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The Ancient Dynasties
Chinese civilization, as described in
mythology, begins with Pangu, the creator of the
universe, and a succession of legendary sage-emperors
and culture heroes (among them are Huang Di, Yao, and
Shun) who taught the ancient Chinese to communicate and
to find sustenance, clothing, and shelter.
Xia
Dynasty
The first prehistoric dynasty is said
to be Xia , from about the twenty-first to the sixteenth
century B.C. Until scientific excavations were made at
early bronze-age sites at Anyang, Henan Province, in
1928, it was difficult to separate myth from reality in
regard to the Xia. But since then, and especially in the
1960s and 1970s, archaeologists have uncovered urban
sites, bronze implements, and tombs that point to the
existence of Xia civilization in the same locations
cited in ancient Chinese historical texts. At minimum,
the Xia period marked an evolutionary stage between the
late Neolithic cultures and the typical Chinese urban
civilization of the Shang Dynasty.
The Dawn of History
Thousands of archaeological finds in
the Huang He ( Yellow River), Henan Valley -the apparent
cradle of Chinese civilization--provide evidence about
the Shang ( dynasty, which endured roughly from 1700 to
1027 B.C. The Shang dynasty (also called the Yin dynasty
in its later stages) is believed to have been founded by
a rebel leader who overthrew the last Xia ruler. Its
civilization was based on agriculture, augmented by
hunting and animal husbandry. Two important events of
the period were the development of a writing system, as
revealed in archaic Chinese inscriptions found on
tortoise shells and flat cattle bones (commonly called
oracle bones), and the use of bronze metallurgy. A
number of ceremonial bronze vessels with inscriptions
date from the Shang period; the workmanship on the
bronzes attests to a high level of civilization.
A line of hereditary Shang kings
ruled over much of northern China, and Shang troops
fought frequent wars with neighboring settlements and
nomadic herdsmen from the inner Asian steppes. The
capitals, one of which was at the site of the modern
city of Anyang, were centers of glittering court life.
Court rituals to propitiate spirits and to honor sacred
ancestors were highly developed. In addition to his
secular position, the king was the head of the ancestor-
and spirit-worship cult. Evidence from the royal tombs
indicates that royal personages were buried with
articles of value, presumably for use in the afterlife.
Perhaps for the same reason, hundreds of commoners, who
may have been slaves, were buried alive with the royal
corpse.
The Zhou Period
The last Shang ruler, a despot
according to standard Chinese accounts, was overthrown
by a chieftain of a frontier tribe called Zhou (), which
had settled in the Wei Valley in modern Shaanxi
Province. The Zhou dynasty had its capital at Hao, near
the city of Xi'An , or Chang'an, as it was known in its
heyday in the imperial period. Sharing the language and
culture of the Shang, the early Zhou rulers, through
conquest and colonization, gradually sinicized, that is,
extended Shang culture through much of China Proper
north of the Chang Jiang (Yangtze River). The Zhou
dynasty lasted longer than any other, from 1027 to 221
B.C. It was philosophers of this period who first
enunciated the doctrine of the "mandate of heaven"
(tianming), the notion that the ruler (the "son of
heaven" ) governed by divine right but that his
dethronement would prove that he had lost the mandate.
The doctrine explained and justified the demise of the
two earlier dynasties and at the same time supported the
legitimacy of present and future rulers.
The term feudal has often been
applied to the Zhou period because the Zhou's early
decentralized rule invites comparison with medieval rule
in Europe. At most, however, the early Zhou system was
proto-feudal , being a more sophisticated version of
earlier tribal organization, in which effective control
depended more on familial ties than on feudal legal
bonds. Whatever feudal elements there may have been
decreased as time went on. The Zhou amalgam of
city-states became progressively centralized and
established increasingly impersonal political and
economic institutions. These developments, which
probably occurred in the latter Zhou period, were
manifested in greater central control over local
governments and a more reutilized agricultural taxation.
In 771 B.C. the Zhou court was
sacked, and its king was killed by invading barbarians
who were allied with rebel lords. The capital was moved
eastward to Luoyang in present-day Henan Province.
