by John Keay
The lopsided nature of the relationship was conceded by the Song when in 1206 they ended four and a half decades of mostly peaceful coexistence by issuing a declaration of war. By way of justification, and in the hope of attracting defectors, they offered the view that the Jin ‘through their evil actions and incompetence, had lost the Mandate of Heaven and thus the legitimate claim to rule their country’.26 Clearly, to lose the Mandate, they must once have held it; thus either the Song had long been ruling in defiance of the Mandate – an unlikely admission – or there were indeed two legitimate rulers under Heaven. Ironically it would take yet a third, who in this same year, 1206, on the banks of the Onon River in central Mongolia, was acclaimed khan of all the Mongols, to resolve this clash of the mandates.
The Song’s claim that the Jin had forfeited the Mandate may not have seemed unreasonable at the time. Troubles had lately assailed the Jin from all directions. In the north, Mongol raids were already obliging the Jin to spend heavily on fortifications and punitive expeditions. The additional taxation required to meet this expense bore heavily on farmers in the central plain, who were already struggling with that bane of the period, inflation fuelled by a shortage of coin, plus the usual end-of-dynasty cycle of drought, disease, locust attack and, increasingly, floods. Ever since the 1160s the Yellow River had been behaving erratically. There were serious inundations in the Kaifeng area in the 1170s and farther downstream in Shandong in the 1180s. Siltation was evidently raising the river to spate levels that the levees could not contain and which the Jin lacked the experience to deal with.
The disaster struck in 1194. The river burst it banks in several places. It not only turned its normally productive flood-plain into plain unproductive flood, but completely changed its course, shunning the channels that had previously conducted it to estuaries north of the Shandong peninsula in favour of a new cross-country route (later incorporated into the Grand Canal) to the mouth of the Huai River south of the Shandong peninsula. It was almost an exact reversal of the great change that had taken place in AD 11/12; and just as that cataclysm, by undermining Wang Mang’s fundamentalist reform programme, had clearly demonstrated that his oneman dynasty had forfeited the Mandate, so Heaven, it seemed, had now withdrawn its favour from the Jin.
The disruption to communciations and grain shipments may have been as serious as the loss of crops and property. Famine and unrest ensued. Economically crippled as well as dynastically delegitimised, the Jin now looked an easy target to the Song. No doubt the irredentist poet Lu You, already into his seventies, lent what support he could to the emerging warmongers in the Song capital of Hangzhou. The Jin then made things worse for themselves by an ostentatious attempt to reassert their legitimacy. After several years of heated debate, in 1202 Jin Zhangzhong (r. 1189–1208) ceremonially adopted from among the ‘Five Phases’ (or ‘Elements’) that of Earth (colour: yellow, etc.) as the one appropriate to the Jin. The move clearly signified that the Jin considered themselves the sole Mandatees with the Southern Song as their vassals. The long debate had simply been over which Phase/Element to plump for; it depended on which dynasty – Northern Song, Khitan Liao or Tang – the Mandate had supposedly been inherited from; when the decision went in favour of the Northern Song, whose Phase/Element had been Fire (colour: red, etc.), the sequence of Phases as then understood dictated that Earth come next.
Undeterred by Earth having sustained long-lasting dynasties like the Han and Tang, the Song hastened to invade. In 1208 their forces pushed north across the Huai River. They met unexpectedly stiff resistance and found surprisingly few defectors. Instead Sichuan, part of their own empire, chose to revolt. Like the Jin attack of 1161, the campaign achieved next to nothing beyond discrediting the belligerent party. Lu You lived to see its failure and die a disappointed man.
That was in 1210. A year later, the Mongols ceased their sporadic raiding of Jin territory to launch a full-scale invasion. Chinggis Khan in person led one of the two armies, each of about 50,000 well-mounted archers, that began systematically plundering the Jin empire. Datong in Shanxi was captured, Beijing besieged. In 1213/14 the invaders were back for more triumphs, more booty and a truce that thoroughly humiliated the Jin. It lasted a year. When, for security, the Jin moved their capital to Kaifeng, Chinggis Khan took it to be an infringement of the treaty. The Mongols returned and in 1215 took Beijing.
