But the Chinese naval effort could not last. Historians have debated why it was abandoned. Part of the answer, at least, is clear. The scholar-elites hated overseas adventures and the factions that favored them so much that, when they recaptured power, the mandarins destroyed almost all Zheng He’s records in an attempt to obliterate his memory. Moreover, China’s land frontiers became insecure as Mongol power revived. China needed to turn away from the sea and toward the new threat. The state never resumed overseas expansion. The growth of trade and of Chinese colonization in Southeast Asia was left to merchants and migrants. China, the empire best equipped for maritime imperialism, opted out. Consequently, lesser powers, including those of Europe, were able to exploit opportunities in seas that Chinese power vacated. It became possible for the Ryukyu Islands to be unified as a thriving emporium for the trade of China and Japan with Southeast Asia. Sho Shin ruled the islands from 1477. He disarmed the warlords, sent bureaucrats to China for education in Confucian principles, and imposed internal peace.
In many ways, it was to the credit of Chinese decision makers that they pulled back from involvement in costly adventures far from home. Most powers that have undertaken such expeditions and attempted to impose their rule on distant countries have had cause to regret it. Confucian values, as we have seen, included giving priority to good government at home. “Barbarians” would submit to Chinese rule if and when they saw the benefits. Attempting to beat or coax them into submission was a waste of resources. By consolidating their landward empire, and refraining from seaborne imperialism, China’s rulers ensured the longevity of their state. All the maritime empires founded in the world in the last five hundred years have crumbled. China is still here.
Ch’oe Pu’s diary reflects the successes and limitations of Chinese Confucians’ “soft power,” as modern political theory would call it. Ch’oe Pu was aware of similar struggles and exchanges of prejudice between Confucians and their Buddhist rivals in Korea. He was such a pious Confucian, so respectful of the rites for the dead, that he refused to doff mourning, even when it might have exempted him from peril of his life, as when his companions were afraid of slaughter—either at the hands of brigands unintimidated by the sight of Ch’oe Pu’s official uniform, or by Chinese peasants who mistook the Koreans for Japanese pirates. He declined to pray at a river shrine, which he regarded as superstitious, despite the advisability of deferring to local customs. His contempt for Buddhism was excoriating. He denounced the futility of monks’ prayers and rejoiced at the news of secularizations of monasteries because “the abolished temples become people’s houses, the destroyed Buddhas become vessels, and the heads that once were bald are now hairy and fill the army’s ranks.” 21
He spoke to his Chinese hosts in terms that were calculated to flatter, but which also reflected two long-standing prejudices among Korea’s elite: willingness to defer to China, and anxiety to imitate the Chinese. “In heaven,” he admitted,
there are not two suns. How under the same heaven can there be two emperors? My king’s one purpose is to serve your country devotedly.22…Though my Korea is beyond the sea, its clothing and culture being the same as China’s, it cannot be considered a foreign country. That is especially so now, with Great Ming’s unification…under one roof. All under Heaven are my brothers; how can we discriminate among people because of distance? That is particularly true of my country, which respectfully serves the celestial court and pays tribute without fail. The Emperor, for his part, treats us punctiliously and tends us benevolently. The feeling of security he imparts is perfect.23
Ch’oe Pu learned to make a water wheel he saw in China because “it will be useful to Koreans for all ages to come.” But when interrogators asked for military intelligence, he was evasive. When they asked the distance to Korea, he exaggerated. When officials asked him how Korea had managed to repel earlier Chinese attempts at conquest, he sidestepped the question and emphasized his country’s strength.24
