(A) The Mongol Epoch (1280-1368)
1 Beginning of new foreign rules
During more than half of the third period of “Modern Times” which
now began, China was under alien rule. Of the 631 years from 1280 to
1911, China was under national rulers for 276 years and under alien
rule for 355. The alien rulers were first the Mongols, and later the
Tungus Manchus. It is interesting to note that the alien rulers in the
earlier period came mainly from the north-west, and only in modern
times did peoples from the north-east rule over China. This was due in
part to the fact that only peoples who had attained a certain level of
civilization were capable of dominance. In antiquity and the Middle
Ages, eastern Mongolia and Manchuria were at a relatively low level of
civilization, from which they emerged only gradually through permanent
contact with other nomad peoples, especially Turks. We are dealing
here, of course, only with the Mongol epoch in China and not with the
great Mongol empire, so that we need not enter further into these
questions.
Yet another point is characteristic: the Mongols were the first
alien people to rule the whole of China; the Manchus, who appeared in
the seventeenth century, were the second and last. All alien peoples
before these two ruled only parts of China. Why was it that the Mongols
were able to be so much more successful than their predecessors? In the
first place the Mongol political league was numerically stronger than
those of the earlier alien peoples; secondly, the military organization
and technical equipment of the Mongols were exceptionally advanced for
their day. It must be borne in mind, for instance, that during their
many years of war against the Sung dynasty in South China the Mongols
already made use of small cannon in laying siege to towns. We have no
exact knowledge of the number of Mongols who invaded and occupied
China, but it is estimated that there were more than a million Mongols
living in China. Not all of them, of course, were really Mongols! The
name covered Turks, Tunguses, and others; among the auxiliaries of the
Mongols were Uighurs, men from Central Asia and the Middle East, and
even Europeans. When the Mongols attacked China they had the advantage
of all the arts and crafts and all the new technical advances of
western and central Asia and of Europe. Thus they had attained a high
degree of technical progress, and at the same time their number was
very great.
2 “Nationality legislation“
It was only after the Hsia empire in North China, and then the
empire of the Juchen, had been destroyed by the Mongols, and only after
long and remarkably modern tactical preparation, that the Mongols
conquered South China, the empire of the Sung dynasty. They were now
faced with the problem of ruling their great new empire. The conqueror
of that empire, Kublai, himself recognized that China could not be
treated in quite the same way as the Mongols' previous conquests; he
therefore separated the empire in China from the rest of the Mongol
empire. Mongol China became an independent realm within the Mongol
empire, a sort of Dominion. The Mongol rulers were well aware that in
spite of their numerical strength they were still only a minority in
China, and this implied certain dangers. They therefore elaborated a
“nationality legislation", the first of its kind in the Far East. The
purpose of this legislation was, of course, to be the protection of the
Mongols. The population of conquered China was divided into four
groups—(1) Mongols, themselves falling into four sub-groups (the
oldest Mongol tribes, the White Tatars, the Black Tatars, the Wild
Tatars); (2) Central Asian auxiliaries (Naimans, Uighurs, and various
other Turkish people, Tanguts, and so on); (3) North Chinese; (4) South
Chinese. The Mongols formed the privileged ruling class. They remained
militarily organized, and were distributed in garrisons over all the
big towns of China as soldiers, maintained by the state. All the higher
government posts were reserved for them, so that they also formed the
heads of the official staffs. The auxiliary peoples were also admitted
into the government service; they, too, had privileges, but were not
all soldiers but in many cases merchants, who used their privileged
position to promote business. Not a few of these merchants were Uighurs
and Mohammedans; many Uighurs were also employed as clerks, as the
Mongols were very often unable to read and write Chinese, and the
government offices were bilingual, working in Mongolian and Chinese.
The clever Uighurs quickly learned enough of both languages for
official purposes, and made themselves indispensable assistants to the
Mongols. Persian, the main language of administration in the western
parts of the Mongol empire besides Uighuric, also was a lingua
franca among the new rulers of China.
In the Mongol legislation the South Chinese had the lowest status,
and virtually no rights. Intermarriage with them was prohibited. The
Chinese were not allowed to carry arms. For a time they were forbidden
even to learn the Mongol or other foreign languages. In this way they
were to be prevented from gaining official positions and playing any
political part. Their ignorance of the languages of northern, central,
and western Asia also prevented them from engaging in commerce like the
foreign merchants, and every possible difficulty was put in the way of
their travelling for commercial purposes. On the other hand, foreigners
were, of course, able to learn Chinese, and so to gain a footing in
Chinese internal trade.
Through legislation of this type the Mongols tried to build up and
to safeguard their domination over China. Yet their success did not
last a hundred years.
3 Military position
In foreign affairs the Mongol epoch was for China something of a
breathing space, for the great wars of the Mongols took place at a
remote distance from China and without any Chinese participation. Only
a few concluding wars were fought under Kublai in the Far East. The
first was his war against Japan (1281): it ended in complete failure,
the fleet being destroyed by a storm. In this campaign the Chinese
furnished ships and also soldiers. The subjection of Japan would have
been in the interest of the Chinese, as it would have opened a market
which had been almost closed against them in the Sung period. Mongol
wars followed in the south. In 1282 began the war against Burma; in
1284 Annam and Cambodia were conquered; in 1292 a campaign was started
against Java. It proved impossible to hold Java, but almost the whole
of Indo-China came under Mongol rule, to the satisfaction of the
Chinese, for Indo-China had already been one of the principal export
markets in the Sung period. After that, however, there was virtually no
more warfare, apart from small campaigns against rebellious tribes. The
Mongol soldiers now lived on their pay in their garrisons, with nothing
to do. The old campaigners died and were followed by their sons,
brought up also as soldiers; but these young Mongols were born in
China, had seen nothing of war, and learned of the soldiers' trade
either nothing or very little; so that after about 1320 serious things
happened. An army nominally 1,000 strong was sent against a group of
barely fifty bandits and failed to defeat them. Most of the 1,000
soldiers no longer knew how to use their weapons, and many did not even
join the force. Such incidents occurred again and again.
4 Social situation
The results, however, of conditions within the country were of much
more importance than events abroad. The Mongols made Peking their
capital as was entirely natural, for Peking was near their homeland
Mongolia. The emperor and his entourage could return to Mongolia in the
summer, when China became too hot or too humid for them; and from
Peking they were able to maintain contact with the rest of the Mongol
empire. But as the city had become the capital of a vast empire, an
enormous staff of officials had to be housed there, consisting of
persons of many different nationalities. The emperor naturally wanted
to have a magnificent capital, a city really worthy of so vast an
empire. As the many wars had brought in vast booty, there was money for
the building of great palaces, of a size and magnificence never before
seen in China. They were built by Chinese forced labour, and to this
end men had to be brought from all over the empire—poor peasants,
whose fields went out of cultivation while they were held in bondage
far away. If they ever returned home, they were destitute and had lost
their land. The rich gentry, on the other hand, were able to buy
immunity from forced labour. The immense increase in the population of
Peking (the huge court with its enormous expenditure, the mass of
officials, the great merchant community, largely foreigners, and the
many servile labourers), necessitated vast supplies of food. Now, as
mentioned in earlier chapters, since the time of the Later T'ang the
region round Nanking had become the main centre of production in China,
and the Chinese population had gone over more and more to the
consumption of rice instead of pulse or wheat. As rice could not be
grown in the north, practically the whole of the food supplies for the
capital had to be brought from the south. The transport system taken
over by the Mongols had not been created for long-distance traffic of
this sort. The capital of the Sung had lain in the main centre of
production. Consequently, a great fleet had suddenly to be built,
canals and rivers had to be regulated, and some new canals excavated.
This again called for a vast quantity of forced labour, often brought
from afar to the points at which it was needed. The Chinese peasants
had suffered in the Sung period. They had been exploited by the large
landowners. The Mongols had not removed these landowners, as the
Chinese gentry had gone over to their side. The Mongols had deprived
them of their political power, but had left them their estates, the
basis of their power. In past changes of dynasty the gentry had either
maintained their position or been replaced by a new gentry: the total
number of their class had remained virtually unchanged. Now, however,
in addition to the original gentry there were about a million Mongols,
for whose maintenance the peasants had also to provide, and their
standard of maintenance was high. This was an enormous increase in the
burdens of the peasantry.
Two other elements further pressed on the peasants in the Mongol
epoch—organized religion and the traders. The upper classes among the
Chinese had in general little interest in religion, but the Mongols,
owing to their historical development, were very religious. Some of
them and some of their allies were Buddhists, some were still
shamanists. The Chinese Buddhists and the representatives of popular
Taoism approached the Mongols and the foreign Buddhist monks trying to
enlist the interest of the Mongols and their allies. The old shamanism
was unable to compete with the higher religions, and the Mongols in
China became Buddhist or interested themselves in popular Taoism. They
showed their interest especially by the endowment of temples and
monasteries. The temples were given great estates, and the peasants on
those estates became temple servants. The land belonging to the temples
was free from taxation.
We have as yet no exact statistics of the Mongol epoch, only
approximations. These set the total area under cultivation at some six
million ch'ing (a ch'ing is the ideal size of the farm
worked by a peasant family, but it was rarely held in practice); the
population amounted to fourteen or fifteen million families. Of this
total tillage some 170,000 ch'ing were allotted to the temples;
that is to say, the farms for some 400,000 peasant families were taken
from the peasants and no longer paid taxes to the state. The peasants,
however, had to make payments to the temples. Some 200,000 ch'ing
with some 450,000 peasant families were turned into military
settlements; that is to say, these peasants had to work for the needs
of the army. Their taxes went not to the state but to the army.
Moreover, in the event of war they had to render service to the army.
In addition to this, all higher officials received official properties,
the yield of which represented part payment of their salaries. Then,
Mongol nobles and dignitaries received considerable grants of land,
which was taken away from the free peasants; the peasants had then to
work their farms as tenants and to pay dues to their landlords, no
longer to the state. Finally, especially in North China, many peasants
were entirely dispossessed, and their land was turned into pasturage
for the Mongols' horses; the peasants themselves were put to forced
labour. On top of this came the exploitation of the peasants by the
great landowners of the past. All this meant an enormous diminution in
the number of free peasants and thus of taxpayers. As the state was
involved in more expenditure than in the past owing to the large number
of Mongols who were its virtual pensioners, the taxes had to be
continually increased. Meanwhile the many peasants working as tenants
of the great landlords, the temples, and the Mongol nobles were
entirely at their mercy. In this period, a second migration of farmers
into the southern provinces, mainly Fukien and Kwangtung, took place;
it had its main source in the lower Yangtze valley. A few gentry
families whose relatives had accompanied the Sung emperor on their
flight to the south, also settled with their followers in the Canton
basin.
The many merchants from abroad, especially those belonging to the
peoples allied to the Mongols, also had in every respect a privileged
position in China. They were free of taxation, free to travel all over
the country, and received privileged treatment in the use of means of
transport. They were thus able to accumulate great wealth, most of
which went out of China to their own country. This produced a general
impoverishment of China. Chinese merchants fell more and more into
dependence on the foreign merchants; the only field of action really
remaining to them was the local trade within China and the trade with
Indo-China, where the Chinese had the advantage of knowing the
language.
The impoverishment of China began with the flow abroad of her
metallic currency. To make up for this loss, the government was
compelled to issue great quantities of paper money, which very quickly
depreciated, because after a few years the government would no longer
accept the money at its face value, so that the population could place
no faith in it. The depreciation further impoverished the people.
Thus we have in the Mongol epoch in China the imposing picture of a
commerce made possible with every country from Europe to the Pacific;
this, however, led to the impoverishment of China. We also see the
rising of mighty temples and monumental buildings, but this again only
contributed to the denudation of the country. The Mongol epoch was thus
one of continual and rapid impoverishment in China, simultaneously with
a great display of magnificence. The enthusiastic descriptions of the
Mongol empire in China offered by travellers from the Near East or from
Europe, such as Marco Polo, give an entirely false picture: as
foreigners they had a privileged position, living in the cities and
seeing nothing of the situation of the general population.
5 Popular risings: National rising
It took time for the effects of all these factors to become evident.
The first popular rising came in 1325. Statistics of 1329 show that
there were then some 7,600,000 persons in the empire who were starving;
as this was only the figure of the officially admitted sufferers, the
figure may have been higher. In any case, seven-and-a-half millions
were a substantial percentage of the total population, estimated at
45,000,000. The risings that now came incessantly were led by men of
the lower orders—a cloth-seller, a fisherman, a peasant, a salt
smuggler, the son of a soldier serving a sentence, an office messenger,
and so on. They never attacked the Mongols as aliens, but always the
rich in general, whether Chinese or foreign. Wherever they came, they
killed all the rich and distributed their money and possessions.
