For sheer immediacy, plus a touching glimpse of one man’s dismay in the face of overwhelming historical events, nothing can beat the letter written from somewhere in northern China in the year 313 by a foreigner called Nanai Vandak. The letter is on paper, one of the earliest examples of its use for correspondence. With other mail, and still in the postbag in which it had been abandoned some sixteen centuries earlier, it was acquired in 1907 by the archaeological explorer Aurel Stein while he was controversially uplifting ancient scrolls by the donkey-load from the caves of Dunhuang. How the postbag had come to be parted from its postman in the first place is not known; nor is it certain to where the letter was addressed. But from its tone and content it is assumed that Nanai Vandak was a commercial representative, probably a Sogdian or Persian, they being major contractors in the overland silk trade; and that the letter was in the nature of a report to his superior, perhaps in Samarkand. The year of its writing, 313, is the crucial part. Nanai Vandak had news from China of no small importance. The Jin capital of Luoyang had for some time been under intermittent siege, many of its defenders had deserted, and those who remained had little to eat. But more than a year after the event, the writer’s disbelief at the city’s ultimate fate was still almost palpable.
. . . And, Sir, the last Emperor – so they say – fled from [Luoyang] because of the famine. And his fortified residence burnt down, and the town was [destroyed]. So [Luoyang] is no more, [Yeh] is no more! . . . They pillaged up to N’ymn’ymh and up to Ngap, these Xiongnu who yesterday had been the Emperor’s property! . . . And, Sir, if I wrote you all the details of how China fared, it would be [a catalogue] of debts and woe. You will have no wealth from here . . .20
Though evidently not an eyewitness to all these events – and though his account still perplexes posterity with its rendering of Chinese place-names – Nanai Vandak had gauged the scale of the disaster well. With the flight of the Jin court and the destruction of Luoyang by the Xiongnu, 500 years of Chinese empire had come to an end. It was one of history’s more emphatic breaks. Arthur Waley, the great twentieth-century sinologist and translator, likened the fall of Luoyang in 311 to the sack of Rome by the Goths in 410;21 Erik Zurcher, following the Franco-Hungarian orientalist Etienne Balazs, simply dubbed its perpetrator ‘the Attila of Chinese history’ – a tag of no mean consequence considering the number of contemporary contenders.22
Luoyang had of course been sacked before, yet rebuilt. The Later Han were long gone, yet Wei and then Jin had risen from their ashes; indeed, it was the Jin who had briefly ‘united the empire long divided’. But now it was different. The victors were Xiongnu, not Chinese, their apparent aim being to despoil China, not reconstruct it. In 311 the world’s second-largest city had been laid waste, and its oldest empire terminated, by a horde of unlettered tent-dwellers.
Arguably the Jin had brought the catastrophe on themselves. Their fragile reunification after the Three Kingdoms period had been achieved at a high cost to central authority. Kinsmen had been rewarded with military commands over semi-autonomous districts; and when Sima Yan, founder of the dynasty, had died in 290, these royal princelings had predictably vied for control of his successors. The so-called ‘War of the Eight Princes’ (290–311) had served to thin the ranks of the Jin contenders while devastating the empire for which they contended. Fierce competition for military recruits snatched the farmer from his fields and the herdsman from his herds. Serviceable cattle and available food-stocks were commandeered by military provisioners. Seed went unsown, grass ungrazed, coin unminted, taxes unpaid.
In their desperation, thousands took to crime, tens of thousands took to the hills, hundreds of thousands just took to the road. The press of vagrants and migrants then destabilised the provinces through which they straggled; government collapsed; locality warred with locality. The formulaic phrasing used in the Standard Histories may for once have had some substance: ‘the rivers filled with floating corpses, bleached bones covered the fields’, says the Jin History. ‘There was much cannibalism. Famine and pestilence went hand in hand.’23
Fortune favoured those whose roving habits, social organisation and sense of a distinct identity, not to mention their equestrian skills and horses, could most readily be translated to military advantage. Xiongnu, Xianbei, Qiang and other tribal groupings who were already settled within the empire were sought as auxiliaries, and whether willingly recruited or driven to take up arms by the recruiters were well represented among the contending forces. Other tribal confederations from beyond the northern frontier, drawn into the fray as allies, stayed on as predators. All the frontier peoples had grievances of their own, not least that of diminished status. Once honoured guests and respected allies of the Han, they had gradually been demoted to what Nanai Vandak calls ‘the property’ of the Jin. ‘From being princes and nobles we have descended to the same level as ordinary registered households of commoners,’ complained one Xiongnu leader.24 The good old days of massive Han subsidies were fondly recalled; and it was a descendant of one of the ancient ‘peace-through-kinship’ unions between a shanyu and a Han princess who led the advance on Luoyang in 310.
