Ancient China Simplified

E >> Edward Harper Parker >> Ancient China Simplified

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25

After his humiliating defeat by the King of Wu in 494 B.C., the
King of Yiieh introduced a veritable _Lex Julia_ into his
dominions, in order to increase the population more quickly, and
to prepare for his great revenge. Robust men were forbidden to
marry old women, and old men to marry robust women. Parents were
punished if girls were not married by the time they were
seventeen, and if boys were not married by twenty. _Enceinte_
women had to be placed under the care of public midwives. For
every boy born, a royal bounty of two pots of wine and a dog were
given: for every girl born, two pots of wine and a sucking-pig;--
the dog, it is explained, being figurative of outdoor, the pig of
internal economy. Triplets were to be suckled at the public
expense; twins to be fed, when big enough, at the public expense.
The chief wife's son must be mourned, with absence from official
duty, for three years; other sons for two; and both kinds of son
were to be equally buried with weeping and wailing. Orphans, and
the sons of sick or poor widows, were to receive official
employment. Distinguished sons were to have their apartments
cleansed for them, and had to be well fed and handsomely clothed.
Learned men from other states were to be officially welcomed in
the ancestral temple. With reference to this curious law, which is
totally un-Chinese in its startling originality, it may be
mentioned that it seems to have gradually led to that laxity of
morals in ancient Yiieh which is still proverbial in those parts;
for, when the First August Emperor was touring over his new empire
in 212 B.C., he left an inscription (still on record) at the old
Yiieh capital, denouncing the "pig-like adultery" of the region,
and, more especially, the remarrying of widows already in
possession of children. Only a few years ago, proclamations
appeared in this region denouncing the pernicious custom of
forcing widows to remarry. Although Kwan-tsz is supposed to have
"invented" the Babylonian woman for Ts'i, nothing is said in any
ancient Chinese history about common prostitution; nor is female
infanticide ever mentioned. In 502 B.C. the Lu revolutionary,
already mentioned in Chapter XXXVII., who was driven to Tsin by
Confucius' astute measures, had, before leaving Lu, formed a plot
to murder all the sons, by wives, of the three "powerful families"
who were intriguing against the ducal rights, and to put concubine
sons-being creatures of his own-in their place; thus the
succession principles applied not only to ruling families, but
also to private houses; though, as a matter of fact, these three
were all, in their origin, descended from previous ruling dukes.
As explained in Chapters XII. and XXXIII., after five generations
a fresh "family" is supposed to spring out of the common clan.

In spite of Wu's barbarism, the fact of its belonging, by remote
origin, to the imperial clan (through its first: ruler having
magnanimously migrated from Chou before Chou conquered China in
1122), made it technically incest for Lu to intermarry with Wu;
thus, when in 482 B.C., a Wu princess (evidently forced for
political purposes upon Lu) died, her husband, the ruler of Lu,
was obliged to refrain from a public burial, as has been explained
in Chapter XXXIII. on Names.

CHAPTER XXXIX

GEOGRAPHICAL KNOWLEDGE

It will have been noticed that, even in strictly historical times
subsequent to 842 B.C., orthodox China was, _mutatis mutandis_,
like orthodox Greece, a petty territory surrounded by a fringe of
little-known regions, such as Macedonia, Asia Minor, Phoenicia,
Egypt, and Italy; not to say distant Marseilles, and the Pillars of
Hercules-all places at best very little visited except by navigators,
and even then only by a few specially enterprising navigators or
desperate adventurers; though later on Greek influence and Greek
colonies soon began to replace the Phoenician, and to exhibit surrounding
countries in a more correct and definite light.

