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

In 545, when Ts'u for the moment had the predominant say over
CHENG's political action, it was insisted that the ruler of CHENG
should come in person to pay his respects: this was after a great
Peace Conference, held at Sung, on which occasion Tsin and Ts'u
arranged a _modus operandi_ for their respective subordinate
or allied vassals. There was no help for it, and the Earl
accordingly went. The minister in attendance was Tsz-ch'an-a very
great name indeed in Chinese history; he was a lawyer, statesman,
"democratic conservative," sceptic, and philosopher, deeply
lamented on his death alike by the people of CHENG, and by his
friend or correspondent Confucius of Lu state. The Chinese
diplomats then, as now, had the most roundabout ways of pointing a
moral or delicately insinuating an innuendo. On arrival at the
outskirts of the capital, instead of building the usual dais for
formalities and sacrifices, Tsz-ch'an threw up a mean hut for the
accommodation of his mission, saying: "Altars are built by great
states when they visit small ones as a symbol of benefits
accorded, and by way of exhortation to continue in virtuous ways."
Four years later Ts'u sent a mission of menacing size to CHENG,
ostensibly to complete the carrying out of a marriage agreed upon
by treaty between Ts'u and CHENG. Tsz-ch'an insisted that the bows
and arrows carried by the escort should be left outside the city
walls, adding: "Our poor state is too small to bear the full
honour of such an escort; erect your altar dais outside the wall
for the service of the ancestral sacrifices, and we will there
await your commands about the marriage."

In 538, when Ts'u was, for the first time, holding a durbar as
recognized Protector, being at the time, however, on hostile terms
with her former vassal, Wu, the King of Ts'u committed the gross
outrage of seizing the ruler of a petty state, who was then
present at the durbar, because that ruler had married (being
himself of eastern barbarian descent) a princess of Wu. The
following year, when two very distinguished statesmen from the
territory of his secular enemy Tsin came on a political mission,
the King of Ts'u consulted his premier about the advisability of
castrating the one for a harem eunuch, and cutting off the feet of
the other for a door-porter. "Your Majesty can do it, certainly,"
was the reply, "but how about the consequences?" This was the
occasion, mentioned in Chapter VI., on which the king was reminded
how many great private families there were in Tsin quite capable
of raising a hundred chariots apiece.

It appears that envoys, at least in Lu, were hereditary in some
families, just as other families provided successive generations
of ministers. A Lu envoy to Tsin, who carried a very valuable gem-
studded girdle with him, had very great pressure put upon him by a
covetous Tsin minister who wanted the girdle. The envoy offered to
give some silk instead, but he said that not even to save his life
would he give up the girdle. The Tsin magnate thought better of
it; but it is remarkable how many cases of sordid greed of this
kind are recorded, all pointing to the comparative absence of
commercial exchanges, or standards of value between the feudal
states.

Ts'u seems to have thoroughly deserved Yen-tsz's imputations of
treachery and roguery. At the great Peace Conference held outside
the Sung capital in 546, the Ts'u escort was detected wearing
cuirasses underneath their clothing. One of the greatest of the
Tsin statesmen, Shuh Hiang (a personal friend of Yen-tsz,
Confucius, and Tsz-ch'an) managed diplomatically to keep down the
rising indignation of the other powers and representatives present
by pooh-poohing the clumsy artifice on the ground that by such
treachery Ts'u simply injured her own reputation in the federation
to the manifest advantage of Tsin: it did not suit Tsin to
continue the struggle with Ts'u just then. Then there was a
squabble as to precedence at the same Peace Conference; that is,
whether Tsin or Ts'u had the first right to smear lips with the
blood of sacrifice: here again Shuh Hiang tactfully gave way, and
by his conciliatory conduct succeeded in inducing the federal
princes to sign a sort of disarmament agreement. This is one of
the numerous instances in which Confucius as an annalist tries to
_menager_ the true facts in the interests of orthodoxy.

Even the more fully civilized state of Ts'i attempted an act of
gross treachery, when in 500 B.C. the ruler of Lu, accompanied by
Confucius as his minister in attendance, went to pay his respects.
But Confucius was just as sharp as Yen-tsz and Tsz-ch'an, his
friends, neighbours, and colleagues: he at once saw through the
menacing appearance of the barbarian "dances" (introduced here,
again, as a "variety entertainment"), and by his firm behaviour
not only saved the person of his prince, but shamed the ruler of
Ts'i into disclaiming and disavowing his obsequious fellow-
practical jokers. Yen-tsz was actually present at the time, in
attendance upon his own marquis; but it is nowhere alleged that he
was responsible for the disgraceful manoeuvre. As a result T'si
was obliged to restore to Lu several cities and districts
wrongfully annexed some years before, and Lu promised to assist
Ts'i in her wars.

