THE MIDDLE AGES

Chapter Six

THE HAN DYNASTY (206 B.C.-A.D.220)

I Development of the gentry-state

In 206 B.C.Liu Chi assumed the title of Emperor and gave his dynasty the name of the Han Dynasty.After his death he was given as emperor the name of Kao Tsu.[4] The period of the Han dynasty may be described as the beginning of the Chinese Middle Ages, while that of the Ch'in dynasty represents the transition from antiquity to the Middle Ages; for under the Han dynasty we meet in China with a new form of state, the "gentry state".The feudalism of ancient times has come definitely to its end.

[Footnote 4: From then on, every emperor was given after his death an official name as emperor, under which he appears in the Chinese sources.We have adopted the original or the official name according to which of the two has come into the more general use in Western books.]

Emperor Kao Tsu came from eastern China, and his family seems to have been a peasant family; in any case it did not belong to the old nobility.After his destruction of his strongest rival, the removal of the kings who had made themselves independent in the last years of the Ch'in dynasty was a relatively easy task for the new autocrat, although these struggles occupied the greater part of his reign.A much more difficult question, however, faced him: How was the empire to be governed?Kao Tsu's old friends and fellow-countrymen, who had helped him into power, had been rewarded by appointment as generals or high officials.Gradually he got rid of those who had been his best comrades, as so many upstart rulers have done before and after him in every country in the world.An emperor does not like to be reminded of a very humble past, and he is liable also to fear the rivalry of men who formerly were his equals.It is evident that little attention was paid to theories of administration; policy was determined mainly by practical considerations.Kao Tsu allowed many laws and regulations to remain in force, including the prohibition of Confucianist writings.On the other hand, he reverted to the allocation of fiefs, though not to old noble families but to his relatives and some of his closest adherents, generally men of inferior social standing.Thus a mixed administration came into being: part of the empire was governed by new feudal princes, and another part split up into provinces and prefectures and placed directly under the central power through its officials.

But whence came the officials? Kao Tsu and his supporters, as farmers from eastern China, looked down upon the trading population to which farmers always regard themselves as superior. The merchants were ignored as potential officials although they had often enough held official appointments under the former dynasty. The second group from which officials had been drawn under the Ch'in was that of the army officers, but their military functions had now, of course, fallen to Kao Tsu's soldiers. The emperor had little faith, however, in the loyalty of officers, even of his own, and apart from that he would have had first to create a new administrative organization for them. Accordingly he turned to another class which had come into existence, the class later called the gentry, which in practice had the power already in its hands.

The term "gentry" has no direct parallel in Chinese texts; the later terms "shen-shih" and "chin-shen" do not quite cover this concept.The basic unit of the gentry class are families, not individuals.Such families often derive their origin from branches of the Chou nobility.But other gentry families were of different and more recent origin in respect to land ownership.Some late Chou and Ch'in officials of non-noble origin had become wealthy and had acquired land; the same was true for wealthy merchants and finally, some non-noble farmers who were successful in one or another way, bought additional land reaching the size of large holdings.All "gentry" families owned substantial estates in the provinces which they leased to tenants on a kind of contract basis.The tenants, therefore, cannot be called "serfs" although their factual position often was not different from the position of serfs.The rents of these tenants, usually about half the gross produce, are the basis of the livelihood of the gentry.One part of a gentry family normally lives in the country on a small home farm in order to be able to collect the rents.If the family can acquire more land and if this new land is too far away from the home farm to make collection of rents easy, a new home farm is set up under the control of another branch of the family.But the original home remains to be regarded as the real family centre.

In a typical gentry family, another branch of the family is in the capital or in a provincial administrative centre in official positions. These officials at the same time are the most highly educated members of the family and are often called the "literati". There are also always individual family members who are not interested in official careers or who failed in their careers and live as free "literati" either in the big cities or on the home farms. It seems, to judge from much later sources, that the families assisted their most able members to enter the official careers, while those individuals who were less able were used in the administration of the farms. This system in combination with the strong familism of the Chinese, gave a double security to the gentry families. If difficulties arose in the estates either by attacks of bandits or by war or other catastrophes, the family members in official positions could use their influence and power to restore the property in the provinces. If, on the other hand, the family members in official positions lost their positions or even their lives by displeasing the court, the home branch could always find ways to remain untouched and could, in a generation or two, recruit new members and regain power and influence in the government. Thus, as families, the gentry was secure, although failures could occur to individuals. There are many gentry families who remained in the ruling élite for many centuries, some over more than a thousand years, weathering all vicissitudes of life. Some authors believe that Chinese leading families generally pass through a three- or four-generation cycle: a family member by his official position is able to acquire much land, and his family moves upward. He is able to give the best education and other facilities to his sons who lead a good life. But either these sons or the grandsons are spoiled and lazy; they begin to lose their property and status. The family moves downward, until in the fourth or fifth generation a new rise begins. Actual study of families seems to indicate that this is not true. The main branch of the family retains its position over centuries. But some of the branch families, created often by the less able family members, show a tendency towards downward social mobility.

It is clear from the above that a gentry family should be interested in having a fair number of children. The more sons they have, the more positions of power the family can occupy and thus, the more secure it will be; the more daughters they have, the more "political" marriages they can conclude, i.e. marriages with sons of other gentry families in positions of influence. Therefore, gentry families in China tend to be, on the average, larger than ordinary families, while in our Western countries the leading families usually were smaller than the lower class families. This means that gentry families produced more children than was necessary to replenish the available leading positions; thus, some family members had to get into lower positions and had to lose status. In view of this situation it was very difficult for lower class families to achieve access into this gentry group. In European countries the leading élite did not quite replenish their ranks in the next generation, so that there was always some chance for the lower classes to move up into leading ranks. The gentry society was, therefore, a comparably stable society with little upward social mobility but with some downward mobility. As a whole and for reasons of gentry self-interest, the gentry stood for stability and against change.

The gentry members in the bureaucracy collaborated closely with one another because they were tied together by bonds of blood or marriage.It was easy for them to find good tutors for their children, because a pupil owed a debt of gratitude to his teacher and a child from a gentry family could later on nicely repay this debt; often, these teachers themselves were members of other gentry families.It was easy for sons of the gentry to get into official positions, because the people who had to recommend them for office were often related to them or knew the position of their family.In Han time, local officials had the duty to recommend young able men; if these men turned out to be good, the officials were rewarded, if not they were blamed or even punished.An official took less of a chance, if he recommended a son of an influential family, and he obliged such a candidate so that he could later count on his help if he himself should come into difficulties.When, towards the end of the second century B.C., a kind of examination system was introduced, this attitude was not basically changed.

The country branch of the family by the fact that it controlled large tracts of land, supplied also the logical tax collectors: they had the standing and power required for this job.Even if they were appointed in areas other than their home country (a rule which later was usually applied), they knew the gentry families of the other district or were related to them and got their support by appointing their members as their assistants.

Gentry society continued from Kao Tsu's time to 1948, but it went through a number of phases of development and changed considerably in time.We will later outline some of the most important changes.In general the number of politically leading gentry families was around one hundred (texts often speak of "the hundred families" in this time) and they were concentrated in the capital; the most important home seats of these families in Han time were close to the capital and east of it or in the plains of eastern China, at that time the main centre of grain production.

We regard roughly the first one thousand years of "Gentry Society" as the period of the Chinese "Middle Ages", beginning with the Han dynasty; the preceding time of the Ch'in was considered as a period of transition, a time in which the feudal period of "Antiquity" came to a formal end and a new organization of society began to become visible.Even those authors who do not accept a sociological classification of periods and many authors who use Marxist categories, believe that with Ch'in and Han a new era in Chinese history began.

2 Situation of the Hsiung-nu empire; its relation to the Han empire.Incorporation of South China

In the time of the Ch'in dynasty there had already come into unpleasant prominence north of the Chinese frontier the tribal union, then relatively small, of the Hsiung-nu.Since then, the Hsiung-nu empire had destroyed the federation of the Yüeh-chih tribes (some of which seem to have been of Indo-European language stock) and incorporated their people into their own federation; they had conquered also the less well organized eastern pastoral tribes, the Tung-hu and thus had become a formidable power.Everything goes to show that it had close relations with the territories of northern China.Many Chinese seem to have migrated to the Hsiung-nu empire, where they were welcome as artisans and probably also as farmers; but above all they were needed for the staffing of a new state administration.The scriveners in the newly introduced state secretariat were Chinese and wrote Chinese, for at that time the Hsiung-nu apparently had no written language.There were Chinese serving as administrators and court officials, and even as instructors in the army administration, teaching the art of warfare against non-nomads.But what was the purpose of all this?Mao Tun, the second ruler of the Hsiung-nu, and his first successors undoubtedly intended ultimately to conquer China, exactly as many other northern peoples after them planned to do, and a few of them did.The main purpose of this was always to bring large numbers of peasants under the rule of the nomad rulers and so to solve, once for all, the problem of the provision of additional winter food.Everything that was needed, and everything that seemed to be worth trying to get as they grew more civilized, would thus be obtained better and more regularly than by raids or by tedious commercial negotiations.But if China was to be conquered and ruled there must exist a state organization of equal authority to hers; the Hsiung-nu ruler must himself come forward as Son of Heaven and develop a court ceremonial similar to that of a Chinese emperor.Thus the basis of the organization of the Hsiung-nu state lay in its rivalry with the neighbouring China; but the details naturally corresponded to the special nature of the Hsiung-nu social system.The young Hsiung-nu feudal state differed from the ancient Chinese feudal state not only in depending on a nomad economy with only supplementary agriculture, but also in possessing, in addition to a whole class of nobility and another of commoners, a stratum of slavery to be analysed further below.Similar to the Chou state, the Hsiung-nu state contained, especially around the ruler, an element of court bureaucracy which, however, never developed far enough to replace the basically feudal character of administration.

Thus Kao Tsu was faced in Mao Tun not with a mere nomad chieftain but with the most dangerous of enemies, and Kao Tsu's policy had to be directed to preventing any interference of the Hsiung-nu in North Chinese affairs, and above all to preventing alliances between Hsiung-nu and Chinese.Hsiung-nu alone, with their technique of horsemen's warfare, would scarcely have been equal to the permanent conquest of the fortified towns of the north and the Great Wall, although they controlled a population which may have been in excess of 2,000,000 people.But they might have succeeded with Chinese aid.Actually a Chinese opponent of Kao Tsu had already come to terms with Mao Tun, and in 200 B.C.Kao Tsu was very near suffering disaster in northern Shansi, as a result of which China would have come under the rule of the Hsiung-nu.But it did not come to that, and Mao Tun made no further attempt, although the opportunity came several times.Apparently the policy adopted by his court was not imperialistic but national, in the uncorrupted sense of the word.It was realized that a country so thickly populated as China could only be administered from a centre within China.The Hsiung-nu would thus have had to abandon their home territory and rule in China itself.That would have meant abandoning the flocks, abandoning nomad life, and turning into Chinese.The main supporters of the national policy, the first principle of which was loyalty to the old ways of life, seem to have been the tribal chieftains.Mao Tun fell in with their view, and the Hsiung-nu maintained their state as long as they adhered to that principle—for some seven hundred years.Other nomad peoples, Toba, Mongols, and Manchus, followed the opposite policy, and before long they were caught in the mechanism of the much more highly developed Chinese economy and culture, and each of them disappeared from the political scene in the course of a century or so.

The national line of policy of the Hsiung-nu did not at all mean an end of hostilities and raids on Chinese territory, so that Kao Tsu declared himself ready to give the Hsiung-nu the foodstuffs and clothing materials they needed if they would make an end of their raids.A treaty to this effect was concluded, and sealed by the marriage of a Chinese princess with Mao Tun.This was the first international treaty in the Far East between two independent powers mutually recognized as equals, and the forms of international diplomacy developed in this time remained the standard forms for the next thousand years.The agreement was renewed at the accession of each new ruler, but was never adhered to entirely by either side.The needs of the Hsiung-nu increased with the expansion of their empire and the growing luxury of their court; the Chinese, on the other hand, wanted to give as little as possible, and no doubt they did all they could to cheat the Hsiung-nu.Thus, in spite of the treaties the Hsiung-nu raids went on.With China's progressive consolidation, the voluntary immigration of Chinese into the Hsiung-nu empire came to an end, and the Hsiung-nu actually began to kidnap Chinese subjects.These were the main features of the relations between Chinese and Hsiung-nu almost until 100 B.C.

In the extreme south, around the present-day Canton, another independent empire had been formed in the years of transition, under the leadership of a Chinese.The narrow basis of this realm was no doubt provided by the trading colonies, but the indigenous population of Yüeh tribes was insufficiently civilized for the building up of a state that could have maintained itself against China.Kao Tsu sent a diplomatic mission to the ruler of this state, and invited him to place himself under Chinese suzerainty (196 B.C.)The ruler realized that he could offer no serious resistance, while the existing circumstances guaranteed him virtual independence and he yielded to Kao Tsu without a struggle.

3 Brief feudal reaction.Consolidation of the gentry

Kao Tsu died in 195 B.C.From then to 179 the actual ruler was his widow, the empress Lü, while children were officially styled emperors.The empress tried to remove all the representatives of the emperor's family and to replace them with members of her own family.To secure her position she revived the feudal system, but she met with strong resistance from the dynasty and its supporters who already belonged in many cases to the new gentry, and who did not want to find their position jeopardized by the creation of new feudal lords.

On the death of the empress her opponents rose, under the leadership of Kao Tsu's family.Every member of the empress's family was exterminated, and a son of Kao Tsu, known later under the name of Wen Ti (Emperor Wen), came to the throne.He reigned from 179 to 157 B.C.Under him there were still many fiefs, but with the limitation which the emperor Kao Tsu had laid down shortly before his death: only members of the imperial family should receive fiefs, to which the title of King was attached.Thus all the more important fiefs were in the hands of the imperial family, though this did not mean that rivalries came to an end.

On the whole Wen Ti's period of rule passed in comparative peace.For the first time since the beginning of Chinese history, great areas of continuous territory were under unified rule, without unending internal warfare such as had existed under Shih Huang-ti and Kao Tsu.The creation of so extensive a region of peace produced great economic advance.The burdens that had lain on the peasant population were reduced, especially since under Wen Ti the court was very frugal.The population grew and cultivated fresh land, so that production increased and with it the exchange of goods.The most outstanding sign of this was the abandonment of restrictions on the minting of copper coin, in order to prevent deflation through insufficiency of payment media.As a consequence more taxes were brought in, partly in kind, partly in coin, and this increased the power of the central government.The new gentry streamed into the towns, their standard of living rose, and they made themselves more and more into a class apart from the general population.As people free from material cares, they were able to devote themselves to scholarship.They went back to the old writings and studied them once more.They even began to identify themselves with the nobles of feudal times, to adopt the rules of good behaviour and the ceremonial described in the Confucianist books, and very gradually, as time went on, to make these their textbooks of good form.From this point the Confucianist ideals first began to penetrate the official class recruited from the gentry, and then the state organization itself.It was expected that an official should be versed in Confucianism, and schools were set up for Confucianist education.Around 100 B.C.this led to the introduction of the examination system, which gradually became the one method of selection of new officials.The system underwent many changes, but remained in operation in principle until 1904.The object of the examinations was not to test job efficiency but command of the ideals of the gentry and knowledge of the literature inculcating them: this was regarded as sufficient qualification for any position in the service of the state.

In theory this path to training of character and to admission to the state service was open to every "respectable" citizen.Of the traditional four "classes" of Chinese society, only the first two, officials (shih) and farmers (nung) were always regarded as fully "respectable" (liang-min).Members of the other two classes, artisans (kung) and merchants (shang), were under numerous restrictions.Below these were classes of "lowly people" (ch'ien-min) and below these the slaves which were not part of society proper.The privileges and obligations of these categories were soon legally fixed.In practice, during the first thousand years of the existence of the examination system no peasant had a chance to become an official by means of the examinations.In the Han period the provincial officials had to propose suitable young persons for examination, and so for admission to the state service, as was already mentioned.In addition, schools had been instituted for the sons of officials; it is interesting to note that there were, again and again, complaints about the low level of instruction in these schools.Nevertheless, through these schools all sons of officials, whatever their capacity or lack of capacity, could become officials in their turn.In spite of its weaknesses, the system had its good side.It inoculated a class of people with ideals that were unquestionably of high ethical value.The Confucian moral system gave a Chinese official or any member of the gentry a spiritual attitude and an outward bearing which in their best representatives has always commanded respect, an integrity that has always preserved its possessors, and in consequence Chinese society as a whole, from moral collapse, from spiritual nihilism, and has thus contributed to the preservation of Chinese cultural values in spite of all foreign conquerors.

In the time of Wen Ti and especially of his successors, the revival at court of the Confucianist ritual and of the earlier Heaven-worship proceeded steadily.The sacrifices supposed to have been performed in ancient times, the ritual supposed to have been prescribed for the emperor in the past, all this was reintroduced.Obviously much of it was spurious: much of the old texts had been lost, and when fragments were found they were arbitrarily completed.Moreover, the old writing was difficult to read and difficult to understand; thus various things were read into the texts without justification.The new Confucians who came forward as experts in the moral code were very different men from their predecessors; above all, like all their contemporaries, they were strongly influenced by the shamanistic magic that had developed in the Ch'in period.

Wen Ti's reign had brought economic advance and prosperity; intellectually it had been a period of renaissance, but like every such period it did not simply resuscitate what was old, but filled the ancient moulds with an entirely new content.Socially the period had witnessed the consolidation of the new upper class, the gentry, who copied the mode of life of the old nobility.This is seen most clearly in the field of law.In the time of the Legalists the first steps had been taken in the codification of the criminal law.They clearly intended these laws to serve equally for all classes of the people.The Ch'in code which was supposedly Li K'uei's code, was used in the Han period, and was extensively elaborated by Siao Ho (died 193 B.C.)and others.This code consisted of two volumes of the chief laws for grave cases, one of mixed laws for the less serious cases, and six volumes on the imposition of penalties.In the Han period "decisions" were added, so that about A.D.200 the code had grown to 26,272 paragraphs with over 17,000,000 words.The collection then consisted of 960 volumes.This colossal code has been continually revised, abbreviated, or expanded, and under its last name of "Collected Statues of the Manchu Dynasty" it retained its validity down to the present century.

Alongside this collection there was another book that came to be regarded and used as a book of precedences. The great Confucianist philosopher Tung Chung-shu (179-104 B. C.) , a firm supporter of the ideology of the new gentry class, declared that the classic Confucianist writings, and especially the book Ch'un-ch'iu, "Annals of Spring and Autumn", attributed to Confucius himself, were essentially books of legal decisions.They contained "cases" and Confucius's decisions of them.Consequently any case at law that might arise could be decided by analogy with the cases contained in "Annals of Spring and Autumn".Only an educated person, of course, a member of the gentry, could claim that his action should be judged by the decisions of Confucius and not by the code compiled for the common people, for Confucius had expressly stated that his rules were intended only for the upper class.Thus, right down to modern times an educated person could be judged under regulations different from those applicable to the common people, or if judged on the basis of the laws, he had to expect a special treatment.The principle of the "equality before the law" which the Legalists had advocated and which fitted well into the absolutistic, totalitarian system of the Ch'in, had been attacked by the feudal nobility at that time and was attacked by the new gentry of the Han time.Legalist thinking remained an important undercurrent for many centuries to come, but application of the equalitarian principle was from now on never seriously considered.

Against the growing influence of the officials belonging to the gentry there came a last reaction.It came as a reply to the attempt of a representative of the gentry to deprive the feudal princes of the whole of their power.In the time of Wen Ti's successor a number of feudal kings formed an alliance against the emperor, and even invited the Hsiung-nu to join them.The Hsiung-nu did not do so, because they saw that the rising had no prospect of success, and it was quelled.After that the feudal princes were steadily deprived of rights.They were divided into two classes, and only privileged ones were permitted to live in the capital, the others being required to remain in their domains.At first, the area was controlled by a "minister" of the prince, an official of the state; later the area remained under normal administration and the feudal prince kept only an empty title; the tax income of a certain number of families of an area was assigned to him and transmitted to him by normal administrative channels.Often, the number of assigned families was fictional in that the actual income was from far fewer families.This system differs from the Near Eastern system in which also no actual enforcement took place, but where deserving men were granted the right to collect themselves the taxes of a certain area with certain numbers of families.

