Ancient China Simplified

E >> Edward Harper Parker >> Ancient China Simplified

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APPENDICES

INDEX

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

[For the illustration of the Wuchuan vase, and the inscription
thereon, I am indebted to Dr. S. W. Bushell M.D., from whose work
on "Chinese Art" (vol. i. p. 82) the plates (kindly lent by H.M.
Stationery Office) are taken. For the photograph of the Duke of
"Propagating Holiness" (i.e. Confucius) I am indebted to the
Jesuit Fathers of Shanghai, and to Father Tschepe, who obtained it
from his Grace.]

1. Tripod of the Chou dynasty, date 8l2 B.C. In 1565 A.D. it was
placed by the owner for safety in a temple on Silver Island (near
Chinkiang), where it may be seen now.

Taken (by kind permission of the author) from Dr. S. W. Bushell's
"Chinese Art," vol. i. p. 82. _Frontispiece_

2. K'ung Ling-i, the hereditary Yen-sheng Kung, or "Propagating
Holiness Duke"; 76th in descent from K'ung K'iu, alias K'ung
Chung-ni, the original philosopher, 551-479 B.C.

This portrait was presented to "the priest P'eng" (Father Tschepe,
S.J.), on the occasion of his visit last autumn (7th moon, 33rd
year). To _face page 81_

3. Original inscription on the Sacrificial Tripod, together with
(1) transcription in modern Chinese character (to the right), and
(2) an account of its history (to the left). Taken from Dr.
Bushell's "Chinese Art".

[Illustration: MAP]

LIST OF MAPS

1. The other small maps will explain each section more in detail.

2. This map is intended to give a general idea of the extremely
limited area of the empire in the sixth century B.C.

3. Like the modern Sultan, the Chow Emperor was gradually driven
into a corner, surrounded by Bulgarias, Servias, Egypts, and other
countries once under his effective rule; and, like the Sultan, the
Chou Emperor remained spiritual head for many centuries after the
practical dismemberment of his empire.

4. Until quite recent times, the true source of the Yang-tsz had
been unknown to the Chinese, and the River Min has been, and even
still is, considered to be the chief head-water. It flows through
the rich country of ancient Shuh, now the administrative centre of
Sz Ch'wan province.

5. Even now the Yang-tsz River is practically the only great route
from China into Sz Ch'wan, and in ancient times the rapids were
probably not negotiable by large craft.

6. The land routes into Sz Ch'wan from the head-waters of the Wei
and Ilan Rivers are all extremely precipitous. It was not until
200 B.C. that any military road was attempted.

7. Ancient China meant the Yellow River. Then the Han and the
Hwai. Next the Yang-tsz. Last the Sz Ch'wan tributaries of the
Yang-tsz. It was through the lakes and rivers south of the Yang-
tsz that China at last colonized the south.

CHAPTER I

OPENING SCENES

The year 842 B.C. may be considered the first accurate date in
Chinese history, and in this year the Emperor had to flee from his
capital on account of popular dissatisfaction with his tyrannical
ways: he betook himself northward to an outlying settlement on the
Tartar frontier, and the charge of imperial affairs was taken over
by a regency or duumvirate.

At this time the confederation of cultured princes called China--
or, to use their own term, the Central Kingdom--was a very
different region from the huge mass of territory familiar to us
under those names at the present day. It is hardly an exaggeration
to say that civilized China, even at that comparatively advanced
period, consisted of little more than the modern province of Ho
Nan. All outside this flat and comparatively riverless region
inhabited by the "orthodox" was more or less barbaric, and such
civilization as it possessed was entirely the work of Chinese
colonists, adventurers, or grantees of fiefs _in partibus
infidelium_ (so to speak). Into matters of still earlier
ancient history we may enter more deeply in another chapter, but
for the present we simply take China as it was when definite
chronology begins.

