IN THE FOURTH century B.C., the days of the Greek city-states were nearing an end. They had fought each other for too long, and maybe they were tired. More than that, many Greeks (but not the Athenians) seemed to have lost interest in their cities; no longer would they dedicate their lives to public service. Perhaps this happened because their activities were now more specialized. As trade in the Mediterranean developed, business grew more complicated and it took more time. Meanwhile, the art of war now called for full-time soldiers; part-time wouldn’t do. So a citizen could not easily be a farmer or trader and at the same time a politician and a soldier, as his grandfather might have been. The active citizen had been the strength of the city-state. Now he was gone, and the city-state was bound to follow.
Just north of the city-states in the Balkan Peninsula lay Macedon, a kingdom that was partly Greek. In the middle of the 300s B.C., King Philip II transformed this backwoods country into a military engine with a well-trained army. He then began to conquer Greece. Striking first to one side, then the other, making peace with one enemy so that he could strike the next, he conquered neighbors to the east and south. The Athenians tried several times to stop him, but in the autumn of 338, Philip and his brilliant son Alexander totally defeated Athens and its allies. Soon all of Greece was under his control.
Lively Athens, martial Sparta, and all the other city-states of Greece that showed how much the human species can achieve had sunk to insignificance.
Chapter 5
China excels and endures.
LIKE THE OTHER ancient civilizations, China rose beside a river. The Huang Ho or Yellow River (see the map opposite) starts its journey near the “Roof of the World” in Tibet. From there it rushes eastward, cutting through the treeless mountain ranges, picking up the yellow silt from which the river takes its name. Then it makes a northward loop through a desert, bends south and east again, ambles over the North China Plain, forms a swampy delta, and empties in the Yellow Sea.
One might suppose the Chinese first begin to farm and build a civilization on the North China Plain, which is famous for its endless fertile fields of cotton, rice, and wheat. But that’s not how it happened. Chinese civilization began farther inland, at places where the river runs through highlands, and where natural terraces lie between the hills and the swampy land beside the river. In these places the soil was so light that early farmers could loosen it with sticks, and the terraces were high enough to escape the floods that make the Yellow River “China’s sorrow.” Here the farmers could safely plant their cabbages and millet.
China, the Middle Kingdom
The big rivers flow eastward from lofty mountains to the seas.
Agriculture later spread down the river and into the North China Plain, and southward through the rest of China. Fertile land was scarce, so China’s peasants began early to spend huge efforts on their tiny fields. Often they grew rice, which demands a lot of work but can fill many stomachs. They terraced the hills, built dikes beside the treacherous rivers, irrigated their fields, and fertilized their crops with their own excrement. Land was much too precious to be used for raising cattle, so they kept animals that scavenged for themselves — chickens, ducks, and pigs — and not too many of them. China became a “vegetable civilization.”
From about 1800 to 1100 B.C., a line of kings called the Shang ruled the peasants on the Yellow River. Historians once believed this dynasty a legend, concocted out of ancient tales of mythic kings, but a century ago that view began to change. Chinese scholars heard that pharmacies in Peking were grinding strange old bones to make their pills. Scratched on the bones were picture figures much like those still used in modern Chinese writing.
The scholars traced these bones to a place beside the Yellow River, and began to dig. Soon they came on large deposits of the bones, and realized that these were ancient royal archives. In time, the scholars learned to match the figures or characters on these bones with their modern Chinese equivalents.
Then the scholars figured out the purpose of the bones. Fortune-tellers working for the ancient kings used to pose a question about the future, then split apart a turtle shell or an animal’s shoulder blade. The way it cracked gave the answer to the question — usually a yes or no. Sometimes the seer then scratched on the bone the question he had asked. Some typical questions were: “Will the king’s child be a son?” “Will tomorrow be good for hunting?” “If we raise an army of three thousand men, will we drive away the enemy?”
The bones assure us that the Shang existed, since the writings on them name specific rulers once considered legendary. They show that kings and warriors spent much of their time fighting cruder peoples on their borders. Other digs have told us even more about these ancient people. The farmers dwelt in villages in thatch-roofed huts, while ruling families, servants, craftsmen, priests, and certain soldiers lived in thick-walled towns. Their artisans were masters of the art of casting stately bronze goblets, steamers, and cauldrons. Some of these the Shang employed in sacred rites; others they filled with food and wine and placed in tombs to feed the spirits of the dead.
Another point about the writings on the ancient bones: The Chinese have always felt a oneness with the ancient people of their land. The writings scratched on bones prove that they are right to do so, since the characters so nearly match the modern Chinese characters. The path of Chinese culture leads directly, for four thousand years, from the Shang to now.
After several hundred years had passed, a semi-barbarous people called the Zhou (pronounced “joe”) settled on the borders of the little kingdom. The Shang ruling class looked down on the Zhou as country bumpkins, but these neighbors had confidence and frontier energy. The Shang people, meanwhile, were fed up with their cruel and dissipated king. In 1122 B.C., a Zhou king, Wu the Warlike, routed a dispirited Shang army fourteen times as large as his. As Wu took over the kingdom, the Shang ruler fled to his palace, set it on fire, and died in the flames.
