Ancient China Simplified

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In the year 485 B.C. the King of Wu, who was then in the hey-day
of his success, and by way of becoming Protector of China, erected
a wall and fortifications round the well-known modern city of
Yangchow (where Marco Polo 1700 years later acted as governor); he
next proceeded for the first time in history to establish water
communication between the Yang-tsz River and the River Hwai; this
canal was then (483-481) continued farther north, so as to give
communication with the southern and central parts of modern Shan
Tung province.

His object was to facilitate the conveyance of stores for his
armies, then engaged in bringing pressure upon Ts'i (North Shan
Tung) and Lu (South Shan Tung). He succeeded in getting his boats
to the River Tsi, running past Tsi-nan Fu, and to the River I,
running past I-thou Fu, thus dominating the whole Shan Tung
region; for these two were then the only navigable rivers in Shan
Tung besides the Sz. The River Tsi is now taken possession of by
the Yellow River, which, as we have shown, then ran a parallel
course much to the westward of it; and the River I then ran south
into the River Sz, which, as already explained, has in its lower
course, in comparatively modern times, been taken possession of
permanently by the Grand Canal; but the upper course of the Sz,
now, as then, ran past Confucius' town, the Lu metropolis, of
K'ueh-fu. In 483 B.C. the same king cast his faithful adviser (of
Ts'u origin) into the canal by which the waters of lake T'ai Hu
now run to modern Soochow, and thence to Hangchow. Ever since that
date the unfortunate man in question has been a popular "god of
the waters" in those parts. It follows, therefore, that the Wu
founder's modest canal must have been from time to time extended,
at least in an easterly direction. It was only after the conquest
of China by Ts'in, 250 years later, that the First August Emperor
extended this system of canals northwards and westwards, from
Ch'ang-thou Fu to Tan-yang and Chinkiang, as marked on the modern
maps. Thus the barbarian kings of Wu have found the true alignment
of our "British", railway for us; and, so far as the northern
canal is concerned, have really achieved the task for which credit
is usually given to Kublai Khan, the Mongol patron of Marco Polo.
Kublai merely improved the old work. The ancient Wu capital was 10
English miles south-east of Wu-sih, and 17 miles north of Soochow,
to which place the capital was transferred in the year 513 B.C.,
as it was more suitable than the old capital for the arsenals and
ship-building yards then, for the first time, being built on an
extensive scale by the King of Wu.

The first bridge over the Yellow River was constructed by the
kingdom of Ts'in in 257 B.C., on what is still the high-road
between T'ung-thou Fu and P'u-chou Fu. Previous to that date
armies had to cross the Yellow River at the fords; and, as an
instance of this, it may be stated that the founder of the Chou
dynasty in 1122 B.C. summoned his vassals to meet him at the Ford
of Meng, a place still so marked on the maps, and lying on the
high-road between the two modern cities of Ho-nan Fu and Hwai-
k'ing Fu; thus there was no excuse for the feudal princes failing
to arrive at the rendezvous. It was not far from the same place,
but on the north bank of the river, that Tsin in 632 B.C. held the
great durbar as Second Protector, on the notorious occasion when
the puppet Emperor was "sent for" by the Tsin dictator. To conceal
this outrage on "the rites," Confucius says: "The Son of Heaven
went in camp north of the river." To go on hunt, or in camp, is
still a vague historical expression for "go on fief inspection,"
and it was so used in 1858, when the Manchu Emperor Hien-feng took
refuge from the allied troops at Jehol in Tartary.

The first thing Ts'in did when it united the empire in 221 B.C.
was to occupy all the fords and narrow passes, and to put them in
working order for the passage of armies. As even now the lower
Yellow River is only navigable for large craft for 20 miles from
its mouth (now in Shan Tung), it is easy to imagine how many fords
there must have been in its shallow waters, and also how it came
to pass that boats were so little used to convey large bodies of
troops with their stores.