As touches the surrounding regions of ancient China, and the
knowledge of it possessed by the orthodox nucleus, such traditions
as there are all point to acquaintance with the south and east
rather than with the north and west. Persons who are persistently
bent on bringing the earliest Chinese from the Tower of Babel by
way of the Tarim Valley, are eager to seize upon the faintest
tradition, or what seems to them an apparent tradition, in support
of these preconceived views; ignoring the obviously just argument
that, if we are to pay any attention to mere traditions at all, we
must in common fairness give priority in value to such traditions
as there are, rather than such traditions as are not, but only as
might be. For instance, there was a Chinese tradition that the
founder of the Hia dynasty (2205 B.C.) was, in a sense, somehow
connected with the barbarous kingdom of Yiieh, inasmuch as the
great-great-grandson of the founder of the Hia empire a century
later enfeoffed a son by a concubine in that remote region. The
earliest Chinese mention of Japan is that it lay to the east of
Yiieh, and that the Japanese used to come and trade with Yiieh. If
the Japanese traditions, on the other hand, as first put into
independent writing in the eighth century A.D., are worth
anything, then the Japanese pretend that their ancestors were
present at a durbar held by the above-mentioned great-great-
grandson of the Hia founder; and they also firmly derive their
ruling houses (both king and princes) from the kingdom of Wu. We
have seen in former chapters that both Wu and Yiieh, the most
ancient capitals of which were within 200 miles of each other,
spoke one language, and that both were derived (_i.e._, the
administrative caste was derived) from two separate Chinese
imperial dynasties. Now, the founder of the Hia dynasty is
celebrated above all things for his travels in, and his geography
of China, usually called the "Tribute of Yii" (his name),--a still
existing work, the real origin of which may be obscure, but which
has come down to us in the Book (of History). This geography is
not only accurate, but it even now throws great light upon the
original direction of river-courses which have since changed; in
this work there is not the faintest tradition or indirect mention
of any Chinese having ever migrated into China from the west.

There is no foundation, however, for the supposition, favoured by
some European writers, that the Nine Tripods (frequently mentioned
above) contained upon their surface "maps" of the empire; they
merely contained a summary, or a collection of pictures,
symbolizing the various tribute nations. On the other hand, there
is no trace in the "Tribute of Yii" of any knowledge of China
south of the Yarig-tsz River, south of its mouths, and south of
its connection with the lakes of Hu Nan. The "province" of Yang
Chou is vaguely said to extend from the Hwai River "south to the
sea." The "Blackwater" is the only river mentioned which exhibits
any knowledge of the west (i.e. of the west half of modern Kan Suh
province), and this "Blackwater" was crossed in 984 B.C. by the
Emperor Muh.

Then there is the tradition of Vii's predecessor, the Emperor
Shun, who, as mentioned in the last chapter, married the two
daughters of the Emperor Yao, and is buried at a point just south
of the Lake Tung-t'ing, in the modern province of Hu Nan: it is
certain that in 219 B.C., when the First August Emperor was on
tour, the mountain where the grave lay was pointed out to him at a
distance, if he did not actually go up to it. Again, the
grandfather of the Warrior King who founded the Chou dynasty in
1122 B.C. was, as already repeatedly pointed out, only a younger
brother, his two elder brothers having migrated to the Jungle,
and, proceeding thence eastward, founded a colony in Wu (half-way
between Nanking and Shanghai). Both Wu and Yiieh, for very many
centuries after that, were extremely petty states of only 50 or 60
miles in extent, and for all practical purposes of history may be
considered to have been one and the same region, to wit, the flat,
canal-cut territory through which the much-disputed Shanghai-
Hangchow railway is to run. After the death of the Martial King,
when his brother the Duke of Chou was Regent for his son, the duke
incurred the suspicion of other brethren and relatives as to his
motives, and had to retire for some time to Ts'u, or, as it was
then called, the Jungle country, for two years. There is a
tradition that a mission from one of the southern Yiieh states
found its way to the Duke of Chou, who is supposed to have fitted
up for the envoys a cart with a compass attached to it, in order
to keep the cart's head steadily south. This tradition, which only
appears as a _tradition_ in one of the dynastic histories of
the fifth century A. D., is not given at all in the earlier
standard history, and it is by no means proved that the
undoubtedly early Chinese knowledge of the loadstone extended to
the making of compasses. Yet, as Renan has justly pointed out in
effect, in his masterly evidences of Gospel truth, a weak
tradition is better worth considering than no tradition at all.
Besides, there is some slight indirect confirmation of this, for
in 880 B.C. or thereabout, a King of Ts'u gave one of his younger
sons a Yiieh kingdom bearing almost the same double name as that
Yueeh kingdom from which the envoys in 1080 B.C. came to the Duke
of Chou; in each case the first part of the double name was Yiieh,
and the second part only differed slightly. Again, in or about
820, some of the sons of the king exiled themselves to a place
vaguely defined as "somewhere south of the Han River," which can
scarcely mean anything other than "the country of the Shan or
Siamese races," who lived then in and around Yiin Nan, and some of
whom are still known by the vague name used as here in 820 B.C.
The vagueness of habitat simply means that all south of the Han
and Yang-tsz was _terra_ incognita to China proper. There is
another tradition, unsupported by standard history, to the effect
that the Martial King enfeoffed a faithful minister of the emperor
and dynasty he had just supplanted as a vassal in Corea. Here,
again, if the emperor's own grandfather, or grand-uncles and
trusted friends, could find their way to Wu, and, later, to Japan,
not to mention Shan Tung and the Peking plain, it is reasonable to
permit a respected adherent of the dethroned monarch to find his
way to Corea, the more in that the centre of administrative
gravity of Corea was then Liao Tung and South Manchuria--at the
utmost the north part of modern Corea--rather than the Corean
peninsula.