In his day, Korea was experiencing a Confucian revival parallel to China’s—only more fragile. After a spell, in the previous reign, of royal dependence on Buddhist advisers and lavish patronage of Buddhist temples, Ch’oe’s royal master, Sŏng-jong, who came to the throne in 1470, restored Confucianism, much as the Hongxi emperor did in China. Yet when Chinese dignitaries visited Korea, it struck them as an exotic and barbarous land, more notable for its differences from China than for the continuities Koreans strove to contrive. In 1487 an ambassador arrived in Korea from the court of the new emperor of China. “The ministers,” he reported back, “with pins in their hair, stand like ibises in attendance, while old and young gather on the hills to see…. The stone lions bask in the sun that rises from the sea. In front of the Kwang-wha Gate they sit east and west, high as the towers, wonderfully hammered out.” 25 He watched acrobats masked as lions and elephants in a palace painted red, with green glass windows, in the audience chamber.26 The level of mealtime hospitality impressed him: five layers of honeyed bread, honey and flour cakes piled a foot high, rice soup, pickled relish, soy, rice wine superior in aroma and flavor to Chinese millet wine, beef, mutton, pork, walnuts, dates, mutton sausages, fish, and lotus roots to sweeten the breath.27
He lectured the Koreans on Confucianism, in a way one suspects must have annoyed his hosts: “We proclaim the ceremonies of the Book of Spring and Autumn which says, ‘The various states must first see to the rectitude of the individual man.’” 28 In the long run, the lecture was to little avail. Chong-jik, the minister who put the policy of reviving the ceremonies into effect in Korea, died in 1492. After the king’s death in 1494, his successor reversed the policy, beheaded Chong-jik’s exhumed body, and scourged and exiled other leading Confucians, including Ch’oe Pu.
Japan—the other country Columbus hoped to open trade with—was in no condition to contemplate taking the initiative in reaching out to the rest of the world. Ch’oe Pu, who so admired China, had less respect for Japan. The riches of Japan, he thought, would seem to a Korean like “ice to a summer bug.” 29 But the country’s problems were not fundamentally economic. Japanese rice could be harvested two or three times a year. Large amounts of copper, swords, sulfur, and sappanwood were exported to China. Japan used Chinese coins, minted, for reasons no one has ever fully been able to explain, from copper produced in Japan. The size and distribution of cities—concentrated, as usual in Japanese history, in the teeming heartland of southern Honshu and northern Kyushu—suggest that rural production was high and the systems of commerce and communications could dispense large amounts of food efficiently. Kyoto had reputedly two hundred thousand inhabitants before ruinous civil war broke out in the late 1460s. Tennoji in Kawachi province and Hakata in northern Kyushu had over thirty thousand people. More than twenty other towns had more than ten thousand.
Japan’s problems were political. Though Japanese statesmen regarded China as their model, in practice the country was very differently managed. The emperor was a sacral, secluded figure, spared the vulgarities of politics by hereditary vicegerents known as shoguns. Control of Kyoto ensured fabulous revenues for the shoguns’ government. They could afford to neglect the rest of the country. Provincial power was delegated to or usurped by the warlords as the price of peace. But peace in the hands of a warrior caste is always precarious. Trying to forget “the trials of this world,” the poet Shinkei described the effects: “Even within the powerful clans selfish quarrels broke out between lord and retainer and among the rank and file, in which men of various stations fell in great numbers. And though they battled day and night, pitting their might against each other in their various territories, nowhere was the outcome ever decisive.” 30
While squabbles of the aristocracy overspilled into violence, members of the military class known as samurai made common cause with peasants oppressed by the warlords’ need of money. Together they formed masterless leagues of self-defense that erupted in rebellion. They were, according to the poet-priest Ikkyu, who was a propagandist for
the shogunate, “demons with red faces, their hot blood aroused,…turning the whole city into a den of thieves and striking fear in the people as they endlessly looted for treasures. And thus it came about that the people grew weary, the capital fell into ruin, and of the myriad ways of civilized men nothing remained.” 31 From the late 1430s, the eastern provinces were steeped in constant warfare: “As the months stretched into years, myriads perished, their bodies torn by the sword as men fell upon each other in their madness, and still the strife showed no signs of letting up.” A reforming shogun’s attempts to reassert central authority ended in his assassination in 1441. Fifteen years of effective interregnum followed, while his successors were minors. When the shogun Yoshimasa reached maturity, he struggled to recoup power. In 1482, after the failure of all his efforts, he wrote that the daimyo, or warlords, “do as they please and do not follow orders. That means there can be no government.” 32
