Day of Empire

by Amy Chua

  Worse still, a plague of intensifying ethnic conflict swept over Rome beginning in the late fourth century AD. By this time, hundreds of thousands of principally Germanic “barbarians” had immigrated into Roman territory. These Germans—many of whom were refugees fleeing the Huns—included the Goths, Vandals, Bur-gundians, and Lombards from the northeast and the Franks, Alamanni, Saxons, and Frisians from the northwest.

  These Germanic immigrants occupied a highly precarious position within the Roman Empire. On the one hand, they represented potentially fearsome enemies—invaders who had pushed their way across the Danube through the empire's collapsing frontier defenses. On the other hand, they represented potential allies, offering desperately needed manpower for the badly depleted Roman military.

  At first, Rome's traditional strategy of tolerance and uncoerced assimilation appeared to be succeeding with the various Germanic tribes. They were allowed to live under their own rulers, following their own customs and laws. Their men filled the ranks of Rome's armies. The sons of their chiefs were classically educated and allowed to rise, in some cases to the highest positions of military command. They were given ample land and converted in large numbers to Christianity. Far from planning to sack and pillage Rome (as they would eventually do), the Germanic chiefs initially embraced the idea of contributing to and being part of the great Roman Empire. The Visigoth leader Ataulf spoke of “restoring the fame of Rome in all its integrity, and of increasing it by means of the Gothic strength.”35

  But the assimilation of the Germanic immigrants was never complete and always turbulent. From early on, the Germans were subjected to periodic Roman abuse and contempt. Their sons were sometimes taken as hostages to ensure obedience. Their wives and daughters were taken as slaves. At the same time, the usually starving Germans—although given land, they were ignorant of agriculture—often pillaged and attacked their more prosperous Roman neighbors. Revolts broke out as some Germanic tribes sought more autonomy. Distrust and hostility intensified on both sides.

  Essentially, the famous Roman tradition of tolerance had hit a limit it could not cross. The Germans disgusted the native Roman people, who complained of the Germans’ “nauseous smell” and the repulsive rancid butter they smeared in their yellow hair. Even highly literate Romans who argued for coexistence with the “noble savages” described “the Alamanni as drunkards, the Saxons, Franks, and Heruli as wantonly brutal, and the Alans as rapacious lechers.”

  In the late fourth century, Rome for the first time adopted policies of apartheid against one of its subject peoples, barring intermarriage, forbidding Romans from wearing trousers and other barbarian clothing (as opposed to togas or tunics), and condemning the barbarians’ form of Christianity as heretical. Officers of German heritage were accused of disloyalty, denied posts, and persecuted. Mob lynchings of Goth soldiers grew common. In the worst cases, there were pogroms and massacres, fueling the fire that would eventually lead to the sacking of Rome.

  A famous victim of this strife was the mixed-blooded Stilicho, son of a “barbarian” father—actually a Roman cavalry officer of Vandal descent—and a Roman mother. Stilicho was a towering example of the ability of men of non-Roman stock to rise through the imperial ranks. By 400, he was one of the most powerful men in the empire: a general in the Roman army and father-in-law of the western emperor, Honorius. But Stilicho, to fill his desperate needs for military manpower, had recruited thousands of barbarian troops into the Roman army, and a rumor spread that he planned to overthrow the eastern emperor and put his own barbarian son in control. Although the historical evidence suggests that Stilicho was a loyal Roman to the end, the rumor was believed. Honorius divorced Stilicho's daughter. Roman soldiers mutinied, killing Stilicho's supporters and launching a series of pogroms against his barbarian troops, whose families were massacred in cold blood and whose property was confiscated. In August of 408, Stilicho himself was decapitated.

  Enmity escalated, and the destruction of Rome came with astonishing rapidity. “[D]isliked and despised,” the Germans “retaliated by hating the people whose glories they had once hoped to share.” Outraged Germans once loyal to the empire turned against the Romans, throwing their lot in with rebellious forces. Stilicho's barbarian soldiers joined forces with the Gothic king Alaric, who laid siege to Rome itself in the autumn of 408 and sacked it in 410. In 419 the Visigoths overran Gaul. In 439, the Vandals took Carthage and much of Roman North Africa; in 455 they sacked Rome again.