[Illustration: MAP

1. The River Sz still starts at Sz-shui (cross in circle; means
"River Sz"), and runs past Confucius' town, K'iih-fu, into the
Canal in two branches. But in Confucius' time what is now the
Canal continued to be the River Sz, down to its junction with the
Hwai. The River I starts still from I-shui (also a cross in
circle; means "River I"), passes I-thou, and used to join the Sz
(now the Canal) at the lower cross in a circle. The neck (dotted)
of the Hwai embouchure no longer exists, and the Lake Hung-tseh
now dissipates itself into lakelets and canals. The Wu fleets, by
sailing up the Hwai, Sz, and I, could get up to Lu, and threaten
Ts'i.

2. In Confucius' time the Yellow River turned north near the
junction of the Emperor's territory with Cheng: it passed through
Wei, and there divided. Its main branch, after coursing through
part of the River Wei bed, left it and took possession of the
River Chang bed. Up to 602 B.C. the secondary branch took the more
easterly dotted line (the present Yellow River, once the River
Tsi); but after 602 B.C. it cut through Hing, followed the Wei,
and took the line of the present Canal. Hing was a Tartar-harried
state contested by Ts'i and Tsin: it fell at last to Tsin.

3. The capitals of Ts'i, Wei, Ts'ao, Cheng, Sung, Ch'en, Ts'ai
(three) are marked with encircled crosses. K'iih-fu, the capital
of Lu, is marked with a small circle. In 278 B.C. the Ts'u capital
was moved east to Ch'en. In 241 B.C., under pressure of Ts'in, the
Ts'u capital had to be moved to the double black cross on the
south bank of the Hwai.]

CHAPTER X

THE SECOND PROTECTOR

We must now go back a little. The first of the so-called Five
Tyrants, or the Five successive Protectors of orthodox China, had
died in 643, his philosopher and friend, Kwan-tsz, having departed
this life a little before him. Their joint title to fame lies in
the fact that "they saved China from becoming a Tartar province,"
and even Confucius admits the truth of this--a most important
factor in enabling us to understand the motive springs of Chinese
policy. Under these circumstances the Duke of Sung, who, as we
have seen, had special moral pretensions to leadership on account
of his being the direct lineal representative of the Shang dynasty
which perished in 1122 B.C., immediately put forward a claim to
the hegemony. He rather prejudiced his reputation, however, by
committing the serious ritual offence of "warring upon Ts'i's
mourning," that is, of engaging the allies in hostilities with the
late Protector's own country whilst his body lay unburied, and his
sons were still wrangling over the question of succession. The
Tartars, however, came to the rescue of, and made a treaty with,
Ts'i--this is only one of innumerable instances which show how the
northern Chinese princes of those early days were in permanent
political touch with the horse-riding nomads. The orthodox Duke of
Sung, dressed in his little brief authority as Protector, had the
temerity to "send for" the ruler of Ts'u to attend his first
durbar. (It must be remembered that the "king" in his own
dominions was only "viscount" in the orthodox peerage of ruling
princes.) The result was that the King unceremoniously took his
would-be protector into custody at the durbar, and put in a claim
to be Protector himself. During the military operations connected
with this political manoeuvre, the Duke of Sung was guilty of the
most ridiculous piece of ritual chivalry; highly approved, it is
true, by the literary pedants of all subsequent ages, but ruinous
to his own worldly cause. The Ts'u army was crossing a difficult
ford, and the Duke's advisers recommended a prompt attack. "It is
not honourable," said the Duke, "to take advantage even of an
enemy in distress." "But," said his first adviser, "war is war,
and its only object is to punish the foe as severely and promptly
as possible, so as to gain the upper hand, and establish what you
are fighting for."

