In Search of the First Civilizations

by Michael Wood

  Then suddenly the imperial bureaucrats of the Ming dynasty banned any further voyages, despite their rich commercial potential. The ships were broken up and their log books destroyed, leaving us only the fragmentary accounts in later Chinese historians, ‘marvellous visions from the starry raft’ as one of them described the great adventure. Now only a few stone inscriptions on the wind-swept hillside at Quenzhou remain as clues to one of history’s unsolved mysteries: why were the voyages stopped?

  Western thinkers have always taken a typically simple line on the stopping of Zheng He’s explorations. For them it would be like calling a halt to manned space exploration on the eve of the first moon landing. Even now the ban is seen as proof that the Chinese were backward-looking and rigid in their thought; that they had no desire for new knowledge and were run by a class of hidebound bureaucrats whose world view was closed. Proof too, it is said, that the West was the fount of science and technology and progress; that the West had a monopoly on the spirit of enterprise. But, as always in history, there are many ways of looking at the same question. After all, as we have seen, it was the Chinese who were the great technological innovators. They had made virtually all the key inventions on which the later hegemony of the West would depend. So perhaps it really comes down to the question of how different civilizations think we should use technology. And perhaps then the Chinese saw, quite sensibly on the face of it, that their true interests lay inside their own borders, cultivating their soil, and cultivating the inner life; searching for the harmony that had always been the goal of their civilization. And perhaps it was the West on the other hand which had a compulsive desire to change; a compulsive need to invade other people’s space, both moral and physical; and a refusal to accept limits on its own.

  Since the eighteenth century, it has been customary for Europeans to talk about the East needing to ‘catch up’ with the West. These days that is obviously happening all around us in a material sense, if it has not happened already. But it takes two to make a dialogue, and perhaps the West still has some catching up to do. Perhaps the West still has to learn from the East a way of cultivating its inner space; of accepting limits on desires and space in an increasingly finite world. At the beginning of this modern dialogue between the East and the West the French philosopher Pascal said that the trouble with Western man was this, that he did not know ‘how to be content in an empty room.’

  The banning of the Ming voyages was, nevertheless, part of a deepening introspection in Chinese culture. Now behind a new Great Wall to keep out the barbarians, the Ming government based itself in a capital far to the north: Beijing, the ‘North City,’ which had been founded by the Mongols in the thirteenth century. From here they waged interminable strength-sapping wars against the Mongols and other steppe peoples who continued to threaten their northern border throughout the fifteenth century. At home, in administration as in culture, they became increasingly rigid in doctrine and practice, imposing an all-pervasive literary censorship, and were unremittingly harsh in their legalistic enforcement of punishment. Meanwhile at the Altar of Heaven in Beijing the Emperor continued to perform the rituals of the Bronze Age in the belief that the world would never change.

  THE WAY IS QUESTIONED

  Elsewhere the world was changing fast. In the sixteenth century western missionaries and scholars came to reside in Beijing for the first time, propounding new views about the world, time and the cosmos. In 1602 the Jesuit Matteo Ricci could present the Ming court with a world map showing undreamed-of continents. The brilliant cartographical achievements of the Sung were now superseded. From this time the longest and richest intellectual tradition in the world increasingly seems to turn in on itself. Though the cultural achievements of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were still extraordinary in their diversity, the state-sponsored scholarship, on which the whole edifice depended, reads more and more like a dialogue with the past. In the national library in Beijing is the most pointed proof both of its greatness and of its progressive desiccation. Here is the greatest literary enterprise of all time, an encyclopedia running to 79,000 hand-written volumes, the Ssu-Ku-Ch’uan-shu. Still in its original shelves and boxes, beautifully tooled and varnished, labelled in green, red, blue and grey according to the Imperial cataloguing system of Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter (for Classics, History, Philosophy and Literature), it is a testimony to the idea that all knowledge, past, present and future, could be contained in a single room. This was the most ambitious of a number of huge encyclopaedic projects and dictionaries commissioned during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by the Ching dynasty which succeeded the Ming in the 1640s. Among them too was a comprehensive collection of Tang poetry containing nearly 50,000 poems. Such works are a testimony to the intellectual culture of their time, a culture refined and often brilliant still in literature and art, for a long time competent in administration too; but slow to react to the way the world beyond its horizons was changing, inquisitorial towards critical opinion, and more and more bogged down by the vast and bureaucratic feudal order bequeathed to them by the ancestors.

  The most successful of the Ching rulers, K‘ang-hsi, was one of the greatest and longest-lived of all Chinese emperors, and has left us one of the most touching of all ruler autobiographies (‘I’m now approaching seventy. The country is more or less at peace and the world is at peace. Even if we haven’t improved all manners and customs, and made all the people prosperous and happy, yet I have worked with unceasing diligence…’). By any standards, his was another brilliant epoch. So, too was the equally long reign of the Ch‘ien-lung emperor (1736–96). But all this time, western explorers, missionaries and condottieri were spreading their power and influence across the globe. And so too, far away in ‘barbarian’ Europe, Bacon, Newton and Descartes had been concerning themselves not with how to perfect the past, but how to control the future. And now some Chinese intellectuals began to plead for a more open approach to knowledge, among them an obscure young historian called Chang Hsüeh Cheng, who has been compared to the greatest historians of the past, to Ibn Khaldun or Thucydides.

