by John Keay
But there is another problem. Since the Five Dynasties rose and fell – ‘controlled’ would be putting it too strongly – within a comparatively small, if growing, part of northern China, the conventional periodisation may exaggerate their prominence. Elsewhere there were developments of no less importance. In the far north powerful new states that straddled the erstwhile frontier began to emerge, most notably under the leadership of the Khitan in the north-east and of the Tangut (a Tibetan people) in the north-west; as the Liao and Xi Xia kingdoms, they would achieve a cohesion and pose a challenge that prefigured that of the later Jurchen and Mongols.
Meanwhile, within the erstwhile empire, provinces followed the example of the north-east before the collapse of the Tang to declare themselves kingdoms and form rival and sometimes stabler states than that ruled by the Five Dynasties. Almost without exception, they adopted the regional identities of antiquity. There was a Shu (and then another) in Sichuan, a Chu in Hunan, a Wu on the middle Yangzi, and a Yue (later Wu-Yue) at the mouth of the Yangzi. Collectively known as the ‘Ten Kingdoms’ (though there were sometimes more, sometimes fewer) they have been little studied. But ‘Ten Kingdoms’ is also used as a term for the period as a whole, and it does perhaps give a more accurate impression of the political fragmentation than the exclusively northern ‘Five Dynasties’.
Ouyang Xiu’s Historical Records of the Five Dynasties, a private work later accorded the status of a Standard History, portrays the period as one of such unrelieved treachery and bloodshed that the Chinese preference for a single centralised empire becomes readily understandable. The rash of regional sovereignties proves disastrous. Foreign incursions multiply and justice is nowhere to be found. Disasters come thick and fast, the virtuous suffer with the vicious, and destitution stalks the land. ‘It would be wrong to assume a total absence of loyal men in the Five Dynasties,’ says Ouyang Xiu, ‘I have found three.’ ‘Woe it is’, he elsewhere laments, ‘that for a total of fifty-three years, in a world ruled by five houses, so few of the officials with the misfortune to live then insisted on total integrity and undivided loyalty.’11
As with accounts of the ‘Warring States’ and the post-Han ‘Period of Disunion’, Ouyang Xiu’s magisterial history of the Five Dynasties focuses on the northern plains and features marches and countermarches ad nauseam, bewildering intrigues and brutal encounters. Often unedifying, it sometimes verges on the unreadable with more places and persons per page than a directory. No doubt the period was indeed a troubled one. But as always, allowance needs to be made for the circumstances under which such histories were compiled and for the preferences of their writers and editors.
Historians, official and otherwise, belonged to that class of scholarly bureaucrats whose status and livelihood depended on the authority of the emperor and the stability of the state. They were seen as the empire’s adornment and they acted as its propagandists. Ouyang Xiu wrote under the Song, when the empire had been substantially reunited. If his account of the Five Dynasties is unduly depressing, it is in part because it was meant to be. By disparaging a fragmented past, he glorified a more integrated present. Described by his translator as ‘a giant among giants on the eleventh century intellectual landscape’, Ouyang Xiu may have been above ingratiating himself with the Song emperor. But he was dependent on materials compiled by men who, keen to do just that, used history to emphasise the singularity of Heaven’s Son and the indivisibility of ‘All-under-Heaven’. The historiographical tradition invariably talks up empire while playing down regional variables.
This makes it difficult to answer some fundamental questions. How long has China been united? For how much of its history has it been ruled by Chinese? How continuous is its record of political integration? It all depends on how one defines the Chinese and where one starts the history. A timeline of empire based on the traditional dates of each all-China dynasty suggests that ‘the political coherence of [the] Chinese population . . . has been maintained for almost three-quarters of the time that has elapsed since the First Emperor of Qin’.12 So says the excellent Cultural Atlas of China, though The Cambridge History of China suggests ‘around half’ rather than ‘almost three-quarters’. Both assume that the Chinese population is synonymous with those considered ethnically and culturally Han, so excluding all those non-Han peoples prominent in the country’s history plus all those Tibetans, Uighurs and other minorities whom the government of today regards as Chinese. Moreover, both estimates raise the question of why earlier periods, like that of the pre-imperial Zhou and the ‘Warring States’ – periods more seminal to Chinese civilisation than the Greek and Roman republics to Mediterranean civilisation – should be left out of the equation. Include them, and the three-quarters-to-a-half of recorded history during which China has been ‘politically coherent’ shrinks to no more than a quarter.
