Ancient China Simplified

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Besides the heavy war-chariots, there were also rather more
comfortable and lighter conveyances: in one case two generals are
spoken of ironically because they went to the front playing the
banjo in a light cart, whilst their colleague from another state--
the very state they were assisting--was roughing it in a war-
chariot. These latter seem to have connoted, for military
organization purposes, a strength of 75 men each, and four horses;
to wit, three heavily armed men or cuirassiers in the chariot
itself, and 72 foot-soldiers. At least in the case of Tsin, a
force of 37,500 men, which in the year 613 boldly marched off
three hundred or more English miles upon an eastern expedition, is
so described. On the other hand, thirty years later, a small Ts'u
force is said to have had 125 men attached to each chariot, while
the Emperor's chariots are stated to have had 100 men assigned to
each. In the year 627 a celebrated battle was fought between the
rival powers of Ts'in and Tsin, in which the former was utterly
routed; "not a man nor a wheel of the whole army ever got back."
War-chariots are mentioned as having been in use at least as far
back as 1797 B.C. by the Tartar-affected ancestors of the Chou
dynasty, nearly 700 years before they themselves came to the
imperial power. The territory north of the River Wei, inhabited by
them, is all yellow _loess_, deeply furrowed by the stream in
question, and by its tributaries: there is no apparent reason to
suppose that the gigantic cart-houses used by the Tartars, even to
this day, had any historical connection with the swift war-
chariots of the Chinese.

Little, if anything, is said of conveying troops by boat in any of
the above-mentioned countries north of the Yang-tsz River. None
of the rivers in Shen Si are navigable, even now, for any
considerable stretches, and the Yellow River itself has its strict
limitations. Later on, when the King of Ts'u's possessions along
the sea coast, embracing the delta of the Yang-tsz, revolted from
his suzerainty and began (as we shall relate in due course) to
take an active part in orthodox Chinese affairs, boats and
gigantic canal works were introduced by the hitherto totally
unknown or totally forgotten coast powers; and it is probably
owing to this innovation that war-chariots suddenly disappeared
from use, and that even in the north of China boat expeditions
became the rule, as indeed was certainly the case after the third
century B.C.

Some idea of the limited population of very ancient China may be
gained from a consideration of the oldest army computations. The
Emperor was supposed to have six brigades, the larger vassals
three, the lesser two, and the small ones one; but owing to the
loose way in which a _Shi_, or regiment of 2,500 men, and a
_Kun_, or brigade of 12,500 men, are alternately spoken of,
the Chinese commentators themselves are rather at a loss to
estimate how matters really stood after the collapse of the
Emperor in 771: but though at much later dates enormous armies,
counting up to half a million men on each side, stubbornly
contended for mastery, at the period of which we speak there is no
reason to believe that any state, least of all the imperial
reserve, ever put more than 1000 chariots, or say, 75,000 men,
into the field on any one expedition.

Flags seem to have been in use very much as in the West. The
founder of the Chou dynasty marched to the conquest of China
carrying, or having carried for him, a yellow axe in the left, and
a white flag in the right hand. In 660 one of the minor federal
princes was crushed because he did not lower his standard in time;
nearly a century later, this precedent was quoted to another
federal prince when hard-pressed, in consequence of which a sub-
officer "rolled up his master's standard and put it in its
sheath." In 645 "the cavaliers under the ruler's flag "--defined
to mean his body-guard--were surrounded by the enemy.

During the fifth century B.C., when the coast provinces, having
separated from the Ts'u suzerainty, were asserting their equality
with the orthodox Chinese princes, and two rival "barbarian"
armies were contending for the Shanghai region, one royal scion
was indignant when he saw the enemy advance "with the flag
captured in the last battle from his own father the general."
Flags were used, not only to signal movements of troops during the
course of battle, but also in the great hunts or battues which
were arranged in peace times, not merely for sport, but also in
order to prepare soldiers for a military life.

For victories over the Tartars in 623, the Emperor presented the
ruler of Ts'in with a metal drum; and it seems that sacrificing to
the regimental drum before a fight was a very ancient custom,
which has been carried down to the present day. In 1900, during
the "Boxer" troubles, General (now Viceroy) Yiian Shi-k'ai is
reported to have sacrificed several condemned criminals to his
drum before setting out upon his march.

[Illustration: Hilly County Dividing Wei Valley from Han Valley.

1. Si-ngan Fu is at the junction of the King River and Wei River.
The encircled crosses mark the oldest and the newest Ts'in
capitals; all other Ts'in capitals lay somewhere between the King
and the Wei.

