these were not meant
for discovery, only to impress foreigners. Therefore, while the Spaniards and
other Europeans set out to voyage the oceans, ironically looking for a way to
China, the Chinese stayed nearby, even though they clearly had the capacity to
go to the New World. However, the Chinese had no China to look for. As “the
center of the world,” there was no good motivation to look for anything better.
The rule of Chengzu’s grandson Xuanzong
is considered to be the high point of the Ming Dynasty. Ruling from 1426-35,
Xuanzong was a highly refined emperor, a great painter and calligrapher, though
he became increasingly “licentious” at the end. He promoted eunuchs as a way of
countering the power of the civil bureaucracy with men who had greater loyalty
to him. One of them, Wang Zheng, would become extremely important as the de
facto dictator during the reign of his son. That son, Yingzang, sought military
glory, and Wang Zheng convinced him to launch a northern invasion of the
Mongols. It was a disaster in which Wang Zheng was killed and the emperor was
captured. The court named his brother emperor, and his brother continued even
after the Mongols released him. Then, when his brother died, he took back over.
It is weird how peacefully that went down. Things went alright for awhile in
Ming, and Yinhzang’s grandson, Xiaozong, proved to be a consequential emperor
from 1488 to 1505. He reduced corruption and diverted the Yellow River south in
1495, which would be the course it followed until 1852. While the Yuan had
joined many canals, it was the Ming who truly finished the work on the Grand
Canal. They didn’t have many more goo emperors, though. Wuzong (1505-21) and Shizong
(1521-67) were “strong-willed, perverse, and inattentive to their governing and
ritual responsibilities.” While emperors retained their unlimited power, the
actual governing was done by eunuchs and the civil bureaucracy. Emperors used
it more so to divert funds to their own profligate spending.
In chapter 27, the author takes us
on a tour of the Ming borders that I found very interesting. Here is a short
description of what was happening on China’s borders:
1.
Northern Border- The Mongols had split up and
Buddhist monasteries had led to less nomadism and more settling down. Mongols
wanted trade but the Ming did not, and they built and extended portions of the
Great Wall from the 1550s to the end of the dynasty in 1644, though Mote says
it was not that useful. In 1571, after the Mongols defeated the Ming in a war,
they finally got the trade they wanted.
2.
Tibet and the Western Border- Tibet had close,
Buddhist relations with India (except during the Muslim conquest) and Mongolia.
“Dalai” as in “Dalai Lama” is actually a Mongolian word meaning “oceanic” or “all-encompassing
in wisdom.” China began to interact more with Tibet throughout the Ming
Dynasty.
3.
“Soft” Southern Border- The weird thing about
the south of China is that up to this point in Chinese history, huge portions
of it are still not considered to be ethnically “Han Chinese.” While China had
been moving steadily southward since at least the Tang Dynasty, many native
peoples remained and practiced a sort of cultural dualism and integration.
4.
Maritime East China Border- Tang and Ming China
produced the biggest ships in the world, and while the government saw the sea
as a source of piracy and lawlessness, China had a long history of exporting trace
goods to Southeast and South Asia. China generally ignored Taiwan because
Taiwan was a primitive society still without much purchasing power, so not much
to offer the Chinese. Starting in 1514, China began to interact with the Portuguese,
who established Macau as a trading colony in the 1540’s. Something important to
know about the Chinese coast is that not all of it is good for ports. Natural
harbors are formed where mountains and hills meet the sea, plunging quickly to
great depths, allowing ships with large keels to come in. Northern and central China
just don’t really have that except for the Shandong and the Liaodong
peninsulas. The deltas of the Yellow and Yangzi rivers in north and central
China have no natural harbors, which tend to be found in southern China, south
of Shanghai and the Yangzi river.
China began to open up to the world more, especially in 1567,
when the emperor Muzong lifted the ban on Chinese participation in oceanic
trade.
The Ming
entered a long political decline from the mid-16th century onward,
dominated by the reign of Shanzong from 1563-1620, who was a terrible, corrupt,
cruel, and perverse emperor. Even earlier, really after the end of the emperor
Chengzu in 1435, the civil bureaucracy had taken on a much larger role and
emperors had to turn to eunuchs for support. Chinese society, however, remained
lively. While Chinese population as a portion of the world population (which
had been about a third) was declining and most Chinese continued to live in small
villages of around ten families, merchants grew in influence from the 16th
century onwards. However, unlike in Europe, where they led a revolution against
feudalism, merchants in China easily joined the ruling classes. China became
highly dependent on Spanish silver and became the biggest consumer of silver in
the world, swallowing it all up thanks to Spanish trade routes across the Pacific
from Acapulco, Mexico to Manila in the Philippines. This is when Europe started
to increase in power and influence while China stagnated. That said, literacy
and learning were common and Ming society was still seen by Europeans as
superior.
The Ming
Dynasty fell to a resurgence of Jurchen power, the same ethnic group that had
founded the Jin Dynasty and invaded northern China in the 12th
century, settling there. This time however, they would change their name from Jurchen
to Manchu. I won’t get into the specifics of how the Manchus did it, but a lack
of Ming money made things difficult when confronted with Manchu invaders and
roving bandits. The Ming had made poor decisions at the highest levels and corruption
had sapped the strength of the state. First, a bandit raider sacked Beijing and
then the Manchus came in and swept him out. The emperor Shunzhi was a boy when
he inherited the throne in 1644 and was ruled by a council of regents let by
Prince Dorgon. It quickly became a cosmopolitan empire, hosting a German Jesuit
at court. Dorgon stayed close to old Ming policies, though he made some tax reforms.