The third of the great dynasties which had ruled over this limited
China had, in 842 B.C., already been on the imperial throne for
practically three hundred years, and, following the custom of its
predecessors, it had parcelled out all the land under its sway to
vassal princes who were, subject to the general imperial law and
custom, or ritual, together with the homage and tribute duty
prescribed thereunder, all practically absolute in their own
domains. Roughly speaking, those smaller fiefs may be said to have
corresponded in size with the walled-city and surrounding district
of our own times, so well known under the name of _hien_.
About a dozen of the larger fiefs had been originally granted to
the blood relations of the dynastic founder in or after 1122 B.C.;
but not exclusively so, for it seems to have been a point of
honour, or of religious scruple, not to "cut off the sacrifices"
from ruined or disgraced reigning families, unless the attendant
circumstances were very gross; and so it came to pass that
successive dynasties would strain a point in order to keep up the
spiritual memory of decayed or rival houses.

Thus, at the time of which we speak (842 B.C.), about ten of the
dozen or so of larger vassal princes were either of the same clan
as the Emperor himself, or were descended from remoter branches of
that clan before it secured the imperial throne; or, again, were
descended from ministers and statesmen who had assisted the
founder to obtain empire; whilst the two or three remaining great
vassals were lineal representatives of previous dynasties, or of
their great ministers, keeping up the honour and the sacrifices of
bygone historical personages. As for the minor fiefs, numbering
somewhere between a thousand and fifteen hundred, these play no
part in political history, except as this or that one of them may
have been thrust prominently forward for a moment as a pawn in the
game of ambition played by the greater vassals. Nominally the
Emperor was direct suzerain lord of all vassals, great or small;
but in practice the greater vassal princes seem to have been what
in the Norman feudal system were called "mesne lords"; that is,
each one was surrounded by his own group of minor ruling lords,
who, in turn, naturally clung for protection to that powerful
magnate who was most immediately accessible in case of need; thus
vassal rulers might be indefinitely multiplied, and there is some
vagueness as to their numbers.

Just as the oldest civilizations of the West concentrated
themselves along the banks of the Euphrates and the Nile, so the
most ancient Chinese civilization is found concentrated along the
south bank of the Yellow River. The configuration of the land as
shown on a modern map assists us to understand how the industrious
cultivators and weavers, finding the flat and so-called
_loess_ territory too confined for their ever-increasing
numbers, threw out colonies wherever attraction offered, and
wherever the riverine systems gave them easy access; whether by
boat and raft; or whether--as seems more probable, owing to the
scanty mention of boat-travel--by simply following the low levels
sought by the streams, and tilling on their way such pasturages as
they found by the river-sides. When it is said that the earliest
Chinese we know of clung to the Yellow River bed, it must be
remembered that "the River" (as they call it simply) turned sharp
to the north at a point in Ho Nan province very far to the west of
its present northerly course, near a city marked in the modern
maps as Jung-t&h, in lat. 35 degrees N., long, 114 degrees E., or
thereabouts; moreover, its course further north lay considerably to the
westward of the present Grand Canal, taking possession now of the
bed of the Wei River, now of that of the Chang River, according to
whether we regard it before or after the year 602 B.C.; but always
entering the Gulf near modern Tientsin. Hence we need not be
surprised to find that the Conqueror or Assertor of the dynasty
had conferred upon a staunch adviser, of alien origin, and upon
two of his most trusty relatives, the three distant fiefs which
commanded both sides of the Yellow River mouth, at that time near
the modern Tientsin. There was no Canal in those days, and the
river which runs past Confucius' birth-place, and now goes towards
feeding the Grand Canal, had then a free course south-east towards
the lakes in Kiang Su province to the north of Nanking. It will be
noticed that quite a network of tributary rivers take their rise
in Ho Nan province, and trend in an easterly direction towards the
intricate Hwai River system. The River Hwai, which has a great
history in the course of Chinese development, was in quite recent
times taken possession of by the Yellow River for some years, and
since then the Grand Canal and the lakes between them have so
impeded its natural course that it may be said to have no natural
delta at all; to be dissipated in a dedalus of salt flats,
irrigation channels, and marshes: hence it is not so obvious to us
now why the whole coast-line was at the period we are now
describing, when there was no Grand Canal, quite beyond the reach
of Chinese colonization from the Yellow River valley: this was
only possible in two directions--firstly to the south, by way of
the numerous ramifications of the Han River, which now, as then,
joins the Yang-tsz Kiang at Hankow; and secondly to the south-
east, by way of the equally numerous ramifications of the Hwai
River, which entered the sea in lat. 34o N. No easy emigration to
the westward or south-westward was possible in those comparatively
roadless days, for not a single river pointed out the obvious way to
would-be colonists.

