Our Oriental Heritage

by Will Durant

  I suggest that the official histories, with the exception of the Memoirs of Ch’in, be all burnt, and that those who attempt to hide the Shi-Ching, the Shu-Ching* and the Discourses of the Hundred Schools, be forced to bring them to the authorities to be burnt.8

  The Emperor liked the idea considerably, and issued the order; the books of the historians were everywhere brought to the flames, so that the weight of the past should be removed from the present, and the history of China might begin with Shih Huang-ti. Scientific books, and the works of Mencius, seem to have been excepted from the conflagration, and many of the forbidden books were preserved in the Imperial Library, where they might be consulted by such students as had obtained official permission.9 Since books were then written on strips of bamboo fastened with swivel pins, and a volume might be of some weight, the scholars who sought to evade the order were put to many difficulties. A number of them were detected; tradition says that many of them were sent to labor on the Great Wall, and that four hundred and sixty were put to death.10 Nevertheless some of the literati memorized the complete works of Confucius, and passed them on by word of mouth to equal memories. Soon after the Emperor’s death these volumes were freely circulated again, though many errors, presumably, had crept into their texts. The only permanent result was to lend an aroma of sanctity to the proscribed literature, and to make Shih Huang-ti unpopular with the Chinese historians. For generations the people expressed their judgment of him by befouling his grave.11

  The destruction of powerful families, and of freedom in writing and speech, left Shih almost friendless in his declining years. Attempts were made to assassinate him; he discovered them in time, and slew the assailants with his own hand.12 He sat on his throne with a sword across his knees, and let no man know in what room of his many palaces he would sleep.13 Like Alexander he sought to strengthen his dynasty by spreading the notion that he was a god; but as the comparison limped, he, like Alexander, failed. He decreed that his dynastic successors should number themselves from him as “First Emperor,” down to the ten thousandth of their line; but the line ended with his son. In his old age, if we credit the historians who hated him, he became superstitious, and went to much expense to find an elixir of immortality. When he died, his body was brought back secretly to his capital; and to conceal its smell it was convoyed by a caravan of decaying fish. Several hundred maidens (we are told) were buried alive to keep him company; and his successor, grateful for his death, lavished art and money upon the tomb. The roof was studded with constellations, and a map of the empire was traced in quicksilver on the floor of bronze. Machines were erected in the vault for the automatic slaughter of intruders; and huge candles were lit in the hope that they would for an indefinite period illuminate the doings of the dead emperor and his queens. The workmen who brought the coffin into the tomb were buried alive with their burden, lest they should live to reveal the secret passage to the grave.14

  II. EXPERIMENTS IN SOCIALISM

  Chaos and poverty—The Han Dynasty—The reforms of Wu Ti—The income tax—The planned economy of Wang Mang—Its overthrow—The Tatar invasion

  Disorder followed his death, as it has followed the passing of almost every dictator in history; only an immortal can wisely take all power into his hands. The people revolted against his son, killed him soon after he had killed Li Ssü, and put an end to the Ch’in Dynasty within five years after its founder’s death. Rival princes established rival kingdoms, and disorder ruled again. Then a clever condottiere, Kao-tsu, seized the throne and founded the Han Dynasty, which, with some interruptions and a change of capital,* lasted four hundred years. Wen Ti (179-57 B.C.) restored freedom of speech and writing, revoked the edict by which Shih Huang-ti had forbidden criticism of the government, pursued a policy of peace, and inaugurated the Chinese custom of defeating a hostile general with gifts.15

