HIST 2381: Mandate of Heaven Essay

HIST 2381 China Before 1800 Exam 1 (20% of final grade) Due by 23:59, Oct. 14 Write two essays to address the following questions (each essay accounts for 10% of your final grade). 1. What, in particular, was the “Mandate of Heaven” (Tianming) and what was its historical significance as a political principle? In what ways do popular interpretations of “Heaven” (see the proverbs) reflect or contradict the “Mandate of Heaven”? What does such reflection or contradiction tell about Chinese society? 2. What were the basic features of “Confucianism” and “Daoism”? What are the most significant similarities and differences between them? Make sure you present a logical argument and use appropriate, specific historical events and documents as evidence to support your argument. Simply reproduce facts and events in a pure narrative style will automatically receive a D. Evidence should be drawn from course materials, including lectures and assigned readings— both the textbook and primary sources on Brightspace. Essays failed to use course materials will automatically receive an F. Also, familiarize yourself with the “Marking Rubric” on Brightspace for details on essay writing. Format: Each essay should be 300-500 words long. Save your essays in a word document and submit it as an email attachment to the professor by 23:59, Oct. 14. The professor will reply on Oct. 15 to confirm receiving your submission. If you have emailed your exam but don’t get a confirmation reply the next day, make sure you contact the professor and resubmit ASAP. The professor is not responsible for submissions lost in the cyberspace. Since you are only using course materials, no bibliography or reference list is needed. Citations should follow this simple format: • • • For lectures: (Lecture, date). For the textbook: (Tanner, p#). For primary sources: (Divination Record, p#), (Proverbs, p#), (Confucian teachings, p#), or (Qin Law, p#). The rule is to use brief title indicators and page number in brackets. Late submission: To reiterate what’s stated in the syllabus: Late submission will be penalized 1/3 of a grade per day (e.g. A- to B+), including weekends. No exams will be accepted more than one week late without a valid medical or other excuse. CHINA A History VOLUME 1 2 CHINA A History VOLUME 1 FROM NEOLITHIC CULTURES THROUGH THE GREAT QING EMPIRE 10,000 BCE–1799 CE Harold M. Tanner Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. Indianapolis/Cambridge 3 Copyright © 2010 by Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 14 13 12 11 10 1 2 3 4 5 6 For further information, please address Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. P.O. Box 44937 Indianapolis, Indiana 46244-0937 www.hackettpublishing.com Cover design by Abigail Coyle Interior design by Elizabeth L. Wilson Maps by Tracy Ellen Smith Composition by Agnew’s, Inc. Printed at Sheridan Books, Inc. Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify the following images under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license can be found at http://www.gnu.org/licenses/ fdl-1.2-standalone.html. Oracle bone, Shang dynasty, page 47. Copyright © 2004 Herr Klubeisser. Terracotta Officer, page 91. Copyright © 2006 Tor Svensson. Terracotta Army, page 93. Copyright © 2006 Tor Svensson. Every reasonable effort has been made to contact the rights holders of copyrighted materials in this book. The author and the publisher would be grateful for any additional information and will address any errors or omissions in subsequent printings of the book. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Tanner, Harold Miles. China : a history / Harold M. Tanner. v. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. Contents: v. 1. From Neolithic cultures through the Great Qing Empire (10,000 BCE–1799 CE)—v. 2. From the Great Qing Empire through the People’s Republic of China (1644–2009). ISBN 978-1-60384-202-0 (v. 1 : paper)—ISBN 978-1-60384-203-7 (v. 1 : cloth)— ISBN 978-1-60384-204-4 (v. 2 : paper)—ISBN 978-1-60384-205-1 (v. 2 : cloth) 1. China—History. I. Title. DS735.T34 2010 951—dc22 2009048040 4 ePub ISBN: 978-1-60384-565-6 5 CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS A NOTE ON TRANSLITERATIONS ABOUT THE CHINESE CHARACTERS LIST OF MAPS CHRONOLOGY INTRODUCTION: THE LAY OF THE LAND AND THE ORIGINS OF THE CHINESE PEOPLE PART I – HIST 2381: Mandate of Heaven Essay