  By 476 the western Roman Empire was no more. In its place was an assortment of warlike “barbarian” kingdoms, the distant precursors of the modern European nations. The eastern Roman Empire, with its capital at Constantinople, lasted another thousand years. But this Byzantine Empire—fervently intolerant of religious dissent, riven by ecclesiastical infighting, and continually besieged by Persians, Slavs, and later Muslims—never approached the grandeur of ancient Rome.36

  A century ago, when racial theories were more in vogue, some historians argued that Rome fell because the “pure” Roman stock had been polluted and diluted by the blood of Rome's conquered peoples. If I am right, just the opposite is true.

  Rome thrived so long as it was able to enlist, absorb, reward, and intermix peoples of diverse ethnicities, religions, and backgrounds. At the Roman Empire's peak, Africans, Spaniards, Britons, and Gauls alike could rise to the highest echelons of power— indeed, could even become emperor—as long as they assimilated. The empire sank when it let in peoples that it failed to assimilate, either because they were unassimilable or because their culture and habits exceeded the limits of Roman tolerance. Out of a mixture of religious and ethnic intolerance, Rome sparked wars and internal rebellions it could not win. It was precisely when the empire sought to maintain the “purity” of Roman blood, culture, and religion—replicating the mistake that Claudius and later Gibbon imputed to ancient Athens and Sparta—that Rome spiraled downward into disintegration and oblivion.

  THREE

  The Mixed-Blooded Tang Dynasty

  When I was a girl in West Lafayette, Indiana, my father told me that I was descended from a demigod. This may sound hard to believe, but it turns out that my great-grandfather was a revered statesman and philanthropist in the Fujian province of China. After his death, when tiny ghost sprites—or in my father's words, Chinese leprechauns—were sighted dancing on his grave, his fellow villagers declared him a deity (lo-han).

  Thirty years later, I repeated this story to my own daughters, and in the summer of 1999 my husband and I took them to China to visit Tangdong, where my great-grandfather had lived. Based on my father's descriptions, I was expecting a worn but graceful mansion on the South China Sea, overlooking acres of white sand. On a clear day, supposedly, one could see all the way to Taiwan.

  After a sweltering two-hour taxi ride from the city of Xiamen, we arrived at Tangdong. It was indeed a seaside village, and there was white sand—but no mansion. Instead, scattered all over the beach were huge piles of stinking oyster shells, rising up thirty or forty feet in the air. Except for a few scrawny chickens, the village seemed completely deserted. Whatever its past glories, Tangdong in 1999 was, at least to the disappointed eye, little more than an impoverished ghost town.

  I eventually found a local villager. He was sitting on a stoop on the town's long, dusty main street. He stared at us with his mouth open, his four front teeth missing. In the local dialect, I told him my last name and asked if he knew where the Chuas had lived.

  The villager blinked at me a few times. Then, he turned and waved his arm. “Everyone on this side of the street is named Chua,” he grunted. “Everyone on the other side is named Lao.”

  The sudden discovery of two hundred new, inbred relatives complicated matters, and the search for my family's house ultimately proved futile. There was, however, solace. We found my great-grandfather's tomb, which, amazingly, and for reasons probably long forgotten, is still regarded as sacred by the townspeople—even if it is now next to some municip
al drainpipes.

  In addition to my great-grandfather, I have obsessively tried to track down every other remotely impressive ancestor I have in China. A fifth cousin by marriage, thrice removed, collected great works of nineteenth-century calligraphy; his collection is now in the Shanghai Museum. My great “uncle” Chua Ge Kun, possibly unrelated by blood, was a renowned symphony conductor and the founder of the Fuzhou Music School. Finally, my family's most prized heirloom—in fact, our only heirloom—is an original 2,000-page treatise from 1655, handwritten by a direct ancestor named Chua Wu Neng, who was the royal astronomer to Emperor Shen Zong of the Ming dynasty. Also a philosopher and poet, Wu Neng was appointed by the emperor to be the chief of military staff in 1644, when China faced a Manchu invasion. A leather-bound copy of Wu Neng's treatise sits prominently on my living room coffee table.