As already mentioned, the Mongol garrisons were unable to cope with
these risings. But how was it that the Mongol rule did not collapse
until some forty years later? The Mongols parried the risings by
raising loans from the rich and using the money to recruit volunteers
to fight the rebels. The state revenues would not have sufficed for
these payments, and the item was not one that could be included in the
military budget. What was of much more importance was that the gentry
themselves recruited volunteers and fought the rebels on their own
account, without the authority or the support of the government. Thus
it was the Chinese gentry, in their fear of being killed by the
insurgents, who fought them and so bolstered up the Mongol rule.
In 1351 the dykes along the Yellow River burst. The dykes had to be
reconstructed and further measures of conservancy undertaken. To this
end the government impressed 170,000 men. Following this action, great
new revolts broke out. Everywhere in Honan, Kiangsu, and Shantung, the
regions from which the labourers were summoned, revolutionary groups
were formed, some of them amounting to 100,000 men. Some groups had a
religious tinge; others declared their intention to restore the
emperors of the Sung dynasty. Before long great parts of central China
were wrested from the hands of the government. The government
recognized the menace to its existence, but resorted to contradictory
measures. In 1352 southern Chinese were permitted to take over certain
official positions. In this way it was hoped to gain the full support
of the gentry, who had a certain interest in combating the rebel
movements. On the other hand, the government tightened up its
nationality laws. All the old segregation laws were brought back into
force, with the result that in a few years the aim of the rebels became
no longer merely the expulsion of the rich but also the expulsion of
the Mongols: a social movement thus became a national one. A second
element contributed to the change in the character of the popular
rising. The rebels captured many towns. Some of these towns refused to
fight and negotiated terms of submission. In these cases the rebels did
not murder the whole of the gentry, but took some of them into their
service. The gentry did not agree to this out of sympathy with the
rebels, but simply in order to save their own lives. Once they had
taken the step, however, they could not go back; they had no
alternative but to remain on the side of the rebels.
In 1352 Kuo Tz[)u]-hsing rose in southern Honan. Kuo was the son of
a wandering soothsayer and a blind beggar-woman. He had success; his
group gained control of a considerable region round his home. There was
no longer any serious resistance from the Mongols, for at this time the
whole of eastern China was in full revolt. In 1353 Kuo was joined by a
man named Chu Yuean-chang, the son of a small peasant, probably a
tenant farmer. Chu's parents and all his relatives had died from a
plague, leaving him destitute. He had first entered a monastery and
become a monk. This was a favourite resource—and has been almost to
the present day—for poor sons of peasants who were threatened with
starvation. As a monk he had gone about begging, until in 1353 he
returned to his home and collected a group, mostly men from his own
village, sons of peasants and young fellows who had already been
peasant leaders. Monks were often peasant leaders. They were trusted
because they promised divine aid, and because they were usually rather
better educated than the rest of the peasants. Chu at first also had
contacts with a secret society, a branch of the White Lotus Society
which several times in the course of Chinese history has been the
nucleus of rebellious movements. Chu took his small group which
identified itself by a red turban and a red banner to Kuo, who received
him gladly, entered into alliance with him, and in sign of friendship
gave him his daughter in marriage. In 1355 Kuo died, and Chu took over
his army, now many thousands strong. In his campaigns against towns in
eastern China, Chu succeeded in winning over some capable members of
the gentry. One was the chairman of a committee that yielded a town to
Chu; another was a scholar whose family had always been opposed to the
Mongols, and who had himself suffered injustice several times in his
official career, so that he was glad to join Chu out of hatred of the
Mongols.
These men gained great influence over Chu, and persuaded him to give
up attacking rich individuals, and instead to establish an assured
control over large parts of the country. He would then, they pointed
out, be permanently enriched, while otherwise he would only be in funds
at the moment of the plundering of a town. They set before him
strategic plans with that aim. Through their counsel Chu changed from
the leader of a popular rising into a fighter against the dynasty. Of
all the peasant leaders he was now the only one pursuing a definite
aim. He marched first against Nanking, the great city of central China,
and captured it with ease. He then crossed the Yangtze, and conquered
the rich provinces of the south-east. He was a rebel who no longer
slaughtered the rich or plundered the towns, and the whole of the
gentry with all their followers came over to him en masse. The
armies of volunteers went over to Chu, and the whole edifice of the
dynasty collapsed.
The years 1355-1368 were full of small battles. After his conquest
of the whole of the south, Chu went north. In 1368 his generals
captured Peking almost without a blow. The Mongol ruler fled on
horseback with his immediate entourage into the north of China, and
soon after into Mongolia. The Mongol dynasty had been brought down,
almost without resistance. The Mongols in the isolated garrisons
marched northward wherever they could. A few surrendered to the Chinese
and were used in southern China as professional soldiers, though they
were always regarded with suspicion. The only serious resistance
offered came from the regions in which other Chinese popular leaders
had established themselves, especially the remote provinces in the west
and south-west, which had a different social structure and had been
relatively little affected by the Mongol regime.
Thus the collapse of the Mongols came for the following reasons: (1)
They had not succeeded in maintaining their armed strength or that of
their allies during the period of peace that followed Kublai's
conquest. The Mongol soldiers had become effeminate through their life
of idleness in the towns. (2) The attempt to rule the empire through
Mongols or other aliens, and to exclude the Chinese gentry entirely
from the administration, failed through insufficient knowledge of the
sources of revenue and through the abuses due to the favoured treatment
of aliens. The whole country, and especially the peasantry, was
completely impoverished and so driven into revolt. (3) There was also a
psychological reason. In the middle of the fourteenth century it was
obvious to the Mongols that their hold over China was growing more and
more precarious, and that there was little to be got out of the
impoverished country: they seem in consequence to have lost interest in
the troublesome task of maintaining their rule, preferring, in so far
as they had not already entirely degenerated, to return to their old
home in the north. It is important to bear in mind these reasons for
the collapse of the Mongols, so that we may compare them later with the
reasons for the collapse of the Manchus.
No mention need be made here of the names of the Mongol rulers in
China after Kublai. After his death in 1294, grandsons and
great-grandsons of his followed each other in rapid succession on the
throne; not one of them was of any personal significance. They had no
influence on the government of China. Their life was spent in
intriguing against one another. There were seven Mongol emperors after
Kublai.
6 Cultural
During the Mongol epoch a large number of the Chinese scholars
withdrew from official life. They lived in retirement among their
friends, and devoted themselves mainly to the pursuit of the art of
poetry, which had been elaborated in the Later Sung epoch, without
themselves arriving at any important innovations in form. Their poems
were built up meticulously on the rules laid down by the various
schools; they were routine productions rather than the outcome of any
true poetic inspiration. In the realm of prose the best achievements
were the “miscellaneous notes” already mentioned, collections of
learned essays. The foreigners who wrote in Chinese during this epoch
are credited with no better achievements by the Chinese historians of
literature. Chief of them were a statesman named Yeh-lue Ch'u-ts'ai, a
Kitan in the service of the Mongols; and a Mongol named T'o-t'o
(Tokto). The former accompanied Genghiz Khan in his great campaign
against Turkestan, and left a very interesting account of his journeys,
together with many poems about Samarkand and Turkestan. His other works
were mainly letters and poems addressed to friends. They differ in no
way in style from the Chinese literary works of the time, and are
neither better nor worse than those works. He shows strong traces of
Taoist influence, as do other contemporary writers. We know that
Genghiz Khan was more or less inclined to Taoism, and admitted a Taoist
monk to his camp (1221-1224). This man's account of his travels has
also been preserved, and with the numerous European accounts of Central
Asia written at this time it forms an important source. The Mongol
Tokto was the head of an historical commission that issued the annals
of the Sung dynasty, the Kitan, and the Juchen dynasty. The annals of
the Sung dynasty became the largest of all the historical works, but
they were fiercely attacked from the first by Chinese critics on
account of their style and their hasty composition, and, together with
the annals of the Mongol dynasty, they are regarded as the worst of the
annals preserved. Tokto himself is less to blame for this than the
circumstance that he was compelled to work in great haste, and had not
time to put into order the overwhelming mass of his material.
The greatest literary achievements, however, of the Mongol period
belong beyond question to the theatre (or, rather, opera). The emperors
were great theatre-goers, and the wealthy private families were also
enthusiasts, so that gradually people of education devoted themselves
to writing librettos for the operas, where in the past this work had
been left to others. Most of the authors of these librettos remained
unknown: they used pseudonyms, partly because playwriting was not an
occupation that befitted a scholar, and partly because in these works
they criticized the conditions of their day. These works are divided in
regard to style into two groups, those of the “southern” and the
“northern” drama; these are distinguished from each other in musical
construction and in their intellectual attitude: in general the
northern works are more heroic and the southern more sentimental,
though there are exceptions. The most famous northern works of the
Mongol epoch are P'i-p'a-chi (“The Story of a Lute"), written
about 1356, probably by Kao Ming, and Chao-shih ku-erh-chi (“The
Story of the Orphan of Chao “), a work that enthralled Voltaire, who
made a paraphrase of it; its author was the otherwise unknown Chi
Chuen-hsiang. One of the most famous of the southern dramas is
Hsi-hsiang-chi (“The Romance of the Western Chamber"), by Wang
Shih-fu and Kuan Han-ch'ing. Kuan lived under the Juchen dynasty as a
physician, and then among the Mongols. He is said to have written
fifty-eight dramas, many of which became famous.
In the fine arts, foreign influence made itself felt during the
Mongol epoch much more than in literature. This was due in part to the
Mongol rulers' predilection for the Lamaism that was widespread in
their homeland. Lamaism is a special form of Buddhism which developed
in Tibet, where remnants of the old national Tibetan cult (Bon)
were fused with Buddhism into a distinctive religion. During the rise
of the Mongols this religion, which closely resembled the shamanism of
the ancient Mongols, spread in Mongolia, and through the Mongols it
made great progress in China, where it had been insignificant until
their time. Religious sculpture especially came entirely under Tibetan
influence (particularly that of the sculptor Aniko, who came from
Nepal, where he was born in 1244). This influence was noticeable in the
Chinese sculptor Liu Yuean; after him it became stronger and stronger,
lasting until the Manchu epoch.
In architecture, too, Indian and Tibetan influence was felt in this
period. The Tibetan pagodas came into special prominence alongside the
previously known form of pagoda, which has many storeys, growing
smaller as they go upward; these towers originally contained relics of
Buddha and his disciples. The Tibetan pagoda has not this division into
storeys, and its lower part is much larger in circumference, and often
round. To this day Peking is rich in pagodas in the Tibetan style.
The Mongols also developed in China the art of carpet-knotting,
which to this day is found only in North China in the zone of northern
influence. There were carpets before these, but they were mainly of
felt. The knotted carpets were produced in imperial workshops—only, of
course, for the Mongols, who were used to carpets. A further
development probably also due to West Asian influence was that of
cloisonne technique in China in this period.
Painting, on the other hand, remained free from alien influence,
with the exception of the craft painting for the temples. The most
famous painters of the Mongol epoch were Chao Meng-fu (also called Chao
Chung-mu, 1254-1322), a relative of the deposed imperial family of the
Sung dynasty, and Ni Tsan (1301-1374).
(B) The Ming Epoch (1368-1644)
1 Start. National feeling
It was necessary to give special attention to the reasons for the
downfall of Mongol rule in China, in order to make clear the cause and
the character of the Ming epoch that followed it. It is possible that
the erroneous impression might be gained that the Mongol epoch in China
was entirely without merits, and that the Mongol rule over China
differed entirely from the Mongol rule over other countries of Asia.
Chinese historians have no good word to say of the Mongol epoch and
avoid the subject as far as they can. It is true that the union of the
national Mongol culture with Chinese culture, as envisaged by the
Mongol rulers, was not a sound conception, and consequently did not
endure for long. Nevertheless, the Mongol epoch in China left indelible
traces, and without it China's further development would certainly have
taken a different course.
The many popular risings during the latter half of the period of
Mongol rule in China were all of a purely economic and social
character, and at first they were not directed at all against the
Mongols as representatives of an alien people. The rising under Chu
Yuean-chang, which steadily gained impetus, was at first a purely
social movement; indeed, it may fairly be called revolutionary. Chu was
of the humblest origin; he became a monk and a peasant leader at one
and the same time. Only three times in Chinese history has a man of the
peasantry become emperor and founder of a dynasty. The first of these
three men founded the Han dynasty; the second founded the first of the
so-called “Five Dynasties” in the tenth century; Chu was the third.
Not until the Mongols had answered Chu's rising with a tightening of
the nationality laws did the revolutionary movement become a national
movement, directed against the foreigners as such. And only when Chu
came under the influence of the first people of the gentry who joined
him, whether voluntarily or perforce, did what had been a revolutionary
movement become a struggle for the substitution of one dynasty for
another without interfering with the existing social system. Both these
points were of the utmost importance to the whole development of the
Ming epoch.