Submission and loot, rather than thrones and territory, were the Mongol objectives at the time; conquest and government would come later. Thus for the next two decades, while Chinggis terrorised the rest of Eurasia, the Jin were left to the tender mercies of his lieutenants. Manchuria was soon lost, although Jin territory south of the Yellow River remained intact and elsewhere some of the devastation was repaired and the scattered population resettled. Rebuilding the military proved more difficult. Many Jurchen and Khitan had deserted to the Mongols; and appeals for help to Xia and Southern Song met with contempt. When in 1228 the Mongols returned in force, the by now largely Han forces of the Jin nevertheless offered a fierce resistance. It continued until 1233, in which year Kaifeng finally fell to the enemy. The last Jin emperor committed suicide a year later. A dynasty that, for all its faults, had set an example, substantially followed by both Mongols and Manchus, of how non-Han rule could be made acceptable to an overwhelmingly Han population had finally proved itself worthy of the Mandate; extinction with honour had been preferred to the shame of a mock abdication. The Southern Song, come their turn, would know what was expected of them.
12
BY LAND AND SEA
1235–1405
SUNSET OF THE SONG
AFTER THE SONG THERE WOULD BE just three more imperial dynasties: the Mongol Yuan (1279–1368), the Ming (1368–1644) and the Manchu Qing (1644–1911). Although definitely legitimate, in Chinese eyes all would in some way be compromised. The first and last would often be portrayed as alien regimes indifferent to the plight of their Chinese subjects, and the Ming, though indigenous and in many ways admirable, as culpable for a decline in China’s international standing relative to that of the European powers that began frequenting China’s ports towards the end of the Ming period. That left the Song at the apex of the dynastic trajectory. The Song, and more especially the sunset blaze of the Southern Song (1127–1279), would come to be seen as a halcyon age of imperial China.
Talent and industry, along with fugitives and colonists, had gravitated south with every incursion into the north. The demand for ink and pigments was never so high as among the artists and calligraphers, poets, philosophers, playwrights and diarists who plied their brushes in the benign climate of Southern Song. Block-printed books of reasonable price now circulated widely, connoisseurs and collectors drooled over landscape paintings of exquisite delicacy, and the production of fine lacquerware reached industrial proportions. Above all, it was ‘the classic period of Chinese ceramics’.1 Technical mastery combined with a revival of interest in archaic forms to produce stonewares of elegance and restraint for a rich and discerning domestic market. Meanwhile the booming export demand was increasingly supplied from southern kilns within waterborne reach of the coast, most notably those at Jingdezhen in Jiangxi province. Here, high-quality deposits of a clay enriched with kaolin made possible the production of a shell-like ware whose transparent glaze gave a ‘blue-white’ (qingbai) tinge. It was probably this qingbai ware that Marco Polo termed porcelain and ascribed to a place called ‘Tyunju’, which could be Jingdezhen. ‘They make it nowhere but in that city, and thence it is exported all over the world.’2 Along with other ceramic wares, Jingdezhen’s porcelain found its way to ports throughout east and south-east Asia and farther afield to India, Egypt, Europe and east Africa. When around 1340 Jingdezhen began producing a decorated blue-and-white porcelain, it too was almost entirely for export. A prime candidate for the doubtful honour of being ‘the first truly global “brand”’, this Jingdezhen blue-and-white ware would come to be known in English as ‘China-ware’ or just ‘china’.3
The logic behind the provenance of this ‘China/china’ terminology is indicated by Polo. When his Mongol hosts used the word Chin (which was Polo’s rendering of ‘Jin’), ‘’tis Manzi they mean’, he reports. Evidently the Jurchen dynastic title ‘Jin’ had been extended by the Mongols to all parts of China that they had still to conquer, while ‘Manzi’ was Polo’s transcription of two characters signifying the land of the aboriginal ‘Man peoples’, a derogatory northerners’ term for the subjects of the Southern Song.4 With the Southern Song still flourishing when Polo claims to have arrived on the scene some time in the 1270s, Chin and Manzi were indeed the same. The East China Sea was known as the Sea of Chin, and the porcelain exported from its ports was known to foreigners as ‘Chin ware’, hence ‘china-ware’. There seems no compelling reason for launching an etymological grappling iron across centuries of silence to establish some tenuous link with Ptolemy’s ‘Sinae’, the Graeco-Roman ‘Sinai’/‘Thinai’, India’s ‘Cina’/‘Chitan’, the First Emperor’s ‘Qin’, or the warring state of ‘Jin’.