  Like many others who can trace their roots to great fallen empires—whether China, Greece, Persia, Turkey, or Rome—I cling for my identity to ethereal strands of history and high culture. China's long traditions of calligraphy, science, poetry, opera, philosophy, naturalism, and Confucian discipline have always fascinated me, perhaps because they contrasted so sharply with the dismal third world reality of the China that confronted me as a child.

  For Westerners, the best known of the Chinese dynasties may be the Ming, famous for its blue and white porcelain and recently the subject of Gavin Menzies’ 1421: The Year China Discovered America. But for ethnic Chinese around the world, it is the Tang dynasty that represents China's golden age—not only a period of unprecedented prosperity and political power, but the pinnacle of Chinese literary and artistic achievement, setting a standard to which every subsequent dynasty aspired.1 In terms of population under its control, the Tang dynasty towered over every other contemporaneous empire, including the powerful Arab caliphates. The Tang was also, not coincidentally, more open, cosmopolitan, and ethnically and religiously tolerant than any other empire of its day, and perhaps than any other period in Chinese history.

  INTOLERANCE AND “BARBARIANS” IN CHINESE HISTORY

  For centuries prior to 221 BC central China's Yellow River plains had consisted of numerous vying kingdoms, tribes, and states engaged in perpetual warfare. Known as the “Spring and Autumn” and “Warring States” eras, this period of disunity and constant strife was also characterized by tremendous intellectual ferment. All of China's major schools of philosophy—including Confucianism, Taoism, and Legalism—emerged during this period. As Chinese historians would later note, it was a time when “one hundred schools of thought” contended.2

  The Warring States era was brought to an end by the First Emperor of the Qin (Qin Shi huangdi), who unified China politically for the first time in 221 BC. (“Qin,” pronounced “chin,” is the source of the Western name “China.”) Like other great nation builders, he imposed a standard currency and a uniform written script, undertaking construction projects of unprecedented scale, including the 1,500-mile-long Great Wall of China, said to have cost a million lives, and the emperor's own royal tomb, containing the famous 7,000-strong terra-cotta army.

  Even among his admirers, the First Emperor is known for his cruelty and intolerance. He prohibited philosophical debate, burning thousands of “subversive” books and forbidding any praise of the past or criticism of the present. In 212 BC, the emperor reportedly executed 460 scholars, burying them all in a single grave. Those who defied the emperor were buried alive, boiled to death, or ripped to pieces by chariots tied to their four limbs.3

  The First Emperor's oppressive policies sparked widespread rebellions and at least three assassination attempts against him. Although the emperor survived these attempts, he became obsessed with finding an elixir of immortality, and he died traveling in search of it. His son was a weakling, and only fifteen years after its founding, the house of Qin was overthrown, succeeded by the Han dynasty, which would remain in power for four hundred years.

  Despite the brevity of his reign, the First Emperor had laid down a powerful principle that—with only a few striking exceptions, including the Tang dynasty—would reappear throughout Chinese history: that the ruthless suppression of diversity could be required to unify China. During the Qin dynasty, it was principally intellectual diversity that was quashed. Over the next two thousand years, China's intolerance would take the form of sporadic ethnic and religious oppressions, cultural “purification,” rejection of foreigners and foreign ideas, and, most fundamentally, Chinese ethnocentrism and the assertion of Chinese cultural supremacy.

  Perhaps all societies practice a degree of ethnocentrism, but special circumstances in China encouraged such attitudes to an unusual degree. Hemmed in by natural barriers, China for centuries experienced only the most limited contact with the developed civilizations of Europe, India, and the Middle East. China's neighbors were principally scattered, nomadic, and tribal. The Chinese were thus for centuries the largest unified population in the region, the most urbanized, the most literate, and consequently by far the most advanced technologically and culturally.

