by Michael Wood
Today the evidence of that great meeting of civilizations is to be seen all over western China: in the ruined Buddhist monasteries along the Silk Route, for example, and especially in the thousand Buddhist caves at Dunhuang with their exquisite paintings. Right down the Yellow River, into the heartland of the Empire, vast monumental carvings and elaborate cave shrines and monasteries are still to be seen, such as the Longmen caves outside the old capital of Luoyang. But what was the appeal of this foreign religion, that it exercised such a hold on the Chinese imagination? A down-to-earth, practical people, the Chinese never developed, and perhaps never needed, an elaborate theology of their own. Indeed the Western idea of a personal God is utterly foreign to them. But Buddhism, with its atheistic and democratic message, its deep care for ritual, was to have the greatest appeal of all the foreign religions which took root here (until, and perhaps including, Marxism). Buddhism was the third great stream making up the current of Chinese civilization, a spiritual discipline to set beside Confucian wisdom and Taoist mysticism. The later Chinese came to believe that these three philosophies contained the essential ideas of civilization and without any one of them life would be unbalanced; that however sophisticated and technologically advanced a society might become, its people could only be fulfilled through inner enlightenment and the contemplation of eternity. It is a dilemma which lies at the core of civilization.
In the Tang dynasty (618–907 AD) intrepid Chinese scholars went on great missionary journeys through Tibet to India, to bring back authentic texts and relics of the Buddha. In a little temple in a secluded valley outside Xian are kept the ashes of the most famous of those missionaries, Hsuan Tsang. Some of the texts Hsuan Tsang brought back from India in the seventh century AD are still here: palm leaf manuscripts written in Pali, the old language used by Buddhist scholars in Ceylon. Perhaps Hsuan Tsang bought them during his stay in Kanchi, the great South Indian centre of scholarship: fragments of 650 books which he and his helpers brought back to Xian for translation. A stele in the monastic library shows him, rucksack on his back, a lamp to light his way, doggedly braving the elements to bring home his precious cargo. It is rare in history that we can pin-point the very moment when one great civilization goes out to learn from another. In the contemporary biographies of Hsuan Tsang, and other missionaries of that period, we can still feel the overwhelming excitement they experienced in encountering ‘the other’ in India. Theirs was a curiously moving and open-minded sensibility: as the Emperor declared in 638 to a group of Nestorian Christians applying for his permission to begin building their church in Xian, ‘This teaching is helpful to all creatures, and beneficial to all mankind, so let it have free course through the empire.’
XIAN: ‘AXIS OF THE WORLD’
In the eighth century AD all roads in Asia led to Xian or Chang’an, as it was then known. One of the greatest cities in the world, rivalled only by Baghdad and Constantinople, its vast square was laid out ‘like a chess board’ as the poet Tu Fu said: a huge ritual enclosure with a central boulevard four miles long and twice as wide as today’s avenue which leads to the city’s bell-tower. The present city walls – seven miles of them – were built in Ming times; you have to go out into the farm fields north of Xian to find the earthworks, platforms, and isolated pagodas from the earlier Han and Tang cities. But walk under the Ming drum tower at sunset when all the street vendors are out, and enter the winding streets of the medieval Muslim quarter which surround the beautiful Friday Mosque. Then you will get a sense of what life must have been like in the Tang city. This was the first time that foreigners had entered China in any numbers and, as often in later days, they were supervised by the authorities and confined to their own area at night, well away from the centre of power. Over in the western quarter of the Tang city, in the foreigners’ enclave, you could find an anarchic vitality and a sophistication and cultural mix that impressed all visitors to Chang’an. Here there were Muslims, Christians and Jews from Syria and Iraq, Zoroastrians and Manichaeans from Iran and Central Asia. There were Persian conjurors, Turkish moneylenders and Hindu fakirs. In the cafés there was central Asian music, Asian food (as there still is today) and also entertainment from singing and dancing girls from Persia and even further afield – some of them it was said with blonde hair and blue eyes! Small wonder then, that as a poet of the time, Tu Mu, said, ‘You could misspend your youth in cities like this and end up with nothing but the reputation of a wanderer in the blue houses.’
