China: 3000 Years of History, 50 Years of Revolution. Robert Louzon 1998
The capture of Nanjing by the Sui [1] restored the unity of China; it now remained to recreate the empire. This was to be the work of the two succeeding dynasties – the Sui and the Tang. If the first of these dynasties was thus of barbarian origin, the second was authentically Chinese. It is not, however, out of place to deal with them in the same chapter, because the race from which the imperial family springs is not really a factor of much importance in the history of China. On the one hand, by the time they succeeded in ruling over the whole of China, the barbarian chieftains were already almost three-quarters Chinese, whilst their successors very rapidly became even more so; and on the other hand, because the only thing of real importance to China was its unity, whoever it might be who achieved or maintained it, because its unity means its ability to resist a nomad invasion, whereas the loss of this unity makes invasion certain. For the only thing that really matters to this peasant people is to see to it that nobody settles on its soil, or destroys its dykes or blocks up its canals. All life, and consequently its entire civilisation, depends upon it. The Sui ruled for only 30 years, whereas the Tang, on the other hand, lasted for nearly three centuries, almost as long as the Han.
Under these dynasties, the seventh, eighth and ninth centuries were to be for China, from the point of view of foreign affairs, a simple repeat of the Han era; grandeur and imperialism.
With regard to the nomads, the Sui confined themselves to a policy of indirect influence, which consisted of setting the various Mongol tribes against each other. On the other hand, they sought to extend their domination over such territories as were suitable for colonisation by Chinese peasants. It was thus that in the far south they annexed the basin of the Red River, whilst in the north-east they attempted to do the same with Korea, only to be defeated. [2]
This reverse provoked an internal revolt which, combined with a palace revolution in which the emperor was assassinated, culminated in the dictatorship of the military leaders, one of whom in 618 deposed the last of the Sui and installed himself in his place. Yet again it was a ‘soldier of fortune’, the first of the Tang, who became the first ruler of the second great Chinese dynasty. [3] This new dynasty set out to conquer the countries of the northern and western steppes and deserts; Mongolia to begin with, and then Eastern Turkestan, whose dominant tribes at that time were no longer the Huns, but the Turks. [4]
But about this time, however, a new menace appeared – this time from the south-west. It came from the lama-shepherds who roamed over the frozen heights of the Tibetan table-lands. India had already sent its missionaries amongst them, Buddhism had provided them with both a religion and a script, and made them establish a monarchy. From these circumstances, it followed that the Tibetans, the poverty of whose soil had for a long time made them troublesome ‘brigands’, now became formidable warriors. The Tang thus found themselves obliged to take the offensive against them, and apply to them the same method they had used against the Mongols of the north and north-west – the method of conquest, in other words. [5] The Chinese armies therefore invaded Tibet, and even penetrated into India, where in 647 they defeated the ruler of Delhi. [6] However, they soon left the peninsula, re-crossed the Himalayas and never again made a descent on India, as indeed India on its part never penetrated into China. The two great nations of irrigators did not seek to conquer each other.
The Tang then resumed the campaign in Korea, where their predecessors had failed, and in this they now succeeded, making Korea a Chinese protectorate under a Korean administrator. [7]
Finally, like the Han, the Tang ventured beyond the Pamirs, and brought under their protection the various states of the Syr-Daria and the Amu-Darya, some 4000 kilometres as the crow flies from their capital; their aid was even sought by the rulers of the Punjab. [8] This was at the beginning of the eighth century, when the Tang dynasty was at its height.
At this moment, contact with the India of the Indus valley, broken since the close of the Han Dynasty, seemed to be re-established by the same route and in the same way, and even more closely than under the Han. Instead of one country seeking to conquer the other, were the two great Asian peoples once more about to pursue cultural exchange? No! For an insurmountable obstacle arose at that very moment – Islam.
Here were nomads again, but nomads of a type with whom the Chinese were not familiar; nomads who dwelt in far more desert regions than the steppes of central Asia, men hailing from further than the Pamirs and Turkestan. The Arabs were now on the scene, in the full flood of their conquests, expansion and assimilation.
The nomad sea is infinite; it is a reservoir of limitless capacity from which masses of men are constantly being carried away in an outward flow. After having subdued the Tungus, the Huns, the Turks and the Tibetans, the Chinese armies now found themselves in conflict with the nomads of Arabia. It was in 751 on the plains beyond the Amu-Darya that the decisive engagement took place, and in this the Chinese met with defeat. [9]
Thereupon, the Arabs hastened to convert to their own faith all who inhabited the regions west of the Pamirs, whether nomads or the sedentary folk of the oasis. For this reason, all communication between China and India was severed almost as soon as it had become re-established. Islam had placed a barrier between the two great irrigational civilisations of eastern Asia, just as it had at the same time placed one between the two halves of the Mediterranean world.