The Zhou king taught the conquered Chinese a view of human events that runs like this: Heaven, the supreme being, rules the cosmos, and no one rules on earth unless he has the Mandate, or consent, of Heaven. They, the Zhou, had not fought the Shang kings to win power or glory, but because Heaven had commanded them to punish the Shang for ruling badly. The Chinese therefore should accept the Mandate of Heaven and obey their new rulers. The Zhou also pointed out that rulers were obliged to rule justly in order to remain in the good graces of Heaven. Otherwise they would themselves lose the Mandate of Heaven to another king. And how would this new king prove that he had the Mandate of Heaven? Simply by succeeding in overthrowing the bad king.
The Zhou rulers enjoyed the Mandate of Heaven for many centuries, and they conquered most of northern China. Finally, however, they too fell. A time came when their governors in the provinces would no longer obey the king, and semi-barbarians began to invade the country. Tradition says that the last Zhou ruler was infatuated with a concubine and used to amuse her by lighting beacon fires to summon his army to fight invaders. His officers got tired of this game, and when real enemies appeared, they ignored the signals. The king had lost the Mandate of Heaven, and the invaders sacked his capital and slew him.
For the Chinese, the Mandate of Heaven became an organizing concept. From Zhou times onward, intellectuals viewed history as the story of the rise and fall of dynasties of kings, each of which began with the Mandate of Heaven and then lost it and fell from power.
In the decade from 230 to 221 B.C., the rulers of a western kingdom conquered all the other Chinese states. For the first time ever, all of China was united under a single ruling family, the Qin. (Pronounced “chin.” From Qin comes the Western name for the country: China.) The newly unified country was as big as Europe — so big that it took about a month for horsemen to carry a ruler’s orders to the borders. Compared to the rest of the world, it was also populous; the Chinese were a quarter of the people on the earth.
The conqueror of China thought big. He decided that the
ruler of so much land was more than a king, so he adopted a new title that suggested he was both a god and hero. Westerners usually mistranslate it as “emperor” and call him the “First Emperor.” He moved the noblemen of states he conquered into mansions on one side of the Wei River, from which they could gaze across the river at his enormous palace on the other side.
Earlier rulers of the northern border states had built long walls to keep out raiding horsemen from the Asian grasslands. The First Emperor joined these into a single Great Wall that stretched fourteen hundred miles from the Pacific Ocean into central Asia. This awesome wall, which others rebuilt many centuries later, is so big that astronauts could spot it as they circled earth. When the emperor died, officials buried him beneath a massive mound of earth with an army of eight thousand life-sized terra-cotta soldiers and horses.
Chinese emperors of later centuries sometimes lost control of this vast land, but others always put it back together. Even when China was divided and weak, it was the greatest force in eastern Asia. Its neighbors borrowed China’s picture writing and its thoughts on politics, religion, and art.
Although they exported their silk westward, the Chinese knew little and cared less about the peoples to the west, beyond the Himalayas, the Gobi Desert, and the Asian steppes. As a result, they viewed their country as the center of civilization, surrounded on all sides by “barbarians” (they viewed the Japanese as shoeless, tattooed “dwarfs”) and so they named their country Zhonghua, which is usually translated as “Middle Kingdom.”
China’s self-satisfaction must have infuriated its neighbors. On one occasion an emperor was angry with the shogun of Japan because he would not curb the Japanese pirates who raided the ports of the Middle Kingdom. “You stupid eastern barbarians!” he wrote. “Living so far across the sea…you are haughty and disloyal; you permit your subjects to do evil.” The shogun coolly answered, “Heaven and Earth are vast; one ruler does not monopolize them.”
Not many civilizations can boast, as China can, that the leading figure in their history was a man who taught others how to live. Such a man was Kongfuzi, whom English-speakers call Confucius. He was born in the small state of Lu in 551 B.C., while the Zhou dynasty was breaking up. Confucius is said to have been very tall, and he had big ears, a flat nose, and buck teeth. His family were minor gentry, and for a time he held a minor government position. However, he was chiefly a professional teacher, who collected fees from students and taught them his opinions on government and life.
Some of his students rose to high official posts, but their teacher didn’t. In his middle years, Confucius spent a dozen years traveling through northern China hoping to persuade some ruler to give him a position in which he could put into practice his views on government. But while everyone respected Confucius, no one hired him, and at the end of his life he viewed himself as a failure. He resented, he said, being treated “like a gourd that is fit only to be hung on the wall and never put to use.”
As a source of lasting inspiration, though, Confucius proved to be a huge success. This might surprise anyone who reads the compilation of his sayings made by his disciples after he had died. Many of their teacher’s sayings are, quite frankly, dull and flat. They have only the merit of conviction.