The Mongols were driven out fairly quickly and without great
difficulty. The Chinese drew from the ease of their success a sense of
superiority and a clear feeling of nationalism. This feeling should not
be confounded with the very old feeling of Chinese as a culturally
superior group according to which, at least in theory though rarely in
practice, every person who assimilated Chinese cultural values and
traits was a “Chinese”. The roots of nationalism seem to lie in the
Southern Sung period, growing up in the course of contacts with the
Juchen and Mongols; but the discriminatory laws of the Mongols greatly
fostered this feeling. From now on, it was regarded a shame to serve a
foreigner as official, even if he was a ruler of China.
2 Wars against Mongols and Japanese
It had been easy to drive the Mongols out of China, but they were
never really beaten in their own country. On the contrary, they seem to
have regained strength after their withdrawal from China: they
reorganized themselves and were soon capable of counter-thrusts, while
Chinese offensives had as a rule very little success, and at all events
no decisive success. In the course of time, however, the Chinese gained
a certain influence over Turkestan, but it was never absolute, always
challenged. After the Mongol empire had fallen to pieces, small states
came into existence in Turkestan, for a long time with varying
fortunes; the most important one during the Ming epoch was that of
Hami, until in 1473 it was occupied by the city-state of Turfan. At
this time China actively intervened in the policy of Turkestan in a
number of combats with the Mongols. As the situation changed from time
to time, these city-states united more or less closely with China or
fell away from her altogether. In this period, however, Turkestan was
of no military or economic importance to China.
In the time of the Ming there also began in the east and south the
plague of Japanese piracy. Japanese contacts with the coastal provinces
of China (Kiangsu, Chekiang and Fukien) had a very long history:
pilgrims from Japan often went to these places in order to study
Buddhism in the famous monasteries of Central China; businessmen sold
at high prices Japanese swords and other Japanese products here and
bought Chinese products; they also tried to get Chinese copper coins
which had a higher value in Japan. Chinese merchants co-operated with
Japanese merchants and also with pirates in the guise of merchants.
Some Chinese who were or felt persecuted by the government, became
pirates themselves. This trade-piracy had started already at the end of
the Sung dynasty, when Japanese navigation had become superior to
Korean shipping which had in earlier times dominated the eastern
seaboard. These conditions may even have been one of the reasons why
the Mongols tried to subdue Japan. As early as 1387 the Chinese had to
begin the building of fortifications along the eastern and southern
coasts of the country; The Japanese attacks now often took the
character of organized raids: a small, fast-sailing flotilla would land
in a bay, as far as possible without attracting notice; the soldiers
would march against the nearest town, generally overcoming it, looting,
and withdrawing. The defensive measures adopted from time to time
during the Ming epoch were of little avail, as it was impossible
effectively to garrison the whole coast. Some of the coastal
settlements were transferred inland, to prevent the Chinese from
co-operating with the Japanese, and to give the Japanese so long a
march inland as to allow time for defensive measures. The Japanese
pirates prevented the creation of a Chinese navy in this period by
their continual threats to the coastal cities in which the shipyards
lay. Not until much later, at a time of unrest in Japan in 1467, was
there any peace from the Japanese pirates.
The Japanese attacks were especially embarrassing for the Chinese
government for one other reason. Large armies had to be kept all along
China's northern border, from Manchuria to Central Asia. Food supplies
could not be collected in north China which did not have enough
surplusses. Canal transportation from Central China was not reliable,
as the canals did not always have enough water and were often clogged
by hundreds of ships. And even if canals were used, grain still had to
be transported by land from the end of the canals to the frontier. The
Ming government therefore, had organized an overseas flotilla of grain
ships which brought grain from Central China directly to the front in
Liao-tung and Manchuria. And these ships, vitally important, were so
often attacked by the pirates, that this plan later had to be given up
again.
These activities along the coast led the Chinese to the belief that
basically all foreigners who came by ships were “barbarians”; when
towards the end of the Ming epoch the Japanese were replaced by
Europeans who did not behave much differently and were also
pirate-merchants, the nations of Western Europe, too, were regarded as
“barbarians” and were looked upon with great suspicion. On the other
side, continental powers, even if they were enemies, had long been
regarded as “states", sometimes even as equals. Therefore, when at a
much later time the Chinese came into contact with Russians, their
attitude towards them was similar to that which they had taken towards
other Asian continental powers.
3 Social legislation within the existing order
At the time when Chu Yuean-chang conquered Peking, in 1368, becoming
the recognized emperor of China (Ming dynasty), it seemed as though he
would remain a revolutionary in spite of everything. His first laws
were directed against the rich. Many of the rich were compelled to
migrate to the capital, Nanking, thus losing their land and the power
based on it. Land was redistributed among poor peasants; new land
registers were also compiled, in order to prevent the rich from evading
taxation. The number of monks living in idleness was cut down and
precisely determined; the possessions of the temples were reduced, land
exempted from taxation being thus made taxable—all this, incidentally,
although Chu had himself been a monk! These laws might have paved the
way to social harmony and removed the worst of the poverty of the
Mongol epoch. But all this was frustrated in the very first years of
Chu's reign. The laws were only half carried into effect or not at all,
especially in the hinterland of the present Shanghai. That region had
been conquered by Chu at the very beginning of the Ming epoch; in it
lived the wealthy landowners who had already been paying the bulk of
the taxes under the Mongols. The emperor depended on this wealthy class
for the financing of his great armies, and so could not be too hard on
it.
Chu Yuean-chang and his entourage were also unable to free
themselves from some of the ideas of the Mongol epoch. Neither Chu, nor
anybody else before and long after him discussed the possibility of a
form of government other than that of a monarchy. The first ever to
discuss this question, although very timidly, was Huang Tsung-hsi
(1610-1695), at the end of the Ming dynasty. Chu's conception of an
emperor was that of an absolute monarch, master over life and death of
his subjects; it was formed by the Mongol emperors with their
magnificence and the huge expenditure of their life in Peking; Chu was
oblivious of the fact that Peking had been the capital of a vast empire
embracing almost the whole of Asia, and expenses could well be higher
than for a capital only of China. It did not occur to Chu and his
supporters that they could have done without imperial state and
splendour; on the contrary, they felt compelled to display it. At first
Chu personally showed no excessive signs of this tendency, though they
emerged later; but he conferred great land grants on all his relatives,
friends, and supporters; he would give to a single person land
sufficient for 20,000 peasant families; he ordered the payment of state
pensions to members of the imperial family, just as the Mongols had
done, and the total of these pension payments was often higher than the
revenue of the region involved. For the capital alone over eight
million shih of grain had to be provided in payment of
pensions—that is to say, more than 160,000 tons! These pension
payments were in themselves a heavy burden on the state; not only that,
but they formed a difficult transport problem! We have no close figure
of the total population at the beginning of the Ming epoch; about 1500
it is estimated to have been 53,280,000, and this population had to
provide some 266,000,000 shih in taxes. At the beginning of the
Ming epoch the population and revenue must, however, have been smaller.
The laws against the merchants and the restrictions under which the
craftsmen worked, remained essentially as they had been under the Sung,
but now the remaining foreign merchants of Mongol time also fell under
these laws, and their influence quickly diminished. All craftsmen, a
total of some 300,000 men with families, were still registered and had
to serve the government in the capital for three months once every
three years; others had to serve ten days per month, if they lived
close by. They were a hereditary caste as were the professional
soldiers, and not allowed to change their occupation except by special
imperial permission. When a craftsman or soldier died, another family
member had to replace him; therefore, families of craftsmen were not
allowed to separate into small nuclear families, in which there might
not always be a suitable male. Yet, in an empire as large as that of
the Ming, this system did not work too well: craftsmen lost too much
time in travelling and often succeeded in running away while
travelling. Therefore, from 1505 on, they had to pay a tax instead of
working for the government, and from then on the craftsmen became
relatively free.
4 Colonization and agricultural developments
As already mentioned, the Ming had to keep a large army along the
northern frontiers. But they also had to keep armies in south China,
especially in Yuennan. Here, the Mongol invasions of Burma and Thailand
had brought unrest among the tribes, especially the Shan. The Ming did
not hold Burma but kept it in a loose dependency as “tributary nation”.
In order to supply armies so far away from all agricultural surplus
centres, the Ming resorted to the old system of “military colonies"
which seems to have been invented in the second century B.C. and is
still used even today (in Sinkiang). Soldiers were settled in camps
called ying, and therefore there are so many place names ending
with ying in the outlying areas of China. They worked as state
farmers and accumulated surplusses which were used in case of war in
which these same farmers turned soldiers again. Many criminals were
sent to these state farms, too. This system, especially in south China,
transformed territories formerly inhabited by native tribes or
uninhabited, into solidly Chinese areas. In addition to these military
colonies, a steady stream of settlers from Central China and the coast
continued to move into Kwangtung and Hunan provinces. They felt
protected by the army against attacks by natives. Yet Ming texts are
full of reports on major and minor clashes with the natives, from
Kiangsi and Fukien to Kwangtung and Kwangsi.
But the production of military colonies was still not enough to feed
the armies, and the government in Chu's time resorted to a new design.
It promised to give merchants who transported grain from Central China
to the borders, government salt certificates. Upon the receipt, the
merchants could acquire a certain amount of salt and sell it with high
profits. Soon, these merchants began to invest some of their capital in
local land which was naturally cheap. They then attracted farmers from
their home countries as tenants. The rent of the tenants, paid in form
of grain, was then sold to the army, and the merchant's gains
increased. Tenants could easily be found: the density of population in
the Yangtze plains had further increased since the Sung time. This
system of merchant colonization did not last long, because soon, in
order to curb the profits of the merchants, money was given instead of
salt certificates, and the merchants lost interest in grain transports.
Thus, grain prices along the frontiers rose and the effectiveness of
the armies was diminished.
Although the history of Chinese agriculture is as yet only partially
known, a number of changes in this field, which began to show up from
Sung time on, seem to have produced an “agricultural revolution” in
Ming time. We have already mentioned the Sung attempts to increase
production near the big cities by deep-lying fields, cultivation on and
in lakes. At the same time, there was an increase in cultivation of
mountain slopes by terracing and by distributing water over the
terraces in balanced systems. New irrigation machines, especially the
so-called Persian wheel, were introduced in the Ming time. Perhaps the
most important innovation, however, was the introduction of rice from
Indo-China's kingdom Champa in 1012 into Fukien from where it soon
spread. This rice had three advantages over ordinary Chinese rice: it
was drought-resistant and could, therefore, be planted in areas with
poor or even no irrigation. It had a great productivity, and it could
be sown very early in the year. At first it had the disadvantage that
it had a vegetation period of a hundred days. But soon, the Chinese
developed a quick-growing Champa rice, and the speediest varieties took
only sixty days from transplantation into the fields to the harvest.
This made it possible to grow two rice harvests instead of only one and
more than doubled the production. Rice varieties which grew again after
being cut and produced a second, but very much smaller harvest,
disappeared from now on. Furthermore, fish were kept in the ricefields
and produced not only food for the farmers but also fertilized the
fields, so that continuous cultivation of ricefields without any
decrease in fertility became possible. Incidentally, fish control the
malaria mosquitoes; although the Chinese did not know this fact, large
areas in South China which had formerly been avoided by Chinese because
of malaria, gradually became inhabitable.
The importance of alternating crops was also discovered and from now
on, the old system of fallow cultivation was given up and continuous
cultivation with, in some areas, even more than one harvest per field
per year, was introduced even in wheat-growing areas. Considering that
under the fallow system from one half to one third of all fields
remained uncultivated each year, the increase in production under the
new system must have been tremendous. We believe that the population
revolution which in China started about 1550, was the result of this
earlier agrarian revolution. From the eighteenth century on we get
reports on depletion of fields due to wrong application of the new
system.
Another plant deeply affected Chinese agriculture: cotton. It is
often forgotten that, from very early times, the Chinese in the south
had used kapok and similar fibres, and that the cocoons of different
kinds of worms had been used for silk. Real cotton probably came from
Bengal over South-East Asia first to the coastal provinces of China and
spread quickly into Fukien and Kwangtung in Sung time.
On the other side, cotton reached China through Central Asia, and
already in the thirteenth century we find it in Shensi in north-western
China. Farmers in the north could in many places grow cotton in summer
and wheat in winter, and cotton was a high-priced product. They ginned
the cotton with iron rods; a mechanical cotton gin was introduced not
until later. The raw cotton was sold to merchants who transported it
into the industrial centre of the time, the Yangtze valley, and who
re-exported cotton cloth to the north. Raw cotton, loosened by the
string of the bow (a method which was known since Sung), could now in
the north also be used for quilts and padded winter garments.