They tried to implement the “queue,” a form of forehead shaving common to Inner
Asian peoples who wanted to force others to demonstrate their submission, but
the Chinese resisted this. Ming Loyalists fled to Dutch Taiwan, but the Dutch
abandoned the island in 1661 and the Manchus, under the Qing Dynasty
(officially founded in 1644), conquered the island, ending Ming resistance. One
should note that a lot of modern Chinese regions, such as Manchuria, Tibet, and
Taiwan, were all Qing conquests, who were an “alien people.”
The Qing
Dynasty took its form under Xuanye, emperor name Shengzu, but who is better
known by his reign period name s the Kangxi emperor. He had very long reign from 1662 to 1722. He came to
the throne as a boy and was ruled over by the regent Oboi, who he and his teen
friends overthrew when he was 15 years old. Convincing Oboi that they were
playing games, they actually trained in the palace grounds to overthrow him.
Pretty impressive for a group of teenagers. When he was just 19, border lords
rebelled in 1672 and he defeated them in 1681 and took Taiwan in 1685. He was certainly
tried by fire in his early years and became a very strong emperor. During his
reign, Manchus enslaved Chinese farmers, introducing a completely alien oppression
into the Chinese countryside. It is interesting to think how similar the
Jurchen/Manchus acted 500 years later, from the Jin Dynasty into the Qing
Dynasty, moving the entire people south. The Manchus were ordered not to do any
labor, killing their work ethic that had made them strong. The Qing expanded
Chinese borders on all sides and butted up against the Russians in northern
Siberia. The process of bringing Tibet into China is an interesting one, as the
author states that it really took place from 1696-1959 at varying levels of
recognition, then trade, then political claims, then military force, then
international legitimacy. The Qing were powerful but prone to factionalism and
corruption, which stained the reign of the Kangxi emperor. There was high
estrangement in the royal family.
The
Kangxi emperor was followed by Shizong, who ruled from 1723-35 and centralized
power. He was effective, efficient, and authoritarian. The next emperor, like
the Kangxi emperor, was known by his reign name. The Qianlong emperor ruled
from 1735-96. He was a major art lover. He built lots of buildings and
completed major infrastructure projects. He extended government control through
the Baojia system, which appointed leaders of every ten households to annually
report any deaths or births in the households and report tax obligations,
greatly simplifying and improving the efficiency of the tax system. The
Qianlong emperor was a great lover of Chinese culture despite his Manchu roots.
He started a project called the “complete library” where he wanted to copy all
the major Chinese works, though it turned into a sort of literary inquisition as
they realized that most Chinese works talked very badly about the
Jurchens/Manchus and other steppe peoples. The emperor won many border wars and
though corruption continued without slowing down much and the empire was in
decline, there was no sign of crisis and that decline would not have been very
noticeable or clear to observers at the time. But a crisis was to come. Just 50
years after his death, China would lose the Opium Wars against Britain, Beijing
would be sacked, and China would enter what the Chinese today refer to as the “100
years of humiliation.” I’ve read quite a bit about those times, and I was surprised
that this book hardly mentioned opium, though I guess it would be slightly
outside of the book’s focus. That said, it was a let down.
The
final chapter, titled “China’s Legacy in a Changing World” attempts to explain
the turning point in Chinese history that would come in the early to mid-19th
century. Mote points out that contact with tiny European states would be this great
empire’s downfall, beginning with the Portuguese, then the Spanish, then the
Dutch, then the English and so on. These contacts generally followed a pattern
of:
1.
Mutual Recognition
2.
Economic Interactions
3.
Broadened Horizons of Religion and Philosophy
4.
Changing Military and Diplomatic Scene
It is sad to watch China decline, with their leaders not
noticing what’s happening and not realizing the extent to which they had been outmatched.
Never a serious investor in the seas, China learned the hard way the value of
naval power. The trade imbalance in which China exported to the world and took
in silver could not be tolerated by the states of Europe, and so when Britain
discovered that opium produced in India could sell in the Chinese market, they
could not resist and sold the drug by force into China, addicting the Chinese
against the will of the Qing. That said, the Chinese defeat was certainly not
permanent and within a short 100 years, China was back in control of her own territory
again, and the time of European domination was much shorter than the time of
Qing/Manchu domination. China continues to benefit from its civilizational
values that promote a high, communal work ethic.
In
conclusion, I want to say again that is book is stellar. It is incredible in
its thoroughness, and while not perfect, specifically because it omitted
greater discussions of women and the beginnings of the opium era, it is very
complete in almost all other ways. This is a challenging book, but that is
because of subject matter and not the writing. 900 years of imperial Chinese
history is no light thing and a nearly 1000-page book on it is always going to
be a difficult read. That said, F.W. Mote writes this book extremely well, bringing
the historical figures to life and explaining very well every critical moment,
philosophical concept, emperor, general, regent, and change in Chinese society.
This book is without a doubt a masterpiece of scholarship and was extremely
educational for me.
Miscellaneous Facts:
- Surnames have been required in China since the 5-4th centuries BCE, two thousand years before Europe. Ancestor worship in China came before all other religious practice. It was considered incest to marry someone with the same last name, even if it was common.
- The Jurchens created a script in 1120 and recreated it in 1138, neither had much success though, and it seems like they eventually forgot about them.
- The Chinese word for Europeans, which was “Farang” comes from the Arabic word for Franks.
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