Kublai Khan’s greatest domestic contribution was the dredging and reopening of China’s ancient Grand Canal, which led to a resurgence of the Chinese economy. Parts of this canal dated back as far as 500 BC, but it had not become linked up along its entire 1,000-mile length until a millennium later, before falling into disrepair during the ensuing centuries. This amazing feat of engineering remains to this day the oldest and longest artificial inland waterway in the world. When Kublai Khan reopened the canal, it stretched from Khanbaliq through the Eastern Chinese hinterland all the way to the city of Hangzhou, which 300 years earlier had been the capital of China.
When Marco Polo arrived at Hangzhou, ‘the city of heaven’, he could hardly believe his eyes. This was:
The finest and most splendid city in all the world, filled with wide and spacious waterways. On one side of the city is a lake of crystal-clear fresh water. Its shores are thirty miles long and filled with stately palaces and mansions of such splendour that it is impossible to imagine anything more beautiful. These are the abodes of nobles and magnates. At the same time there are also cathedrals and monasteries. The surface of the lake is covered with all manner of barges filled with pleasure-seekers . . .
No such city existed in Europe, or anywhere else in the world. Even Venice appeared but a pale miniature imitation. Once again, we come to the concept of sideways history, with separate regions simultaneously at different stages of historical development. In the remnant of the caliphates, Al-Andalus, the mixture of religions and learning had provided a ferment of ideas, with superb architecture such as the Grand Mosque in Cordoba and the Alhambra Gardens in Granada; but all this stood in peril from the southward advance of the Christian armies through the Iberian peninsula.
Meanwhile in the heart of Europe, the Dark Ages had long since given way to a revival of education, with great centres of learning such as the Sorbonne in Paris attracting students from far and wide, as well as a resurgence of architecture with teams of skilled artisans and stonemasons erecting gothic cathedrals in the heart of cities throughout the continent. Yet none of this compared with the splendours of Hangzhou.23
In Roman times, Europe had led the world; during the caliphates the Middle East had seen the most advanced civilisation; and now China was beginning to emerge as the world leader. But here was something utterly new. Europe and the Middle East had cross-fertilised ideas and technologies, borrowing from each other as their ships traded across the Mediterranean. China, on the other hand, was largely sui generis, developing its own ideas in isolation and retaining its secrets. Illustrative of this is the Silk Road, which was already well developed by the time it was described by Herodotus in the fifth century BC.
The raison d’être of this network of interlinked trade routes lies in its name. China had discovered how to produce silk, which became a valued luxury in the West. The manufacture of this product, which was spun by the silkworm in its chrysalis, remained a closely guarded secret. Not until the tenth century did two Nestorian monks manage to smuggle out silkworm eggs, concealed in the hollowed-out tops of their walking canes, enabling the secret to reach the West.
China was to come up with several fundamental discoveries that would remain secret, until knowledge of their manufacture seeped out to the West. In many, though not all cases, this would result in their further development, which would often change the face of world history. Paper was discovered, and the making of it developed in China, during the first and second centuries AD. It would be almost a millennium before this technique reached Europe. Similarly, gunpowder was discovered by the Chinese sometime around the turn of the first millennium AD. Its military use would soon be exploited in such weapons as ‘fire arrows’, the ‘mother of a hundred bullets gun’, and ‘thunderclap bombs’ (similar to stone grenades), whose shrapnel could inflict lethal wounds over a wide area.
Ironically, gunpowder had been discovered by Chinese alchemists searching for the elixir of life: the mythical substance that promised to preserve the life, and youth, of any who drank it. This was a persistent favourite of Chinese emperors. The first Qin emperor, Qin Shi Huang, is known to have died of ‘elixir poisoning’ in 210 BC. Elixir ingredients prepared by later imperial alchemists included ground pearl, gold leaf and other precious substances known for their incorruptibility. More ambitious alchemists introduced mercury and salts of arsenic, which had the opposite of the desired effect. Chinese alchemists’ search for an elixir of life would continue to lead the world until the eighteenth-century Qing Dynasty.
This knowledge too would spread to Europe, gaining credence amongst accomplished and susceptible physicians alike. Lorenzo the Magnificent, lying on his deathbed in fifteenth-century Florence, was administered an elixir containing ground pearl, which would later become a favourite of English Victorian physicians who catered for the wealthy. The dream of eternal life is a persistent fairy tale, which has occupied a permanent place in every great empire throughout all human history. It persists to this day in the form of cryogenics, in which a gullible plutocrat pays for his cadaver to be frozen to below -130°C, in the expectation that one day he will return to amaze his ancestors.
But back to the unfortunately more realistic infliction of death. It would be several centuries before the formula for gunpowder reached Europe, where its potential was little realised, and it would be used mainly in the production of spectacular firework displays. It was the Mongol invasion of the Middle East and eastern Europe, and the widespread use of explosive fire arrows by their horsemen, which altered this perception. Witnessing this new weapon, some unremembered inventor made a simple connection of genius, and invented the cannon.