The expansion of the Empire thus checked, retreat was speedily to follow. The same year that the Arabs defeated the Chinese, the mountaineers of Yunnan, formerly subdued by the Chinese, rose in rebellion and recovered their independence. [10] Shortly afterwards, the Tibetans started a new war against China, ravaging Gansu and even occupying Sichuan, and it was only after the Chinese had invoked the aid of the Turks against them that peace was again imposed on them. [11]
This was, moreover, to be the end of Tibet as a military monarchy. In the ninth century, the king was overthrown by the Buddhist clergy, and from that time onward Tibet was no more than a paradise for monks. [12] The hardiest and poorest of all the inhabited countries chose celibacy and begging in the place of conquest.
But China’s armies were exhausted by this far too prolonged and too vast an effort; the first years of the tenth century saw the dislocation of the empire.
The Tang epoch was China’s golden age. If we care to look for points of comparison with the Roman empire that allow us at least to understand better this faraway world, we can say that the Tang were the equivalent of the Antonines. Whilst it was the Han (call it the Julian dynasty) that founded the empire, the Tang was the dynasty that, having reconstituted it (which the Antonines did not have to do), brought it to its height, consolidated it, and managed it. [13]
During the three centuries of the Tang, Chinese industry and commerce developed with ever-increasing prosperity; during that period the two basic Chinese industries – silk and porcelain – reached their highest degree of perfection. It was during this period also that printing became highly developed. The first mention of printing using wood block characters relates to the time of the first Sui monarch; [14] the first reference to it using stone relates to the year 837, during the Tang’s last century. [15]
It was also under the Tang, during the seventh century, that the Chinese introduced the stirrup in the harnessing of horse saddles, a considerable improvement, and one that only reached Western Europe through the intermediary of the Arabs some two centuries later.
More important than all that, and what remains as the great work of the time, was the completion of the colonisation of the south. It was, in fact, only starting from the Tang period that the Chinese fully occupied this vast region and brought it completely into use; it is for this reason that the inhabitants of it still today describe themselves as ‘the sons of Tang’, and not as ‘the sons of Han’, as do the northern Chinese.
From the economic point of view, this complete sinicisation of the south had two important consequences, which are reflected in the ethnic character of the Chinese people.
The first consisted of the addition of a new cultivation to China’s traditional crops; that of tea. It was only, in fact, during the eighth century that this began to take on any importance. The tea plant is cultivated on the sinewy hills extending from Hangzhou to Canton at some distance from the coast. In contrast with other Chinese crops, tea is thus not a crop of the plain, but a crop of the slopes; from that comes a new technique, and a new type of man: alongside the cereal grower we now have a cultivator of trees. [16]
The second consequence, an even more important one, is that thanks to the south, the Chinese were to become sailors, and were to add to their commerce on the land the much more far-flung commerce of the sea. Just as the northern coasts of China were unsuitable for navigation, the southern coasts just as much invited it. Take a look at a map of China! To the north, the Great Plain borders on a seacoast (the ‘Yellow Sea’) which the Yellow River, constantly bringing fresh alluvial deposits, provides with deltas; flat, without any inlets, ports, or any sheltered places. On the other hand, to the south of the Yellow River we have a typical ria coast (with numerous inlets). At high tide, the sea enters the valleys, which then become openings in the shore, each of them providing some sort of shelter. Furthermore, the peaks that previously rose on dry land in front of what is now the coast and were later half-submerged and surrounded by sea water, now emerge like a chain of islets forming a real protective curtain, behind which, cut off from the high seas, a whole region of calm water extends.
That is why the effective control of the southern coast by the Chinese provided the signal for their maritime vocation. Very quickly, great centres of navigation and business were established along this coast, and there they prospered. First of all, two great emporia are found there at either end: Hangzhou at its northern extremity, close to the mouth of the Blue River, and Canton at its southern extremity near the outlet of the Zhu Jiang. Between these two giants were ports of lesser but nevertheless of considerable importance – such as those of Wenzhou, Fuzhou and Guangzhou, some of which, notably the last-named, at certain times even rivalled the ports of Hangzhou and Canton.
Moreover, the Chinese merchants did not make these ports a closely-guarded preserve. They were in fact freely used by the merchant ships of all the maritime nations. The Arabs notably were assiduous in frequenting them. It was through them that the great centres of world luxury – Baghdad, the capital cities of India and the court of China – found the means of establishing their mutual commercial relations.