Because of this shift, historians divide the Zhou era
into Western Zhou (1027-771 B.C.) and Eastern Zhou
(770-221 B.C.). With the royal line broken, the power of
the Zhou court gradually diminished; the fragmentation
of the kingdom accelerated. Eastern Zhou divides into
two sub periods. The first, from 770 to 476 B.C., is
called the Spring and Autumn Period (), after a famous
historical chronicle of the time; the second is known as
the Warring States Period (475-221 B.C.).
The First Imperial Period
Much of what came to constitute China
Proper was unified for the first time in 221 B.C. In
that year the western frontier state of Qin, the most
aggressive of the Warring States, subjugated the last of
its rival states. (Qin in Wade-Giles Romanization is
Ch'in, from which the English China probably derived.)
Once the king of Qin consolidated his power, he took the
title Shi Huangdi (First Emperor), a formulation
previously reserved for deities and the mythological
sage-emperors, and imposed Qin's centralized,
nonhereditary bureaucratic system on his new empire. In
subjugating the six other major states of Eastern Zhou,
the Qin kings had relied heavily on Legalist
scholar-advisers. Centralization, achieved by ruthless
methods, was focused on standardizing legal codes and
bureaucratic procedures, the forms of writing and
coinage, and the pattern of thought and scholarship. To
silence criticism of imperial rule, the kings banished
or put to death many dissenting Confucian scholars and
confiscated and burned their books . Qin aggrandizement
was aided by frequent military expeditions pushing
forward the frontiers in the north and south. To fend
off barbarian intrusion, the fortification walls built
by the various warring states were connected to make a
5,000-kilometer-long great wall. What is commonly
referred to as the Great Wall is actually four great
walls rebuilt or extended during the Western Han, Sui,
Jin, and Ming periods, rather than a single, continuous
wall. At its extremities, the Great Wall reaches from
northeastern Heilongjiang Province to northwestern
Gansu. A number of public works projects were also
undertaken to consolidate and strengthen imperial rule.
These activities required enormous levies of manpower
and resources, not to mention repressive measures.
Revolts broke out as soon as the first Qin emperor died
in 210 B.C. His dynasty was extinguished less than
twenty years after its triumph. The imperial system
initiated during the Qin dynasty, however, set a pattern
that was developed over the next two millennia.
The Han Dynasty
After a short civil war, a new
dynasty, called Han (206 B.C.-A.D. 220), emerged with
its capital at Chang'an . The new empire retained much
of the Qin administrative structure but retreated a bit
from centralized rule by establishing vassal
principalities in some areas for the sake of political
convenience. The Han rulers modified some of the harsher
aspects of the previous dynasty; Confucian ideals of
government, out of favor during the Qin period, were
adopted as the creed of the Han empire, and Confucian
scholars gained prominent status as the core of the
civil service. A civil service examination system also
was initiated. Intellectual, literary, and artistic
endeavors revived and flourished. The Han period
produced China's most famous historian, Sima Qian
(145-87 B.C.?), whose Shiji (Historical Records)
provides a detailed chronicle from the time of a
legendary Xia emperor to that of the Han emperor Wu Di
(141-87 B.C.). Technological advances also marked this
period. Two of the great Chinese inventions, paper and
porcelain, date from Han times.
The Han dynasty, after which the
members of the ethnic majority in China, the "people of
Han," are named, was notable also for its military
prowess. The empire expanded westward as far as the rim
of the Tarim Basin (in modern Xinjiang-Uyghur Autonomous
Region), making possible relatively secure caravan
traffic across Central Asia to Antioch, Baghdad, and
Alexandria. The paths of caravan traffic are often
called the "silk route" because the route was used to
export Chinese silk to the Roman Empire. Chinese armies
also invaded and annexed parts of northern Vietnam and
northern Korea toward the end of the second century B.C.