Soon after this the whole government was given the shape which it continued to have until A.D.220, and which formed the point of departure for all later forms of government.At the head of the state was the emperor, in theory the holder of absolute power in the state restricted only by his responsibility towards "Heaven", i.e.he had to follow and to enforce the basic rules of morality, otherwise "Heaven" would withdraw its "mandate", the legitimation of the emperor's rule, and would indicate this withdrawal by sending natural catastrophes.Time and again we find emperors publicly accusing themselves for their faults when such catastrophes occurred; and to draw the emperor's attention to actual or made-up calamities or celestial irregularities was one way to criticize an emperor and to force him to change his behaviour.There are two other indications which show that Chinese emperors—excepting a few individual cases—at least in the first ten centuries of gentry society were not despots: it can be proved that in some fields the responsibility for governmental action did not lie with the emperor but with some of his ministers.Secondly, the emperor was bound by the law code: he could not change it nor abolish it.We know of cases in which the ruler disregarded the code, but then tried to "defend" his arbitrary action.Each new dynasty developed a new law code, usually changing only details of the punishment, not the basic regulations.Rulers could issue additional "regulations", but these, too, had to be in the spirit of the general code and the existing moral norms. This situation has some similarity to the situation in Muslim countries.At the ruler's side were three counsellors who had, however, no active functions.The real conduct of policy lay in the hands of the "chancellor", or of one of the "nine ministers".Unlike the practice with which we are familiar in the West, the activities of the ministries (one of them being the court secretariat) were concerned primarily with the imperial palace.As, however, the court secretariat, one of the nine ministries, was at the same time a sort of imperial statistical office, in which all economic, financial, and military statistical material was assembled, decisions on issues of critical importance for the whole country could and did come from it.The court, through the Ministry of Supplies, operated mines and workshops in the provinces and organized the labour service for public constructions.The court also controlled centrally the conscription for the general military service.Beside the ministries there was an extensive administration of the capital with its military guards.The various parts of the country, including the lands given as fiefs to princes, had a local administration, entirely independent of the central government and more or less elaborated according to their size.The regional administration was loosely associated with the central government through a sort of primitive ministry of the interior, and similarly the Chinese representatives in the protectorates, that is to say the foreign states which had submitted to Chinese protective overlordship, were loosely united with a sort of foreign ministry in the central government.When a rising or a local war broke out, that was the affair of the officer of the region concerned.If the regional troops were insufficient, those of the adjoining regions were drawn upon; if even these were insufficient, a real "state of war" came into being; that is to say, the emperor appointed eight generals-in-chief, mobilized the imperial troops, and intervened.This imperial army then had authority over the regional and feudal troops, the troops of the protectorates, the guards of the capital, and those of the imperial palace.At the end of the war the imperial army was demobilized and the generals-in-chief were transferred to other posts.

In all this there gradually developed a division into civil and military administration.A number of regions would make up a province with a military governor, who was in a sense the representative of the imperial army, and who was supposed to come into activity only in the event of war.

This administration of the Han period lacked the tight organization that would make precise functioning possible.On the other hand, an extremely important institution had already come into existence in a primitive form.As central statistical authority, the court secretariat had a special position within the ministries and supervised the administration of the other offices.Thus there existed alongside the executive a means of independent supervision of it, and the resulting rivalry enabled the emperor or the chancellor to detect and eliminate irregularities.Later, in the system of the T'ang period (A.D.618-906), this institution developed into an independent censorship, and the system was given a new form as a "State and Court Secretariat", in which the whole executive was comprised and unified.Towards the end of the T'ang period the permanent state of war necessitated the permanent commissioning of the imperial generals-in-chief and of the military governors, and as a result there came into existence a "Privy Council of State", which gradually took over functions of the executive.The system of administration in the Han and in the T'ang period is shown in the following table:

Han epoch T'ang epoch

1. Emperor 1. Emperor

  2.  Three counsellors to the emperor 2.  Three counsellors and three
     (with no active functions) assistants (with no active
                                         functions)

  3.  Eight supreme generals (only 3.  Generals and Governors-General
     appointed in time of war) (only appointed in time of
                                         war; but in practice
                                         continuously in office)

  4.  —————————————- 4.  (a) State secretariat
                                          (1) Central secretariat
                                          (2) Secretariat of the Crown
                                          (3) Secretariat of the Palace
                                              and imperial historical
                                              commission
                                         (b) Emperor's Secretariat
                                          (1) Private Archives
                                          (2) Court Adjutants' Office
                                          (3) Harem administration

  5.  Court administration 5.  Court administration
     (Ministries) (Ministries)
    (1) Ministry for state (1) Ministry for state
        sacrifices sacrifices
    (2) Ministry for imperial (2) Ministry for imperial
        coaches and horses coaches and horses
    (3) Ministry for justice at (3) Ministry for justice at
        court court
    (4) Ministry for receptions (4) Ministry for receptions
                                            (i.e.                                             foreign affairs)
  (5) Ministry for ancestors' (5) Ministry for ancestors'
        temples temples
    (6) Ministry for supplies to (6) Ministry for supplies to
        the court the court
    (7) Ministry for the harem (7) Economic and financial
                                            Ministry
    (8) Ministry for the palace (8) Ministry for the payment
        guards of salaries
    (9) Ministry for the court (9) Ministry for armament
        (state secretariat) and magazines

  6.  Administration of the 6.  Administration of the
     capital: capital:
    (1) Crown prince's palace (1) Crown prince's palace
    (2) Security service for the (2) Palace guards and guards'
        capital office
    (3) Capital administration: (3) Arms production department
        (a) Guards of the capital
        (b) Guards of the city gates
        (c) Building department
                                        (4) Labour service department
                                        (5) Building department
                                        (6) Transport department
                                        (7) Department for education
                                            (of sons of officials!)

  7.  Ministry of the Interior 7.  Ministry of the Interior
     (Provincial administration) (Provincial administration)

8. Foreign Ministry 8. —————————————-

9. Censorship (Audit council)

There is no denying that according to our standard this whole system was still elementary and "personal", that is to say, attached to the emperor's person—though it should not be overlooked that we ourselves are not yet far from a similar phase of development.To this day the titles of not a few of the highest officers of state—the Lord Privy Seal, for instance—recall that in the past their offices were conceived as concerned purely with the personal service of the monarch.In one point, however, the Han administrative set-up was quite modern: it already had a clear separation between the emperor's private treasury and the state treasury; laws determined which of the two received certain taxes and which had to make certain payments.This separation, which in Europe occurred not until the late Middle Ages, in China was abolished at the end of the Han Dynasty.

The picture changes considerably to the advantage of the Chinese as soon as we consider the provincial administration.The governor of a province, and each of his district officers or prefects, had a staff often of more than a hundred officials.These officials were drawn from the province or prefecture and from the personal friends of the administrator, and they were appointed by the governor or the prefect.The staff was made up of officials responsible for communications with the central or provincial administration (private secretary, controller, finance officer), and a group of officials who carried on the actual local administration.There were departments for transport, finance, education, justice, medicine (hygiene), economic and military affairs, market control, and presents (which had to be made to the higher officials at the New Year and on other occasions).In addition to these offices, organized in a quite modern style, there was an office for advising the governor and another for drafting official documents and letters.

The interesting feature of this system is that the provincial administration was de facto independent of the central administration, and that the governor and even his prefects could rule like kings in their regions, appointing and discharging as they chose. This was a vestige of feudalism, but on the other hand it was a healthy check against excessive centralization. It is thanks to this system that even the collapse of the central power or the cutting off of a part of the empire did not bring the collapse of the country. In a remote frontier town like Tunhuang, on the border of Turkestan, the life of the local Chinese went on undisturbed whether communication with the capital was maintained or was broken through invasions by foreigners. The official sent from the centre would be liable at any time to be transferred elsewhere; and he had to depend on the practical knowledge of his subordinates, the members of the local families of the gentry. These officials had the local government in their hands, and carried on the administration of places like Tunhuang through a thousand years and more. The Hsin family, for instance, was living there in 50 B. C. and was still there in A. D. 950; and so were the Yin, Ling-hu, Li, and K'ang families.

All the officials of the various offices or Ministries were appointed under the state examination system, but they had no special professional training; only for the more important subordinate posts were there specialists, such as jurists, physicians, and so on.A change came towards the end of the T'ang period, when a Department of Commerce and Monopolies was set up; only specialists were appointed to it, and it was placed directly under the emperor.Except for this, any official could be transferred from any ministry to any other without regard to his experience.

4 Turkestan policy.End of the Hsiung-nu empire

In the two decades between 160 and 140 B.C.there had been further trouble with the Hsiung-nu, though there was no large-scale fighting.There was a fundamental change of policy under the next emperor, Wu (or Wu Ti, 141-86 B.C.)The Chinese entered for the first time upon an active policy against the Hsiung-nu.There seem to have been several reasons for this policy, and several objectives.The raids of the Hsiung-nu from the Ordos region and from northern Shansi had shown themselves to be a direct menace to the capital and to its extremely important hinterland.Northern Shansi is mountainous, with deep ravines.A considerable army on horseback could penetrate some distance to the south before attracting attention.Northern Shensi and the Ordos region are steppe country, in which there were very few Chinese settlements and through which an army of horsemen could advance very quickly.It was therefore determined to push back the Hsiung-nu far enough to remove this threat.It was also of importance to break the power of the Hsiung-nu in the province of Kansu, and to separate them as far as possible from the Tibetans living in that region, to prevent any union between those two dangerous adversaries.A third point of importance was the safeguarding of caravan routes.The state, and especially the capital, had grown rich through Wen Ti's policy.Goods streamed into the capital from all quarters.Commerce with central Asia had particularly increased, bringing the products of the Middle East to China.The caravan routes passed through western Shensi and Kansu to eastern Turkestan, but at that time the Hsiung-nu dominated the approaches to Turkestan and were in a position to divert the trade to themselves or cut it off.The commerce brought profit not only to the caravan traders, most of whom were probably foreigners, but to the officials in the provinces and prefectures through which the routes passed.Thus the officials in western China were interested in the trade routes being brought under direct control, so that the caravans could arrive regularly and be immune from robbery.Finally, the Chinese government may well have regarded it as little to its honour to be still paying dues to the Hsiung-nu and sending princesses to their rulers, now that China was incomparably wealthier and stronger than at the time when that policy of appeasement had begun.

[Illustration: Map 3.China in the struggle with the Huns or Hsiung Nu (roughly 128-100 B.C.)]

The first active step taken was to try, in 133 B. C. , to capture the head of the Hsiung-nu state, who was called a shan-yü but the shan-yü saw through the plan and escaped. There followed a period of continuous fighting until 119 B. C. The Chinese made countless attacks, without lasting success. But the Hsiung-nu were weakened, one sign of this being that there were dissensions after the death of the shan-yü Chün-ch'en, and in 127 B. C. his son went over to the Chinese. Finally the Chinese altered their tactics, advancing in 119 B. C. with a strong army of cavalry, which suffered enormous losses but inflicted serious loss on the Hsiung-nu. After that the Hsiung-nu withdrew farther to the north, and the Chinese settled peasants in the important region of Kansu.

Meanwhile, in 125 B.C., the famous Chang Ch'ien had returned.He had been sent in 138 to conclude an alliance with the Yüeh-chih against the Hsiung-nu.The Yüeh-chih had formerly been neighbours of the Hsiung-nu as far as the Ala Shan region, but owing to defeat by the Hsiung-nu their remnants had migrated to western Turkestan.Chang Ch'ien had followed them.Politically he had no success, but he brought back accurate information about the countries in the far west, concerning which nothing had been known beyond the vague reports of merchants.Now it was learnt whence the foreign goods came and whither the Chinese goods went.Chang Ch'ien's reports (which are one of the principal sources for the history of central Asia at that remote time) strengthened the desire to enter into direct and assured commercial relations with those distant countries.The government evidently thought of getting this commerce into its own hands.The way to do this was to impose "tribute" on the countries concerned.The idea was that the missions bringing the annual "tribute" would be a sort of state bartering commissions.The state laid under tribute must supply specified goods at its own cost, and received in return Chinese produce, the value of which was to be roughly equal to the "tribute".Thus Chang Ch'ien's reports had the result that, after the first successes against the Hsiung-nu, there was increased interest in a central Asian policy.The greatest military success were the campaigns of General Li Kuang-li to Ferghana in 104 and 102 B.C.The result of the campaigns was to bring under tribute all the small states in the Tarim basin and some of the states of western Turkestan.From now on not only foreign consumer goods came freely into China, but with them a great number of other things, notably plants such as grape, peach, pomegranate.

In 108 B. C. the western part of Korea was also conquered. Korea was already an important transit region for the trade with Japan. Thus this trade also came under the direct influence of the Chinese government. Although this conquest represented a peril to the eastern flank of the Hsiung-nu, it did not by any means mean that they were conquered. The Hsiung-nu while weakened evaded the Chinese pressure, but in 104 B. C. and again in 91 they inflicted defeats on the Chinese. The Hsiung-nu were indirectly threatened by Chinese foreign policy, for the Chinese concluded an alliance with old enemies of the Hsiung-nu, the Wu-sun, in the north of the Tarim basin. This made the Tarim basin secure for the Chinese, and threatened the Hsiung-nu with a new danger in their rear. Finally the Chinese did all they could through intrigue, espionage, and sabotage to promote disunity and disorder within the Hsiung-nu, though it cannot be seen from the Chinese accounts how far the Chinese were responsible for the actual conflicts and the continual changes of shan-yüHostilities against the Hsiung-nu continued incessantly, after the death of Wu Ti, under his successor, so that the Hsiung-nu were further weakened.In consequence of this it was possible to rouse against them other tribes who until then had been dependent on them—the Ting-ling in the north and the Wu-huan in the east.The internal difficulties of the Hsiung-nu increased further.

Wu Ti's active policy had not been directed only against the Hsiung-nu.After heavy fighting he brought southern China, with the region round Canton, and the south-eastern coast, firmly under Chinese dominion—in this case again on account of trade interests.No doubt there were already considerable colonies of foreign merchants in Canton and other coastal towns, trading in Indian and Middle East goods.The traders seem often to have been Sogdians.The southern wars gave Wu Ti the control of the revenues from this commerce.He tried several times to advance through Yünnan in order to secure a better land route to India, but these attempts failed.Nevertheless, Chinese influence became stronger in the south-west.

In spite of his long rule, Wu Ti did not leave an adult heir, as the crown prince was executed, with many other persons, shortly before Wu Ti's death.The crown prince had been implicated in an alleged attempt by a large group of people to remove the emperor by various sorts of magic.It is difficult to determine today what lay behind this affair; probably it was a struggle between two cliques of the gentry.Thus a regency council had to be set up for the young heir to the throne; it included a member of a Hsiung-nu tribe.The actual government was in the hands of a general and his clique until the death of the heir to the throne, and at the beginning of his successor's reign.

At this time came the end of the Hsiung-nu empire—a foreign event of the utmost importance. As a result of the continual disastrous wars against the Chinese, in which not only many men but, especially, large quantities of cattle fell into Chinese hands, the livelihood of the Hsiung-nu was seriously threatened; their troubles were increased by plagues and by unusually severe winters. To these troubles were added political difficulties, including unsettled questions in regard to the succession to the throne. The result of all this was that the Hsiung-nu could no longer offer effective military resistance to the Chinese. There were a number of shan-yü ruling contemporaneously as rivals, and one of them had to yield to the Chinese in 58 B. C. ; in 51 he came as a vassal to the Chinese court. The collapse of the Hsiung-nu empire was complete. After 58 B. C. the Chinese were freed from all danger from that quarter and were able, for a time, to impose their authority in Central Asia.

5 Impoverishment.Cliques.End of the Dynasty

In other respects the Chinese were not doing as well as might have been assumed.The wars carried on by Wu Ti and his successors had been ruinous.The maintenance of large armies of occupation in the new regions, especially in Turkestan, also meant a permanent drain on the national funds.There was a special need for horses, for the people of the steppes could only be fought by means of cavalry.As the Hsiung-nu were supplying no horses, and the campaigns were not producing horses enough as booty, the peasants had to rear horses for the government.Additional horses were bought at very high prices, and apart from this the general financing of the wars necessitated increased taxation of the peasants, a burden on agriculture no less serious than was the enrolment of many peasants for military service.Finally, the new external trade did not by any means bring the advantages that had been hoped for.The tribute missions brought tribute but, to begin with, this meant an obligation to give presents in return; moreover, these missions had to be fed and housed in the capital, often for months, as the official receptions took place only on New Year's Day.Their maintenance entailed much expense, and meanwhile the members of the missions traded privately with the inhabitants and the merchants of the capital, buying things they needed and selling things they had brought in addition to the tribute.The tribute itself consisted mainly of "precious articles", which meant strange or rare things of no practical value.The emperor made use of them as elements of personal luxury, or made presents of some of them to deserving officials.The gifts offered by the Chinese in return consisted mainly of silk.Silk was received by the government as a part of the tax payments and formed an important element of the revenue of the state.It now went abroad without bringing in any corresponding return.The private trade carried on by the members of the missions was equally unserviceable to the Chinese.It, too, took from them goods of economic value, silk and gold, which went abroad in exchange for luxury articles of little or no economic importance, such as glass, precious stones, or stud horses, which in no way benefited the general population.Thus in this last century B.C.China's economic situation grew steadily and fairly rapidly worse.The peasants, more heavily taxed than ever, were impoverished, and yet the exchequer became not fuller but emptier, so that gold began even to be no longer available for payments.Wu Ti was aware of the situation and called different groups together to discuss the problems of economics.Under the name "Discussions on Salt and Iron" the gist of these talks is preserved and shows that one group under the leadership of Sang Hung-yang (143-80 B.C.)was business-oriented and thinking in economic terms, while their opponents, mainly Confucianists, regarded the situation mainly as a moral crisis.Sang proposed an "equable transportation" and a "standardization" system and favoured other state monopolies and controls; these ideas were taken up later and continued to be discussed, again and again.

Already under Wu Ti there had been signs of a development which now appeared constantly in Chinese history.Among the new gentry, families entered into alliances with each other, sealed their mutual allegiance by matrimonial unions, and so formed large cliques.Each clique made it its concern to get the most important government positions into its hands, so that it should itself control the government.Under Wu Ti, for example, almost all the important generals had belonged to a certain clique, which remained dominant under his two successors.Two of the chief means of attaining power were for such a clique to give the emperor a girl from its ranks as wife, and to see to it that all the eunuchs around the emperor should be persons dependent on the clique.Eunuchs came generally from the poorer classes; they were launched at court by members of the great cliques, or quite openly presented to the emperor.

The chief influence of the cliques lay, however, in the selection of officials.It is not surprising that the officials recommended only sons of people in their own clique—their family or its closest associates.On top of all this, the examiners were in most cases themselves members of the same families to which the provincial officials belonged.Thus it was made doubly certain that only those candidates who were to the liking of the dominant group among the gentry should pass.

Surrounded by these cliques, the emperors became in most cases powerless figureheads.At times energetic rulers were able to play off various cliques against each other, and so to acquire personal power; but the weaker emperors found themselves entirely in the hands of cliques.Not a few emperors in China were removed by cliques which they had attempted to resist; and various dynasties were brought to their end by the cliques; this was the fate of the Han dynasty.

The beginning of its fall came with the activities of the widow of the emperor Yüan Ti.She virtually ruled in the name of her eighteen-year-old son, the emperor Ch'eng Ti (32-7 B.C.), and placed all her brothers, and also her nephew, Wang Mang, in the principal government posts.They succeeded at first in either removing the strongest of the other cliques or bringing them into dependence.Within the Wang family the nephew Wang Mang steadily advanced, securing direct supporters even in some branches of the imperial family; these personages declared their readiness to join him in removing the existing line of the imperial house.When Ch'eng Ti died without issue, a young nephew of his (Ai Ti, 6-1 B.C.)was placed on the throne by Wang Mang, and during this period the power of the Wangs and their allies grew further, until all their opponents had been removed and the influence of the imperial family very greatly reduced.When Ai Ti died, Wang Mang placed an eight-year-old boy on the throne, himself acting as regent; four years later the boy fell ill and died, probably with Wang Mang's aid.Wang Mang now chose a one-year-old baby, but soon after he felt that the time had come for officially assuming the rulership.In A.D.8 he dethroned the baby, ostensibly at Heaven's command, and declared himself emperor and first of the Hsin ("new") dynasty.All the members of the old imperial family in the capital were removed from office and degraded to commoners, with the exception of those who had already been supporting Wang Mang.Only those members who held unimportant posts at a distance remained untouched.

Wang Mang's "usurpation" is unusual from two points of view.First, he paid great attention to public opinion and induced large masses of the population to write petitions to the court asking the Han ruler to abdicate; he even fabricated "heavenly omina" in his own favour and against the Han dynasty in order to get wide support even from intellectuals.Secondly, he inaugurated a formal abdication ceremony, culminating in the transfer of the imperial seal to himself.This ceremony became standard for the next centuries.The seal was made of a precious stone, once presented to the Ch'in dynasty ruler before he ascended the throne.From now on, the possessor of this seal was the legitimate ruler.

6 The pseudo-socialistic dictatorship.Revolt of the "Red Eyebrows"

Wang Mang's dynasty lasted only from A.D.9 to 23; but it was one of the most stirring periods of Chinese history.It is difficult to evaluate Wang Mang, because all we know about him stems from sources hostile towards him.Yet we gain the impression that some of his innovations, such as the legalization of enthronement through the transfer of the seal; the changes in the administration of provinces and in the bureaucratic set-up in the capital; and even some of his economic measures were so highly regarded that they were retained or reintroduced, although this happened in some instances centuries later and without mentioning Wang Mang's name.But most of his policies and actions were certainly neither accepted nor acceptable.He made use of every conceivable resource in order to secure power to his clique.As far as possible he avoided using open force, and resorted to a high-level propaganda.Confucianism, the philosophic basis of the power of the gentry, served him as a bait; he made use of the so-called "old character school" for his purposes.When, after the holocaust of books, it was desired to collect the ancient classics again, texts were found under strange circumstances in the walls of Confucius's house; they were written in an archaic script.The people who occupied themselves with these books were called the old character school.The texts came under suspicion; most scholars had little belief in their genuineness.Wang Mang, however, and his creatures energetically supported the cult of these ancient writings.The texts were edited and issued, and in the process, as can now be seen, certain things were smuggled into them that fitted in well with Wang Mang's intentions.He even had other texts reissued with falsifications.He now represented himself in all his actions as a man who did with the utmost precision the things which the books reported of rulers or ministers of ancient times.As regent he had declared that his model was the brother of the first emperor of the Chou dynasty; as emperor he took for his exemplar one of the mythical emperors of ancient China; of his new laws he claimed that they were simply revivals of decrees of the golden age.In all this he appealed to the authority of literature that had been tampered with to suit his aims. Actually, such laws had never before been customary; either Wang Mang completely misinterpreted passages in an ancient text to suit his purpose, or he had dicta that suited him smuggled into the text.There can be no question that Wang Mang and his accomplices began by deliberately falsifying and deceiving.However, as time went on, he probably began to believe in his own frauds.