Accustomed as we now are to regard China as one vast homogeneous
whole, approachable to us easily from the sea, it is not easy for
us to understand the historical lines of expansion without these
preliminary explanations. Corea and Japan were totally unknown
even by name, and even Liao Tung, or "East of the River Liao,"
which was then inhabited by Corean tribes, was, if known by
tradition at all, certainly only in communication with the remote
Chinese colony, or vassal state, in possession of the Peking
plain: on the other hand, this vassal state itself (if it had
records of its own at all), for the three centuries previous to
842 B.C., had no political relations with the federated Chinese
princes, and nothing is known of its internal doings, or of its
immediate relations (if any) with Manchus and Coreans. The whole
coast-line of Shan Tung was in the hands of various tribes of
"Eastern Barbarians." True, a number of Chinese vassal rulers held
petty fiefs to the south and the east of the two highly civilized
principalities already described as being in possession of the
Lower Yellow River; but the originally orthodox rulers of these
petty colonies are distinctly stated to have partly followed
barbarian usage, even despite their own imperial clan origin, and
to have paid court to these two greater vassals as mesne lords,
instead of direct to the Emperor. South of these, again, came the
Hwai group of Eastern barbarians in possession of the Lower Hwai
valley, and the various quite unknown tribes of Eastern barbarians
occupying the marshy salt flats and shore accretions on the Kiang
Su coast right down to the River Yang-tsz mouth.

As we shall see, a century or two later than 842 B.C. powerful
semi-Chinese states began to assert themselves against the
federated orthodox Chinese princes lying to their north; but, when
dated history first opens, Central China knew nothing whatever of
any part of the vast region lying to the south of the Yang-tsz;
nothing whatever of what we now call Yiin Nan and Sz Ch'wan, not
to say of the Indian and Tibetan dominions lying beyond them; _
fortiori_ nothing of Formosa, Hainan, Cochin-China, Tonquin,
Burma, Siam, or the various Hindoo trading colonies advancing from
the South Sea Islands northwards along the Indo-Chinese coasts;
nothing whatever of Tsaidam, the Tarim Valley, the Desert, the
Persian civilization, Turkestan, Kashgaria, Tartary, or Siberia.

It is, and will here be made, quite clear that the whole of the
left bank of the Yellow River was in possession of various Turkish
and Tartar-Tibetan tribes. The only exception is that the south-
west corner of Shan Si province, notably the territory enclosed
between the Yellow River and the River F&n (which, running from
the north, bisects Shan Si province and enters the Yellow River
about lat. 35" 30' N., long. 110 degrees 30' E.) was colonized by a branch
of the imperial family quite capable of holding its own against
the Tartars; in fact, the valley of this river as far north as
P'ing-yang Fu had been in semi-mythical times (2300 B.C.) the
imperial residence. It will be noticed that the River Wei joins
the Yellow River on its right bank, just opposite the point where
this latter, flowing from the north, bends eastwards, the Wei
itself flowing from the west. This Wei Valley (including the sub-
valleys of its north-bank tributaries) was also in 842 B.C.
colonized by an ancient Chinese family--not of imperial extraction
so far as the reigning house was concerned--which, by adopting
Tartar, or perhaps Tartar--Tibetan, manners, had for many
generations succeeded in acquiring a predominant influence in that
region. Assuming that--which is not at all improbable--the nomad
horsemen in unchallenged possession of the whole desert and Tartar
expanse had at any time, as a consequence of their raids in
directions away from China westward, brought to China any new
ideas, new commercial objects, or new religious notions, these
novelties must almost necessarily have filtered through this semi-
Chinese half-barbarous state in possession of the Wei Valley, or
through other of their Tartar kinsmen periodically engaged in
raiding the settled Chinese cultivators farther east, along the
line of what is now the Great Wall, and the northern parts of Shan
Si and Chih Li provinces.