2. From 643 B.C. to 385 B.C. Ts'in was in occupation of the
territory between the Yellow River and the River Loh, taken from
Tsin and again lost to Tsin at those dates.]

CHAPTER VII

THE COAST STATES

Before we enter into a categorical description of the hegemony or
Protector system, under which the most powerful state for the time
being held durbars "in camp," and in theory maintained the shadowy
rights of the Emperor, we must first introduce the two coast
states of the Yang-tsz delta, just mentioned as having asserted
their independence of Ts'u, each state being in possession of one
of the Great River branches, In ancient times the Yang-tsz was
simply called the _Kiang_ ("river"), just as the Yellow River
was simply styled the _Ho_ (also "river"). In those days the
Great River had three mouths-the northernmost very much as at
present, except that the flat accretions did not then extend so
far out to sea, and in any case were for all practical purposes
unknown to orthodox China, and entirely in the hands of "Eastern
barbarians"; the southerly course, which branched off near the
modern treaty-port of Wuhu in An Hwei province, emerging into the
sea at, or very near, Hangchow; and the middle course, which was
practically the combined beds of the Soochow Creek and the Wusung
River of Shanghai. Before the Chou dynasty came to power in 1122
B.C., the grandfather of the future founder, as a youth, displayed
such extraordinary talents, that, by family arrangement, his two
eldest brothers voluntarily resigned their rights, and exiled
themselves in the Jungle territory, subsequently working their way
east to the coast, and adopting entirely, or in part, the rude
ways of the barbarous tribes they hoped to govern. We can
understand this better if we picture how the Phoenician and Greek
merchants in turn acted when successively colonizing Marseilles,
Cadiz, and even parts of Britain. Excepting doubtful genealogies
and lists of rulers, nothing whatever is heard of this colony
until 585 B.C.--say, 800 years subsequent to the original
settlement. A malcontent of Ts'u had, as was the practice among
the rival states of those, times, offered his services to the
hated Tsin, then engaged in desperate warfare with Ts'u: he
proposed to his new master that he should be sent on a mission to
the King of Wu (for that was, and still is, for literary purposes,
the name of the kingdom comprising Shanghai, Soochow, and Nanking)
in order to induce him to join in attacking Ts'u. "He taught them
the use of arrows and chariots," from which we may assume that
spears and boats were, up to that date, the usual warlike
apparatus of the coast power. Its capital was at a spot about
half-way between Soochow and Nanking, on the new (British)
railway line; and it is described by Chinese visitors during the
sixth century B.C. as being "a mean place, with low-built houses,
narrow streets, a vulgar palace, and crowds of boats and
wheelbarrows." The native word for the country was something like
Keugu, which the Chinese (as they still do with foreign words, as,
for instance, _Ying_ for "England") promptly turned into a
convenient monosyllable Ngu, or Wu. The semi-barbarous King was
delighted at the opening thus given him to associate with orthodox
Chinese princes on an equal footing, and to throw off his former
tyrannical suzerain. He annexed a number of neighbouring barbarian
states hitherto, like himself, belonging to Ts'u; paid visits to
the Emperor's court, to the Ts'u court, and to the petty but
highly cultivated court of Lu (in South Shan Tung), in order to
"study the rites"; and threw himself with zest into the whirl of
interstate political intrigue. Confucius in his history hardly
alludes to him as a civilized being until the year 561, when the
King died; and as his services to China (i.e. to orthodox Tsin
against unorthodox Ts'u) could not be ignored, the philosopher-
historian condescends to say "the Viscount of Wu died this year."
It must be explained that the Lu capital had been celebrated for
its learning ever since the founder of the Chou dynasty sent the
Duke of Chou, his own brother, there as a satrap (1122 B.C.).
Confucius, of course, wrote retrospectively, for he himself was
only born in 551 and did not compose his "Springs and Autumns"
history for at least half a century after that date. The old Lu
capital of K'uh-fu on she River Sz (both still so called) is the
official headquarters of the Dukes Confucius, the seventy-sixth in
descent from the Sage having at this moment direct semi-official
relations with Great Britain's representative at Wei-hai-wei. It
must also be explained that the vassal princes were all dukes,
marquises, earls, viscounts, or barons, according to the size of
their states, the distinction of their clan or gens, and the
length of their pedigrees; but the Emperor somewhat contemptuously
accorded only the courtesy title of "viscount" to barbarian
"kings," such as those of Ts'u and Wu, very much as we vaguely
speak of "His Highness the Khedive," or (until last year) "His
Highness the Amir," so as to mark unequality with genuine crowned
or sovereign heads.

