Catastrophe: An Investigation Into the Origins of the Modern World

by David Keys

  As these new droughts raged—and with the government weak and starved of taxes—a third revolt broke out with substantial peasant backing. In 547 a northern Chinese general, Hou Jing, defected to the south, and as a result, the huge tract of northern territory he controlled became at least nominally part of the southern state.

  The northern government understandably took immediate action to recover its lost land, and within a year Hou Jing had been defeated, his territory fell again under northern control, and the defeated general fled south. The southern government then made peace with the north, and Hou feared he would be handed over to his former northern colleagues as part of the peace treaty. Faced with such a fate, and knowing the weaknesses of the southern Chinese state, the general rebelled in August 548. His revolt, though caused by the political pressures of the day, would not have stood any chance of success if it had not been for the massively increased levels of poverty and government weakness that were results of the drought and famines.

  He openly courted the poverty-stricken rural peasantry and the urban poor, and it is very likely that at least some of his peasant supporters harbored Left Way messianic hopes, as the peasants in Ancheng had six years earlier.

  He marched on the southern capital, Jiankang (now Nanjing), and camped outside its massive walls. After a siege of just four months, the city surrendered. The general—who was of Turkic, not Chinese, origin—despised the Chinese aristocracy. Many of the capital’s poorer citizens had escaped from the city and were welcomed by the rebels. Indeed, when the rebels entered Jiankang, they found senior aristocrats starving to death in their palaces and deserted by their retainers, yet still clad in their traditional finery. The emperor himself, now in his eighties, was captured by the rebels, and is said to have been left to starve to death in his imperial palace.

  Hou Jing was finally defeated in 552, but the southern state was exhausted and shattered. The general’s revolt had become in many ways a popular revolution against poverty, famine, and traditional aristocratic rule. One of China’s greatest epic poems—The Lament for the South, written by a southern civil servant—described in metaphoric terms how the circumstances of the mid-sixth century made disaster inevitable:

  We were sailing over leaking-in water,

  In a glued-together boat,

  Driving runaway horses with rotten reins,

  Trying with a worn-out sieve to make the salt lake less brackish.5

  The 520-line epic also described how Hou Jing incited popular revolt and attacked the imperial capital:

  He then stirred up the unruly,

  And invaded the royal domain,

  Halberds hacked the twin towers [of the palace],

  Arrows struck the thousand gates.

  The defeat of the imperial forces at the siege was a disastrous and bitter experience for the aristocracy, including the author of The Lament:

  Drums toppled, standards broken,

  Riderless horses lost from the troop,

  Confused tracks from fleeing chariots,

  Brave warriors kept inside the walls,

  Wise advisers held their tongues,

  As if the [fierce] elephants had fled to the forest,

  Or the [ever-resourceful] snake was to flee to its hole.

  But catastrophe did not cease at the fall of Jiankang. In a sense, the revolt simply exacerbated it. The Hou Jing rebellion, successful because of the increasing weakness of the state, totally destabilized south China. The rebel victory had created a sort of political vacuum. Because Hou Jing was an outsider, a populist rebel who had no connection to the ruling dynasty and was not even ethnically Chinese, his brief regime was not regarded as having any legitimacy at all. His puppet emperor—a virtual prisoner whom he murdered in the end—must have been seen as no more than a captive marionette.6

  From the day the capital fell to the rebels, a bloody, often multisided civil war broke out within the remnants of the old ruling dynasty. Over the next eight years, south China was to have no less than ten emperors—puppets, children, and assorted megalomaniacs. Usually there were two, sometimes three, claiming to be emperor at any one time, and most ended up as murderers, murder victims, or both. The warlord with the most blood on his hands was one of the previous emperor’s children, Xiao Yi, who killed his nephew and his own brother and drove a second brother to his death. The murderer was then slaughtered by another nephew.

  South China broke into three major power centers—Jiankang in the east, Sichuan in the west, and, in the middle, the central Yangtze. While dynastic brother fought dynastic brother in the south, the north Chinese powers of Northern Qi and Western Wei busied themselves grabbing as much southern territory as they could digest.

  The Western Wei seized most of Sichuan and the central Yangtze and dragged most of the population of the capital of the latter region off into slavery. This multisided struggle for power was brutal in the extreme, and desperate men resorted to desperate measures. Whole families were wiped out. The rebel Hou Jing had taken the precaution of slaughtering the sons of his erstwhile puppet emperor, whom he murdered in 551, shortly before he himself was killed and, reportedly, cooked and eaten—his skull being retained by his enemies as a drinking vessel!

  When the great warlord Xiao Yi perished at the hands of his nephew in 554, most of Yi’s sons were murdered, too. Yi, quite apart from murdering numerous members of his own family, is also said to have indulged in black magic. In early 553 he apparently had a wooden effigy made of his brother and proceeded to drive nails into it. At any rate, nails or no nails, by August his brother Chi had been defeated, captured, and beheaded.

