The Human Story

by James C. Davis

  Chinese painting had its own aesthetic. Artists often painted the same subjects that their teachers had painted before them, but they did it with charm and freshness. A painter waited till he saw his painting in his mind. Then (a Chinese once explained), “with his brush sweeping across the paper, he pursues [the vision] as a falcon chases an elusive rabbit. If he slackens his pace, his vision escapes and may never return.” A Chinese landscape painting on a yards-long scroll can have great appeal. Tiny people walk on paths through villages, across wild rivers on hump-backed bridges, through forests where they’re dwarfed by tall and crooked pines, and up the slopes of rugged hills whose peaks are lost in mist.

  Unlike painters, Chinese poets wrote about anything at all. Two much-admired poets of the 700s, Li Po and Du Fu, were officials at the court of an emperor who was an eager patron of the arts. Li Po considered himself “an immortal banished from heaven.” He was a swordsman, drinker, wanderer, and friend of “singsong girls” and hermits, but he also found the time to write some 20,000 poems that glow with charm. Usually he was cheerful, as in “The Girl of Yue”:

  A girl picking lotuses beside the stream —

  At the sound of my oars she turns about.

  Giggling, she vanishes among the flowers,

  And, all pretenses, declines to come out.

  Sometimes, however, Li Po was thoughtful and nostalgic. Every child in China can recite his “Quiet Night Thoughts”:

  Beside my bed the bright moonbeams bound

  Almost as if there were frost on the ground.

  Rising up, I gaze at the mountain moon;

  Lying back, I think of my old town.

  Li Po is said to have drowned while drinking and boating with some friends. He had reached across the water to seize the moon’s reflection.

  Li Po’s friend Du Fu had a reverence for the family that marks him as a Confucian. He wrote “Chiang Village” when he was reunited with his family after a separation caused by a rebellion:

  Westward beyond the high purple clouds

  The sun strides down to the level earth.

  My rickety gate is loud with sparrows;

  The stranger comes home from a thousand leagues.

  My wife and children can’t believe I’ve survived;

  Recovered from shock, they still wipe at tears.

  In times of great troubles I’ve been buffeted about,

  And returning alive is nothing but luck.

  Neighbors crowd along the top of the wall,

  Groaning out sighs, or sniffling and sobbing.

  Late in the night we light a new candle

  And confront one another as if in a dream.

  Not only were the Chinese splendid artists; they also were the most inventive folk on earth. They may have been the first to use umbrellas, wheelbarrows, matches, toothbrushes, and playing cards. Their magicians magnetized needles and used them to choose lucky places for houses and graves; later, Chinese sailors made compasses with them to find their way across the seas. More than a thousand years before anybody else, the Chinese were making paper, and later they discovered how to print words upon it. (It’s said that a blacksmith named Pi Sheng made clay copies of Chinese characters, baked them hard, glued them on an iron plate, inked them, and pressed papers on the ink, thus making many copies.) Five centuries before Johannes Gutenberg printed the first European book (a Bible, in about 1450), the Chinese government sponsored the printing of a 130-volume set of the Confucian classics.

  At about the same time, a Chinese inventor combined honey, sulfur, and saltpeter, and heated the mix. He was searching for a potion that would make one live forever, but he found one with the opposite effect. Later others dropped the honey and added charcoal. Sad to say, they used the resulting gunpowder not only for firecrackers, as historians have claimed, but also to make hand grenades and mines.

  China’s silk was such a major export that the route that caravans took through central Asia to the west was called the Silk Road. Chinese potters made porcelain cups, bowls, and vases that were thin as eggshells, lovely enough for the gentry and maybe cheap enough for the poor. Some of it was so hard (it’s said) that steel couldn’t scratch it.

  IN THE 1200S, disaster struck. Mongol nomads from the grasslands to the north swept down and, shedding lots of blood, conquered all of China, as well as much of the rest of Asia and some of Europe. (We will have more to say about them in the next chapter.) The Mongols’ ways were not like those of civilized Chinese. Later Chinese chroniclers pictured them as savages who washed in urine, if at all, and knew only the ways to rob and kill.

