Our Oriental Heritage

by Will Durant

  Meanwhile industry flourished as nowhere else on earth before our eighteenth century. As far back as we can delve into Chinese history we find busy handicrafts in the home and thriving trade in the towns. The basic industries were the weaving of textiles and the breeding of worms for the secretion of silk; both were carried on by women in or near their cottages. Silk-weaving was a very ancient art, whose beginnings in China went back to the second millennium before Christ.*45 The Chinese fed the worms on fresh-cut mulberry leaves, with startling results: on this diet a pound of (700,000) worms increased in weight to 9,500 pounds in forty-two days.47 The adult worms were then placed in little tents of straw, around which they wove their cocoons by emitting silk. The cocoons were dropped in hot water, the silk came away from its shell, was treated and woven, and was skilfully turned into a great variety of rich clothing, tapestries, embroideries and brocades for the upper classes of the world.* The raisers and weavers of silk wore cotton.

  Even in the centuries before Christ this domestic industry had been supplemented with shops in the towns. As far back as 300 B.C. there had been an urban proletariat, organized with its masters into industrial guilds.49 The growth of this shop industry filled the towns with a busy population, making the China of Kublai Khan quite the equal, industrially, of eighteenth-century Europe. “There are a thousand workshops for each craft,” wrote Marco Polo, “and each furnishes employment for ten, fifteen, or twenty workmen, and in a few instances as many as forty. . . . The opulent masters in these shops do not labor with their own hands, but on the contrary assume airs of gentility and affect parade.”50 These guilds, like codified industries of our time, limited competition, and regulated wages, prices and hours; many of them restricted output in order to maintain the prices of their products; and perhaps their genial content with traditional ways must share some of the responsibility for retarding the growth of science in China, and obstructing the Industrial Revolution until all barriers and institutions are today being broken down by its flood.

  The guilds undertook many of the functions which the once proud citizens of the West have surrendered to the state: they passed their own laws, and administered them fairly; they made strikes infrequent by arbitrating the disputes of employers and employees through mediation boards representing each side equally; they served in general as a self-governing and self-disciplining organization for industry, and provided an admirable escape from the modern dilemma between laissez-faire and the servile state. These guilds were formed not only by merchants, manufacturers and their workmen, but by such less exalted trades as barbers, coolies and cooks; even the beggars were united in a brotherhood that subjected its members to strict laws.51 A small minority of town laborers were slaves, engaged for the most part in domestic service, and usually bonded to their masters for a period of years, or for life. In times of famine girls and orphans were exposed for sale at the price of a few “cash,” and a father might at any time sell his daughters as bondservants. Such slavery, however, never reached the proportions that it attained in Greece and Rome; the majority of the workers were free agents or members of guilds, and the majority of the peasants owned their land, and governed themselves in village communities largely independent of national control.52

  The products of labor were carried on the backs of men; even human transport moved, for the most part, in sedan chairs raised upon the bruised but calloused shoulders of uncomplaining coolies.* Heavy buckets or enormous bundles were balanced on the ends of poles, and slung over the shoulder. Sometimes dray-carts were drawn by donkeys, but more often they were pulled by men. Muscle was so cheap that there was no encouragement to the development of animal or mechanical transport; and the primitiveness of transportation offered no stimulus to the improvement of roads. When European capital built the first Chinese railway (1876)—a ten-mile line between Shanghai and Woosung—the people protested that it would disturb and offend the spirit of the earth; and the opposition grew so vigorous that the government bought the railroad and heaved its rolling stock into the sea.53 In the days of Shih Huang-ti and Kublai Khan imperial highways existed, paved with stone; but only their outlines now remain. The city streets were mere alleys eight feet wide, designed with a view to keeping out the sun. Bridges were numerous, and sometimes very beautiful, like the marble bridge at the Summer Palace. Commerce and travel used avenues of water almost as frequently as the land; 25,000 miles of canals served as a leisurely substitute for railways; and the Grand Canal between Hangchow and Tientsin, 650 miles long, begun about 300 A.D. and completed by Kublai Khan was surpassed only by the Great Wall in the modest list of China’s engineering achievements. “Junks” and sampans plied the rivers busily, and provided not only cheap transportation for goods, but homes for millions of the poor.