The great wall of China of 217 B.C. was by no means the first of
its kind. A century before that date Ts'in built a long wall to
keep off the Tartars; and, half a century before that again, Ngwei
(one of the three powerful families of Tsin, all made independent
princes in 403) had built a wall to keep off its western neighbour
Ts'in; both these walls seem to have been in the north part of the
modern Shen Si region, and they were possibly portions of the
later continuous great wall of the August Emperor, which occupied
the forced energies of 700,000 men. There is a statement that the
same Emperor set 700,000 eunuchs to work on the palaces and the
tomb he was constructing for himself at his new metropolis (moved
since 350 B.C. to the city of Hien-yang, north of the river Wei,
opposite the present Si-ngan Fu). This probably means, not that
eunuchs were common in those times as palace _employes_, but
that castration still was the usual punishment inflicted
throughout China for grave offences not calling for the penalty of
death, or for the more serious forms of maiming, such as foot-
chopping or knee-slicing; and that all the prisoners of that
degree were told off to do productive work: although humiliatingly
deformed, they were still available for the common purposes of
native life, and their defenceless and forlorn plight would
probably make it an easier matter to handle them in gangs than to
handle sound males; and if they died off under the rough treatment
of task-masters, they would have no families to mourn or avenge
them in accordance with family duty; for a eunuch has no name and
no family. The palaces in question were joined by a magnificent
bridge on the high-road between Hien-yang and Si-ngan. This very
year a German firm has contracted to build an iron bridge over the
Yellow River at Lan-thou Fu, where crossed by Major Bruce.

CHAPTER XXII

CITIES AND TOWNS

There are singularly few descriptions of cities in ancient Chinese
history, but here again we may safely assume that most of them
were in principle, if only on a small scale, very much what they
are now, mere inartistic, badly built collections of hovels. Soul,
the quaint capital of Corea, as it appeared in its virgin
condition to its European discoverers twenty-five years ago,
probably then closely resembled an ancient vassal Chinese prince's
capital of the very best kind. Modern trade is responsible for the
wealthy commercial streets now to be found in all large Chinese
cities; but a small _hien_ city in the interior--and it must
be remembered that a _hien_ circuit or district corresponds
to an old marquisate or feudal principality of the vassal unit
type--is often a poor, dusty, dirty, depressing, ramshackle
agglomeration of villages or hamlets, surrounded by a disproportionately
pretentious wall, the cubic contents of which wall alone would more
than suffice to build in superior style the whole mud city within; for half
the area of the interior is apt to be waste land or stagnant puddles: it
was so even in Peking forty years ago, and possibly is so still except
in the "Legation quarter."

In 745 B.C., when the Tsin marquess foolishly divided his
patrimony with a collateral branch, the capital town of this
subdivided state is stated to have been a greater place than the
old capital. They are both of them still in existence as
insignificant towns, situated quite close together on the same
branch of the River Fen (the only navigable river) in South Shan
Si; marked with their old names, too; that is to say, K'iih-wuh
and Yih-CH'ENg. It was only after the younger branch annexed the
elder in 679 that Tsin became powerful and began to expand; and it
was only when a policy of "home rule" and disintegration set in,
involving the splitting up of Tsin's orthodox power into three
royal states of doubtful orthodoxy, that China fell a prey to
Ts'in ambition. _Absit_ omen to us.

In 560, when the deformed philosopher Yen-tsz visited Ts'u, and
entertained that semi-barbarous court with his witticisms, he took
the opportunity boastfully to enlarge upon the magnificence of
Lin-tsz (still so marked), the capital of Ts'i. "It is," said he,
"surrounded by a hundred villages; the parasols of the walkers
obscure the sky, whose perspiration runs in such streams as to
cause rain; their shoulders and heels touch together, so closely
are they packed." The assembled Ts'u court, with mouths open, but
inclined for sport at the cost of their visitor, said: "If it is
such a grand place, why do they select you?" Yen-tsz played a
trump card when he replied: "Because I am such a mean-looking
fellow,"--meaning, as explained in Chapter IX., that "any pitiful
rascal is good enough to send to Ts'u." Exaggerations apart,
however, there is every reason to believe that the statesman-
philosopher Kwan-tsz, a century before that date, had really
organized a magnificent city. A full description of how he
reconstructed the economic life of both city and people is given
in the _Kwoh-yue_ (see Chapter XVII.), the authenticity of
which work, though not free from question, is, after all, only
subject to the same class of criticism as Renan lavishes upon one
or two of the Gospels, the general tenor of which, be says, must
none the less be accepted, with all faults, as the _bonafide_
attempt of some one, more or less contemporary, to represent what
was then generally supposed to be the truth.

