China

by John Keay

  In the short term this experiment failed, just like Tai-wudi’s Daoist experiment. But it had profound consequences. Indeed, ‘the effects of the series of decrees from 472 until . . . 499 on China for the next three centuries were to be immeasurably great’.33 For instance, the incentives now offered to all taxpaying agriculturalists included a fixed entitlement to both farmland and mulberry groves (for silkworms), with additional acreage depending on the number of women, slaves and livestock attached to each household. An ‘equal-field system’, it was intended, like the old ‘well-field system’, as an equitable division of land by the state which would form a basis for registration and taxation. But the holdings were considerably bigger than of old, and part of each, notably that required for mulberry trees or other cloth-yielding crops such as hemp, was hereditary. In other words, there was enough here to make the cultivator think twice before vacating whenever famine or disturbance threatened. Something similar had been attempted by the Cao Wei and Western Jin dynasties; but it was this Northern Wei version that would be adopted by the Sui and Tang. It would last until the mid-eighth century, at which point ‘Chinese attempts at state regulation of land finally came to an end and were not effectively renewed . . . until the communism of the twentieth century’.34

  In theory no state-allocated land (other than that for mulberry trees) could be disposed of or inherited. Yet almost immediately both these practices became commonplace. As larger landholdings were consolidated, the ‘equal-field system’ became decidedly unequal and in fact helped to sustain a new class of landed proprietors. Even Xianbei warriors seem to have been attracted by the system, and wherever the reforms were effective and the tenure could be made hereditary, powerful landowning clans of now mixed descent took root. From this milieu of military men turned landowners, and of non-Han turned Chinese, would come most of the leading figures of the sixth and seventh centuries. An ethnic and social accommodation – Chinese historians might prefer ‘assimilation’ – was under way. Like Buddhism, it would be instrumental in underpinning the eventual reintegration of the empire.

  Central to the new policies devised by the Dowager Empress Feng and continued by Xiao-wendi was the 493 removal of the imperial capital. From Pingcheng, a place on the verge of the Mongolian steppe that had proved difficult to supply with grain, let alone luxuries, it was to be transferred to the still-devastated Luoyang, a site well served by road and water transport, at the centre of the great northern plain, and steeped in imperial associations. After much discussion and in the face of considerable disquiet, the move had to be made as if by accident. While leading south an army to assail the Qi, fourth of the Six (southern) Dynasties of Jiankang (Nanjing), the emperor engineered a halt near the site of the old Han, Wei and Jin capital. Incessant rain had already dampened martial spirits, and it now led to pleas to abandon the whole campaign. The emperor, feigning reluctance, agreed on condition that the army stay put and begin reconstructing the city.

  So it did; and after nine years of rebuilding and a massive population transfer, a great city once again graced the northern bank of the Luo River. The new Luoyang covered an area of over 18 square kilometres (7 square miles) and accommodated more than half a million people and 1,300 monasteries. It witnessed scenes of magnificence barely rivalled by its predecessors, it hosted further developments in Buddhist scholarship, it minted the first new coinage for a couple of centuries – and it lasted for all of a generation. Not wilfully destroyed this time, merely evacuated, by 535 Luoyang was again a ghost town.

  The move from Pingcheng had always been resented, most notably by the Xianbei garrisons on the northern frontier. The policy of sinicisation and the favour being shown to Han bureaucrats proved the final straws. The northern Xianbei troops rebelled and the Northern Wei empire split. Other tribal groupings hastened to join in the fray; in 534 the last Northern Wei emperor was deposed; and in the same year Luoyang’s population was removed to a new capital. From the flurry of ferocious infighting between the short-lived dynastic successors of the Northern Wei would emerge the dynamic instigator of China’s second attempt at an enduring integration.

  8

  SUI, TANG AND

  THE SECOND EMPIRE

  550–650

  INTERCALARY CONJUNCTION

  BEFORE CHINA’S ADOPTION OF THE STANDARD Gregorian calendar in 1912, each month of the Chinese year lasted twenty-eight to twenty-nine days, that being the duration of the moon’s cycle. But since 28/29 days x 12 months comes to somewhat less than the 365 days of the solar year, the Chinese calendar, like other luni-solar calendars, needed a way of accommodating the difference. The Julian and Gregorian calendars manage this by extending the duration of most months to thirty or thirty-one days, so spreading the differential throughout the year. But in China, as in pre-Julian Rome, the moon-length month remained standard. Instead, the luni-solar difference was taken up by the introduction, every eighteen months or so, of an additional month.