5 Commercial and industrial developments
Intensivation and modernization of agriculture led to strong
population increases especially in the Yangtze valley from Sung time
on. Thus, in this area commerce and industry also developed most
quickly. Urbanization was greatest here. Nanking, the new Ming capital,
grew tremendously because of the presence of the court and
administration, and even when later the capital was moved, Nanking
continued to remain the cultural capital of China. The urban population
needed textiles and food. From Ming time on, fashions changed quickly
as soon as government regulations which determined colour and material
of the dress of each social class were relaxed or as soon as they could
be circumvented by bribery or ingenious devices. Now, only factories
could produce the amounts which the consumers wanted. We hear of many
men who started out with one loom and later ended up with over forty
looms, employing many weavers. Shanghai began to emerge as a centre of
cotton cloth production. A system of middle-men developed who bought
raw cotton and raw silk from the producers and sold it to factories.
Consumption in the Yangtze cities raised the value of the land
around the cities. The small farmers who were squeezed out, migrated to
the south. Absentee landlords in cities relied partly on migratory,
seasonal labour supplied by small farmers from Chekiang who came to the
Yangtze area after they had finished their own harvest. More and more,
vegetables and mulberries or cotton were planted in the vicinity of the
cities. As rice prices went up quickly a large organization of rice
merchants grew up. They ran large ships up to Hankow where they bought
rice which was brought down from Hunan in river boats by smaller
merchants. The small merchants again made contracts with the local
gentry who bought as much rice from the producers as they could and
sold it to these grain merchants. Thus, local grain prices went up and
we hear of cases where the local population attacked the grain boats in
order to prevent the depletion of local markets.
Next to these grain merchants, the above-mentioned salt merchants
have to be mentioned again. Their centre soon became the city of
Hsin-an, a city on the border of Chekiang and Anhui, or in more general
terms, the cities in the district of Hui-chou. When the grain
transportation to the frontiers came to an end in early Ming time, the
Hsin-an merchants specialized first in silver trade. Later in Ming
time, they spread their activities all over China and often monopolized
the salt, silver, rice, cotton, silk or tea businesses. In the
sixteenth century they had well-established contacts with smugglers on
the Fukien coast and brought foreign goods into the interior. Their
home was also close to the main centres of porcelain production in
Kiangsi which was exported to overseas and to the urban centres. The
demand for porcelain had increased so much that state factories could
not fulfil it. The state factories seem often to have suffered from a
lack of labour: indented artisans were imported from other provinces
and later sent back on state expenses or were taken away from other
state industries. Thus, private porcelain factories began to develop,
and in connection with quickly changing fashions a great
diversification of porcelain occurred.
One other industry should also be mentioned. With the development of
printing, which will be discussed below, the paper industry was greatly
stimulated. The state also needed special types of paper for the paper
currency. Printing and book selling became a profitable business, and
with the application of block print to textiles (probably first used in
Sung time) another new field of commercial activity was opened.
As already mentioned, silver in form of bars had been increasingly
used as currency in Sung time. The yearly government production of
silver was c. 10,000 kg. Mongol currency was actually based upon
silver. The Ming, however, reverted to copper as basic unit, in
addition to the use of paper money. This encouraged the use of silver
for speculative purposes.
The development of business changed the face of cities. From Sung
time on, the division of cities into wards with gates which were closed
during the night, began to break down. Ming cities had no more wards.
Business was no more restricted to official markets but grew up in all
parts of the cities. The individual trades were no more necessarily all
in one street. Shops did not have to close at sunset. The guilds
developed and in some cases were able to exercise locally some
influence upon the officials.
6 Growth of the small gentry
With the spread of book printing, all kinds of books became easily
accessible, including reprints of examination papers. Even businessmen
and farmers increasingly learned to read and to write, and many people
now could prepare themselves for the examinations. Attendance, however,
at the examinations cost a good deal. The candidate had to travel to
the local or provincial capital, and for the higher examinations to the
capital of the country; he had to live there for several months and, as
a rule, had to bribe the examiners or at least to gain the favour of
influential people. There were many cases of candidates becoming
destitute. Most of them were heavily in debt when at last they gained a
position. They naturally set to work at once to pay their debts out of
their salary, and to accumulate fresh capital to meet future
emergencies. The salaries of officials were, however, so small that it
was impossible to make ends meet; and at the same time every official
was liable with his own capital for the receipt in full of the taxes
for the collection of which he was responsible. Consequently every
official began at once to collect more taxes than were really due, so
as to be able to cover any deficits, and also to cover his own cost of
living—including not only the repayment of his debts but the
acquisition of capital or land so as to rise in the social scale. The
old gentry had been rich landowners, and had no need to exploit the
peasants on such a scale.
The Chinese empire was greater than it had been before the Mongol
epoch, and the population was also greater, so that more officials were
needed. Thus in the Ming epoch there began a certain democratization,
larger sections of the population having the opportunity of gaining
government positions; but this democratization brought no benefit to
the general population but resulted in further exploitation of the
peasants.
The new “small gentry” did not consist of great families like the
original gentry. When, therefore, people of that class wanted to play a
political part in the central government, or to gain a position there,
they had either to get into close touch with one of the families of the
gentry, or to try to approach the emperor directly. In the immediate
entourage of the emperor, however, were the eunuchs. A good many
members of the new class had themselves castrated after they had passed
their state examination. Originally eunuchs were forbidden to acquire
education. But soon the Ming emperors used the eunuchs as a tool to
counteract the power of gentry cliques and thus to strengthen their
personal power. When, later, eunuchs controlled appointments to
government posts, long established practices of bureaucratic
administration were eliminated and the court, i.e. the emperor and his
tools, the eunuchs, could create a rule by way of arbitrary decisions,
a despotic rule. For such purposes, eunuchs had to have education, and
these new educated eunuchs, when they had once secured a position, were
able to gain great influence in the immediate entourage of the emperor;
later such educated eunuchs were preferred, especially as many offices
were created which were only filled by eunuchs and for which educated
eunuchs were needed. Whole departments of eunuchs came into existence
at court, and these were soon made use of for confidential business of
the emperor's outside the palace.
These eunuchs worked, of course, in the interest of their families.
On the other hand, they were very ready to accept large bribes from the
gentry for placing the desires of people of the gentry before the
emperor and gaining his consent. Thus the eunuchs generally accumulated
great wealth, which they shared with their small gentry relatives. The
rise of the small gentry class was therefore connected with the
increased influence of the eunuchs at court.
7 Literature, art, crafts
The growth of the small gentry which had its stronghold in the
provincial towns and cities, as well as the rise of the merchant class
and the liberation of the artisans, are reflected in the new literature
of Ming time. While the Mongols had developed the theatre, the novel
may be regarded as the typical Ming creation. Its precursors were the
stories of story-tellers centuries ago. They had developed many styles,
one of which, for instance, consisted of prose with intercalated poetic
parts (pien-wen). Buddhists monks had used these forms of
popular literature and spread their teachings in similar forms; due to
them, many Indian stories and tales found their way into the Chinese
folklore. Soon, these stories of story-tellers or monks were written
down, and out of them developed the Chinese classical novel. It
preserved many traits of the stories: it was cut into chapters
corresponding with the interruptions which the story-teller made in
order to collect money; it was interspersed with poems. But most of
all, it was written in everyday language, not in the language of the
gentry. To this day every Chinese knows and reads with enthusiasm
Shui-hu-chuan (“The Story of the River Bank"), probably written
about 1550 by Wang Tao-k'un, in which the ruling class was first
described in its decay. Against it are held up as ideals
representatives of the middle class in the guise of the gentleman
brigand. Every Chinese also knows the great satirical novel
Hsi-yu-chi (“The Westward Journey"), by Feng Meng-lung (1574-1645),
in which ironical treatment is meted out to all religions and sects
against a mythological background, with a freedom that would not have
been possible earlier. The characters are not presented as individuals
but as representatives of human types: the intellectual, the hedonist,
the pious man, and the simpleton, are drawn with incomparable skill,
with their merits and defects. A third famous novel is San-kuo yen-i
(“The Tale of the Three Kingdoms"), by Lo Kuan-chung. Just as the
European middle class read with avidity the romances of chivalry, so
the comfortable class in China was enthusiastic over romanticized
pictures of the struggle of the gentry in the third century. “The Tale
of the Three Kingdoms” became the model for countless historical novels
of its own and subsequent periods. Later, mainly in the sixteenth
century, the sensational and erotic novel developed, most of all in
Nanking. It has deeply influenced Japanese writers, but was mercilessly
suppressed by the Chinese gentry which resented the frivolity of this
wealthy and luxurious urban class of middle or small gentry families
who associated with rich merchants, actors, artists and musicians.
Censorship of printed books had started almost with the beginning of
book printing as a private enterprise: to the famous historian,
anti-Buddhist and conservative Ou-yang Hsiu (1007-1072), the enemy of
Wang An-shih, belongs the sad glory of having developed the first
censorship rules. Since Ming time, it became a permanent feature of
Chinese governments.
The best known of the erotic novels is the Chin-p'ing-mei
which, for reasons of our own censors can be published only in
expurgated translations. It was written probably towards the end of the
sixteenth century. This novel, as all others, has been written and
re-written by many authors, so that many different versions exist. It
might be pointed out that many novels were printed in Hui-chou, the
commercial centre of the time.
The short story which formerly served the entertainment of the
educated only and which was, therefore, written in classical Chinese,
now also became a literary form appreciated by the middle classes. The
collection Chin-ku ch'i-kuan (“Strange Stories of New Times and
Old"), compiled by Feng Meng-lung, is the best-known of these
collections in vernacular Chinese.
Little original work was done in the Ming epoch in the fields
generally regarded as “literature” by educated Chinese, those of poetry
and the essay. There are some admirable essays, but these are only
isolated examples out of thousands. So also with poetry: the poets of
the gentry, united in “clubs", chose the poets of the Sung epoch as
their models to emulate.
The Chinese drama made further progress in the Ming epoch. Many of
the finest Chinese dramas were written under the Ming; they are still
produced again and again to this day. The most famous dramatists of the
Ming epoch are Wang Shih-chen (1526-1590) and T'ang Hsien-tsu
(1556-1617). T'ang wrote the well-known drama Mu-tan-ting (“The
Peony Pavilion"), one of the finest love-stories of Chinese literature,
full of romance and remote from all reality. This is true also of the
other dramas by T'ang, especially his “Four Dreams", a series of four
plays. In them a man lives in dream through many years of his future
life, with the result that he realizes the worthlessness of life and
decides to become a monk.
Together with the development of the drama (or, rather, the opera)
in the Ming epoch went an important endeavour in the modernization of
music, the attempt to create a “well-tempered scale” made in 1584 by
Chu Tsai-yue. This solved in China a problem which was not tackled till
later in Europe. The first Chinese theorists of music who occupied
themselves with this problem were Ching Fang (77-37 B.C.) and Ho
Ch'eng-t'ien (A.D. 370-447).
In the Mongol epoch, most of the Chinese painters had lived in
central China; this remained so in the Ming epoch. Of the many painters
of the Ming epoch, all held in high esteem in China, mention must be
made especially of Ch'in Ying (c. 1525), T'ang Yin (1470-1523),
and Tung Ch'i-ch'ang (1555-1636). Ch'in Ying painted in the Academic
Style, indicating every detail, however small, and showing preference
for a turquoise-green ground. T'ang Yin was the painter of elegant
women; Tung became famous especially as a calligraphist and a
theoretician of the art of painting; a textbook of the art was written
by him.
Just as puppet plays and shadow theatre are the “opera of the common
man” and took a new development in Ming time, the wood-cut and
block-printing developed largely as a cheap substitute of real
paintings. The new urbanites wanted to have paintings of the masters
and found in the wood-cut which soon became a multi-colour print a
cheap mass medium. Block printing in colours, developed in the Yangtze
valley, was adopted by Japan and found its highest refinement there.
But the Ming are also famous for their monumental architecture which
largely followed Mongol patterns. Among the most famous examples is the
famous Great Wall which had been in dilapidation and was rebuilt; the
great city walls of Peking; and large parts of the palaces of Peking,
begun in the Mongol epoch. It was at this time that the official style
which we may observe to this day in North China was developed, the
style employed everywhere, until in the age of concrete it lost its
justification.
In the Ming epoch the porcelain with blue decoration on a white
ground became general; the first examples, from the famous kilns in
Ching-te-chen, in the province of Kiangsi, were relatively coarse, but
in the fifteenth century the production was much finer. In the
sixteenth century the quality deteriorated, owing to the disuse of the
cobalt from the Middle East (perhaps from Persia) in favour of Sumatra
cobalt, which did not yield the same brilliant colour. In the Ming
epoch there also appeared the first brilliant red colour, a product of
iron, and a start was then made with three-colour porcelain (with lead
glaze) or five-colour (enamel). The many porcelains exported to western
Asia and Europe first influenced European ceramics (Delft), and then
were imitated in Europe (Boettger); the early European porcelains long
showed Chinese influence (the so-called onion pattern, blue on a white
ground). In addition to the porcelain of the Ming epoch, of which the
finest specimens are in the palace at Istanbul, especially famous are
the lacquers (carved lacquer, lacquer painting, gold lacquer) of the
Ming epoch and the cloisonne work of the same period. These are closely
associated with the contemporary work in Japan.