Ouyang Xiu himself conceded the point. Looking back, admittedly from an eleventh-century vantage point, he could detect little in the way of political coherence.
Since antiquity, times of good governance have been the aberration and tumult the norm. Kings of the the Three Dynasties [Xia, Shang and Zhou] ruled for hundreds of years, yet a mere handful of rulers merit much attention. More, then, can hardly be expected of later times, let alone the Five Dynasties!13
But all the above estimates may be further flawed. The tendency has already been noted for official histories to exaggerate – or elasticate – the duration of favoured dynasties and credit them with exercising a universal authority that was not actually effective for anything like as long. For instance, the empire of the Tang, though traditionally coterminous with the dynasty (618–907), can hardly be described as politically coherent after Huang Chao’s capture of Chang’an in 881; it had in fact been in turmoil throughout the three decades previous to that, and had been seriously compromised ever since An Lushan’s rebellion in 755. Similar reservations apply to the last century of the Later Han. Add the imminent Song (who lost half the empire for 150 years), the Mongol Yuan (whose decentralised dominion became basically ‘a conglomeration of regions under strong regional governments’14), the Manchu Qing (whose last century was also one of ill-disguised chaos) and the twentieth-century republic (beset by warlords and Japanese invaders until 1949), and China’s record of political integration, whether under Han rulers or non-Han, becomes still less impressive. As in the case of the ‘Great Wall’ or the ‘Grand Canal’, episodic segments of monumental achievement have been exaggerated and conflated to convey a misleading impression of near-continuity.
This is not to deny a remarkable continuity of political culture. The Mandate, the supremacy of Heaven’s Son, the concept of zhongguo (whether as ‘the central states’ or ‘the Middle Kingdom’), reverence for a political hierarchy grounded in Confucian morality, and the superiority of this shared culture over the uncultured ‘barbarism’ of non-Han peoples – these were universally acknowledged. Political integration was invariably applauded, inter-dynastic disorder invariably disparaged; the one was synonymous with ‘good governance’, according to Ouyang Xiu, the other with ‘tumult’. Any possibility of things being the other way round, of empire being a burden and regional autonomy a boon, is not so much as scouted in any surviving text.
Yet latter-day historians, especially non-Chinese ones accustomed to Europe’s record of political fragmentation, have indeed queried this equation. They note the periodic resurgence throughout Chinese history of regional entities such as Shu, Chu and Wu, potential states that were as populous and distinctive as any European kingdom; they observe the search for power-balancing constructs based on them; they deplore the dearth of regional historical studies; and though quite unacceptable to most of China’s historians, they sometimes interpret a phrase like ‘imperial inter-dynastic disorder’ as ‘only a derogatory term for multi-state order’.15 Centralised rule is seen as a recipe for ossification, while state-on-state ‘tumult’ is recast as a competitive dynamic, productive of social renewal, commercial enterpri
se and great outbursts of creativity and invention.
Thus the ‘Warring States’ period spawned the ‘hundred schools of philosophy’, and the ‘Period of Disunion’ hosted the transformation of Daoism and the consummation of the great affair with Buddhism. The Five Dynasties/Ten Kingdoms looks to have been too brief and chaotic for anything comparable. Yet if it is taken to cover the whole period of imperial eclipse between the collapse of Tang authority in, say, 850 and the final triumph of Song authority c. 980, then it too was by no means barren of distinction.