THE EARLY EMPIRE: BUILDING INSTITUTIONS AND IDENTITY, 2070(?) BCE–220 CE Chapter 1: From Myth to History: The Beginnings of the Chinese State and Culture in the Xia, Shang, and Western Zhou Dynasties Chapter 2: The Age of Fighting and Philosophy: The Eastern Zhou Dynasty Chapter 3: From Feudal States to Bureaucratic Empire: The Qin and Western Han Dynasties Chapter 4: The Decline and Fall of Eastern Civilization: The Xin and Eastern Han Dynasties PART II – CULTURAL INTERACTION AND TRANSFORMATION, 220– 1368 Chapter 5: The Age of Warriors and Buddhists: The Three Kingdoms, Western Jin, and the Period of North-South Division Chapter 6: A Multi-Ethnic Empire: The Sui and Tang Dynasties Chapter 7: Competing Suns in Heaven: The Song and Its Neighbors Chapter 8: China in the Mongol Empire: The Yuan Dynasty PART III – A NEW CONFUCIAN EMPIRE, 1368–1799 Chapter 9: A Model Government for the Ages: The Early to Mid-Ming Dynasty 6 Chapter 10: Wealth and Instability: The Mid- and Late Ming Chapter 11: A Manchu Empire: The Qing Dynasty to 1799 FURTHER READINGS TEXT AND ILLUSTRATION CREDITS INDEX 7 Acknowledgments My education in China’s history, language, and culture has been a long journey—both real and metaphorical—a journey in which this book marks only a milestone, not an end. It has taken me from my home in New Jersey to Taiwan and China, to London and New York City, and to my new home in Texas. The many people who have helped me along the way have enriched my knowledge and transformed my thinking, though perhaps not as thoroughly as they would have liked. Their teaching, advice, and support have made this book possible. The list of those to thank begins with my teachers: Parry Jones, who introduced me to the study of China’s history at the Princeton Day School in New Jersey; Stuart Schram, Paul Chen, and Ian Nish at London University’s School of Oriental and African Studies; and at Columbia University, Madeleine Zelin, Andrew Nathan, Tom Bernstein, Gari Ledyard, Bob Hymes, Wm. Theodore de Bary, Irene Bloom, Morris Rossabi, and Hans Beilenstein. I hope that this book reflects, at least in some small way, the breadth and depth of the education that I have been fortunate enough to receive from these and other teachers over the years. Friends and colleagues near and far also made important contributions to what turned out to be a much larger project than I had anticipated. The University of North Texas and its Department of History have been supportive, particularly in granting me a semester of paid leave during which I wrote a large portion of the manuscript. I thank Johan Elverskog for his insights on religion, the Mongols, and Central Asia, and Margherita Zanasi for her comments on a number of chapters. Special thanks are due to Sarah Schneewind. Her encouragement of this project, close reading, and frank comments on many chapters were particularly helpful and well beyond the call of duty. I have also benefited tremendously from the comments of the external reviewers for this book: Joanna Waley-Cohen, Ruth Dunnell, Paul Fischer, Charles W. Hayford, Roland Higgins, Michael Loewe, Peter Perdue, Caroline Reeves, and Roger Thompson. I am grateful to my editor, Deborah Wilkes, for recruiting such notable scholars and for performing all the other tasks required to turn my ideas into a manuscript, and the manuscript into a book. Tracy Ellen Smith of Creative Design Resources has done a remarkable job of transforming my often unrealistic ideas into 8 maps. While expressing my thanks to all those who have assisted in making this book possible, I reserve to myself the responsibility for any remaining errors or infelicities of style. Finally, but most importantly, I offer my deepest thanks to my wife, Yiyun, and our children, Sophia and William. For years, and with good grace, they have made the sacrifices that seem to go along with research and writing, allowing me to work on too many evenings, too many weekends, and too many otherwise perfectly beautiful summer days, and putting up with my trips to archives and conferences. This book is for them, with my love and affection. 9 A Note on Transliterations Chinese names in this text have been written using the Hanyu pinyin system of Romanization. Most words are pronounced roughly the way an Englishspeaker would guess. HIST 2381: Mandate of Heaven Essay

There are a few important exceptions to this rule: “c” is pronounced as “ts,” “q” as “ch,” and “x” more or less like “s.” I have used nonpinyin spellings for a few individuals and entities whose names have become universally recognized under those earlier spellings in English-language literature. Thus, Sun Yat-sen (known in Chinese as Sun Wen or Sun Yixian), Chiang Kai-shek (pinyin Jiang Jieshi), the Kwantung Army (pinyin Guandong Army), and “Manchukuo.” Mongolian names have been rendered in line with the system used in Christopher P. Atwood, Encyclopedia of Mongolian and the Mongol Empire (New York: Facts on File, 2004), ix. For Tibetan names, I have followed the system used by the International Association of Tibetan Studies (online at http://thdl.org). 