Wang Mang's great series of certain laws has brought him the name of "the first Socialist on the throne of China".But closer consideration reveals that these measures, ostensibly and especially aimed at the good of the poor, were in reality devised simply in order to fill the imperial exchequer and to consolidate the imperial power.When we read of the turning over of great landed estates to the state, do we not imagine that we are faced with a modern land reform?But this applied only to the wealthiest of all the landowners, who were to be deprived in this way of their power.The prohibition of private slave-owning had a similar purpose, the state reserving to itself the right to keep slaves.Moreover, landless peasants were to receive land to till, at the expense of those who possessed too much.This admirable law, however, was not intended seriously to be carried into effect.Instead, the setting up of a system of state credits for peasants held out the promise, in spite of rather reduced interest rates, of important revenue.The peasants had never been in a position to pay back their private debts together with the usurious interest, but there were at least opportunities of coming to terms with a private usurer, whereas the state proved a merciless creditor.It could dispossess the peasant, and either turn his property into a state farm, convey it to another owner, or make the peasant a state slave.Thus this measure worked against the interest of the peasants, as did the state monopoly of the exploitation of mountains and lakes."Mountains and lakes" meant the uncultivated land around settlements, the "village commons", where people collected firewood or went fishing.They now had to pay money for fishing rights and for the right to collect wood, money for the emperor's exchequer.The same purpose lay behind the wine, salt, and iron tool monopolies.Enormous revenues came to the state from the monopoly of minting coin, when old metal coin of full value was called in and exchanged for debased coin.Another modern-sounding institution, that of the "equalization offices", was supposed to buy cheap goods in times of plenty in order to sell them to the people in times of scarcity at similarly low prices, so preventing want and also preventing excessive price fluctuations.In actual fact these state offices formed a new source of profit, buying cheaply and selling as dearly as possible.

Thus the character of these laws was in no way socialistic; nor, however, did they provide an El Dorado for the state finances, for Wang Mang's officials turned all the laws to their private advantage. The revenues rarely reached the capital; they vanished into the pockets of subordinate officials. The result was a further serious lowering of the level of existence of the peasant population, with no addition to the financial resources of the state. Yet Wang Mang had great need of money, because he attached importance to display and because he was planning a new war. He aimed at the final destruction of the Hsiung-nu, so that access to central Asia should no longer be precarious and it should thus be possible to reduce the expense of the military administration of Turkestan. The war would also distract popular attention from the troubles at home. By way of preparation for war, Wang Mang sent a mission to the Hsiung-nu with dishonouring proposals, including changes in the name of the Hsiung-nu and in the title of the shan-yü. The name Hsiung-nu was to be given the insulting change of Hsiang-nu, meaning "subjugated slaves". The result was that risings of the Hsiung-nu took place, whereupon Wang Mang commanded that the whole of their country should be partitioned among fifteen shan-yü and declared the country to be a Chinese province. Since this declaration had no practical result, it robbed Wang Mang of the increased prestige he had sought and only further infuriated the Hsiung-nu. Wang Mang concentrated a vast army on the frontier. Meanwhile he lost the whole of the possessions in Turkestan.

But before Wang Mang's campaign against the Hsiung-nu could begin, the difficulties at home grew steadily worse. In A. D. 12 Wang Mang felt obliged to abrogate all his reform legislation because it could not be carried into effect; and the economic situation proved more lamentable than ever. There were continual risings, which culminated in A. D. 18 in a great popular insurrection, a genuine revolutionary rising of the peasants, whose distress had grown beyond bearing through Wang Mang's ill-judged measures. The rebels called themselves "Red Eyebrows"; they had painted their eyebrows red by way of badge and in order to bind their members indissolubly to their movement. The nucleus of this rising was a secret society. Such secret societies, usually are harmless, but may, in emergency situations, become an immensely effective instrument in the hands of the rural population. The secret societies then organize the peasants, in order to achieve a forcible settlement of the matter in dispute. Occasionally, however, the movement grows far beyond its leaders' original objective and becomes a popular revolutionary movement, directed against the whole ruling class. That is what happened on this occasion. Vast swarms of peasants marched to the capital, killing all officials and people of position on their way. The troops sent against them by Wang Mang either went over to the Red Eyebrows or copied them, plundering wherever they could and killing officials. Owing to the appalling mass murders and the fighting, the forces placed by Wang Mang along the frontier against the Hsiung-nu received no reinforcements and, instead of attacking the Hsiung-nu, themselves went over to plundering, so that ultimately the army simply disintegrated. Fortunately for China, the shan-yü of the time did not take advantage of his opportunity, perhaps because his position within the Hsiung-nu empire was too insecure.

Scarcely had the popular rising begun when descendants of the deposed Han dynasty appeared and tried to secure the support of the upper class.They came forward as fighters against the usurper Wang Mang and as defenders of the old social order against the revolutionary masses.But the armies which these Han princes were able to collect were no better than those of the other sides.They, too, consisted of poor and hungry peasants, whose aim was to get money or goods by robbery; they too, plundered and murdered more than they fought.

However, one prince by the name of Liu Hsiu gradually gained the upper hand.The basis of his power was the district of Nanyang in Honan, one of the wealthiest agricultural centres of China at that time and also the centre of iron and steel production.The big landowners, the gentry of Nanyang, joined him, and the prince's party conquered the capital.Wang Mang, placing entire faith in his sanctity, did not flee; he sat in his robes in the throne-room and recited the ancient writings, convinced that he would overcome his adversaries by the power of his words.But a soldier cut off his head (A.D.22).The skull was kept for two hundred years in the imperial treasury.The fighting, nevertheless, went on.Various branches of the prince's party fought one another, and all of them fought the Red Eyebrows.In those years millions of men came to their end.Finally, in A.D.24, Liu Hsiu prevailed, becoming the first emperor of the second Han dynasty, also called the Later Han dynasty; his name as emperor was Kuang-wu Ti (A.D.25-57).

7 Reaction and Restoration: the Later Han dynasty

Within the country the period that followed was one of reaction and restoration.The massacres of the preceding years had so reduced the population that there was land enough for the peasants who remained alive.Moreover, their lords and the moneylenders of the towns were generally no longer alive, so that many peasants had become free of debt.The government was transferred from Sian to Loyang, in the present province of Honan.This brought the capital nearer to the great wheat-producing regions, so that the transport of grain and other taxes in kind to the capital was cheapened.Soon this cleared foundation was covered by a new stratum, a very sparse one, of great landowners who were supporters and members of the new imperial house, largely descendants of the landowners of the earlier Han period.At first they were not much in evidence, but they gained power more and more rapidly.In spite of this, the first half-century of the Later Han period was one of good conditions on the land and economic recovery.

8 Hsiung-nu policy

In foreign policy the first period of the Later Han dynasty was one of extraordinary success, both in the extreme south and in the question of the Hsiung-nu.During the period of Wang Mang's rule and the fighting connected with it, there had been extensive migration to the south and south-west.Considerable regions of Chinese settlement had come into existence in Yünnan and even in Annam and Tongking, and a series of campaigns under General Ma Yuan (14 B.C.-A.D.49) now added these regions to the territory of the empire.These wars were carried on with relatively small forces, as previously in the Canton region, the natives being unable to offer serious resistance owing to their inferiority in equipment and civilization.The hot climate, however, to which the Chinese soldiers were unused, was hard for them to endure.

The Hsiung-nu, in spite of internal difficulties, had regained considerable influence in Turkestan during the reign of Wang Mang.But the king of the city state of Yarkand had increased his power by shrewdly playing off Chinese and Hsiung-nu against each other, so that before long he was able to attack the Hsiung-nu.The small states in Turkestan, however, regarded the overlordship of the distant China as preferable to that of Yarkand or the Hsiung-nu both of whom, being nearer, were able to bring their power more effectively into play.Accordingly many of the small states appealed for Chinese aid.Kuang-wu Ti met this appeal with a blank refusal, implying that order had only just been restored in China and that he now simply had not the resources for a campaign in Turkestan.Thus, the king of Yarkand was able to extend his power over the remainder of the small states of Turkestan, since the Hsiung-nu had been obliged to withdraw.Kuang-wu Ti had several frontier wars with the Hsiung-nu without any decisive result.But in the years around A.D.45 the Hsiung-nu had suffered several severe droughts and also great plagues of locusts, so that they had lost a large part of their cattle.They were no longer able to assert themselves in Turkestan and at the same time to fight the Chinese in the south and the Hsien-pi and the Wu-huan in the east.These two peoples, apparently largely of Mongol origin, had been subject in the past to Hsiung-nu overlordship.They had spread steadily in the territories bordering Manchuria and Mongolia, beyond the eastern frontier of the Hsiung-nu empire.Living there in relative peace and at the same time in possession of very fertile pasturage, these two peoples had grown in strength.And since the great political collapse of 58 B.C.the Hsiung-nu had not only lost their best pasturage in the north of the provinces of Shensi and Shansi, but had largely grown used to living in co-operation with the Chinese.They had become much more accustomed to trade with China, exchanging animals for textiles and grain, than to warfare, so that in the end they were defeated by the Hsien-pi and Wu-huan, who had held to the older form of purely warlike nomad life.Weakened by famine and by the wars against Wu-huan and Hsien-pi, the Hsiung-nu split into two, one section withdrawing to the north.

The southern Hsiung-nu were compelled to submit to the Chinese in order to gain security from their other enemies.Thus the Chinese were able to gain a great success without moving a finger: the Hsiung-nu, who for centuries had shown themselves again and again to be the most dangerous enemies of China, were reduced to political insignificance.About a hundred years earlier the Hsiung-nu empire had suffered defeat; now half of what remained of it became part of the Chinese state.Its place was taken by the Hsien-pi and Wu-huan, but at first they were of much less importance.

In spite of the partition, the northern Hsiung-nu attempted in the years between A.D.60 and 70 to regain a sphere of influence in Turkestan; this seemed the easier for them since the king of Yarkand had been captured and murdered, and Turkestan was more or less in a state of confusion.The Chinese did their utmost to play off the northern against the southern Hsiung-nu and to maintain a political balance of power in the west and north.So long as there were a number of small states in Turkestan, of which at least some were friendly to China, Chinese trade caravans suffered relatively little disturbance on their journeys.Independent states in Turkestan had proved more profitable for trade than when a large army of occupation had to be maintained there.When, however, there appeared to be the danger of a new union of the two parts of the Hsiung-nu as a restoration of a large empire also comprising all Turkestan, the Chinese trading monopoly was endangered.Any great power would secure the best goods for itself, and there would be no good business remaining for China.For these reasons a great Chinese campaign was undertaken against Turkestan in A.D.73 under Tou Ku.Mainly owing to the ability of the Chinese deputy commander Pan Ch'ao, the whole of Turkestan was quickly conquered.Meanwhile the emperor Ming Ti (A.D.58-75) had died, and under the new emperor Chang Ti (76-88) the "isolationist" party gained the upper hand against the clique of Tou Ku and Pan Ch'ao: the danger of the restoration of a Hsiung-nu empire, the isolationists contended, no longer existed; Turkestan should be left to itself; the small states would favour trade with China of their own accord.Meanwhile, a considerable part of Turkestan had fallen away from China, for Chang Ti sent neither money nor troops to hold the conquered territories.Pan Ch'ao nevertheless remained in Turkestan (at Kashgar and Khotan) where he held on amid countless difficulties.Although he reported (A.D.78) that the troops could feed themselves in Turkestan and needed neither supplies nor money from home, no reinforcements of any importance were sent; only a few hundred or perhaps a thousand men, mostly released criminals, reached him.Not until A.D.89 did the Pan Ch'ao clique return to power when the mother of the young emperor Ho Ti (89-105) took over the government during his minority: she was a member of the family of Tou Ku.She was interested in bringing to a successful conclusion the enterprise which had been started by members of her family and its followers.In addition, it can be shown that a number of other members of the "war party" had direct interests in the west, mainly in form of landed estates.Accordingly, a campaign was started in 89 under her brother against the northern Hsiung-nu, and it decided the fate of Turkestan in China's favour.Turkestan remained firmly in Chinese possession until the death of Pan Ch'ao in 102.Shortly afterwards heavy fighting broke out again: the Tanguts advanced from the south in an attempt to cut off Chinese access to Turkestan.The Chinese drove back the Tanguts and maintained their hold on Turkestan, though no longer absolutely.

9 Economic situation.Rebellion of the "Yellow Turbans".Collapse of the Han dynasty

The economic results of the Turkestan trade in this period were not so unfavourable as in the earlier Han period.The army of occupation was incomparably smaller, and under Pan Ch'ao's policy the soldiers were fed and paid in Turkestan itself, so that the cost to China remained small.Moreover, the drain on the national income was no longer serious because, in the intervening period, regular Chinese settlements had been planted in Turkestan including Chinese merchants, so that the trade no longer remained entirely in the hands of foreigners.

In spite of the economic consolidation at the beginning of the Later Han dynasty, and in spite of the more balanced trade, the political situation within China steadily worsened from A.D.80 onwards.Although the class of great landowners was small, a number of cliques formed within it, and their mutual struggle for power soon went beyond the limits of court intrigue.New actors now came upon the stage, namely the eunuchs.With the economic improvement there had been a general increase in the luxury at the court of the Han emperors, and the court steadily increased in size.The many hundred wives and concubines in the palace made necessary a great army of eunuchs.As they had the ear of the emperor and so could influence him, the eunuchs formed an important political factor.For a time the main struggle was between the group of eunuchs and the group of scholars.The eunuchs served a particular clique to which some of the emperor's wives belonged.The scholars, that is to say the ministers, together with members of the ministries and the administrative staff, served the interests of another clique.The struggles grew more and more sanguinary in the middle of the second century A.D.It soon proved that the group with the firmest hold in the provinces had the advantage, because it was not easy to control the provinces from a distance.The result was that, from about A.D.150, events at court steadily lost importance, the lead being taken by the generals commanding the provincial troops.It would carry us too far to give the details of all these struggles.The provincial generals were at first Ts'ao Ts'ao, Lü Pu, Yüan Shao, and Sun Ts'ê; later came Liu Pei.All were striving to gain control of the government, and all were engaged in mutual hostilities from about 180 onwards.Each general was also trying to get the emperor into his hands.Several times the last emperor of the Later Han dynasty, Hsien Ti (190-220), was captured by one or another of the generals.As the successful general was usually unable to maintain his hold on the capital, he dragged the poor emperor with him from place to place until he finally had to give him up to another general.The point of this chase after the emperor was that according to the idea introduced earlier by Wang Mang the first ruler of a new dynasty had to receive the imperial seals from the last emperor of the previous dynasty.The last emperor must abdicate in proper form.Accordingly, each general had to get possession of the emperor to begin with, in order at the proper time to take over the seals.

By about A.D.200 the new conditions had more or less crystallized.There remained only three great parties.The most powerful was that of Ts'ao Ts'ao, who controlled the north and was able to keep permanent hold of the emperor.In the west, in the province of Szechwan, Liu Pei had established himself, and in the south-east Sun Ts'ê's brother.

But we must not limit our view to these generals' struggles.At this time there were two other series of events of equal importance with those.The incessant struggles of the cliques against each other continued at the expense of the people, who had to fight them and pay for them.Thus, after A.D.150 the distress of the country population grew beyond all limits.Conditions were as disastrous as in the time of Wang Mang.And once more, as then, a popular movement broke out, that of the so-called "Yellow Turbans".This was the first of the two important events.This popular movement had a characteristic which from now on became typical of all these risings of the people.The intellectual leaders of the movement, Chang Ling and others, were members of a particular religious sect.This sect was influenced by Iranian Mazdaism on the one side and by certain ideas from Lao Tz[)u] on the other side; and these influences were superimposed on popular rural as well as, perhaps, local tribal religious beliefs and superstitions.The sect had roots along the coastal settlements of Eastern China, where it seems to have gained the support of the peasantry and their local priests.These priests of the people were opposed to the representatives of the official religion, that is to say the officials drawn from the gentry.In small towns and villages the temples of the gods of the fruits of the field, of the soil, and so on, were administered by authorized local officials, and these officials also carried out the prescribed sacrifices.The old temples of the people were either done away with (we have many edicts of the Han period concerning the abolition of popular forms of religious worship), or their worship was converted into an official cult: the all-powerful gentry extended their domination over religion as well as all else.But the peasants regarded their local unauthorized priests as their natural leaders against the gentry and against gentry forms of religion.One branch, probably the main branch of this movement, developed a stronghold in Eastern Szechwan province, where its members succeeded to create a state of their own which retained its independence for a while.It is the only group which developed real religious communities in which men and women participated, extensive welfare schemes existed and class differences were discouraged.It had a real church organization with dioceses, communal friendship meals and a confession ritual; in short, real piety developed as it could not develop in the official religions.After the annihilation of this state, remnants of the organization can be traced through several centuries, mainly in central and south China.It may well be that the many "Taoistic" traits which can be found in the religions of late and present-day Mongolian and Tibetan tribes, can be derived from this movement of the Yellow Turbans.

The rising of the Yellow Turbans began in 184; all parties, cliques and generals alike, were equally afraid of the revolutionaries, since these were a threat to the gentry as such, and so to all parties.Consequently a combined army of considerable size was got together and sent against the rebels.The Yellow Turbans were beaten.

During these struggles it became evident that Ts'ao Ts'ao with his troops had become the strongest of all the generals.His troops seem to have consisted not of Chinese soldiers alone, but also of Hsiung-nu.It is understandable that the annals say nothing about this, and it can only be inferred from the facts.It appears that in order to reinforce their armies the generals recruited not only Chinese but foreigners.The generals operating in the region of the present-day Peking had soldiers of the Wu-huan and Hsien-pi, and even of the Ting-ling; Liu Pei, in the west, made use of Tanguts, and Ts'ao Ts'ao clearly went farthest of all in this direction; he seems to have been responsible for settling nineteen tribes of Hsiung-nu in the Chinese province of Shansi between 180 and 200, in return for their armed aid.In this way Ts'ao Ts'ao gained permanent power in the empire by means of these troops, so that immediately after his death his son Ts'ao P'ei, with the support of powerful allied families, was able to force the emperor to abdicate and to found a new dynasty, the Wei dynasty (A.D.220).

This meant, however, that a part of China which for several centuries had been Chinese was given up to the Hsiung-nu. This was not, of course, what Ts'ao Ts'ao had intended; he had given the Hsiung-nu some area of pasturage in Shansi with the idea that they should be controlled and administered by the officials of the surrounding district. His plan had been similar to what the Chinese had often done with success: aliens were admitted into the territory of the empire in a body, but then the influence of the surrounding administrative centres was steadily extended over them, until the immigrants completely lost their own nationality and became Chinese. The nineteen tribes of Hsiung-nu, however, were much too numerous, and after the prolonged struggles in China the provincial administration proved much too weak to be able to carry out the plan. Thus there came into existence here, within China, a small Hsiung-nu realm ruled by several shan-yüThis was the second major development, and it became of the utmost importance to the history of the next four centuries.

10 Literature and Art

With the development of the new class of the gentry in the Han period, there was an increase in the number of those who were anxious to participate in what had been in the past an exclusively aristocratic possession—education.Thus it is by no mere chance that in this period many encyclopaedias were compiled.Encyclopaedias convey knowledge in an easily grasped and easily found form.The first compilation of this sort dates from the third century B.C.It was the work of Lü Pu wei, the merchant who was prime minister and regent during the minority of Shih Huang-ti.It contains general information concerning ceremonies, customs, historic events, and other things the knowledge of which was part of a general education.Soon afterwards other encyclopaedias appeared, of which the best known is the Book of the Mountains and Seas (Shan Hai Ching). This book, arranged according to regions of the world, contains everything known at the time about geography, natural philosophy, and the animal and plant world, and also about popular myths. This tendency to systemization is shown also in the historical works. The famous Shih Chi, one of our main sources for Chinese history, is the first historical work of the modern type, that is to say, built up on a definite plan, and it was also the model for all later official historiography. Its author, Ss[)u]-ma Ch'ien (born 135 B. C.) , and his father, made use of the material in the state archives and of private documents, old historical and philosophical books, inscriptions, and the results of their own travels. The philosophical and historical books of earlier times (with the exception of those of the nature of chronicles) consisted merely of a few dicta or reports of particular events, but the Shih Chi is a compendium of a mass of source-material. The documents were abbreviated, but the text of the extracts was altered as little as possible, so that the general result retains in a sense the value of an original source. In its arrangement the Shih Chi became a model for all later historians: the first part is in the form of annals, and there follow tables concerning the occupants of official posts and fiefs, and then biographies of various important personalities, though the type of the comprehensive biography did not appear till later. The Shih Chi also, like later historical works, contains many monographs dealing with particular fields of knowledge, such as astronomy, the calendar, music, economics, official dress at court, and much else. The whole type of construction differs fundamentally from such works as those of Thucydides or Herodotus. The Chinese historical works have the advantage that the section of annals gives at once the events of a particular year, the monographs describe the development of a particular field of knowledge, and the biographical section offers information concerning particular personalities. The mental attitude is that of the gentry: shortly after the time of Ss[)u]-ma Ch'ien an historical department was founded, in which members of the gentry worked as historians upon the documents prepared by representatives of the gentry in the various government offices.

