Common section

12

BY LAND AND SEA

1235–1405

SUNSET OF THE SONG

AFTER THE SONG THERE WOULD BE just three more imperial dynasties: the Mongol Yuan (1279–1368), the Ming (1368–1644) and the Manchu Qing (1644–1911). Although definitely legitimate, in Chinese eyes all would in some way be compromised. The first and last would often be portrayed as alien regimes indifferent to the plight of their Chinese subjects, and the Ming, though indigenous and in many ways admirable, as culpable for a decline in China’s international standing relative to that of the European powers that began frequenting China’s ports towards the end of the Ming period. That left the Song at the apex of the dynastic trajectory. The Song, and more especially the sunset blaze of the Southern Song (1127–1279), would come to be seen as a halcyon age of imperial China.

Talent and industry, along with fugitives and colonists, had gravitated south with every incursion into the north. The demand for ink and pigments was never so high as among the artists and calligraphers, poets, philosophers, playwrights and diarists who plied their brushes in the benign climate of Southern Song. Block-printed books of reasonable price now circulated widely, connoisseurs and collectors drooled over landscape paintings of exquisite delicacy, and the production of fine lacquerware reached industrial proportions. Above all, it was ‘the classic period of Chinese ceramics’.1 Technical mastery combined with a revival of interest in archaic forms to produce stonewares of elegance and restraint for a rich and discerning domestic market. Meanwhile the booming export demand was increasingly supplied from southern kilns within waterborne reach of the coast, most notably those at Jingdezhen in Jiangxi province. Here, high-quality deposits of a clay enriched with kaolin made possible the production of a shell-like ware whose transparent glaze gave a ‘blue-white’ (qingbai) tinge. It was probably this qingbai ware that Marco Polo termed porcelain and ascribed to a place called ‘Tyunju’, which could be Jingdezhen. ‘They make it nowhere but in that city, and thence it is exported all over the world.’2 Along with other ceramic wares, Jingdezhen’s porcelain found its way to ports throughout east and south-east Asia and farther afield to India, Egypt, Europe and east Africa. When around 1340 Jingdezhen began producing a decorated blue-and-white porcelain, it too was almost entirely for export. A prime candidate for the doubtful honour of being ‘the first truly global “brand”’, this Jingdezhen blue-and-white ware would come to be known in English as ‘China-ware’ or just ‘china’.3

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The logic behind the provenance of this ‘China/china’ terminology is indicated by Polo. When his Mongol hosts used the word Chin (which was Polo’s rendering of ‘Jin’), ‘’tis Manzi they mean’, he reports. Evidently the Jurchen dynastic title ‘Jin’ had been extended by the Mongols to all parts of China that they had still to conquer, while ‘Manzi’ was Polo’s transcription of two characters signifying the land of the aboriginal ‘Man peoples’, a derogatory northerners’ term for the subjects of the Southern Song.4 With the Southern Song still flourishing when Polo claims to have arrived on the scene some time in the 1270s, Chin and Manzi were indeed the same. The East China Sea was known as the Sea of Chin, and the porcelain exported from its ports was known to foreigners as ‘Chin ware’, hence ‘china-ware’. There seems no compelling reason for launching an etymological grappling iron across centuries of silence to establish some tenuous link with Ptolemy’s ‘Sinae’, the Graeco-Roman ‘Sinai’/‘Thinai’, India’s ‘Cina’/‘Chitan’, the First Emperor’s ‘Qin’, or the warring state of ‘Jin’.

The seaports and rivers of Southern Song bristled with shipping, but as yet no impertinent visitors from beyond the seas questioned the superi ority of China’s culture. Foreign trade offered some compensation for the loss of the north and was officially encouraged. Just as local bureaucrats and landed gentry invested in commerce, so financiers and merchants participated in government, especially in the operation of the official monopolies. Meanwhile famines were few and prosperity the norm. Emperors were attentive to the advice of councillors; the bureaucracy was seldom bypassed. Like ceramics and brushwork, the values and institutions dear to China seemed transcendent throughout East Asia – eagerly adopted in Japan, Korea and Vietnam, resilient and indispensable to alien regimes in the north, and acknowledged as of surpassing prestige far beyond. Chinese was the lingua franca of the whole region, its characters written and read by a discernng few from Almaty (Alma Ata) to Angkhor. Dazzling as had been the achievements of the Han and Tang dynasties, the legacy of the Song would seem still brighter and, following the dynasty’s extinction, be bathed in a nostalgic afterglow.

