13 Imperial China

China’s earliest historical rulers, the Shang, emerged some 3,500 years ago—the first of a number of imperial dynasties that ruled China right up to the 20th century. It was under the Shang that there evolved the elements of a recognizably Chinese culture, both in the form of an ideographic script of a type still in use today, and in the style of its artifacts—bronze, pottery, silk and jade.

China is so vast, its population so huge and its resources so rich that for millennia the Chinese saw no need to look beyond the distant frontiers of their own land, which they called the Middle Kingdom. Beyond lay nothing but benighted barbarians, while China itself flourished—economically, artistically and technologically. Until the beginnings of the Scientific Revolution in the West in the 16th century, China had been far in advance of Europe in terms of science and technology, and it is to China that we owe four key inventions: the compass, gunpowder, papermaking and printing.

The early dynasties China is dominated by two great rivers, the Yellow River (Huang He) in the north and the Yangtze (Chang Jiang) in the south. It was on the fertile flood plain of the Yellow River that agriculture first appeared in China, around 4000 BC, spreading from there to the Yangtze basin. As Chinese society became more complex, various important ceremonial centers emerged, and by the time of the Shang dynasty, these had evolved into planned cities, laid out on a grid oriented to the points of the compass. The Shang, who claimed they had a “mandate from heaven,” ruled over much of northern China from their power base in the valley of the Yellow River. As in ancient Egypt, the royal tombs of the Shang were furnished with rich goods to sustain the dead in the afterlife. The Shang went further, though, sacrificing men, women and children to bury in the tomb, so that the departed would not lack for servants.

The Shang were overthrown around 1000 BC by the Zhou state to the west. The Zhou claimed they had inherited the “mandate of heaven” and established their own dynasty, which endured until early in the 5th century BC, when China entered the period of the “Warring States.”

Confucianism and the state

Around 500 BC a scholar-official called Kongfuzi—known in the West as Confucius—taught that, in order to conform to the “will of heaven,” people should show the same respect to the emperor as they do to the head of their family. This emphasis on hierarchy within both family and state—accompanied by the Confucian values of self-improvement, wisdom, sincerity, loyalty, piety and compassion—has had an enduring influence on Chinese society to this day.

The first emperor The period of the Warring States came to an end in 221 BC when Zheng, king of the small western state of Qin, emerged victorious over his rivals. He adopted the name Shi Huangdi, declared himself emperor of all China, and extended its frontiers to central Asia and the South China Sea.

“The state established by the emperor is the greatest ever seen.”

Inscription made on the order of Shi Huangdi on becoming emperor in 221 BC

Shi Huangdi centralized the administration, standardized weights and measures and built many roads and canals. But he earned the hatred of his people by his ruthless crushing of all opposition and his forced conscription of hundreds of thousands of young men to work on the Great Wall in the far north. Earlier rulers had built various defensive walls against the northern nomads, but Shi Huangdi determined to connect and reinforce the existing fortifications. Tens of thousands of laborers died as a consequence.

The rise and fall of dynasties After Shi Huangdi died in 210 BC he was buried along with a remarkable “terracotta army” consisting of thousands of life-sized statues of soldiers. Shortly afterward a new dynasty, the Han, took over. The Han, who ruled China for 400 years, improved administration by instituting entrance exams for the civil service and by posting administrators far from their homes in order to prevent corruption. The Han oversaw improvements in agriculture and a further expansion of the empire, and controlled the Silk Road as far as central Asia. It was via the Silk Road—the system of overland routes named after China’s most valued export—that trading links were established with peoples far to the west, including the Roman empire, whose frontiers lay at the other end of Asia.

The Han were followed by a succession of dynasties, whose rigidly planned imperial capitals, with populations approaching a million, were the greatest cities in the world between the fall of Rome and the meteoric growth of London in the 18th century. New dynasties tended to start strongly, with an effective and even-handed central administration, but over time they were weakened by rival power bases in the provinces, by peasant revolts against excessive taxes, and by invasions of nomadic horsemen from the north. Two such invasions led to the foundation of new dynasties: in the 1270s the Mongols under Kublai Khan completed their conquest of China, establishing the Yuan dynasty, and in 1644 a clan from Manchuria overran the country and established the Manchu or Qing dynasty, the last dynasty of imperial China.

Looking inward and outward The Chinese had developed considerable skills in shipbuilding, seafaring and navigation—it was they who had invented the compass—and in the early 15th century the imperial government sent a great fleet under Admiral Zheng He to conduct a series of trading voyages to the East Indies, India, Arabia and East Africa. But this policy of broadening China’s horizons, and possibly establishing an overseas trading empire, was suddenly abandoned in the early 1430s. The emperor was apparently persuaded that China possessed all the resources it needed, and that it would do better to concentrate on defending its northern frontiers.

“The serfs had risen in swarms … They sharpened their hoes into swords, and took to themselves the title of ‘Levelling Kings,’ declaring they were levelling the distinction between rich and poor.”

A contemporary scholar describes an outbreak of popular unrest in 1645, just one of many peasant revolts that punctuated the history of imperial China

China withdrew into itself just as Europeans were beginning to look beyond their own shores—and on the verge of overtaking China in terms of technological advance. In the middle of the 16th century the Portuguese established a trading post on the southern coast of China, and by the early 19th century Western powers such as Britain were pressing the reluctant Chinese to trade with them, in particular to agree to the import of opium from British India. The resulting “Opium Wars” ended with the Western powers gaining control of a number of ports in China. Weakened by internal revolts and continued external pressure, the reactionary imperial court turned its back on all thoughts of modernization and reform, while European troops occupied Beijing itself. The Chinese people had had enough, and in 1911 the last emperor was overthrown in a nationalist revolution. Thus ended three and a half millennia of imperial rule.

the condensed idea

Imperial China’s inwardness became its undoing