From the archival treasure trove of Dunhuang, Aurel Stein’s 1907 haul would include numerous fragments of a Buddhist doctrinal text called the Diamond Sutra. It had first been translated by Kumarajiva around AD 400 and was so called because it held the promise, for those who mastered it, of cutting away all worldly illusions ‘like a diamond’. One complete version, comprising seven sheets of paper printed with the Chinese text, pasted together to form a scroll, and now in the British Library, carries a Chinese date equivalent to 11 May 868. Contrary to popular opinion, it is probably not ‘the world’s first printed book’. Replicating images and written characters using inked blocks carved in relief, a process not much removed from that used for making moulds for ceramics and metals, had been practised in China since at least the eighth century. But it is the oldest complete printed text with a date. The development of printing, seven centuries before Gutenberg, and eleven before any of India’s scripts was printed, was undoubtedly the most momentous of all Chinese inventions; as a result, Europe and India still have dozens of languages and literatures but China only one. And this ‘infotech’ revolution substantially took place during the extended Five Dynasties/Ten Kingdoms period. The first use of movable type may also be datable to the period, though ‘the earliest authoritative account of its use’ comes a few decades later in the early eleventh century.16
These were not mere technical landmarks. Under the Five Dynasties there appeared the first complete printed edition of all the Confucianist classics. It ran to 130 volumes, took twenty-one years and was completed in 953. Arguably the ability to replicate and disseminate the classical corpus AD lib did more to permanently enshrine both Confucian values and the Chinese system of writing than the edicts of any emperor or the injunctions of any scholar. An eccentric character called Feng Dao is generally credited with overseeing this first printing, and one might expect his name to be held in awe by his fellow literati. Yet historian Ouyang Xiu does no such thing. In his Five Dynasties history, his biographical sketch of Feng Dao is to be found neither among the ‘Martyrs to Virtue’ nor the ‘Martyrs in Service’ but tucked away, between a Tuyuhun leader who jumped down a well and a man who was ‘perpetually busy without achieving anything’, in a section entitled ‘Miscellaneous Biographies’. Ouyang Xiu disapproved of Feng Dao.
It was not because he was ‘frugal to the point of self-deprivation’. For a long time Feng Dao lived in a hut, slept on straw rather than a mattress, and ‘found quiet contentment’ in passing his salary on to his servants. Captured damsels that came his way as chief minister he lodged separately until he could ascertain their origins and discreetly send them home. He alleviated a famine, slipped out at night to till the fields of those who neglected them, and mourned the death of his father with full honours. He was a Confucian paragon in everything – except, that is, his professional career.
Ouyang Xiu explains this with a story of the period about a woman called Li. Lately widowed, Li set off with her young son and her husband’s corpse to return to her parents’ home. An innkeeper, suspicious of her travelling unaccompanied by servants, refused her a bed; she refused to leave; he took her by the arm to evict her. For a chaste gentlewoman this was too much. She grabbed an axe and, letting out a long wail, ‘lopped off her own arm’. As she later explained, the stranger’s touch had defiled her; and since she ‘had failed to protect her chastity’, it was her duty to remove the arm rather than let it pollute her whole body. The story was cited as a classic example of Confucian piety; Ouyang Xiu prefers terms that translate as ‘integrity’ or ‘regard for one’s moral repute’; and it was these that Feng Dao, for all his learning, so conspicuously lacked. In the Confucian system of interlocking relationships, the minister should be as exclusively jealous of the dynasty he served as the emperor of the Heaven he served or the wife of the husband she served. Yet instead of being shamed into retirement by the failure of his chosen dynasty (it was the Turk Later Tang, second of the Five Dynasties), Feng Dao had taken pride in ingratiating himself with the next, then the next, then the next.