  The Chinese are natural merchants, and work many hours at the business of bargaining. Chinese philosophy and officialdom agreed in despising traders, and the Han emperors taxed them heavily, and forbade them to use carriages or silk. The educated classes displayed long nails as Western women wore French heels—to indicate their exemption from physical toil.54 It was the custom to rank scholars, teachers and officials as the highest class, farmers as the next, artisans as the third, merchants as the lowest; for, said China, these last merely made profits by exchanging the fruits of other men’s toil. Nevertheless they prospered, carried the products of Chinese fields and workshops to all corners of Asia, and became in the end the chief financial support of the government. Internal commerce was hindered by the likin tax, and foreign trade was made hazardous by robbers on land and pirates on the sea; but the merchants of China found a way, by sailing around the Malay Peninsula or plodding the caravan routes through Turkestan, to get their goods to India, Persia, Mesopotamia, at last even to Rome.55 Silk and tea, porcelain and paper, peaches and apricots, gunpowder and playing cards, were the staple exports; in return for which the world sent to China alfalfa and glass, carrots and peanuts, tobacco and opium.

  Trade was facilitated by an ancient system of credit and coinage. Merchants lent to one another at high rates of interest, averaging some thirty-six per cent—though this was no higher than in Greece and Rome.56 Money-lenders took great risks, charged commensurate fees, and were popular only at borrowing time; “wholesale robbers,” said an old Chinese proverb, “start a bank.”57 The oldest known currency of the country took the form of shells, knives and silk; the first metal currency went back at least to the fifth century B.C.58 Under the Ch’in Dynasty gold was made the standard of value by the government; but an alloy of copper and tin served for the smaller coins, and gradually drove out the gold.* When Wu Ti’s experiment with a currency of silver alloyed with tin was ruined by counterfeiters, the coins were replaced with leather strips a foot long, which became the foster-parents of paper money. About the year 807, the supply of copper having, like modern gold, become inadequate as compared with the rising abundance of goods, the Emperor Hsien Tsung ordered that all copper currency should be deposited with the government, and issued in exchange for it certificates of indebtedness which received the name of “flying money” from the Chinese, who appear to have taken their fiscal troubles as good-naturedly as the Americans of 1933. The practice was discontinued after the passing of the emergency; but the invention of block-printing tempted the government to apply the new art to the making of money, and about 935 A.D. the semi-independent province of Szechuan, and in 970 the national government at Ch’ang-an, began the issuance of paper money. During the Sung Dynasty a fever of printing-press inflation ruined many fortunes.59 “The Emperor’s Mint,” wrote Polo of Kublai’s treasury, “is in the city of Cambaluc (Peking); and the way it is wrought is such that you might say that he hath the Secret of Alchemy in perfection, and you would be right. For he makes his money after this fashion”—and he proceeded to arouse the incredulous scorn of his countrymen by describing the process by which the bark of the mulberry tree was pressed into bits of paper accepted by the people as the equivalent of gold.60 Such
were the sources of that flood of paper money which, ever since, has alternately accelerated and threatened the economic life of the world.

  3. Invention and Science

  Gunpowder, fireworks and war—The compass—Poverty of industrial invention—Geography—Mathematics—Physics—“Fengshui”—Astronomy—Medicine—Hygiene

  The Chinese have been more facile in making inventions than in using them. Gunpowder appeared under the T’angs, but was very sensibly restricted to fireworks; not until the Sung Dynasty (1161 A.D.) was it formed into hand-grenades and employed in war. The Arabs became acquainted with saltpetre—the main constituent of gunpowder—in the course of their trade with China, and called it “Chinese snow”; they brought the secret of gunpowder westward, the Saracens turned it to military use, and Roger Bacon, the first European to mention it, may have learned of it through his study of Arab lore or his acquaintance with the central Asiatic traveler, De Rubruquis.61