In the year 649 the First Protector began to boast of having done
as much as any of the' three dynasties, Hia, Shang, and Chou,
during the 1500 years before him; he then defines the area of his
glory, which is circumscribed by (at the very utmost) the west
part of Shan Si, the south part of Ho Nan, the north part of the
Peking plain, and the Gulf of "Pechelee." The Second Protector,
when he safely reached his ancestral throne after nineteen years
of wanderings as Pretender, said to his faithful Tartar henchman
and father-in-law: "I have made the tour of the whole world (or
whole empire) with you." As a matter of fact, he had been with the
Tartars, certainly in central, and possibly also in northern Shan
Si; in Ts'i, which means the northern part of Shan Tung and
southern part of Chih Li; thence across the four small orthodox
states of Sung, Wei, Ts'ao, and CHENG (which simply means up the
Yellow River valley into Ho Nan), to Ts'u; and thence Ts'in
fetched him to put him on the Tsin throne. The Emperor was already
an obscure figure-head beneath all political notice, and no other
parts of what we now call China were known to the Protector, even
by name. As we shall see in a later chapter, Confucius covered the
same ground, except that he never went to Tsin or to Tartarland.
The first bare mention of Yiieh is in 670 B.C., when the new King
of Ts'u, who had assassinated his elder brother, and who therefore
wished to make amends for this crime and for his father's rude
conquests, and to consolidate his position by putting himself on
good behaviour to federal China, made dutiful advances to Lu and
to the Emperor (these two minor powers then best representing the
old ritual civilization). The Emperor replied: "Go on conquering
the barbarians and Yiieh, but let the Hia (i.e. orthodox Chinese)
states alone." In 601 Ts'u and Wu came to a friendly understanding
about their mutual frontiers, and Yiieh was also admitted to the
conclave or _entente_; but this was a local act, and had nothing
whatever to do with China proper, which first hears of Yiieh as an
independent or semi-independent power in 536, when the King
of Ts'u, with a string of conquered orthodox Chinese princes
in train as his allies, and also a Yiieh contingent, makes war on
Wu. In later days there is evidence showing that there was not
much general knowledge of China as a whole, and that interstate
intercourse was chiefly confined to next-door neighbours. For
instance, when Tsin boldly marched an army upon Ts'i in 589 B.C.,
it was considered a remarkable thing that Tsin chariots should
actually gaze upon the sea. In 560, when the Ts'i minister and
philosopher, Yen-tsz, was in Ts'u as envoy, and the Ts'u courtiers
were playing tricks upon him (as previously narrated in Chapter
IX.) he said: "I have heard it stated that when once you get south
of the Hwai River the oranges are good. In the same way, we
northerners produce but sorry rogues; the genuine article reaches
its perfection in Ts'u." Thus, even at this date, the Yang-tsz was
regarded much as the Romans of the Empire regarded the Danube--as
a sort of vague barrier between _civis_ and _barbarus_. In
no sense was the Ts'u capital--at no time were the bulk of the
Ts'u dominions--south of that Great River; nor, in fact, were the
capitals of Wu and Yiieh south of it either, for one of the three
mouths (the northernmost was as now), corresponded to the Soochow
Creek and the Wusung River, as they pass through the Shanghai
settlement of to-day; whilst the other ancient mouth entered the
sea at modern Hangchow. We have given various other evidence above
to show that, even earlier than this, the Yang-tsz was an
unexplored region, known, and that only imperfectly and locally,
to the Ts'u government alone. In the year 656 B.C. the First
Protector called Ts'u to book because, in 1003 B.C., the Emperor
had made a tour to the Great River and had never returned (see
Chapter XX-XV.). Again, when the imperial power collapsed in 771
B.C., the first Earl of CHENG (a relative of the Emperor)
consulted the imperial astrologer as to where he had better
establish his new fief: his own idea was to settle southwards on
the borders of the Yang-tsz; but he was dissuaded from this step
on the ground that the Ts'u power would grow accordingly as the
Chou power declined, and thus CHENG would all the easier fall a
prey to Ts'u in the future if she migrated now so far south. The
astrologer makes another observation which supports the view that
Ts'u and orthodox China were originally of the same prehistoric
stock. He says: "When the remote ancestor of Ts'u did good service
to the Emperor (2400 B.C.), his renown was great, yet his
descendants never became so flourishing as those of the Chou
family." In 597 B.C., when the Earl of CHENG really was at the
mercy of Ts'u, he said: "If you choose to send me south of the
Yang-tsz towards the South Sea, I shall not have the right to
object"; meaning, "no exile, however remote, is too severe for my
deserts." In 549, when the Tsin generals were marching against
Ts'u, they were particularly anxious to find good CHENG guides who
knew the routes well. Finally, in 541, a Tsin statesman made the
following observations to a prince (afterwards king) of Ts'u, who
was then on a mission to Tsin, by way of illustrating for his
visitor the conquests and distant expeditions of ancient times:--