The Tang were also great builders. To them is due the credit for the greater part of China’s public works. Their chief preoccupation appears to have been concerned with lessening the perils to which Chinese ships navigating the northern coasts were exposed, and so by artificial means extending the Chinese maritime commerce of the south as far north as possible.
The most notable of these works, comparable in its magnitude with the Great Wall, was the Grand Canal, which was dug in the seventh century. [17] This canal is over 1000 kilometres in length, and passing from Hangzhou to Tianjin, it enables goods unloaded in the latter port to reach the northern extremity of the country without having to face the dangers of the Yellow Sea.
There can be no doubt that navigation around the peninsula of Shandong must have been extremely perilous at the time, for shortly after the Tang period another canal was constructed, which cut off Shandong at its base, going from Jiaozhou Bay to the Gulf of Jilin.
Finally, amongst the other spectacular works of this period we must mention the great dyke of 144 kilometres which lines the whole sea front south of the Bay of Hangzhou, and which at the same time serves as a towpath for a canal dug alongside the dyke and as a protection for the cultivated lands situated below the sea level. [18]
Side by side with these public utility works, in order to set the tone of the time, we must mention purely luxury constructions, such as the park made by the last of the Sui at Luoyang with a 120 kilometres perimeter, decorated with a lake of nine kilometres circumference. Luoyang thus became a kind of ‘Versailles’. [19]
The administration of the empire on its part had become fixed. The system that made examination the sole means of access to public office was everywhere rigorously applied.
As for the rest, all the arts – architecture, sculpture, painting, poetry, etc. – now reached their classical period. The Tang style can be summed up by what underlies the classical form; a vigour in simplicity. The artist now enjoyed complete mastery over his means of expression, and was not yet merely searching for complexity.
It is not difficult to show, however, that despite its outward appearance of splendour, the Tang empire, like that of the Roman Antonines, was steadily approaching its eclipse. In both cases, the cause was the same – the same which had also led to the destruction of the Han empire – in other words, the pressure of the barbarians, which was becoming increasingly persistent. It was not now pressure from faraway barbarians like the western Turks, whose Islamisation had set up an insuperable barrier to any further expansion of the Chinese empire, but this time it was pressure from barbarians much closer at hand, those who for the most part were themselves already three-quarters Chinese – those, in fact, whom China had taken into its service.
The policy that the Han had inaugurated of winning over the Huns to defend China’s frontiers was strongly extended and intensified under the Tang. It was not enough to install several tribes along the interior of the Great Wall merely as auxiliary troops, because it was the eastern Turks who now constituted the main part of the Chinese army; it was they who formed the shock troops who had been used to reconquer the empire. The difference between the Han and the Tang was that whilst the Han created the Chinese empire using Chinese troops, the Tang reconstituted the empire and maintained it using mercenary Turks under the command of Turkish generals.
There were still, of course, Chinese troops in use, but they were nothing more than a militia raised by conscription, and their rôle was mainly that of auxiliary troops. They did the job quite reluctantly, because the Chinese preferred not to be soldiers at all. It seems, indeed, that this was the era when Chinese pacifism first made its appearance. One of the chief poets in the most brilliant period of the Tang era, Du Fu, who lived in the middle of the eighth century under Xuan Zong, [20] one of the two greatest emperors of the dynasty, in fact wrote:
In the border lands blood flows in streams,
Yet still ambition fires the Emperor’s dreams!
In truth, ‘tis but misfortune to have sons,
Only to fall in combat with the Huns!
Surely you see that round the Koko Nor
Only blanched skeletons remain of yore!
Or again:
Our sovereign wields a mighty empire,
To what more can he now aspire?
And again:
Let the Wall guard us from the barbarian band,
And send our men back to their native land.
A military empire and an anti-militarist population – such is the paradox that the China of the Tang era presents to us. It was a paradoxical situation that could only last through the presence of these foreign mercenaries, whose rôle increased in importance in proportion as the aversion to war developed amongst the citizens of China.
But those who possess arms possess power. Throughout these three centuries, the mercenary Turks were not slow to intervene in domestic quarrels. Indeed, the emperors themselves approached them when they found themselves in difficulty, and called for their aid to consolidate the throne.
Thus when the dowager empress Wu Zetian dethroned her son at the close of the seventh century in order to proclaim herself empress, it was a Turk who demanded the son’s restoration. [21] Half a century later, it was another mercenary Turk who compelled the great emperor Xuan Zong to abdicate, and it was only by begging the aid of other Turks (the Uighurs) that the latter’s son succeeded in entering the capital and ascending his father’s throne. [22] Finally, it was to the Turks again that the last of the Tang emperors appealed in their struggle against the great internal revolt which was at last to sweep them away.[23]
The social process which we have seen on two occasions under the Han Dynasty was once again reproduced under the Tang, periods of progress inevitably engendering the elements of social upheaval.