  The Lament for the South—a truly appropriate title for a poem about the period—suggests that Yi trusted no one and that in his own character lay the seeds of his destruction:

  Sunk in suspicion he followed only his own desires,

  Concealing his faults, he prided himself on his accomplishments,

  The business of the empire came to naught.

  Recording the end of Prince Yi, The Lament describes the pathetic state of his imperial territory in 554:

  Now, territory reduced to a wart,

  With a fortress like a crossbow pellet,

  His enemies bitter,

  His alliances cold,

  This vengeful bird could fill up no sea,

  This simple old man could move no mountains.

  In the end, with the rebel Hou Jing and most of the imperial family dead, two southern generals seized power and enthroned one of the last remaining members of the southern royal house, a son of Xiao Yi. Northern Chinese pressure, however, forced one of the generals to put an alternative southern royal—a northern nominee—on the throne. The second general, named Chen, promptly attacked and executed his erstwhile colleague and restored the original puppet emperor, but not for long. In 557 the surviving general forced the emperor to abdicate, took the throne for himself, and founded China’s last independent southern dynasty.

  The author of The Lament was clearly puzzled as to how God could have allowed the iniquities that had afflicted southern China:

  As the greatest gift of Heaven and Earth is Life,

  So the greatest treasure of the sage is the throne,

  By employing worthless upstarts,

  They took the whole South and threw it away,

  One grieves that the empire united in one household,

  Should have met with [Hou Jing’s] rebellion,

  And to have given the quail’s head to Qin

  How could God have been so drunk.

  Climatic disaster had produced famine and poverty, which in turn had produced in the south Chinese state a collapse of the tax system and weakened government. Increased poverty (and sometimes the resultant messianic religious fervor) and financial and administrative weakness in the government had then combined to produce social unrest and rebellion. And rebellion—plus all the other factors—had then finally destabilized the old southern imperial regime and had led to its fragmentatio
n and its demise.

  In its place, a new southern imperial system developed, but it was a totally different edifice from the old imperial system that had flourished before the chaotic period from 535 to 557. The old system had been a relatively centralized one, whereas the new order was highly decentralized. During the years of chaos, local warlords had increased their power vis-à-vis the weakened central authority, but now that the troubles were over, the decentralization could not be reversed. What’s more, political continuity had been destroyed and could not be resurrected. A very large number of the traditional ruling class had been liquidated by rebels and by each other during the years of chaos. On top of all this, the new decentralized southern state was much smaller. The northern Chinese states of the Western Wei and the Northern Qi had seized huge tracts of southern territory while the south was busy cutting itself to pieces.

  It was now only a matter of time before the northerners—who had not suffered such dire political consequences as a result of the mid-sixth-century famines—decided finally to finish the job.7 The powerful northern state of Zhou took spectacular advantage of the new southern regime’s weakness in 575–577 when it turned on the south after tricking them into joining an anti–Northern Qi alliance. The southerners were routed and lost huge amounts of military equipment and men. Only political distractions in northern China saved the south from being swallowed up there and then.

  But the southern state had been further enfeebled and could only be regarded by the north as prey awaiting slaughter, a crop waiting for the harvester’s sickle.

  20

  T H E R E B I R T H

  O F U N I T Y

  “You are a wasteful and licentious ruler and have neglected your proper imperial duties and have oppressed the people, executed the righteous, exterminated the blameless, and disregarded the forces of Heaven.”1

  The emperor of northern China wrote these words to his weaker southern counterpart in the third month of A.D. 588. The southern ruler was presented by a northern envoy with an imperially sealed list of his twenty alleged political crimes—wastefulness, neglect of duty, moral laxity, and so on—and was accused of responsibility for virtually all the ills of the world, from the appearance of malevolent phantoms to the repeated occurrence of natural disasters. The sealed letter may have looked like a private warning to a weaker neighbor, but the northern emperor then published three hundred thousand copies and illicitly distributed them throughout southern China.

  The northern harvester had indeed sharpened his sickle. A new dynasty, the Sui, had come to power in northern China in 581, and its first emperor, Wendi, was determined to finally finish off the job of devouring what was left of the south Chinese state. By 584 a new military communications system, involving roads and canals, was being built. Key military appointments had been made by 586. A special purchasing commission had bought a hundred thousand fresh horses from stud farms throughout north China.