We shall allude in a more convenient place and chapter to specific
traditions touching the supposed journeys about 990 B.C. of a
Chinese Emperor to Turkestan; the alleged missions from Tonquin to
a still earlier Chinese Emperor or Regent; and the pretended
colonization of Corea by an aggrieved Chinese noble-all three
events some centuries earlier than the opening period of dated
history of which we now specially speak. For the present we ignore
them, as, even if true, these events have had, and have now, no
specific or definite influence whatever on the question of Chinese
political development as expounded here. It seems certain that for
many centuries previous to 842 B.C. the ruling and the literary
Chinese had known of the existence of at least the Lower Yang-tsz
and its three mouths (the Shanghai mouth and the Hangchow mouth
have ceased long ago to exist at all): they also seem to have
heard in a vague way of "moving sands" beyond the great northerly
bend of the Yellow River in Tartarland. It is not even impossible
that the persistent traditions of two of their very ancient
Emperors having been buried south of the Yang-tsz--one near the
modern coast treaty-port of Ningpo, the other near the modern
riverine treaty-port of Ch'ang-sha--may be true; for nothing is
more likely than that they both met their death whilst exploring
the tributaries of the mysterious Yang-tsz Kiang lying to their
south; because the father of the adventurous Emperor who is
supposed to have explored Tartary in ggo B.C. certainly lost his
life in attempting to explore the region of Hankow, as will be
explained in due course.

All this, however, is matter of side issue. The main point we wish
to insist upon, by way of introduction, in endeavouring to give
our readers an intelligible notion of early Chinese development,
is that Chinese beginnings were like any other great nation's
beginnings--like, for instance, the Greek beginnings; these were
centred at first round an extremely petty area, which, gradually
expanding, threw out its tentacles and branches, and led to the
final inclusion of the mysterious Danube, the gloomy Russian
plain, the Tin Islands, Ultima Thule, and the Atlantic coasts into
one fairly harmonious Graeco-Roman civilization. Or it may be
compared to the development of the petty Anglo-Saxon settlements
and kingdoms and sub-kingdoms, and their gradual political
absorption of the surrounding Celts. In any case it may be said
that there is nothing startlingly new about it; it followed a
normal course.