Ts'u itself must have had something considerable to show in the
way of public buildings, for in the year 542 B.C. after paying a
visit to that country in accordance with the provisions of the
Peace Conference of 546, the ruler of Lu built himself a palace in
imitation of one he saw there. The original capital of Wu (see
Chapter VII.) was a poor place, and is described as having
consisted of low houses in narrow streets, with a vulgar palace;
this was in 523. In 513 a new king moved to the site now occupied
by Soochow, and he seems to have made of it the magnificent city
it has remained ever since--the place, of course it will be
remembered, where General Gordon and Li Hung-chang had their
celebrated quarrel about decapitating surrendered rebels. There
were eight gates, besides eight water-gates for boats; it was
eight English miles in circuit, and contained the palace, several
towers (pagodas, being Buddhist, were then naturally unknown),
kiosks, ponds, and duck preserves. The extensive arsenal and ship-
yard was quite separate from the main town. No city in the
orthodox part of China is so closely described as this one, nor is
it likely that there were many of them so vast in extent.

Judging by the frequency with which Ts'in moved its capitals (but
always within a limited area in the Wei valley, between that river
and its tributary the K'ien), they cannot have been very important
or substantial places; in fact, there are no descriptions of early
Ts'in economic life at all; and, for all we know to the contrary,
the headquarters of Duke Muh, when he entered upon his reforms in
the seventh century B.C., may have resembled a Tartar encampment.
The _Kwoh-yue_ has no chapter devoted to Ts'in, which (as indeed
stated) for 500 years lived a quite isolated life of its own. In later
times, especially after the reforms introduced by the celebrated
Chinese princely adventurer, Wei Yang, during the period 360--340,
the land administration was reconstituted, the capital was finally moved
to Hien-yang, and every effort was made to develop all the resources
of the country. Ts'in then possessed 41 _hien,_ those with a
population of under 10,000 having a governor with a lower title than
the governors of the larger towns, Probably the total population of
Ts'in by this time reached 3,000,000. A century later, when the First
August Emperor was conquering China, armies of half a million men
on each side were not at all uncommon. When his conquests were
complete, he set about building palaces on both banks of the Wei in
most lavish style, as narrated in the last chapter. It is said of him that,
"as he conquered each vassal prince, he had a sketch made of his
palace buildings," and, with these before him as models, he lined
the river with rows of beautiful edifices,--evidently, from the
description given, much resembling those lying along the Golden
Horn at Constantinople; if not in quality, at least in general
spectacular arrangement.

As to the minor orthodox states grouped along the Yellow River,
they seem to have shifted their capitals on very slight
provocation; scarcely one of them remained from first to last in
the same place. To take one as an instance, the state of Hu, an
orthodox state belonging to the same clan name as Ts'i. The
history of this petty principality or barony is only exactly known
from the time when Confucius' history begins, and it was
continually being oppressed by Cheng and Ts'u, its more powerful
neighbours; in 576, 533, 524 and onwards from that, there were
incessant removals, so that even the native commentators say: "it
was just like shifting a village, so superficial an affair was
it." The accepted belles _lettres_ style (see p. 78) of saying
"my country" is still the ancient _pi-yih_ or "unworthy village":
the Empress of China once (about 190 B.C.) used this expression,
even after the whole of China had been united, in order to reject
politely the offer of marriage conveyed to her by a powerful Tartar
king. The expression is particularly interesting, inasmuch as it recalls,
as we have already pointed out, a time when the "country" of each
feudal chief was simply his mud village and the few square miles of
fields around it, which were naturally divided off from the next chief's
territory by hills and streams. On the Burmo-Chinese frontier there are
at this moment many Kakhyen "kings" of this kind, each of them ruling
over his mountain or valley, and supreme in his own domain.

That there were walled cities in China (apart from the Emperor's,
which, of course, would be "the city" par _excellence_) is
plain from the language used at durbars, which were always held
"outside the walls." In the _loess_ plains there could not
have been any stone whatever for building purposes, and there is
little, if any, specific mention of brick. Probably the walls were
of adobe, i.e. of mud, beaten down between two rigid planks,
removed higher as the wall dries below. This is the way most of
the houses are still built in modern Peking, and perhaps also in
most parts of China, at least where stone (or brick) is not
cheaper; the "barbarian" parts of China are still the best built;
for instance, CH'ENg-tu in Sz Ch'wan, Canton in the south. Hankow
(Ts'u) is a comparatively poor place; Peking the dingiest of all.
Chinkiang is a purely _loess_ country.

At the time of the unification of China, during the middle of the
third century B.C., the Ts'in armies found it necessary to flood
Ta-liang or "Great Liang," the capital of Ngwei (otherwise called
Liang), corresponding to the modern K'ai-feng Fu, the Jewish
centre in Ho Nan province: the waters of the Yellow River were
allowed to flood the country (this was again done by the Tai-p'ing
rebels fifty years ago, when the Jews suffered like other people,
and lost their synagogue), the walls of which collapsed. It is
evident that the ancient city walls could not have been such
solid, brick-faced walls as we now see round Peking and Nanking,
but simply mud ramparts.

