China

by John Keay

  The centrepiece of the Leigudun collection is a house-size musical ensemble consisting of sixty-five bronze bells with a combined weight of 2,500 kilograms (5,500 pounds). The bells are clapper-less (they were struck with wooden mallets), arranged according to size, and suspended in three tiers from a massive and highly ornate timber frame, part-lacquered in red and black. In an unusual but highly successful foray into figurative sculpture, bronze caryatids with swords in their belts and arms aloft stand braced to support each tier. At the centre of the ensemble the largest bell is a replacement. Its design is more elaborate than the others and it carries a dedicatory inscription to the effect that King Hui of Chu, hearing of the death of Marquis Yi of Zeng, had had this bell specially cast and sent it as an offering to be employed in the marquis’s mortuary rites.

  Significantly, the Chu ruler is here described as wang, that is ‘king’, a title still reserved to the fading Zhou, not adopted by other warring states until the late fourth century BC, but in use in Chu since at least the tenth century BC. Chu was evidently in a league apart from the ‘central states’, although its political trajectory is far from clear. Originating somewhere in southern Henan or northern Hubei, it had slowly spread to embrace an enormous arc through what is now central China from the Huai River basin to the Yangzi gorges and Sichuan. Expansion was largely at the cost of non-Xia peoples, referred to as Man, whose traditions no doubt account for Chu’s distinctive cultural profile and whose incorporation may explain why the ‘central states’ disparaged Chu as non-Xia and so ‘not one of us’.

  Southward expansion had brought Chu into contact with other culturally hybrid polities outside the ‘central states’. In effect the zhongguo ‘cradle’ of Chinese civilisation in the north was already being challenged by the states of ‘core’ China farther south. They included Wu in the region of the Yangzi delta in Zhejiang, and Yue to the south of Wu in Fujian, with both of whom Chu was occasionally at war. In the late sixth century BC, Wu had overrun Chu and obliged its king to flee to Zeng, where the then marquis had given him protection. Frustrated by this grant of sanctuary, the Wu ruler had vented his fury on an earlier Chu king, whose corpse, or what remained of it, was exhumed, publicly flogged and thoroughly dismembered. Wu’s ruler was made ba (‘hegemon’) in 482 BC but nine years later was conquered by Yue. Chu thereupon retook most of its lost territory; and it is supposed that it was in remembrance of Zeng’s act of mercy to his fugitive predecessor that in 433 BC King Hui of Chu caused the great central bell of the Leigudun ensemble to be cast for the tomb of Marquis Yi, the grandson of Chu’s saviour.

  States like Chu, Wu and Yue that were located around or beyond the perimeter of the northern ‘central plain’ figure prominently from the fifth century BC onwards. Their consolidation may have benefited from immigration as refugees fled from the fighting in the north, and they certainly took advantage of a wave of centralising reforms that significantly advanced state formation throughout China in the sixth to fourth centuries BC. Cause and effect are hard to distinguish in this process. To adapt a formulation used in respect of the European states in the later Middle Ages, during the ‘Warring States’ period ‘the state made war and war made the state’.26 Although in China the state proved a better warmonger than war did a state-monger – for the wars got worse and the states got fewer – the military imperative of mobilising all possible resources clearly depended on civil reforms that strengthened the authority of the state.

  Qi in Shandong had pioneered the process and most other states followed suit, the last and most thoroughgoing reforms being those in Qin. Essentially the reforms reversed the earlier trend towards feudal fragmentation. Borderlands and newly conquered or reconquered territories, instead of being granted out as fiefs, were formed into administrative ‘counties’ or ‘commanderies’ under centrally appointed ministers and could thus serve as recruitment units. This system was then extended to the rest of the state; population registration and the introduction of a capitation tax would soon follow. Meanwhile oaths, sealed in blood, were sworn to secure the loyalty of subordinate lineages, while rival lineages might be officially proscribed. Regulations and laws were standardised and then ‘published’ in bronze inscriptions. Land was gradually re-allocated in return for a tax on its yield, the tax being increasingly paid in coin.