  In fact, the Mongols governed China well for about a hundred years. They were wise enough to use some Chinese scholar-bureaucrats to help them rule their huge domain. As we’ll see in chapter 8, Italian merchants who came to China while the Mongols ruled it were favorably impressed. Eventually, however, the Mongols met the fate of all the dynasties before them; they lost the Mandate of Heaven. The country fell apart, and by the 1350s it was wracked by civil war, and famine and disease were killing people by the tens of millions.

  Let the story of one family stand for what happened to those millions. In the 1330s, Chu Shih-chen and his wife were hungry peasants in the North China Plain. When their landlord evicted them from their tiny farm they moved to another. But they found it so hard to feed their six children that they arranged for others to adopt two of their sons, and as soon as they could they married off their two daughters. Not long after this, their crops shriveled during a drought and were eaten by locusts. Shih-chen, his wife, and their oldest son all starved to death.

  Only their youngest son, seventeen-year-old Chu Yüan-chang, was left, and he was so poor that he could not afford to bury his family until a neighbor gave him a scrap of land for their graves. In order to survive, he became a novice in a Buddhist monastery, which sent him out to beg. Soon, however, the monastery found itself so poor that the abbot disbanded it. Yüan-chang faced starvation.

  We know that dismal story only because Chu Yüan-chang later became so prominent that someone thought it worth recording. At the age of twenty-five, the young beggar became a soldier, and soon he was a rebel warlord. In the 1360s he defeated other warlords and won control of the Yangtze valley in the center of China, and in 1368 he drove the last Mongol emperor back into the grasslands from which his people had come. Chu Yüan-chang then proclaimed himself emperor and founder of a new dynasty, the Ming or “Brilliant.” As emperor, he took the name Hung-wu, which means “Swelling military power.”

  Hung-wu had his faults. After his first few years he felt a paranoid fear of being ridiculed because of his peasant origins and his pockmarked, pig-snout face. In a series of purges he killed tens of thousands of the very men who had helped him triumph.

  However, he also undid the blunders of the Mongols and restored and sometimes improved on the best of the old Chinese ways. He built up a large standing army, which he kept divided so that no general could become the mighty warlord he had been. He seized the estates of big landowners and rented the land to the poor, perhaps because his own peasant family had suffered so much. What was perhaps most important, he brought back the old Confucian schools and government examinations. Hung-wu hated educated men — he often had officials thrashed with bamboo rods — but he knew the value of a good bureaucracy.

  A few years after Hung-wu’s death, Emperor Yong-lo began a project that could have shaped the history of the world. History is full of might-have-beens, and this is big. In 1405 Yong-lo sent a fleet of junks (flat-bottomed, square-sailed ships) on a voyage to impress other rulers and gather tribute from them. An able eunuch named Zheng He commanded the fleet. (Many eunuchs served in Chinese courts.) With many stops at royal courts, they journeyed south along the Chinese coast, around the Malay peninsula, west to India, and then back home. During the next quarter century Yong-lo and his successors sent six other fleets to courts as far away as the Persian Gulf, Arabia, and east Africa. They brought home tribute paym
ents, ostriches, giraffes, and sometimes rulers who refused to pay.

  These cruises were impressive, as they were meant to be. Usually about 30,000 men sailed on as many as 317 oceangoing junks. Some of the ships were four decks high and longer than a football field. With their compasses, the Chinese sailed across the open seas, something Europeans hadn’t yet learned to do.

  After the seventh voyage, in 1433, the voyages stopped, never to resume. What’s more, the emperor decreed that henceforth Chinese ships must not sail outside of coastal waters, and no Chinese could go abroad. Why did the Chinese, when they seemed to have begun on the road to far-flung power and influence, suddenly stop the voyages? One reason was simply that the emperors could not afford to keep them up. Just then they needed all the money they could get to build their capital, Peking, and drive away the always-looming Mongols. The tribute money gathered on the voyages didn’t match the cost of building junks and manning them.