Meanwhile important events had been going on in the marquisate of
Tsin, which, during the thirty-five years' hegemony of Ts'i, had
been engaged in extending its territory in all directions, in
fighting Ts'in, and in annexing bordering Tartar tribes. At its
greatest development Tsin practically comprised all between the
Yellow River in its turns south, east, and north; but, though
probably half its population was Tartar, it never ceased to be
"orthodox" in administrative principle. The energetic but
licentious ruler of Tsin had married a Tartar wife in addition to
his more legitimate spouse (daughter of the late Protector,
Marquess of Ts'i); or, rather, he took two wives, the one being
sister of the other, but the younger sister brought him no
children. Before this he had already married two sisters of quite
a different Tartar tribe, and each of his earlier wives had
brought him a son. His last pair of Tartar lady-loves gained such
a strong hold upon his affections that he was induced by the
mother, being the elder sister of the two, to nominate her own son
as his heir to the exclusion of the three elder brethren, who were
sent on various flimsy pretexts to defend the northern frontiers
against the more hostile Tartars. To complicate matters, the
Marquess's legitimate or first spouse, the Ts'i princess, besides
bearing a son, had also given him a daughter, who had married the
powerful ruler of Ts'in to the west. Thus not only were Ts'in and
Tsin both half-Tartar in origin and sympathy, but at this period
three out of four of the Tsin possible heirs were actually sons of
Tartar women. The legitimate heir, whose mother was of Ts'i
origin, and, who himself was a man of very high character, ended
the question so far as he was concerned, by committing dutiful
suicide; the three sons by Tartar mothers succeeded to the throne
one after the other, but in the inverse order of their respective
ages. The story of the wanderings of the eldest brother, who did
not come to the throne until he was sixty-two years of age, is one
of the most interesting and romantic episodes in the whole history
of China; and, even with the unfamiliar proper names, would make a
capital romantic novel, so graphically and naturally are some of
the scenes depicted. First he threw himself heart and soul into
Tartar life, joined the rugged horsemen in their internecine wars,
married a Tartar wife, and gave her sister to his most faithful
henchman; then, hearing of the death of the Ts'i premier, Kwan-
tsz, he vowed he would go to Ts'i and try to act as political
adviser in his place. Hospitably received by the Marquess of Ts'i,
he was presented with a charming and sensible Ts'i princess, who
for five years exercised so enervating an influence upon his
virility, ambition, and warlike ardour, that he had to be
surreptitiously smuggled away from the gay Ts'i capital whilst
drunk, by his Tartar father-in-law and by his chief Chinese
henchman and brother-in-law. Then he commenced a series of visits
to the petty orthodox courts which separated Ts'i from Ts'u.
Several of them were rude and neglectful to this unfortunate
prince in distress; but Sung was an exception, for Sung ambition,
as above narrated, had been roughly checked by Ts'u, and Sung now
wished to make overtures to Tsin instead, and to conciliate a
prince who was as likely as not to come to the throne of Tsin. In
637 the prince reached the court of Ts'u, whose ruler had quite
recently begun to take formal and official rank as a "civilized"
federal prince. Meanwhile, news came that his brother (by his own
mother's younger sister) was dead; this younger brother had taken
refuge in Ts'in during the reign of his youngest brother (the one
born of the last Tartar favourite), and had, after that brother's
death, been most generously assisted to the throne in turn by the
ruler of Ts'in, on the understanding, however, that Tsin should
cede to Ts'in all territory on the right bank of the Yellow River,
i.e. in the modern province of Shen Si: but the new Tsin ruler had
been persuaded by his courtiers to go back on this humiliating
bargain, in consequence of which war had been declared by Ts'in
upon Tsin, and the faithless ruler of Tsin had been for some time
a prisoner of war in Ts'in; but, regaining his throne through the
influence of his half-sister, the wife of the Ts'in ruler, had
died in harness in 637 B.C. This deceased ruler's young son was
not popular, and Ts'in was now instrumental in welcoming the
refugee back from Ts'u, and in leading him in triumph, after
nineteen years of adventurous wandering, to his own ancestral
throne; his rival and nephew was killed.

All orthodox China seemed to feel now that the interesting
wanderer, after all his experiences of war, travel, Tartars,
Chinese, barbarians, and politics, was the right man to be
Protector. But it was first necessary for Tsin to defeat Ts'u in a
decisive battle; a war had arisen between Tsin and Ts'u out of an
attempt on the part of CHENG (one of the orthodox Chinese states
that had been uncivil to the wanderer), to drag in the preponderant
power of Ts'u by way of shielding itself from punishment at Tsin's
hands for past rude behaviour. The Emperor sent his own son to
confer the status of "my uncle" upon him,--which is practically
another way of saying "Protector" to a kinsman,--and in the year
632 accordingly a grand durbar was held, in which the Emperor
himself took part. The Tsin ruler, who had summoned the durbar,
and had even "commanded the presence" of the Emperor, was the
guiding spirit of the meeting in every respect, except in the nominal
and ritualistic aspect of it; nevertheless, he was prudent and careful
enough scrupulously to observe all external marks of deference,
and to make it appear that he was merely acting as mouthpiece to
the puppet Emperor; he even went the length of dutifully offering
to the Emperor some Ts'u prisoners, and the Emperor in turn "graciously
ceded" to Tsin the imperial possessions north of the Yellow River.
Thus Ts'in and Tsin each in turn clipped the wings of the Autocrat
of All the Chinas, so styled.