10 About the Chinese Characters Chinese characters from the Zhou Dynasty divination text, the Book of Changes (Yi jing), have been used as symbols for the Introduction and for each of the three parts of this book. The Book of Changes uses sixty-four hexagrams (combinations of broken and unbroken lines) to represent the stages of change in a cyclically changing universe. The hexagrams used in this text, their names, and their meanings are as follows: Introduction: (qian) “The Creative.” The first hexagram of the Book of Changes, qian symbolizes beginnings, justice, the way of the superior man, and the primal creative force of the universe. Part I: (shihe) “Biting Through.” This, the twenty-first hexagram, refers to the establishment of institutions and the judicious, yet forceful use of laws and punishments to bring about order and harmony. Part II: (dayou) “Possession in Great Measure.” The fourteenth hexagram stands for blessings extended to all, just as the sun in the heavens shines equally on all below, bringing clarity and order to the world. Part III: (feng) “Abundance.” The fifty-fifth hexagram conveys the meaning of having surmounted challenges in order to achieve a glorious abundance, like the sun standing high in the sky at midday. 11 List of Maps Introduction 1: The People’s Republic of China and neighboring areas. Introduction 2: Major Neolithic cultures, 5000–3000 BCE. 1.1: The Shang kingdom and neighboring peoples. 1.2: The Western Zhou. 2.1: The Eastern Zhou in the Springs and Autumns period. 2.2: Major states of the Warring States period. 3.1: The expansion of the Qin Empire. 3.2: The Western Han Empire. 5.1: The Three Kingdoms. 5.2: The period of division: Northern Wei and Southern Qi, c. 480. 6.1: Rebellions in the late Sui. 6.2: The Tang Empire. 6.3: The An Lushan and Huang Chao rebellions. 7.1: The Song, Liao, and Xi Xia Empires. 7.2: The Jin, Xi Xia, and Southern Song. 8.1: Central and East Asia on the eve of the Mongolian conquests. 8.2: Chinggis Khan’s military campaigns and the Mongol Empire, c. 1230. 8.3: The Mongolian Empire, c. 1280. 9.1: The Ming Empire and the Zheng He voyages. 9.2: Defenses on the Ming northern frontier. 10.1: Military challenges in the late Ming. 11.1: The maximum extent of the Qing Empire, c. 1780. 11.2: Patterns of migration in the 18th century. 12 13 China A HISTORY 14 THE LAY OF THE LAND AND THE ORIGINS OF THE CHINESE PEOPLE Introduction At 8:08 p.m. on the eighth of August, the eighth month of 2008, China reintroduced itself to the world with the grand opening ceremony of the Beijing Summer Olympics. China’s Communist Party leaders had chosen the date and time in accord with popular superstition: the Chinese words for “eight” and “to get rich” are homophones, which makes eight a very fortunate number. The theatrical opening ceremony, the ultramodern Olympic venues, extensive investment in urban infrastructure (including a new international terminal at Beijing’s airport), and the Chinese athletes’ record haul of fifty-one gold medals (more than any other country) all stood as testimony to China’s wealth and power. An event like the Beijing Olympics is often portrayed as a symbolic moment in the history of a nation. But symbolic of what? That all depends on the way you write the history of the decades, centuries, or millennia that preceded the time of the event itself. HIST 2381: Mandate of Heaven Essay

As they watched and discussed the Beijing Olympics, Chinese and American audiences attached different meanings to the same event because they approached it with different histories of China in mind. For Chinese audiences, the opening ceremony and the games themselves symbolized a recovery of lost glory. Until the early 19th century, China had been one of the largest and most productive economies on earth and the dominant military and cultural power in East and Central Asia. Then, in the mid-19th century, came what Chinese history textbooks and politicians often refer to as a “national humiliation.” The industrialized nations of the West and Japan invaded China, took its resources, dominated its markets, stunted its economic growth, and mistreated its people. Now, in 2008, after more than a century of poverty, war, and revolution in which it had been dismissed as the “sick man of Asia,” China was back on the road to wealth and ready to join the ranks of the developed industrialized nations as an equal. 15 The People’s Republic of China and neighboring areas. Most American spectators approached the Beijing Olympics with a very different idea of China’s history. The American media portrayed the games as China’s “coming-out party.” The picture created for the American public was one of a country emerging from centuries of isolation and/or a country “opening” to the capitalist, democratic West after decades of control by an anti-Western Communist leadership. American journalists and spectators tended to interpret much of what they noticed in Beijing—Starbucks coffee, rock and roll, and Chinese fans’ enthusiasm for American basketball stars like Kobe Bryant, for instance—as encouraging signs of “opening.” Americans were also quick to point to evidence that China’s Communist leadership had not completely signed on