Ancient China Simplified

E >> Edward Harper Parker >> Ancient China Simplified

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In 575 Tsin is recorded as "invoking the spirits and requesting a
victory." A little later one of the Tsin generals, after a defeat,
issued a general order by way of concealing his weakness: to
deceive the enemy he suggested that the army should amongst other
things make a great show of praying for victory. There are many
other similar analogous instances of undoubted prayer. Much later,
in the year 210 B.C., when the King (as he had been) of Ts'in had
conquered all China and given himself the name, for the first time
in history, of August Emperor (the present title), he consulted
his soothsayers about an unpleasant dream he had had. He was
advised to pray, and to worship (or to sacrifice, for the two are
practically one) with special ardour if he wished to bring things
round to a favourable conclusion: and this is a monarch, too, who
was steeped in Lao-tsz's philosophy.

CHAPTER XII

ANCESTRAL WORSHIP

We have just seen that, when a military expedition started out,
the event was notified, with sacrifice, to the ancestors of the
person most concerned: it was also the practice to carry to
battle, on a special chariot, the tablet of the last ancestor
removed from the ancestral hall, in order that, under his aegis so
to speak, the tactics of the battle might be successful. Ancestral
halls varied according to rank, the Emperor alone having seven
shrines; vassal rulers five; and first-class ministers three;
courtiers or second-class ministers had only two; that is to say,
no one beyond the living subject's grandfather was in these last
cases worshipped at all. From this we may assume that the ordinary
folk could not pretend to any shrine, unless perhaps the house-
altar, which one may see still any day in the streets of Canton.
In 645 B.C. a first-class minister's temple was struck by
lightning, and the commentator observes: "Thus we see that all,
from the Emperor down to the courtiers, had ancestral shrines",--a
statement which proves that already at the beginning of our
Christian era such matters had to be explained to the general
public. The shrines were disposed in the following fashion:--To
the left (on entrance) was the shrine of the living subject's
father; to the right his grandfather; above these two, to the left
and right again, the great-grandfather and great-great-
grandfather; opposite, in the centre, was that of the founder,
whose tablet or effigy was never moved; but as each living
individual died, his successor of course regarded him in the light
of father, and, five being the maximum allowed, one tablet had to
be removed at each decease, and it was placed in the more general
ancestral hall belonging to the clan or gens rather than to the
specific family: it was therefore the, tablet or effigy of the
great-great-grandfather that was usually carried about in war. The
Emperor alone had two special chapels beyond the five shrines,
each chapel containing the odds (left) and evens (right) of those
higher up in ascent than the great and great-great-grandfathers
respectively. The King of Ts'u who died in 560 B.C. said on his
death-bed: "I now take my place in the ancestral temple to receive
sacrifices in the spring and autumn of each year." In the year
597, after a great victory over Tsin, the King of Ts'u had been
advised to build a trophy over the collected corpses of the enemy;
but, being apparently rather a high-minded man, after a little
reflection, he said: "No! I will simply erect there a temple to my
ancestors, thanking them for the success." After the death in 210
B.C. of the First August Emperor, a discussion arose as to what
honours should be paid to his temple shrine: it was explained that
"for a thousand years without any change the rule has been seven
shrines for the Son of Heaven, five for vassal princes, and three
for ministers." In the year 253, after the conquest of the
miserable Chou Emperor's limited territory, the same Ts'in
conqueror "personally laid the matter before the Emperor Above in
the suburb sacrifice";--which means that he took over charge of
the world as Vicar of God. The Temple of Heaven (outside the
Peking South Gate), occupied in 1900 by the British troops, is
practically the "suburb sacrifice" place of ancient times. It was
not until the year 221 B.C. that the King of Ts'in, after that
date First August Emperor, formally annexed the whole empire:
"thanks to the shrines in the ancestral temple," or "thanks to the
spiritual help of my ancestors' shrines the Under-Heaven (i.e.
Empire) is now first settled." These expressions have been
perpetuated dynasty by dynasty, and were indeed again used but
yesterday in the various announcements of victory made to Heaven
and his ancestors by the Japanese _Tenshi,_ or Mikado; that
is by the "Son of Heaven," or T'ien-tsz of the ancient Chinese,
from whom the Japanese Shinto ritual was borrowed in whole or in
part.

