China

by John Keay

  IN SINGING-GIRL TOWERS

  Wang Anshi’s reforms, while revolutionary in scope and of abiding significance, were not quite as dangerous as they seemed to conservatives like Sima Guang. Indeed, much about Song China was not quite as it seemed. The examinations as rejigged under the Song would become the defining institution of elite society for the next seven centuries; yet at the time they may have had little impact on the social base from which office-holders were recruited and certainly did not open up the administration to all-comers. Talent was recognised, higher standards required, but neither was a guarantee of advancement. The upwardly mobile still found the going tough and the professional gradient vertiginous. Not until the Ming would the examinations system spawn a genuine meritocracy.

  More statesmen hailing from the Yangzi and the south – Ouyang Xiu, Fan Zhongyang and Wang Anshi among them – secured high office, but this may simply reflect the changing demography. Very few of them were from families with no previous record of government service, and though printed books and new schools made education more widely available, most of those who sat the higher examinations and aspired to office still relied on the influence of patrons and family networks. Moreover they were still heavily outnumbered by those who, with or without a degree, attained office courtesy of a system of privileged induction that no reform had yet successfully addressed.

  On the other hand, just sitting for the highest degrees conferred a recognised intellectual status and could become something of a profession in itself. Hundreds prepared for the exams every year, although the preset quota of passes rarely exceeded a handful – some years there were none at all – and by the 1090s only one candidate in ten could expect to pass. The rate fell even farther thereafter. Luckily the failed could always resit; there was no limit to the number of times nor, within reason, to the age of the candidate. Fifty-year-old students were not unknown, though by that age most had settled for another avenue of advancement. On the well-known principle that ‘those who can, do, while those who can’t, teach’, many set up as tutors, started schools or joined monasteries. Under the Jurchen Jin dynasty (and very probably under the Northern Song since the Jurchen simply took over their educational procedures) every state school would reportedly be staffed with ‘one professor who had taken the civil service examinations five times (without passing) or who held a jinshi degree but was over fifty years of age (and therefore too old to embark on an official career)’.14

  As is the way with dynasties facing disaster, the last decades of the Northern Song were troubled. Famine ravaged the north in 1074–76, and a 1077 Song naval attack on Annam, considered a softer option than invading Xia or Liao, proved disappointingly inconclusive. The Northern Song had initiated a build-up of warlike shipping and, as a result of the expedition’s failure, would devote resources to constructing a formidable navy. But for the attack on Annam in 1077 merchant vessels had been hired as transports, their owners being assured of compensation for any losses in the novel form of what were called ‘monk certificates’.

  Evidence as to the state of the economy as well as the status of Buddhism, these certificates were transferable titles that empowered the holder, whether lay or monastic, to nominate a number of candidates for the Buddhist monkhood. No vocation was necessary, residence was optional and the required vows were not to be taken seriously. The attraction of ordination now lay almost entirely in the exemption from taxation and service that a monastic attachment conferred. Buddhist schools of study, especially the esoteric Chan (Zen) school, continued to flourish despite the decline in contacts with central Asia and India (where Islamic encroachment had already severed the ‘Sutra route’ via Afghanistan). But the Song were not notable Buddhist patrons like the Sui and Tang; ordination was strictly regulated, with the sale of monk certificates affording the state a useful source of revenue; and in the face of the Confucianist revival, Buddhist establishments were undergoing a slow secularisation that marginalised their doctrinal heterodoxy while emphasising their social role in teaching, caring for the sick and elderly, managing their large estates and, as here, affording an economic sanctuary to those to whom the state was indebted. Buddhism, in effect, was slowly buckling under regulatory pressure from above and subsidence from below as popular practice became permeated by indigenous superstitions and local spirit cults. The Middle Way was becoming one of many – Daoist, Confucianist and animist – and barely distinguishable from them. As for the economy, unprecedented issues of coin and paper money were fuelling a rampant inflation that made certificated privilege more valuable than depreciating cash.