In addition to encyclopaedias and historical works, many books of philosophy were written in the Han period, but most of them offer no fundamentally new ideas. They were the product of the leisure of rich members of the gentry, and only three of them are of importance. One is the work of Tung Chung-shu, already mentioned. The second is a book by Liu An called Huai-nan Tz[)u]Prince Liu An occupied himself with Taoism and allied problems, gathered around him scholars of different schools, and carried on discussions with them.Many of his writings are lost, but enough is extant to show that he was one of the earliest Chinese alchemists.The question has not yet been settled, but it is probable that alchemy first appeared in China, together with the cult of the "art" of prolonging life, and was later carried to the West, where it flourished among the Arabs and in medieval Europe.

The third important book of the Han period was the Lun Hêng (Critique of Opinions) of Wang Ch'ung, which appeared in the first century of the Christian era. Wang Ch'ung advocated rational thinking and tried to pave the way for a free natural science, in continuation of the beginnings which the natural philosophers of the later Chou period had made. The book analyses reports in ancient literature and customs of daily life, and shows how much they were influenced by superstition and by ignorance of the facts of nature. From this attitude a modern science might have developed, as in Europe towards the end of the Middle Ages; but the gentry had every reason to play down this tendency which, with its criticism of all that was traditional, might have proceeded to an attack on the dominance of the gentry and their oppression especially of the merchants and artisans. It is fascinating to observe how it was the needs of the merchants and seafarers of Asia Minor and Greece that provided the stimulus for the growth of the classic sciences, and how on the contrary the growth of Chinese science was stifled because the gentry were so strongly hostile to commerce and navigation, though both had always existed.

There were great literary innovations in the field of poetry.The splendour and elegance at the new imperial court of the Han dynasty attracted many poets who sang the praises of the emperor and his court and were given official posts and dignities.These praises were in the form of grandiloquent, overloaded poetry, full of strange similes and allusions, but with little real feeling.In contrast, the many women singers and dancers at the court, mostly slaves from southern China, introduced at the court southern Chinese forms of song and poem, which were soon adopted and elaborated by poets.Poems and dance songs were composed which belonged to the finest that Chinese poetry can show—full of natural feeling, simple in language, moving in content.

Our knowledge of the arts is drawn from two sources—literature, and the actual discoveries in the excavations.Thus we know that most of the painting was done on silk, of which plenty came into the market through the control of silk-producing southern China.Paper had meanwhile been invented in the second century B.C., by perfecting the techniques of making bark-cloth and felt.Unfortunately nothing remains of the actual works that were the first examples of what the Chinese everywhere were beginning to call "art"."People", that is to say the gentry, painted as a social pastime, just as they assembled together for poetry, discussion, or performances of song and dance; they painted as an aesthetic pleasure and rarely as a means of earning.We find philosophic ideas or greetings, emotions, and experiences represented by paintings—paintings with fanciful or ideal landscapes; paintings representing life and environment of the cultured class in idealized form, never naturalistic either in fact or in intention.Until recently it was an indispensable condition in the Chinese view that an artist must be "cultured" and be a member of the gentry—distinguished, unoccupied, wealthy.A man who was paid for his work, for instance for a portrait for the ancestral cult, was until late time regarded as a craftsman, not as an artist.Yet, these "craftsmen" have produced in Han time and even earlier, many works which, in our view, undoubtedly belong to the realm of art.In the tombs have been found reliefs whose technique is generally intermediate between simple outline engraving and intaglio.The lining-in is most frequently executed in scratched lines.The representations, mostly in strips placed one above another, are of lively historical scenes, scenes from the life of the dead, great ritual ceremonies, or adventurous scenes from mythology.Bronze vessels have representations in inlaid gold and silver, mostly of animals.The most important documents of the painting of the Han period have also been found in tombs.We see especially ladies and gentlemen of society, with richly ornamented, elegant, expensive clothing that is very reminiscent of the clothing customary to this day in Japan.There are also artistic representations of human figures on lacquer caskets.While sculpture was not strongly developed, the architecture of the Han must have been magnificent and technically highly complex.Sculpture and temple architecture received a great stimulus with the spread of Buddhism in China.According to our present knowledge, Buddhism entered China from the south coast and through Central Asia at latest in the first century B.C.; it came with foreign merchants from India or Central Asia.According to Indian customs, Brahmans, the Hindu caste providing all Hindu priests, could not leave their homes.As merchants on their trips which lasted often several years, did not want to go without religious services, they turned to Buddhist priests as well as to priests of Near Eastern religions.These priests were not prevented from travelling and used this opportunity for missionary purposes.Thus, for a long time after the first arrival of Buddhists, the Buddhist priests in China were foreigners who served foreign merchant colonies.The depressed conditions of the people in the second century A.D.drove members of the lower classes into their arms, while the parts of Indian science which these priests brought with them from India aroused some interest in certain educated circles.Buddhism, therefore, undeniably exercised an influence at the end of the Han dynasty, although no Chinese were priests and few, if any, gentry members were adherents of the religious teachings.

With the end of the Han period a further epoch of Chinese history comes to its close.The Han period was that of the final completion and consolidation of the social order of the gentry.The period that followed was that of the conflicts of the Chinese with the populations on their northern borders.

Chapter Seven

THE EPOCH OF THE FIRST DIVISION OF CHINA (A.D.220-580)

(A) The three kingdoms (220-265)

1 Social, intellectual, and economic problems during the first division

The end of the Han period was followed by the three and a half centuries of the first division of China into several kingdoms, each with its own dynasty.In fact, once before during the period of the Contending States, China had been divided into a number of states, but at least in theory they had been subject to the Chou dynasty, and none of the contending states had made the claim to be the legitimate ruler of all China.In this period of the "first division" several states claimed to be legitimate rulers, and later Chinese historians tried to decide which of these had "more right" to this claim.At the outset (220-280) there were three kingdoms (Wei, Wu, Shu Han); then came an unstable reunion during twenty-seven years (280-307) under the rule of the Western Chin.This was followed by a still sharper division between north and south: while a wave of non-Chinese nomad dynasties poured over the north, in the south one Chinese clique after another seized power, so that dynasty followed dynasty until finally, in 580, a united China came again into existence, adopting the culture of the north and the traditions of the gentry.

In some ways, the period from 220 to 580 can be compared with the period of the coincidentally synchronous breakdown of the Roman Empire: in both cases there was no great increase in population, although in China perhaps no over-all decrease in population as in the Roman Empire; decrease occurred, however, in the population of the great Chinese cities, especially of the capital; furthermore we witness, in both empires, a disorganization of the monetary system, i.e.in China the reversal to a predominance of natural economy after some 400 years of money economy.Yet, this period cannot be simply dismissed as a transition period, as was usually done by the older European works on China.The social order of the gentry, whose birth and development inside China we followed, had for the first time to defend itself against views and systems entirely opposed to it; for the Turkish and Mongol peoples who ruled northern China brought with them their traditions of a feudal nobility with privileges of birth and all that they implied.Thus this period, socially regarded, is especially that of the struggle between the Chinese gentry and the northern nobility, the gentry being excluded at first as a direct political factor in the northern and more important part of China.In the south the gentry continued in the old style with a constant struggle between cliques, the only difference being that the class assumed a sort of "colonial" character through the formation of gigantic estates and through association with the merchant class.

To throw light on the scale of events, we need to have figures of population.There are no figures for the years around A.D.220, and we must make do with those of 140; but in order to show the relative strength of the three states it is the ratio between the figures that matters.In 140 the regions which later belonged to Wei had roughly 29,000,000 inhabitants; those later belonging to Wu had 11,700,000; those which belonged later to Shu Han had a bare 7,500,000.(The figures take no account of the primitive native population, which was not yet included in the taxation lists.)The Hsiung-nu formed only a small part of the population, as there were only the nineteen tribes which had abandoned one of the parts, already reduced, of the Hsiung-nu empire.The whole Hsiung-nu empire may never have counted more than some 3,000,000.At the time when the population of what became the Wei territory totalled 29,000,000 the capital with its immediate environment had over a million inhabitants.The figure is exclusive of most of the officials and soldiers, as these were taxable in their homes and so were counted there.It is clear that this was a disproportionate concentration round the capital.

It was at this time that both South and North China felt the influence of Buddhism, which until A.D.220 had no more real effect on China than had, for instance, the penetration of European civilization between 1580 and 1842.Buddhism offered new notions, new ideals, foreign science, and many other elements of culture, with which the old Chinese philosophy and science had to contend.At the same time there came with Buddhism the first direct knowledge of the great civilized countries west of China.Until then China had regarded herself as the only existing civilized country, and all other countries had been regarded as barbaric, for a civilized country was then taken to mean a country with urban industrial crafts and agriculture.In our present period, however, China's relations with the Middle East and with southern Asia were so close that the existence of civilized countries outside China had to be admitted.Consequently, when alien dynasties ruled in northern China and a new high civilization came into existence there, it was impossible to speak of its rulers as barbarians any longer.Even the theory that the Chinese emperor was the Son of Heaven and enthroned at the centre of the world was no longer tenable.Thus a vast widening of China's intellectual horizon took place.

Economically, our present period witnessed an adjustment in South China between the Chinese way of life, which had penetrated from the north, and that of the natives of the south.Large groups of Chinese had to turn over from wheat culture in dry fields to rice culture in wet fields, and from field culture to market gardening.In North China the conflict went on between Chinese agriculture and the cattle breeding of Central Asia.Was the will of the ruler to prevail and North China to become a country of pasturage, or was the country to keep to the agrarian tradition of the people under this rule?The Turkish and Mongol conquerors had recently given up their old supplementary agriculture and had turned into pure nomads, obtaining the agricultural produce they needed by raiding or trade.The conquerors of North China were now faced with a different question: if they were to remain nomads, they must either drive the peasants into the south, or make them into slave herdsmen, or exterminate them.There was one more possibility: they might install themselves as a ruling upper class, as nobles over the subjugated native peasants.The same question was faced much later by the Mongols, and at first they answered it differently from the peoples of our present period.Only by attention to this problem shall we be in a position to explain why the rule of the Turkish peoples did not last, why these peoples were gradually absorbed and disappeared.

2 Status of the two southern Kingdoms

When the last emperor of the Han period had to abdicate in favour of Ts'ao P'ei and the Wei dynasty began, China was in no way a unified realm.Almost immediately, in 221, two other army commanders, who had long been independent, declared themselves emperors.In the south-west of China, in the present province of Szechwan, the Shu Han dynasty was founded in this way, and in the south-east, in the region of the present Nanking, the Wu dynasty.

The situation of the southern kingdom of Shu Han (221-263) corresponded more or less to that of the Chungking regime in the Second World War.West of it the high Tibetan mountains towered up; there was very little reason to fear any major attack from that direction.In the north and east the realm was also protected by difficult mountain country.The south lay relatively open, but at that time there were few Chinese living there, but only natives with a relatively low civilization.The kingdom could only be seriously attacked from two corners—through the north-west, where there was a negotiable plateau, between the Ch'in-ling mountains in the north and the Tibetan mountains in the west, a plateau inhabited by fairly highly developed Tibetan tribes; and secondly through the south-east corner, where it would be possible to penetrate up the Yangtze.There was in fact incessant fighting at both these dangerous corners.

Economically, Shu Han was not in a bad position.The country had long been part of the Chinese wheat lands, and had a fairly large Chinese peasant population in the well irrigated plain of Ch'engtu.There was also a wealthy merchant class, supplying grain to the surrounding mountain peoples and buying medicaments and other profitable Tibetan products.And there were trade routes from here through the present province of Yünnan to India.

Shu Han's difficulty was that its population was not large enough to be able to stand against the northern State of Wei; moreover, it was difficult to carry out an offensive from Shu Han, though the country could defend itself well.The first attempt to find a remedy was a campaign against the native tribes of the present Yünnan.The purpose of this was to secure manpower for the army and also slaves for sale; for the south-west had for centuries been a main source for traffic in slaves.Finally it was hoped to gain control over the trade to India.All these things were intended to strengthen Shu Han internally, but in spite of certain military successes they produced no practical result, as the Chinese were unable in the long run to endure the climate or to hold out against the guerrilla tactics of the natives.Shu Han tried to buy the assistance of the Tibetans and with their aid to carry out a decisive attack on Wei, whose dynastic legitimacy was not recognized by Shu Han.The ruler of Shu Han claimed to be a member of the imperial family of the deposed Han dynasty, and therefore to be the rightful, legitimate ruler over China.His descent, however, was a little doubtful, and in any case it depended on a link far back in the past.Against this the Wei of the north declared that the last ruler of the Han dynasty had handed over to them with all due form the seals of the state and therewith the imperial prerogative.The controversy was of no great practical importance, but it played a big part in the Chinese Confucianist school until the twelfth century, and contributed largely to a revision of the old conceptions of legitimacy.

The political plans of Shu Han were well considered and far-seeing.They were evolved by the premier, a man from Shantung named Chu-ko Liang; for the ruler died in 226 and his successor was still a child.But Chu-ko Liang lived only for a further eight years, and after his death in 234 the decline of Shu Han began.Its political leaders no longer had a sense of what was possible.Thus Wei inflicted several defeats on Shu Han, and finally subjugated it in 263.

The situation of the state of Wu was much less favourable than that of Shu Han, though this second southern kingdom lasted from 221 to 280.Its country consisted of marshy, water-logged plains, or mountains with narrow valleys.Here Tai peoples had long cultivated their rice, while in the mountains Yao tribes lived by hunting and by simple agriculture.Peasants immigrating from the north found that their wheat and pulse did not thrive here, and slowly they had to gain familiarity with rice cultivation.They were also compelled to give up their sheep and cattle and in their place to breed pigs and water buffaloes, as was done by the former inhabitants of the country.The lower class of the population was mainly non-Chinese; above it was an upper class of Chinese, at first relatively small, consisting of officials, soldiers, and merchants in a few towns and administrative centres.The country was poor, and its only important economic asset was the trade in metals, timber, and other southern products; soon there came also a growing overseas trade with India and the Middle East, bringing revenues to the state in so far as the goods were re-exported from Wu to the north.

Wu never attempted to conquer the whole of China, but endeavoured to consolidate its own difficult territory with a view to building up a state on a firm foundation.In general, Wu played mainly a passive part in the incessant struggles between the three kingdoms, though it was active in diplomacy.The Wu kingdom entered into relations with a man who in 232 had gained control of the present South Manchuria and shortly afterwards assumed the title of king.This new ruler of "Yen", as he called his kingdom, had determined to attack the Wei dynasty, and hoped, by putting pressure on it in association with Wu, to overrun Wei from north and south.Wei answered this plan very effectively by recourse to diplomacy and it began by making Wu believe that Wu had reason to fear an attack from its western neighbour Shu Han.A mission was also dispatched from Wei to negotiate with Japan.Japan was then emerging from its stone age and introducing metals; there were countless small principalities and states, of which the state of Yamato, then ruled by a queen, was the most powerful.Yamato had certain interests in Korea, where it already ruled a small coastal strip in the east.Wei offered Yamato the prospect of gaining the whole of Korea if it would turn against the state of Yen in South Manchuria.Wu, too, had turned to Japan, but the negotiations came to nothing, since Wu, as an ally of Yen, had nothing to offer.The queen of Yamato accordingly sent a mission to Wei; she had already decided in favour of that state.Thus Wei was able to embark on war against Yen, which it annihilated in 237.This wrecked Wu's diplomatic projects, and no more was heard of any ambitious plans of the kingdom of Wu.

The two southern states had a common characteristic: both were condottiere states, not built up from their own population but conquered by generals from the north and ruled for a time by those generals and their northern troops.Natives gradually entered these northern armies and reduced their percentage of northerners, but a gulf remained between the native population, including its gentry, and the alien military rulers.This reduced the striking power of the southern states.

On the other hand, this period had its positive element.For the first time there was an emperor in south China, with all the organization that implied.A capital full of officials, eunuchs, and all the satellites of an imperial court provided incentives to economic advance, because it represented a huge market.The peasants around it were able to increase their sales and grew prosperous.The increased demand resulted in an increase of tillage and a thriving trade.Soon the transport problem had to be faced, as had happened long ago in the north, and new means of transport, especially ships, were provided, and new trade routes opened which were to last far longer than the three kingdoms; on the other hand, the costs of transport involved fresh taxation burdens for the population.The skilled staff needed for the business of administration came into the new capital from the surrounding districts, for the conquerors and new rulers of the territory of the two southern dynasties had brought with them from the north only uneducated soldiers and almost equally uneducated officers.The influx of scholars and administrators into the chief cities produced cultural and economic centres in the south, a circumstance of great importance to China's later development.

3 The northern State of Wei

The situation in the north, in the state of Wei (220-265) was anything but rosy.Wei ruled what at that time were the most important and richest regions of China, the plain of Shensi in the west and the great plain east of Loyang, the two most thickly populated areas of China.But the events at the end of the Han period had inflicted great economic injury on the country.The southern and south-western parts of the Han empire had been lost, and though parts of Central Asia still gave allegiance to Wei, these, as in the past, were economically more of a burden than an asset, because they called for incessant expenditure.At least the trade caravans were able to travel undisturbed from and to China through Turkestan.Moreover, the Wei kingdom, although much smaller than the empire of the Han, maintained a completely staffed court at great expense, because the rulers, claiming to rule the whole of China, felt bound to display more magnificence than the rulers of the southern dynasties.They had also to reward the nineteen tribes of the Hsiung-nu in the north for their military aid, not only with cessions of land but with payments of money.Finally, they would not disarm but maintained great armies for the continual fighting against the southern states.The Wei dynasty did not succeed, however, in closely subordinating the various army commanders to the central government.Thus the commanders, in collusion with groups of the gentry, were able to enrich themselves and to secure regional power.The inadequate strength of the central government of Wei was further undermined by the rivalries among the dominant gentry.The imperial family (Ts'ao Pei, who reigned from 220 to 226, had taken as emperor the name of Wen Ti) was descended from one of the groups of great landowners that had formed in the later Han period.The nucleus of that group was a family named Ts'ui, of which there is mention from the Han period onward and which maintained its power down to the tenth century; but it remained in the background and at first held entirely aloof from direct intervention in high policy.Another family belonging to this group was the Hsia-hou family which was closely united to the family of Wen Ti by adoption; and very soon there was also the Ss[)u]-ma family.Quite naturally Wen Ti, as soon as he came into power, made provision for the members of these powerful families, for only thanks to their support had he been able to ascend the throne and to maintain his hold on the throne.Thus we find many members of the Hsia-hou and Ss[)u]-ma families in government positions.The Ss[)u]-ma family especially showed great activity, and at the end of Wen Ti's reign their power had so grown that a certain Ss[)u]-ma I was in control of the government, while the new emperor Ming Ti (227-233) was completely powerless.This virtually sealed the fate of the Wei dynasty, so far as the dynastic family was concerned.The next emperor was installed and deposed by the Ss[)u]-ma family; dissensions arose within the ruling family, leading to members of the family assassinating one another.In 264 a member of the Ss[)u]-ma family declared himself king; when he died and was succeeded by his son Ss[)u]-ma Yen, the latter, in 265, staged a formal act of renunciation of the throne of the Wei dynasty and made himself the first ruler of the new Chin dynasty.There is nothing to gain by detailing all the intrigues that led up to this event: they all took place in the immediate environment of the court and in no way affected the people, except that every item of expenditure, including all the bribery, had to come out of the taxes paid by the people.

With such a situation at court, with the bad economic situation in the country, and with the continual fighting against the two southern states, there could be no question of any far-reaching foreign policy.Parts of eastern Turkestan still showed some measure of allegiance to Wei, but only because at the time it had no stronger opponent.The Hsiung-nu beyond the frontier were suffering from a period of depression which was at the same time a period of reconstruction.They were beginning slowly to form together with Mongol elements a new unit, the Juan-juan, but at this time were still politically inactive.The nineteen tribes within north China held more and more closely together as militarily organized nomads, but did not yet represent a military power and remained loyal to the Wei.The only important element of trouble seems to have been furnished by the Hsien-pi tribes, who had joined with Wu-huan tribes and apparently also with vestiges of the Hsiung-nu in eastern Mongolia, and who made numerous raids over the frontier into the Wei empire.The state of Yen, in southern Manchuria, had already been destroyed by Wei in 238 thanks to Wei's good relations with Japan.Loose diplomatic relations were maintained with Japan in the period that followed; in that period many elements of Chinese civilization found their way into Japan and there, together with settlers from many parts of China, helped to transform the culture of ancient Japan.

(B) The Western Chin dynasty (A.D.265-317)

1 Internal situation in the Chin empire

The change of dynasty in the state of Wei did not bring any turn in China's internal history.Ss[)u]-ma Yen, who as emperor was called Wu Ti (265-289), had come to the throne with the aid of his clique and his extraordinarily large and widely ramified family.To these he had to give offices as reward.There began at court once more the same spectacle as in the past, except that princes of the new imperial family now played a greater part than under the Wei dynasty, whose ruling house had consisted of a small family.It was now customary, in spite of the abolition of the feudal system, for the imperial princes to receive large regions to administer, the fiscal revenues of which represented their income.The princes were not, however, to exercise full authority in the style of the former feudal lords: their courts were full of imperial control officials.In the event of war it was their duty to come forward, like other governors, with an army in support of the central government.The various Chin princes succeeded, however, in making other governors, beyond the frontiers of their regions, dependent on them.Also, they collected armies of their own independently of the central government and used those armies to pursue personal policies.The members of the families allied with the ruling house, for their part, did all they could to extend their own power.Thus the first ruler of the dynasty was tossed to and fro between the conflicting interests and was himself powerless.But though intrigue was piled on intrigue, the ruler who, of course, himself had come to the head of the state by means of intrigues, was more watchful than the rulers of the Wei dynasty had been, and by shrewd counter-measures he repeatedly succeeded in playing off one party against another, so that the dynasty remained in power.Numerous widespread and furious risings nevertheless took place, usually led by princes.Thus during this period the history of the dynasty was of an extraordinarily dismal character.