In the year 572 B.C., on the accession of a Tsin ruler after
various irregular interruptions in the lineal succession, he says:
"Thanks to the supernatural assistance of my ancestors--and to
your assistance, my lords--I can now carry out the Tsin
sacrifices." In the year 548 the wretched ruler of Ts'i, victim of
a palace intrigue, begged the eunuch who was charged with the task
of assassinating him at least "to grant me permission to commit
suicide in my ancestral hall." The wooden tablet representing the
ancestor is defined as being "that on which the spirit reclines";
and the temple "that place where the ancestral spiritual
consciousness doth dwell." Each tablet was placed on its own
altar: the tablet was square, with a hole in the centre, "in order
to leave free access on all four sides." The Emperor's was twelve
inches, those of vassal princes one foot (i.e. ten inches) in
length, and no doubt the inscription was daubed on in varnish
(before writing on silk became general, and before the hair-brush
and ink came into use about 200 B.C.). The rulers of Lu, being
lineal descendants of the Duke of Chou, brother of the first
Emperor of the Chou dynasty (1122 B.C.) had special privileges in
sacrificial matters, such as the right to use the imperial music
of all past dynasties; the right to sacrifice to the father of the
Duke of Chou and the founder; the right to imperial rites, to
suburban sacrifice, and so on; besides the custody of certain
ancient symbolic objects presented by the first Chou Emperors, and
mentioned on page 22.

Of course no punishment could be spiritually greater than the
destruction of ancestral temples: thus on two occasions, notably
in 575 B.C. when a first-class minister traitorously fled his
country, his prince, the Marquess of Lu, as a special act of
grace, simply "swept his ancestral temple, but did not cut off the
sacrifices." The second instance was also in Lu, in 550: the Wei
friend with whom Confucius lived seventy years later, when
wandering in Wei, retrospectively gave his ritual opinion on the
case--a proof of the solidarity in sympathy that existed between
the statesmen of the orthodox principalities. In the bloodthirsty
wars between the semi-barbarous southern states of Wu and Ts'u,
the capital of the latter was taken by storm in the year 506, the
ancestral temple of Ts'u was totally destroyed, and the renegade
Ts'u ministers who accompanied the Wu armies even flogged the
corpse of the previous Ts'u king, their former master, against
whom they had a grievance. This mutilation of the dead (in cases
where the guilty rulers have contravened the laws of nature and
heaven) was practised even in imperial China; for (see page 57)
the founder of the dynasty, on taking possession of the last Shang
Emperor's palace, deliberately fired several arrows into the body
of the suicide Emperor. Decapitating corpses and desecrating tombs
of great criminals have frequently been practised by the existing
Manchu government, in criticizing whom we must not forget the
treatment of Cromwell's body at the Restoration. In the year 285
B.C., when the Ts'i capital was taken possession of by the allied
royal powers then united against Ts'i, the ancestral temple was
burnt. In 249 B.C. Ts'u extinguished the state of Lu, "which thus
witnessed the interruption of its ancestral sacrifices."

Frequent instances occur, throughout this troublous period, of the
Emperor's sending presents of meat used in ancestral sacrifices to
the vassal princes; this was intended as a special mark of honour,
something akin to the "orders" or decorations distributed in
Europe. Thus in 671 the new King of Ts'u who had just murdered his
predecessor, which predecessor had for the first time set the bad
example of annexing petty orthodox Chinese principalities,
received this compliment of sacrificial meat from the Emperor,
together with a mild hint to "attack the barbarians such as Yiieh,
but always to let the Chinese princes alone." Ts'i, Lu, Ts'in, and
Yiieh on different occasions between that date and the fourth
century B.C. received similar donations, usually, evidently, more
propitiatory than patronizing. In 472 the barbarous King of Yiieh
was even nominated Protector along with his present of meat; this
was after his total destruction of Wu, when he was marching north
to threaten North China. Presents of private family sacrificial
meat are still in vogue between friends in China.