Meanwhile, in 1461 drought struck
when not a single tuft of grass grew upon the fields across the land. From the capital and the villages, thousands of starving people, both high and low, wandered out to beg on the wayside, or just sat there till they crumpled over and died. It is impossible to say how many myriads perished in just a single day. The world had turned into a hell of hungry ghosts before my eyes.33
In 1467 the two most powerful warlords came to blows, ostensibly over the succession to the shogunate, and were forced to flee when their armies ravaged the capital. “All, high and low, were thrown into utter confusion and scattered in the four directions, their flight swifter than flowers in a windstorm, red leaves beneath the tree-withering blast. Within the capital, it had become a veritable hell.” The poet Ichijo Kaneyoshi fled devastation so total that “only layers of cloud cover the remains,” while bandits scattered the contents of his library—“the dwellings of hundreds of bookworms…that had been passed down for over ten generations.” 34 The following ten years were the most destructive in Japan’s long history of civil wars.
“How terrible it is,” wrote the poet Shinkei, “to have been born in the last days of such an utterly degenerate age.” The calamities seemed to him “to presage the world’s destruction.” 35 Moralists blamed the indifference and self-indulgence of the ruling classes, or the aloof lifestyle of the shogun, or the supposed influence of women at his court, or the corruption of his ministers.
Yet wars, though they warp morals and wreck lives, can stimulate art. A renaissance was under way,36 with painters and poets who looked back half a millennium for their models and perhaps for escape. In the longueurs of war, fighters competed to write Chinese verses. The shogun Yoshimasa dabbled while Japan burned. His character has puzzled every historian who tried to tackle it fairly. He treated the events of his day as if they were none of his responsibility. In the earliest years of the war, his own poetry expressed optimism amounting to insouciance:
Forlorn though the hope,
Still I believe that somehow
Peace will be restored.
Although it is so confused,
I don’t despair of the world.37
Pessimism followed, amounting to despair, but deeply dyed with egotism.
“What a sad world it is!”
Everyone says the same, but
I’m the only one,
Unable to control it,
Whose grief keeps on growing.38
His life seems a series of evasions. He had an impressive array of virtues: in selecting artists he showed unerring judgment. In organizing poetry competitions he displayed unstinting industry. In identifying the problems of government he showed considerable sagacity. But he turned away from every disagreeable task: curbing his wife’s avarice, reprimanding his son’s prodigality, punishing the warlords’ presumptions. He simply ignored the wars that broke out around him, withdrawing first into a circle of artistic mutual admiration in the capital, then resigning government responsibilities altogether in his country retreat before taking the final step: ordination as a Zen monk.
His profligacy probably helped cause the dissolution of the state by ratcheting up taxation, immiserating peasants, and leaving the central government bereft of an armed force. But at least it can be said to his credit that much of his spending was on the arts. While in power, he was a compulsive builder and redecorator of palaces. When he retired from public life, his hillside villa became like the country retreats of the Medici—a center where artists and literati gathered to perform plays, coin poems, practice the tea ceremony, blend perfumes, paint, and converse. Sometimes, warlords took time out from strife or state building on their own account in nearby provinces to join the soirees. Yoshimasa built a supposedly silver-foil-clad pavilion on the grounds, decorated with “rare plants and curious rocks,” 39 begun in 1482 and completed three years after his death, in 1493. To meet the costs, the government requisitioned labor from the dwindling number of loyal landowners in the provinces. In retirement, Yoshimasa boosted his income by engaging in trade in his own right, sending horses, swords, sulfur, screens, and fans to China and getting cash and books in return.40 This shows both that a merchant life was no derogation, even for a former shogun, and that the troubles did not interrupt the trade.