The seaports and rivers of Southern Song bristled with shipping, but as yet no impertinent visitors from beyond the seas questioned the superi ority of China’s culture. Foreign trade offered some compensation for the loss of the north and was officially encouraged. Just as local bureaucrats and landed gentry invested in commerce, so financiers and merchants participated in government, especially in the operation of the official monopolies. Meanwhile famines were few and prosperity the norm. Emperors were attentive to the advice of councillors; the bureaucracy was seldom bypassed. Like ceramics and brushwork, the values and institutions dear to China seemed transcendent throughout East Asia – eagerly adopted in Japan, Korea and Vietnam, resilient and indispensable to alien regimes in the north, and acknowledged as of surpassing prestige far beyond. Chinese was the lingua franca of the whole region, its characters written and read by a discernng few from Almaty (Alma Ata) to Angkhor. Dazzling as had been the achievements of the Han and Tang dynasties, the legacy of the Song would seem still brighter and, following the dynasty’s extinction, be bathed in a nostalgic afterglow.
But this elevation of the Song presupposes that eminence lay more in intellectual distinction and cultural sophistication than in territorial dominion and military clout. Neither the humiliations suffered at the hands of the Khitan and Jurchen under the Northern Song, nor the loss of northern China and the eventual capitulation to the Mongols under the Southern Song, would be allowed to tarnish the glittering image. Even the person of the emperor proved largely immune to these catastrophes, blame being reserved for a succession of powerful ministers, such as Cai Jing, whose prominence remained a feature of the period. The six emperors of the Southern Song who actually reigned (three end-of-the-line emperors were infants) merit scant mention. Neither saints nor monsters, some, like the founder Song Gaozong, took a keen interest in government; all showed restraint in dealing with critics; none was especially forceful. Of the six, three abdicated or retired prematurely, one being deranged, the others simply keen to indulge their prurient interests without interruption from ministers and wordy didacts.
Yet with the Mandate itself in dispute during much of the period, a sense of crisis remained palpable. Across the placid surface of Hangzhou’s West Lake – a watery wonderland and pleasure park adjoining the Southern Song capital – beyond its bristling pagodas and behind its bosky hills, the storm clouds massed and the threat of conflict flickered like summer lightning along the northern horizon. War and peace dominated the period. They dictated the rhythms of political life, determined reputations, sharpened perceptions and concentrated great minds wonderfully.
After the 1127 loss of Kaifeng, their northern capital, the Song had found a doughty champion in Yue Fei, a professional soldier of little education but heroic stature. From Nanjing and then Wuchang – near where southern forces had defeated those of the north at the battle of the Red Cliffs some nine centuries earlier – Yue Fei led his men across the Yangzi and up the Han River. Raids deep into Jurchen Jin territory during the 1130s somewhat redeemed the reputation of Song arms. No less memorably, Yue Fei also suppressed a local uprising and commandeered its formidable river flotilla, including several ships propelled by paddle-wheels. The technology was not unlike that of the waterwheel used in irrigation, and had long since been adapted for boats. But the novelty of these vessels lay in their size and the number of their paddle-wheels. The biggest were armed with derricks, from which swung wrecking irons, and deck-mounted trebuchets (cannon-size catapults used in siege warfare) that fired both smoke bombs and incendiary shells. Behind armoured screens, the multiple decks could accommodate hundreds of men; and with up to twenty-four paddle-wheels – twelve per side – the riverine giants must have churned through the water like juggernauts on a flooded highway. ‘A truly remarkable piece of technology’, the paddle-boat was unrivalled elsewhere in the world and would remain so. ‘No other civilisation produced anything like them,’ says Joseph Needham.5 The numerous crew was essential for propulsion, and since this depended on a pedalled treadmill mechanism, they were not paddle-steamers but steamer-size pedaloes. They nevertheless proved a conspicuous addition both to the mythic reputation of Yue Fei and to his now amphibious forces, which grew with every daring escapade.