Fasting and purification were necessary before undertaking solemn
sacrifice of any kind. Thus the King of Ts'u in 690 B.C. did this
before announcing a proposed war to his ancestors; and an envoy
starting from Ts'u to Lu in 618 reported the circumstance to his
own particular ancestors, who may or may not have been (as many
high officers were) of the reigning caste. On another occasion the
ruler of Lu was assassinated whilst purifying himself in the
enclosure dedicated to the god of the soil, previous to
sacrificing to the _manes_ of an individual who had once
saved his life. Practically all this is maintained in modern
Chinese usage.

A curious distinction is mentioned in connection with official
mourning tidings in the highly ritual state of Lu. If the deceased
were of a totally different family name, the Marquess of Lu wept
outside his capital, turning towards deceased's native place, or
place of death; if of the same name, then in the ancestral temple:
if the deceased was a descendant of the same founder, then in the
founder's temple; if of the same family branch, then in the
paternal temple. All these refinements are naturally tedious and
obscure to us Westerners; but it is only by collating specific
facts that we can arrive at any general principle or rule.

[Illustration: MAP

1. Ts'u's five capitals, in order of date, are marked. In 504 B.C.
the king had to leave the Yang-tsz for good in order to escape Wu
attacks. In 278 B.C. Ts'in captured No. 4, and then the ancient
Ch'ta capital (No. 5, already annexed by Ts'u) became the Ts'u
capital (see maps showing Ch'en's position). Ts'u was now a Hwai
River power instead of being a Han River and Yang-tsz power. Shuh
and Pa are modern Sz Ch'wan, both inaccessible from the Han
system. The Han system to its north was separated from the Wei
system and the country of Ts'in by a common watershed.

2. Wu seems to have been the only power besides Ts'u possessing
any knowledge of the Yang-tsz River, and Wu was originally part
of, or vassal to Ts'u. 3. Pa had relations with Ts'u so early as
600 B.C. Later Pa princesses married Ts'u kings.]

CHAPTER XIII

ANCIENT DOCUMENTS FOUND

The reign of the Tsin marquess (628-635), second of the Five
Protectors, only lasted eight years, and nothing is recorded to
have happened during this period at all commensurate with his
picturesque figure in history while yet a mere wanderer. But it is
very interesting to note that the Bamboo Annals or Books, i.e. the
History of Tsin from 784 B.C., and incidentally also of China from
1500 years before that date, are one of the corroborative
authorities we now possess upon the accuracy of Confucius' history
from 722 B.C., as expanded by his three commentators; and it is
satisfactory to know that the oldest of the three commentaries,
that usually called the Tso _Chwan_, or "Commentary of Tso
K'iu-ming," a junior contemporary of Confucius, and official
historiographer at the Lu Court, is the most accurate as well as
the most interesting of the three. These Bamboo Books were only
discovered in the year 281 A.D., after having been buried in a
tomb ever since the year 299 B.C. The character in which they were
written, upon slips of bamboo, had already become so obsolete that
the sustained work of antiquarians was absolutely necessary in
order to reduce it to the current script of the day; or, in other
words, of to-day. Another interesting fact is, that whilst the
Chou dynasty, and consequently Confucius of Lu (which state was
intimately connected by blood with the Chou family), had
introduced a new calendar, making the year begin one (Shang) or
two (Hia) months sooner than before, Tsin had continued to compute
(see page 27) the year according to the system of the Hia dynasty:
in other words, the intercalary moons, or massed fractions of time
periodically introduced in order to bring the solar and lunar
years into line, had during the millennium so accumulated (at the
rate apparently of, roughly, sixty days in 360,000, or, say, three
half-seconds a day) that the Chou dynasty found it necessary to
call the Hia eleventh moon the first and the Hia first moon the
third of the year. A parallel distinction is observable in modern
times when the Russian year (until a few years ago twelve days
later than ours), was declared thirteen days later; and when we
ourselves in 1900 (and in three-fourths of all future years making
up a net hundred), omit the intercalary day of the 29th February,
which otherwise occurs every fourth year of even numbers divisible
by four. Thus the very discrepancies in the dates of the Bamboo
Books (where the later editors, in attempting to accommodate all
dates to later calendars, have accidentally left a Tsin date
unchanged) and in the dates of Confucius' expanded history,
pointed out and explained as they are by the Chinese commentators
themselves, are at once a guarantee of fact, and of good faith in
recording that fact.