He had in fact served under all Five Dynasties except the first – plus, briefly, a Khitan ruler. No doubt the supervision of his great publishing venture required that he cling to office. But for Ouyang Xiu, as for Sima Guang, who tells the same story in his slightly later Zizhi Tongjian, Feng Dao’s complacency was unforgivable. ‘In a world beleaguered by universal chaos and alien invasions that gravely imperilled the fate of all living souls’, Feng Dao seemed to have rejoiced in his infidelity. He was actually proud to have cohabited with so many emperors. ‘I have always found contentment with the times,’ Feng had written in his autobiography. ‘And with age, I find contentment within. Whay joy could be greater?’ Almost any, Ouyang Xiu might have snorted. A man unembarrassed by prospering in an age of such self-evident depravity had forfeited all claim to virtue. In effect, the times reflected the calibre of the man and the man the calibre of the times. Since an empire in disarray could expect little in the way of righteous achievement, Feng Dao’s publishing programme is not so much as mentioned by Ouyang Xiu.17
Another complete set of the Confucian classics was produced a decade later in the Shu (Sichuan) capital of Chengdu. ‘It was intended by its sponsor to be sold inexpensively to poor scholars.’18 In general, Tang literary and artistic traditions fared better under the Ten Kingdoms than under the war-torn Five Dynasties in the north. In Hangzhou (the Wu-Yue, and nowadays Zhejiang, capital) and Nanjing (the capital of a ‘Southern Tang’ state), the poems of the great Tang masters appeared in print for the first time. Chengdu saw the publication in 940 of an important anthology of the lyric verses known as ci that were originally composed for a musical accompaniment. The title of the collection, ‘Amidst the Flowers’, refers to the company of courtesans. Love poems of a dreamy and erotic nature, they must have seemed to Ouyang Xiu, as they did to later Confucianists, typical products of a degenerate age. Instead of extolling the integrity of noble ladies like the armless widow Li, they explored the charms of sated harlots and inebriated sirens. Analogies have been drawn between this anthology with ‘its comfort sex in a curtained feminine space’ (as one modern critic puts it) and the failure of its contributors, who might otherwise have found useful employment in the bureaucracy, ‘to confront the crisis of a divided and war-torn nation’.19
At around the same time, and also in progressive Sichuan, printing facilitated the first-known appearance of paper money when merchants began issuing promissory notes in lieu of the often scarce and always burdensome strings of iron or copper cash. Officially certified and standardised under the Song, the practice gave birth to the banknote. Marco Polo’s description, three centuries later, of money ‘made out of the bark of trees’, while not entirely accurate, well conveys a foreigner’s utter incredulity at this momentous development: in converting arboreal pulp into a universally accepted medium of exchange with a value far in excess of its intrinsic worth, ‘you might say that the Great [Khubilai] Khan . . . has mastered the art of alchemy’, notes Polo. ‘He has such a quantity made that with it he could buy all the treasure of the world.’20
Helped by such innovations, much of the world’s treasure had been circulating more freely in China than anywhere else. As of the tenth century what has been called ‘a commercial revolution’ was under way. With Chang’an in ruins, its thoroughfares already choked by weeds, the Five Dynasties in the north sometimes located their main capital at Luoyang but more c
ommonly farther east at Kaifeng. The subsequent Song adoption of Kaifeng would confirm this significant eastward shift in the empire’s political fulcrum, away from the now impoverished and vulnerable Wei valley to a more strategically useful point from which to oppose Khitan encroachment in the north-east. Ironically the process would be completed, three centuries later, with relocation to what had been the Khitan capital – but had by then become the Mongol metropolis – of Dadu, a city later known as Beijing.
But commanding the crucial junction between the Grand Canal and the Yellow River, Kaifeng’s importance was also economic. As the northern capital, it grew to a city of over a million with sumptuary and revenue requirements to match. Its vulnerability to flooding (368 inundations would be recorded over the next 750 years) was the price to be paid for hosting the riverine entrepôt of the north. Fields and crops, together with the old system of taxation and service grounded on them, were being matched by money and trade as the basis of the economy. Higher-yielding grains, greater specialisation in manufacturing (ceramics and ironmongery as well as paper and printing), cheap and efficient transport, larger, freer markets and burgeoning financial and brokerage services made commerce sufficiently attractive to lull Confucian reservations about profiting from the product of others. Markets and ferry ports generated towns, local merchants became local magnates. The salt and tea monopolies, whether as officially operated or informally circumvented, had shown the way, creating both public revenue and private wealth.
Urbanisation was especially notable along the Yangzi and in the south, from whose great port cities a wind of adventurous endeavour blew inland. As of the tenth century, maritime trade for the first time exceeded that conducted overland. Locally built shipping was increasingly prominent, and Chinese vessels began to make regular sailings to mainland south-east Asia, the Indonesian archipelago and possibly Sri Lanka and south India. Financed by local investors, the trade generated something like the commercial fever that would seize the Italian city-ports in the thirteenth century, and later Lisbon and London. Past estuary and anchorage, from Yangzhou to Guangzhou, the tide of liquidity spread up river and canal. In China seaboard zones of economic enterprise, though as yet informal, were not invented in the nineteenth century by foreigners – let alone in the late twentieth century by bespoke communists. Nor should official participation in a market free-for-all that was frowned on by conventional ideology cause any surprise.