  Histories, such as the Zhanguoce and the later Shiji, tend to deal with such developments in terms of personnel rather than policy. Reforms receive mention when they can be credited to a minister or adviser deemed worthy of his own biographical sketch. Viewed thus, the rivalry between the warring states includes an important element of competitive head-hunting. Attracting the loftiest minds, the most ingenious strategists and the most feared generals not only improved a ruler’s chances of victory but advertised his virtuous credentials (for virtue attracted expertise like a magnet) and so advanced his candidacy for the award of Heaven’s Mandate.

  Job-hunting shi in general rejoiced; and especially favoured were those savants who, while extending or rejecting the teachings of Confucius, propounded theories about authority and human motivation that included good practical insights into some aspect of statecraft or man-management. Mozi (‘Master Mo’, c. 480–c. 390 BC, but known only for his eponymous text), after advocating a more frugal, caring and pacific society, appended some twenty chapters on defensive tactics, they being the only kind of military activity in which a peace-loving disciple of Mozi (or a Mohist) might decently engage. Unconventional and idealistic, Mohism seems to have been most influential in the ever-eccentric Chu.

  Mengzi lived about fifty years later and found employment at the court of Wei, but he too is otherwise an obscure figure. Devoted to the memory of Confucius, he fleshed out the Master’s utterances into a detailed programme for reform: emulate the mythical Five Emperors and the Three Dynasties (Xia, Shang and Zhou), urged Mengzi; respect Heaven’s Mandate, reduce punishments and taxes, and reinstate the ‘well-field’ system of land-holding; in an age of greed and violence only a ruler who abjured oppression, who cultivated virtue and consulted the welfare of the people, would be sure to triumph; likewise for society as a whole – morality would prevail if human nature was allowed to realise its basic goodness. All of which, while reassuring, made little impression on zhongguo’s power-crazed warlords. Only later would it win for Mengzi the title of ‘second sage’ in the great Confucian tradition and later still the Latinisation of his name into ‘Mencius’ by Rome’s almost-approving missionaries.

  Of far more influence, and decisive for the triumph of centralised government in the state of Qin, was a school of thought known as ‘legalism’. Later histories credit, or more usually condemn, one Shang Yang, minister of Qin from 356 BC, for erecting the draconian framework of the first ‘legalist’ state, although it would be left to others to provide a theoretical basis for it. Like Chu in the south, Qin in the far north-west was peripheral to the ‘central states’ and was habitually disparaged by them as non-Xia. It had expanded into the valley of the River Wei, once the Western Zhou heartland, but its roots lay farther west and its population included large numbers of pastoral Rong. Problems of integration and defence kept Qin on the sidelines until Shang Yang, after learning his trade in Wei state, interested Qin’s duke in a programme of radical restructuring. The ‘county’ system of direct administration was introduced, weights and measures standardised, trade heavily taxed, agriculture encouraged with irrigation and colonisation schemes, and the entire population registered, individually taxed and universally conscripted. ‘Mobilising the masses’ was not a twentieth-century innovation.

  The carrot in all this was an elaborate system of rankings, each with privileges and emoluments, by which the indvidual might advance according to a fixed tariff; in battle, for instance, decapitating one of the enemy brought automatic promotion by one rank. But more effective than the carrot was the stick, which took the form of a legal code enjoining ferocious and indiscriminate punishments for even minor derelictions. Hous
eholds were grouped together in fives or tens, each group being mutually responsible for reporting any indiscretion by its members; failing an informant, the whole group was mutually liable for the prescribed punishment. In battle this translated into a punitive esprit de corps. Serving members of the same household group were expected to arrest any comrade who fled, to deliver a fixed quota of enemy heads, and to suffer collective punishment if they failed on either count. Shang Yang was himself a capable general and may have led some of these conscript units (or perhaps ‘neighbourhood militias’) when Qin forces scored a decisive victory over the state of Wei in 341 BC. Sixteen years later Qin’s duke assumed the title of ‘king’. But by then Shang Yang, following the death of his patron, had fallen foul of his own penal code and been condemned to an ignominious extinction, being ‘torn apart by carriages’.27