  When to introduce this ‘intercalary’ month was a matter of deep concern and elaborate computation, for on the exact harmonisation and synchronisation of the terrestrial world with that of the cosmos depended just about everything – virtue, longevity, health, prosperity, justice, dominion and immunity from disasters. Like other essential ongoing corrections – to the name of the year-period, the setting of the hours, the timing of the seasonal rites, the musical pitch of the ritual pipes – it was ultimately an imperial responsibility. Outstanding emperors, especially those who founded a dynasty or achieved much in their own right, were thought to have been well advised in such matters; bad emperors were generally supposed to have neglected or manipulated them.

  This idea of fraught but cathartic interludes in which human affairs were realigned with the rhythms of the cosmos could be extended to the dynastic succession itself. Some dynasties lasted long; others barely survived a few turbulent decades – it was as if they had been inserted to fill a hiatus or give a new direction. The Former Han had been preceded by the intrusion that was the First Emperor’s Qin dynasty, and the Later Han by the ‘blip’ that was Wang Mang’s Xin dynasty. A pattern was apparent; and since the succession of dynasties was supposed to mimic the cycles of the planets, some Chinese historians embraced the possibility of ‘intercalary’ dynasties. Thus Qin and Xin could be seen as necessary, if traumatic, correctional preludes that had brought Former Han and Later Han into propitious harmony with the cosmic forces.

  The task of what he calls ‘making a distinction between the orthodox and the intercalated status [of dynasties]’ was one that eventually defeated Sima Guang, the eleventh-century author of the Zizhi Tongjian (and not to be confused with Sima Qian, the second-to-first-century BC ‘Grand Historian’ who wrote the Shiji). In the post-Han period there were just too many dynasties for Sima Guang to decide which were intercalary and which, if any, were not. Yet the title of his all-embracing history, which translates as something like ‘A Comprehensive Mirror for Aid in Government’, seems to endorse the idea of history ‘reflecting’ the cosmic cycles.1 And in common with all Chinese historians, Sima Guang continued to subscribe to the belief that each individual dynasty did indeed conform to a cyclical pattern. Planet-like again, every dynasty ascended and declined, waxed and waned, shone and faded. Strong and virtuous emperors usually came early in the succession; weaker and worse ones usually came towards the end. Indeed, ‘the bad-last emperor’, a necessary conjunction if the Mandate was about to be forfeited, features so frequently in the Standard Histories as to be considered a convention of history-writing. As with the ‘vindictive empress’ and the ‘scheming eunuch’, the dismal deeds and delicious improprieties credited to such stereotypes should be approached with caution.

  Moreover Sima Guang did not entirely abandon the idea of dynasties themselves being intercalary. It might not be applicable in respect of the localised dynasties of the ‘Period of Disunion’, but with the return to a wider dominion in the late sixth century it was about to be demonstrated in
the most satisfactory fashion. For before the Tang dynasty could embark on its long and glorious career, another short and dramatic intercalary prelude would serve to bring the country back into what dynastic historians regarded as its natural trajectory. This was as a unitary empire; and the dynasty responsible was the Sui.

  There were only two Sui emperors, their combined reigns lasting just thirty-seven years (581–618), but for maniacal energy and solid achievement it is hard to find their equal in the later history of the empire. Rather one must look, as they did, to the past. Just as the mighty empire of Han had relied on the administrative structures, legal constraints, mobilisational capacity and awesome reputation generated by the Qin First Emperor, so the empire of Tang would scarcely have flourished without the conquests, institutions and infrastructure bequeathed it by the Sui. And yet, since neither Qin’s controversial reputation nor any hint of ‘intercalated status’ could be entertained by a dynast ambitious for his lineage, it was not the example of Qin which inspired the Sui but that of Han itself. As will be seen, the dynasty that the Sui regarded as traumatic and transitional was the one they replaced. Intercalary interludes, like ‘bad-last’ emperors, were always someone else’s.