The history of the wars between Wu and Ts'u is extremely
interesting, the more so in that there are some grounds for
believing that at least some part of the Japanese civilization was
subsequently introduced from the east coast of China, when the
ruling caste of Wu, in its declining days, had to "take flight
eastwards in boats to the islands to the east of the coast." But
we shall come to that episode later on. In the year 506 the
capital of Ts'u was occupied by a victorious Wu army, under
circumstances full of dramatic detail. But now, in the flush of
success, it was Wu's turn to suffer from the ambition of a vassal.
South of Wu, with a capital at the modern Shao-hing, near Ningpo,
reigned the barbarian King of Yiieh (this is a corrupted
monosyllable supposed to represent a dissyllabic native word
something like Uviet); and this king had once been a 'vassal of
Ts'u, but had, since Wu's conquests, transferred, either willingly
or under local compulsion, his allegiance to Wu. Advances were
made to him by Ts'u, and he was ultimately induced to declare war
as an ally of Ts'u. There is nothing more interesting in our
European history than the detailed account, full of personal
incident, of the fierce contests between Wu and Yiieh. The
extinction of Wu took place in 483, after that state had played a
very commanding part in federal affairs, as we shall have occasion
to specify in the proper places. Yiieh, in turn, peopled by a race
supposed to have ethnological connection with the Annamese of
Vietnam or "Southern Yiieh," became a great power in China, and in
468 even transferred its capital to a spot on or near the coast,
very near the German colony of Kiao Chou in Shan Tung. But its
predominance was only successfully asserted on the coasts; to use
the historians' words: "Yiieh could never effectively administer
the territory comprised in the Yang-tsz Kiang and Hwai River
regions."

It was precisely during this barbarian struggle, when federated
China, having escaped the Tartars, seemed to be running the risk
of falling into the clutches of southern pirates, that Confucius
flourished, and it is in reference to the historical events
sketched above-(1) the providential escape of China from
Tartardom, (2) the collapse of the imperial Chou house, (3) the
hegemony or Protector system, (4) the triumph of might over rite
(right and rite being one with Confucius), and (5) the desirability of
a prompt return to the good old feudal ways--that he abandoned
his own corrupt and ungrateful principality, began his peripatetic
teaching in the other orthodox states, composed a warning history
full of lessons for future guidance, and established what we
somewhat inaccurately call a "religion" for the political guidance of
mankind.

CHAPTER VIII

FIRST PROTECTOR OF CHINA

The first of the so-called five hegemons or lords-protector of the
federated Chinese Empire (after the collapse of the imperial
power, and its consequent incapacity to protect the vassal states
from the raids of the Tartars and other barbarians) was the Lord
of Ts'i, whose capital was at the powerful and wealthy city of
Lin-tsz (lat. 37o, long. 118o 30'; still so called on the modern
maps), in Shan Tung province. Neither the Yellow River nor the
Grand Canal touched Shan Tung in those days, and Lin-tsz was
evidently situated with reference to the local rivers which flow
north into the Gulf of "Pechelee," so as to take full political
advantage of the salt, mining, and fishing industries. A word is
here necessary as to this Protector's pedigree: we have seen that
his ancestor, thirteen generations back, had inspired with his
counsels and courage the founder of the imperial Chou dynasty in
1122 B.C.; he had further given to the new Emperor a daughter of
his own in marriage, had served him as premier, and had finally
been enfeoffed in reward for his services as Marquess of Ts'i, the
economic condition of which far-eastern principality he had in a
very few years by his energy as ruler mightily improved, notably
with reference to the salt and fish industries, and to general
commerce. The Yellow River, then flowing along the bed of what is
now called the Chang River, and the sea, respectively, were the
western and eastern limits of this state, which embraced to the
north the salt flats now under the administration of a special
Tientsin Commissioner, and extended south to the present Manchu
Tartar-General's military garrison at Ts'ing-thou Fu. Of course,
later on, during the five-hundred-year period of unrest,
extensions and cessions of territory frequently took place, both
within and beyond these vague limits, usually at the expense of Lu
and other small orthodox states. Across the Yellow River, whose
course northwards, as already stated, lay considerably to the west
of the present channel, was the extensive state of Tsin; and south
was the highly ritual and literary Weimar of China, the unwarlike
principality of Lu, destined in future times to be glorified by
Confucius.