CHAPTER II

SHIFTING SCENES

Having now seen how the Chinese people, taking advantage of the
material and moral growth naturally following upon a settled
industrial existence, and above all upon the exclusive possession
of a written character, gradually imposed themselves as rulers
upon the ignorant tribes around them, let us see to what families
these Chinese emigrant adventurers or colonial satraps belonged.
To begin with the semi-Tartar power in the River Wei Valley--
destined six hundred years later to conquer the whole of China as
we know it to-day--the ruling caste claimed descent from the most
ancient (and of course partly mythological) Emperors of China; but
for over a thousand years previous to 842 B.C. this remote branch
of the Chinese race had become scattered and almost lost amongst
the Tartars. However, a generation or two before our opening
period, one of these princes had served the then ruling imperial
dynasty as a sort of guardian to the western frontier, as a rearer
of horses for the metropolitan stud, and perhaps even as a guide
on the occasion of imperial expeditions into Tartarland. The
successor of the Emperor who was driven from his capital in 842
B.C. about twenty years later employed this western satrap to
chastise the Tartar nomads whose revolt had in part led to the
imperial flight. After suffering some disasters, the conductors of
this series of expeditions were at last successful, and in 815
B.C. the title of "Warden of the Western Marches" was officially
conferred on the ruler for the time being of this western state,
who in 777 B.C. had the further honour of seeing one of his
daughters married to the Emperor himself. This political move on
the part of the Emperor was unwise, for it led indirectly to the
Tartars, who were frequently engaged in war with the Warden,
interfering in the quarrels about the imperial succession, in
which question the Tartars naturally thought they had a right to
interfere in the interests of their own people. The upshot of it
was that in 771 B.C. the Emperor was killed by the Tartars in
battle, and it was only by securing the military assistance of the
semi-Tartar Warden of the Marches that the imperial dynasty was
saved. As it was, the Emperor's capital was permanently moved east
from the immediate neighbourhood of what we call Si-ngan Fu in
Shen Si province to the immediate neighbourhood of Ho-nan Fu in
the modern Ho Nan province; and as a reward for his services the
Warden was granted nearly the whole of the original imperial
patrimony west of the Yellow River bend and on both sides of the
Wei Valley. This was also in the year 771 B.C., and this is really
one of the great pivot-points in Chinese history, of equal weight
with the almost contemporaneous founding of Rome, and the gradual
substitution of a Roman centre for a Greek centre in the
development and civilization of the Far West. The new capital was
not, however, a new city. Shortly after the imperial dynasty
gained the possession of China in 1122 B.C., it had been surveyed,
and some of the regalia had been taken thither; this, with a view
of making it one of the capitals at least, if not the sole
capital.

As Chinese names sound uncouth to our Western ears, and will,
therefore, in these introductory chapters only be used sparingly
and gradually, it becomes correspondingly difficult to explain
historical phenomena adequately whilst endeavouring to avoid as
far as possible the use of such unintelligible names: it will be
well, then, to sum up the situation, and even repeat a little, so
that the reader may assimilate the main points without fatigue or
repulsion. The reigning dynasty of Chou had secured the adhesion
of the thousand or more of Chinese vassal princes in 1122 B.C.,
and had in other words "conquered" China by invitation, much in
the same way, and for very much the same general reasons, that
William III. had' accepted the conquest of the British Isles; that
is to say, because the people were dissatisfied with their
legitimate ruler and his house. But, before this conquest, the
vassal princes of Chou had occupied practically the same
territory, and had stood in the same relation to the imperial
dynasty subsequently ousted by them in 1122, that the Wardens of
the Marches occupied and stood in when the imperial house of Chou
in turn fled east in 771 B.C. The Shang dynasty thus ousted by the
Chou princes in 1122, had for like misgovernment driven out the
Hia dynasty in 1766 B.C. Thus, at the time when the Wardens of the
Marches (whose real territorial title was Princes of Ts'in)
practically put the imperial power into commission in 771 B.C.,
the two old-fashioned dynasties of Shang and Chou had already
ruled patriarchally for almost exactly one thousand years, and
nothing of either a very startling, or a very definite, character
had taken place at all within the comparatively narrow area
described in our first chapter.