But this elevation of the Song presupposes that eminence lay more in intellectual distinction and cultural sophistication than in territorial dominion and military clout. Neither the humiliations suffered at the hands of the Khitan and Jurchen under the Northern Song, nor the loss of northern China and the eventual capitulation to the Mongols under the Southern Song, would be allowed to tarnish the glittering image. Even the person of the emperor proved largely immune to these catastrophes, blame being reserved for a succession of powerful ministers, such as Cai Jing, whose prominence remained a feature of the period. The six emperors of the Southern Song who actually reigned (three end-of-the-line emperors were infants) merit scant mention. Neither saints nor monsters, some, like the founder Song Gaozong, took a keen interest in government; all showed restraint in dealing with critics; none was especially forceful. Of the six, three abdicated or retired prematurely, one being deranged, the others simply keen to indulge their prurient interests without interruption from ministers and wordy didacts.

Yet with the Mandate itself in dispute during much of the period, a sense of crisis remained palpable. Across the placid surface of Hangzhou’s West Lake – a watery wonderland and pleasure park adjoining the Southern Song capital – beyond its bristling pagodas and behind its bosky hills, the storm clouds massed and the threat of conflict flickered like summer lightning along the northern horizon. War and peace dominated the period. They dictated the rhythms of political life, determined reputations, sharpened perceptions and concentrated great minds wonderfully.

After the 1127 loss of Kaifeng, their northern capital, the Song had found a doughty champion in Yue Fei, a professional soldier of little education but heroic stature. From Nanjing and then Wuchang – near where southern forces had defeated those of the north at the battle of the Red Cliffs some nine centuries earlier – Yue Fei led his men across the Yangzi and up the Han River. Raids deep into Jurchen Jin territory during the 1130s somewhat redeemed the reputation of Song arms. No less memorably, Yue Fei also suppressed a local uprising and commandeered its formidable river flotilla, including several ships propelled by paddle-wheels. The technology was not unlike that of the waterwheel used in irrigation, and had long since been adapted for boats. But the novelty of these vessels lay in their size and the number of their paddle-wheels. The biggest were armed with derricks, from which swung wrecking irons, and deck-mounted trebuchets (cannon-size catapults used in siege warfare) that fired both smoke bombs and incendiary shells. Behind armoured screens, the multiple decks could accommodate hundreds of men; and with up to twenty-four paddle-wheels – twelve per side – the riverine giants must have churned through the water like juggernauts on a flooded highway. ‘A truly remarkable piece of technology’, the paddle-boat was unrivalled elsewhere in the world and would remain so. ‘No other civilisation produced anything like them,’ says Joseph Needham.5 The numerous crew was essential for propulsion, and since this depended on a pedalled treadmill mechanism, they were not paddle-steamers but steamer-size pedaloes. They nevertheless proved a conspicuous addition both to the mythic reputation of Yue Fei and to his now amphibious forces, which grew with every daring escapade.

Unfortunately for Yue Fei, by 1140 this martial spirit had ceased to be to the court’s liking. His success was seen as a threat and his devotion to the Song as an embarrassment; his undoubted fame had revived Song paranoia about powerful generals defying civilian rule, while his belligerent utterances ran counter to the peace feelers that were already being extended to the Jin (and would produce the settlement of 1141/42). Yue Fei was therefore recalled, deprived of his command, imprisoned for insubordination, poisoned on the orders of the chief minister, and erased from official memory. Not until 1161, twenty years later, when a Jin invasion (it was the one mounted by the unpopular Prince Hailing) again threatened the Southern Song, was Yue Fei’s memory partially rehabilitated. Military role models were suddenly back in vogue; the minister responsible for Yue Fei’s disgrace and death was labelled a detested appeaser.