  The compass is of much greater antiquity. If we may believe Chinese historians, it was invented by the Duke of Chou in the reign of the Emperor Cheng Wang (1115-1078 B.C.) to guide certain foreign ambassadors back to their home lands; the Duke, we are told, presented the embassy with five chariots each equipped with a “south-pointing needle.”62 Very probably the magnetic properties of the lodestone were known to ancient China, but the use of it was confined to orienting temples. The magnetic needle was described in the Sung-shu, an historical work of the fifth century A.D., and was attributed by the author to the astronomer Chang Heng (d. 139 A.D.), who, however, had only rediscovered what China had known before. The oldest mention of the needle as useful for mariners occurs in a work of the early twelfth century, which ascribes this use of it to foreign—probably Arab—navigators plying between Sumatra and Canton.63 About 1190 we find the first known European notice of the compass in a poem by Guyot de Provins.64

  Despite the contribution of the compass and gunpowder, of paper and silk, of printing and porcelain, we cannot speak of the Chinese as an industrially inventive people. They were inventive in art, developing their own forms, and reaching a degree of sensitive perfection not surpassed in any other place or time; but before 1912 they were content with ancient economic ways, and had a perhaps prophetic scorn of labor-saving devices that hectically accelerate the pace of human toil and throw half the population out of work in order to enrich the rest. They were among the first to use coal for fuel, and mined it in small quantities as early as 122 B.C.;65 but they developed no mechanisms to ease the slavery of mining, and left for the most part unexplored the mineral resources of their soil. Though they knew how to make glass they were satisfied to import it from the West. They made no watches or clocks or screws, and only the coarsest nails.66 Through the two thousand years that intervened between the rise of the Han and the fall of the Manchus, industrial life remained substantially the same in China—as it remained substantially the same in Europe from Pericles to the Industrial Revolution.

  In like manner China preferred the quiet and mannerly rule of tradition and scholarship to the exciting and disturbing growth of science and plutocracy. Of all the great civilizations it has been the poorest in contributions to the material technique of life. It produced excellent textbooks of agriculture and sericulture two centuries before Christ, and excelled in treatises on geography.67 Its centenarian mathematician, Chang Ts’ang (d. 152 B.C.), left behind him a work on algebra and geometry, containing the first known mention of a negative quantity. Tsu Ch’ung-chih calculated the correct value of π to six decimal places, improved the magnet or “south-pointing vehicle,” and is vaguely recorded to have experimented with a self-moving vessel.68 Chang Heng invented a seismograph in 132 A.D.,* but for the most part Chinese physics lost itself in the occultism of feng shut and the metaphysics of the yang and the yin.† Chinese mathematicians apparently derived algebra from India, but developed geometry for themselves out of their need for measuring the land.70 The astronomers of Confucius’ time correctly calculated eclipses, and laid the bases of the Chinese calendar—twelve hours a day, and twelve months each beginning with the new moon; an extra month was added periodically to bring this lunar calendar in accord with the seasons and the sun.71 Life on earth was lived in harmony with life in the sky; the festivals of the year were regulated by sun and moon; the moral order of society itself was based upon the regularity of the planets and the stars.