From this date of 771 B.C., and for five hundred years more down
to 250 B.C., when the Chou dynasty was extinguished, the rule of
the feudal Emperors of China was almost purely nominal, and except
in so far as this or that powerful vassal made use of the moral,
and even occasionally of the military power of the metropolitan
district when it suited his purpose, the imperial ruler was
chiefly exercised in matters of form and ritual; for under all
three patriarchal dynasties it was on form and ritual that the
idea of government had always been based. Of course the other
powerful satraps--especially the more distant ones, those not
bearing the imperial clan-name, and those more or less tinged with
barbarian usages--learning by degrees what a helpless and
powerless personage the Emperor had now become, lost no time in
turning the novel situation to their own advantage: it is
consequently now that begins the "tyrant period," or the period of
the "Five Dictators," as the Chinese historians loosely term it:
that is to say, the period during which each satrap who had the
power to do so took the lead of the satrap body in general, and
gave out that he was restoring the imperial prestige, representing
the Emperor's majesty, carrying out the behests of reason,
compelling the other vassals to do their duty, keeping up the
legitimist sacrifices, and so on. In other words, the population
of China had grown so enormously, both by peaceful in-breeding and
by imperceptible absorption of kindred races, that more elbow-room
was needed; more freedom from the shackles of ritual, rank, and
feudal caste; more independence, and more liberty to take
advantage of local or changed traditions. Besides all this, the
art of writing, though still clumsy, expensive, and confined in
its higher and literary aspects to the governing classes, had
recently become simplified and improved; the salt trade, iron
trade, fish industry, silk industry, grain trade, and art of usury
had spread from one state to the other, and had developed: though
the land roads were bad or non-existent, there were great numbers
of itinerant dealers in cattle and army provisions. In a word,
material civilization had made great strides during the thousand
years of patriarchal rule immediately preceding the critical
period comprised between the year 842 B.C. and the year 771 B.C.
The voices of the advocates and the preachers of ancient
patriarchal virtues were as of men crying in a wilderness of
substantial prosperity and manly ambition. Thus political and
natural forces combined with each other to prepare the way for a
radical change, and this period of incipient revolution is
precisely the period (722-480) treated of in Confucius' history,
the first history of China--meagre though it be--which deals with
definite human facts, instead of "beating the air" (as the Chinese
say) with sermons and ritualistic exhortations.

CHAPTER III

THE NORTHERN POWERS

We have already alluded to a princely family, of the same clan-
name as the Chou Emperor, which had settled in the southern part
of modern Shan Si province, and had thus acted as a sort of buffer
state to the imperial domain by keeping off from it the Tartar-
Turk tribes in the north. This family was enfeoffed by the new
Chou dynasty in 1106 B.C. to replace the extremely ancient
princely house which had reigned there ever since the earliest
Emperors ruled from that region (2300 B.C.), but which had
resisted the Chou conquest, and had been exterminated. Nothing
definite is known of what transpired in this principality
subsequently to the infeoffment of 1106 B.C., and prior to the
events of 771 B.C., at which latter date the ruling prince,
hearing of the disaster to his kinsman the Emperor, went to meet
that monarch's fugitive successor, and escorted him eastwards to
his new capital. This metropolis had, as we have explained
already, been marked out some 340 years before this, and had
continued to be one of the chief spiritual and political centres
in the imperial domain; but for some reason it had never before
771 B.C. been officially declared a capital, or at all events
_the_ capital. Confucius, in his history, does not mention at
all the petty semi-Tartar state of which we are now speaking
before 671 B.C., and all that we know of its doings during this
century of time is that rival factions, family intrigues, and
petty annexations at the cost of various Tartar tribes, and of
small, but ancient, Chinese principalities, occupied most of its
time. It must be repeated here, however, that, notwithstanding
Tartar neighbours, the valley of the River Fen had been the seat
of several of China's oldest semi-mythical emperors-possibly even
of dynasties,-and at no time do the Tartars seem to have ever
succeeded in ousting the Chinese from South Shan Si. The official
name of the region after the Chou infeoffment of 1106 B.C. was the
State of Tsin, and it was roughly divided off to the west from its
less civilized colleague Ts'in by the Yellow River, on the right
bank of which Tsin still possessed a number of towns. It is
particularly difficult for Europeans to realize the sharp
distinction in sound between these two names, the more especially
because we have in the West no conception whatever of the effect
of tone upon a syllable It may be explained, however, that the
sonant initial and even-voiced tone in the one case, contrasted
with the surd initial and the scaled tone in the other, involves
to the Chinese mind a distinction quite as clear in all dialects
as the European distinction in all languages between the two
states of Prussia and Russia, or between the two peoples Swedes
and Swiss: it is entirely the imperfection of our Western
alphabet, not at all that of the spoken sounds or the ideographs,
that is at fault.

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