But the neighbour and brother-in-law of the Tsin marquess (himself
three parts Turkish), the Earl of Ts'in, who reigned from 659 to
621 B.C., and during that reign quietly laid the foundations of a
powerful state which was destined to achieve the future conquest
of all China, was himself a remarkable man; and there is some
reason to believe that he, even at this period, also possessed a
special calendar of his own, as his successors certainly did 400
years later, when they imposed their own calendar reckoning upon
China. We have already seen (page 52) what powerful influence he
exercised in bringing the semi-Tartar Tsin brethren to the Tsin
throne in turn. He had invited several distinguished men from the
neighbouring petty, but very ancient, Chinese principalities to
settle in his capital as advisers; he was too far off to attend
the durbars held by the, First Protector, but he sent one of these
Chinese advisers as his representative, He is usually himself
counted as one of the Five Protectors; but, although he was
certainly very influential, and for that reason was certainly one
of the Five Tyrants, or Five Predominating Powers, it is certain
that he never succeeded in obtaining the Emperor's formal sanction
to act as such over the orthodox principalities, nor did he ever
preside at a durbar of Chinese federal princes. Long and bloody
wars with his neighbour of Tsin were the chief feature of his
reign so far as orthodox China was concerned; but his chief glory
lies in his great Tartar conquests, and in his enormous extensions
to the west. These extensions, however, must not be exaggerated,
and there is no reason to suppose that they ever reached farther
than Kwa Chou and Tun-hwang (long. 95o, lat. 40o), two very
ancient places which still appear under those names on the most
modern maps of China, and from which roads (recently examined by
Major Bruce) branch off to Turkestan and Lob Nor respectively.

Most Emperors and vassal princes are spoken of in history by their
posthumous names, that is by the names voted to them after death,
with the view of tersely expressing by that name the essential
features (good or bad) of the deceased's personal character; just
as we say in Europe, officially or unofficially, Louis le
Bienaime, Albert the Good, or Charles the Fat. The posthumous name
of this Ts'in earl was "the Duke Muh" (no matter whether duke,
marquess, earl, viscount, or baron when living, it was customary
to say "duke" when the ruler was dead), and the posthumous name of
the Emperor who died in 947 B.C. was "the King Muh"; for, as
already stated, the Chou dynasty of Sons of Heaven were called
"King," and not "Emperor" though their supreme position was as
fully imperial as that of previous dynastic monarchs, and they
were, in fact, "Emperors" as we now understand that word in
Europe. At the same time that the Bamboo Annals were unearthed,
there were also found copies of some of the old "classics" or
"Scripture," and a hitherto unknown book called "the Story of the
Son of Heaven Muh," all, of course, written in the same ancient
script. This Son of Heaven (a term applied to all the Emperors of
China, no matter whether they styled themselves Emperor, King, or
August Emperor) was supposed to have travelled far west, and to
have had interviews with a foreign prince, who, as his land too,
was transcribed as _Siwangmu_. The subject will be touched
upon more in detail in another chapter; but, for the present, it
will be useful to say that, in the opinion of one very learned
sinologist, all evidence points clearly to this expedition having
been undertaken by Duke Muh of Ts'in, installed as he was in the
old appanage of the emperors lost to the Tartars (as we have
explained) in 771, and made over at the same time by the Emperor
involved to the ancestors of Duke Muh. This view of the case is
supported by the fact that in 664 B.C. Ts'in and Tsin, for some
unknown reason, forced the Tartars of Kwa Chou to migrate into
China, which migration was subsequently alluded to by a Tartar
chief (when attending a Chinese durbar in 559 B.C.) as a well-
known historical fact. It was undoubtedly the practice of semi-
Chinese states, such as Ts'u, Wu, Yueh, and Shuh (the last is the
modern Sz Ch'wan province, and its history was only discovered
long after Confucius' time), to call themselves "Kings,"
"Emperors," and "Sons of Heaven," in their own country (just as
the tributary King of Annam always did until the French assumed a
protectorate over him; and just as the tributary Japanese did
before they officially announced the fact to China in the seventh
century A.D.); and there are many indications that Ts'in did, or
at least might have done and would like to have done, the same
thing. Hence, when the story of Muh was discovered, the literary
manipulators--even if they did not really believe that it
positively must refer to the Emperor Muh-might well have honestly
doubted whether the story referred to Ts'in or to the Emperor; or
might well have decided to incorporate it with orthodox history,
as a strengthening factor in support of the theory of one single
and indivisible imperial dignity; just as, again, in the seventh
century and eighth century A.D., the Japanese manipulators of
their traditional history incorporated hundreds, not to say
thousands of Chinese historical facts and speeches, and worked
them into their own historical episodes and into their own
emperors' mouths, for the honour and glory of Dai Nippon (Great
Japan).