Han control of peripheral regions was generally
insecure, however. To ensure peace with non-Chinese
local powers, the Han court developed a mutually
beneficial "tributary system" . Non-Chinese states were
allowed to remain autonomous in exchange for symbolic
acceptance of Han over lordship. Tributary ties were
confirmed and strengthened through intermarriages at the
ruling level and periodic exchanges of gifts and goods.
After 200 years, Han rule was
interrupted briefly (in A.D. 9-24 by Wang Mang, a
reformer), and then restored for another 200 years. The
Han rulers, however, were unable to adjust to what
centralization had wrought: a growing population,
increasing wealth and resultant financial difficulties
and rivalries, and ever-more complex political
institutions. Riddled with the corruption characteristic
of the dynastic cycle, by A.D. 220 the Han empire
collapsed.
Era of Disunity
The collapse of the Han dynasty was
followed by nearly four centuries of rule by warlords.
The age of civil wars and disunity began with the era of
the Three Kingdoms (Wei, Shu, and Wu, which had
overlapping reigns during the period A.D. 220-80). In
later times, fiction and drama greatly romanticized the
reputed chivalry of this period. Unity was restored
briefly in the early years of the Jin dynasty (A.D.
265-420), but the Jin could not long contain the
invasions of the nomadic peoples. In A.D. 317 the Jin
court was forced to flee from Luoyang and reestablished
itself at Nanjing to the south. The transfer of the
capital coincided with China's political fragmentation
into a succession of dynasties that was to last from
A.D. 304 to 589. During this period the process of
sanitization accelerated among the non-Chinese arrivals
in the north and among the aboriginal tribesmen in the
south. This process was also accompanied by the
increasing popularity of Buddhism (introduced into China
in the first century A.D.) in both north and south
China. Despite the political disunity of the times,
there were notable technological advances. The invention
of gunpowder (at that time for use only in fireworks)
and the wheelbarrow is believed to date from the sixth
or seventh century. Advances in medicine, astronomy, and
cartography are also noted by historians.
Sui Dynasty
China was reunified in A.D. 589 by
the short-lived Sui dynasty (A.D. 581-617), which has
often been compared to the earlier Qin dynasty in tenure
and the ruthlessness of its accomplishments. The Sui
dynasty's early demise was attributed to the
government's tyrannical demands on the people, who bore
the crushing burden of taxes and compulsory labor. These
resources were overstrained in the completion of the
Grand Canal(´óÔ˺Ó)
--a monumental engineering feat--and in the undertaking
of other construction projects, including the
reconstruction of the Great Wall. Weakened by costly and
disastrous military campaigns against Korea (³¯ÏÊ)in
the early seventh century, the dynasty disintegrated
through a combination of popular revolts, disloyalty,
and assassination.
Tang Dynasty
The Tang dynasty (A.D. 618-907), with
its capital at Chang'an, is regarded by historians as a
high point in Chinese civilization--equal, or even
superior, to the Han period. Its territory, acquired
through the military exploits of its early rulers, was
greater than that of the Han. Stimulated by contact with
India and the Middle East, the empire saw a flowering of
creativity in many fields. Buddhism , originating in
India around the time of Confucius, flourished during
the Tang period, becoming thoroughly sanitized and a
permanent part of Chinese traditional culture. Block
printing was invented, making the written word available
to vastly greater audiences. The Tang period was the
golden age of literature and art. A government system
supported by a large class of Confucian literati
selected through civil service examinations was
perfected under Tang rule. This competitive procedure
was designed to draw the best talents into government.
But perhaps an even greater consideration for the Tang
rulers, aware that imperial dependence on powerful
aristocratic families and warlords would have
destabilizing consequences, was to create a body of
career officials having no autonomous territorial or
functional power base. As it turned out, these
scholar-officials acquired status in their local
communities, family ties, and shared values that
connected them to the imperial court. From Tang times
until the closing days of the Qing empire in 1911,
scholar-officials functioned often as intermediaries
between the grass-roots level and the government.