In spite of this, the Chin troops succeeded in overthrowing the second southern state, that of Wu (A. D. 280), and in so restoring the unity of the empire, the Shu Han realm having been already conquered by the Wei. After the destruction of Wu there remained no external enemy that represented a potential danger, so that a general disarmament was decreed (280) in order to restore a healthy economic and financial situation. This disarmament applied, of course, to the troops directly under the orders of the dynasty, namely the troops of the court and the capital and the imperial troops in the provinces. Disarmament could not, however, be carried out in the princes' regions, as the princes declared that they needed personal guards. The dismissal of the troops was accompanied by a decree ordering the surrender of arms. It may be assumed that the government proposed to mint money with the metal of the weapons surrendered, for coin (the old coin of the Wei dynasty) had become very scarce; as we indicated previously, money had largely been replaced by goods so that, for instance, grain and silks were used for the payment of salaries. China, from c200 A.D.on until the eighth century, remained in a period of such partial "natural economy".

Naturally the decree for the surrender of weapons remained a dead-letter.The discharged soldiers kept their weapons at first and then preferred to sell them.A large part of them was acquired by the Hsiung-nu and the Hsien-pi in the north of China; apparently they usually gave up land in return.In this way many Chinese soldiers, though not all by any means, went as peasants to the regions in the north of China and beyond the frontier.They were glad to do so, for the Hsiung-nu and the Hsien-pi had not the efficient administration and rigid tax collection of the Chinese; and above all, they had no great landowners who could have organized the collection of taxes.For their part, the Hsiung-nu and the Hsien-pi had no reason to regret this immigration of peasants, who could provide them with the farm produce they needed.And at the same time they were receiving from them large quantities of the most modern weapons.

This ineffective disarmament was undoubtedly the most pregnant event of the period of the western Chin dynasty.The measure was intended to save the cost of maintaining the soldiers and to bring them back to the land as peasants (and taxpayers); but the discharged men were not given land by the government.The disarmament achieved nothing, not even the desired increase in the money in circulation; what did happen was that the central government lost all practical power, while the military strength both of the dangerous princes within the country and also of the frontier people was increased.The results of these mistaken measures became evident at once and compelled the government to arm anew.

2 Effect on the frontier peoples

Four groups of frontier peoples drew more or less advantage from the demobilization law—the people of the Toba, the Tibetans, and the Hsien-pi in the north, and the nineteen tribes of the Hsiung-nu within the frontiers of the empire.In the course of time all sorts of complicated relations developed among those ascending peoples as well as between them and the Chinese.

The Toba (T'o-pa) formed a small group in the north of the present province of Shansi, north of the city of Tat'ungfu, and they were about to develop their small state.They were primarily of Turkish origin, but had absorbed many tribes of the older Hsiung-nu and the Hsien-pi.In considering the ethnical relationships of all these northern peoples we must rid ourselves of our present-day notions of national unity.Among the Toba there were many Turkish tribes, but also Mongols, and probably a Tungus tribe, as well as perhaps others whom we cannot yet analyse.These tribes may even have spoken different languages, much as later not only Mongol but also Turkish was spoken in the Mongol empire.The political units they formed were tribal unions, not national states.

Such a union or federation can be conceived of, structurally, as a cone.At the top point of the cone there was the person of the ruler of the federation.He was a member of the leading family or clan of the leading tribe (the two top layers of the cone).If we speak of the Toba as of Turkish stock, we mean that according to our present knowledge, this leading tribe (a) spoke a language belonging to the Turkish language family and (b) exhibited a pattern of culture which belonged to the type called above in Chapter One as "North-western Culture".The next layer of the cone represented the "inner circle of tribes", i.e.such tribes as had joined with the leading tribe at an early moment.The leading family of the leading tribe often took their wives from the leading families of the "inner tribes", and these leaders served as advisors and councillors to the leader of the federation.The next lower layer consisted of the "outer tribes", i.e.tribes which had joined the federation only later, often under strong pressure; their number was always much larger than the number of the "inner tribes", but their political influence was much weaker.Every layer below that of the "outer tribes" was regarded as inferior and more or less "unfree".There was many a tribe which, as a tribe, had to serve a free tribe; and there were others who, as tribes, had to serve the whole federation.In addition, there were individuals who had quit or had been forced to quit their tribe or their home and had joined the federation leader as his personal "bondsmen"; further, there were individual slaves and, finally, there were the large masses of agriculturists who had been conquered by the federation.When such a federation was dissolved, by defeat or inner dissent, individual tribes or groups of tribes could join a new federation or could resume independent life.

Typically, such federations exhibited two tendencies.In the case of the Hsiung-nu we indicated already previously that the leader of the federation repeatedly attempted to build up a kind of bureaucratic system, using his bondsmen as a nucleus.A second tendency was to replace the original tribal leaders by members of the family of the federation leader.If this initial step, usually first taken when "outer tribes" were incorporated, was successful, a reorganization was attempted: instead of using tribal units in war, military units on the basis of "Groups of Hundred", "Groups of Thousand", etc., were created and the original tribes were dissolved into military regiments.In the course of time, and especially at the time of the dissolution of a federation, these military units had gained social coherence and appeared to be tribes again; we are probably correct in assuming that all "tribes" which we find from this time on were already "secondary" tribes of this type.A secondary tribe often took its name from its leader, but it could also revive an earlier "primary tribe" name.

The Toba represented a good example for this "cone" structure of pastoral society.Also the Hsiung-nu of this time seem to have had a similar structure.Incidentally, we will from now on call the Hsiung-nu "Huns" because Chinese sources begin to call them "Hu", a term which also had a more general meaning (all non-Chinese in the north and west of China) as well as a more special meaning (non-Chinese in Central Asia and India).

The Tibetans fell apart into two sub-groups, the Ch'iang and the Ti.Both names appeared repeatedly as political conceptions, but the Tibetans, like all other state-forming groups of peoples, sheltered in their realms countless alien elements.In the course of the third and second centuries B.C.the group of the Ti, mainly living in the territory of the present Szechwan, had mixed extensively with remains of the Yüeh-chih; the others, the Ch'iang, were northern Tibetans or so-called Tanguts; that is to say, they contained Turkish and Mongol elements.In A.D.296 there began a great rising of the Ti, whose leader Ch'i Wan-nien took on the title emperor.The Ch'iang rose with them, but it was not until later, from 312, that they pursued an independent policy.The Ti State, however, though it had a second emperor, very soon lost importance, so that we shall be occupied solely with the Ch'iang.

As the tribal structure of Tibetan groups was always weak and as leadership developed among them only in times of war, their states always show a military rather than a tribal structure, and the continuation of these states depended strongly upon the personal qualities of their leaders.Incidentally, Tibetans fundamentally were sheep-breeders and not horse-breeders and, therefore, they always showed inclination to incorporate infantry into their armies.Thus, Tibetan states differed strongly from the aristocratically organized "Turkish" states as well as from the tribal, non-aristocratic "Mongol" states of that period.

The Hsien-pi, according to our present knowledge, were under "Mongol" leadership, i.e.we believe that the language of the leading group belonged to the family of Mongolian languages and that their culture belonged to the type described above as "Northern culture".They had, in addition, a strong admixture of Hunnic tribes.Throughout the period during which they played a part in history, they never succeeded in forming any great political unit, in strong contrast to the Huns, who excelled in state formation.The separate groups of the Hsien-pi pursued a policy of their own; very frequently Hsien-pi fought each other, and they never submitted to a common leadership.Thus their history is entirely that of small groups.As early as the Wei period there had been small-scale conflicts with the Hsien-pi tribes, and at times the tribes had some success.The campaigns of the Hsien-pi against North China now increased, and in the course of them the various tribes formed firmer groupings, among which the Mu-jung tribes played a leading part.In 281, the year after the demobilization law, this group marched south into China, and occupied the region round Peking.After fierce fighting, in which the Mu-jung section suffered heavy losses, a treaty was signed in 289, under which the Mu-jung tribe of the Hsien-pi recognized Chinese overlordship.The Mu-jung were driven to this step mainly because they had been continually attacked from southern Manchuria by another Hsien-pi tribe, the Yü-wen, the tribe most closely related to them.The Mu-jung made use of the period of their so-called subjection to organize their community in North China.

South of the Toba were the nineteen tribes of the Hsiung-nu or Huns, as we are now calling them. Their leader in A. D. 287, Liu Yüan, was one of the principal personages of this period. His name is purely Chinese, but he was descended from the Hun shan-yü, from the family and line of Mao Tun.His membership of that long-famous noble line and old ruling family of Huns gave him a prestige which he increased by his great organizing ability.

3 Struggles for the throne

We shall return to Liu Yüan later; we must now cast another glance at the official court of the Chin.In that court a family named Yang had become very powerful, a daughter of this family having become empress.When, however, the emperor died, the wife of the new emperor Hui Ti (290-306) secured the assassination of the old empress Yang and of her whole family.Thus began the rule at court of the Chia family.In 299 the Chia family got rid of the heir to the throne, to whom they objected, assassinating this prince and another one.This event became the signal for large-scale activity on the part of the princes, each of whom was supported by particular groups of families.The princes had not complied with the disarmament law of 280 and so had become militarily supreme.The generals newly appointed in the course of the imperial rearmament at once entered into alliance with the princes, and thus were quite unreliable as officers of the government.Both the generals and the princes entered into agreements with the frontier peoples to assure their aid in the struggle for power.The most popular of these auxiliaries were the Hsien-pi, who were fighting for one of the princes whose territory lay in the east.Since the Toba were the natural enemies of the Hsien-pi, who were continually contesting their hold on their territory, the Toba were always on the opposite side to that supported by the Hsien-pi, so that they now supported generals who were ostensibly loyal to the government.The Huns, too, negotiated with several generals and princes and received tempting offers.Above all, all the frontier peoples were now militarily well equipped, continually receiving new war material from the Chinese who from time to time were co-operating with them.

In A.D.300 Prince Lun assassinated the empress Chia and removed her group.In 301 he made himself emperor, but in the same year he was killed by the prince of Ch'i.This prince was killed in 302 by the prince of Ch'ang-sha, who in turned was killed in 303 by the prince of Tung-hai.The prince of Ho-chien rose in 302 and was killed in 306; the prince of Ch'engtu rose in 303, conquered the capital in 305, and then, in 306, was himself removed.I mention all these names and dates only to show the disunion within the ruling groups.

4 Migration of Chinese

All these struggles raged round the capital, for each of the princes wanted to secure full power and to become emperor.Thus the border regions remained relatively undisturbed.Their population suffered much less from the warfare than the unfortunate people in the neighbourhood of the central government.For this reason there took place a mass migration of Chinese from the centre of the empire to its periphery.This process, together with the shifting of the frontier peoples, is one of the most important events of that epoch.A great number of Chinese migrated especially into the present province of Kansu, where a governor who had originally been sent there to fight the Hsien-pi had created a sort of paradise by his good administration and maintenance of peace.The territory ruled by this Chinese, first as governor and then in increasing independence, was surrounded by Hsien-pi, Tibetans, and other peoples, but thanks to the great immigration of Chinese and to its situation on the main caravan route to Turkestan, it was able to hold its own, to expand, and to become prosperous.

Other groups of Chinese peasants migrated southward into the territories of the former state of Wu.A Chinese prince of the house of the Chin was ruling there, in the present Nanking.His purpose was to organize that territory, and then to intervene in the struggles of the other princes.We shall meet him again at the beginning of the Hun rule over North China in 317, as founder and emperor of the first south Chinese dynasty, which was at once involved in the usual internal and external struggles.For the moment, however, the southern region was relatively at peace, and was accordingly attracting settlers.

Finally, many Chinese migrated northward, into the territories of the frontier peoples, not only of the Hsien-pi but especially of the Huns.These alien peoples, although in the official Chinese view they were still barbarians, at least maintained peace in the territories they ruled, and they left in peace the peasants and craftsmen who came to them, even while their own armies were involved in fighting inside China.Not only peasants and craftsmen came to the north but more and more educated persons.Members of families of the gentry that had suffered from the fighting, people who had lost their influence in China, were welcomed by the Huns and appointed teachers and political advisers of the Hun nobility.

5 Victory of the Huns.The Hun Han dynasty (later renamed the Earlier Chao dynasty)

With its self-confidence thus increased, the Hun council of nobles declared that in future the Huns should no longer fight now for one and now for another Chinese general or prince.They had promised loyalty to the Chinese emperor, but not to any prince.No one doubted that the Chinese emperor was a complete nonentity and no longer played any part in the struggle for power.It was evident that the murders would continue until one of the generals or princes overcame the rest and made himself emperor.Why should not the Huns have the same right?Why should not they join in this struggle for the Chinese imperial throne?

There were two arguments against this course, one of which was already out of date.The Chinese had for many centuries set down the Huns as uncultured barbarians; but the inferiority complex thus engendered in the Huns had virtually been overcome, because in the course of time their upper class had deliberately acquired a Chinese education and so ranked culturally with the Chinese.Thus the ruler Liu Yüan, for example, had enjoyed a good Chinese education and was able to read all the classical texts.The second argument was provided by the rigid conceptions of legitimacy to which the Turkish-Hunnic aristocratic society adhered.The Huns asked themselves: "Have we, as aliens, any right to become emperors and rulers in China, when we are not descended from an old Chinese family?"On this point Liu Yüan and his advisers found a good answer.They called Liu Yüan's dynasty the "Han dynasty", and so linked it with the most famous of all the Chinese dynasties, pointing to the pact which their ancestor Mao Tun had concluded five hundred years earlier with the first emperor of the Han dynasty and which had described the two states as "brethren".They further recalled the fact that the rulers of the Huns were closely related to the Chinese ruling family, because Mao Tun and his successors had married Chinese princesses.Finally, Liu Yüan's Chinese family name, Liu, had also been the family name of the rulers of the Han dynasty.Accordingly the Hun Lius came forward not as aliens but as the rightful successors in continuation of the Han dynasty, as legitimate heirs to the Chinese imperial throne on the strength of relationship and of treaties.

Thus the Hun Liu Yüan had no intention of restoring the old empire of Mao Tun, the empire of the nomads; he intended to become emperor of China, emperor of a country of farmers.In this lay the fundamental difference between the earlier Hun empire and this new one.The question whether the Huns should join in the struggle for the Chinese imperial throne was therefore decided among the Huns themselves in 304 in the affirmative, by the founding of the "Hun Han dynasty".All that remained was the practical question of how to hold out with their small army of 50,000 men if serious opposition should be offered to the "barbarians".

Meanwhile Liu Yüan provided himself with court ceremonial on the Chinese model, in a capital which, after several changes, was established at P'ing-ch'êng in southern Shansi.He attracted more and more of the Chinese gentry, who were glad to come to this still rather barbaric but well-organized court.In 309 the first attack was made on the Chinese capital, Loyang.Liu Yüan died in the following year, and in 311, under his successor Liu Ts'ung (310-318), the attack was renewed and Loyang fell.The Chin emperor, Huai Ti, was captured and kept a prisoner in P'ing-ch'êng until in 313 a conspiracy in his favour was brought to light in the Hun empire, and he and all his supporters were killed.Meanwhile the Chinese clique of the Chin dynasty had hastened to make a prince emperor in the second capital, Ch'ang-an (Min Ti, 313-316) while the princes' struggles for the throne continued.Nobody troubled about the fate of the unfortunate emperor in his capital.He received no reinforcements, so that he was helpless in face of the next attack of the Huns, and in 316 he was compelled to surrender like his predecessor.Now the Hun Han dynasty held both capitals, which meant virtually the whole of the western part of North China, and the so-called "Western Chin dynasty" thus came to its end.Its princes and generals and many of its gentry became landless and homeless and had to flee into the south.

(C) The alien empires in North China, down to the Toba (A.D.317-385)

1 The Later Chao dynasty in eastern North China (Hun; 329-352)

At this time the eastern part of North China was entirely in the hands of Shih Lo, a former follower of Liu Yüan.Shih Lo had escaped from slavery in China and had risen to be a military leader among detribalized Huns.In 310 he had not only undertaken a great campaign right across China to the south, but had slaughtered more than 100,000 Chinese, including forty-eight princes of the Chin dynasty, who had formed a vast burial procession for a prince.This achievement added considerably to Shih Lo's power, and his relations with Liu Ts'ung, already tense, became still more so.Liu Yüan had tried to organize the Hun state on the Chinese model, intending in this way to gain efficient control of China; Shih Lo rejected Chinese methods, and held to the old warrior-nomad tradition, making raids with the aid of nomad fighters.He did not contemplate holding the territories of central and southern China which he had conquered; he withdrew, and in the two years 314-315 he contented himself with bringing considerable expanses in north-eastern China, especially territories of the Hsien-pi, under his direct rule, as a base for further raids.Many Huns in Liu Ts'ung's dominion found Shih Lo's method of rule more to their taste than living in a state ruled by officials, and they went over to Shih Lo and joined him in breaking entirely with Liu Ts'ung.There was a further motive for this: in states founded by nomads, with a federation of tribes as their basis, the personal qualities of the ruler played an important part.The chiefs of the various tribes would not give unqualified allegiance to the son of a dead ruler unless the son was a strong personality or gave promise of becoming one.Failing that, there would be independence movements.Liu Ts'ung did not possess the indisputable charisma of his predecessor Liu Yüan; and the Huns looked with contempt on his court splendour, which could only have been justified if he had conquered all China.Liu Ts'ung had no such ambition; nor had his successor Liu Yao (319-329), who gave the Hun Han dynasty retroactively, from its start with Liu Yüan, the new name of "Earlier Chao dynasty" (304-329).Many tribes then went over to Shih Lo, and the remainder of Liu Yao's empire was reduced to a precarious existence.In 329 the whole of it was annexed by Shih Lo.

Although Shih Lo had long been much more powerful than the emperors of the "Earlier Chao dynasty", until their removal he had not ventured to assume the title of emperor. The reason for this seems to have lain in the conceptions of nobility held by the Turkish peoples in general and the Huns in particular, according to which only those could become shan-yü (or, later, emperor) who could show descent from the Tu-ku tribe the rightful shan-yü stock. In accordance with this conception, all later Hun dynasties deliberately disowned Shih Lo. For Shih Lo, after his destruction of Liu Yao, no longer hesitated: ex-slave as he was, and descended from one of the non-noble stocks of the Huns, he made himself emperor of the "Later Chao dynasty" (329-352).

Shih Lo was a forceful army commander, but he was a man without statesmanship, and without the culture of his day.He had no Chinese education; he hated the Chinese and would have been glad to make north China a grazing ground for his nomad tribes of Huns.Accordingly he had no desire to rule all China.The part already subjugated, embracing the whole of north China with the exception of the present province of Kansu, sufficed for his purpose.

The governor of that province was a loyal subject of the Chinese Chin dynasty, a man famous for his good administration, and himself a Chinese.After the execution of the Chin emperor Huai Ti by the Huns in 313, he regarded himself as no longer bound to the central government; he made himself independent and founded the "Earlier Liang dynasty", which was to last until 376.This mainly Chinese realm was not very large, although it had admitted a broad stream of Chinese emigrants from the dissolving Chin empire; but economically the Liang realm was very prosperous, so that it was able to extend its influence as far as Turkestan.During the earlier struggles Turkestan had been virtually in isolation, but now new contacts began to be established.Many traders from Turkestan set up branches in Liang.In the capital there were whole quarters inhabited only by aliens from western and eastern Turkestan and from India.With the traders came Buddhist monks; trade and Buddhism seemed to be closely associated everywhere.In the trading centres monasteries were installed in the form of blocks of houses within strong walls that successfully resisted many an attack.Consequently the Buddhists were able to serve as bankers for the merchants, who deposited their money in the monasteries, which made a charge for its custody; the merchants also warehoused their goods in the monasteries.Sometimes the process was reversed, a trade centre being formed around an existing monastery.In this case the monastery also served as a hostel for the merchants.Economically this Chinese state in Kansu was much more like a Turkestan city state that lived by commerce than the agrarian states of the Far East, although agriculture was also pursued under the Earlier Liang.

From this trip to the remote west we will return first to the Hun capital. From 329 onward Shih Lo possessed a wide empire, but an unstable one. He himself felt at all times insecure, because the Huns regarded him, on account of his humble origin, as a "revolutionary". He exterminated every member of the Liu family, that is to say the old shan-yü family, of whom he could get hold, in order to remove any possible pretender to the throne; but he could not count on the loyalty of the Hun and other Turkish tribes under his rule. During this period not a few Huns went over to the small realm of the Toba; other Hun tribes withdrew entirely from the political scene and lived with their herds as nomad tribes in Shansi and in the Ordos region. The general insecurity undermined the strength of Shih Lo's empire. He died in 333, and there came to the throne, after a short interregnum, another personality of a certain greatness, Shih Hu (334-349). He transferred the capital to the city of Yeh, in northern Honan, where the rulers of the Wei dynasty had reigned. There are many accounts of the magnificence of the court of Yeh. Foreigners, especially Buddhist monks, played a greater part there than Chinese. On the one hand, it was not easy for Shih Hu to gain the active support of the educated Chinese gentry after the murders of Shih Lo and, on the other hand, Shih Hu seems to have understood that foreigners without family and without other relations to the native population, but with special skills, are the most reliable and loyal servants of a ruler. Indeed, his administration seems to have been good, but the regime remained completely parasitic, with no support of the masses or the gentry. After Shih Hu's death there were fearful combats between his sons; ultimately a member of an entirely different family of Hun origin seized power, but was destroyed in 352 by the Hsien-pi, bringing to an end the Later Chao dynasty.