In Chinese eyes, the Tang dynasty was above all the most golden of the many golden ages of their poetry, an art inseparable from that of calligraphy, and whose roots must go back to the shamanistic magic of the Bronze Age. For the Chinese indeed, composing poetry was one of the essential ingredients of civilization. And if we could choose a single career to symbolize this first international era of Chinese culture, then it would be perhaps the great poet Li Bai, or Li Po as we know him in the West (650–701). Li Po was a product of the Silk Route. He was born not in China but in central Asia and spoke one of the Turkish languages. He spent his early years as a wandering soldier of fortune; one of his greatest poems is about the futility of war, ‘A cursed thing which the wise man uses only if he must.’ Then he found his opportunities in Chang’an, in the greatest city on earth. His personality was magnetic, irascible, self-taught, with flashing eyes, a fearsome voice and a heaven-sent talent. He was a prodigious drinker too: the story goes that he died, falling drunk into a river, trying to catch at the reflection of the moon! Li Po wandered through the music halls and the cabarets and restaurants of Chang’an and the other cities of China, his ear tuned not only to classical poetry, but to folk songs and ballads and the latest pop music coming hot out of central Asia on the caravan trails. He refused pointedly to sit the Confucian examinations, preferring to do it, as he would have put it, his way. Always an outsider, but still today, along with his friend Tu Fu, among the Chinese people he is their best loved and best known poet.
Xian in the early eighth century BC, showing the beauty spots: the Chinese vision of the city. There were over a hundred Buddhist temples here, along with four Zoroastrian shrines, two Christian churches and a mosque.
‘All pomp and circumstance,’ said Li Po, ‘all wealth and power is like clouds passing by.’The great Tang poets, like the best artists of any time, understood suffering, they felt for the poor and saw through the pretensions of the rich. They were familiar with the lifestyle of the royal family, whose tombs still lie outside Xian guarded by their spirit ways, their ceremonial avenues of the dead. Inside their tombs we can still come face to face with the people of whom the poets spoke: Tang princes and princesses who lost the mandate of heaven when their dynasty subsided into famine, disorder and chaos. On one wall young courtiers play polo, a game imported along with their expensive horses down the Silk Route from Central Asia, ‘proud and cocksure, thinking that all under heaven was theirs to sport with, that their power would be everlasting.’ In Princess Yongtai’s tomb are women who were perhaps imperial concubines like those described by Li Po: ‘On marble stairs behind crystal blinds, fretting as they grow old, trapped by their wealth, their tears leaving damp stains on their silk slippers.’
In the last days of the Tang, in the mid-eighth century, the writing was on the wall: an incompetent government could no longer feed its people. ‘Beyond the vermilion gates and the smell of wine and flesh,’ wrote Tu Fu, ‘people are freezing and starving to death. In thousands of villages they harvest only weeds, while the women do the ploughing. The people of China can face any test if only their leaders treat them humanely.’
THE SUNG GOLDEN AGE
Amidst famine and internecine struggle, the Tang dynasty ended in social upheaval and revolution, like many in Chinese history. But it was followed by one even greater. Four hundred miles from Xian eastwards down the Yellow River lies Kaifeng. In the eleventh century AD Kaifeng was the capital of what is regarded as the peak of Chinese civilization, the Sung dynasty (960–1279 AD)
, a cultural golden age to set beside any in world history. Kaifeng was a new kind of city in Chinese history: a commercial centre with manufacturing industries – metalwork, porcelain and textiles (as it still is today). It was a cheek-by-jowl place jammed with restaurants, its skyline smoking from coal-fired furnaces. Something of a backwater now, the old city of Kaifeng has escaped the wholesale modernization many cities suffered under the communists. Its narrow alleys are still full of balconied shops from the Ching dynasty, and in its warren of streets you can still find signs of the many foreign communities who settled here in the Sung period, in time becoming Chinese. Kaifeng’s first Christian church was built then, and it is still a cathedral city today. One lane is still known as the ‘alley of the sect who teach the scriptures,’ that is, of the Jews. Their synagogue closed a century ago, the farthest outpost of Judaism. There are still a few Chinese Jewish families there today, with the mezuzah on the door frame, and the candelabrum in the living room. Near the alley is a lovely old Islamic mosque, with a fine wooden pillared prayer hall. Like the Jews, the Kaifeng Muslims came as traders from the Near East in Sung times, whether from Persia or South India they are no longer sure. Today their community, fifty thousand strong, is mainly poor shopkeepers and small traders: a living survival of the great cosmopolitan era of medieval Kaifeng.