CHAPTER XXIII

BREAK-UP OF CHINA

We must turn to unorthodox China once more, and see how it fared
after Confucius' death. After only a short century of international
existence, the vigorous state of Wu perished once for all in the
year 473 B.C., and the remains of the ruling caste escaped
eastwards in boats. When for the first time embassies between
the Japanese and the Chinese became fairly regular, in the
second and third centuries of our era, there began to be
persistent statements made in standard Chinese history that the
then ruling powers in Japan considered themselves in some way
lineally connected with a Chinese Emperor of 2100 B.C., and with
his descendants, their ancestors, who, it was said, escaped from
Wu to China. This is the reason why, in Chapter VII., we have
suggested, not that the population of Japan came from China, but
that some of the semi-barbarous descendants of those ancient
Chinese princes who first colonized the then purely barbarous Wu,
finding their power destroyed in 473 B.C. by the neighbouring
barbarous power of Yueeh, settled in Japan, and continued their
civilizing mission in quite a new sphere. Many years ago I
endeavoured, in various papers published in China and Japan, to
show that, apart from Chinese words adopted into Japanese ever
since A.D. 1 from the two separate sources of North China by land
and Central China by sea, there is clear reason to detect, in the
supposed pure Japanese language, as it was anterior to those
importations, an admixture of Chinese words adopted much earlier
than A.D. 1, and incorporated into the current tongue at a time
when there was no means or thought of "nailing the sounds down" by
any phonetic system of writing. There is much other very sound
Chinese historical evidence in favour of the migration view, and
it has been best summarized in an excellent little work in German,
by Rev. A. Tschepe, S.J., published in the interior of Shan Tung
province only last year.

The ancient native names for Wu and Yiieh, according to the clumsy
Confucian way of writing them, were something like _Keu-ngu_
and _O-viet_ (see Chapter VII.); but it is quite hopeless to
attempt reconstruction of the exact sounds intended then to be
expressed by syllables which, in Chinese itself, have quite
changed in power. The power of Yueeh was supreme after 473; its
king was voted Protector by the federal princes, and in 472 he
held a grand durbar at the "Lang-ya Terrace," which place is no
longer exactly identifiable, but is probably nothing more than the
German settlement at Kiao Chou; in 468 he transferred his capital
thither, and it remained there for over a century, till 379: but
his power, it seems, was almost purely maritime, and he never
succeeded in obtaining a sure footing north of or even in the Hwai
valley, the greater part of which he subsequently returned to
Ts'u. It must be remembered that the Hwai then had a free course
to the sea, and of a part of it, the now extinct Sui valley, the
Yellow River took possession for several centuries up to 1851 A.D.
He also returned to Sung the territory Wu had taken from her, and
made over to Lu 100 _li_ square (30 miles) to the east of the
River Sz; to understand this it must be remembered, at the cost of
a little iteration, that Sung and Lu were the two chief powers of
the middle and lower Sz valley, which is now entirely monopolized
by the Grand Canal.

[Illustration: MAP

1. The dotted lines mark the boundaries of modern Shen Si, Shan
Si, Chih Li, Ho Nan, Shan Tung, An Hwei, and Kiang Su.

2. The names Chao, Ngwei, and Han show how Tsin was split up into
three in 403 B.C.

3. The crosses (in the line of each name) show the successive
capitals as Ts'in encroached from the west, the _last_ capital in
each case having a circle round the cross.]

The imperial dynasty went from bad to worse; in 440 there were
family intrigues, assassinations, and divisions. The imperial
metropolis, which was towards the end about all the Emperors had
left to them, was divided into two, each half ruled by an Eastern
and a Western Emperor respectively; unfortunately, no literature
has survived which might depict for us the life of the inhabitants
during those wretched days. Meanwhile, the ambitious great
families of Tsin very nearly fell under the dictatorship of one of
their number; in 452 he was himself annihilated by a combination
of the others, and the upshot of it was that next year the three
families that had crushed the dictator and, emerged victorious,
divided up the realm of Tsin into three separate and practically
independent states, called respectively Wei or Ngwei (the Shan Si
parts), Han (the Ho Nan parts), and Chao (the Chih Li parts). The
other ancient and more orthodox state of Wei, occupying the Yellow
River valley to the west of Sung and Lu, was now a mere vassal to
these three Tsin powers, which had not quite yet declared
themselves independent, and which had for the present left the old
Tsin capital to the direct administration of the legitimate
prince. It was only in the year 403 that the Emperor's administration
formally declared them to be feudal princes. This year is really the
next great turning-point in Chinese history, in order of date, after the
flight of the Emperors from their old capital in 771 B.C.; and it is, in
fact, with this year that the great modern historical work of Sz-ma
Kwang begins; it was published A.D. 1084, and brings Chinese
events down to a century previous to that date.