  In 587 the north had invaded and occupied a small yet strategically vital independent state and had thus gained control of the whole of the north bank of the Yangtze River frontier with the south. By 588 two great fleets had been built—one maritime, the other constructed purely for river warfare on the Yangtze. Then finally, seven months after the propaganda war had been launched with the distribution of the three hundred thousand tracts, all southern diplomats in the north were arrested and final preparations for invasion began. Within a matter of days, the greatest military campaign the world had ever seen was under way.2

  The invasion force consisted of 518,000 infantry, horse soldiers, sailors, and marines. Pouring across the Yangtze in a massive eight-pronged assault, the invading force also boasted hundreds of maritime and riverine battleships. In what was a reflection of the weakened political state of the south, the southern empire was almost totally unprepared. The southern emperor was, in fact, too drunk even to read his own general’s urgent military dispatch informing him that northern troops had crossed the frontier. Later, when the invaders captured the southern capital, the dispatch was found unopened under the southern emperor’s bed!

  As northern forces closed in on the south’s capital, southern generals were quick to submit. One key commander virtually defected and helped the invaders gain entry to the city. The southern emperor, Chen Shubao, in a pathetic attempt at escape or suicide, threw himself down a well and had to be rescued by the invaders, who heard screams at the bottom and winched him up, wet, bedraggled, and with two concubines still clinging to him.

  Meanwhile, most of the south Chinese aristocracy surrendered and the resistance in the capital quickly came to an end after a few isolated yet bloody battles. However, elsewhere in the southern empire, fierce fighting broke out. On the Yangtze itself, four giant 110-foot-high, five-deck battleships—each manned by eight hundred sailors, crossbowmen, and marines—used their fifty-foot-long battering rams to demolish ten southern warships. Other southern defeats followed, and soon virtually the whole of the Yangtze Valley was in northern hands.

  Then, in a desperate but doomed attempt to turn the tide, surviving southern forces gathered around the city of Wuzhou, located between the fallen capital and the sea. But a virtual blitzkrieg by northern land and sea forces took the city. The southern general who was in charge fled disguised as a Taoist monk, and his forces fell back to a last refuge, an island in the middle of a nearby lake.³ As a last stand, it was a heroic failure.

  Soon the entire southern empire was under northern control, and the southern emperor, his family, and his entire aristocracy were being marched into permanent exile in the north. According to one ancient source, the column of high-ranking southern prisoners, plus their retainers and their northern military guards, stretched for 170 miles without a break.4 Some on foot, others on horseback, many in carts, and the highest-ranking in exquisitely appointed sedan chairs, the exiles wound their way through China to the northern capital, Daxing Cheng (near modern Xi’an).

  As they marched into exile their former home—the capital city of the southern empire for the previous 282 years—was razed to the ground. Like Carthage at the hands of Rome, its walls, temples, palaces, and houses were all obliterated, and the site of the vast metropolis was returned to agricultural use.

  And when at last the column of weary exiles entered the capital city of their captors, they were made to play out the very last act of the drawnout tragedy that had begun amid climatic chaos and famine more than half a century earlier. In a bizarre ceremony, the captured ex-emperor of the south, his imperial regalia, his ex-ministers, and his ex-generals were paraded into the Sui emperor’s vast ancestral shrine to be presented as prizes of war to the northern emperor’s ancestors. It must have been the strangest of meetings, for many of these aristocratic prisoners were descended from northerners who had fled south almost three hundred years earlier, when the Chinese state had first fragmented. For some, it was not only a surrender but a sort of ancestral, even spiritual, homecoming.

  The next day, the ex-emperor, twenty-eight of his most senior princely relations, and two hundred of his former top officials were assembled in the vast open plaza south of the great southern gate of the imperial palace. There, they were offered official imperial sympathy for their sufferings as a defeated dynasty—and then blamed for bringing south China to ruination.

  “Chen Shubao and his ministers all held their breath and prostrated themselves on the ground; filled with shame, they were unable to reply,” says the contemporary chronicle of the Sui dynasty.5

  The southern empire had taken half a century to unravel, but its demise made possible the unification of China, a state that has survived, with only a few interludes, till the present day.

  21

  K O R E A N D A W N

  As much of China began its half-century-long journey into chaos, and as societies throughout the world began to be destabilized by the climatic events of the 530s, those same events played a pivotal role in the long-term history of another part of the Far East—th
e Korean Peninsula.

  In A.D. 535—the very year the climatic disaster started in China and almost certainly in Korea as well—the only surviving pagan state in the peninsula, the Kingdom of Silla, decided to adopt Buddhism. It was a momentous decision that was to play a key role in creating the circumstances that led to the emergence of a united Korea. Once again, the sixth-century climatic events seem to have helped realign geopolitics and redesign history, bringing to a close the era of ancient Korea and ushering in its protomodern successor. But how did the climatic events of the 530s lead to the adoption of Buddhism, and how did the adoption of that particular religious faith lead ultimately to the unification of a country that over the centuries was to grow into an important regional political power and then, more recently, into a major second-tier world industrial power?