By the middle of the eighth century
A.D., Tang power had ebbed. Domestic economic
instability and military defeat in 751 by Arabs at
Talas, in Central Asia, marked the beginning of five
centuries of steady military decline for the Chinese
empire. Misrule, court intrigues, economic exploitation,
and popular rebellions weakened the empire, making it
possible for northern invaders to terminate the dynasty
in 907. The next half-century saw the fragmentation of
China into five northern dynasties and ten southern
kingdoms.
Song Dynasty
But in 960 a new power, Song
(960-1279), reunified most of China Proper. The Song
period divides into two phases: Northern Song (960-1127)
and Southern Song (1127-1279). The division was caused
by the forced abandonment of north China in 1127 by the
Song court, which could not push back the nomadic
invaders.
The founders of the Song dynasty
built an effective centralized bureaucracy staffed with
civilian scholar-officials. Regional military governors
and their supporters were replaced by centrally
appointed officials. This system of civilian rule led to
a greater concentration of power in the emperor and his
palace bureaucracy than had been achieved in the
previous dynasties.
The Song dynasty is notable for the
development of cities not only for administrative
purposes but also as centers of trade, industry, and
maritime commerce. The landed scholar-officials,
sometimes collectively referred to as the gentry, lived
in the provincial centers alongside the shopkeepers,
artisans, and merchants. A new group of wealthy
commoners--the mercantile class--arose as printing and
education spread, private trade grew, and a market
economy began to link the coastal provinces and the
interior. Landholding and government employment were no
longer the only means of gaining wealth and prestige.
Culturally, the Song refined many of
the developments of the previous centuries. Included in
these refinements were not only the Tang ideal of the
universal man, who combined the qualities of scholar,
poet, painter, and statesman, but also historical
writings, painting, calligraphy, and hard-glazed
porcelain. Song intellectuals sought answers to all
philosophical and political questions in the Confucian
Classics. This renewed interest in the Confucian ideals
and society of ancient times coincided with the decline
of Buddhism, which the Chinese regarded as foreign and
offering few practical guidelines for the solution of
political and other mundane problems.
The Song Neo-Confucian philosophers,
finding a certain purity in the originality of the
ancient classical texts, wrote commentaries on them. The
most influential of these philosophers was Zhu Xi
(1130-1200), whose synthesis of Confucian thought and
Buddhist, Taoist, and other ideas became the official
imperial ideology from late Song times to the late
nineteenth century. As incorporated into the examination
system, Zhu Xi's philosophy evolved into a rigid
official creed, which stressed the one-sided obligations
of obedience and compliance of subject to ruler, child
to father, wife to husband, and younger brother to elder
brother. The effect was to inhibit the societal
development of premodern China, resulting both in many
generations of political, social, and spiritual
stability and in a slowness of cultural and
institutional change up to the nineteenth century.
Neo-Confucian doctrines also came to play the dominant
role in the intellectual life of Korea, Vietnam, and
Japan.
Mongolian Interlude
By the mid-thirteenth century, the
Mongols had subjugated north China, Korea, and the
Muslim kingdoms of Central Asia and had twice penetrated
Europe. With the resources of his vast empire, Kublai
Khan (ºö±ØÁÒ1215-94),
a grandson of Genghis Khan (³É·ªË·º±1167?-1227)
and the supreme leader of all Mongol tribes, began his
drive against the Southern Song. Even before the
extinction of the Song dynasty, Kublai Khan had
established the first alien dynasty to rule all
China--the Yuan (1279-1368).
Although the Mongols sought to
govern China through traditional institutions, using
Chinese (Han) bureaucrats, they were not up to the task.
The Han were discriminated against socially and
politically. All important central and regional posts
were monopolized by Mongols, who also preferred
employing non-Chinese from other parts of the Mongol
domain--Central Asia, the Middle East, and even
Europe--in those positions for which no Mongol could be
found. Chinese were more often employed in non-Chinese
regions of the empire.