During these few unsettled years between the death of the first
real Protector in 643 and the formal nomination by the Emperor of
the second in 632, Ts'u and Sung had, as we have seen, both
attempted to assert their rival claims. A triangular war had also
been going on for some time between Ts'i and Ts'u, the bone of
contention being some territory of which Ts'i had stripped Lu; and
there was war also between Tsin and Ts'i, Tsin and Ts'in, and Tsin
and Ts'u, which latter state always tried to secure the assistance
of Ts'in when possible. From first to last, there never was,
during the period covered by Confucius' history, any serious war
between Tartar Ts'in and barbarian Ts'u; rather were they natural
allies against orthodox China, upon which intermediate territory
they both learned to fix covetous eyes.

The situation is too involved, in view of the uncouthness of
strange names and the absence of definite frontiers--changing as
they did with the result of each few years' campaigning--to make
it possible to give a full, or even approximately intelligible,
explanation of each move. But the following main features are
incontestable:--Ts'in, Tsin, Ts'i, and Ts'u were growing,
progressive, and aggressive states, all of them strongly tinged
with foreign blood, which foreign blood was naturally assimilated
the more readily in proportion to the power, wealth, and culture
of the assimilating orthodox nucleus. The imperial domain was an
extinct political volcano, belching occasional fumes of
threatening, sometimes noxious, but not ever fatally suffocating
smoke, always without fire. "The Hia," that is, the federation of
princes belonging to pure Hia, or (as we now say) "Chinese" stock,
were evidently unwarlike in proportion to the absence of foreign
blood in their veins; but they were all of them equally
_ruses_, and all of them past-masters in casuistic diplomacy.
Trade, agriculture, literature, and even law, were now quite
active, and (as we shall gradually see in these short chapters)
China was undoubtedly beginning to move, as, after 2500 years of a
second "ritual" sleep, she is again now moving, at the beginning
of the twentieth century A.D.

CHAPTER XI

RELIGION

All through these five centuries of struggle, between the flight
of the Emperor with the transfer of the metropolis in 771 B.C.,
and the total destruction of the feudal system by the First August
Emperor of Ts'in in 221 B.C., it is of supreme interest to note
that religion in our Western sense was not only non-existent
throughout China, but had not yet even been conceived of as an
abstract notion; apart, that is to say, from government, public
law, family law, and class ritual. No word for "religion" was
known to the language; the notion of Church or Temple served by a
priestly caste had not entered men's minds. Offences against "the
gods" or "the spirits," in a vague sense, were often spoken of;
but, on the other hand, too much belief in their power was
regarded as superstition. "Sin" was only conceivable in the sense
of infraction of nature's general laws, as symbolized and
specialized by imperial commands; direct, or delegated to vassal
princes; in both cases as representatives, supreme or local, of
Heaven, or of the Emperor Above, whose Son the dynastic central
ruler for the time being was figuratively supposed to be. No
vassal prince ever presumed to style himself "Son of Heaven,"
though nearly all the barbarous vassals called themselves "King"
(the only other title the Chou monarchs took) in their own
dominions. "In the Heaven there can only be one Sun; on Earth
there can only be one Emperor"; this was the maxim, and, ever
since the Chou conquest in 1122 B.C., the word "King" had done
duty for the more ancient "Emperor," which, in remote times had
apparently not been sharply distinguished in men's minds from God,
or the "Emperor on High."

Prayer was common enough, as we shall frequently see, and
sacrifice was universal; in fact, the blood of a victim was almost
inseparable from solemn function or record of any kind. But such
ideas as conscience, fear of God, mortal sin, repentance,
absolution, alms-giving, self-mortification, charity, sackcloth
and ashes, devout piety, praise and glorification,--in a word,
what the Jews, Christians, Mussulmans, and even Buddhists have
each in turn conceived to be religious duty, had no well-defined
existence at all. There are some traces of local or barbarous gods
in the semi-Turkish nation of Ts'in, before it was raised to the
status of full feudal vassal; and also in the semi-Annamese nation
of Ts'u (with its dependencies Wu and Yiieh); but the orthodox
Chinese proper of those times never had any religion such as we
now conceive it, whatever notions their remote ancestors may have
conceived.