According to the twentieth-century Arab historian, Ahmad al-Hassan, the victorious Mamlukes used ‘the first cannon in history’ at the vital Battle of Ain Jalut, which halted the Mongols in 1260. This claim remains disputed, but what cannot be disputed is the transformative effect of the cannon on military history. From that time on, the days of castles, arrows, armour, cavalry even, and all manner of military hardware, were effectively numbered. With the advent of artillery, warfare would never be the same again.24
Not surprisingly, the Chinese also invented the cannon for themselves. In 1341, the historian Xian Zhang recorded that a cannonball fired from an ‘eruptor [could] pierce the heart or belly when it strikes a man or horse, and can transfix several persons at once’. The list of cultural firsts invented, and fully developed, by the Yuan Dynasty continues to astonish. Most of these would trickle through to Europe, more or less slowly, usually by way of the Silk Road. Others would remain uniquely Chinese.
The most influential Yuan discoveries would transform Western civilisation, when they at last reached the outer world. As we have seen, paper had been invented some time previously, and the Song Dynasty had even experimented with paper money. However, it was the skilled administrators of the Yuan court who took this idea to its limit, with the introduction of a centralised system of paper currency. This could not only be printed by special wooden blocks at the Imperial Mint, but could also be used to control the economy. Never before had paper been used as the prevalent form of currency throughout the land.
Not only did these early Chinese financiers invent this form of money, but they also understood how to use it. As we have seen, previous Chinese administrations had introduced various attempts at paper money backed by silver. But the Yuan paper currency – known as Chao – was a fiat currency. That is, it was backed by nothing but government regulation, which simply said that it was worth what it was. As such, it was what is now known as fiduciary money: reliant solely upon the confidence of those who used it.25 This was no mean feat. The first attempt to introduce similar banknotes in Europe would come some 500 years later. In 1720, the Scots financier John Law would be placed in charge of the French treasury, and begin issuing paper money, an experiment that would end in disaster. (France would not accept paper currency for almost another century.)
The other great Yuan achieve
ment was the establishment of the modern printing press. Various methods of printing had been known for some centuries previously in China, but it was a civil servant named Wang Zhen who definitively re-invented printing in 1298, with moveable wooden type containing the many characters of the Chinese alphabet. This enabled the establishment of printing presses that could mass produce entire books. Not until the following century would this method be established in Europe by Johannes Gutenberg. Precisely how much he knew about Chinese methods that had spread to the Middle East remains unclear.
Either way, this invention would revolutionise China, and then Europe, where it would be a catalyst for the Renaissance, spreading images, learning and new ideas. In Yuan China, it would bring about a transformation of culture and the arts that was uniquely oriental. Most notably this would include the development of a distinctive Chinese form of drama, the invention of the novel as a literary form, and the evolution of landscape painting as a form of poetic expression. A high point was the creation of ‘The Three Perfections’, a characteristically Chinese art form, which combined poetry, calligraphy and painting in a single work. However, the Yuan Dynasty’s most exquisite creation was the development of a blue and white porcelain, which would never be surpassed.26
A Yuan Dynasty example of the Three Great Perfections: poetry, calligraphy and painting.
But it is perhaps in science that the Yuan dynasty excelled. It would be three centuries before Galileo crystalised the scientific revolution in Europe with his realisation that ‘the universe is written in the language of mathematics’. Yet by this time Chinese scientists and mathematicians were already making discoveries that would have amazed their European contemporaries as much as Harun al-Rashid’s ornate clock had astonished the court of Charlemagne in the Dark Ages. By 1290, the Yuan astronomer Guo Shoujing had completed a calendar that calculated the terrestrial year as 365.2425 days, i.e. within 26 seconds of its present measurement. He also solved a major hydrological difficulty in the completion of the Grand Canal, and invented a host of astronomical measuring devices, which would not be superseded until the invention of the telescope.
In the light of such achievements, it comes as little surprise that the thirteenth-century Yuan mathematician, Zhu Shijie, ‘raised Chinese algebra to the highest level’. In particular, he devised a method for solving simultaneous equations with four unknowns, introduced matrix methods, as well as what we now know as Pascal triangles. Here again is a classic example of sideways history. These algebraic concepts would remain unknown in Europe until they were discovered independently some three centuries later. Chinese and European mathematics would continue to develop in parallel, yet unevenly and without contact, for many years to come.
Similar parallelism, of a more synchronous kind, can be seen in the development of the magnetic compass. The compass had been known in China since the Qin Dynasty, when it had been used for occult divination practices. Its elevation from quackery to maritime navigational use was a direct result of the Yuan scientific outlook. Meanwhile identical developments were taking place quite independently in Europe, enabling medieval sailors to venture directly across the Bay of Biscay, rather than hugging the coast. This was, of course, nothing compared to the truly astounding navigational journeys of Zheng He during the ensuing Ming Dynasty.
By the fourteenth century, the Yuan Dynasty was beginning to fall apart. In the end, its success in so many fields proved incompatible. Recall Marco Polo’s description of the lakeside shore at Hangzhou, which was lined by no less than thirty miles of stately palaces and splendid mansions. Rapid economic progress had, as ever, led to excessive benefit for the upper strata of society, meanwhile the masses remained crippled by taxes. Class conflict became inevitable. Such troubles were exacerbated by a series of natural disasters. Three times the Yellow River burst its banks, leading to catastrophic floods, famine and loss of life.