  Born in 1738, Chang Hsüeh Cheng lived on the very eve of the most momentous upheaval in Chinese history since the time of the Chin Emperor nearly two thousand years before; in other words, the clash with the West and the changes that would engender. It was he who attempted to reappraise the way that the Chinese had seen history since the very beginnings of the Confucian tradition. For him, history was an all-embracing concept which would include the entire canon of Chinese literature. The Confucian classics, he said, were ‘all history.’ Confucius may be a true guide to life but he is also simply a historical text. And the time was past, he thought, when history should be merely minute textual analysis and compilation by teams of scholars, burrowing away on a rigid and old-fashioned curriculum. History should be dynamic and meaningful. Some have seen Chang Hsüeh Cheng as a precursor of the revolution, a prophet of democracy, an enemy of feudalism. No doubt that is an exaggeration. But in 1799, two years before his death, he wrote a prophetic letter about what he saw as the now inevitable decline of the Ching dynasty and the worrying future prospects for China. This was a time, he said, when history should no longer concern itself merely with the past but ‘should use the past to reform the present,’ and, indeed, to look into the future. The historian’s greatest gifts, he said, are not just knowledge but inspiration and insight. An historian’s inspiration, he thought, could be compared to the I Ching, the Book of Changes, in that it too enabled him to look into the future. At the moment of Chang’s death, China was about to come face-to-face with another culture, whose view of history was diametrically opposed to that of the Chinese tradition. The Europeans with their Judaeo-Christian heritage believed that history was purposive, that it was leading towards an appointed end – and that they would be the winners.

  THE CLASH WITH THE WEST

  Had China been left to solve its own problems, its faltering economy, its growing poverty and
social injustice, its feudal class structures and its rigid educational system, it might have moved into the modern world spared the suffering it was to undergo. But it was not. The first Chinese descriptions of Westerners are not flattering. ‘These barbarians have a grim look, untidy hair, an unpleasant smell. They have no rituals worthy of the name. They are liars and are rather arrogant. They conquer countries by fraud and force, ingratiating themselves in a friendly way before they oppress the natives. At the heart of their conduct is violence.’ Such were early Chinese reports of the Spanish in the Philippines. They were not to change their opinions.

  By the eighteenth century the coasts of the south China sea were frequented by the Spanish, the Dutch, Portuguese, English and later Americans. They all came bearing Chinese inventions: gunpowder, the stern rudder, the magnetic compass, paper maps; coming not just to sell but to impose their goods, their ideas, their religion, their will. They soon set up trading colonies, paid for by the illicit trade in goods like opium. In the tale of colonial infamy this is one of the least known episodes in the West, but it culminated in what might be seen as the pivotal event of nineteenth-century Chinese history, the Opium War.

  For the British, the point of the opium trade was simply to sell opium to China. In practice this meant getting as many Chinese people addicted to the drug as possible. But opium was prohibited in China, and hitherto had an almost negligible local consumption. So it had to be sold illicitly from the one permitted trading post on the mainland, Canton, and from off-shore bases like Gulangjou island. The indispensable link in this set-up was India. There, the British imperial possessions had grown in the last decades of the eighteenth century. The British themselves produced nothing which the Chinese wished to buy, but in India they could grow opium and, to a lesser extent, cotton, which could be traded for the luxuries which the British desired, especially tea, which by then had become a national obsession. And so an infernal triangle was set up between Britain, China and India which parallels the tragic triangle of the previous century between Africa, the Caribbean and Europe, the slave trade. And this was no small business. Incredibly in the early nineteenth century opium was the biggest single trade anywhere in the world.