  At the same time, the Chinese had good reason to fear their neighbors. The Chinese were far superior in numbers and technology, but the nomads had one thing that the Chinese did not: horses. The nomads alone possessed the vast grasslands necessary for grazing large numbers of specially bred horses that for centuries provided a critical military advantage. These horses, along with superb riding and archery skills derived from the hunt, allowed the northern barbarians to conduct raids into the settled lands to their south to seize the Chinese food and other goods they depended on to survive, and then to retreat into the limitless steppe. This constant threat of slaughter and pillage by mounted raiders, a problem that defied permanent solution, shaped the ancient Chinese notion of barbarism. The taint of barbarity was not limited to the steppe peoples. Some foreigners were more dangerous than others, some more civilized than others, but all non-Chinese were, to some degree, barbarians.4

  Even today, in the newly “open” China, the idea of mixing with foreigners retains a hint of the unnatural and taboo for many Chinese. People of mixed racial heritage are regarded as exotic specimens. My two daughters, for example, are half Chinese. They both have brown hair, brown eyes, and vaguely Asian features, and they both speak fluent Mandarin. Yet on a trip to China as recently as 2004, everywhere they went—even in sophisticated Shanghai— my daughters drew curious local crowds, who stared, giggled, and pointed at the “two little foreigners who speak Chinese” as if they were visitors from outer space. Indeed, at the Chengdu Panda Breeding Center, while we were taking pictures of newborn giant pandas—pink, squirming, larva-like creatures that rarely survive— the Chinese tourists were taking pictures of us.

  The First Emperor bequeathed more than one legacy to the nation named after him. The Great Wall he constructed remains China's greatest historical monument. It has long been a symbol of China itself—of the country's unity, territorial integrity, exclusivity, and constant need to insulate and protect its superior civilization from the “barbarians,” whether the fierce nomads from the central Asian steppes or “imperialists” from Europe, Japan, and most recently the United States.

  It is especially ironic, therefore, that the dynasty hailed as China's golden age was founded by a mixed-blooded man of part barbarian ancestry and that the Tang period was characterized above all by cosmopolitanism, embrace of cultural diversity, and an openness to foreigners unsurpassed in Chinese history.

  THE RISE OF THE TANG DYNASTY (AD 618-907)

  After the collapse of the Han dynasty in AD 220, China fell into three hundred years of fragmentation. By the late sixth century, northern China was dominated by rival warlords and aristocratic clans, often of mixed Chinese and Turkic heritage, while southern China was dominated by clans of “purer” Chinese stock.

  In 581, the Sui clan succeeded in reuniting China, but their rule was short-lived. Constantly attacked by Turkic tribes from the steppe, racked by internal rebellion, and overexten
ded militarily, the Sui dynasty collapsed after only thirty years. In 618, Li Yuan, a general belonging to the northern mixed Chinese-Turkic aristocracy, renounced his loyalty to the Sui, marched on the capital city of Changan (now Xian), and declared himself emperor of China, with the imperial title Gaozu (“High Ancestor”). Thus was founded the Tang dynasty, which would rule China for the next three hundred years.

  How Gaozu conquered the Sui is extremely telling: He entered into a military alliance with the barbarian Eastern Turks. Moreover, in his letter to the Turkic ruler, Gaozu used the character qi— which is used by an inferior addressing a superior. For a would-be Chinese emperor to address a barbarian as an equal or, worse, as a superior amounted to sacrilege. In response to the objections of his horrified Confucian advisors, Gaozu explained: “The men of ancient times had a saying, ‘To bend before one man and stand above ten thousand.’ What do the barbarians beyond the frontier amount to in terms of this analogy? They merely amount to one ordinary person. Moreover, the word qi is not worth a thousand measures of gold. Even that I am willing to give away. Why should one worry about one word?”

  Gaozu's shrewd diplomacy reflected the new realities of seventh-century China. China was now threatened on all sides by numerous powerful non-Chinese groups, including the Eastern and Western Turks, the Uighurs, the Khitan, and the Xi, all from the steppe lands north of China, as well as the Tibetans, the Nanzhao, and the Koguryö from the Korean peninsula. Maintaining a unified China in the face of these threats would require not just a Great Wall but complex relationships and alliances with different barbarian groups.5