8 Politics at court
After the founding of the dynasty by Chu Yuean-chang, important
questions had to be dealt with apart from the social legislation. What
was to be done, for instance, with Chu's helpers? Chu, like many
revolutionaries before and after him, recognized that these people had
been serviceable in the years of struggle but could no longer remain
useful. He got rid of them by the simple device of setting one against
another so that they murdered one another. In the first decades of his
rule the dangerous cliques of gentry had formed again, and were engaged
in mutual struggles. The most formidable clique was led by Hu Wei-yung.
Hu was a man of the gentry of Chu's old homeland, and one of his oldest
supporters. Hu and his relations controlled the country after 1370,
until in 1380 Chu succeeded in beheading Hu and exterminating his
clique. New cliques formed before long and were exterminated in turn.
Chu had founded Nanking in the years of revolution, and he made it
his capital. In so doing he met the wishes of the rich grain producers
of the Yangtze delta. But the north was the most threatened part of his
empire, so that troops had to be permanently stationed there in
considerable strength. Thus Peking, where Chu placed one of his sons as
“king", was a post of exceptional importance.
In Chu Yuean-chang's last years (he was named T'ai Tsu as emperor)
difficulties arose in regard to the dynasty. The heir to the throne
died in 1391; and when the emperor himself died in 1398, the son of the
late heir-apparent was installed as emperor (Hui Ti, 1399-1402). This
choice had the support of some of the influential Confucian gentry
families of the south. But a protest against his enthronement came from
the other son of Chu Yuean-chang, who as king in Peking had hoped to
become emperor. With his strong army this prince, Ch'eng Tsu, marched
south and captured Nanking, where the palaces were burnt down. There
was a great massacre of supporters of the young emperor, and the victor
made himself emperor (better known under his reign name, Yung-lo). As
he had established himself in Peking, he transferred the capital to
Peking, where it remained throughout the Ming epoch. Nanking became a
sort of subsidiary capital.
This transfer of the capital to the north, as the result of the
victory of the military party and Buddhists allied to them, produced a
new element of instability: the north was of military importance, but
the Yangtze region remained the economic centre of the country. The
interests of the gentry of the Yangtze region were injured by the
transfer. The first Ming emperor had taken care to make his court
resemble the court of the Mongol rulers, but on the whole had exercised
relative economy. Yung-lo (1403-1424), however, lived in the actual
palaces of the Mongol rulers, and all the luxury of the Mongol epoch
was revived. This made the reign of Yung-lo the most magnificent period
of the Ming epoch, but beneath the surface decay had begun. Typical of
the unmitigated absolutism which developed now, was the word of one of
the emperor's political and military advisors, significantly a Buddhist
monk: “I know the way of heaven. Why discuss the hearts of the people?”
9 Navy. Southward expansion
After the collapse of Mongol rule in Indo-China, partly through the
simple withdrawal of the Mongols, and partly through attacks from
various Chinese generals, there were independence movements in
south-west China and Indo-China. In 1393 wars broke out in Annam.
Yung-lo considered that the time had come to annex these regions to
China and so to open a new field for Chinese trade, which was suffering
continual disturbance from the Japanese. He sent armies to Yuennan and
Indo-China; at the same time he had a fleet built by one of his
eunuchs, Cheng Ho. The fleet was successfully protected from attack by
the Japanese. Cheng Ho, who had promoted the plan and also carried it
out, began in 1405 his famous mission to Indo-China, which had been
envisaged as giving at least moral support to the land operations, but
was also intended to renew trade connections with Indo-China, where
they had been interrupted by the collapse of Mongol rule. Cheng Ho
sailed past Indo-China and ultimately reached the coast of Arabia. His
account of his voyage is an important source of information about
conditions in southern Asia early in the fifteenth century. Cheng Ho
and his fleet made some further cruises, but they were discontinued.
There may have been several reasons, (1) As state enterprises, the
expeditions were very costly. Foreign goods could be obtained more
cheaply and with less trouble if foreign merchants came themselves to
China or Chinese merchants travelled at their own risk. (2) The moral
success of the naval enterprises was assured. China was recognized as a
power throughout southern Asia, and Annam had been reconquered. (3)
After the collapse of the Mongol emperor Timur, who died in 1406, there
no longer existed any great power in Central Asia, so that trade
missions from the kingdom of the Shahruk in North Persia were able to
make their way to China, including the famous mission of 1409-1411. (4)
Finally, the fleet would have had to be permanently guarded against the
Japanese, as it had been stationed not in South China but in the
Yangtze region. As early as 1411 the canals had been repaired, and from
1415 onward all the traffic of the country went by the canals, so
evading the Japanese peril. This ended the short chapter of Chinese
naval history.
These travels of Cheng Ho seem to have had one more cultural result:
a large number of fairy-tales from the Middle East were brought to
China, or at all events reached China at that time. The Chinese, being
a realistically-minded people, have produced few fairy-tales of their
own. The bulk of their finest fairy-tales were brought by Buddhist
monks, in the course of the first millennium A.D., from India by way of
Central Asia. The Buddhists made use of them to render their sermons
more interesting and impressive. As time went on, these stories spread
all over China, modified in harmony with the spirit of the people and
adapted to the Chinese environment. Only the fables failed to strike
root in China: the matter-of-fact Chinese was not interested in animals
that talked and behaved to each other like human beings. In addition,
however, to these early fairy-tales, there was another group of stories
that did not spread throughout China, but were found only in the
south-eastern coastal provinces. These came from the Middle East,
especially from Persia. The fairy-tales of Indian origin spread not
only to Central Asia but at the same time to Persia, where they found a
very congenial soil. The Persians made radical changes in the stories
and gave them the form in which they came to Europe by various
routes—through North Africa to Spain and France; through
Constantinople, Venice, or Genoa to France; through Russian Turkestan
to Russia, Finland, and Sweden; through Turkey and the Balkans to
Hungary and Germany. Thus the stories found a European home. And this
same Persian form was carried by sea in Cheng Ho's time to South China.
Thus we have the strange experience of finding some of our own finest
fairy-tales in almost the same form in South China.
10 Struggles between cliques
Yung-lo's successor died early. Under the latter's son, the emperor
Hsuean Tsung (1426-1435; reign name Hsuean-te), fixed numbers of
candidates were assigned for the state examinations. It had been found
that almost the whole of the gentry in the Yangtze region sat at the
examinations; and that at these examinations their representatives made
sure, through their mutual relations, that only their members should
pass, so that the candidates from the north were virtually excluded.
The important military clique in the north protested against this, and
a compromise was arrived at: at every examination one-third of the
candidates must come from the north and two-thirds from the south. This
system lasted for a long time, and led to many disputes.
At his death Hsuean Tsung left the empire to his eight-year-old son
Ying Tsung (1436-49 and 1459-64), who was entirely in the hands of the
Yang clique, which was associated with his grandmother. Soon, however,
another clique, led by the eunuch Wang Chen, gained the upper hand at
court. The Mongols were very active at this time, and made several
raids on the province of Shansi; Wang Chen proposed a great campaign
against them, and in this campaign he took with him the young emperor,
who had reached his twenty-first birthday in 1449. The emperor had
grown up in the palace and knew nothing of the world outside; he was
therefore glad to go with Wang Chen; but that eunuch had also lived in
the palace and also knew nothing of the world, and in particular of
war. Consequently he failed in the organization of reinforcements for
his army, some 100,000 strong; after a few brief engagements the
Oirat-Mongol prince Esen had the imperial army surrounded and the
emperor a prisoner. The eunuch Wang Chen came to his end, and his
clique, of course, no longer counted. The Mongols had no intention of
killing the emperor; they proposed to hold him to ransom, at a high
price. The various cliques at court cared little, however, about their
ruler. After the fall of the Wang clique there were two others, of
which one, that of General Yue, became particularly powerful, as he had
been able to repel a Mongol attack on Peking. Yue proclaimed a new
emperor—not the captive emperor's son, a baby, but his brother, who
became the emperor Ching Tsung. The Yang clique insisted on the rights
of the imperial baby. From all this the Mongols saw that the Chinese
were not inclined to spend a lot of money on their imperial captive.
Accordingly they made an enormous reduction in the ransom demanded, and
more or less forced the Chinese to take back their former emperor. The
Mongols hoped that this would at least produce political disturbances
by which they might profit, once the old emperor was back in Peking.
And this did soon happen. At first the ransomed emperor was pushed out
of sight into a palace, and Ching Tsung continued to reign. But in 1456
Ching Tsung fell ill, and a successor to him had to be chosen. The Yue
clique wanted to have the son of Ching Tsung; the Yang clique wanted
the son of the deposed emperor Ying Tsung. No agreement was reached, so
that in the end a third clique, led by the soldier Shih Heng, who had
helped to defend Peking against the Mongols, found its opportunity, and
by a coup d'etat reinstated the deposed emperor Ying Tsung.
This was not done out of love for the emperor, but because Shih Heng
hoped that under the rule of the completely incompetent Ying Tsung he
could best carry out a plan of his own, to set up his own dynasty. It
is not so easy, however, to carry a conspiracy to success when there
are several rival parties, each of which is ready to betray any of the
others. Shih Heng's plan became known before long, and he himself was
beheaded (1460).
The next forty years were filled with struggles between cliques,
which steadily grew in ferocity, particularly since a special office, a
sort of secret police headquarters, was set up in the palace, with
functions which it extended beyond the palace, with the result that
many people were arrested and disappeared. This office was set up by
the eunuchs and the clique at their back, and was the first dictatorial
organ created in the course of a development towards despotism that
made steady progress in these years.
In 1505 Wu Tsung came to the throne, an inexperienced youth of
fifteen who was entirely controlled by the eunuchs who had brought him
up. The leader of the eunuchs was Liu Chin, who had the support of a
group of people of the gentry and the middle class. Liu Chin succeeded
within a year in getting rid of the eunuchs at court who belonged to
other cliques and were working against him. After that he proceeded to
establish his power. He secured in entirely official form the emperor's
permission for him to issue all commands himself; the emperor devoted
himself only to his pleasures, and care was taken that they should keep
him sufficiently occupied to have no chance to notice what was going on
in the country. The first important decree issued by Liu Chin resulted
in the removal from office or the punishment or murder of over three
hundred prominent persons, the leaders of the cliques opposed to him.
He filled their posts with his own supporters, until all the higher
posts in every department were in the hands of members of his group. He
collected large sums of money which he quite openly extracted from the
provinces as a special tax for his own benefit. When later his house
was searched there were found 240,000 bars and 57,800 pieces of gold (a
bar was equivalent of ten pieces), 791,800 ounces and 5,000,000 bars of
silver (a bar was five ounces), three bushels of precious stones, two
gold cuirasses, 3,000 gold rings, and much else—of a total value
exceeding the annual budget of the state! The treasure was to have been
used to finance a revolt planned by Liu Chin and his supporters.
Among the people whom Liu Chin had punished were several members of
the former clique of the Yang, and also the philosopher Wang Yang-ming,
who later became so famous, a member of the Wang family which was
allied to the Yang. In 1510 the Yang won over one of the eunuchs in the
palace and so became acquainted with Liu Chin's plans. When a revolt
broke out in western China, this eunuch (whose political allegiance
was, of course, unknown to Liu Chin) secured appointment as army
commander. With the army intended for the crushing of the revolt, Liu
Chin's palace was attacked when he was asleep, and he and all his
supporters were arrested. Thus the other group came into power in the
palace, including the philosopher Wang Yang-ming (1473-1529). Liu
Chin's rule had done great harm to the country, as enormous taxation
had been expended for the private benefit of his clique. On top of this
had been the young emperor's extravagance: his latest pleasures had
been the building of palaces and the carrying out of military games; he
constantly assumed new military titles and was burning to go to war.
11 Risings
The emperor might have had a good opportunity for fighting, for his
misrule had resulted in a great popular rising which began in the west,
in Szechwan, and then spread to the east. As always, the rising was
joined by some ruined scholars, and the movement, which had at first
been directed against the gentry as such, was turned into a movement
against the government of the moment. No longer were all the wealthy
and all officials murdered, but only those who did not join the
movement. In 1512 the rebels were finally overcome, not so much by any
military capacity of the government armies as through the loss of the
rebels' fleet of boats in a typhoon.
In 1517 a new favourite of the emperor's induced him to make a great
tour in the north, to which the favourite belonged. The tour and the
hunting greatly pleased the emperor, so that he continued his
journeying. This was the year in which the Portuguese Fernao Pires de
Andrade landed in Canton—the first modern European to enter China.