Up to now, we have seen two quite distinct systems of ownership in operation – one consisting of the distribution of land on an egalitarian basis between all the families of the village, each family having the right to cultivate its plot and enjoy the products, but without the right to dispose of the land; the other being the right of ownership pure and simple, including the owner’s right to bequeath and sell the land as he so desired.
It seems likely that following the convulsions of the Middle Ages, the system of tenure that had finally been established under the Tang was a mixed system, a compromise between the two previous systems. In effect, every male inhabitant of a village had a right of usage over a plot of between three and six hectares on the one hand, with the hereditary right to 1.5 hectares as a maximum, but this latter plot, just like the former, was inalienable.
Despite the legal inalienability of all peasant property, the concentration of property into fewer hands continued apace, because, as distinct from the peasants, the higher functionaries had obtained the right to unlimited ownership of land – unlimited alike in extent and duration. Then, notwithstanding all the precautions taken, the small peasant proprietor ended up becoming absorbed by the great patrician proprietor. From the end of the eighth century, the families of landowners represented only five per cent of the population, so strong had the forces of concentration become. The laws were just laughed at and were invariably evaded. As long as social peace continues, as long as ‘order’ reigns, as long as economic activity goes on apace, as long as accumulation grows in importance, so shall the process of concentration continue to operate, a concentration that leads to troubles, disorders, revolts and revolutions, and which can only end in having to start all over again.
Thus from the fact of the concentration of property, just as at the end of the Former and Later Han eras, we find at the end of the Tang era a great mass of famished and ravenous landless peasants, who at last felt themselves goaded into revolt.
As before, it was also in Shandong, or, more precisely, on the borders of Shandong and Jilin, that the revolt flared up in 874. It snowballed rapidly, and found a leader in one of the literati, Huang Chao. [24] Soon almost all China had fallen into the hands of the rebels: to begin with the south with Fuzhou and Canton, and then old China with its two capital cities, Chang'an and Luoyang.
To save himself, the emperor, who had taken refuge in Sichuan, appealed to his Senegalese, or I should say, his Turks. One of their groups based in Luoyang succeeded in defeating the Chinese peasants and reinstating the emperor in Chang'an, whilst Huang Chao was slain in Shandong.
Nonetheless, the days of the Tang were numbered, for one of the chiefs of the peasant revolt who had betrayed his brothers and had thereby received the governorship of a province as a reward contrived to have the emperor assassinated in 904, and shortly afterwards proclaimed himself emperor. [25]
He was an emperor without an empire, because during the turbulent 30 years that followed, those centrifugal forces that always take a free course whenever they are not firmly controlled had already broken China up into a number of independent states, so that we are now about to re-enter a new period of Middle Ages.
1. In 589, the Sui empire captured Nanjing and brought the Chen Dynasty to an end, thereby uniting the whole of China once more.
2. In 603, Yang Jian conquered Annam, and went on to pillage its capital, Champa, in 604. His successor, Yang Guang (Emperor Yang Di, 604-618), launched three successive attacks upon the kingdom of Koguryo in Korea in 612-14, all of them unsuccessful and attended by heavy losses.
3. In 617, Li Yuan, an official in the north, led a revolt against the second Sui emperor, and captured Chang'an. When the emperor was assassinated in the following year, Li Yuan proclaimed himself emperor (posthumous throne name, Emperor Gao Zu, 618-626), and founded the Tang Dynasty (618-907).
4. In 629, the Tang launched an attack upon the khan of the Eastern Turks, and conquered the whole of Inner Mongolia up to the edge of the Gobi Desert. In 639, war broke out with the Kingdom of Turfan in Turkestan, which was soon added to the Tang Empire, and in 657, the Western Turks were also conquered. States even beyond the Pamirs offered their submission to the Tang emperor.
5. Tibet first became a unified state in 607, and when its first king, Songzan Gambo (c630-650) was refused a request for a Chinese princess as his wife, he was defeated when he sent his army to attack Sichuan. After a further period of peace, the Tibetans attempted to block the passes over the Pamirs, and were again routed by the Chinese in 747.
6. The emperor Tai Zong enjoyed friendly relations with Harshavardhana (606-647), the Buddhist ruler of Thanesar and Kanauj, who had created an empire across the north of India. When his throne was usurped after his death by Arunashva, the Chinese ambassador gathered a force from Tibet, Nepal and Assam, dethroned him, and took him back as a prisoner to China.