As to the state of Ts'i, it also had fallen into evil ways. So
early as 539 B.C., when the two philosophers Yen-tsz and Shuh
Hiang had confided to each other their mutual sorrows (see
Appendix No. 2), the former had predicted that the powerful local
family of T'ien or Ch'en was slowly but surely undermining the
legitimate princely house, and would certainly end by seizing the
throne; one of the methods adopted by the supplanting family was
to lend money to the people on very favourable terms, and so to
manipulate the grain measures that the taxes due to the prince
were made lighter to bear; in this ingenious and indirect way, all
the odium of taxation was thrown upon the extravagant princes who
habitually squandered their resources, whilst the credit for
generosity was turned towards this powerful tax-farming family,
which thus took care of its own financial interests, and at the
same time secured the affections of the people. In 481 the
ambitious T'ien Heng, _alias_ CH'EN Ch'ang, then acting as
hereditary _maire du palais_ to the legitimate house, assassinated
the ruling prince, an act so shocking from the orthodox point of view that
Confucius was quite heartbroken on learning of it, notwithstanding that his
own prince had narrowly escaped assassination at the hands of the
murdered man's grandfather. It was not until the year 391, however, that
the T'ien, or CH'EN, family, after setting up and deposing princes at
their pleasure for nearly a century, at last openly threw off the
mask and usurped the Ts'i throne: their title was officially
recognized by the Son of Heaven in the year 378.

As to Ts'in ambitions, for a couple of centuries past there had
been no further advance of conquest, at least in China. The
hitherto almost unheard of state of Shuh (Sz Ch'wan) now begins to
come prominently forward, and to contest with Ts'in mastery of the
upper course of the Yang-tsz River. After being for 260 years in
unchallenged possession of all territory west of the Yellow River,
Ts'in once more lost this to Tsin (_i.e._ to Ngwei) in 385.
It was not until the other state of Wei, lower down the Yellow
River, lost its individuality as an independent country that the
celebrated Prince Wei Yang (see Chapter XXII.), having no career
at home, offered his services to Ts'in, and that this latter
state, availing itself to the full of his knowledge, suddenly shot
forth in the light of real progress. We have seen in Chapter XX.
that an eminent lawyer and statesman of Ngwei, Ts'in's immediate
rival on the east, had inaugurated a new legal code and an
economic land system. This man's work had fallen under the
cognizance of Wei Yang, who carried it with him to Ts'in, where it
was immediately utilized to such advantage that Ts'in a century
later was enabled to organize her resources thoroughly, and thus
conquered the whole empire,

We have now arrived at what is usually called the Six Kingdom
Period, or, if we include Ts'in, against whose menacing power the
six states were often in alliance, the period of the Seven
Kingdoms. These were the three equally powerful states of Ngwei,
Han, and Chao (this last very Tartar in spirit, owing to its
having absorbed nearly all the Turko-Tartar tribes west of the
Yellow River mouth); the northernmost state of Yen, which seems in
the same way to have absorbed or to have exercised a strong
controlling influence over the Manchu-Corean group of tribes
extending from the Liao River to the Chao frontier; Ts'u, which
now had the whole south of China entirely to itself, and managed
even to amalgamate the coast states of Yiich in 334; and finally Ts'i.
In other words, the orthodox Chinese princes, whose comparatively
petty principalities in modern Ho Nan province had for several centuries
formed a sort of cock-pit in which Ts'in, Tsin, Ts'i, and Ts'u fought out
their rivalries, had totally disappeared as independent and even as
influential powers, and had been either absorbed by those four great
powers (of which Tsin and Ts'i were in reconstituted form), or had
become mere obedient vassals to one or the other of them. In former
times Tsin had been kinsman and defender; but now Tsin, broken up
into three of strange clans, herself afforded an easy prey to Ts'in
ambition; the orthodox states were in the defenceless position of the
Greek states after Alexander had exhausted Macedon in his Persian
wars, and when their last hope, Pyrrhus, had taught the Romans the art
of war: they had only escaped Persia to fall into the jaws of
Rome.

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