After the death of the Second Protector in 628 B.C., there was a
continuous struggle between Tsin and Ts'in on the one hand, and
between Tsin and Ts'u on the other. Meanwhile Ts'i had all its own
work cut out in order to keep the Tartars off the right bank of
the Yellow River in its lower course, and in order to protect the
orthodox Chinese states, Lu, Sung, Wei, etc., from their attacks;
but Ts'i never again after this date put in a formal claim to be
Protector, although in 610 she led a coalition of princes against
an offending member, and thus practically acted as Protector.

In addition to the Chinese adviser at the disposal of Ts'in, in
the year 626 the King (or a king) of the Tartars supplied Duke Muh
with a very able Tartar adviser of Tsin descent; i.e. his
ancestors had in past times migrated to Tartarland, though he
himself still "spoke the Tsin dialect," and must have had
considerable literary capacity, as he was an author. Ts'in was
now, in addition to being, if only informally, a federal Chinese
state, also supreme suzerain over all the Tartar principalities
within reach; well supplied, moreover, with expert advisers for
both classes of work. All this is important in view of the pre-
eminency of Ts'in when the time came, 400 years later, to abolish
the meticulous feudal system altogether.

CHAPTER XIV

MORE ON PROTECTORS

The Five Tyrants, or Protectors, are usually considered to be the
five personages we have mentioned; to wit, in order of succession,
the Marquess of Ts'i (679-643), under whose reign the great
economist, statesman, and philosopher Kwan-tsz raised this far
eastern part of China to a hitherto unheard-of pitch of material
prosperity; the Marquess of Tsin (632-628), a romantic prince,
more Turkish than Chinese, who was the first vassal prince openly
to treat the Emperor as a puppet; the Duke of Sung (died 637),
representing the imperial Shang dynasty ejected by the Chou family
in 1122, whose ridiculous chivalry failed, however, to secure him
the effective support of the other Chinese princes; the Earl of
Ts'in (died 621) who was, as we see, quietly creating a great
Tartar dominion, and assimilating it to Chinese ways in the west;
and the King of Ts'u (died 591), who, besides taking his place
amongst the recognized federal princes, and annexing innumerable
petty Chinese principalities in the Han River and Hwai River
basins, had been for several generations quietly extending his
dominions at the expense of what we now call the provinces of Sz
Ch'wan, Kiang Si, Hu Kwang-perhaps even Yun Nan and Kwei Chou;
Certainly Kiang Su and Cheh Kiang, and possibly in a loose way the
coast regions of modern Fuh Kien and the Two Kwang; but it cannot
be too often repeated that if any thing intimate was known of the
Yang-tsz basin, it was only Ts'u (in its double character of
independent local empire as well as Chinese federal prince) that
knew, or could have known, any thing about it; just as, if any
thing specific was known of the Far West, Turkestan, the Tarim
valley, and the Desert, it was only Ts'in (in its double character
of independent Tartar empire as well as Chinese federal prince)
that knew, or could know, any thing about them. Ts'i and Tsin were
also Tartar powers, at least in the sense that they knew how to
keep off the particular Tartars known to them, and how to make
friendly alliances with them, thus availing themselves, on the one
hand, of Tartar virility, and faithful on the other to orthodox
Chinese culture. So that, with the exception of the pedantic Duke
of Sung, who was summarily snuffed out after a year or two of
brief light by the lusty King of Ts'u, all the nominal Five
Protectors of China were either half-barbarian rulers or had
passed through the crucible of barbarian ordeals. Finally, so
vague were the claims and services of Sung, Ts'u, and Ts'in, from
a protector point of view, that for the purposes of this work, we
only really recognize two, the First Protector (of Ts'i) and,
after a struggle, the Second Protector (of Tsin): at most a
third,--Ts'u.