Notwithstanding this, the minds of the governing classes at least
were powerfully restrained by family and ancestral feeling, and,
if there were no temples or priests for public worship, there were
invariably shrines dedicated to the ancestors, with appropriate
rites duly carried out by professional clerks or reciters.
Whenever a ruler of any kind undertook any important expedition or
possible duty, he was careful first to consult the oracles in
order to ascertain the will of Heaven, and then to report the fact
to the _manes_ of his forefathers, who were likewise notified
of any great victory, political change, or piece of good fortune.
There is a distinction (not easy to master) between the loss of a
state and the loss of a dynasty; in the latter case the population
remain comparatively unaffected, and it is only the reigning
family whose sacrifices to the gods of the place and of the
harvest are interrupted. Thus in 567, when one of the very small
vassals (of whom the ruler of Lu was mesne lord) crushed the
other, it is explained that the spirits will not spiritually eat
the sacrifices (i.e. accept the worship) of one who does not
belong to the same family name, and that in this case the
annihilating state was only a cousin through sisters: "when the
country is 'lost,' it means that the strange surname succeeds to
power; but, when a strange surname becomes spiritual heir, we say
'annihilated.'" We have seen in the ninth chapter how the Shang
dynasty lost the empire, but was sacrificially maintained in Sung.
From the remotest times there seems to have been a tender
unwillingness to "cut off all sacrifices" entirely, probably out
of a feeling that retribution in like form might at some future
date occur to the ruthless condemner of others. There is another
reason, which is, nearly all ruling families hailed from the same
remote semi-mythical emperors, or from their ministers, or from
their wives of inferior birth. Thus, although the body of the last
tyrannical monarch of the Shang dynasty just cited was pierced
through and through by the triumphant Chou monarch, that monarch's
brother (acting as regent on behalf of the son and successor)
conferred the principality of Sung upon the tyrant's elder half-
brother by an inferior wife, "in order that the dynastic
sacrifices might not be cut off"; and to the very last the Duke of
Sung was the only ruling satrap under the Chou dynasty who
permanently enjoyed the full title of "duke." His neighbour, the
Marquess of Wei (imperial clan), was, it is true, made "duke" in
770 B.C. for services in connection with the Emperor's flight; but
the title seems to have been tacitly abandoned, and at durbars he
is always styled "marquess." Of the Shang tyrant himself it is
recorded: "thus in 1122 B.C. he lost all in a single day, without
even leaving posterity." Of course his elder brother could not
possibly be his spiritual heir. In 597 B.C., when Ts'u, in its
struggle with Tsin for the possession of CHENG, got the ruling
Earl of CHENG in its power, the latter referred appealingly to his
imperial ancestors (the first earl, in 806, was son of the Emperor
who fled from his capital north in 842), and said: "Let me
continue their sacrifices." There are, at least, a score of
similar instances: the ancestral sacrifices seem to refer rather
to posterity, whilst those to gods of the land and grain appear
more connected with rights as feoffee.

Prayer is mentioned from the earliest times. For instance Shun,
the active ploughman monarch (not hereditary) who preceded the
three dynasties of Hia (2205-1767), Shang (1766-1123), and Chou
(1122-249), prayed at a certain mountain in the centre of modern
Hu Nan province, where his grave still is, (a fact which points to
the possibility of the orthodox Chinese having worked their way
northwards from the south-west). When the Chou conqueror,
posthumously called the Martial King, fell ill, his brother, the
Duke of Chou (later regent for the Martial King's son), prayed to
Heaven for his brother's recovery, and offered himself as a
substitute; the clerk was instructed to commit the offer to
writing, and this solemn document was securely locked up. The same
man, when regent, again offered himself to Heaven for his sick
nephew, cutting his nails off and throwing them into the river, as
a symbol of his willingness to give up his own body. The Emperor
K'ang-hi of the present Manchu dynasty, perhaps in imitation of
the Duke of Chou, offered himself to Heaven in place of his sick
Mongol grandmother. A very curious instance of prayer occurs in
connection with the succession to the Tsin throne; it will be
remembered that the legitimate heir committed dutiful suicide, and
two other half-brothers (and, for a few months, one of these
brother's sons) reigned before the second Protector secured his
ancestral rights. The suicide's ghost appears to his usurping
brother, and says: "I have prayed to the Emperor (God), who will
soon deliver over Tsin into Ts'in's hands, so that Ts'in will
perform the sacrifices due to me." The reply to the ghost was:
"But the spirits will only eat the offerings if they come from the
same family stock." The ghost said: "Very good; then I will pray
again. . . . God now says my half-brother will be overthrown at
the battle of Han" (the pass where the philosopher Lao-tsz is
supposed to have written his book 150 years later). In 645 the
ruler of Tsin was in fact captured in battle by his brother-in-law
of Ts'in, who was indeed about to sacrifice to the Emperor on High
as successor of Tsin; but he was dissuaded by his orthodox wife
(the Tsin princess, daughter of a Ts'i princess as explained on
page 51).

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