Later still a grandson of Yue Fei took it upon himself to ferret out documentary evidence of his grandfather’s achievements, embellish them and, early in the thirteenth century, publish an adulatory biography. This coincided with another bout of Song bellicosity when in 1206–08, with the Jin reeling from Yellow River floods, the Song armies moved north to take advantage. The attack soon petered out, but such were the enduring properties of the printed word that the grandson’s biography established Yue Fei and his ill-requited exploits as a model for all time. Much mythologised in reaction to Mongol rule, under the Ming dynasty Yue Fei would be elevated to the position of ‘number two military hero of all Chinese history’ (as F. W. Mote puts it), second only to Guan Yu, the most warlike of the three swashbuckling companions in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Both Guan Yu and Yue Fei featured in countless other novels and plays and had temples dedicated to their memory. ‘Recover our Rivers and Mountains’, a slogan adopted against the Japanese invader in the 1940s, was culled from lyrics supposedly composed by the now immortalised Yue Fei and subsequently set to music. With lines like ‘My hair bristles in my helmet,. . . My fierce ambition is to feed on the flesh of the Huns’ (literally ‘Xiongnu flesh’ but figuratively that of Jurchen, Mongol, Japanese or any other non-Han invader), Yue Fei symbolised the spirit of a nation’s resistance. Communist cadres rallying to the homeland’s liberation must, though, have choked on the last line in which recovering the mountains and the rivers was to be but a prelude to ‘paying our respects once more to the emperor’.6

The warmongers of 1206–08 were discredited when Song forces again failed to reclaim much in the way of territory. Peace was restored, and another militaristic minister paid the price; his head, gift-wrapped and forwarded to the Jin, formed part of the indemnity settlement. In Hangzhou pacific counsels reasserted themselves, as well they might, for the Jin, now facing the full force of Chinggis Khan’s rough-riding armies, posed a much-reduced threat. When in 1233–34 the Mongols finally eliminated the Jin altogether, Hangzhou drew a long sigh of relief. Not until two decades later, when the Mongols resumed their advance on the Yangzi, would West Lake’s rhapsodising patrons realise that a similar fate might yet be awaiting them.

The lull in hostilities and the triumph of Southern Song’s peace-loving bureaucrats over its war-waging militarists reopened the question of reform. While at the height of his power, Han Tuozhou, the general whose head had since been detached and gift-wrapped, had taken against the scholarly elite and in particular against a school of what he called ‘false learning’. Its exponents had been denounced and dismissed from office, among them the man who is now generally considered as (to ape Mote’s phrasing) the number-two philosopher-moralist of all Chinese history, second, that is, only to Confucius himself. This was Zhu Xi (1130–1200), an intellectual colossus responsible for a new orientation, ‘a new culture’ even, which, becoming the dominant ideology during the empire’s seven remaining centuries, would come to be known as Neo-Confucianism. The ‘Confucian persuasion’ was about to become more intellectually persuasive.

Perhaps mischievously, Confucianism prior to the Song has been characterised as ‘more a curriculum than a philosophy’.7 Lacking a bedrock in natural law or divine revelation, all Chinese scholarship probed the past for structural validation. Pile-driving into the depths of documented antiquity, it sought an acceptable purchase much as construction engineers building on China’s soft alluvial soils must today drill deep to secure their skyscrapers. Writing of any sort had a bibliographical flavour and involved copious citation; the compilation of anthologies, historical encyclopedias, geographical gazetteers, biographical collections and all manner of other compendia constituted a veritable industry. It was by selecting, editing, interpreting, listing and reproducing the extant works of other ages – curriculum-building in effect – that scholarship progressed. Such constant revision could be a sterile process, which was how it had seemed to Han Tuozhou when he labelled it ‘false learning’. But it also possessed its own dynamic. In the 1170s Wang Anshi’s reinterpretation of the contentious Zhouli had triggered the most revolutionary of reform programmes. Likewise the number of works enjoying canonical status as ‘the Confucian classics’ had varied over the centuries between five and thirteen, additions and subtractions providing the stimulus for new trends in thought and government as well as affording a barometer of these trends.