  The reformer Wang Anshi had deplored foreign adventures like that against Annam; but in another attempt to redeem Song honour overtures were made towards the Korean kingdom with a mission by sea across the Gulf of Bohai from Shandong. The idea seems to have been to outflank the Khitan Liao empire on Asia’s eastern seaboard; and when the Korean initiative came to nothing, in 1211–15 attention turned farther north to the Jurchen of Manchuria as potential allies in a common front against Khitan Liao. The old and generally satisfactory arrangement with Liao was about to be jettisoned, and two centuries of multi-state order repudiated. Neither ambitious reform within, nor salutary reverses without, had reconciled the Song to partial sovereignty. Such was the burden of empire.

  And yet, by all accounts, the period of the Song was ‘China’s greatest age’.15 Revolts broke out in Shandong and Zhejiang during the dynasty’s dying days in the early 1120s, but for the most part it had been an era of internal tranquillity, booming trade, technological innovation and cultural sophistication. Around 5 per cent of the population lived in cities, not a spectacularly high proportion but still about 6 million people, a figure ‘probably equal to the urban population of the rest of the world at that time’.16 Kaifeng, the capital and much the largest conurbation, was smaller than Chang’an under the Tang yet accounted for about a million, ‘which is not far short of the total population of England under William the Conqueror, the exact contemporary of [Song] Shenzong’.17 There were thirty cities with populations of 40,000–100,000; Europe had perhaps six. As centres of commerce and overseas trade Yangzhou (in Jiangsu), Hangzhou (in Zhejiang), Fuzhou and Quanzhou (in Fujian) and Guangzhou (Canton, in Guangdong) all rivalled Venice.

  Marco Polo, himself a Venetian, would award Suzhou (in Jiangsu) 6,000 stone bridges (the so-called ‘Venice of the East’ has about the same today) and a circumference of 65 kilometres (40 miles). But Hangzhou, which would be the Southern Song’s capital and which Polo called ‘Kinsai’, was ‘undoubtedly the finest and most splendid city in the world’. Polo’s ‘1.6 million houses’ must have been a wildly exaggerated guess, the sort that back in Italy would win him notoriety as il Milione, ‘Mr Millions’. But guesswork apart, his wonderment at the industry, order and invention – in the countryside as well as the cities – rings true enough. The bustling vignettes of road and riverside life depicted in contemporary paintings such as the twelfth-century Qingming scroll confirm the impression. To the medieval European visitor, China afforded a glimpse of a futuristic utopia in which industry and abundance were complemented by just and effective government.

  To printed books and paper money might be added a host of contemporary developments in medicine, mechanics, mathematics, chemistry and metallurgy. Of the three inventions credited by Francis Bacon with having changed his sixteenth-century European world – printing, the magnetic compass and gunpowder – all had been anticipated by the Chinese and all had entered everyday use under the Song, so distinguishing that age of innovation from the Tang age of importation. The printed book dealt a telling blow to ignorance, the compass discovered its vocation as a navigational instrument, and gunpowder graduated from fireworks to warfare (mainly for the mining of fortifications and as an explosive projectile rather than as a propellant). Coal began to replace charcoal in furnace, forge and kiln as tree cover in the north was depleted, steel to replace iron for weapons, implements and in construction. Surve
ying and map-making achieved a high degree of accuracy; so did astronomy, ever a strong suit in the Celestial Empire. A calculation of the world’s circumference proved accurate to within a matter of metres; the fall of the Grand Canal over a 420-kilometre (260-mile) section was measured to within millimetres.

  Song Huizong, the last Northern Song emperor (r. 1101–25), took little interest in government but delighted in these achievements, maintained his own academy of scholars and artists, and extended unrivalled patronage to all the arts. He was himself a fine painter and outstanding calligrapher, and his imperial collection of paintings and antiques is thought to have been the largest ever amassed in China. Aware as he was of no limit to the largesse at his disposal, his expert connoisseurship encouraged the production of exquisite ceramics, while his fascination with Daoism, the most nature-loving of speculative philosophies, resulted in elaborate gardens and grottoes flanked by palaces and pavilions.