  The Chinese had another cause to halt the journeys, and it may have counted more. The emperors and their advisers saw their country as the center of the world. Probably they asked themselves, why should the Middle Kingdom bother any longer with those distant barbarians? They were satisfied to dominate their own large quarter of the world.

  Halting the expeditions was a fateful move. If the journeys had continued, they might, first, have made Ming China a major naval power. Then its merchants might have followed up with trading voyages of their own, making China a colossus in the world economy. China might have spread around the earth its inventiveness, its energy, its taste in art, and the teaching of Confucius that, “If one leads [people] with virtue…they will have a sense of shame and will come up to expectations.”

  Of course, after it had stopped the voyages Ming China didn’t shrink to insignificance. Hardly! It was still the largest realm on earth, with more people than all of Europe. Its artisans made china, silk, and books so fine that no one else could match them. Its rulers, guided by the teachings of Confucius, ran the country well. Its people usually had enough to eat.

  In the 1500s and early 1600s, however, troubles started. Several emperors grew bored and let officials and the palace eunuchs rule the empire. Hungry workers in the cities rioted because their pay was low and taxes high. A potter threw himself inside a blazing kiln to dramatize the workers’ plight. Famine and disease were common. When the rulers didn’t pay the troops on time, the men deserted. Former soldiers and hungry peasants took to the roads as bandits. Japanese pirates ravaged the coast, even after an angry emperor captured some and steamed them to death in giant pots, like lobsters. Court officials accused the finest Chinese general of treason and had him cut to pieces in the Peking marketplace.

  The reader knows what was happening. After ruling for nearly three centuries, the Ming dynasty was losing the Mandate of Heaven.

  Rebellions broke out in northern China, and in 1644 a rebel leader seized Peking. The empress killed herself. The emperor rang a bell to summon his ministers and ask for their advice, but none appeared. He walked to the imperial garden and hanged himself from a tree. After ruling China for nearly three centuries, the Ming dynasty had ended.

  One of the Ming generals fighting the rebels asked for help from the Manchus. These were war-loving semi-barbarians who had already conquered China’s northeast corner, right down to the Great Wall. Happy to oblige, the Manchus hurried south and drove away the rebels. They took Peking and declared their five-year-old king the emperor of China. They named his dynasty the Qing (pronounced “ching”) or “Pure.” It would take a generation, but they ended by subduing all of China.

  The Qing emperors faced a dilemma. Should the Manchus adopt the ways of the Chinese? Or should they make the Chinese adopt the ways of the Manchus? The first option was not an option. For every two Manchus there were ninety-eight Chinese, and the Manchus had no wish to drown in that ocean. So the Manchus forbade their own people to marry Chinese, or to do manual labor, or to become businessmen. And for a while these measures worked.

  As for forcing the Chinese to become Manchus, that too was out of the question. One could hardly make the vast majority accept the customs of a tiny semi-barbarian minority. However, the Manchus did order Chinese men to shave the front halves of their scalps and braid the remaining hair in pigtails, Manchu style, to show submission. The Chinese did this. “Keep your hair and lose your head,” they summed it up, “or lose your hair and keep your head.”

  The Manchus understood that since they were so few they needed the help of the Chinese gentry, with their Confucian ideals of service. So they revived the civil service examinations and used Chinese scholar-bureaucrats to help run the country. Some scholars refused to cooperate, out of loyalty to the memory of the Ming, but by using great tact the ablest of the Manchu rulers, Kangxi, won over a number of them. He announced a special examination only for men of outstanding talent, and then announced their names. Those who were thus singled out could scarcely refuse to compete, so they took the examination. Kangxi put the winners to work on an official history of the Ming dynasty.