Under the Song, concern over the marginalisation of Heaven’s Son within the cosmic and geographical schema of ‘All-under-Heaven’ set thinkers to thinking and writers to writing as never before. It generated the candid historical scholarship of Ouyang Xiu and Sima Guang, the furore over the reformist programmes of Fan Zhongyang and Wang Anshi, endless debate about the merits of peace versus the risks of war, and urgent scrutiny of the entire Confucian legacy. Neo-Confucianism in its broadest sense embraced all these activities. Like the Renaissance in Europe, the term came to be used to sum up the spirit of an age and highlight its defining characteristic. This was not the rediscovery of a classical past but the re-evaluation of an intellectual and ethical heritage that, though always cherished, was thought to have long been imperfectly understood.

The parameters of scholarly reference remained tight. Education and tradition kept speculation on the straight-and-narrow of what could be sourced in the Confucian classics and illustrated from the historical record. On the other hand, these repositories of wisdom were sufficiently capacious and enigmatic to accommodate challenging and often contradictory new thinking about the dynamics of the universe, the composition of human nature and the social and political conduct appropriate to both. In this ferment of ideas, the formation of pressure groups and parties remained taboo. Confucian tradition urged self-cultivation; virtue was to be sought within, through arduous study and such vigilant examination of one’s motives that doing the right thing became second nature. Exceptional scholars like Zhu Xi, though encouraged to teach and publish, tended therefore to stress their association not with contemporary thinkers but with past sages and to construct a pedigree for their ideas. Sometimes dignified as a ‘Way’ or a ‘Great Tradition’, it linked them to key figures, concepts and phrases from the textual tradition.

Bearded and twinkly-eyed (if one may trust his portrait) and apparently indifferent to career advancement, Zhu Xi chose his textual pedigree rather sparingly. His curricular contribution was to pare down the Confucian classics to just ‘Four Books’ (Sishu). Two were from the same text, the perhaps fourth-century BC Liji or ‘Book of Rites’; he selected extracts, reorganised them as two works entitled the Great Learning and the Doctrine of the Mean, reinterpreted them, and then repositioned them within his own ‘Four Books’ sequence. The other two of the four, also heavily abbreviated and glossed, were the Analects of Confucius and the Mengzi of Mencius, the Master’s acknowledged successor. Forming ‘a coherent humanistic vision’ and stressing the humane and socially responsible side of Confucianism, the Four Books would soon take priority over all the other classics and as of the fourteenth century become the foundation texts for both primary and civil service examinations. Memorised by millions, they ‘exerted far greater influence on Chinese life and thought over the next six hundred years than any other works’.8

Surveying the historical record, Zhu Xi was equally sparing. The mythical Five Emperors of prehistoric times were unassailably virtuous, likewise the pre-imperial Xia and Shang dynasties and of course the grand old Duke of Zhou. Then things had gone downhill. Confucius had managed to ‘transmit’ the accumulated wisdom of this sage past, and Mencius had refined and humanised this ‘transmission’; but the principles and the rationale underlying it had been too often ignored in public life. The nadir was reached in the tenth century under fly-by-night dynasties like that of Later Liang, the most unspeakable of Ouyang Xiu’s Five Dynasties.

Only under the Northern Song in the eleventh to twelfth centuries had the great ‘Way of Learning’ (Daoxue) at last resurfaced. Prompted by the Song’s political embarrassments, and goaded by the mystical and metaphysical subtleties of Daoist and especially Buddhist doctrine, Confucian studies had revived. At the core of this new, or Neo-, Confucian thinking lay a host of different ideas about how the cosmos worked and how the individual, as part of it and in accordance with its workings, might discover his own parallel path to moral perfection. The society and government composed of such enlightened individuals would then automatically be realigned in harmony with the cosmos. Man had the potential for good, or ‘humaneness’, within him; but to realise it, he needed to understand what human nature consisted of and how the mind functioned. Ancient concepts such as the ‘Mean’ (a state of lofty impartiality) and the ‘Supreme Ultimate’ held the key. According to Zhu Xi, the ‘Supreme Ultimate’ was ‘merely the principle [or the polarity] of Heaven and Earth and the myriad things’ it resided in each and every one; and its ‘movement generates yang and . . . its tranquillity generates yin’.9 Rationally reinterpreted, reformulated and, of course, exhaustively sourced, these and other such key ideas generated several schools of philosophy and so, for the first time, gave to Confucianism a metaphysical root-structure that was every bit as philosophically respectable, not to say mentally testing, as for instance Buddhist notions of non-being. Indeed, whether in reaction to Buddhism and Daoism or in imitation of them, Neo-Confucianism owed to both a considerable debt.