  Medicine in China was a characteristic mixture of empirical wisdom and popular superstition. It had its beginnings before recorded history, and produced great physicians long before Hippocrates. Already under the Chous the state held yearly examinations for admission to medical practice, and fixed the salaries of the successful applicants according to their showing in the tests. In the fourth century before Christ a Chinese governor ordered a careful dissection and anatomical study of forty beheaded criminals; but the results were lost in theoretical discussion, and dissection stopped. Chang Chung-ning, in the second century, wrote treatises on dietetics and fevers, which remained standard texts for a thousand years. In the third century Hua To wrote a volume on surgery, and made operations popular by inventing a wine which produced a general anesthesia; it is one of the stupidities of history that the formula for mixing this drink has been lost. About 300 A.D. Wang Shu-ho wrote a celebrated treatise on the pulse.72 Towards the beginning of the sixth century T’ao Hung-ching composed an extensive description of the 730 drugs used in Chinese medicine; and a hundred years later Ch’ao Yuan-fang wrote a classic on the diseases of women and children. Medical encyclopedias were frequent under the T’angs, and specialist monographs under the Sungs.73 A medical college was established in the Sung Dynasty, but most medical education was through apprenticeship. Drugs were abundant and various; one store, three centuries ago, sold a thousand dollars’ worth every day.74 Diagnosis was pedantically detailed; ten thousand varieties of fever were described, and twenty-four conditions of the pulse were distinguished. Inoculation—not vaccination—was used, probably in imitation of India, in the treatment of small-pox; and mercury was administered for syphilis. This disease seems to have appeared in China in the later years of the Ming Dynasty, to have run wild through the population, and to have left behind its course a comparative immunity to its more serious effects. Public sanitation, preventive medicine, hygiene and surgery made little progress in China; sewage and drainage systems were primitive, or hardly existed;75 and some towns failed to solve the primary obligations of an organized society—to secure good water, and to dispose of waste.

  Soap was a rare luxury, but lice and vermin were easily secured. The simpler Chinese learned to itch and scratch with Confucian equanimity. Medical science made no ascertainable progress from Shih Huang-ti to the Dowager; perhaps the same might be said of European medicine between Hippocrates and Pasteur. European medicine invaded China as an annex to Christianity; but the sick natives, until our own time, confined their use of it to surgery, and for the rest preferred their own physicians and their ancient herbs.

  IV. RELIGION WITHOUT A CHURCH

  Superstition and scepticism—Animism—The worship of Heaven—Ancestor-worship—Confucianism—Taoism—The elixir of immortality—Buddhism—Religious toleration and eclecticism—Mohammedanism—Christianity—Causes of its failure in China

  Chinese society was built not on science but on a strange and unique mixture of religion, morals and philosophy. History has known no people more superstitious, and none more sceptical; no people more devoted to piety, and none more rationalistic and secular; no nation so free from clerical domination, and none but the Hindus so blessed and cursed with gods. How shall we explain these contradictions, except by ascribing to the philosophers of China a degree of influence unparalleled in history, and at the same time recognizing in the poverty of China an inexhaustible fountain of hopeful fantasy?

  The religion of the primitive inhabitants was not unlike the faith of nature peoples generally: an animistic fear and worship of spirits lurking anywhere, a
poetic reverence for the impressive forms and reproductive powers of the earth, and an awed adoration of a heaven whose energizing sunlight and fertilizing rains were part of the mystic rapport between terrestrial life and the secret forces of the sky. Wind and thunder, trees and mountains, dragons and snakes were worshiped; but the greater festivals celebrated above all the miracle of growth, and in the spring girls and young men danced and mated in the fields to give example of fertility to mother earth. Kings and priests were in those days near allied, and the early monarchs of China, in the edifying accounts which tendentious historians gave of them in later years, were statesmen-saints whose heroic deeds were always prefaced with prayers, and aided by the gods.76

  In this primitive theology heaven and earth were bound together as two halves of a great cosmic unity, and were related very much as man and woman, lord and vassal, yang and yin. The order of the heavens and the moral behavior of mankind were kindred processes, parts of a universal and necessary rhythm called Tao—the heavenly way; morality, like the law of the stars, was the cooperation of the part with the whole. The Supreme God was this mighty heaven itself, this moral order, this divine orderliness, that engulfed both men and things, dictating the right relationship of children to parents, of wives to husbands, of vassals to lords, of lords to the emperor, and of the emperor to God. It was a confused but noble conception, hovering between personality when the people prayed to T’ien—heaven as a deity—and impersonality when the philosophers spoke of T’ien as the just and beneficent, but hardly human or personal, sum of all those forces that ruled the sky, the earth, and men. Gradually, as philosophy developed, the personal conception of “Heaven” was confined to the masses of the people, and the impersonal conception was accepted by the educated classes and in the official religion of the state.77