In 1518 Wang Yang-ming, the philosopher general, crushed a rising in
Kiangsi. The rising had been the outcome of years of unrest, which had
two causes: native risings of the sort we described above, and loss for
the gentry due to the transfer of the capital. The province of Kiangsi
was a part of the Yangtze region, and the great landowners there had
lived on the profit from their supplies to Nanking. When the capital
was moved to Peking, their takings fell. They placed themselves under a
prince who lived in Nanking. This prince regarded Wang Yang-ming's move
into Kiangsi as a threat to him, and so rose openly against the
government and supported the Kiangsi gentry. Wang Yang-ming defeated
him, and so came into the highest favour with the incompetent emperor.
When peace had been restored in Nanking, the emperor dressed himself up
as an army commander, marched south, and made a triumphal entry into
Nanking.
One other aspect of Wang Yang-ming's expeditions has not yet been
studied: he crushed also the so-called salt-merchant rebels in the
southernmost part of Kiangsi and adjoining Kwangtung. These
merchants-turned-rebels had dominated a small area, off and on since
the eleventh century. At this moment, they seem to have had connections
with the rich inland merchants of Hsin-an and perhaps also with
foreigners. Information is still too scanty to give more details, but a
local movement as persistent as this one deserves attention.
Wang Yang-ming became acquainted as early as 1519 with the first
European rifles, imported by the Portuguese who had landed in 1517.
(The Chinese then called them Fu-lan-chi, meaning Franks. Wang was the
first Chinese who spoke of the “Franks”.) The Chinese had already had
mortars which hurled stones, as early as the second century A.D. In the
seventh or eighth century their mortars had sent stones of a couple of
hundredweights some four hundred yards. There is mention in the
eleventh century of cannon which apparently shot with a charge of a
sort of gunpowder. The Mongols were already using true cannon in their
sieges. In 1519, the first Portuguese were presented to the Chinese
emperor in Nanking, where they were entertained for about a year in a
hostel, a certain Lin Hsuen learned about their rifles and copied them
for Wang Yang-ming. In general, however, the Chinese had no respect for
the Europeans, whom they described as “bandits” who had expelled the
lawful king of Malacca and had now come to China as its
representatives. Later they were regarded as a sort of Japanese,
because they, too, practiced piracy.
12 Machiavellism
All main schools of Chinese philosophy were still based on
Confucius. Wang Yang-ming's philosophy also followed Confucius, but he
liberated himself from the Neo-Confucian tendency as represented by Chu
Hsi, which started in the Sung epoch and continued to rule in China in
his time and after him; he introduced into Confucian philosophy the
conception of “intuition”. He regarded intuition as the decisive
philosophic experience; only through intuition could man come to true
knowledge. This idea shows an element of meditative Buddhism along
lines which the philosopher Lu Hsiang-shan (1139-1192) had first
developed, while classical Neo-Confucianism was more an integration of
monastic Buddhism into Confucianism. Lu had felt himself close to Wang
An-shih (1021-1086), and this whole school, representing the small
gentry of the Yangtze area, was called the Southern or the Lin-ch'uan
school, Lin-ch'uan in Kiangsi being Wang An-shih's home. During the
Mongol period, a Taoist group, the Cheng-i-chiao (Correct Unity
Sect) had developed in Lin-ch'uan and had accepted some of the
Lin-ch'uan school's ideas. Originally, this group was a continuation of
Chang Ling's church Taoism. Through the Cheng-i adherents, the
Southern school had gained political influence on the despotic Mongol
rulers. The despotic Yung-lo emperor had favoured the monk Tao-yen (
c. 1338-1418) who had also Taoist training and proposed a philosophy
which also stressed intuition. He was, incidentally, in charge of the
compilation of the largest encyclopaedia ever written, the Yung-lo
ta-tien commissioned by the Yung-lo emperor.
Wang Yang-ming followed the Lin-ch'uan tradition. The introduction
of the conception of intuition, a highly subjective conception, into
the system of a practical state philosophy like Confucianism could not
but lead in the practice of the statesman to Machiavellism. The
statesman who followed the teaching of Wang Yang-ming had the
opportunity of justifying whatever he did by his intuition.
Wang Yang-ming failed to gain acceptance for his philosophy. His
disciples also failed to establish his doctrine in China, because it
served the interests of an individual despot against those of the
gentry as a class, and the middle class, which might have formed a
counterweight against them, was not yet politically ripe for the
seizure of the opportunity here offered to it. In Japan, however,
Wang's doctrine gained many followers, because it admirably served the
dictatorial state system which had developed in that country.
Incidentally, Chiang Kai-shek in those years in which he showed Fascist
tendencies, also got interested in Wang Yang-ming.
13 Foreign relations in the sixteenth century
The feeble emperor Wu Tsung died in 1521, after an ineffective
reign, without leaving an heir. The clique then in power at court
looked among the possible pretenders for the one who seemed least
likely to do anything, and their choice fell on the fifteen-year-old
Shih Tsung, who was made emperor. The forty-five years of his reign
were filled in home affairs with intrigues between the cliques at
court, with growing distress in the country, and with revolts on a
larger and larger scale. Abroad there were wars with Annam, increasing
raids by the Japanese, and, above all, long-continued fighting against
the famous Mongol ruler Yen-ta, from 1549 onward. At one time Yen-ta
reached Peking and laid siege to it. The emperor, who had no knowledge
of affairs, and to whom Yen-ta had been represented as a petty bandit,
was utterly dismayed and ready to do whatever Yen-ta asked; in the end
he was dissuaded from this, and an agreement was arrived at with Yen-ta
for state-controlled markets to be set up along the frontier, where the
Mongols could dispose of their goods against Chinese goods on very
favourable terms. After further difficulties lasting many years, a
compromise was arrived at: the Mongols were earning good profits from
the markets, and in 1571 Yen-ta accepted a Chinese title. On the
Chinese side, this Mongol trade, which continued in rather different
form in the Manchu epoch, led to the formation of a local merchant
class in the frontier province of Shansi, with great experience in
credit business; later the first Chinese bankers came almost entirely
from this quarter.
After a brief interregnum there came once more to the throne a
ten-year-old boy, the emperor Shen Tsung (reign name Wan-li;
1573-1619). He, too, was entirely under the influence of various
cliques, at first that of his tutor, the scholar Chang Chue-chan. About
the time of the death, in 1582, of Yen-ta we hear for the first time of
a new people. In 1581 there had been unrest in southern Manchuria. The
Mongolian tribal federation of the Tuemet attacked China, and there
resulted collisions not only with the Chinese but between the different
tribes living there. In southern and central Manchuria were remnants of
the Tungus Juchen. The Mongols had subjugated the Juchen, but the
latter had virtually become independent after the collapse of Mongol
rule over China. They had formed several tribal alliances, but in
1581-83 these fought each other, so that one of the alliances to all
intents was destroyed. The Chinese intervened as mediators in these
struggles, and drew a demarcation line between the territories of the
various Tungus tribes. All this is only worth mention because it was
from these tribes that there developed the tribal league of the
Manchus, who were then to rule China for some three hundred years.
In 1592 the Japanese invaded Korea. This was their first real effort
to set foot on the continent, a purely imperialistic move. Korea, as a
Chinese vassal, appealed for Chinese aid. At first the Chinese army had
no success, but in 1598 the Japanese were forced to abandon Korea. They
revenged themselves by intensifying their raids on the coast of central
China; they often massacred whole towns, and burned down the looted
houses. The fighting in Korea had its influence on the Tungus tribes:
as they were not directly involved, it contributed to their further
strengthening.
The East India Company was founded in 1600. At this time, while the
English were trying to establish themselves in India, the Chinese tried
to gain increased influence in the south by wars in Annam, Burma, and
Thailand (1594-1604). These wars were for China colonial wars, similar
to the colonial fighting by the British in India. But there began to be
defined already at that time in the south of Asia the outlines of the
states as they exist at the present time.
In 1601 the first European, the Jesuit Matteo Ricci, succeeded in
gaining access to the Chinese court, through the agency of a eunuch. He
made some presents, and the Chinese regarded his visit as a mission
from Europe bringing tribute. Ricci was therefore permitted to remain
in Peking. He was an astronomer and was able to demonstrate to his
Chinese colleagues the latest achievements of European astronomy. In
1613, after Ricci's death, the Jesuits and some Chinese whom they had
converted were commissioned to reform the Chinese calendar. In the time
of the Mongols, Arabs had been at work in Peking as astronomers, and
their influence had continued under the Ming until the Europeans came.
By his astronomical labours Ricci won a place of honour in Chinese
literature; he is the European most often mentioned.
The missionary work was less effective. The missionaries penetrated
by the old trade routes from Canton and Macao into the province of
Kiangsi and then into Nanking. Kiangsi and Nanking were their chief
centres. They soon realized that missionary activity that began in the
lower strata would have no success; it was necessary to work from
above, beginning with the emperor, and then, they hoped, the whole
country could be converted to Christianity. When later the emperors of
the Ming dynasty were expelled and fugitives in South China, one of the
pretenders to the throne was actually converted—but it was politically
too late. The missionaries had, moreover, mistaken ideas as to the
nature of Chinese religion; we know today that a universal adoption of
Christianity in China would have been impossible even if an emperor had
personally adopted that foreign faith: there were emperors who had been
interested in Buddhism or in Taoism, but that had been their private
affair and had never prevented them, as heads of the state, from
promoting the religious system which politically was the most
expedient—that is to say, usually Confucianism. What we have said here
in regard to the Christian mission at the Ming court is applicable also
to the missionaries at the court of the first Manchu emperors, in the
seventeenth century. Early in the eighteenth century missionary
activity was prohibited—not for religious but for political reasons,
and only under the pressure of the Capitulations in the nineteenth
century were the missionaries enabled to resume their labours.
14 External and internal perils
Towards the end of the reign of Wan-li, about 1620, the danger that
threatened the empire became more and more evident. The Manchus
complained, no doubt with justice, of excesses on the part of Chinese
officials; the friction constantly increased, and the Manchus began to
attack the Chinese cities in Manchuria. In 1616, after his first
considerable successes, their leader Nurhachu assumed the imperial
title; the name of the dynasty was Tai Ch'ing (interpreted as “The
great clarity", but probably a transliteration of a Manchurian word
meaning “hero"). In 1618, the year in which the Thirty Years War
started in Europe, the Manchus conquered the greater part of Manchuria,
and in 1621 their capital was Liaoyang, then the largest town in
Manchuria.
But the Manchu menace was far from being the only one. On the
south-east coast a pirate made himself independent; later, with his
family, he dominated Formosa and fought many battles with the Europeans
there (European sources call him Coxinga). In western China there came
a great popular rising, in which some of the natives joined, and which
spread through a large part of the southern provinces. This rising was
particularly sanguinary, and when it was ultimately crushed by the
Manchus the province of Szechwan, formerly so populous, was almost
depopulated, so that it had later to be resettled. And in the province
of Shantung in the east there came another great rising, also very
sanguinary, that of the secret society of the “White Lotus”. We have
already pointed out that these risings of secret societies were always
a sign of intolerable conditions among the peasantry. This was now the
case once more. All the elements of danger which we mentioned at the
outset of this chapter began during this period, between 1610 and 1640,
to develop to the full.
Then there were the conditions in the capital itself. The struggles
between cliques came to a climax. On the death of Shen Tsung (or
Wan-li; 1573-1619), he was succeeded by his son, who died scarcely a
month later, and then by his sixteen-year-old grandson. The grandson
had been from his earliest youth under the influence of a eunuch, Wei
Chung-hsien, who had castrated himself. With the emperor's wet-nurse
and other people, mostly of the middle class, this man formed a
powerful group. The moment the new emperor ascended the throne, Wei was
all-powerful. He began by murdering every eunuch who did not belong to
his clique, and then murdered the rest of his opponents. Meanwhile the
gentry had concluded among themselves a defensive alliance that was a
sort of party; this party was called the Tung-lin Academy. It was
confined to literati among the gentry, and included in particular the
literati who had failed to make their way at court, and who lived on
their estates in Central China and were trying to gain power
themselves. This group was opposed to Wei Chung-hsien, who ruthlessly
had every discoverable member murdered. The remainder went into hiding
and organized themselves secretly under another name. As the new
emperor had no son, the attempt was made to foist a son upon him; at
his death in 1627, eight women of the harem were suddenly found to be
pregnant! He was succeeded by his brother, who was one of the opponents
of Wei Chung-hsien and, with the aid of the opposing clique, was able
to bring him to his end. The new emperor tried to restore order at
court and in the capital by means of political and economic decrees,
but in spite of his good intentions and his unquestionable capacity he
was unable to cope with the universal confusion. There was insurrection
in every part of the country. The gentry, organized in their
“Academies", and secretly at work in the provinces, no longer supported
the government; the central power no longer had adequate revenues, so
that it was unable to pay the armies that should have marched against
all the rebels and also against external enemies. It was clear that the
dynasty was approaching its end, and the only uncertainty was as to its
successor. The various insurgents negotiated or fought with each other;
generals loyal to the government won occasional successes against the
rebels; other generals went over to the rebels or to the Manchus. The
two most successful leaders of bands were Li Tz[)u]-ch'eng and Chang
Hsien-chung. Li came from the province of Shensi; he had come to the
fore during a disastrous famine in his country. The years around 1640
brought several widespread droughts in North China, a natural
phenomenon that was repeated in the nineteenth century, when unrest
again ensued. Chang Hsien-chung returned for a time to the support of
the government, but later established himself in western China. It was
typical, however, of all these insurgents that none of them had any
great objective in view. They wanted to get enough to eat for
themselves and their followers; they wanted to enrich themselves by
conquest; but they were incapable of building up an ordered and new
administration. Li ultimately made himself “king” in the province of
Shensi and called his dynasty “Shun", but this made no difference:
there was no distribution of land among the peasants serving in Li's
army; no plan was set into operation for the collection of taxes; not
one of the pressing problems was faced.