2 Earlier Yen dynasty in the north-east (proto-Mongol; 352-370), and the Earlier Ch'in dynasty in all north China (Tibetan; 351-394)

In the north, proto-Mongol Hsien-pi tribes had again made themselves independent; in the past they had been subjects of Liu Yüan and then of Shih Lo.A man belonging to one of these tribes, the tribe of the Mu-jung, became the leader of a league of tribes, and in 337 founded the state of Yen.This proto-Mongol state of the Mu-jung, which the historians call the "Earlier Yen" state, conquered parts of southern Manchuria and also the state of Kao-li in Korea, and there began then an immigration of Hsien-pi into Korea, which became noticeable at a later date.The conquest of Korea, which was still, as in the past, a Japanese market and was very wealthy, enormously strengthened the state of Yen.Not until a little later, when Japan's trade relations were diverted to central China, did Korea's importance begin to diminish.Although this "Earlier Yen dynasty" of the Mu-jung officially entered on the heritage of the Huns, and its regime was therefore dated only from 352 (until 370), it failed either to subjugate the whole realm of the "Later Chao" or effectively to strengthen the state it had acquired.This old Hun territory had suffered economically from the anti-agrarian nomad tendency of the last of the Hun emperors; and unremunerative wars against the Chinese in the south had done nothing to improve its position.In addition to this, the realm of the Toba was dangerously gaining strength on the flank of the new empire.But the most dangerous enemy was in the west, on former Hun soil, in the province of Shensi—Tibetans, who finally came forward once more with claims to dominance.These were Tibetans of the P'u family, which later changed its name to Fu.The head of the family had worked his way up as a leader of Tibetan auxiliaries under the "Later Chao", gaining more and more power and following.When under that dynasty the death of Shih Hu marked the beginning of general dissolution, he gathered his Tibetans around him in the west, declared himself independent of the Huns, and made himself emperor of the "Earlier Ch'in dynasty" (351-394).He died in 355, and was followed after a short interregnum by Fu Chien (357-385), who was unquestionably one of the most important figures of the fourth century.This Tibetan empire ultimately defeated the "Earlier Yen dynasty" and annexed the realm of the Mu-jung.Thus the Mu-jung Hsien-pi came under the dominion of the Tibetans; they were distributed among a number of places as garrisons of mounted troops.

The empire of the Tibetans was organized quite differently from the empires of the Huns and the Hsien-pi tribes.The Tibetan organization was purely military and had nothing to do with tribal structure.This had its advantages, for the leader of such a formation had no need to take account of tribal chieftains; he was answerable to no one and possessed considerable personal power.Nor was there any need for him to be of noble rank or descended from an old family.The Tibetan ruler Fu Chien organized all his troops, including the non-Tibetans, on this system, without regard to tribal membership.

Fu Chien's state showed another innovation: the armies of the Huns and the Hsien-pi had consisted entirely of cavalry, for the nomads of the north were, of course, horsemen; to fight on foot was in their eyes not only contrary to custom but contemptible.So long as a state consisted only of a league of tribes, it was simply out of the question to transform part of the army into infantry.Fu Chien, however, with his military organization that paid no attention to the tribal element, created an infantry in addition to the great cavalry units, recruiting for it large numbers of Chinese.The infantry proved extremely valuable, especially in the fighting in the plains of north China and in laying siege to fortified towns.Fu Chien thus very quickly achieved military predominance over the neighbouring states.As we have seen already, he annexed the "Earlier Yen" realm of the proto-Mongols (370), but he also annihilated the Chinese "Earlier Liang" realm (376) and in the same year the small Turkish Toba realm.This made him supreme over all north China and stronger than any alien ruler before him.He had in his possession both the ancient capitals, Ch'ang-an and Loyang; the whole of the rich agricultural regions of north China belonged to him; he also controlled the routes to Turkestan.He himself had a Chinese education, and he attracted Chinese to his court; he protected the Buddhists; and he tried in every way to make the whole country culturally Chinese.As soon as Fu Chien had all north China in his power, as Liu Yüan and his Huns had done before him, he resolved, like Liu Yüan, to make every effort to gain the mastery over all China, to become emperor of China.Liu Yüan's successors had not had the capacity for which such a venture called; Fu Chien was to fail in it for other reasons.Yet, from a military point of view, his chances were not bad.He had far more soldiers under his command than the Chinese "Eastern Chin dynasty" which ruled the south, and his troops were undoubtedly better.In the time of the founder of the Tibetan dynasty the southern empire had been utterly defeated by his troops (354), and the south Chinese were no stronger now.

Against them the north had these assets: the possession of the best northern tillage, the control of the trade routes, and "Chinese" culture and administration.At the time, however, these represented only potentialities and not tangible realities.It would have taken ten to twenty years to restore the capacities of the north after its devastation in many wars, to reorganize commerce, and to set up a really reliable administration, and thus to interlock the various elements and consolidate the various tribes.But as early as 383 Fu Chien started his great campaign against the south, with an army of something like a million men.At first the advance went well.The horsemen from the north, however, were men of the mountain country, and in the soggy plains of the Yangtze region, cut up by hundreds of water-courses and canals, they suffered from climatic and natural conditions to which they were unaccustomed.Their main strength was still in cavalry; and they came to grief.The supplies and reinforcements for the vast army failed to arrive in time; units did not reach the appointed places at the appointed dates.The southern troops under the supreme command of Hsieh Hsüan, far inferior in numbers and militarily of no great efficiency, made surprise attacks on isolated units before these were in regular formation.Some they defeated, others they bribed; they spread false reports.Fu Chien's army was seized with widespread panic, so that he was compelled to retreat in haste.As he did so it became evident that his empire had no inner stability: in a very short time it fell into fragments.The south Chinese had played no direct part in this, for in spite of their victory they were not strong enough to advance far to the north.

3 The fragmentation of north China

The first to fall away from the Tibetan ruler was a noble of the Mu-jung, a member of the ruling family of the "Earlier Yen dynasty", who withdrew during the actual fighting to pursue a policy of his own.With the vestiges of the Hsien-pi who followed him, mostly cavalry, he fought his way northward into the old homeland of the Hsien-pi and there, in central Hopei, founded the "Later Yen dynasty" (384-409), himself reigning for twelve years.In the remaining thirteen years of the existence of that dynasty there were no fewer than five rulers, the last of them a member of another family.The history of this Hsien-pi dynasty, as of its predecessor, is an unedifying succession of intrigues; no serious effort was made to build up a true state.

In the same year 384 there was founded, under several other Mu-jung princes of the ruling family of the "Earlier Yen dynasty", the "Western Yen dynasty" (384-394).Its nucleus was nothing more than a detachment of troops of the Hsien-pi which had been thrown by Fu Chien into the west of his empire, in Shensi, in the neighbourhood of the old capital Ch'ang-an.There its commanders, on learning the news of Fu Chien's collapse, declared their independence.In western China, however, far removed from all liaison with the main body of the Hsien-pi, they were unable to establish themselves, and when they tried to fight their way to the north-east they were dispersed, so that they failed entirely to form an actual state.

There was a third attempt in 384 to form a state in north China.A Tibetan who had joined Fu Chien with his followers declared himself independent when Fu Chien came back, a beaten man, to Shensi.He caused Fu Chien and almost the whole of his family to be assassinated, occupied the capital, Ch'ang-an, and actually entered into the heritage of Fu Chien.This Tibetan dynasty is known as the "Later Ch'in dynasty" (384-417).It was certainly the strongest of those founded in 384, but it still failed to dominate any considerable part of China and remained of local importance, mainly confined to the present province of Shensi.Fu Chien's empire nominally had three further rulers, but they did not exert the slightest influence on events.

With the collapse of the state founded by Fu Chien, the tribes of Hsien-pi who had left their homeland in the third century and migrated to the Ordos region proceeded to form their own state: a man of the Hsien-pi tribe of the Ch'i-fu founded the so-called "Western Ch'in dynasty" (385-431).Like the other Hsien-pi states, this one was of weak construction, resting on the military strength of a few tribes and failing to attain a really secure basis.Its territory lay in the east of the present province of Kansu, and so controlled the eastern end of the western Asian caravan route, which might have been a source of wealth if the Ch'i-fu had succeeded in attracting commerce by discreet treatment and in imposing taxation on it.Instead of this, the bulk of the long-distance traffic passed through the Ordos region, a little farther north, avoiding the Ch'i-fu state, which seemed to the merchants to be too insecure.The Ch'i-fu depended mainly on cattle-breeding in the remote mountain country in the south of their territory, a region that gave them relative security from attack; on the other hand, this made them unable to exercise any influence on the course of political events in western China.

Mention must be made of one more state that rose from the ruins of Fu Chien's empire.It lay in the far west of China, in the western part of the present province of Kansu, and was really a continuation of the Chinese "Earlier Liang" realm, which had been annexed ten years earlier (376) by Fu Chien.A year before his great march to the south, Fu Chien had sent the Tibetan Lü Kuang into the "Earlier Liang" region in order to gain influence over Turkestan.As mentioned previously, after the great Hun rulers Fu Chien was the first to make a deliberate attempt to secure cultural and political overlordship over the whole of China.Although himself a Tibetan, he never succumbed to the temptation of pursuing a "Tibetan" policy; like an entirely legitimate ruler of China, he was concerned to prevent the northern peoples along the frontier from uniting with the Tibetan peoples of the west for political ends.The possession of Turkestan would avert that danger, which had shown signs of becoming imminent of late: some tribes of the Hsien-pi had migrated as far as the high mountains of Tibet and had imposed themselves as a ruling class on the still very primitive Tibetans living there.From this symbiosis there began to be formed a new people, the so-called T'u-yü-hun, a hybridization of Mongol and Tibetan stock with a slight Turkish admixture.Lü Kuang had considerable success in Turkestan; he had brought considerable portions of eastern Turkestan under Fu Chien's sovereignty and administered those regions almost independently.When the news came of Fu Chien's end, he declared himself an independent ruler, of the "Later Liang" dynasty (386-403).Strictly speaking, this was simply a trading State, like the city-states of Turkestan: its basis was the transit traffic that brought it prosperity.For commerce brought good profit to the small states that lay right across the caravan route, whereas it was of doubtful benefit, as we know, to agrarian China as a whole, because the luxury goods which it supplied to the court were paid for out of the production of the general population.

This "Later Liang" realm was inhabited not only by a few Tibetans and many Chinese, but also by Hsien-pi and Huns.These heterogeneous elements with their divergent cultures failed in the long run to hold together in this long but extremely narrow strip of territory, which was almost incapable of military defence.As early as 397 a group of Huns in the central section of the country made themselves independent, assuming the name of the "Northern Liang" (397-439).These Huns quickly conquered other parts of the "Later Liang" realm, which then fell entirely to pieces.Chinese again founded a state, "West Liang" (400-421) in western Kansu, and the Hsien-pi founded "South Liang" (379-414) in eastern Kansu.Thus the "Later Liang" fell into three parts, more or less differing ethnically, though they could not be described as ethnically unadulterated states.

4 Sociological analysis of the two great alien empires

The two great empires of north China at the time of its division had been founded by non-Chinese—the first by the Hun Liu Yüan, the second by the Tibetan Fu Chien.Both rulers went to work on the same principle of trying to build up truly "Chinese" empires, but the traditions of Huns and Tibetans differed, and the two experiments turned out differently.Both failed, but not for the same reasons and not with the same results.The Hun Liu Yüan was the ruler of a league of feudal tribes, which was expected to take its place as an upper class above the unchanged Chinese agricultural population with its system of officials and gentry.But Liu Yüan's successors were national reactionaries who stood for the maintenance of the nomad life against that new plan of transition to a feudal class of urban nobles ruling an agrarian population.Liu Yüan's more far-seeing policy was abandoned, with the result that the Huns were no longer in a position to rule an immense agrarian territory, and the empire soon disintegrated.For the various Hun tribes this failure meant falling back into political insignificance, but they were able to maintain their national character and existence.

Fu Chien, as a Tibetan, was a militarist and soldier, in accordance with the past of the Tibetans.Under him were grouped Tibetans without tribal chieftains; the great mass of Chinese; and dispersed remnants of tribes of Huns, Hsien-pi, and others.His organization was militaristic and, outside the military sphere, a militaristic bureaucracy.The Chinese gentry, so far as they still existed, preferred to work with him rather than with the feudalist Huns.These gentry probably supported Fu Chien's southern campaign, for, in consequence of the wide ramifications of their families, it was to their interest that China should form a single economic unit.They were, of course, equally ready to work with another group, one of southern Chinese, to attain the same end by other means, if those means should prove more advantageous: thus the gentry were not a reliable asset, but were always ready to break faith.Among other things, Fu Chien's southern campaign was wrecked by that faithlessness.When an essentially military state suffers military defeat, it can only go to pieces.This explains the disintegration of that great empire within a single year into so many diminutive states, as already described.

5 Sociological analysis of the petty States

The states that took the place of Fu Chien's empire, those many diminutive states (the Chinese speak of the period of the Sixteen Kingdoms), may be divided from the economic point of view into two groups—trading states and warrior states; sociologically they also fall into two groups, tribal states and military states.

The small states in the west, in Kansu (the Later Liang and the Western, Northern, and Southern Liang), were trading states: they lived on the earnings of transit trade with Turkestan.The eastern states were warrior states, in which an army commander ruled by means of an armed group of non-Chinese and exploited an agricultural population.It is only logical that such states should be short-lived, as in fact they all were.

Sociologically regarded, during this period only the Southern and Northern Liang were still tribal states.In addition to these came the young Toba realm, which began in 385 but of which mention has not yet been made.The basis of that state was the tribe, not the family or the individual; after its political disintegration the separate tribes remained in existence.The other states of the east, however, were military states, made up of individuals with no tribal allegiance but subject to a military commandant.But where there is no tribal association, after the political downfall of a state founded by ethnical groups, those groups sooner or later disappear as such.We see this in the years immediately following Fu Chien's collapse: the Tibetan ethnical group to which he himself belonged disappeared entirely from the historical scene.The two Tibetan groups that outlasted him, also forming military states and not tribal states, similarly came to an end shortly afterwards for all time.The Hsien-pi groups in the various fragments of the empire, with the exception of the petty states in Kansu, also continued, only as tribal fragments led by a few old ruling families.They, too, after brief and undistinguished military rule, came to an end; they disappeared so completely that thereafter we no longer find the term Hsien-pi in history.Not that they had been exterminated.When the social structure and its corresponding economic form fall to pieces, there remain only two alternatives for its individuals.Either they must go over to a new form, which in China could only mean that they became Chinese; many Hsien-pi in this way became Chinese in the decades following 384.Or, they could retain their old way of living in association with another stock of similar formation; this, too, happened in many cases.Both these courses, however, meant the end of the Hsien-pi as an independent ethnical unit.We must keep this process and its reasons in view if we are to understand how a great people can disappear once and for all.

The Huns, too, so powerful in the past, were suddenly scarcely to be found any longer.Among the many petty states there were many Hsien-pi kingdoms, but only a single, quite small Hun state, that of the Northern Liang.The disappearance of the Huns was, however, only apparent; at this time they remained in the Ordos region and in Shansi as separate nomad tribes with no integrating political organization; their time had still to come.

6 Spread of Buddhism

According to the prevalent Chinese view, nothing of importance was achieved during this period in north China in the intellectual sphere; there was no culture in the north, only in the south.This is natural: for a Confucian this period, the fourth century, was one of degeneracy in north China, for no one came into prominence as a celebrated Confucian.Nothing else could be expected, for in the north the gentry, which had been the class that maintained Confucianism since the Han period, had largely been destroyed; from political leadership especially it had been shut out during the periods of alien rule.Nor could we expect to find Taoists in the true sense, that is to say followers of the teaching of Lao Tz[)u], for these, too, had been dependent since the Han period on the gentry.Until the fourth century, these two had remained the dominant philosophies.

What could take their place?The alien rulers had left little behind them.Most of them had been unable to write Chinese, and in so far as they were warriors they had no interest in literature or in political philosophy, for they were men of action.Few songs and poems of theirs remain extant in translations from their language into Chinese, but these preserve a strong alien flavour in their mental attitude and in their diction.They are the songs of fighting men, songs that were sung on horseback, songs of war and its sufferings.These songs have nothing of the excessive formalism and aestheticism of the Chinese, but give expression to simple emotions in unpolished language with a direct appeal.The epic of the Turkish peoples had clearly been developed already, and in north China it produced a rudimentary ballad literature, to which four hundred years later no less attention was paid than to the emotional world of contemporary songs.The actual literature, however, and the philosophy of this period are Buddhist.How can we explain that Buddhism had gained such influence?

It will be remembered that Buddhism came to China overland and by sea in the Han epoch.The missionary monks who came from abroad with the foreign merchants found little approval among the Chinese gentry.They were regarded as second-rate persons belonging, according to Chinese notions, to an inferior social class.Thus the monks had to turn to the middle and lower classes in China.Among these they found widespread acceptance, not of their profound philosophic ideas, but of their doctrine of the after life.This doctrine was in a certain sense revolutionary: it declared that all the high officials and superiors who treated the people so unjustly and who so exploited them, would in their next reincarnation be born in poor circumstances or into inferior rank and would have to suffer punishment for all their ill deeds.The poor who had to suffer undeserved evils would be born in their next life into high rank and would have a good time.This doctrine brought a ray of light, a promise, to the country people who had suffered so much since the later Han period of the second century A.D.Their situation remained unaltered down to the fourth century; and under their alien rulers the Chinese country population became Buddhist.

The merchants made use of the Buddhist monasteries as banks and warehouses.Thus they, too, were well inclined towards Buddhism and gave money and land for its temples.The temples were able to settle peasants on this land as their tenants.In those times a temple was a more reliable landlord than an individual alien, and the poorer peasants readily became temple tenants; this increased their inclination towards Buddhism.

The Indian, Sogdian, and Turkestani monks were readily allowed to settle by the alien rulers of China, who had no national prejudice against other aliens.The monks were educated men and brought some useful knowledge from abroad.Educated Chinese were scarcely to be found, for the gentry retired to their estates, which they protected as well as they could from their alien ruler.So long as the gentry had no prospect of regaining control of the threads of political life that extended throughout China, they were not prepared to provide a class of officials and scholars for the anti-Confucian foreigners, who showed interest only in fighting and trading.Thus educated persons were needed at the courts of the alien rulers, and Buddhists were therefore engaged.These foreign Buddhists had all the important Buddhist writings translated into Chinese, and so made use of their influence at court for religious propaganda.This does not mean that every text was translated from Indian languages; especially in the later period many works appeared which came not from India but from Sogdia or Turkestan, or had even been written in China by Sogdians or other natives of Turkestan, and were then translated into Chinese.In Turkestan, Khotan in particular became a centre of Buddhist culture.Buddhism was influenced by vestiges of indigenous cults, so that Khotan developed a special religious atmosphere of its own; deities were honoured there (for instance, the king of Heaven of the northerners) to whom little regard was paid elsewhere.This "Khotan Buddhism" had special influence on the Buddhist Turkish peoples.

Big translation bureaux were set up for the preparation of these translations into Chinese, in which many copyists simultaneously took down from dictation a translation made by a "master" with the aid of a few native helpers.The translations were not literal, but were paraphrases, most of them greatly reduced in length, glosses were introduced when the translator thought fit for political or doctrinal reasons, or when he thought that in this way he could better adapt the texts to Chinese feeling.

Buddhism, quite apart from the special case of "Khotan Buddhism", underwent extensive modification on its way across Central Asia.Its main Indian form (Hinayana) was a purely individualistic religion of salvation without a God—related in this respect to genuine Taoism—and based on a concept of two classes of people: the monks who could achieve salvation and, secondly, the masses who fed the monks but could not achieve salvation.This religion did not gain a footing in China; only traces of it can be found in some Buddhistic sects in China.Mahayana Buddhism, on the other hand, developed into a true popular religion of salvation.It did not interfere with the indigenous deities and did not discountenance life in human society; it did not recommend Nirvana at once, but placed before it a here-after with all the joys worth striving for.In this form Buddhism was certain of success in Asia.On its way from India to China it divided into countless separate streams, each characterized by a particular book.Every nuance, from profound philosophical treatises to the most superficial little tracts written for the simplest of souls, and even a good deal of Turkestan shamanism and Tibetan belief in magic, found their way into Buddhist writings, so that some Buddhist monks practiced Central Asian Shamanism.

In spite of Buddhism, the old religion of the peasants retained its vitality.Local diviners, Chinese shamans (wu), sorcerers, continued their practices, although from now on they sometimes used Buddhist phraseology.Often, this popular religion is called "Taoism ", because a systematization of the popular pantheon was attempted, and Lao Tz[)u] and other Taoists played a role in this pantheon.Philosophic Taoism continued in this time, aside from the church-Taoism of Chang Ling and, naturally, all kinds of contacts between these three currents occurred.The Chinese state cult, the cult of Heaven saturated with Confucianism, was another living form of religion.The alien rulers, in turn, had brought their own mixture of worship of Heaven and shamanism.Their worship of Heaven was their official "representative" religion; their shamanism the private religion of the individual in his daily life.The alien rulers, accordingly, showed interest in the Chinese shamans as well as in the shamanistic aspects of Mahayana Buddhism.Not infrequently competitions were arranged by the rulers between priests of the different religious systems, and the rulers often competed for the possession of monks who were particularly skilled in magic or soothsaying.

But what was the position of the "official" religion?Were the aliens to hold to their own worship of heaven, or were they to take over the official Chinese cult, or what else?This problem posed itself already in the fourth century, but it was left unsolved.