As in other periods of alien
dynastic rule of China, a rich cultural diversity
developed during the Yuan dynasty. The major cultural
achievements were the development of drama and the novel
and the increased use of the written vernacular. The
Mongols' extensive West Asian and European contacts
produced a fair amount of cultural exchange. Western
musical instruments were introduced to enrich the
Chinese performing arts. From this period dates the
conversion to Islam, by Muslims of Central Asia, of
growing numbers of Chinese in the northwest and
southwest. Nestorianism and Roman Catholicism also
enjoyed a period of toleration. Lamaism (Tibetan
Buddhism) flourished, although native Taoism endured
Mongol persecutions. Confucian governmental practices
and examinations based on the Classics, which had fallen
into disuse in north China during the period of
disunity, were reinstated by the Mongols in the hope of
maintaining order over Han society. Advances were
realized in the fields of travel literature, cartography
and geography, and scientific education. Certain key
Chinese innovations, such as printing techniques,
porcelain production, playing cards, and medical
literature, were introduced in Europe, while the
production of thin glass and cloisonne became popular in
China. The first records of travel by Westerners date
from this time. The most famous traveler of the period
was the Venetian Marco Polo, whose account of his trip
to "Cambaluc," the Great Khan's capital (now Beijing),
and of life there astounded the people of Europe. The
Mongols undertook extensive public works. Road and water
communications were reorganized and improved. To provide
against possible famines, granaries were ordered built
throughout the empire. The city of Beijing was rebuilt
with new palace grounds that included artificial lakes,
hills and mountains, and parks. During the Yuan period,
Beijing became the terminus of the Grand Canal, which
was completely renovated. These commercially oriented
improvements encouraged overland as well as maritime
commerce throughout Asia and facilitated the first
direct Chinese contacts with Europe. Chinese and Mongol
travelers to the West were able to provide assistance in
such areas as hydraulic engineering, while bringing back
to the Middle Kingdom new scientific discoveries and
architectural innovations. Contacts with the West also
brought the introduction to China of a major new food
crop--sorghum--along with other foreign food products
and methods of preparation.
The Chinese Regain Power
Rivalry among the Mongol imperial
heirs, natural disasters, and numerous peasant uprisings
led to the collapse of the Yuan dynasty. The Ming
dynasty (1368-1644) was founded by a Han Chinese peasant
and former Buddhist monk turned rebel army leader (ÖìÔªè°).
Having its capital first at Nanjing (Äϵ©which
means Southern Capital) and later at Beijing (±±µ©or
Northern Capital), the Ming reached the zenith of power
during the first quarter of the fifteenth century. The
Chinese armies reconquered Annam (°²ÄÏ),
as northern Vietnam was then known, in Southeast Asia
and kept back the Mongols, while the Chinese fleet
sailed the China seas and the Indian Ocean, cruising as
far as the east coast of Africa. The maritime Asian
nations sent envoys with tribute for the Chinese
emperor. Internally, the Grand Canal was expanded to its
farthest limits and proved to be a stimulus to domestic
trade.
The Ming maritime expeditions stopped
rather suddenly after 1433, the date of the last voyage.
Historians have given as one of the reasons the great
expense of large-scale expeditions at a time of
preoccupation with northern defenses against the
Mongols. Opposition at court also may have been a
contributing factor, as conservative officials found the
concept of expansion and commercial ventures alien to
Chinese ideas of government. Pressure from the powerful
Neo-Confucian bureaucracy led to a revival of strict
agrarian-centered society. The stability of the Ming
dynasty, which was without major disruptions of the
population (then around 100 million), economy, arts,
society, or politics, promoted a belief among the
Chinese that they had achieved the most satisfactory
civilization on earth and that nothing foreign was
needed or welcome.
Long wars with the Mongols,
incursions by the Japanese into Korea, and harassment of
Chinese coastal cities by the Japanese in the sixteenth
century weakened Ming rule, which became, as earlier
Chinese dynasties had, ripe for an alien takeover. In
1644 the Manchus took Beijing from the north and became
masters of north China, establishing the last imperial
dynasty, the Qing (1644-1911).
The Rise of the Manchus
Although the Manchus were not Han
Chinese and were strongly resisted, especially in the
south, they had assimilated a great deal of Chinese
culture before conquering China Proper. Realizing that
to dominate the empire they would have to do things the
Chinese way, the Manchus retained many institutions of
Ming and earlier Chinese derivation. They continued the
Confucian court practices and temple rituals, over which
the emperors had traditionally presided.