  When in 534 the newly rebuilt Luoyang had been forcibly evacuated, it was on the orders of a warlord called Gao Huan. Himself Chinese but from the northern frontier and married to a Xianbei, Gao Huan then ruled in the name of several short-lived Northern Wei descendants (known as the Eastern Wei) from a more defensible capital at Ye in the south of Hebei. Luoyang was thought too exposed because to the west another warlord of pure Xianbei descent called Yuwen Tai ruled in the name of more puppet emperors of Northern Wei descent (there known as the Western Wei). In time-honoured fashion, both these Wei remnants were soon removed, with Gao Huan’s successors in the east reigning as the Northern Qi (551–77) and Yuwen Tai’s in the west as the Northern Zhou (557–81). (They called themselves just ‘Qi’ and ‘Zhou’, of course, all the ‘northerns’, ‘easterns’ and ‘westerns’ having been added later for the convenience of historians.)

  The Northern Qi in the east was the more sinicised of the two regimes and may be seen as continuing the ethnic assimilation of Han and non-Han promoted by Dowager Empress Feng and Xiao-wendi of the Northern Wei. But it was Yuwen Tai’s Northern Zhou dynasty based in Chang’an which, though initially the weaker of the two, proved the more innovative and dynamic. According to one historian – admittedly not a Chinese one – this largely non-Han regime, headed by a Xianbei elite many of whom spoke no Chinese at all, ‘was the anvil on which were forged the structures of power – the economic, political and military institutions – upon which [the Sui-Tang] monolith grew’.2 In fact the Northern Zhou actually fashioned that monolith to the extent that they reunified the north, added to it the ever vital resource-base of Sichuan, revived claims to Gansu and some of the oasis-cities beyond, and ennobled a man whose son, as Sui Wendi, would complete the process of reunification. Just as the dukes and kings of Qin in the ‘Warring States’ period had developed centralised bureaucratic structures and mobilised massive armies for the career of conquest that made possible the Qin, and then Han, empires, so it was the little-honoured innovations of the Northern Zhou which made possible the better-known triumphs of Sui, which in turn underpinned the glorious Tang.

  One day in 535 Yuwen Tai, already the power behind the Western Wei throne, was out fishing with friends near Chang’an. In what must have been a novel sport for men from the desiccated northern frontier, the anglers chose a stretch of water that looked to have been man-made. Curious about its origins – it probably dated from the Former Han – Yuwen Tai sought information. A local man called Su Chuo was produced, and he proving a fund of information, the Xianbei warlord took more delight in his antiquarian ‘catch’ than in the fishing. He kept Su Chuo talking for the rest of the day and well into the night. Besides information about ‘the vestiges of the rise and fall of successive dynasties’, he learned of ‘the way of orderly government . . . the way of emperors and kings’ and of the political teachings of ancient sages like the legalist Han Fei. Curiosity and an open-minded pragmatism being among the finer qualities of the non-Han incomers, Yuwen Tai was intrigued. He co-opted Su Chuo as his fiscal adviser and also entrusted him with the task of devising a legitimising ideology for the new regime, a role in which subsequent Northern Zhou rulers would retain him.3

  Su Chuo’s approach to the problem of how to make non-Han rule more palatable in northern China was to present it not as a compromise with the surviving traditions of the Han Chinese but as a reversion to the pre-Han, and of course pre-Buddhist, purity of those traditions. In other words, he would out-orthodox the orthodox. Like Confucius, he harked back to the age prior to the ‘Warring States’ period when society supposedly conformed to the highest ideals of Confucian decorum and duty. Hence the choice of ‘Zhou’ as the dynastic name; hence his putting into Yuwen Tai’s mouth sentiments and speeches culled from those credited to the Duke of Zhou; and hence his promotion of the Zhouli (‘Rites of Zhou’), a contentious text, also sometimes credited to the Duke of Zhou, that described the life and times – and more especially the life and terms – of that Elysian age.