"The Emperor Shun (who married Yao's two daughters, and employed
the founder of the Hia dynasty as his minister) was obliged to
imprison the prince of the Three Miao (in Hu Nan; the savages of
Hu Nan and Kwei Chou provinces are still called _Miao_); the
Hia dynasty had to deal with quarrels in (modern) Shan Tung and
Shen Si; the Shang dynasty had to do the same in (modern) Kiang
Su; the early Chou monarchs the same in (modern) North Kiang Su
and South Shan Tung: but, now that there are no able emperors, all
the vassals are at loggerheads. Wu and P'uh (the supposed Shan or
Siamese region above referred to) are giving you trouble; but it
is no one's concern but yours."

From all this it is quite plain, though the Chinese historians and
philosophers never seem to have discerned it clearly themselves,
that the cultivated or orthodox Chinese, that is, the group of
closely related monosyllabic and tonic tribes which alone
possessed the art of writing, and thus inevitably took the lead
and gradually civilized the rest, covered but a very small area of
ground even at the time of Confucius' death in 479 B.C., and were
completely ignorant of everything but the bare names of all the
regions surrounding this orthodox nucleus, which nucleus was
therefore rightly called the "Central State," as China is, by
extension, now still called.

[Illustration: MAP

1. Si-ngan Fu (and Hien-yang opposite, on the north bank of the
River Wei), marked with circles in a lozenge, were the capitals of
China, off and on, from 220 B.C. for over a thousand years. The
ancient capital of the Chou dynasty, forsaken in 771 B.C., is
marked with a cross in a circle and is west of Si-ngan. In 771
B.C. the Emperor fled east to his "east capital" (founded 300
years before that date), which then became the sole metropolis,
called _Loh_ (from the river on which it stands); it is also
marked with a cross inside a circle and is practically the modern
Ho-nan Fu; it has, off and on, been the capital of all China,
alternately with Si-ngan Fu, in later times.

2. The ford where the first Chou Emperor (122 B.C.) made an
appointment with all his vassals is marked by two dotted lines
across the Yellow River.

3. The two dots in a half-circle mark the spot whither Tsin
"summoned" the Emperor to the durbar of 632 B.C. After this, Tsin
obtained from the Emperor cession of the strip between the Yellow
River and the Ts'in River (nothing to do with Ts'in state).