In the Sung period many of the great inventions were developed by which we live our lives today. Cast iron technology was so advanced that entire segmented bridges and pagodas could be built, which still stand today. Deep drilling for salt and natural gas was commonplace. In Kaifeng they built a huge mechanical clock and were able to measure the year to within twenty-six seconds of what can be done today. Another great invention which came into its own at this time was printing. Printing had come out of the age-old Chinese tradition of making stamped prints on paper: the first printed book is dated 868. In the Sung period, dictionaries, scientific works, star charts, paper money, even newspapers followed; they also experimented with movable type. This was almost certainly the most literate society which had yet existed on earth; the aristocratic and exclusive cast of Chinese culture was broadened and given fresh vitality as material of a more general appeal was made available in print. In this intellectual climate, the Sung Age produced a series of brilliant figures aspiring to the Confucian ideal of the ‘Renaissance man’: statesman, scholar, poet, painter and philosopher. Some, like the Statesman Ou-yang Hsiu (1007–72) and the philosopher Chu Hsi (1130–1200) it has been said, ‘stand comparison with the greatest human spirits of all times and places.’ They were humanists in the true sense of the word. They believed in the innate goodness of humanity, and in the possibility that through rational inquiry and lived experience, human beings could find the single immutable principle of all things. Ou-yang Hsiu has also left us some delightful personal sketches which convey a vivid flavour of his time. One story tells of his boyhood in an uncultured town, and the finding of a tattered old book from the Tang dynasty in a neighbour’s waste paper basket. Taking it home the boy found its writing ‘rich and profound, forceful and erudite,’ though its style was then out of fashion: ‘I was still young and could not understand it all, but I did see its spirit was grand and overpowering.’ And so his future path opened up! Later, his Sound of Autumn reads like a fragment of a Chinese Remembrance of Things Past. Finally there is a delightful retirement tale of the old drunkard carousing with his friends in the Chu mountains, frying wild vegetables, drinking wine and playing chess. ‘An old man now, white-haired, garrulous, but relaxed and at ease with himself – and already half kettled. Who is this drunken old buffer? Why Ou-yang Hsiu of Luling!’
Another great Sung figure was the historian Ssu-ma Kuang. Working in Kaifeng and then Luoyang between 1064 and 1085, he produced a Comprehensive Mirror of Chinese history in 360 fascicles, with an appended ‘examination of differences’ making explicit his selection and criticism of sources. This was a vision of history in the Confucian moralist tradition, ‘to understand the merits and demerits of past ages, and to serve as models and warnings.’ How extraordinary it is that we still sometimes hear the claim that the West’s is the only true historiographical tradition in the world!
The Sung achievement was right across the board from industry and technology to landscape painting, literature, poetry, and history. It appears now as one of the great cultural epochs of the world, the rival of Abbasid Baghdad and classical Athens; and with the existence of printing they could disseminate their ideals across Eastern Asia. Sung thinkers like Chu Hsi reshaped the old ideals of Confucian philosophy, of inward cultivation, self-development, and secular piety; they harnessed them to an examination system which ensured that only the best could aspire to positions of power and they made that the root of their state culture. This philosophy would dominate Eastern Asia for the next millennium, and is the cultural basis of the phenomenal success of countries like Japan and Korea in modern times, for they are still essentially neo-Confucian.
‘THE GREATEST CIVILIZATION IN THE WORLD’
Kaifeng fell to northern invaders in 1126, and for over a century China was divided, with the southern Sung continuing to rule from Hangchow. But between 1259 and 1279 the Mongols, who had shattered Iran and Iraq far to the west, overcame China. It was a crucial moment in Chinese history, as crucial perhaps as the Communist takeover in 1949. Their traditional civilization was put to the severest test of its resilience. The Mongols were alien to settled city civilization, to Chinese institutions, to Confucian values. Rather like Roman scholars in Western barbarian courts, Chinese statesmen had to persuade their new overlords of the worth of the tradition, and to work to perpetuate it by inculcating the Mongols with Sung values.