The Manchus continued the Confucian
civil service system. Although Chinese were barred from
the highest offices, Chinese officials predominated over
Manchu officeholders outside the capital, except in
military positions. The Neo-Confucian philosophy,
emphasizing the obedience of subject to ruler, was
enforced as the state creed. The Manchu emperors also
supported Chinese literary and historical projects of
enormous scope; the survival of much of China's ancient
literature is attributed to these projects.
Ever suspicious of Han Chinese, the
Qing rulers put into effect measures aimed at preventing
the absorption of the Manchus into the dominant Han
Chinese population. Han Chinese were prohibited from
migrating into the Manchu homeland, and Manchus were
forbidden to engage in trade or manual labor.
Intermarriage between the two groups was forbidden. In
many government positions a system of dual appointments
was used--the Chinese appointee was required to do the
substantive work and the Manchu to ensure Han loyalty to
Qing rule.
The Qing regime was determined to
protect itself not only from internal rebellion but also
from foreign invasion. After China Proper had been
subdued, the Manchus conquered Outer Mongolia (now the
Mongolian People's Republic) in the late seventeenth
century. In the eighteenth century they gained control
of Central Asia as far as the Pamir Mountains and
established a protectorate over the area the Chinese
call XiZang (Tibet) but commonly known in the West as
Tibet. The Qing thus became the first dynasty to
eliminate successfully all danger to China Proper from
across its land borders. Under Manchu rule the empire
grew to include a larger area than before or since;
Taiwan, the last outpost of anti-Manchu resistance, was
also incorporated into China for the first time. In
addition, Qing emperors received tribute from the
various border states.
The chief threat to China's integrity
did not come overland, as it had so often in the past,
but by sea, reaching the southern coastal area first.
Western traders, missionaries, and soldiers of fortune
began to arrive in large numbers even before the Qing,
in the sixteenth century. The empire's inability to
evaluate correctly the nature of the new challenge or to
respond flexibly to it resulted in the demise of the
Qing and the collapse of the entire millennia-old
framework of dynastic rule.
Republic of China
The republic that Sun Yat-sen and his
associates envisioned evolved slowly. The revolutionists
lacked an army, and the power of Yuan Shikai began to
outstrip that of parliament. Yuan revised the
constitution at will and became dictatorial. In August
1912 a new political party was founded by Song Jiaoren
(1882-1913), one of Sun's associates. The party, the
Guomindang Kuomintang or KMT--the National People's
Party, frequently referred to as the Nationalist Party),
was an amalgamation of small political groups, including
Sun's Tongmeng Hui . In the national elections held in
February 1913 for the new bicameral parliament, Song
campaigned against the Yuan administration, and his
party won a majority of seats. Yuan had Song
assassinated in March; he had already arranged the
assassination of several pro-revolutionist generals.
Animosity toward Yuan grew. In the summer of 1913 seven
southern provinces rebelled against Yuan. When the
rebellion was suppressed, Sun and other instigators fled
to Japan. In October 1913 an intimidated parliament
formally elected Yuan president of the Republic of
China, and the major powers extended recognition to his
government. To achieve international recognition, Yuan
Shikai had to agree to autonomy for Outer Mongolia and
Xizang (Î÷²Ø).
China was still to be suzerain, but it would have to
allow Russia a free hand in Outer Mongolia and Britain
continuance of its influence in Xizang.
In November Yuan Shikai, legally
president, ordered the Guomindang dissolved and its
members removed from parliament. Within a few months, he
suspended parliament and the provincial assemblies and
forced the promulgation of a new constitution, which, in
effect, made him president for life. Yuan's ambitions
still were not satisfied, and, by the end of 1915, it
was announced that he would reestablish the monarchy.
Widespread rebellions ensued, and numerous provinces
declared independence. With opposition at every quarter
and the nation breaking up into warlord factions, Yuan
Shikai died of natural causes in June 1916, deserted by
his lieutenants.
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