But although the Chinese historians thus loosely confine the Five-
Protector period to less than a century of time, it is a fact that
Ts'u and Tsin went on obstinately struggling for the hegemony, or
for practical predominance, for at least another 200 years;
besides, Ts'in, Ts'u, and Sung were never formally nominated by
the Emperor as Protectors, nor were they ever accepted as such by
the Chinese federal princes in the permanent and definite way that
Ts'i and Tsin had been and were accepted. Moreover, the barbarian
states of Wu and Yueeh each in turn acted very effectively as
Protector, and are never included in the Five-Great-Power series.
The fact is, the Chinese have never grasped the idea of principles
in history: their annals are mere diaries of events; and when once
an apparently definite "period" is named by an annalist, they go
on using it, quite regardless of its inconsistency when confronted
with facts adverse to a logical acceptance of it.

The situation was this: Tsin and Ts'u were at perpetual
loggerheads about the small Chinese states that lay between them,
more especially about the state of Cheng, which, though small, was
of quite recent imperial stock, and was, moreover, well supplied
with brains. Tsin and Ts'in were at perpetual loggerheads about
the old Tsin possessions on the west bank of the Yellow River,
which, running from the north to the south, lay between them; and
about their rival claims to influence the various nomadic Tartar
tribes living along both the banks, Tsin and Ts'i were often
engaged in disputes about Lu, Wei, and other orthodox states
situated in the Lower Yellow River valley running from the west to
the east and north-east; also in questions concerning eastern
barbarian states inhabiting the whole coast region, and concerning
the petty Chinese states which had degenerated, and whose manners
savoured of barbarian ways. Thus Ts'in and Ts'u, and also to some
extent Ts'i and Ts'u, had a regular tendency to ally themselves
against Tsin's flanks, and it was therefore always Tsin's policy
as the "middle man" to obstruct communications between Ts'in and
Ts'u, and between Ts'i and Ts'u. In 580 Tsin devised a means of
playing off a similar flanking game upon Ts'u: negotiations were
opened with Wu, which completely barbarous state only begins to
appear in history at all at about this period, all the kings
having manifestly phonetic barbarian names, which mean absolutely
nothing (beyond conveying the sound) as expressed in Chinese, Wu
was taught the art of war, as we have seen, by (page 34) a Ts'u
traitor who had fled to Tsin and taken service there; and the King
of Wu soon made things so uncomfortable for Ts'u that the latter
in turn tried by every means to block the way between Tsin and Wu.
Within a single generation Wu was so civilized that one of the
royal princes was sent the rounds of the Chinese states as special
ambassador, charged, under the convenient cloak of seeking for
civilization, ritual, and music, with the duty of acquiring
political and strategical knowledge. This prince so favourably
impressed the orthodox statesmen of Ts'i, Lu, Tsin, and Wei (the
ruling family of this state, like that of Sung, was, until it
revolted in 1106 B.C. against the new Chou dynasty, of Shang
dynasty origin, and the Yellow River ran through it northwards),
that he was everywhere deferentially received _as_ an equal:
his tomb is still in existence, about ten miles from the treaty-
port of Chinkiang, and the inscription upon it, in ancient
characters, was written by Confucius himself, who, though a boy of
eight when the Wu prince visited Lu in 544, may well have seen the
prince in the flesh elsewhere, for the latter lived to prevent a
war with Ts'u in 485; i.e. he lived to within six years of
Confucius' death: he is known, too, to have visited Tsin on a
spying mission in 515 B.C. The original descent of the first
voluntarily barbarous Wu princes from the same grandfather as the
Chou emperors would afford ample basis for the full recognition of
a Wu prince by the orthodox as their equal, especially when his
manners were softened by rites and music. It was like an oriental
prince being feted and invested in Europe, so long as he should
conform to the conventional dress and mannerisms of "society."

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