This Liu Yuan, though unquestionably a Xiongnu, had adopted the name (Liu) of the imperial Han and actually designated himself ‘king of Han’. Like that other latter-day ‘king of Han’, Liu Bei of the ‘Three Kingdoms’ period, he hoped to use the connection to rally support from contemptuous Chinese subjects. But he died before his mainly Xiongnu forces could take Luoyang. The honours fell to his successor, Liu Cong, ‘the Chinese Attila’. Ten thousand defenders are said to have been slaughtered in the final assault, a modest figure by Chinese standards which may reflect earlier desertions. If the descriptions of a city already choked with dead bodies are to be believed, Liu Cong’s incendiarists may even have done it a favour.
Chang’an soon shared Luoyang’s fate – twice. Meanwhile the Jin emperor was captured and later killed. So was his successor. That left Sima Rui, a distant cousin stationed on the far-off Yangzi, to claim the emperorship and revive the dynasty. He did so, albeit only in the south, as founder of the Eastern Jin, and was there soon joined by at least a million, perhaps several million, who fled from the north to escape the mounting chaos. Aristocratic émigrés joined destitute refugees in the mass exodus. Entire districts upped sticks, followed their local leaders south, and there settled under the same district administration with the same name. Though there would be friction with both prior settlers in the south and with the region’s indigenous peoples, northerners would provide the southern court with its most distinguished scholars, its later dynasts and its most effective, if not entirely reliable, troops. In a strictly demographic sense, there was thus some substance to the southern dynasties’ claim to be the heirs of Han. Hopes of returning north never flagged; and at court, standards of conduct, scholarship and ritual were zealously maintained against just such a day.
This was in marked contrast to the dismal state of affairs in the north. There the ‘Sixteen Kingdoms’ period (traditionally 304–439) was under way. Of these sixteen kingdoms’ sixteen dynasties, some followed one another in an orderly chronological succession but most crowded abreast in a jostle of competing entities. The result of internecine squabbling and fragmentation among the rampaging tribes, all these regimes were fundamentally unstable, being incapable of reactivating the depleted administrations they had inherited, despised by their Chinese bureaucrats and subjects, and all too ready to resort to coercion.
Perhaps the most feared was the Jie or ‘Later Zhao’ dynasty of Shandong and Hebei. It was founded by a Xiongnu one-time slave and outlaw called Shi Le (r. 319–33). Shi Le, though he knew neither scruples nor letters, was yet a gentleman compared to Shi Hu (333–49), his successor. The reign of Shi Hu, charitably described as a psychopath, was ‘one of unprecedented terror’.25 On falling out with his own heir apparent, he is said to have had the young man killed along with his consort and their twenty-six children, and then to have had them all buried in the same coffin; their over two hundred retainers shared the same fate, though not the same coffin. To such monsters a doctrine enjoining non-violence and respect for life in all its forms should have been cause for ridicule, tending to rage. Yet it was under the patronage of precisely these Xiongnu tyrants that Buddhism in the north made its most dramatic strides.
Fotudeng, a missionary and miracle-worker from Kuqa (Kuche, Kucha) on the Silk Road who had once studied in Kashmir, reached the Yellow River in 310. Forseeing the outcome of the siege of Luoyang – he was also a seer – he secured an interview with Shi Le, then one of the city’s assailants. Since he knew ‘that Shi Le did not understand profound doctrines and would respect only magical powers as evidence of the potency of Buddhism’, Fotudeng filled his begging bowl with water and conjured from it a bright blue lotus.26 Greatly impressed, the Xiongnu leader, and later his blood-curdling successor, adopted Fotudeng as their ‘court-chaplain’ and took Buddhism as their cult. Fotudeng’s remarkable powers, rather than his teachings, were often called to the aid of the Shi family’s Later Zhao dynasty and were handsomely rewarded. Shi Le had his younger sons educated in a Buddhist establishment, while the unspeakable Shi Hu arrogated to himself the title ‘Crown Prince of the Buddha’. Mass conversions, an enormous following, and the foundation of some nine hundred monasteries, nunneries and temples are mentioned. From such dubious dealings with the secular power, Buddhism in north China acquired a popular base. In the words of Fotudeng’s biographer, the miracle-working monk ‘used the patronage of the Shi family to lay the foundations of a Buddhist church’.27
But whether Fotudeng was quite as doctrinally negligent, or the Later Zhao quite as easily impressed, as the records suggest is open to doubt. Fotudeng’s disciples would include some of Chinese Buddhism’s most outstanding scholars. When the Later Zhao kingdom fell apart in 349 – four princes were enthroned and murdered in that year alone – Fotudeng’s disciples fanned out across the north from Shandong to Sichuan and gravitated south as far as Guangdong. One of them, the monk Dao’an, became the greatest exponent, translator and organiser in the early history of Chinese Buddhism; and of his disciples several assisted Kumarajiva, another native of Kuqa, in the most ambitious of all translation projects in terms of quantity and fidelity. Yet all such luminaries continued to revere Fotudeng’s memory, which would suggest that he was more than a mere showman and miracle-worker.