Meanwhile the Manchus were gaining support. Almost all the Mongol
princes voluntarily joined them and took part in the raids into North
China. In 1637 the united Manchus and Mongols conquered Korea. Their
power steadily grew. What the insurgents in China failed to achieve,
the Manchus achieved with the aid of their Chinese advisers: they
created a new military organization, the “Banner Organization”. The men
fit for service were distributed among eight “banners", and these
banners became the basis of the Manchu state administration. By this
device the Manchus emerged from the stage of tribal union, just as
before them Turks and other northern peoples had several times
abandoned the traditional authority of a hierarchy of tribal leaders, a
system of ruling families, in favour of the authority, based on
efficiency, of military leaders. At the same time the Manchus set up a
central government with special ministries on the Chinese model. In
1638 the Manchus appeared before Peking, but they retired once more.
Manchu armies even reached the province of Shantung. They were hampered
by the death at the critical moment of the Manchu ruler Abahai
(1626-1643). His son Fu Lin was not entirely normal and was barely six
years old; there was a regency of princes, the most prominent among
them being Prince Dorgon.
Meanwhile Li Tz[)u]-ch'eng broke through to Peking. The city had a
strong garrison, but owing to the disorganization of the government the
different commanders were working against each other; and the soldiers
had no fighting spirit because they had no pay for a long time. Thus
the city fell, on April 24th, 1644, and the last Ming emperor killed
himself. A prince was proclaimed emperor; he fled through western and
southern China, continually trying to make a stand, but it was too
late; without the support of the gentry he had no resource, and
ultimately, in 1659, he was compelled to flee into Burma.
Thus Li Tz[)u]-ch'eng was now emperor. It should have been his task
rapidly to build up a government, and to take up arms against the other
rebels and against the Manchus. Instead of this he behaved in such a
way that he was unable to gain any support from the existing officials
in the capital; and as there was no one among his former supporters who
had any positive, constructive ideas, just nothing was done.
This, however, improved the chances of all the other aspirants to
the imperial throne. The first to realize this clearly, and also to
possess enough political sagacity to avoid alienating the gentry, was
General Wu San-kui, who was commanding on the Manchu front. He saw that
in the existing conditions in the capital he could easily secure the
imperial throne for himself if only he had enough soldiers. Accordingly
he negotiated with the Manchu Prince Dorgon, formed an alliance with
the Manchus, and with them entered Peking on June 6th, 1644. Li
Tz[)u]-ch'eng quickly looted the city, burned down whatever he could,
and fled into the west, continually pursued by Wu San-kui. In the end
he was abandoned by all his supporters and killed by peasants. The
Manchus, however, had no intention of leaving Wu San-kui in power: they
established themselves in Peking, and Wu became their general.
(C) The Manchu Dynasty (1644-1911)
1 Installation of Manchus
The Manchus had gained the mastery over China owing rather to
China's internal situation than to their military superiority. How was
it that the dynasty could endure for so long, although the Manchus were
not numerous, although the first Manchu ruler (Fu Lin, known under the
rule name Shun-chih; 1644-1662) was a psychopathic youth, although
there were princes of the Ming dynasty ruling in South China, and
although there were strong groups of rebels all over the country? The
Manchus were aliens; at that time the national feeling of the Chinese
had already been awakened; aliens were despised. In addition to this,
the Manchus demanded that as a sign of their subjection the Chinese
should wear pigtails and assume Manchurian clothing (law of 1645). Such
laws could not but offend national pride. Moreover, marriages between
Manchus and Chinese were prohibited, and a dual government was set up,
with Manchus always alongside Chinese in every office, the Manchus
being of course in the superior position. The Manchu soldiers were
distributed in military garrisons among the great cities, and were paid
state pensions, which had to be provided by taxation. They were the
master race, and had no need to work. Manchus did not have to attend
the difficult state examinations which the Chinese had to pass in order
to gain an appointment. How was it that in spite of all this the
Manchus were able to establish themselves?
The conquering Manchu generals first went south from eastern China,
and in 1645 captured Nanking, where a Ming prince had ruled. The region
round Nanking was the economic centre of China. Soon the Manchus were
in the adjoining southern provinces, and thus they conquered the whole
of the territory of the landowning gentry, who after the events of the
beginning of the seventeenth century had no longer trusted the Ming
rulers. The Ming prince in Nanking was just as incapable, and
surrounded by just as evil a clique, as the Ming emperors of the past.
The gentry were not inclined to defend him. A considerable section of
the gentry were reduced to utter despair; they had no desire to support
the Ming any longer; in their own interest they could not support the
rebel leaders; and they regarded the Manchus as just a particular sort
of “rebels”. Interpreting the refusal of some Sung ministers to serve
the foreign Mongols as an act of loyalty, it was now regarded as
shameful to desert a dynasty when it came to an end and to serve the
new ruler, even if the new regime promised to be better. Many thousands
of officials, scholars, and great landowners committed suicide. Many
books, often really moving and tragic, are filled with the story of
their lives. Some of them tried to form insurgent bands with their
peasants and went into the mountains, but they were unable to maintain
themselves there. The great bulk of the elite soon brought themselves
to collaborate with the conquerors when they were offered tolerable
conditions. In the end the Manchus did not interfere in the ownership
of land in central China.
At the time when in Europe Louis XIV was reigning, the Thirty Years
War was coming to an end, and Cromwell was carrying out his reforms in
England, the Manchus conquered the whole of China. Chang Hsien-chung
and Li Tz[)u]-ch'eng were the first to fall; the pirate Coxinga lasted
a little longer and was even able to plunder Nanking in 1659, but in
1661 he had to retire to Formosa. Wu San-kui, who meanwhile had
conquered western China, saw that the situation was becoming difficult
for him. His task was to drive out the last Ming pretenders for the
Manchus. As he had already been opposed to the Ming in 1644, and as the
Ming no longer had any following among the gentry, he could not
suddenly work with them against the Manchus. He therefore handed over
to the Manchus the last Ming prince, whom the Burmese had delivered up
to him in 1661. Wu San-kui's only possible allies against the Manchus
were the gentry. But in the west, where he was in power, the gentry
counted for nothing; they had in any case been weaker in the west, and
they had been decimated by the insurrection of Chang Hsien-chung. Thus
Wu San-kui was compelled to try to push eastwards, in order to unite
with the gentry of the Yangtze region against the Manchus. The Manchus
guessed Wu San-kui's plan, and in 1673, after every effort at
accommodation had failed, open war came. Wu San-kui made himself
emperor, and the Manchus marched against him. Meanwhile, the Chinese
gentry of the Yangtze region had come to terms with the Manchus, and
they gave Wu San-kui no help. He vegetated in the south-west, a region
too poor to maintain an army that could conquer all China, and too
small to enable him to last indefinitely as an independent power. He
was able to hold his own until his death, although, with the loss of
the support of the gentry, he had no prospect of final success. Not
until 1681 was his successor, his grandson Wu Shih-fan, defeated. The
end of the rule of Wu San-kui and his successor marked the end of the
national governments of China; the whole country was now under alien
domination, for the simple reason that all the opponents of the Manchus
had failed. Only the Manchus were accredited with the ability to bring
order out of the universal confusion, so that there was clearly no
alternative but to put up with the many insults and humiliations they
inflicted—with the result that the national feeling that had just been
aroused died away, except where it was kept alive in a few secret
societies. There will be more to say about this, once the works which
were suppressed by the Manchus are published.
In the first phase of the Manchu conquest the gentry had refused to
support either the Ming princes or Wu San-kui, or any of the rebels, or
the Manchus themselves. A second phase began about twenty years after
the capture of Peking, when the Manchus won over the gentry by
desisting from any interference with the ownership of land, and by the
use of Manchu troops to clear away the “rebels” who were hostile to the
gentry. A reputable government was then set up in Peking, free from
eunuchs and from all the old cliques; in their place the government
looked for Chinese scholars for its administrative posts. Literati and
scholars streamed into Peking, especially members of the “Academies"
that still existed in secret, men who had been the chief sufferers from
the conditions at the end of the Ming epoch. The young emperor Sheng
Tsu (1663-1722; K'ang-hsi is the name by which his rule was known, not
his name) was keenly interested in Chinese culture and gave privileged
treatment to the scholars of the gentry who came forward. A rapid
recovery quite clearly took place. The disturbances of the years that
had passed had got rid of the worst enemies of the people, the
formidable rival cliques and the individuals lusting for power; the
gentry had become more cautious in their behaviour to the peasants; and
bribery had been largely stamped out. Finally, the empire had been
greatly expanded. All these things helped to stabilize the regime of
the Manchus.
2 Decline in the eighteenth century
The improvement continued until the middle of the eighteenth
century. About the time of the French Revolution there began a
continuous decline, slow at first and then gathering speed. The
European works on China offer various reasons for this: the many
foreign wars (to which we shall refer later) of the emperor, known by
the name of his ruling period, Ch'ien-lung, his craze for building, and
the irruption of the Europeans into Chinese trade. In the eighteenth
century the court surrounded itself with great splendour, and countless
palaces and other luxurious buildings were erected, but it must be
borne in mind that so great an empire as the China of that day
possessed very considerable financial strength, and could support this
luxury. The wars were certainly not inexpensive, as they took place
along the Russian frontier and entailed expenditure on the transport of
reinforcements and supplies; the wars against Turkestan and Tibet were
carried on with relatively small forces. This expenditure should not
have been beyond the resources of an ordered budget. Interestingly
enough, the period between 1640 and 1840 belongs to those periods for
which almost no significant work in the field of internal social and
economic developments has been made; Western scholars have been too
much interested in the impact of Western economy and culture or in the
military events. Chinese scholars thus far have shown a prejudice
against the Manchu dynasty and were mainly interested in the study of
anti-Manchu movements and the downfall of the dynasty. On the other
hand, the documentary material for this period is extremely extensive,
and many years of work are necessary to reach any general conclusions
even in one single field. The following remarks should, therefore, be
taken as very tentative and preliminary, and they are, naturally,
fragmentary.
[Illustration: 14 Aborigines of South China, of the 'Black Miao'
tribe, at a festival. China-ink drawing of the eighteenth century.
Collection of the Museum fuer Voelkerkunde, Berlin. No. 1D 8756, 68.]
[Illustration: 15 Pavilion on the 'Coal Hill' at Peking, in which
the last Ming emperor committed suicide. Photo Eberhard.]
[Illustration: Chart POPULATION GROWTH OF CHINA]
The decline of the Manchu dynasty began at a time when the European
trade was still insignificant, and not as late as after 1842, when
China had to submit to the foreign Capitulations. These cannot have
been the true cause of the decline. Above all, the decline was not so
noticeable in the state of the Exchequer as in a general impoverishment
of China. The number of really wealthy persons among the gentry
diminished, but the middle class, that is to say the people who had
education but little or no money and property, grew steadily in number.
One of the deeper reasons for the decline of the Manchu dynasty
seems to lie in the enormous increase in the population. Here are a few
Chinese statistics:
Year Population
1578(before the Manchus) 10,621,463 families or 60,692,856
individuals
1662 19,203,233 ” 100,000,000 ” [*]
1710 23,311,236 ” 116,000,000 ” [*]
1729 25,480,498 ” 127,000,000 ” [*]
1741 ” 143,411,559 “
1754 184,504,493 “
1778 242,965,618 “
1796 275,662,414 “
1814 374,601,132 “
1850 414,493,899 “
(1953) (601,938,035 “)
[*] Approximately
It may be objected that these figures are incorrect and exaggerated.
Undoubtedly they contain errors. But the first figure (for 1578) of
some sixty millions is in close agreement with all other figures of
early times; the figure for 1850 seems high, but cannot be far wrong,
for even after the great T'ai P'ing Rebellion of 1851, which, together
with its after-effects, costs the lives of countless millions, all
statisticians of today estimate the population of China at more than
four hundred millions. If we enter these data together with the census
of 1953 into a chart (see p. 273), a fairly smooth curve emerges; the
special features are that already under the Ming the population was
increasing and, secondly, that the high rate of increase in the
population began with the long period of internal peace since about
1700. From that time onwards, all China's wars were fought at so great
a distance from China proper that the population was not directly
affected. Moreover, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the
Manchus saw to the maintenance of the river dykes, so that the worst
inundations were prevented. Thus there were not so many of the floods
which had often cost the lives of many million people in China; and
there were no internal wars, with their heavy cost in lives.