  The greatest of the Han emperors was Wu Ti. In a reign of over half a century (140-87 B.C.) he pushed back the invading barbarians, and extended the rule of China over Korea, Manchuria, Annam, Indo-China and Turkestan; now for the first time China acquired those vast dimensions which we have been wont to associate with her name. Wu Ti experimented with socialism by establishing national ownership of natural resources, to prevent private individuals from “reserving to their sole use the riches of the mountains and the sea in order to gain a fortune, and from putting the lower classes into subjection to themselves.”16 The production of salt and iron, and the manufacture and sale of fermented drinks, were made state monopolies. To break the power of middlemen and speculators—“those who buy on credit and make loans, those who buy to heap up in the towns, those who accumulate all sorts of commodities” as the contemporary historian, Szuma Ch’ien expressed it—Wu Ti established a national system of transport and exchange, and sought to control trade in such a way as to prevent sudden variations in price. State workingmen made all the means of transportation and delivery in the empire. The state stored surplus goods, selling them when prices were rising too rapidly, buying them when prices were falling; in this way, says Szuma Ch’ien, “the rich merchants and large shop-keepers would be prevented from making big profits, . . . and prices would be regulated throughout the empire.”17 All incomes had to be registered with the government, and had to pay an annual tax of five per cent. In order to facilitate the purchase and consumption of commodities the Emperor enlarged the supply of currency by issuing coins of silver alloyed with tin. Great public works were undertaken in order to provide employment for the millions whom private industry had failed to maintain; bridges were flung across China’s streams, and innumerable canals were cut to bind the rivers and irrigate the fields.18*

  For a time the new system flourished. Trade grew in amount, variety and extent, and bound China even with the distant nations of the Near East.20 The capital, Lo-yang, increased in population and wealth, and the coffers of the government were swollen with revenue. Scholarship flourished, poetry abounded, and Chinese pottery began to be beautiful. In the Imperial Library there were 3,123 volumes on the classics, 2,705 on philosophy, 1,318 on poetry, 2,568 on mathematics, 868 on medicine, 790 on war.21 Only those who had passed the state examinations were eligible to public office, and these examinations were open to all. China had never prospered so before.

  A combination of natural misfortunes with human deviltry put an end to this brave experiment. Floods alternated with droughts, and raised prices beyond control. Harassed by the high cost of food and clothing, the people began to clamor for a return to the good old days of an idealized past, and proposed that the inventor of the new system should be boiled alive. Business men protested that state control had diminished healthy initiative and competition, and they objected to paying, for the support of these experiments, the high taxes levied upon them by the government.22 Women entered the court, acquired a secret influence over important functionaries, and became an element in a wave of official corruption that spread far and wide after the death of the Emperor.23 Counterfeiters imitated the new currency so successfully that it had to be withdrawn. The business of exploiting the weak was resumed under a new management, and for a century the reforms of Wu Ti were forgotten or reviled.

  At the beginning of our era—eighty-four years after Wu Ti’s death—another reformer ascended the throne of China, first as regent, and then as emperor. Wang Mang was of the highest type of Chinese gentleman.* Though rich, he lived temperately, even frugally, and scattered his income among his friends and the poor. Absorbed in the vital struggle to reõrganize the economic and political life of his country, he found time nevertheless not only to patronize literature and scholarship, but to become an accomplished scholar himself. On his accession to power he surrounded himself not with the usual politicians, but with men trained in letters and philosophy; to these men his enemies attributed his failure, and his friends attributed his success.

  Shocked by the development of slavery on the large estates of China, Wang Mang, at the very outset of his reign, abolished b
oth the slavery and the estates by nationalizing the land. He divided the soil into equal tracts and distributed it among the peasants; and, to prevent the renewed concentration of wealth, he forbade the sale or purchase of land.25 He continued the state monopolies of salt and iron, and added to them state ownership of mines and state control of the traffic in wine. Like Wu Ti he tried to protect the cultivator and the consumer against the merchant by fixing the prices of commodities. The state bought agricultural surpluses in time of plenty, and sold them in time of dearth. Loans were made by the government, at low rates of interest, for any productive enterprise.26

  Wang had conceived his policies in economic terms, and had forgotten the nature of man. He worked long hours, day and night, to devise schemes that would make the nation rich and happy; and he was heart broken to find that social disorder mounted during his reign. Natural calamities like drought and flood continued to disrupt his planned economy, and all the groups whose greed had been clipped by his reforms united to plot his fall. Revolts broke out, apparently among the people, but probably financed from above; and while Wang, bewildered by such ingratitude, struggled to control these insurrections, subject peoples weakened his prestige by throwing off the Chinese yoke, and the Hsiung-nu barbarians overran the northern provinces. The rich Liu family put itself at the head of a general rebellion, captured Chang-an, slew Wang Mang, and annulled his reforms. Everything was as before.