In some ways, the arts of the time seem strangely indifferent to the wars. Kano Masanobu painted Chinese rivers and Buddhist worthies on the walls in styles derived from Chinese models. The critics and painters Shinkei Geiami and his son Soami coaxed great work from the brushes of pupils, such as the dynamic Kenko Shokei. But art was ultimately inseparable from the politics of the wars, because warlords paid for so much of it, and the shogun’s patronage was by no means disinterested.
One suspects that Yoshimasa employed artists because, at least in part, they were cheaper than warriors and more effective as mediators of propaganda. Patronage of Noh theater, for instance, was traditional in the shogunal house, exhibiting heroic themes and aligning the shoguns with exemplars from a sometimes mythic past; it was while watching a play that Yoshimasa’s father had been assassinated. Because Yoshimasa had to maintain links around the kingdom, he commanded a brisk trade in portraits for distribution to provincial shrines, where they could focus loyalties, like fragments or relics of himself.41 But Yoshimasa elevated art to a new rank as the Japanese equivalent of the “rites and music” Confucius had prescribed as essential to the health of the Chinese state.42
Not everyone succumbed to Yoshimasa’s patronage. The painter of landscape in ink Toyo Sesshu visited China in 1467, after years of copying Chinese paintings. He served only provincial houses and declined to paint for Yoshimasa with a characteristically Chinese excuse: it was not right for a mere priest to paint in a “golden palace.” 43 Such dissent or fastidiousness was rare. Yoshimasa’s taste inspired swathes of the elite and of merchants who sought to spend their way to status. Provincial chieftains imitated his practice, inviting poets, painters, and scholars to elevate their own courts with learning and art. A once-popular theory about the origins of the Italian Renaissance ascribed investment in culture to the mood of hard times: when wars curtail opportunities to make money from trade, capitalists sink their money into works of art. Something of the sort seems to have happened in Japan in the long years of civil war from the late 1460s. The fear—often realized—that frequent burnings in the capital would destroy valuable libraries inspired a feverish enthusiasm for copying manuscripts. The flight of sages and artists from the capital helped spread metropolitan tastes around the country. Warlords competed for the services of poets and painters.44 Yamaguchi, for instance, became a “little Kyoto,” graced by the presence of famous artists.
Shinkei’s wanderings are a case in point. In 1468 he left the capital for the east, to use his prestige as a Buddhist sage in the interests of one of the contending parties in the civil wars. He spent most of the next four years responding to invitations from nobles to conduct poetical soirees in their castles and camps, endeavoring, he said, “to soften the hearts of warriors and rude folk
and teach the way of human sensibility for all the distant ages.” 45 Spring afflicted him: “Even the flowers are thickets of upturned blades.” 46
Tranquillity, sorrow, and reflection in the midst of civil wars: Sogi, composing verses with fellow literati by a colleague’s grave under the full moon.
Nishikawa Sukenobu, Ehon Yamato Hiji (10 vols.; Osaka, 1742).
The adventures of another renowned poet exemplify the predicament of artists in a time of civil war. Sogi, an equally famous poet, usually traveled between provincial courts in response to invitations from aspiring patrons. In 1492, however, he stayed in the capital, educating aristocrats on the classics of the Heian era of nearly half a millennium before. He was seventy-three years old, and his taste for traveling was waning. In the summer of that year, however, he made an excursion into the countryside to visit Yukawa Masaharu, a minor warlord with literary ambitions. The sequence of poems he wrote for this patron begins with a prayer for the endurance of the house, likening Masaharu’s offspring to a stand of young pines: “[Y]et still more tall may they grow.” But “the law,” he also wrote, “is not what it was.” 47 Piety was past.
Who will hear it?
The temple bell from the hills,
Off in the distance.
Despite Sogi’s prayers for him to be spared in the battle he had to face, Masaharu backed the wrong side in the conflict. Within a year of Sogi’s visit, his fortunes were in ruins. He disappeared from records after 1493.
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