to the spirit of “openness.” Much was made, for example, of continued government blocking of politically sensitive Web sites. These two versions of Chinese history—one Chinese, the other American —are mutually contradictory. On the one hand, we have invasion; on the other, self-imposed isolation. Both stories are fundamentally wrong. China’s history is not a drama of strength and glory, downfall at the hands of Western imperialists, and redemption through rapid economic growth, nor is it an 16 object lesson in the dangers of isolation and the value of open doors and open markets. The goal of this book, the first of two volumes, is to trace Chinese history from its beginnings around 10,000 BCE through the reign of the Qianlong emperor (r. 1736–1796) of the Qing Empire (1644–1912).Volume Two will pick up the story in the Qianlong reign and take it into the first decade of the 21st century CE. Together, the two volumes will tell the story of China in a way that goes beyond the simple but misleading narratives of glory to downfall to redemption or of isolation to opening. During the millennia covered in volume one there was, in fact, no one nation or state corresponding precisely with the people and territory of the contemporary People’s Republic of China. The story of China’s past presented in these pages is not, then, the story of a single unchanging country. It is, instead, the tale of various Paleolithic and Neolithic cultures followed by a number of dynastic governments whose territories included various parts of what are now China, Vietnam, Korea, Mongolia, Russia, and the Central Asian Republics. Nor is this the story of a single, unchanging Chinese people and culture. It is, rather, the story of how the Chinese people and their culture (including language, government, philosophy, religion, literature, architecture, art, and music) developed through centuries of interaction between the settled agricultural people of northern China’s Central Plains and the peoples of southern China, Southeast Asia, Korea, Central Asia, India, the Middle East, Europe, and, especially, the hunters, nomads, and traders of China’s Inner Asian periphery (see pg. 8). It is only appropriate, then, that we begin the story by looking at the land and its people, and by asking: What is China? And who are the people of China? HIST 2381: Mandate of Heaven Essay

The Lay of the Land The territory that we now refer to as China is vast: over 3,705,386 square miles (9,596,960 sq km), extending from over 50 degrees latitude in the north to below 20 degrees latitude in the south, from the alluvial plains and river valleys of the east to the forbidding mountains, high plateaus, and deserts of Tibet and Xinjiang in the west. This territory has been home to a variety of ethnic groups. Kingdoms and empires have risen and fallen on this huge landmass: in many cases, what we now refer to as “China” has 17 been home to two or more different kingdoms or empires at the same time. In the 20th century, we observe the emergence of a unified, modern nationstate, the Republic of China, and then the People’s Republic of China, dominated by a single large ethnic group—the Han, whom we generally call “Chinese.” In addition to the Han (who comprise 91.5 percent of China’s population), China has fifty-five other ethnic groups, or “minority nationalities” as they are called in China. The unification of all the territory and peoples now falling within the borders of the People’s Republic of China is the relatively recent product of a very long historical process. The origins of that territorial unity lie in the empire-building of the Han and later dynastic regimes and in waves of migration in which Han people, their agricultural civilization, and the power of their dynastic governments spread across the land. The process of migration and government action and the ethnic, economic, and cultural transformations that follow continue in the 21st century as Han Chinese migration changes the ethnic composition of the western areas of Tibet and Xinjiang, and as the market economy and globalization change the lifestyles and customs of all Chinese, the Han majority and the many ethnic minority peoples. The homeland of the Han people is that area which geographers refer to as “China Proper.” The territory includes the drainage areas of three major river systems and their tributaries: the Yellow River in the north, the Yangzi River in the center, and the Xi (West) River in the south. The area includes the Central Plains, the Yangzi Valley, the Guangdong (Canton) Basin, and the Sichuan Basin—the latter relatively isolated behind mountain ranges and (until recently) the forbidding Three Gorges of the Yangzi River. China Proper is well suited to settled agriculture and is the area in which the Han Chinese came to be the dominant ethnic group by the tenth century. China Proper itself may be divided into two parts, …