Unfortunately for Yue Fei, by 1140 this martial spirit had ceased to be to the court’s liking. His success was seen as a threat and his devotion to the Song as an embarrassment; his undoubted fame had revived Song paranoia about powerful generals defying civilian rule, while his belligerent utterances ran counter to the peace feelers that were already being extended to the Jin (and would produce the settlement of 1141/42). Yue Fei was therefore recalled, deprived of his command, imprisoned for insubordination, poisoned on the orders of the chief minister, and erased from official memory. Not until 1161, twenty years later, when a Jin invasion (it was the one mounted by the unpopular Prince Hailing) again threatened the Southern Song, was Yue Fei’s memory partially rehabilitated. Military role models were suddenly back in vogue; the minister responsible for Yue Fei’s disgrace and death was labelled a detested appeaser.
Later still a grandson of Yue Fei took it upon himself to ferret out documentary evidence of his grandfather’s achievements, embellish them and, early in the thirteenth century, publish an adulatory biography. This coincided with another bout of Song bellicosity when in 1206–08, with the Jin reeling from Yellow River floods, the Song armies moved north to take advantage. The attack soon petered out, but such were the enduring properties of the printed word that the grandson’s biography established Yue Fei and his ill-requited exploits as a model for all time. Much mythologised in reaction to Mongol rule, under the Ming dynasty Yue Fei would be elevated to the position of ‘number two military hero of all Chinese history’ (as F. W. Mote puts it), second only to Guan Yu, the most warlike of the three swashbuckling companions in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Both Guan Yu and Yue Fei featured in countless other novels and plays and had temples dedicated to their memory. ‘Recover our Rivers and Mountains’, a slogan adopted against the Japanese invader in the 1940s, was culled from lyrics supposedly composed by the now immortalised Yue Fei and subsequently set to music. With lines like ‘My hair bristles in my helmet,. . . My fierce ambition is to feed on the flesh of the Huns’ (literally ‘Xiongnu flesh’ but figuratively that of Jurchen, Mongol, Japanese or any other non-Han invader), Yue Fei symbolised the spirit of a nation’s resistance. Communist cadres rallying to the homeland’s liberation must, though, have choked on the last line in which recovering the mountains and the rivers was to be but a prelude to ‘paying our respects once more to the emperor’.6
The warmongers of 1206–08 were discredited when Song forces again failed to reclaim much in the way of territory. Peace was restored, and another militaristic minister paid the price; his head, gift-wrapped and forwarded to the Jin, formed part of the indemnity settlement. In Hangzhou pacific counsels reasserted themselves,
as well they might, for the Jin, now facing the full force of Chinggis Khan’s rough-riding armies, posed a much-reduced threat. When in 1233–34 the Mongols finally eliminated the Jin altogether, Hangzhou drew a long sigh of relief. Not until two decades later, when the Mongols resumed their advance on the Yangzi, would West Lake’s rhapsodising patrons realise that a similar fate might yet be awaiting them.
The lull in hostilities and the triumph of Southern Song’s peace-loving bureaucrats over its war-waging militarists reopened the question of reform. While at the height of his power, Han Tuozhou, the general whose head had since been detached and gift-wrapped, had taken against the scholarly elite and in particular against a school of what he called ‘false learning’. Its exponents had been denounced and dismissed from office, among them the man who is now generally considered as (to ape Mote’s phrasing) the number-two philosopher-moralist of all Chinese history, second, that is, only to Confucius himself. This was Zhu Xi (1130–1200), an intellectual colossus responsible for a new orientation, ‘a new culture’ even, which, becoming the dominant ideology during the empire’s seven remaining centuries, would come to be known as Neo-Confucianism. The ‘Confucian persuasion’ was about to become more intellectually persuasive.