As for the Xiongu, they certainly viewed Fotudeng as some superior kind of shaman whose skills as a doctor, rainmaker, seer and political analyst were worth cultivating. But as Shi Hu explained, they also appreciated the peculiar advantages of Buddhism. ‘Buddha, being a foreign [or outsiders’] god, is the very one we [as outsiders] should worship,’ he declared in the course of an edict urging Buddhist devotion;28 on similar grounds, Buddhism would be encouraged by later incomers such as the Mongols and Manchus. Additionally, its universalist message, extending the chance of release from suffering to all peoples regardless of race, gender or education, was in marked contrast to the narrow social remit of Confucianism. In effect Buddhism offered to semi-literate herdsmen a source of identity and legitimacy denied them by the lofty standards of Confucian scholarship; and by sidelining the precedent-bound rituals of the ru, it brought these alien rulers into direct touch with the less educated mass of their subjects, Chinese and non-Chinese, among whom northern Buddhism now found its greatest following.
Most of the ‘Sixteen Kingdoms’, though ruled by non-Chinese and dominated by their tribal followings, acknowledged the necessity of enlisting the support of the Chinese masses who constituted the majority of their subjects. To this end they paid lip-service to Han traditions, experimented with bureaucratic government and adopted illustrious dynastic names. As well as two Zhao dynasties, there were several Wei, Yan and even Qin dynasties. Based like its original namesake on Chang’an and the Wei valley, the first of these Qin dynasties (351–86) was an unlikely contender for power. Ethnically the latter-day Qin were Di, a tribe of semi-sedentary shepherds and goatherds from the Tibet/Sichuan frontier rather than full-blooded horse-and-camel-rearing nomads from the Mongolian steppe. They had no tradition of concerted action and were ‘governed by a rather large number of independent petty chiefs’.29 They nevertheless adopted the expansionist policies associated with the Qin of old; and partly thanks to a fragmented resistance that badly underestimated them, partly to intelligent accommodations with the more formidable Xiongnu and Xianbei, the Qin had by 381 successfully reunited all of northern China.
In the process Qin forces had seized Sichuan from the Eastern Jin and then threatened the north–south division of the country by advancing on the rest of the Eastern Jin empire in the Yangzi basin. The city of Xiangyang on the Han River was captured and Jiankang, the great southern capital, exposed. When the Jin retook Xiangyang, the Qin responded in emphatic fashion, fielding an incredible 270,000 cavalry and 600,000 infantry for a two-pronged advance on the south – one prong via Henan and the Huai River and the other via Sichuan and the middle Yangzi. But in 383, beside the Fei River, a tributary of the Huai, disaster struck the Qin. The eastern army suffered a mysterious but catastrophic defeat that effectively ended not only the whole offensive but Qin’s all-too-brief dominion.
This so-called battle at the Fei River, though less convincing than that at the Red Cliffs, is another of those north–south engagements credited with being decisive for the future of China. Qin’s bubble had been burst. The southern court at Jiankang (Nanjing) had survived its hour of peril and would linger on for another two centuries of cultivated discourse and confused politics. In 385 southern forces actually attempted their own reunification and reached the Yellow River before withdrawing. Over the next thirty years the Jiankang government was repeatedly rocked by insurrections, yet no northern dynasty sought to take advantage; and it was the same when in 420 the last Eastern Jin emperor conceded the Mandate to his general Liu Yu, founder of the southern Liu Song dynasty. While the 209 battle at the Red Cliffs had consigned the once united empire to being long divided, the 383 battle at the Fei River confirmed that long divided meant longer than a couple of centuries. ‘In the aftermath of the collapse of the Former Qin [so called because it was succeeded in the north-west by a Qiang kingdom that adopted the same dynastic name] the north was more politically fractured than it had been at any time since the fall of the Western Jin.’30