  In practice it may have been that not all these measures were Shang Yang’s. Some may have been awarded him posthumously by the back-dating beloved of historians. And they may not have been as harsh as they are portrayed; discrediting Qin and its policies would be a priority of the subsequent Han dynasty, during whose long ascendancy Qin’s history would be compiled. The reforms were nevertheless sensationally effective. Besides again ravaging Wei state, in 316 BC Qin’s forces swept south over the Qinling mountains into Sichuan and thus, as will be seen, secured a vast new source of cereals and manpower plus some important strategic leverage over Chu. During the last century of the ‘Warring States’ (c. 320–220 BC) Qin was more than a match for any of its rivals. It largely dictated the ever shifting pattern of alliances and it initiated about forty of the sixty ‘great power wars’ recorded for the period.

  Visiting Xianyang, Qin’s new capital, in c. 263 BC the philosopher Xunzi was both impressed and appalled – impressed by the decorum and the quiet sense of purpose, appalled by the lack of scholarship and the plight of the people; they were ‘terrorised by authority, embittered by hardship, cajoled by rewards and cowed by punishments’. In fact the whole state seemed to be ‘living in constant terror and apprehension lest the rest of the world should someday unite and strike it down’.28 Xunzi wanted nothing to do with the place, and having previously directed the Jixia, an intellectual academy in the state of Qi, he hastened on to a more congenial post in Zhao, then one in Chu, so completing a circuit of four of the main power contenders. It was deeply ironic that it would be Han Fei, one of Xunzi’s disciples, who would eventually provide legalism with an intellectually respectable rationale, and another, Li Si, who as the First Emperor’s chief minister would become legalism’s most notorious practitioner.

  At about the same time as Xunzi’s visit to Xianyang, Qin abandoned the traditional policy of alliances and adopted one of unilateral expansion through naked aggression. ‘Attack not only their territory but also their people,’ advised Qin’s then chief minister, for as Xunzi had put it, ‘the ruler is just the boat but the people are the water’. Enemy forces must be not only defeated but annihilated so that their state lost the capacity to fight back. ‘Here’, intones the Cambridge History of Ancient China, ‘we find enunciated as policy the mass slaughters of the third century BC.’

  The slaughters were made more feasible by important advances in weaponry and military organisation. In the ‘Spring and Autumn’ period, military capacity had been assessed in terms of horse-drawn chariots. Besides usually three passengers – commander, archer/bodyguard and charioteer – each of the two-wheeled chariots was accompanied by a complement of about seventy infantrymen armed with lances, who ran alongside and did most of the fighting. The chariot was a speedy prestige conveyance for ‘feudal’ lords and provided a vantage and rallying point for the troops, but it often got stuck in the mud and was liable to overturn on rough terrain.

  As centralisation increasingly relieved subordinate lineages of their fiefs and autonomy, most states supplemented these ‘feudal’ levies of chariots and runners by recruiting bodies of professional infantrymen that rapidly grew into standing armies. Disciplined and drilled, clad in armour and helmets of leather, and equipped with swords and halberds, the new model armies were more than a match for the chariot-chasing levies even before the introduction of forged iron and the deadly crossbow.

  These important innovations seem to have orginated early in the fourth century BC and in the south, where Wu was famed for its blades and where Chu graves have yielded some of the earliest examples of the metal triggers used for firing crossbows. Never far behind any technological innovation, scholarly treatises provide evidence of warfare being elevated into an art. A shi called Sun Bin, also from the south, is credited with the first text in which the crossbow is described as ‘the decisive element in combat’.29 Sun Bin also mentions cavalry, a novelty in that the art of fighting from horseback was as yet little understood. A famous discussion on the merits of trousers over skirts that took place in the state of Zhao in 307 BC seems to mark the adoption of the nomadic practice of sitting astride horses rather than being drawn along behind them in chariots. But cavalry were used largely for reconnaisance and their numbers were small. Mozi, that stickler for non-aggression, manages under the rubric of self-defence to reveal the development of a much more sophisticated level of siege warfare, including the use of wheeled ladders for wall-scaling and smoke-bellows to counter tunnellers. Cities had long been fortified, but it was in the ‘Warring States’ period that chains of garrisoned forts linked by ‘long walls’ first receive mention. Partly to define territory, partly to defend it, ‘long walls’, bits of which would later be incorporated into Qin’s supposed ‘Great Wall’, were perhaps the most obvious manifestation of state formation.