7. In 660, the Tang conquered the Kingdom of Paikche, and in 668 the Kingdom of Koguryo. This left Silla, the remaining Korean kingdom, as a vassal state of the Tang Empire.
8. In the middle of the seventh century, Chinese influence even spread into the Oxus valley, and the king of Khotan submitted to the Chinese.
9. When a Tang army moved against the prince of Tashkent, he appealed for help to the Arabs, who came to his aid and under the command of Ziyad ibn Salih defeated the Chinese at the Battle of the Talas River in 751. They lost control of Turkestan soon after.
10. In 750, a dispute broke out between the Tang court and the dependent kingdom of Nanzhao in Yunnan. The kingdom gained its dependence after inflicting two heavy defeats upon the Tang forces in 751 and 754.
11. During the rebellion of An Lushan, the Tibetans invaded China almost as far as Chang'an, and established themselves in Gansu and Sichuan. In 808, they were expelled by Uighur mercenaries in the service of the Tang court.
12. By 889, Tibet was a mere congery of separate lordships, each dominated by a different Buddhist sect. In 1578, the Dalai Lama, head abbot of the Dge Lugspa sect, was granted overall control of the country by the khan of the Mongols.
13. The Julian house, founded by Augustus (27BC-14AD), ruled the Roman Empire from 27BC to 68AD. It was followed after an interval by the prosperous rule of the Antonines (98-161AD), founded by Trajan (98-117AD).
14. Mirror image characters to produce rubbings appear cut upon the backs of bronzes as early as the Warring States period of the Eastern Zhou Dynasty. Printing from wood blocks is variously assigned by scholars to the sixth century AD or to the end of the ninth century. It appears to have been mainly elaborated in Sichuan (Joseph Needham, ‘Paper and Printing’, Science and Civilisation in China, Volume 6, Cambridge, 1985, pp26, 146).
15. The cutting of the Confucian classics on stone to be inked in for printing is traditionally assigned to the Han Dynasty, and is reliably attested as early as the sixth century (Needham, op cit, p8).
16. There has always been a marked contrast between the ways of life of a cultivator of trees and a cereal grower. Compare the Greece of Athens, the country of the olive tree, with that of Thessaly, a cereal-growing country! The Burgundy schoolmaster, the very first time he has them in the classroom, in the same way distinguishes between those of his pupils who are the children of vine growers, and those who are not. [Author’s note]
17. The Grand Canal, which upon completion stretched from Beijing to Hangzhou, was begun from Luoyang in 605.
18. The Jiangnan channel and dyke at the southern end of the Grand Canal stretched for 400 kilometres from the Chang Jiang River to Hangzhou, on the Qiantang River.
19. Yang Guang, the second and last of the Sui rulers, had a taste for magnificence, and began the construction of his capital at Luoyang in 605. To the west of the city he laid out an enormous park, stocked with exotic animals from all over the empire.
20. Du Fu (712-770) was China’s foremost realist poet. He flourished during the reign of Li Longji (Emperor Xuan Zong, 712-756).
21. Wu Zetian, the wife of the Emperor Gao Zong, took control of the Tang court in 660, and in 690 usurped the throne, assuming the name Sheng Shen (Emperor Wu Zhao, 690-705). When she fell ill two of her ministers conspired to put the emperor Zhong Zong back upon the throne he had briefly occupied in 684.
22. In 755, An Lushan, a Sogdian officer in control of the northern armies, broke out in revolt against the unstable rule of Li Longji (Emperor Xuan Zong, 712-756). When his armies approached Chang'an the emperor fled to Sichuan, and abdicated in favour of his son, Li Heng (Emperor Su Zong, 756-762), who recaptured the capital a year later with help of Uighur troops.
23. Incapable of dislodging the Huangchao rebels from Chang'an, Li Yan (Emperor Xi Zong, 873-888) called in Li Keyong, leader of the Shatuo Turks, who took the city in 883.
24. In 874, a peasant insurrection broke out at Changyuan in Henan. When its leader was killed in 878, he was succeeded in his command by Huang Chao, who captured Chang'an in 880 and proclaimed himself emperor. He committed suicide after being cornered near Mount Taishan in 884.
25. General Zhu Wen, who had deserted Huang Chao to help the Tang court suppress the insurrection, murdered the Emperor Zhao Zong in 904, and put Li Zhu on the throne instead (Emperor Ai Zong, 904-907). He deposed him soon after, and proclaimed himself the first emperor (Tai Zu, 907-912) of the Later Liang Dynasty.