  The Han line ended in a succession of weak emperors, and was followed by a chaos of petty dynasties and divided states. Despite the Great Wall the Tatars poured down into China, and conquered large areas of the north. And as the Huns broke down the organization of the Roman Empire, and helped to plunge Europe into a Dark Age for a hundred years, so the inroads of these kindred Tatars disordered the life of China, and put an end for a while to the growth of civilization. We may judge the strength of the Chinese stock, character and culture from the fact that this disturbance was much briefer and less profound than that which ruined Rome. After an interlude of war and chaos, and racial mixture with the invaders, Chinese civilization recovered, and enjoyed a brilliant resurrection. The very blood of the Tatars served, perhaps, to reinvigorate a nation already old. The Chinese accepted the conquerors, married them, civilized them, and advanced to the zenith of their history.

  III. THE GLORY OF T’ANG

  The new dynasty—T’ai Tsung’s method of reducing crime—An age of prosperity—The “Brilliant Emperor”—The romance of Yang Kwei-fei—The rebellion of An Lu-shan

  The great age of China owed its coming partly to this new biological mixture,* partly to the spiritual stimulation derived from the advent of Buddhism, partly to the genius of one of China’s greatest emperors, T’ai Tsung (627-50 A.D.) At the age of twenty-one he was raised to the throne by the abdication of his father, a second Kao-tsu, who had established the T’ang Dynasty nine years before. He began unprepossessingly by murdering the brothers who threatened to displace him; and then he exercised his military abilities by pushing back the invading barbarians into their native haunts, and reconquering those neighboring territories which had thrown off Chinese rule after the fall of the Han. Suddenly he grew tired of war, and returning to his capital, Ch’ang-an, gave himself to the ways of peace. He read and re-read the works of Confucius, and had them published in a resplendent format, saying: “By using a mirror of brass you may see to adjust your cap; by using antiquity as a mirror you may learn to foresee the rise and fall of empires.” He refused all luxuries, and sent away the three thousand ladies who had been chosen to entertain him. When his ministers recommended severe laws for the repression of crime, he told them: “If I diminish expenses, lighten the taxes, employ only honest officials, so that the people have clothing enough, this will do more to abolish robbery than the employment of the severest punishments.”27

  One day he visited the jails of Ch’ang-an, and saw two hundred and ninety men who had been condemned to die. He sent them out to till the fields, relying solely on their word of honor that they would return. Every man came back; and T’ai Tsung was so well pleased that he set them all free. He laid it down then that no emperor should ratify a death sentence until he had fasted three days. He made his capital so beautiful that tourists flocked to it from India and Europe. Buddhist monks arrived in great numbers from India, and Chinese Buddhists, like Yuan Chwang, traveled freely to India to study the new religion of China at its source. Missionaries came to Ch’ang-an to preach Zoroastrianism and Nestorian Christianity; the Emperor, like Akbar, welcomed them, gave them protection and freedom, and exempted their temples from taxation, at a time when Europe was sunk in poverty, intellectual darkness, and theological strife. He himself remained, without dogma or prejudice, a simple Confucian. “When he died,” says a brilliant historian, “the grief of the people knew no bounds, and even the foreign envoys cut themselves with knives and lancets and sprinkled the dead emperor’s bier with their self-shed blood.”28