(D) The Toba empire in North China (A.D.385-550)

1 The rise of the Toba State

On the collapse of Fu Chien's empire one more state made its appearance; it has not yet been dealt with, although it was the most important one.This was the empire of the Toba, in the north of the present province of Shansi.Fu Chien had brought down the small old Toba state in 376, but had not entirely destroyed it.Its territory was partitioned, and part was placed under the administration of a Hun: in view of the old rivalry between Toba and Huns, this seemed to Fu Chien to be the best way of preventing any revival of the Toba.However, a descendant of the old ruling family of the Toba succeeded, with the aid of related families, in regaining power and forming a small new kingdom.Very soon many tribes which still lived in north China and which had not been broken up into military units, joined him.Of these there were ultimately 119, including many Hun tribes from Shansi and also many Hsien-pi tribes.Thus the question who the Toba were is not easy to answer.The leading tribe itself had migrated southward in the third century from the frontier territory between northern Mongolia and northern Manchuria.After this migration the first Toba state, the so-called Tai state, was formed (338-376); not much is known about it.The tribes that, from 385 after the break-up of the Tibetan empire, grouped themselves round this ruling tribe, were both Turkish and Mongol; but from the culture and language of the Toba we think it must be inferred that the ruling tribe itself as well as the majority of the other tribes were Turkish; in any case, the Turkish element seems to have been stronger than the Mongolian.

Thus the new Toba kingdom was a tribal state, not a military state.But the tribes were no longer the same as in the time of Liu Yüan a hundred years earlier.Their total population must have been quite small; we must assume that they were but the remains of 119 tribes rather than 119 full-sized tribes.Only part of them were still living the old nomad life; others had become used to living alongside Chinese peasants and had assumed leadership among the peasants.These Toba now faced a difficult situation.The country was arid and mountainous and did not yield much agricultural produce.For the many people who had come into the Toba state from all parts of the former empire of Fu Chien, to say nothing of the needs of a capital and a court which since the time of Liu Yüan had been regarded as the indispensable entourage of a ruler who claimed imperial rank, the local production of the Chinese peasants was not enough.All the government officials, who were Chinese, and all the slaves and eunuchs needed grain to eat.Attempts were made to settle more Chinese peasants round the new capital, but without success; something had to be done.It appeared necessary to embark on a campaign to conquer the fertile plain of eastern China.In the course of a number of battles the Hsien-pi of the "Later Yen" were annihilated and eastern China conquered (409).

Now a new question arose: what should be done with all those people?Nomads used to enslave their prisoners and use them for watching their flocks.Some tribal chieftains had adopted the practice of establishing captives on their tribal territory as peasants.There was an opportunity now to subject the millions of Chinese captives to servitude to the various tribal chieftains in the usual way.But those captives who were peasants could not be taken away from their fields without robbing the country of its food; therefore it would have been necessary to spread the tribes over the whole of eastern China, and this would have added immensely to the strength of the various tribes and would have greatly weakened the central power.Furthermore almost all Chinese officials at the court had come originally from the territories just conquered.They had come from there about a hundred years earlier and still had all their relatives in the east.If the eastern territories had been placed under the rule of separate tribes, and the tribes had been distributed in this way, the gentry in those territories would have been destroyed and reduced to the position of enslaved peasants.The Chinese officials accordingly persuaded the Toba emperor not to place the new territories under the tribes, but to leave them to be administered by officials of the central administration.These officials must have a firm footing in their territory, for only they could extract from the peasants the grain required for the support of the capital.Consequently the Toba government did not enslave the Chinese in the eastern territory, but made the local gentry into government officials, instructing them to collect as much grain as possible for the capital.This Chinese local gentry worked in close collaboration with the Chinese officials at court, a fact which determined the whole fate of the Toba empire.

The Hsien-pi of the newly conquered east no longer belonged to any tribe, but only to military units.They were transferred as soldiers to the Toba court and placed directly under the government, which was thus notably strengthened, especially as the millions of peasants under their Chinese officials were also directly responsible to the central administration.The government now proceeded to convert also its own Toba tribes into military formations.The tribal men of noble rank were brought to the court as military officers, and so were separated from the common tribesmen and the slaves who had to remain with the herds.This change, which robbed the tribes of all means of independent action, was not carried out without bloodshed.There were revolts of tribal chieftains which were ruthlessly suppressed.The central government had triumphed, but it realized that more reliance could be placed on Chinese than on its own people, who were used to independence.Thus the Toba were glad to employ more and more Chinese, and the Chinese pressed more and more into the administration.In this process the differing social organizations of Toba and Chinese played an important part.The Chinese have patriarchal families with often hundreds of members.When a member of a family obtains a good position, he is obliged to make provision for the other members of his family and to secure good positions for them too; and not only the members of his own family but those of allied families and of families related to it by marriage.In contrast the Toba had a patriarchal nuclear family system; as nomad warriors with no fixed abode, they were unable to form extended family groups.Among them the individual was much more independent; each one tried to do his best for himself.No Toba thought of collecting a large clique around himself; everybody should be the artificer of his own fortune.Thus, when a Chinese obtained an official post, he was followed by countless others; but when a Toba had a position he remained alone, and so the sinification of the Toba empire went on incessantly.

2 The Hun kingdom of the Hsia (407-431)

At the rebuilding of the Toba empire, however, a good many Hun tribes withdrew westward into the Ordos region beyond the reach of the Toba, and there they formed the Hun "Hsia" kingdom.Its ruler, Ho-lien P'o-p'o, belonged to the family of Mao Tun and originally, like Liu Yüan, bore the sinified family name Liu; but he altered this to a Hun name, taking the family name of Ho-lien.This one fact alone demonstrates that the Hsia rejected Chinese culture and were nationalistic Hun.Thus there were now two realms in North China, one undergoing progressive sinification, the other falling back to the old traditions of the Huns.

3 Rise of the Toba to a great Power

The present province of Szechwan, in the west, had belonged to Fu Chien's empire.At the break-up of the Tibetan state that province passed to the southern Chinese empire and gave the southern Chinese access, though it was very difficult access, to the caravan route leading to Turkestan.The small states in Kansu, which dominated the route, now passed on the traffic along two routes, one northward to the Toba and the other alien states in north China, the other through north-west Szechwan to south China.In this way the Kansu states were strengthened both economically and politically, for they were able to direct the commerce either to the northern states or to south China as suited them.When the South Chinese saw the break-up of Fu Chien's empire into numberless fragments, Liu Yü, who was then all-powerful at the South Chinese court, made an attempt to conquer the whole of western China.A great army was sent from South China into the province of Shensi, where the Tibetan empire of the "Later Ch'in" was situated.The Ch'in appealed to the Toba for help, but the Toba were themselves too hotly engaged to be able to spare troops.They also considered that South China would be unable to maintain these conquests, and that they themselves would find them later an easy prey.Thus in 417 the state of "Later Ch'in" received a mortal blow from the South Chinese army.Large numbers of the upper class fled to the Toba.As had been foreseen, the South Chinese were unable to maintain their hold over the conquered territory, and it was annexed with ease by the Hun Ho-lien P'o-p'o.But why not by the Toba?

Towards the end of the fourth century, vestiges of Hun, Hsien-pi, and other tribes had united in Mongolia to form the new people of the Juan-juan (also called Ju-juan or Jou-jan).Scholars disagree as to whether the Juan-juan were Turks or Mongols; European investigators believe them to have been identical with the Avars who appeared in the Near East in 558 and later in Europe, and are inclined, on the strength of a few vestiges of their language, to regard them as Mongols.Investigations concerning the various tribes, however, show that among the Juan-juan there were both Mongol and Turkish tribes, and that the question cannot be decided in favour of either group.Some of the tribes belonging to the Juan-juan had formerly lived in China.Others had lived farther north or west and came into the history of the Far East now for the first time.

This Juan-juan people threatened the Toba in the rear, from the north.It made raids into the Toba empire for the same reasons for which the Huns in the past had raided agrarian China; for agriculture had made considerable progress in the Toba empire.Consequently, before the Toba could attempt to expand southward, the Juan-juan peril must be removed.This was done in the end, after a long series of hard and not always successful struggles.That was why the Toba had played no part in the fighting against South China, and had been unable to take immediate advantage of that fighting.

After 429 the Juan-juan peril no longer existed, and in the years that followed the whole of the small states of the west were destroyed, one after another, by the Toba—the "Hsia kingdom" in 431, bringing down with it the "Western Ch'in", and the "Northern Liang" in 439.The non-Chinese elements of the population of those countries were moved northward and served the Toba as soldiers; the Chinese also, especially the remains of the Kansu "Western Liang" state (conquered in 420), were enslaved, and some of them transferred to the north.Here again, however, the influence of the Chinese gentry made itself felt after a short time.As we know, the Chinese of "Western Liang" in Kansu had originally migrated there from eastern China.Their eastern relatives who had come under Toba rule through the conquest of eastern China and who through their family connections with Chinese officials of the Toba empire had found safety, brought their influence to bear on behalf of the Chinese of Kansu, so that several families regained office and social standing.

[Illustration: Map 4: The Toba empire (about A.D.500)]

Their expansion into Kansu gave the Toba control of the commerce with Turkestan, and there are many mentions of tribute missions to the Toba court in the years that followed, some even from India.The Toba also spread in the east.And finally there was fighting with South China (430-431), which brought to the Toba empire a large part of the province of Honan with the old capital, Loyang.Thus about 440 the Toba must be described as the most powerful state in the Far East, ruling the whole of North China.

4 Economic and social conditions

The internal changes of which there had only been indications in the first period of the Toba empire now proceeded at an accelerated pace.There were many different factors at work.The whole of the civil administration had gradually passed into Chinese hands, the Toba retaining only the military administration.But the wars in the south called for the services of specialists in fortification and in infantry warfare, who were only to be found among the Chinese.The growing influence of the Chinese was further promoted by the fact that many Toba families were exterminated in the revolts of the tribal chieftains, and others were wiped out in the many battles.Thus the Toba lost ground also in the military administration.

The wars down to A.D.440 had been large-scale wars of conquest, lightning campaigns that had brought in a great deal of booty.With their loot the Toba developed great magnificence and luxury.The campaigns that followed were hard and long-drawn-out struggles, especially against South China, where there was no booty, because the enemy retired so slowly that they could take everything with them.The Toba therefore began to be impoverished, because plunder was the main source of their wealth.In addition to this, their herds gradually deteriorated, for less and less use was made of them; for instance, horses were little required for the campaign against South China, and there was next to no fighting in the north.In contrast with the impoverishment of the Toba, the Chinese gentry grew not only more powerful but more wealthy.

The Toba seem to have tried to prevent this development by introducing the famous "land equalization system" (chün-t'ien), one of their most important innovations. The direct purposes of this measure were to resettle uprooted farm population; to prevent further migrations of farmers; and to raise production and taxes. The founder of this system was Li An-shih, member of a Toba family and later husband of an imperial princess. The plan was basically accepted in 477, put into action in 485, and remained the land law until c750.Every man and every woman had a right to receive a certain amount of land for lifetime.After their death, the land was redistributed.In addition to this "personal land" there was so-called "mulberry land" on which farmers could plant mulberries for silk production; but they also could plant other crops under the trees.This land could be inherited from father to son and was not redistributed.Incidentally we know many similar regulations for trees in the Near East and Central Asia.As the tax was levied upon the personal land in form of grain, and on the tree land in form of silk, this regulation stimulated the cultivation of diversified crops on the tree land which then was not taxable.The basic idea behind this law was, that all land belonged to the state, a concept for which the Toba could point to the ancient Chou but which also fitted well for a dynasty of conquest.The new "chün-t'ien" system required a complete land and population survey which was done in the next years.We know from much later census fragments that the government tried to enforce this equalization law, but did not always succeed; we read statements such as "X has so and so much land; he has a claim on so and so much land and, therefore, has to get so and so much"; but there are no records that X ever received the land due to him.

One consequence of the new land law was a legal fixation of the social classes.Already during Han time (and perhaps even earlier) a distinction had been made between "free burghers" (liang-min) and "commoners" (ch'ien-min).This distinction had continued as informal tradition until, now, it became a legal concept.Only "burghers", i.e.gentry and free farmers, were real citizens with all rights of a free man.The "commoners" were completely or partly unfree and fell under several heads.Ranking as the lowest class were the real slaves (nu), divided into state and private slaves.By law, slaves were regarded as pieces of property, not as members of human society.They were, however, forced to marry and thus, as a class, were probably reproducing at a rate similar to that of the normal population, while slaves in Europe reproduced at a lower rate than the population.The next higher class were serfs (fan-hu), hereditary state servants, usually descendants of state slaves.They were obliged to work three months during the year for the state and were paid for this service.They were not registered in their place of residence but under the control of the Ministry of Agriculture which distributed them to other offices, but did not use them for farm work.Similar in status to them were the private bondsmen (pu-ch'ü), hereditarily attached to gentry families.These serfs received only 50 per cent of the land which a free burgher received under the land law.Higher than these were the service families (tsa-hu), who were registered in their place of residence, but had to perform certain services; here we find "tomb families" who cared for the imperial tombs, "shepherd families", postal families, kiln families, soothsayer families, medical families, and musician families. Each of these categories of commoners had its own laws; each had to marry within the category. No intermarriage or adoption was allowed. It is interesting to observe that a similar fixation of the social status of citizens occurred in the Roman Empire from cA.D.300 on.

Thus in the years between 440 and 490 there were great changes not only in the economic but in the social sphere.The Toba declined in number and influence.Many of them married into rich families of the Chinese gentry and regarded themselves as no longer belonging to the Toba.In the course of time the court was completely sinified.

The Chinese at the court now formed the leading element, and they tried to persuade the emperor to claim dominion over all China, at least in theory, by installing his capital in Loyang, the old centre of China.This transfer had the advantage for them personally that the territories in which their properties were situated were close to that capital, so that the grain they produced found a ready market.And it was indeed no longer possible to rule the great Toba empire, now covering the whole of North China from North Shansi.The administrative staff was so great that the transport system was no longer able to bring in sufficient food.For the present capital did not lie on a navigable river, and all the grain had to be carted, an expensive and unsafe mode of transport.Ultimately, in 493-4, the Chinese gentry officials secured the transfer of the capital to Loyang.In the years 490 to 499 the Toba emperor Wen Ti (471-499) took further decisive steps required by the stage reached in internal development.All aliens were prohibited from using their own language in public life.Chinese became the official language.Chinese clothing and customs also became general.The system of administration which had largely followed a pattern developed by the Wei dynasty in the early third century, was changed and took a form which became the model for the T'ang dynasty in the seventh century.It is important to note that in this period, for the first time, an office for religious affairs was created which dealt mainly with Buddhistic monasteries.While after the Toba period such an office for religious affairs disappeared again, this idea was taken up later by Japan when Japan accepted a Chinese-type of administration.

[Illustration: 6 Sun Ch'üan, ruler of Wu. From a painting by Yen
Li-pen (c640-680).]

[Illustration: 7 General view of the Buddhist cave-temples of Yün-kang. In the foreground, the present village; in the background, the rampart. Photo H.Hammer-Morrisson.]

Owing to his bringing up, the emperor no longer regarded himself as Toba but as Chinese; he adopted the Chinese culture, acting as he was bound to do if he meant to be no longer an alien ruler in North China.Already he regarded himself as emperor of all China, so that the South Chinese empire was looked upon as a rebel state that had to be conquered.While, however, he succeeded in everything else, the campaign against the south failed except for some local successes.

The transfer of the capital to Loyang was a blow to the Toba nobles.Their herds became valueless, for animal products could not be carried over the long distance to the new capital.In Loyang the Toba nobles found themselves parted from their tribes, living in an unaccustomed climate and with nothing to do, for all important posts were occupied by Chinese.The government refused to allow them to return to the north.Those who did not become Chinese by finding their way into Chinese families grew visibly poorer and poorer.

5 Victory and retreat of Buddhism

What we said in regard to the religious position of the other alien peoples applied also to the Toba.As soon, however, as their empire grew, they, too, needed an "official" religion of their own.For a few years they had continued their old sacrifices to Heaven; then another course opened to them.The Toba, together with many Chinese living in the Toba empire, were all captured by Buddhism, and especially by its shamanist element.One element in their preference of Buddhism was certainly the fact that Buddhism accepted all foreigners alike—both the Toba and the Chinese were "foreign" converts to an essentially Indian religion; whereas the Confucianist Chinese always made the non-Chinese feel that in spite of all their attempts they were still "barbarians" and that only real Chinese could be real Confucianists.

Secondly, it can be assumed that the Toba rulers by fostering Buddhism intended to break the power of the Chinese gentry.A few centuries later, Buddhism was accepted by the Tibetan kings to break the power of the native nobility, by the Japanese to break the power of a federation of noble clans, and still later by the Burmese kings for the same reason.The acceptance of Buddhism by rulers in the Far East always meant also an attempt to create a more autocratic, absolutistic regime.Mahayana Buddhism, as an ideal, desired a society without clear-cut classes under one enlightened ruler; in such a society all believers could strive to attain the ultimate goal of salvation.

Throughout the early period of Buddhism in the Far East, the question had been discussed what should be the relations between the Buddhist monks and the emperor, whether they were subject to him or not.This was connected, of course, with the fact that to the early fourth century the Buddhist monks were foreigners who, in the view prevalent in the Far East, owed only a limited allegiance to the ruler of the land.The Buddhist monks at the Toba court now submitted to the emperor, regarding him as a reincarnation of Buddha.Thus the emperor became protector of Buddhism and a sort of god.This combination was a good substitute for the old Chinese theory that the emperor was the Son of Heaven; it increased the prestige and the splendour of the dynasty.At the same time the old shamanism was legitimized under a Buddhist reinterpretation.Thus Buddhism became a sort of official religion.The emperor appointed a Buddhist monk as head of the Buddhist state church, and through this "Pope" he conveyed endowments on a large scale to the church.T'an-yao, head of the state church since 460, induced the state to attach state slaves, i.e.enslaved family members of criminals, and their families to state temples.They were supposed to work on temple land and to produce for the upkeep of the temples and monasteries.Thus, the institution of "temple slaves" was created, an institution which existed in South Asia and Burma for a long time, and which greatly strengthened the economic position of Buddhism.

Like all Turkish peoples, the Toba possessed a myth according to which their ancestors came into the world from a sacred grotto.The Buddhists took advantage of this conception to construct, with money from the emperor, the vast and famous cave-temple of Yün-kang, in northern Shansi.If we come from the bare plains into the green river valley, we may see to this day hundreds of caves cut out of the steep cliffs of the river bank.Here monks lived in their cells, worshipping the deities of whom they had thousands of busts and reliefs sculptured in stone, some of more than life-size, some diminutive.The majestic impression made today by the figures does not correspond to their original effect, for they were covered with a layer of coloured stucco.

We know only few names of the artists and craftsmen who made these objects.Probably some at least were foreigners from Turkestan, for in spite of the predominantly Chinese character of these sculptures, some of them are reminiscent of works in Turkestan and even in the Near East.In the past the influences of the Near East on the Far East—influences traced back in the last resort to Greece—were greatly exaggerated; it was believed that Greek art, carried through Alexander's campaign as far as the present Afghanistan, degenerated there in the hands of Indian imitators (the so-called Gandhara art) and ultimately passed on in more and more distorted forms through Turkestan to China.Actually, however, some eight hundred years lay between Alexander's campaign and the Toba period sculptures at Yün-kang and, owing to the different cultural development, the contents of the Greek and the Toba-period art were entirely different.We may say, therefore, that suggestions came from the centre of the Greco-Bactrian culture (in the present Afghanistan) and were worked out by the Toba artists; old forms were filled with a new content, and the elements in the reliefs of Yün-kang that seem to us to be non-Chinese were the result of this synthesis of Western inspiration and Turkish initiative.It is interesting to observe that all steppe rulers showed special interest in sculpture and, as a rule, in architecture; after the Toba period, sculpture flourished in China in the T'ang period, the period of strong cultural influence from Turkish peoples, and there was a further advance of sculpture and of the cave-dwellers' worship in the period of the "Five Dynasties" (906-960; three of these dynasties were Turkish) and in the Mongol period.

But not all Buddhists joined the "Church", just as not all Taoists had joined the Church of Chang Ling's Taoism.Some Buddhists remained in the small towns and villages and suffered oppression from the central Church.These village Buddhist monks soon became instigators of a considerable series of attempts at revolution.Their Buddhism was of the so-called "Maitreya school", which promised the appearance on earth of a new Buddha who would do away with all suffering and introduce a Golden Age.The Chinese peasantry, exploited by the gentry, came to the support of these monks whose Messianism gave the poor a hope in this world.The nomad tribes also, abandoned by their nobles in the capital and wandering in poverty with their now worthless herds, joined these monks.We know of many revolts of Hun and Toba tribes in this period, revolts that had a religious appearance but in reality were simply the result of the extreme impoverishment of these remaining tribes.

In addition to these conflicts between state and popular Buddhism, clashes between Buddhists and representatives of organized Taoism occurred.Such fights, however, reflected more the power struggle between cliques than between religious groups.The most famous incident was the action against the Buddhists in 446 which brought destruction to many temples and monasteries and death to many monks.Here, a mighty Chinese gentry faction under the leadership of the Ts'ui family had united with the Taoist leader K'ou Ch'ien-chih against another faction under the leadership of the crown prince.

With the growing influence of the Chinese gentry, however, Confucianism gained ground again, until with the transfer of the capital to Loyang it gained a complete victory, taking the place of Buddhism and becoming once more as in the past the official religion of the state.This process shows us once more how closely the social order of the gentry was associated with Confucianism.