  In 1839 when the Chinese government attempted to put a stop to the opium trade, the British responded with force in a manner which has never been forgotten in China. In what Gladstone called ‘the most disreputable war ever fought by the British,’ the Chinese fleets, hopelessly outgunned and outdated, were smashed to pieces, defeated by the very technology which they had invented but allowed to stand still. For the Chinese, defeat was a shattering revelation. They were forced to watch impotent as the Western ‘barbarians’, their cultural inferiors, began to carve up the Middle Kingdom into colonies with the same greedy relish that they would scramble for Africa and dismember India. The Opium War was a watershed in Chinese history. They had resisted the Westerners for over two centuries: now the ‘foreign devils’ had become bound up with the very future survival of the Middle Kingdom. Soon China was shaken by a series of tremendous blows: the milleniary rebellion of the Taiping, defeat in a war with Japan, and the failed Boxer rising. It was a time of tremendous intellectual ferment, as the old self-confidence ebbed away. Reformers analysed all too well the reasons for the West’s success – technology, energy, intellect – much as they deprecated it. Many felt that ‘within a hundred years China will adopt all the West’s methods,’ as Wang Ta’o wrote in 1870. The example of Japan beckoned, adopting the ways of the West without letting its people onto Japanese soil. Other reformers, like the charismatic Kang Yu Wei, called for an end to the empire, and for freedom and equality of race, sex and colour through a regeneration of the Confucian way itself! Meantime, unable to cope with the pressure of the outside world, the Chinese imperial government finally collapsed. A Republican movement had arisen in the nineteenth century, long before the founding of the Communist party, but the imperial government had been almost malevolently resistant to all change. The abolition of the Empire after 2100 years and the establishment of a Republic in 1911, came too late to solve China’s intractable problems: an impoverished peasantry, underdeveloped industry and the continued presence of the colonial powers. ‘The great time of revolution’ had arrived as the I Ching, the Book of Changes, states. And the great man was at hand in whom all belief would reside: Mao Tse Tung. In the 1930s a bitter civil war broke out between communists and nationalists. The Japanese invasion of 1936 turned Mao’s communists into a national liberation front. Eventually in 1949, Mao and the communists took power on a heady tide of emotion and optimism, after years of civil war, famine and foreign rule.

  But in their haste to erase the past, the communists killed millions by ill-judged reforms and tyrannical violence. The so-called ‘Great Leap Forward’ in the 1950s brought about catastrophic famine in the countryside with untold damage both to the environment and to the social fabric. The ‘Cultural Revolution’ of the 1960s proved more damaging to China’s heritage than the Mongols ever were. The promise of open debate in the ‘Thousand Flowers and Thousand Schools’ evaporated into brutalized and stagnated intellectual life scarring the next generations. And all this was in the name of a Western ideology and a Western conception of history! Only now, as the dust settles after one of the most extraordinary and significant episodes in the history of the world, can we as outsiders begin to detect the lineaments of the older China – spiritual, psychological, social – still in place, which Mao, like the Chin emperor, sought to obliterate in his illusory quest for a world freed from the weight of the past. For without the past, as Confucius said, what are we?

  THE LEGACY OF CHINA

  Today the Chinese people are living through a time of great opportunity. Though they are still without political power, their country has become an economic giant, with nearly a quarter of the world’s population. Over the past twenty years the Chinese Communist party has shed its Marxist ideology and is now an authoritarian bureaucracy with uncanny resemblances to those of imperial times. And the future? One of the older generation of republicans, Liang Shu-ming, writing in the 1920s, boldly prophesied that the future world civilization would be reconstructed Chinese civilization! Though admiring of some Western values, such as individual freedom and our scientific traditions, which he hoped China might someday embrace in synthesis with its own humanistic values, Liang condemned wholesale imitation of the West as a false path. Western market democracy in particular he thought at odds with Chinese tradition: ‘The fundamental spirit of China was to seek harmony and synthesis, that of the West to go forward to change: a path which has been destructive of nature, and of the spirit.’ What the West would in time come to need he believed, was Confucian jen: humanity. Such hopes now seem misplaced.

  China’s contribution towards the history of humanity has been enormous. Its political system brought peace and stability for long periods to a large proportion of the population of the world: no mean achievement even today. The government may often have been harsh and autocratic, but by a thousand years ago they had developed sophisticated examinations for the selection of officials on merit which were unparalleled elsewhere till our own time. In science and technology they were far ahead of the rest of the world until the modern era. The Chinese were perhaps the finest craftsmen of any civilization; in bronzes, silk, jade, porcelain and lacquer. Their matchless calligraphy and painting are another side of their sensibility. Their literature too is full of wonderful achievements, especially in poetry. Theirs was also the earliest and longest tradition of historiography. But of all their legacies, perhaps their greatest was also the most characteristic: the ideal of harmony and reconciliation of opposites propounded by the Taoists, coupled with the Confucian vision of practical morality. At the root of their civilization lay the shamanistic culture of the Bronze Age with its reverence for the ancestors, for virtue and for the magic of writing. So deeply ingrained were these conceptions that in spite of all the vicissitudes of Chinese history, their civi
lization was able to regenerate itself without ever breaking the cultural continuity right down to the end of the empire and the communist revolution. After the terrible traumas of the twentieth century, it is not yet clear how the next renewal will come about, or whether it will draw on the past for its models as so often before. Whether Mao and his followers have indeed severed the link with the great tradition of classical China, it is, as he liked to say, too early to tell.

  But of one thing we may be tolerably sure. In the I Ching, the ancient Chinese book of divination, there is a hexagram entitled ‘Revolution.’ ‘In a revolution,’ it says, ‘two mistakes must be avoided. You must not move with excessive haste nor use excessive ruthlessness against the people. What is done must correspond to a higher truth. A revolution not founded on inner truth will come to grief; for in the end the people will support only what they feel in their hearts to be just.’ That, as Confucius would have said, is the meaning of the mandate of heaven.