Finally, in its narrowest possible sense the term Neo-Confucianism is sometimes reserved exclusively for the immensely influential synthesis of ideas distilled from this cauldron of speculation by Zhu Xi himself. His synthesis is called Lixue, the ‘doctrine of principle’, the ‘principle’ in question somewhat resembling a metaphysical gene, inherent in all things but not uniform, basically good, and decisive in determining a human being’s moral nature. Zhu supposed it dormant until activated by ‘material-force’, which in the case of man meant the ‘investigation of all things’. His achievement lay not just in synthesising and organising what one writer calls these ‘fruitfully ambiguous concepts’ but in their cogent presentation and practical application.10 As a teacher with his own academy he disseminated them, and as a provincial official he endeavoured to practise them.

A handbook on family rituals – marriages, funerals, ancestor reverence, etc. – prepared under his direction was probably as influential as the ‘Four Books’, though it did his later reputation no favours. As a stickler for the Confucian submission of young to old and female to male, Zhu Xi ordered girls to cover their faces in public; wives were to be denied either financial or intellectual independence; and in those regions ‘notorious for their frequent cases of abduction’, he advised the women to ‘attach wooden blocks to their shoes so that they made a noise in walking’. Assuming they could actually walk, as opposed to shuffling on stumps, this scarcely amounted to protection; the clatter may have been more advertisement than safeguard. The Japanese scholar responsible for unearthing such strictures has suggested that they instilled a deep conservatism. The standard-isation of Confucian family rites, in Japan (where Zhu Xi’s writings were equally influential) as in China, reinforced a stifling degree of social conformity by adding the weight of canonical sanction to the burden of convention. ‘If Christianity. . . attaches importance to the sense of guilt, and Buddhism to the sense of pain [or suffering],’ says the same scholar, ‘Confucianism stresses the sense of shame.’11

Come reaction, let alone eventual revolution, Zhu Xi would be an easy target. His ‘Four Books’, instead of encouraging ‘the investigation of all things’, stressing the obligation to think for oneself, and so ending the set-piece tyranny of the examinations, came in time to comprise that tyranny; and in encapsulating Neo-Confucianism, Zhu Xi would be roundly condemned for it. For ignoring political realities and obsessing about abstract theories of human nature, he invited contempt, while ‘the no doubt unintended consequence of his social thought was to harden the status quo, close minds to unconventional views, and discourage those in government from taking any disruptive actions’.12 The more he became the central figure in the ideology of the later empire, the more exposed he would be to the criticisms of those who would overthrow it.

Ironically the official adoption of Zhu Xi’s Neo-Confucianism would come not under the Song but under the supposedly uncultured Mongols. In 1259 Mongol forces reached the Yangzi, so bringing the prospect of confrontation between the mannered lifestyle of Southern Song and the raw fury of the steppe uncomfortably close. Visions of Mongol cavalry watering their horses in Hangzhou’s West Lake before carrying rape and pillage into the heart of Polo’s ‘finest city in the world’ were too horrible to contemplate. Rote-learning students in lakeside bowers must have shivered in their chest-gaping gowns, carousing grandees aboard pedalled pleasure-craft have choked on their kumquats. ‘The people of this land [i.e. Manzi] were anything but warriors,’ says Polo, ‘all their delight was in women, and nought but women.’ Their ‘king’, too, ‘thought of nothing but women, unless it were charity to the poor’. Though his kingdom ‘had no horses’, the lakes and rivers provided a natural defence; he could have held out if the people had been a little more martial, thought Polo; ‘but that is just what they were not, and so it was lost’.13

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