4. There is a second River Loh separating Ts'in state from Tsin
state. The territory between this River Loh and the Yellow River
was alternately held by Tsin and Ts'in.

5. The territory between the more southerly River Loh and the
Yellow River and River I was the shorn imperial appanage after
Ts'in had in 771 B.C. obtained the west half; after Tsin in 632
had obtained the remaining north half; and after Ts'u had nibbled
away the petty orthodox vassals south of latitude 34".]

CHAPTER XL

TOMBS AND REMAINS

The Chinese, with the single exception of their Great Wall, have
always been flimsy builders, and there is accordingly very little
left in the way of monuments to prove the antiquity of their
civilization. Mention has already been made of the tombs of the
Emperors Shun and Yii (2200 B.C.). The tomb of another Hia dynasty
emperor (1837 B.C.) lay twenty miles north of Yung-ning in Ho
Nan,' where Ts'in, in 627 B.C., was annihilated by Tsin (see p.
30). The tomb (long. 115o, lat. 33o) of the King of Ts'u who died
in 689 B.C. was pillaged about 500 years later, but landslips
defeated the thieves' objects. The First Protector's tomb, seven
miles south of his capital in Shan Tung--the town still marked on
the maps as Lin-tsz--was desecrated in A.D. 312. A small pond of
mercury was found inside, besides arms, valuables, and the bones
of those buried with him. The palace of the Ts'u king of 617
B.C.,--son of the one whose death that year was respectfully
chronicled by Confucius--is still the yam&. or _protorium_ of
the district magistrate at King-thou Fu, and can perhaps even yet
be seen from any passing steamers that circulate above the treaty-
port of Sha-shf. There is a doubt about the date of this king's
tomb (d. 593); some place it near the palace, others over 100
miles north, near the modern city of Siang-yang. It is possible
that, after the sacking of the capital by Wu, in 506, the bodies
of former kings were at once removed to the new temporary capital
(far to the north) to which the old name was given. For instance,
it is certain that the king who died in 545 was buried quite close
to the capital (King-thou Fu). Ki-chah's tomb, with Confucius'
inscription upon it in ancient character, is still shown at a
place ten miles west of Kiang-yin (where the modern forts are,
below Nanking) and twenty miles east of Ch'ang-chou; probably the
new "British" railway passes quite close to the place, as do the
steamers: for the past 400 years sacrifices have been annually
offered to Ki-chah's memory: as Confucius never visited Wu, the
inscription, if genuine, must have been sent thither. The tomb of
Ki-chah's nephew, King of Wu, is still to be seen outside one of
the gates of Soochow; or, rather, the temple built on the site is
there, for the tomb itself was desecrated and pillaged by the
armies of Yueh, when they sacked the capital in 482. There was,
originally, a triple copper coffin, a small pond, and some water
birds made of gold (probably symbolic of sport), arms, valuables,
etc.; but nothing is said of human beings having been sacrificed.
It was said (2000 years ago) that elephants had been employed in
carrying the earth and building materials for this tomb. In 506
the vengeful Ts'u officer who had fled to Wu, and had incited the
King of Wu to do all he could to ruin Ts'u, actually opened the
royal grave, in or near the capital, and flogged the corpse of the
dead king who had so grievously offended him and his family.