  Meanwhile agriculture, still the base of the economy, underwent ‘a green revolution’ with the eleventh-century introduction and development of quick-growing high-yield rice varieties obtained from Champa in central Vietnam. Two crops per year became standard in the Yangzi basin, three in its delta and farther south. Farm implements of iron and steel made the heavier soils of the south easier to work and extended the area of cultivation. The resulting surplus enabled farmers near the big cities to concentrate on cash crops of fruit and vegetables, fish and fowl. Local traders clogged the roads and waterways; markets and eating-houses proliferated. Seaworthy shipping and the expansion of maritime trade turned an exotic luxury such as India’s black pepper into a culinary commonplace. Merchants had never had it so good.

  In singing-girl towers to play at dice, a million [cash] on one throw;

  By flag-flown pavilions calling for wine, ten thousand a cask;

  the Mayor? the Governor? we don’t even know their names;

  what’s it to us who wields power in the palace?18

  In ‘The Merchant’s Joy’ Lu You, the most prolific of Song poets and a great admirer of the compassionate Tang poet Dou Fu, contrasted the louche lifestyle of Yangzi traders with that of the impoverished Confucian scholar, ‘belly crammed with classical texts and body lean with care’, whose ‘teeth rot, hair falls out [and] no one looks your way’. ‘Merchants are the happiest of men,’ he concludes, although officials and landowners must have run them a close second. Courtiers were in a league of their own. As to their dress, imported cottons and furs vied with silks and brocades; for their attentions, prostitutes and courtesans competed with concubines and wives. The exquisite met the gross in an endless round of banquets and bacchanalia, of poetasting and whoring.

  No doubt it was a great age in which to live. Had early medieval man been invited to pick his country of birth, he would surely have opted for China. Not so, though, early medieval woman. Of those who made up the distaff half of society, most faced a perilous infancy leading to an agonised childhood followed by an exploited adolescence and an often sad maturity. The frequency of infanticide – which as elsewhere was predominantly female infanticide – so distressed Lu You that he urged the establishment of a maternity fund; he thought it would encourage families not to jettison the newborn before the bonds of nurture and affection had reconciled them to the burden of having another mouth to feed.

  Whether survival was always in the best interests of the infant, though, is questionable. Female toddlers of pleasing potential might still be sold; and if not, no sooner had they learned to walk than they were reduced to toddling again. For according to one of Lu You’s contemporaries, ‘little [female] children when not yet four or five, who have done nothing wrong, are nevertheless made to suffer unlimited pain from foot-binding’.19 Cosmetic therapy this foot-binding was not. The bandages used were 10 metres (33 feet) long and were so tightly strung back and forth – over toes, round heels – as in time to foreshorten the whole foot, winching the toes inwards, compressing and distorting them until, with bones bent and flesh taut, they caved in to form a pungent little maw nestled into a now high-arched instep. The moment the pain became bearable, or the subject became mobile, the bandages were tightened; shoe sizes slowly shrank by half. The whole process took several years, but ‘if it was done skillfully, after the foot healed in [a further] two years, the young woman could walk short distances in no pain’.20

  The custom came into widespread use under the Song, being reportedly rare prior to 1086 but widely practised by 1100; and it would remain in force until the late nineteenth century. Non-Han women shunned it; their revulsion provides a good example of resistance to Han acculturation, and as a result the practice never caught on in the north among Khitan, Tangut, Jurchen or Mongol. Nor, for obvious reasons, was it widespread among peasant families whose children had a hard life’s work in the fields ahead of them. But for perhaps a third of all China’s small girls, for all of 800 years, foot-binding was de rigueur. Though pain can hardly be quantified, given the numbers and the time-span it probably added more to the sum of human misery than male castration, female circumcision, mutilation for mendicancy and all other custom-endorsed outrages combined.