  The Zhouli, it may be recalled, was also the text so slavishly adopted by Wang Mang in the early first century AD. Once again the long-forgotten nomenclature of Zhou times was resurrected; edicts were issued in the archaic Chinese of that period and all officials compelled to learn it; a handy catechism comprising the Six Articles of the new dispensation had also to be memorised by heart; and the ‘equal-fields system’ of land tenure, though introduced by the Northern Wei, was retained as a fair approximation to the ancient ‘well-field’ grid of equal peasant holdings. Naturally Buddhism and Daoism were frowned on and both were eventually proscribed.

  Whether such affectations endeared the foreign elite to their Chinese subjects is, however, doubtful; for when the duke of Sui, a member of that elite, rose against the Northern Zhou in 581, one of his first moves would be to reject the whole exercise. In effect, Confucian ‘fundamentalism’ probably served the Northern Zhou no better than it had Wang Mang. On the other hand, it served their successors rather well, in that abolition of such an inconvenient model not only enhanced their credibility but threw open the ideological arena for other political exemplars from the past.

  More practical and much more productive were the Northern Zhou’s recruiting initiatives. When they first arrived in Chang’an, Yuwen Tai and his Xianbei followers mustered an effective but not numerous cavalry. To hold off repeated attacks by the Eastern Wei/Northern Qi, they needed to organise local recruitment, enlist the loyalty of various rural militia, and raise both the standing of military men and the standard of military training. This they did so successfully that by 550 the records speak of ‘Twenty-four Armies’ and by the early 570s of 100,000 men under arms. The Gansu corridor was successfully subdued by 549, and after the collapse of the Liang dynasty in the south, Sichuan and then the Han River basin were taken in the 550s. Northern Zhou territory now reached to the Yangzi. To complete the reunification of the north it remained only to overwhelm the Northern Qi in Shandong and Hebei, a feat that was achieved in 577 with a massive force put at 570,000.

  But just how this turnaround in the size and cohesion of the Northern Zhou’s military machine was effected is far from clear. The key development is thought to have been the institution of fubing (‘territorial forces’ or ‘militia forces’). These fubing would famously become the backbone of the Sui and Tang armies and attract much later comment, none of which has helped to clarify their genesis. Under the Northern Zhou most fubing were probably infantry rather cavalry, Han Chinese rather than non-Han, and volunteers rather than conscripts, having been lured into service by exemptions from taxation and corvée. Yet there were numerous exceptions: conscription was by no means abandoned; some fubing may have originated in units previously recruited by local magnates and then incorporated into the ‘Twenty-
four Armies’; the enormous numbers of horses mentioned show that cavalry, both light and heavy, remained crucial; so did the recruitment of non-Han forces; and in the north, as in the south, there is evidence for the growth of military professionalism and a martial culture. Long-term enrolment, with military families or groups of families providing recruits from one generation to the next, is evident; and the growth of an esprit de corps may be inferred from the news that, as of the 570s, the Twenty-four Armies ‘began to perform guard duty by rotation in the environs of the imperial palace, an important feature of the fubing system under the Sui and Tang dynasties’.4

  But perhaps nothing contributed more to this steady build-up than the success it generated. Victory brought reward to all – grants, amnesties and booty to the rank-and-file, honours, emoluments and more booty to their commanders, and additional manpower and foodstuffs to the regime. Expansion created its own momentum; and there seemed no limit to it. For the conquests of the Northern Zhou, reaching from the Liao River in Manchuria to Gansu, Sichuan and the upper Yangzi, had not just reunited the north but had thrown a cordon round the breakaway southern empire based at Jiankang (Nanjing) on the lower Yangzi.

  By the sixth century Jiankang, the capital of all the southern dynasties, had grown into ‘the largest city of the age’ with a population of around a million. Commercially and intellectually it shamed the northern capitals of Chang’an, Luoyang and Ye.5 In its markets the silks and hardware of the north met the spices, pearls and feathery exotica of Vietnam and southeast Asia. Beside the Yangzi, and scattered over the wooded slopes behind, some seven hundred Buddhist establishments maintained the highest standards of exegesis, while at court piety vied with conversational finesse and the grossest indulgence.