  He had paved the way for China’s most creative age. Rich with fifty years of comparative peace and stable government, she began to export her surplus of rice, corn, silk, and spices, and spent her profits on unparalleled luxury. Her lakes were filled with carved and painted pleasure-boats; her rivers and canals were picturesque with commerce, and from her harbors ships sailed to distant ports on the Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf. Never before had China known such wealth; never had she enjoyed such abundant food, such comfortable houses, such exquisite clothing.29 While silk was selling in Europe for its weight in gold,30 it was a routine article of dress for half the population of the larger cities of China, and fur coats were more frequent in eighth-century Ch’ang-an than in twentieth-century New York. One village near the capital had silk factories employing a hundred thousand men.31 “What hospitality!” exclaimed Li Po, “what squandering of money! Red jade cups and rare dainty food on tables inlaid with green gems!”32 Statues were carved out of rubies, and pretentious corpses were buried on beds of pearl.33 The great race was suddenly enamored of beauty, and lavished honors on those who could create it. “At this age,” says a Chinese critic, “whoever was a man was a poet.”34 Emperors promoted poets and painters to high office, and “Sir John Manville”* would have it that no one dared to address the Emperor save “it be mynstrelles that singen and tellen gestes.”35 In the eighteenth century of our era Manchu emperors ordered an anthology to be prepared of the T’ang poets; the result was thirty volumes, containing 48,900 poems by 2,300 poets; so much had survived the criticism of time. The Imperial Library had grown to 54,000 volumes. “At this time,” says Murdoch, “China undoubtedly stood in the very forefront of civilization. She was then the most powerful, the most enlightened, the most progressive, and the best-governed, empire on the face of the globe.36 “It was the most polished epoch that the world had ever seen.”†

  At the head and height of it was Ming Huang—i.e., “The Brilliant Emperor”—who ruled China, with certain intermissions, for some forty years (713-56 A.D.). He was a man full of human contradictions: he wrote poetry and made war upon distant lands, exacting tribute from Turkey, Persia and Samarkand; he abolished capital punishment and reformed the administration of prisons and courts; he levied taxes mercilessly, suffered poets, artists and scholars gladly, and established a college of music in his “Pear Tree Garden.” He began his reign like a Puritan, closing the silk factories and forbidding the ladies of the palace to wear jewelry or embroidery; he ended it like an epicurean, enjoying every art and every luxury, and at last sacrificing his throne for the smiles of Yang Kwei-fei.

  When he met her he was sixty and she was twenty-seven; for ten years she had been the concubine of his eighteenth son. She was corpulent and wore false hair, but the Emperor loved her because she was obstinate, capricious, domineering and insolent. She accepted his admiration graciously, introduced him to five families of her relatives, and permitted him to find sinecures for them at the court. Ming called his lady “The Great Pure One,” and learned from her
the gentle art of dissipation. The Son of Heaven thought little now of the state and its affairs; he placed all the powers of government in the hands of the Pure One’s brother, the corrupt and incapable Yang Kuo-chung; and while destruction gathered under him he reveled through the days and nights.

  An Lu-shan, a Tatar courtier, also loved Yang Kwei-fei. He won the confidence of the Emperor, who promoted him to the post of provincial governor in the north, and placed under his command the finest armies in the realm. Suddenly An Lu-shan proclaimed himself emperor, and turned his armies toward Ch’ang-an. The long-neglected defenses fell, and Ming deserted his capital. The soldiers who escorted him rebelled, slew Yang Kuo-chung and all the five families, and, snatching Yang Kwei-fei from the monarch’s hands, killed her before his eyes. Old and beaten, the Emperor abdicated. An Lu-shan’s barbaric hordes sacked Ch’ang-an, and slaughtered the population indiscriminately.* Thirty-six million people are said to have lost their lives in the rebellion.39 In the end it failed; An Lu-shan was killed by his son, who was killed by a general, who was killed by his son. By the year 762 A.D. the turmoil had worn itself out, and Ming Huang returned, heart-broken, to his ruined capital. There, a few months later, he died. In this framework of romance and tragedy the poetry of China flourished as never before.

  IV. THE BANISHED ANGEL

  An anecdote of Li Po—His youth, prowess and loves—On the imperial barge—The gospel of the grape—War—The Wanderings of Li Po—In prison—’Deathless Poetry”