(E) Succession States of the Toba (A.D.550-580): Northern Ch'i dynasty,
Northern Chou dynasty

1 Reasons for the splitting of the Toba empire

Events now pursued their logical course. The contrast between the central power, now become entirely Chinese, and the remains of the tribes who were with their herds mainly in Shansi and the Ordos region and were hopelessly impoverished, grew more and more acute. From 530 onward the risings became more and more formidable. A few Toba who still remained with their old tribes placed themselves at the head of the rebels and conquered not only the whole of Shansi but also the capital, where there was a great massacre of Chinese and pro-Chinese Toba. The rebels were driven back; in this a man of the Kao family distinguished himself, and all the Chinese and pro-Chinese gathered round him. The Kao family, which may have been originally a Hsien-pi family, had its estates in eastern China and so was closely associated with the eastern Chinese gentry, who were the actual rulers of the Toba State. In 534 this group took the impotent emperor of their own creation to the city of Yeh in the east, where he reigned de jure for a further sixteen years. Then he was deposed, and Kao Yang made himself the first emperor of the Northern Ch'i dynasty (550-577).

The national Toba group, on the other hand, found another man of the imperial family and established him in the west.After a short time this puppet was removed from the throne and a man of the Yü-wen family made himself emperor, founding the "Northern Chou dynasty" (557-580).The Hsien-pi family of Yü-wen was a branch of the Hsien-pi, but was closely connected with the Huns and probably of Turkish origin.All the still existing remains of Toba tribes who had eluded sinification moved into this western empire.

The splitting of the Toba empire into these two separate realms was the result of the policy embarked on at the foundation of the empire.Once the tribal chieftains and nobles had been separated from their tribes and organized militarily, it was inevitable that the two elements should have different social destinies.The nobles could not hold their own against the Chinese; if they were not actually eliminated in one way or another, they disappeared into Chinese families.The rest, the people of the tribe, became destitute and were driven to revolt.The northern peoples had been unable to perpetuate either their tribal or their military organization, and the Toba had been equally unsuccessful in their attempt to perpetuate the two forms of organization alongside each other.

These social processes are of particular importance because the ethnical disappearance of the northern peoples in China had nothing to do with any racial inferiority or with any particular power of assimilation; it was a natural process resulting from the different economic, social, and cultural organizations of the northern peoples and the Chinese.

2 Appearance of the (Gök) Turks

The Toba had liberated themselves early in the fifth century from the Juan-juan peril.None of the fighting that followed was of any great importance.The Toba resorted to the old means of defence against nomads—they built great walls.Apart from that, after their move southward to Loyang, their new capital, they were no longer greatly interested in their northern territories.When the Toba empire split into the Ch'i and the Northern Chou, the remaining Juan-juan entered into treaties first with one realm and then with the other: each realm wanted to secure the help of the Juan-juan against the other.

Meanwhile there came unexpectedly to the fore in the north a people grouped round a nucleus tribe of Huns, the tribal union of the "T'u-chüeh", that is to say the Gök Turks, who began to pursue a policy of their own under their khan.In 546 they sent a mission to the western empire, then in the making, of the Northern Chou, and created the first bonds with it, following which the Northern Chou became allies of the Turks.The eastern empire, Ch'i, accordingly made terms with the Juan-juan, but in 552 the latter suffered a crushing defeat at the hands of the Turks, their former vassals.The remains of the Juan-juan either fled to the Ch'i state or went reluctantly into the land of the Chou.Soon there was friction between the Juan-juan and the Ch'i, and in 555 the Juan-juan in that state were annihilated.In response to pressure from the Turks, the Juan-juan in the western empire of the Northern Chou were delivered up to them and killed in the same year.The Juan-juan then disappeared from the history of the Far East.They broke up into their several tribes, some of which were admitted into the Turks' tribal league.A few years later the Turks also annihilated the Ephtalites, who had been allied with the Juan-juan; this made the Turks the dominant power in Central Asia.The Ephtalites (Yeh-ta, Haytal) were a mixed group which contained elements of the old Yüeh-chih and spoke an Indo-European language.Some scholars regard them as a branch of the Tocharians of Central Asia.One menace to the northern states of China had disappeared—that of the Juan-juan.Their place was taken by a much more dangerous power, the Turks.

3 The Northern Ch'i dynasty; the Northern Chou dynasty

In consequence of this development the main task of the Northern Chou state consisted in the attempt to come to some settlement with its powerful Turkish neighbours, and meanwhile to gain what it could from shrewd negotiations with its other neighbours.By means of intrigues and diplomacy it intervened with some success in the struggles in South China.One of the pretenders to the throne was given protection; he was installed in the present Hankow as a quasi-feudal lord depending on Chou, and there he founded the "Later Liang dynasty" (555-587).In this way Chou had brought the bulk of South China under its control without itself making any real contribution to that result.

Unlike the Chinese state of Ch'i, Chou followed the old Toba tradition.Old customs were revived, such as the old sacrifice to Heaven and the lifting of the emperor on to a carpet at his accession to the throne; family names that had been sinified were turned into Toba names again, and even Chinese were given Toba names; but in spite of this the inner cohesion had been destroyed.After two centuries it was no longer possible to go back to the old nomad, tribal life.There were also too many Chinese in the country, with whom close bonds had been forged which, in spite of all attempts, could not be broken.Consequently there was no choice but to organize a state essentially similar to that of the great Toba empire.

There is just as little of importance that can be said of the internal politics of the Ch'i dynasty.The rulers of that dynasty were thoroughly repulsive figures, with no positive achievements of any sort to their credit.Confucianism had been restored in accordance with the Chinese character of the state.It was a bad time for Buddhists, and especially for the followers of the popularized Taoism.In spite of this, about A.D.555 great new Buddhist cave-temples were created in Lung-men, near Loyang, in imitation of the famous temples of Yün-kang.

The fighting with the western empire, the Northern Chou state, still continued, and Ch'i was seldom successful.In 563 Chou made preparations for a decisive blow against Ch'i, but suffered defeat because the Turks, who had promised aid, gave none and shortly afterwards began campaigns of their own against Ch'i.In 571 Ch'i had some success in the west against Chou, but then it lost parts of its territory to the South Chinese empire, and finally in 576-7 it was defeated by Chou in a great counter-offensive.Thus for some three years all North China was once more under a single rule, though of nothing approaching the strength of the Toba at the height of their power.For in all these campaigns the Turks had played an important part, and at the end they annexed further territory in the north of Ch'i, so that their power extended far into the east.

Meanwhile intrigue followed intrigue at the court of Chou; the mutual assassinations within the ruling group were as incessant as in the last years of the great Toba empire, until the real power passed from the emperor and his Toba entourage to a Chinese family, the Yang. Yang Chien's daughter was the wife of a Chou emperor; his son was married to a girl of the Hun family Tu-ku; her sister was the wife of the father of the Chou emperor. Amid this tangled relationship in the imperial house it is not surprising that Yang Chien should attain great power. The Tu-ku were a very old family of the Hun nobility; originally the name belonged to the Hun house from which the shan-yü had to be descended. This family still observed the traditions of the Hun rulers, and relationship with it was regarded as an honour even by the Chinese. Through their centuries of association with aristocratically organized foreign peoples, some of the notions of nobility had taken root among the Chinese gentry; to be related with old ruling houses was a welcome means of evidencing or securing a position of special distinction among the gentry. Yang Chien gained useful prestige from his family connections. After the leading Chinese cliques had regained predominance in the Chou empire, much as had happened before in the Toba empire, Yang Chien's position was strong enough to enable him to massacre the members of the imperial family and then, in 581, to declare himself emperor. Thus began the Sui dynasty, the first dynasty that was once more to rule all China.

But what had happened to the Toba?With the ending of the Chou empire they disappeared for all time, just as the Juan-juan had done a little earlier.So far as the tribes did not entirely disintegrate, the people of the tribes seem during the last years of Toba and Chou to have joined Turkish and other tribes.In any case, nothing more is heard of them as a people, and they themselves lived on under the name of the tribe that led the new tribal league.

Most of the Toba nobility, on the other hand, became Chinese.This process can be closely followed in the Chinese annals.The tribes that had disintegrated in the time of the Toba empire broke up into families of which some adopted the name of the tribe as their family name, while others chose Chinese family names.During the centuries that followed, in some cases indeed down to modern times, these families continue to appear, often playing an important part in Chinese history.

(F) The Southern Empires

1 Economic and social situation in the south

During the 260 years of alien rule in North China, the picture of South China also was full of change.When in 317 the Huns had destroyed the Chinese Chin dynasty in the north, a Chin prince who normally would not have become heir to the throne declared himself, under the name Yüan Ti, the first emperor of the "Eastern Chin dynasty" (317-419).The capital of this new southern empire adjoined the present Nanking.Countless members of the Chinese gentry had fled from the Huns at that time and had come into the southern empire.They had not done so out of loyalty to the Chinese dynasty or out of national feeling, but because they saw little prospect of attaining rank and influence at the courts of the alien rulers, and because it was to be feared that the aliens would turn the fields into pasturage, and also that they would make an end of the economic and monetary system which the gentry had evolved for their own benefit.

But the south was, of course, not uninhabited.There were already two groups living there—the old autochthonous population, consisting of Yao, Tai and Yüeh, and the earlier Chinese immigrants from the north, who had mainly arrived in the time of the Three Kingdoms, at the beginning of the third century A.D.The countless new immigrants now came into sharp conflict with the old-established earlier immigrants.Each group looked down on the other and abused it.The two immigrant groups in particular not only spoke different dialects but had developed differently in respect to manners and customs. A look for example at Formosa in the years after 1948 will certainly help in an understanding of this situation: analogous tensions developed between the new refugees, the old Chinese immigrants, and the native Formosan population.But let us return to the southern empires.

The two immigrant groups also differed economically and socially: the old immigrants were firmly established on the large properties they had acquired, and dominated their tenants, who were largely autochthones; or they had engaged in large-scale commerce.In any case, they possessed capital, and more capital than was usually possessed by the gentry of the north.Some of the new immigrants, on the other hand, were military people.They came with empty hands, and they had no land.They hoped that the government would give them positions in the military administration and so provide them with means; they tried to gain possession of the government and to exclude the old settlers as far as possible.The tension was increased by the effect of the influx of Chinese in bringing more land into cultivation, thus producing a boom period such as is produced by the opening up of colonial land.Everyone was in a hurry to grab as much land as possible.There was yet a further difference between the two groups of Chinese: the old settlers had long lost touch with the remainder of their families in the north.They had become South Chinese, and all their interests lay in the south.The new immigrants had left part of their families in the north under alien rule.Their interests still lay to some extent in the north.They were working for the reconquest of the north by military means; at times individuals or groups returned to the north, while others persuaded the rest of their relatives to come south.It would be wrong to suppose that there was no inter-communication between the two parts into which China had fallen.As soon as the Chinese gentry were able to regain any footing in the territories under alien rule, the official relations, often those of belligerency, proceeded alongside unofficial intercourse between individual families and family groupings, and these latter were, as a rule, in no way belligerent.

The lower stratum in the south consisted mainly of the remains of the original non-Chinese population, particularly in border and southern territories which had been newly annexed from time to time.In the centre of the southern state the way of life of the non-Chinese was very quickly assimilated to that of the Chinese, so that the aborigines were soon indistinguishable from Chinese.The remaining part of the lower class consisted of impoverished Chinese peasants.This whole lower section of the population rarely took any active and visible part in politics, except at times in the form of great popular risings.

Until the third century, the south had been of no great economic importance, in spite of the good climate and the extraordinary fertility of the Yangtze valley.The country had been too thinly settled, and the indigenous population had not become adapted to organized trade.After the move southward of the Chin dynasty the many immigrants had made the country of the lower Yangtze more thickly populated, but not over-populated.The top-heavy court with more than the necessary number of officials (because there was still hope for a reconquest of the north which would mean many new jobs for administrators) was a great consumer; prices went up and stimulated local rice production.The estates of the southern gentry yielded more than before, and naturally much more than the small properties of the gentry in the north where, moreover, the climate is far less favourable.Thus the southern landowners were able to acquire great wealth, which ultimately made itself felt in the capital.

One very important development was characteristic in this period in the south, although it also occurred in the north.Already in pre-Han times, some rulers had gardens with fruit trees.The Han emperors had large hunting parks which were systematically stocked with rare animals; they also had gardens and hot-houses for the production of vegetables for the court.These "gardens" (yüan) were often called "manors" (pieh-yeh) and consisted of fruit plantations with luxurious buildings.We hear soon of water-cooled houses for the gentry, of artificial ponds for pleasure and fish breeding, artificial water-courses, artificial mountains, bamboo groves, and parks with parrots, ducks, and large animals.Here, the wealthy gentry of both north and south, relaxed from government work, surrounded by their friends and by women.These manors grew up in the hills, on the "village commons" where formerly the villagers had collected their firewood and had grazed their animals.Thus, the village commons begin to disappear.The original farm land was taxed, because it produced one of the two products subject to taxation, namely grain or mulberry leaves for silk production.But the village common had been and remained tax-free because it did not produce taxable things.While land-holdings on the farmland were legally restricted in their size, the "gardens" were unrestricted.Around A.D.500 the ruler allowed high officials to have manors of three hundred mou size, while in the north a family consisting of husband and wife and children below fifteen years of age were allowed a farm of sixty mou only; but we hear of manors which were many times larger than the allowed size of three hundred.These manors began to play an important economic role, too: they were cultivated by tenants and produced fishes, vegetables, fruit and bamboo for the market, thus they gave more income than ordinary rice or wheat land.

With the creation of manors the total amount of land under cultivation increased, though not the amount of grain-producing land. We gain the impression that from cthe third century A.D.on to the eleventh century the intensity of cultivation was generally lower than in the period before.

The period from cA.D.300 on also seems to be the time of the second change in Chinese dietary habits.The first change occurred probably between 400 and 100 B.C.when the meat-eating Chinese reduced their meat intake greatly, gave up eating beef and mutton and changed over to some pork and dog meat.This first change was the result of increase of population and decrease of available land for pasturage.Cattle breeding in China was then reduced to the minimum of one cow or water-buffalo per farm for ploughing.Wheat was the main staple for the masses of the people.Between A.D.300 and 600 rice became the main staple in the southern states although, theoretically, wheat could have been grown and some wheat probably was grown in the south.The vitamin and protein deficiencies which this change from wheat to rice brought forth, were made up by higher consumption of vegetables, especially beans, and partially also by eating of fish and sea food.In the north, rice became the staple food of the upper class, while wheat remained the main food of the lower classes.However, new forms of preparation of wheat, such as dumplings of different types, were introduced.The foreign rulers consumed more meat and milk products.Chinese had given up the use of milk products at the time of the first change, and took to them to some extent only in periods of foreign rule.

2 Struggles between cliques under the Eastern Chin dynasty (A. D. 317-419)

The officials immigrating from the north regarded the south as colonial country, and so as more or less uncivilized.They went into its provinces in order to get rich as quickly as possible, and they had no desire to live there for long: they had the same dislike of a provincial existence as had the families of the big landowners.Thus as a rule the bulk of the families remained in the capital, close to the court.Thither the products accumulated in the provinces were sent, and they found a ready sale, as the capital was also a great and long-established trading centre with a rich merchant class.Thus in the capital there was every conceivable luxury and every refinement of civilization.The people of the gentry class, who were maintained in the capital by relatives serving in the provinces as governors or senior officers, themselves held offices at court, though these gave them little to do.They had time at their disposal, and made use of it—in much worse intrigues than ever before, but also in music and poetry and in the social life of the harems. There is no question at all that the highest refinement of the civilization of the Far East between the fourth and the sixth century was to be found in South China, but the accompaniments of this over-refinement were terrible.

We cannot enter into all the intrigues recorded at this time.The details are, indeed, historically unimportant.They were concerned only with the affairs of the court and its entourage.Not a single ruler of the Eastern Chin dynasty possessed personal or political qualities of any importance.The rulers' power was extremely limited because, with the exception of the founder of the state, Yüan Ti, who had come rather earlier, they belonged to the group of the new immigrants, and so had no firm footing and were therefore caught at once in the net of the newly re-grouping gentry class.

The emperor Yüan Ti lived to see the first great rising.This rising (under Wang Tun) started in the region of the present Hankow, a region that today is one of the most important in China; it was already a centre of special activity.To it lead all the trade routes from the western provinces of Szechwan and Kweichow and from the central provinces of Hupei, Hunan, and Kiangsi.Normally the traffic from those provinces comes down the Yangtze, and thus in practice this region is united with that of the lower Yangtze, the environment of Nanking, so that Hankow might just as well have been the capital as Nanking.For this reason, in the period with which we are now concerned the region of the present Hankow was several times the place of origin of great risings whose aim was to gain control of the whole of the southern empire.

Wang Tun had grown rich and powerful in this region; he also had near relatives at the imperial court; so he was able to march against the capital.The emperor in his weakness was ready to abdicate but died before that stage was reached.His son, however, defeated Wang Tun with the aid of General Yü Liang (A.D.323).Yü Liang was the empress's brother; he, too, came from a northern family.Yüan Ti's successor also died early, and the young son of Yü Liang's sister came to the throne as Emperor Ch'eng (326-342); his mother ruled as regent, but Yü Liang carried on the actual business of government.Against this clique rose Su Chün, another member of the northern gentry, who had made himself leader of a bandit gang in A.D.300 but had then been given a military command by the dynasty.In 328 he captured the capital and kidnapped the emperor, but then fell before the counterthrust of the Yü Liang party.The domination of Yü Liang's clique continued after the death of the twenty-one-years-old emperor.His twenty-year-old brother was set in his place; he, too, died two years later, and his two-year-old son became emperor (Mu Ti, 345-361).

Meanwhile this clique was reinforced by the very important Huan family.This family came from the same city as the imperial house and was a very old gentry family of that city.One of the family attained a high post through personal friendship with Yü Liang: on his death his son Huan Wen came into special prominence as military commander.

Huan Wen, like Wang Tun and others before him, tried to secure a firm foundation for his power, once more in the west.In 347 he reconquered Szechwan and deposed the local dynasty.Following this, Huan Wen and the Yü family undertook several joint campaigns against northern states—the first reaction of the south against the north, which in the past had always been the aggressor.The first fighting took place directly to the north, where the collapse of the "Later Chao" seemed to make intervention easy.The main objective was the regaining of the regions of eastern Honan, northern Anhui and Kiangsu, in which were the family seats of Huan's and the emperor's families, as well as that of the Hsieh family which also formed an important group in the court clique.The purpose of the northern campaigns was not, of course, merely to defend private interests of court cliques: the northern frontier was the weak spot of the southern empire, for its plains could easily be overrun.It was then observed that the new "Earlier Ch'in" state was trying to spread from the north-west eastwards into this plain, and Ch'in was attacked in an attempt to gain a more favourable frontier territory.These expeditions brought no important practical benefit to the south; and they were not embarked on with full force, because there was only the one court clique at the back of them, and that not whole-heartedly, since it was too much taken up with the politics of the court.

Huan Wen's power steadily grew in the period that followed.He sent his brothers and relatives to administer the regions along the upper Yangtze; those fertile regions were the basis of his power.In 371 he deposed the reigning emperor and appointed in his place a frail old prince who died a year later, as required, and was replaced by a child.The time had now come when Huan Wen might have ascended the throne himself, but he died.None of his family could assemble as much power as Huan Wen had done.The equality of strength of the Huan and the Hsieh saved the dynasty for a time.

In 383 came the great assault of the Tibetan Fu Chien against the south.As we know, the defence was carried out more by the methods of diplomacy and intrigue than by military means, and it led to the disaster in the north already described.The successes of the southern state especially strengthened the Hsieh family, whose generals had come to the fore.The emperor (Hsiao Wu Ti, 373-396), who had come to the throne as a child, played no part in events at any time during his reign.He occupied himself occasionally with Buddhism, and otherwise only with women and wine.He was followed by his five-year-old son.At this time there were some changes in the court clique.In the Huan family Huan Hsüan, a son of Huan Wen, came especially into prominence.He parted from the Hsieh family, which had been closest to the emperor, and united with the Wang (the empress's) and Yin families.The Wang, an old Shansi family, had already provided two empresses, and was therefore strongly represented at court.The Yin had worked at first with the Hsieh, especially as the two families came from the same region, but afterwards the Yin went over to Huan Hsüan.At first this new clique had success, but later one of its generals, Liu Lao-chih, went over to the Hsieh clique, and its power declined.Wang Kung was killed, and Yin Chung-k'an fell away from Huan Hsüan and was killed by him in 399.Huan Hsüan himself, however, held his own in the regions loyal to him.Liu Lao-chih had originally belonged to the Hsieh clique, and his family came from a region not far from that of the Hsieh.He was very ambitious, however, and always took the side which seemed most to his own interest.For a time he joined Huan Hsüan; then he went over to the Hsieh, and finally returned to Huan Hsüan in 402 when the latter reached the height of his power.At that moment Liu Lao-chih was responsible for the defence of the capital from Huan Hsüan, but instead he passed over to him.Thus Huan Hsüan conquered the capital, deposed the emperor, and began a dynasty of his own.Then came the reaction, led by an earlier subordinate of Liu Lao-chih, Liu Yü.It may be assumed that these two army commanders were in some way related, though the two branches of their family must have been long separated.Liu Yü had distinguished himself especially in the suppression of a great popular rising which, around the year 400, had brought wide stretches of Chinese territory under the rebels' power, beginning with the southern coast.This rising was the first in the south.It was led by members of a secret society which was a direct continuation of the "Yellow Turbans" of the latter part of the second century A.D.and of organized church-Taoism.The whole course of this rising of the exploited and ill-treated lower classes was very similar to that of the popular rising of the "Yellow Turbans".The movement spread as far as the neighbourhood of Canton, but in the end it was suppressed, mainly by Liu Yü.