  Universal conscription naturally meant that armies were much bigger. At the great battle of Chengpu in 632 BC each side had supposedly mobilised up to 20,000 men. By the beginning of the ‘Warring States’ period, armies are thought to have numbered around 100,000, and by the third century BC several hundred thousand. Battle-deaths running to 240,000 are mentioned but are presumed to be exaggerations. The slaughter was nevertheless on an unprecedented scale; the battles sometimes lasted for weeks, and prisoners-of-war could expect no mercy; their numbers, like their heads, were simply added to the body-count.

  In a series of decisive campaigns accompanied by just such slaughter, Qin decimated the forces of Han and Zhao between 262 and 256 BC. The ageing Zhou king, who had unwisely thrown in his lot on the side of Zhao, was also forced to submit. According to an almost throwaway paragraph in the Shiji, in 256 BC this last of the thirty-nine Zhou kings of such illustrious memory ‘bowed his head in recognition of guilt and offered his entire territory . . . to Qin’. ‘The Qin ruler accepted the gift and sent the Zhou ruler back to his capital. [Next year] the Zhou people fled to the east and their sacred vessels, including the nine cauldrons, passed into the hands of Qin. Thus the Zhou dynasty came to an end.’30

  Ten years later, in 246 BC, there succeeded to the Qin throne a thirteen-year-old boy ‘with arched nose and long eyes, the puffed out chest of a hawk, the voice of a jackal . . . and the heart of a tiger or a wolf’. At this stage he was known as King Zheng of Qin. A quarter of a century’s ruthless campaigning would see the remaining ‘warring states’ eliminated and the same King Zheng arrogate to himself the Zhou’s Heavenly Mandate and assume the title of Shi Huangdi, ‘First Emperor’.

  Contrived in bloodshed, China’s tradition of empire would endure, often broken but never abjured, from this ‘First Emperor’ in the third century BC until the film-famous ‘Last Emperor’ of the twentieth century ad. A milder young man wearing thick spectacles, dark suit and silk tie, the last of China’s emperors, like the last of its Zhou kings, would ‘flee to the east’. Having first abdicated and then been deposed, he would slip away from Beijing’s Forbidden City in 1924 to place his person at the disposal of the Japanese invader.

  3

  THE FIRST EMPIRE

  C. 250–210 BC

  STONE CATTLE ROAD

  ALTHOUGH QIN SHI
HUANGDI (the Qin ‘First Emperor’) is invariably described as the architect of China’s earliest integration, his achievement was not quite as remarkable as might be supposed. The Qin edifice would last barely a generation, after which the empire would have to be laboriously reconstructed; it covered little more than ‘core’ China, and that not entirely; and although the First Emperor certainly outdid all his predecessors in aggressive universalism, his success was largely down to others. Shang Yang and his ‘legalist’ associates had devised the interventionist framework of what amounted to a totalitarian state; various rationalists and ministers continued to fine-tune this machinery: and it was the kings of Qin prior to the First Emperor who had instigated the policy of expansion and had substantially realised it while assembling the resources for its completion.

  In c. 330 BC – so a century before King Zheng of Qin assumed the title of ‘First Emperor’ – his great-great-great-grandfather King Hui of Qin had allowed his attention to wander away from the east, from the lower Yellow River and its ever ‘warring states’, to focus on an inviting but remote and apparently unattainable prospect in the far south-west. There, over the switchback mountains of the Qinling range (now a last redoubt of the Giant Panda), across the valley of the upper Han River, and beyond the misty Daba Hills, lay what one scholar calls the ‘land of silk and money’.1 This was Sichuan, the great upper basin of the Yangzi that is today the country’s most populous province. Two administrations then controlled it – as indeed they do now following a 1997 bisection of the province: Ba in the south-east roughly corresponded to the modern Chongqing region and Shu in the centre to the modern Chengdu region.