Scarcely anything is recorded of a nature to throw specific light
upon the international development of these far-eastern parts. But
in the year 894 B.C. the reigning prince of Ts'i was boiled alive
at the Emperor's order for some political offence, and his
successor thereupon moved his capital, only to be transferred back
to the old place by his son thirty-five years later. The imperial
flight of 842 naturally caused some consternation even in distant
Ts'i, and in 827 the next Emperor on his accession commanded the
reigning Marquess of Ts'i to assist in chastising the Western
Tartars. When this last Emperor's grandson was driven from his old
hereditary domain in 771, and the semi-Tartar ruler of Ts'in took
possession of the same, as already narrated, Ts'i was still so
inconsiderable a military power that even two generations after
that event, in the year 706, it was fain to apply for assistance
against Northern Tartar raids to one of the small Chinese
principalities in the Ho Nan province. (Roughly speaking,
"Northern Tartars" were Manchu-Mongols, and "Western Tartars" were
Mongol-Turks.) In 690 the prince, whose sister had married the
neighbouring ruler of Lu, made an armed attack by way of vengeance
upon the descendant of the adviser who had counselled the Emperor
to boil his ancestor alive in 894: his power was now so
considerable that the Emperor commissioned him to act with
authority in the matter of a disputed succession to a minor
Chinese principality. This was in the year 688 B.C., and it was
the first instance of a vassal acting as dictator or protector on
behalf of the Emperor; only, however, in a special or isolated
case. Two years later this prince of Ts'i was himself assassinated,
and the disputes between his sons regarding the succession
terminated with the advent to the throne of one of the great
characters in Chinese history, who was magnanimous and politic
enough to take as his adviser and premier a still greater character,
and one that almost rivals Confucius himself in fame as an author,
a statesman, a benefactor of China; and a moralist.

This personage, who, like most Chinese of the period, carried many
names, is most generally known as the philosopher Kwan-tsz, and
his chief writings have survived, in part at least, until our own
day. He was, in fact, a distant scion of the reigning imperial
family of Chou, and bore its clan name of _Ki_. Here it may
be useful to state parenthetically that most prominent men in all
the federated states seem to have belonged to a narrow aristocratic
circle, among whose members the craft of government, the
knowledge of letters, and the hereditary right to expect office,
was inherent; at the same time, there was never at any date
anything in the shape of a priestly or military caste, and power
appears to have been always within the reach of the humblest,
so long as the aspirant was competent to assert himself.

The new ruler of Ts'i officially proclaimed himself Protector in
the year 679 B.C., which is one of the fixed dates in Chinese
history about which there is no cavil or doubt, He soon found
himself embroiled in war with the Tartars, who were raiding both
the state to his north in the Peking plain, and also the minor
state, south of the Yellow River, that his predecessor has
protected specially in 688. This was the state of Wei (imperial
clan), through or near the capital town of which, near the modern
Wei-hwei Fu, the Yellow River then ran northwards.

The way these successive Protectors of China afterwards exercised
their preponderant influence in a general sense was this: When it
appeared to them, or when any orthodox vassal state complained to
them, that injustice was being done; whether in matters of duty to
the Emperor, right of succession, legitimacy of birth, great
crime, or inordinate ambition; the recognized Protector summoned a
durbar, usually somewhere within the territory of the central
area, or China proper as previously defined, and consulted with
the princes, his colleagues, as to what course should be pursued.
A distinction was drawn between "full-dress durbars" and "military
durbars"; the etiquette in either case was very minute, and
external behaviour at least was exquisitely courteous, though
treachery was far from rare, and treaties never lasted long
unbroken. But to return to the First Protector. Towards the end of
his glorious reign of forty-three years the Marquess of Ts'i grew
arrogant, vainglorious, and licentious, so much so that his
western neighbour, the powerful state of Tsin, declined to attend
the durbars. Of the other great powers Ts'in (to the west of Tsin)
was much too far off to take active part in these parliaments;
Ts'u was too busy in spreading civilization among the barbarous
states or tribes south of the Yang-tsz. The Emperor was
practically a _roi faineant_ by this time, and, curiously
enough, less is known of what went on within his dominions or
appanage after the western half of it fell to Ts'in in 771, than
of what transpired in the territories of his three menacing
vassals to the north, north-west, and north-east, and of his half-
civilized satrap to the south. The fact is, all four rising powers
were now carefully engaged in watching each other, and in playing
a profound political game around their prey. This prey was the
eastern half of the Emperor's original domain (the western half
now, since 771 B.C., belonging to Ts'in) and the dozen or so of
purely Chinese, highly cultured, vassal states making up the rest
of modern Ho Nan province, together with small parts or wedges of
modern Chih Li, Shan Tung, An Hwei, and Kiang Su. From first to
last none of these ritual and literary states showed any real
fight; there is hardly a single record of a really crushing
victory gained by any one of them. The fighting instincts all lay
with the new Chinese, that is, with the Chinese adventurers who
had got their hand well in with generations of fighting against
barbarians--Tartars, Tunguses, Annamese, Shans, and what not--and
had invigorated themselves with good fresh barbarian blood. The
fact is, the population of China had enormously increased; the
struggle for life and food was keener; the old patriarchal
appetite for ritual was disappearing; the people were beginning to
assert themselves against the land-owners; the land-owners were
encroaching upon the power of the ruling princes; and China was in
a parlous state.