  Kangxi was himself a genuine Confucian and therefore a “sage ruler.” He published a series of maxims that summed up the Confucian virtues — generosity, obedience, hard work, thrift, duty, and so on — written in a down-to-earth style that the man in the street could understand. He also read Confucian classics, and debated the knotty points in them with a team of Manchu and Chinese scholars. Naturally, he made sure that word of his studies leaked out.

  Here is an example of Confucian ethics at work under the Manchus: In the late 1600s a scholar-official named Huang Liu-hung served as magistrate in a poor, bandit-ridden county in northeastern China. He had qualified for his job by passing a Confucian examination. Years later, after he had retired, Huang wrote a handbook about the office of magistrate, and he made his points by giving examples from his own experience.

  One of his cases, he says, involved a woman named Wang and her husband, Jen, who lived in a one-room hut beside a forest. Wang ran away from Jen with another man, but when her lover abandoned her she went back home. Jen was murderously angry. One night he waited until she fell asleep, and then he put his knee on her belly and his hands around her neck and began to strangle her. She struggled so hard that her legs tore their sleeping mat, and her bowels opened. Finally she died.

  Jen carried her body through the forest toward the house of a man named Kao. This man had struck him during a recent quarrel, and Jen wanted to fix the blame for the murder on him. However, when he heard some watchmen nearby, he dropped the body and went home. The next day he filed a murder complaint against Kao.

  Huang, the magistrate, might easily have decided the case against Kao, but he began to suspect Jen. He rode out to the village, eight miles from his home, and examined Jen’s hut. He noticed its poverty, the rips in the almost new mat, and the pile of dried excrement beside it. His assistants told him this must be the dung of an ox or a donkey, which poor people often burned for fuel, but Huang was not convinced. He ordered that water be boiled and poured it on the dung. The resulting odor decided it: the source was human. Taken together with the ripped mat, the excrement strongly suggested that Wang had been killed here, in her own home. Huang finally got Jen to confess.

  By law, Huang might have executed Jen, but he decided not to. His reasons reflect Confucian values, especially the stress on duty to one’s family. Jen was his father’s only son, and the loss would be too much for the aged man to bear. Then too, Jen had no children, and if he was executed his family would die out, a serious concern. Furthermore, Wang had not been a dutiful wife, and since she had betrayed her husband she deserved to die. And finally, Jen had indeed been provoked by Kao, who should not have struck him. So Huang sentenced Jen to a beating with bamboo rods, and he made him wear a wooden collar around his neck.

  But Huang also had to settle another matter. Who would pay for Wang’s burial? Jen could not afford to, so Huang ordered Kao to pay the expenses. That would t
each him not to strike people in the face when he lost his temper.1

  1Jonathan D. Spence, The Death of Woman Wang (1978), pp. 116–39.

  From the late 1600s through most of the 1700s, Qing China enjoyed a Golden Age. In part this happened because the country had a succession of able emperors who kept the land at peace and guarded the borders. Two of them had very long reigns. Kangxi, whom we mentioned as the reviver of the Confucian system, reigned for sixty-one years. So did his grandson, who retired a few years before his death in order not to appear disrespectful by reigning longer than his grandfather.

  At the same time, Chinese arts and letters thrived. A team of scholars produced what is perhaps the largest series of books in the history of the world, an anthology of the most famous Chinese literary and historical works of the past. The series took ten years to complete and filled 36,000 volumes. Meanwhile an aristocrat named Cao Xueqin wrote China’s best-known novel, The Dream of the Red Chamber. It tells the story of a family like his own: rich and charming people who were headed downward.

  China’s greatest triumph in this Golden Age resulted from its earlier disasters. All those horrors of the mid-1600s — civil wars, invasions, bandits, floods, diseases, famines — had reduced the population by perhaps a third. Now that so many had died, good farmland was abundant, and therefore poor peasants could afford to rent some land, marry, and have children. At the same time, the Chinese were starting to grow plants that had reached them from the Americas: corn (maize), potatoes, and sweet potatoes. Peasants could grow these plants even on poor land, where it was hard to raise wheat or rice.