He was wedded to the values of the past. He was certain that the troubles of his time would vanish if his countrymen would only return to the way of life that the first Zhou king (who taught that rulers had the Mandate of Heaven) had shaped centuries earlier. To do this, said Confucius, men must play the roles that life had given them. “Let the ruler be a ruler and the subject a subject,” he said. “Let the father be a father and the son a son.”
The ruler’s major duty is to be a model for his people and promote their good. Confucius was convinced that people would obey and imitate a moral ruler, but not an evil despot. “If one leads them with virtue…they will have a sense of shame and will rise to expectations.” As for men of means, they should strive to be “gentlemen,” that is, people of moral worth. All people, but especially gentlemen, should constantly ask themselves, “What is the right thing to do?” and then try to do it. Such men should help the king to rule by example rather than with harsh and rigid laws. “The gentleman’s essential quality is like wind; the common people’s like grass; and when the wind is on it the grass always bends.”
Confucius hadn’t much to say about the role of women, but a female Confucian named Pan Chao later filled that gap. In a manual called Lessons for Women, she made their humble place in life quite clear. “Let a woman modestly yield to others,” she says, “…let her put others first, herself last.” She must serve her husband because if she does not, “the proper relationship and the natural order of things are neglected and destroyed.” She must also obey his parents: a woman should “not act contrary to the wishes and the opinions of parents-in-law about right and wrong; let her not dispute with them what is straight and what is crooked.”
Not everyone agreed with Confucius and his followers, and rulers didn’t always listen to them. The First Emperor despised Confucians; once he urinated in a scholar’s hat. A well-known Confucian teacher asked an irresponsible Chinese ruler what should be done “if within the state there was no good government.” The ruler “turned his head to the left and right and spoke of other things.”
A group of practical politicians and philosophers known as Legalists objected to Confucius’s do-goodism. It will not work, they said, since bureaucrats, who Confucius wanted to be gentlemen and moral models for the people, are in fact self-seeking and untrustworthy. Perhaps the common people yearn for order, but in fact they are stupid and selfish. So rulers must use rigid laws and heavy punishments. What the ruler wants is right.
In 81 B.C. some Confucians and Legalists had an argument that illustrates their opposite positions. This was the background: The emperor’s finance director had set up offices throughout the country to buy surplus grain wherever the crop was good in order to prevent the market price from dropping. The government then sold this grain in other districts where the crops were poor and grain was scarce, so as to keep the price from rising to the point where people starved. Meanwhile, the government also had monopolized the smelting of iron and the evaporating of seawater to get salt. It made nice profits from the grain deals and monopolies.
Businessmen complained about the state’s invading the marketplace, so the finance minister called together sixty Confucian scholars from all over China to discuss the government’s policies with its officials. The very fact that the minister called scholars to such a meeting shows the respect in which the Chinese held learned men. Notes taken at the meeting by a Confucian have survived. They show that the earnest Confucians found themselves in a tough debate with hard-boiled Legalists.
The Confucians argued that the government competed unequally with ordinary people, and that this encouraged official greed. The Legalists answered that the government needed income from monopolies to pay the troops who guarded China’s borders from attacking nomads. To this the scholars gave the classic Confucian answer: military strength must be rooted in morality. If rulers and officials would develop moral virtue and reflect it in their lives, the barbarians would beg for peace and war would end forever. The scholar who recorded this debate believed his side had won it, but the policy didn’t change.
Legalists were not the only Chinese who disagreed with Confucius’s ideas. A stream of thought called Daoism (or Taoism) held that the only reality was Nature (Dao), a cosmic force. Humans shouldn’t try to make things better, as Confucians did, or they would smash the harmony of Nature. The best thing they could do was to adapt to Nature’s mold. Let Nature take its course! The Daoists’ ideal was a city-state in which people heard the barking dogs and crowing roosters of a nearby city-state but were so content that none of them had ever gone to see it.
It was not the Legalists or Daoists but Confucius and his devotees who altered China. His thought appealed especially to bureaucrats and scholars
, as was natural since he had aimed his teachings at them. But emperors too, even hard-boiled ones with Legalist opinions, saw merit in Confucianism because they did need good administrators. They started putting Confucian scholars on their staffs.
Then the government began to give examinations based on the Confucian writings to the empire’s would-be bureaucrats. Ambitious boys prepared for these exams at schools all over China. It’s said that the examination graders rewarded graceful composition more than logic. But examinations served the rulers’ purpose, which was finding bright and well-Confucianized young men. The rulers also had a system for promoting the most able after they began to serve. So Confucianism helped to shape a thoughtful, loyal ruling class.
WHILE CENTURIES PASSED and dynasties rose and fell, China’s scholar-bureaucrats and wealthy gentry shaped a “high culture” like no other in the world. Many of these cultivated men — even certain emperors — were themselves fine poets, scholars, painters, and masters of the art of writing Chinese characters with style. Those wealthy men who were not artists themselves valued and supported those who were.
The Human Story Page 8