  Xu Ji (d. 1101), another Song poet, celebrated the results in a verse in which he ‘found tiny feet an object of wonder and wanted to hold them in his hands to get a better look’.21 Pleasingly rounded and never publicly exposed, they added to the female form two soft and intimate new zones of male arousal. Courtesans, performers, dancers (slow-footed ones presumably) and other commodified womenfolk are thought to have pioneered the custom. Its adoption in wider society probably had something to do with the Confucian reassertion of proprietary male attitudes. Insistence on the subordination of wife to husband, and strictures against the remarriage of widows, however burdened they might be with children, were promoted by exemplars such as the ‘disarmed’ widow Li cited by both Ouyang Xiu and Sima Guang. Hobbled women constituted a domestic convenience, ever available to their masters and not easily removed by others without a sedan chair or cart. Yet the women too were not blameless. The actual enforcement of foot-binding was entrusted to mothers and grandmothers, themselves teetering on hoof-like stumps and strangely unmindful of the tearful adolescence that had condemned them to crippledom.

  JIN AND SONG

  Lu You, the Song poet who wanted to do something about infanticide, was born in 1125, just as Jurchen invaders began toppling the Northern Song, and he died in 1210, just as Mongol invaders began toppling the Jurchen. Compared with the imperial sway of the other non-Han dynasties of the period – Khitan Liao, Tangut Xia and eventually Mongol Yuan – that of the Jurchen Jin dynasty was comparatively short, just the eighty-five years of Lu You’s life (though courtesy of the historians’ penchant for dynastic extension, Jin’s standard dates are usually given as 1115–1234). The Jurchen nevertheless had a greater impact on northern China than any of the others except the Mongols. Their onslaught was of a devastating suddenness, and by wresting from Song rule the central northern plain, the very heart of zhongguo, and then penetrating south to the Yangzi, they shook the empire to its core. The Khitan and Tangut had merely challenged Song sovereignty; the Jurchen challenged Song survival.

  No one felt the psychological blow more than Lu You himself. All his life he railed against the shame of losing the north and was so outspoken in his condemnation of those who appeased the enemy that his professional career got nowhere. ‘Border Mountain Moon’, written in the 1150s, said it all.

  Fifteen years ago the edict came: peace with the invader:

  our generals fight no more but idly guard the border.

  Vermilion gates [of officialdom] still and silent; inside they sing and dance;

  Stabled horses fatten and die, bows come unstrung . . .

  Spear-clashes on the central plain – these we’ve known from old.

  But since when have traitorous barbarians lived to see their heirs?

  Our captive people, forbearing death, pine for release,

 
Even tonight how many places stained with their tears?22

  Such sentiments would strike a chord through the ensuing centuries of humiliation by Mongol and Manchu, so ensuring Lu You’s eventual fame as one of China’s outstanding patriot-poets. Yet the enemy, those ‘traitorous barbarians’ – Jurchen, Khitan, Tangut or Mongol – would themselves come to comprise substantial elements in the ethnic mix that later subscribed to this Chinese patriotism.

  Ethnic labelling is helpful in handling all these non-Han regimes, but it can be misleading as to their composition. Based on confederal arrangements with other clans, the non-Han regimes were never exclusively of one ethnicity. All included other peoples, and all rapidly attached still more as their fame spread. Tangut clansmen fought both with and against Khitan, Khitan both with and against Jurchen, and Han Chinese both with and against all of them. Whether defined by lifestyle, leadership, language or myth, ethnicity became more diluted at every stage of conquest. Like the contemporary Norsemen (Vikings) in Europe, the steppe and forest peoples who swept down from the north, swift-borne on horses rather than in longships, tended to settle, intermarry, adjust to existing society and co-opt its peoples and institutions.