The end came with a peasant uprising, which rapidly spread from province to province.The military too revolted, and in 1368 the capital fell and a new Han emperor was installed in place of the previous Mongol incumbent. The Ming Dynasty had begun.
This too would be one of the great dynasties, though not quite as formative as the Yuan Dynasty. And it too contained the seeds of its own disaster, which would transform China for centuries to come. The Confucian scholar-officials who had been so instrumental in creating such an efficient and coordinated imperial administration had now become hidebound with rigid traditions and creeping corruption. Such an institution did not take easily to the new challenges posed by scientific inventions and pioneering exploration by the likes of Admiral Zheng He. Such things did nothing but upset the personal and civil harmony required by Confucian teachings.
By the early decades of the fifteenth century, the administration had begun to prevail upon the emperor. China isolated itself from the outside world and the scientific revolution ground to a halt. The progressive society that had led the world began to ossify. Ming vases, exquisite poetry, art and opera reached perfection. Harmony had become absolute. And static.
Sequence
By now individual civilisations had begun to evolve at several new locations across the globe. These ranged from the Songhai Empire in West Africa to the Moghul Empire in India, as well as the Rus of Ivan the Terrible, which had emerged in the Duchy of Moscow after the expulsion of the Golden Horde. Such empires developed their own characteristics, which often incorporated outside influences left behind by conquerors or imported by traders – such as the trans-Saharan caravaners, or Persian sailors navigating the southern sea lanes of the Silk Route. Other civilisations continued to exist in fragmented isolation, such as the Aborigines of Australia and the native tribes of North America.
Like the economist Friedman’s San Francisco, all stages of human development existed on the same horizontal timeline. Each of these contained their own kernel of uniqueness, yet none more so than the next empire we will consider. This would evolve its own version of sophistication, untouched by developments elsewhere. Indeed, its very existence leads us to question the inevitability, or otherwise, of human evolution.
Were we bound to become what we are? Is it in our genes, something foretold in our social interaction, something intrinsic to the very nature of society itself? What does far-flung humanity retain in common? Such questions are necessarily raised by the very existence of the Aztec Empire. The culture, mores and entire social structure of this empire, which evolved in the isolation of Mesoamerica, prompts all manner of undermining inquiry.
20 The present-day population of China is classified as over 90 per cent Han Chinese, with minorities such as the Uighur, a Turkic Muslim people, Mongols and others, making up the remainder. However, such is the populousness of China that the Uighur population consists of more than 11 million people.
21 i.e. considerably more than the distance between Los Angeles and Miami, or the length of the Roman Empire.
22 Only Judaism can claim a longer continuity; only the intermittent tradition of democracy matches its philosophical longevity.
23 It is worth emphasising here that modern sideways history is far from being confined to Milton Friedman’s San Francisco. It can be experienced by anyone who ventures beyond the confines of a twenty-first-century tropical beach resort into the previous centuries of its developing world surroundings.
Furthermore, some years ago I witnessed on TV one of the most extreme and poignant examples of sideways history. An astronomer, of Native American lineage, was working at an observatory in New Mexico. After demonstrating his telescope and its ability to detect stars billions of light-years away, he went outside onto the open-air platform. Away in the night he pointed out the fires of a Native American reservation, where they were still enacting their prehistoric rituals. ‘That is where I come from.’
24 The military mind being such as it is, this fact would take centuries to sink in. It is no surprise that Napoleon learned his trade as a lowly artillery officer, and even half a
century later, many would fail to recognise the Charge of the Light Brigade as a celebration of futility.
25 All the world’s currencies are now fiduciary money. Regular over-production of banknotes, resulting in inflation and spectacular collapses in value, remind us of the precariousness of such currency. It also shows the expertise with which these pioneer Yuan Dynasty financiers handled this new form of money that they had invented.
26 Nowadays fine examples of Yuan blue and white porcelain can fetch in excess of £3 million, more even than the better-known Ming porcelain.
6
The Aztec Empire
Like the Mongol Empire, the Aztec Empire was brief and bloodthirsty, after which its influences were all but expunged from the surface of history. However, deeper cultural resonances would remain unacknowledged. Perhaps the most striking image of this comes from its sister civilisation, the Inca Empire, which developed independently on the western littoral of South America.
Some years after the conquest of the Incas by Spain, a young Catholic priest newly arrived from his home country was conducting a service in a local cathedral. Looking down at the dimly lit rows of Inca faces of his supposedly converted congregation, he recognised that despite appearances, they were in fact still practising their ancient religion. Indeed, they had even decorated the cathedral in such a fashion that Christ, the Virgin Mary and the statues of the saints had all taken on the guise of Inca gods. The sudden realisation by this callow priest that he was unwittingly officiating at the rites of a dark deity, of whose pagan mysteries he knew nothing, had such a traumatic effect on him that he suffered a mental breakdown.
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