CHAPTER IX

POSITION OF ENVOYS

It was a fixed rule in ancient China that envoys should be treated
with courtesy, and that their persons should be held sacred,
whether at residential courts, in durbar, or on the road through a
third state. During the wars of the sixth century B.C. between
Tsin in the north and Ts'u in the south, when these two powers
were rival aspirants to the Protectorate of the original and
orthodox group of principalities lying between them, and were
alternately imposing their will on the important and diplomatic
minor Chinese state of CHENG (still the name of a territory in Ho
Nan), there were furnished many illustrations of this recognized
rule. The chief reason for thus making a fighting-ground of the
old Chinese principalities was that it was almost impossible for
Ts'u to get conveniently at any of the three great northern
powers, and equally difficult for Ts'in, Tsin, and Ts'i to reach
Ts'u, without passing through one or more Chinese states, mostly
bearing the imperial clan name, and permission had to be asked for
an army to pass through, unless the said Chinese state was under
the predominancy of (for instance) Tsin or Ts'u. It was like
Germany and Italy with Switzerland between them, or Germany and
Spain with France between them. Another important old Chinese
state was Sung, lying to the east of CHENG. Both these states were
of the highest caste, the Earl of CHENG being a close relative of
the Chou Emperor, and the Duke of Sung being the representative or
religious heir of the remains of the Shang dynasty ousted by the
Chou family in I 122 B.C., magnanimously reinfeoffed "in order
that the family sacrifices might not be entirely cut off" together
with the loss of imperial sway. In the year 595 B.C. Sung went so
far as to put a Ts'u envoy to death, naturally much to the wrath
of the rising southern power. Ts'u in turn arrested the Tsin envoy
on his way to Sung, and tried in vain to force him to betray his
trust. In 582 Tsin, in a fit of anger, detained the CHENG envoy,
and finally put him to death for his impudence in coming
officially to visit Tsin after coquetting with Tsin's rival Ts'u.
All these irregular cases are severely blamed by the historians.
In 562 Ts'u turned the tables upon Tsin by putting the CHENG envoy
to death after the latter had concluded a treaty with Tsin.
Confucius joins, retrospectively of course, in the chorus of
universal reprobation. In 560 Ts'u tried to play upon the Ts'i
envoy a trick which in its futility reminds us strongly of the
analogous petty humiliations until recently imposed by China,
whenever convenient occasion offered, upon foreign officials
accredited to her. The Ts'i envoy, who was somewhat deformed in
person, was no less an individual than the celebrated philosopher
Yen-tsz, a respected acquaintance of Confucius (though, of course,
much his senior), and second only to Kwan-tsz amongst the great
administrative statesmen of Ts'i. The half-barbarous King of Ts'u
concocted with his obsequious courtiers a nice little scheme for
humiliating the northern envoy by indicating to him the small door
provided for his entry into the presence, such as the Grand
Seigneurs in their hey-day used to provide for the Christian
ambassadors to Turkey. Yen-tsz, of course, at once saw through
this contemptible insult and said: "My master had his own reasons
for selecting so unworthy an individual as myself for this
mission; yet if he had sent me on a mission to a dog-court, I
should have obeyed orders and entered by a dog-gate: however, it
so happens that I am here on a mission to the King of Ts'u, and of
course I expect to enter by a gate befitting the status of that
ruler." Still another prank was tried by the foolish king: a
"variety entertainment" was got up, in which one scene represented
a famished wretch who was being belaboured for some reason.
Naturally every one asked: "What is that?" The answer was: "A Ts'i
man who has been detected in thieving." Yen-tsz said: "I
understand that the best fruits come from Ts'u, and they say we
northern men cannot come near the quality of their peaches. We are
honest simpletons, too, and do not look natural on the variety
stage as thieves. The true rogue, like the true peach, is a
southern speciality. I did see rogues on the stage, it is true,
but none of them looked like a Ts'i man; hence I asked, 'What is
it?'" The king laughed sheepishly, and, for a time at least, gave
up taking liberties with Yen-tsz.

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