It was this task which prompted the historian Ma Tuanlin (1254–1325) to compose his Comprehensive Survey of Written Records and Traditions – a monumental encyclopaedia in 348 chapters attempting to transmit the essence of the heritage though a strikingly modern perception of historical continuity through institutions. ‘These are what determines continuity, not mere events, the saga of rise and fall, order and chaos, and in our time this is where historians should turn their attention.’ Whether such an integrative venture would be possible now, in the late twentieth century, is an open question. But in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, continuity was in fact assured, and the Mongol period, the Yuan (1279–1368), as it turned out, was another great epoch of Chinese art and culture; moreover its economy was still the richest in the world. In the thirteenth century when European visitors came in numbers to China for the first time, they were open-mouthed at what they saw. Sailing up the Grand Canal in Suzhou, the Venetian Marco Polo had no doubt that this was the greatest civilization in the world. ‘I tell you,’ he said, ‘in all truth, the riches and resources, it’s all on such a stupendous scale you wouldn’t believe it unless you saw it. If the Chinese were warlike they could conquer the rest of the world. Thank goodness they’re not.’
At this time agricultural and commercial revolutions led to a population boom in the south which saw China become the most populous country on earth, as it still is today. But the country was self-sufficient and could feed all its people. In 1344 the Arab traveller Ibn Battuta travelled for sixty days up the Grand Canal passing through the most ordered, fertile and productive landscape he had seen in all his travels from the Atlantic seaboard of North Africa to the South China Sea. Even the ordinary peasantry, he thought, enjoyed incomparably the highest standard of living in the world.
There perhaps comes a point in the life of any civilization when the basic necessities of life for the people have been satisfied; food, shelter, freedom from violence. Then it can aspire to extend its higher ideals to more and more of its people. The key conception of Chinese civilization had always been the search for harmony, and all its manifestations were part of that search, from the patterns of the bronze caster and the painter, to the designs of the porcelain maker and the silk weaver. By cultivating such arts, the noble person could rea
lize the universal harmony which Confucian wisdom sought. For the Chinese this was the supreme mission of civilization: it was an élite vision, to be sure; but no less impressive for that.
The path to such wisdom still began with the magic of writing. From its beginnings as a tool of divination, writing remained the means of access to the wisdom of the ancestors. The symbol for writing, the sign called ‘wen,’ had begun by signifying the characters on the oracle bones. Through time its meanings deepened and widened, to embrace writing, culture, refinement, elegance, till the sign ‘wen’ coupled with the sign ‘ming’ (light or brightness) came to mean civilization itself. It was nothing less than an expression of the way the Chinese saw the world.
MARVELLOUS VISIONS FROM THE STARRY RAFT
But now the way China saw the world began to change. Above a vast silted bay at Quenzhou in south China, which was once the busiest port in the world, stands a Muslim shrine and the graves of three followers of the Prophet, who first brought Islam to China in the late seventh century. In the shrine a stone stele records that Ming dynasty admiral Zheng He, a Muslim, prayed here before he embarked on one of seven great voyages of exploration in the fifteenth century; voyages which could have easily changed the course of history.
Zheng He’s huge ships dwarfed anything constructed in the fifteenth century West: 500 feet long, weighing 1500 tons, with watertight compartments, and a stern rudder 30 feet high. They sailed by magnetic compass bearings, with paper charts. Zheng He was the last in a series of great Chinese navigators who as early as the Tang period had sent expeditions to plot the meridian arc from Vietnam to Mongolia, and to map the stars from Java to within twenty degrees of the south celestial pole. Unlike the western admirals who came after him, Zheng He had not come to conquer, though he claimed suzerainty over all overseas Chinese. He sailed his fleets to the great south Indian harbour of Cochin, long the meeting place of East and West. En route, on the northern tip of Ceylon, he left a trilingual inscription affirming he came in peace, and offering respects to the gods of three religions, Allah, Buddha, and Vishnu. In Cochin, Zheng He would have seen the Chinese fishing nets imported in Mongol times. For South Indian merchants had long traded with China, exchanging pepper and spices for porcelain and silk. From Cochin, Zheng He explored East Africa, where Chinese pottery has been found as far south as Mozambique. He visited the Persian Gulf and went on pilgrimage to Mecca itself, writing down its description in his log. He could have ‘discovered’ the West had he had the inclination! It would be nearly a century before Vasco da Gama sailed into the same harbour of Cochin from the West, not as a bearer of peace but a harbinger of war and conquest.