In the year 501 the original bow and sceptre given by the warrior
king to his brother, the Duke of Chou, founder of the State of Lu,
was stolen from its resting-place, but was luckily recovered the
following year. Incidentally this statement is of value; for when
the King of Ts'u, as narrated above, was making his demands upon
the Emperor, one of his grievances was that he possessed no relics
of the founder such as the presents which had been made by him to
Ts'i, Lu, Yen, Tsin, and other favoured states of no greater
status than his own. The above are only a few instances out of
many which show how, from age to age, the Chinese have seen with
their own eyes things which in the vista of the distance now seem
to us uncertain and incredible. As usual, Ts'in gives us nothing
in the way of antiquity; another proof that, until she conceived
the idea of conquering China, she was totally unknown (internally)
to orthodox China. Confucius' own house, temple, grave, and park
form an absolutely unbroken link with the past. There are remains
and the relics of the Duke of Chou in the immediate neighbourhood,
and it must not be forgotten that the Duke of Chou and his ritual
system were Confucius' models: as Confucius insisted, "I am only a
transmitter of antiquity." Moderns, and especially foreigners,
have forgotten or reck nothing about the Duke of Chou; yet his
remains and temples were just as much a matter of visible history
to Confucius as Confucius' grounds are to us. Each successive
generation in China alludes to existing antiquities, or to
contemporaneous objects which have since become antiquities, with
the quiet confidence of those who actually possess, and who doubt
not of their possessions. The very _lacunae_ are pointed out
by themselves--no scepticism of ours is required; for whenever any
historian, or any less formal writer, has outstepped the bounds of
truth or probability, the critics are immediately there, and they
always frankly say what they believe. In a word, the Chinese
documents, be they iron, stone, wood, silk, paper, buildings, or
graves; and their traditions, are the sole evidence we possess:
Chinese critics were the sole critics of that evidence; and they
are the sole light by which we foreigners can become critics. The
great Chinese defect in criticism is the failure to work out
general principles, and to criticize constructively as well as
analytically. Their history is a rule of thumb, hand to mouth,
diary sort of arrangement, like a vast museum of genuine but
unclassified and unticketed objects. But there is no good reason
whatever for our doubting the genuineness of either traditions or
documents beyond the point of scepticism to which native Chinese
doubts go, for it must be remembered that no foreigner possesses
one tenth of the mass of Chinese learning that the professional
literatus easily assimilates. All we can do is to re-group, and
extract principles.

CHAPTER XLI

THE TARTARS

It is important to insist on the very close relations that existed
between the Chinese and the Tartars from the very earliest times.
All that we are told for certain is that they were north and west
of the older dynasties, and especially in occupation of the Upper
Wei River, on the lower part of which the old metropolis of Si-
ngan Fu lies; which means that they were exactly where we find
them in Confucian times, and where we find them now, except that
they have been pushed a little further back, and that Chinese
colonists have appropriated most of the oases. The Chou ancestor
who died in 1231, _i.e._ the father of the founders of Wu,
and the great-grandfather of the founder of the Chou dynasty
(1122), had to abandon to the encroaching Tartars his appanage on
the Upper King River (a northern tributary of the Wei, which runs
almost parallel with it, and joins it at Si-ngan Fu), and was
obliged to move southwards to the Upper Wei River. For nearly 1000
years previous to this, his ancestors, who had originally been
forced to fly to the Tartars in order to avoid the misgovernment
of the third Hia emperor, had lived among and had, whilst
continuing the Chinese art of cultivating, partly become Tartars;
for in 1231 B.C. the migrating host is said to have renounced
Tartar manners, and to have devoted themselves seriously to
building and cultivating; from which it necessarily follows that
Tartar manners must for some time have been definitely adopted by
the Chou family. The grandson of the migrator, the father of the
Chou founder, had various little wars with a tribe called the Dog
Tartars. Over 1000 years after that first flight to Tartardom, we
have seen that the Emperor Muh, great-grandson of the Chou
founder, not only had brushes with the Tartars, but extended his
tours amongst them to the Lower Tarim Valley, Turfan, Harashar,
and possibly even as far as Urumtsi and Kuche; but certainly no
farther. Two hundred years later, again, the then ruling Emperor
was defeated by the Tartars in (modern) Central Shan Si province,
and the descendant in the sixth generation of the Ts'in Jehu who
had conducted the Emperor Muh's chariot into Tartarland, only just
succeeded in saving the Emperor's life; but this family of Chao,
which was thus (_cf._ p. 206) of one and the same descent
with the Ts'in family, subsequently found its account in
abandoning the imperial interest altogether, and in serving the
rising principality of Tsin (Shan Si), where it became one of the
"six families," three of which six in 403 B.C. were ultimately
recognized by the Emperor as independent rulers. As we have said
over and over again, in 772 B.C. the Chou Emperor, through female
intrigues, got into trouble with the Tartars, and was killed: his
successor had to move the metropolis east to (modern) Ho-nan Fu,
thus abandoning the western part of his patrimony--the semi-Tartar
half--to Ts'in. Thus Ts'in in 771 B.C. was to the Chou Emperors
what Chou, previous to 1200 B.C., had been to the Shang Emperors.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25