But while the population increased, the tillage failed to increase
in the needed proportion. I have, unfortunately, no statistics for all
periods; but the general tendency is shown by the following table:
Date Cultivated area mou per person
in mou
1578 701,397,600 11.6
1662 531,135,800
1719 663,113,200
1729 878,176,000 6.1
(1953) (1,627,930,000) (2.7)
Six mou are about one acre. In 1578, there were 66 mou
land per family of the total population. This was close to the figures
regarded as ideal by Chinese early economists for the producing family
(100 mou) considering the fact that about 80 per cent of all
families at that time were producers. By 1729 it was only 35 mou
per family, i.e. the land had to produce almost twice as much as
before. We have shown that the agricultural developments in the Ming
time greatly increased the productivity of the land. This then,
obviously resulted in an increase of population. But by the middle of
the eighteenth century, assuming that production doubled since the
sixteenth century, population pressure was again as heavy as it had
been then. And after c. 1750, population pressure continued to
build up to the present time.
Internal colonization continued during the Manchu time; there was a
continuous, but slow flow of people into Kwangsi, Kweichow, Yuennan. In
spite of laws which prohibited emigration, Chinese also moved into
South-East Asia. Chinese settlement in Manchuria was allowed only in
the last years of the Manchus. But such internal colonization or
emigration could alleviated the pressure only in some areas, while it
continued to build up in others.
In Europe as well as in Japan, we find a strong population increase;
in Europe at almost the same time as in China. But before population
pressure became too serious in Europe or Japan, industry developed and
absorbed the excess population. Thus, farms did not decrease too much
in size. Too small farms are always and in many ways uneconomical. With
the development of industries, the percentage of farm population
decreased. In China, however, the farm population was still as high as
73.3 per cent of the total population in 1932 and the percentage rose
to 81 per cent in 1950.
From the middle of the seventeenth century on, commercial
activities, especially along the coast, continued to increase and we
find gentry families who equip sons who were unwilling or not capable
to study and to enter the ranks of the officials, but who were too
unruly to sit in villages and collect the rent from the tenants of the
family, with money to enter business. The newly settled areas of
Kwangtung and Kwangsi were ideal places for them: here they could sell
Chinese products to the native tribes or to the new settlers at high
prices. Some of these men introduced new techniques from the old
provinces of China into the “colonial” areas and set up dye factories,
textile factories, etc., in the new towns of the south. But the
greatest stimulus for these commercial activities was foreign, European
trade. American silver which had flooded Europe in the sixteenth
century, began to flow into China from the beginning of the seventeenth
century on. The influx was stopped not until between 1661 and 1684 when
the government again prohibited coastal shipping and removed coastal
settlements into the interior in order to stop piracy along the coasts
of Fukien and independence movements on Formosa. But even during these
twenty-three years, the price of silver was so low that home production
was given up because it did not pay off. In the eighteenth century,
silver again continued to enter China, while silk and tea were
exported. This demand led to a strong rise in the prices of silk and
tea, and benefited the merchants. When, from the late eighteenth
century on, opium began to be imported, the silver left China again.
The merchants profited this time from the opium trade, but farmers had
to suffer: the price of silver went up, and taxes had to be paid in
silver, while farm products were sold for copper. By 1835, the ounce of
silver had a value of 2,000 copper coins instead of one thousand before
1800. High gains in commerce prevented investment in industries,
because they would give lower and later profits than commerce. From the
nineteenth century on, more and more industrial goods were offered by
importers which also prevented industrialization. Finally, the gentry
basically remained anti-industrial and anti-business. They tried to
operate necessary enterprises such as mining, melting, porcelain
production as far as possible as government establishments; but as the
operators were officials, they were not too business-minded and these
enterprises did not develop well. The businessmen certainly had enough
capital, but they invested it in land instead of investing it in
industries which could at any moment be taken away by the government,
controlled by the officials or forced to sell at set prices, and which
were always subject to exploitation by dishonest officials. A
businessman felt secure only when he had invested in land, when he had
received an official title upon the payment of large sums of money, or
when he succeeded to push at least one of his sons into the government
bureaucracy. No doubt, in spite of all this, Chinese business and
industry kept on developing in the Manchu time, but they did not
develop at such a speed as to transform the country from an agrarian
into a modern industrial nation.
3 Expansion in Central Asia; the first State treaty
The rise of the Manchu dynasty actually began under the K'ang-hsi
rule (1663-1722). The emperor had three tasks. The first was the
removal of the last supporters of the Ming dynasty and of the generals,
such as Wu San-kui, who had tried to make themselves independent. This
necessitated a long series of campaigns, most of them in the south-west
or south of China; these scarcely affected the population of China
proper. In 1683 Formosa was occupied and the last of the insurgent army
commanders was defeated. It was shown above that the situation of all
these leaders became hopeless as soon as the Manchus had occupied the
rich Yangtze region and the intelligentsia and the gentry of that
region had gone over to them.
A quite different type of insurgent commander was the Mongol prince
Galdan. He, too, planned to make himself independent of Manchu
overlordship. At first the Mongols had readily supported the Manchus,
when the latter were making raids into China and there was plenty of
booty. Now, however, the Manchus, under the influence of the Chinese
gentry whom they brought, and could not but bring, to their court, were
rapidly becoming Chinese in respect to culture. Even in the time of
K'ang-hsi the Manchus began to forget Manchurian; they brought tutors
to court to teach the young Manchus Chinese. Later even the emperors
did not understand Manchurian! As a result of this process, the Mongols
became alienated from the Manchurians, and the situation began once
more to be the same as at the time of the Ming rulers. Thus Galdan
tried to found an independent Mongol realm, free from Chinese
influence.
The Manchus could not permit this, as such a realm would have
threatened the flank of their homeland, Manchuria, and would have
attracted those Manchus who objected to sinification. Between 1690 and
1696 there were battles, in which the emperor actually took part in
person. Galdan was defeated. In 1715, however, there were new
disturbances, this time in western Mongolia. Tsewang Rabdan, whom the
Chinese had made khan of the Oeloet, rose against the Chinese. The wars
that followed, extending far into Turkestan and also involving its
Turkish population together with the Dzungars, ended with the Chinese
conquest of the whole of Mongolia and of parts of eastern Turkestan. As
Tsewang Rabdan had tried to extend his power as far as Tibet, a
campaign was undertaken also into Tibet, Lhasa was occupied, a new
Dalai Lama was installed there as supreme ruler, and Tibet was made
into a protectorate. Since then Tibet has remained to this day under
some form of Chinese colonial rule.
This penetration of the Chinese into Turkestan took place just at
the time when the Russians were enormously expanding their empire in
Asia, and this formed the third problem for the Manchus. In 1650 the
Russians had established a fort by the river Amur. The Manchus regarded
the Amur (which they called the “River of the Black Dragon") as part of
their own territory, and in 1685 they destroyed the Russian settlement.
After this there were negotiations, which culminated in 1689 in the
Treaty of Nerchinsk. This treaty was the first concluded by the Chinese
state with a European power. Jesuit missionaries played a part in the
negotiations as interpreters. Owing to the difficulties of translation
the text of the treaty, in Chinese, Russian, and Manchurian, contained
some obscurities, particularly in regard to the frontier line.
Accordingly, in 1727 the Russians asked for a revision of the old
treaty. The Chinese emperor, whose rule name was Yung-cheng, arranged
for the negotiations to be carried on at the frontier, in the town of
Kyakhta, in Mongolia, where after long discussions a new treaty was
concluded. Under this treaty the Russians received permission to set up
a legation and a commercial agency in Peking, and also to maintain a
church. This was the beginning of the foreign Capitulations. From the
Chinese point of view there was nothing special in a facility of this
sort. For some fifteen centuries all the “barbarians” who had to bring
tribute had been given houses in the capital, where their envoys could
wait until the emperor would receive them—usually on New Year's Day.
The custom had sprung up at the reception of the Huns. Moreover,
permission had always been given for envoys to be accompanied by a few
merchants, who during the envoy's stay did a certain amount of
business. Furthermore the time had been when the Uighurs were permitted
to set up a temple of their own. At the time of the permission given to
the Russians to set up a “legation", a similar office was set up (in
1729) for “Uighur” peoples (meaning Mohammedans), again under the
control of an office, called the Office for Regulation of Barbarians.
The Mohammedan office was placed under two Mohammedan leaders who lived
in Peking. The Europeans, however, had quite different ideas about a
“legation", and about the significance of permission to trade. They
regarded this as the opening of diplomatic relations between states on
terms of equality, and the carrying on of trade as a special privilege,
a sort of Capitulation. This reciprocal misunderstanding produced in
the nineteenth century a number of serious political conflicts. The
Europeans charged the Chinese with breach of treaties, failure to meet
their obligations, and other such things, while the Chinese considered
that they had acted with perfect correctness.
4 Culture
In this K'ang-hsi period culture began to flourish again. The
emperor had attracted the gentry, and so the intelligentsia, to his
court because his uneducated Manchus could not alone have administered
the enormous empire; and he showed great interest in Chinese culture,
himself delved deeply into it, and had many works compiled, especially
works of an encyclopaedic character. The encyclopaedias enabled
information to be rapidly gained on all sorts of subjects, and thus
were just what an interested ruler needed, especially when, as a
foreigner, he was not in a position to gain really thorough instruction
in things Chinese. The Chinese encyclopaedias of the seventeenth and
especially of the eighteenth century were thus the outcome of the
initiative of the Manchurian emperor, and were compiled for his
information; they were not due, like the French encyclopaedias of the
eighteenth century, to a movement for the spread of knowledge among the
people. For this latter purpose the gigantic encyclopaedias of the
Manchus, each of which fills several bookcases, were much too expensive
and were printed in much too limited editions. The compilations began
with the great geographical encyclopaedia of Ku Yen-wu (1613-1682), and
attained their climax in the gigantic eighteenth-century encyclopaedia
T'u-shu chi-ch'eng, scientifically impeccable in the accuracy of
its references to sources. Here were already the beginnings of the
“Archaeological School", built up in the course of the eighteenth
century. This school was usually called “Han school” because the
adherents went back to the commentaries of the classical texts written
in Han time and discarded the orthodox explanations of Chu Hsi's school
of Sung time. Later, its most prominent leader was Tai Chen
(1723-1777). Tai was greatly interested in technology and science; he
can be regarded as the first philosopher who exhibited an empirical,
scientific way of thinking. Late nineteenth and early twentieth century
Chinese scholarship is greatly obliged to him.
The most famous literary works of the Manchu epoch belong once more
to the field which Chinese do not regard as that of true
literature—the novel, the short story, and the drama. Poetry did
exist, but it kept to the old paths and had few fresh ideas. All the
various forms of the Sung period were made use of. The essayists, too,
offered nothing new, though their number was legion. One of the best
known is Yuean Mei (1716-1797), who was also the author of the
collection of short stories Tse-pu-yue (“The Master did not
tell"), which is regarded very highly by the Chinese. The volume of
short stories entitled Liao-chai chich-i, by P'u Sung-lin
(1640-1715?), is world-famous and has been translated into every
civilized language. Both collections are distinguished by their simple
but elegant style. The short story was popular among the greater
gentry; it abandoned the popular style it had in the Ming epoch, and
adopted the polished language of scholars.
The Manchu epoch has left to us what is by general consent the
finest novel in Chinese literature, Hung-lou-meng (“The Dream of
the Red Chamber"), by Ts'ao Hsueeh-ch'in, who died in 1763. It
describes the downfall of a rich and powerful family from the highest
rank of the gentry, and the decadent son's love of a young and
emotional lady of the highest circles. The story is clothed in a
mystical garb that does something to soften its tragic ending. The
interesting novel Ju-lin wai-shih (“Private Reports from the
Life of Scholars"), by Wu Ching-tz[)u] (1701-1754), is a mordant
criticism of Confucianism with its rigid formalism, of the social
system, and of the examination system. Social criticism is the theme of
many novels. The most modern in spirit of the works of this period is
perhaps the treatment of feminism in the novel Ching-hua-yuean,
by Li Yu-chen (d. 1830), which demanded equal rights for men and women.
The drama developed quickly in the Manchu epoch, particularly in
quantity, especially since the emperors greatly appreciated the
theatre. A catalogue of plays compiled in 1781 contains 1,013 titles!
Some of these dramas were of unprecedented length. One of them was
played in 26 parts containing 240 acts; a performance took two years to
complete! Probably the finest dramas of the Manchu epoch are those of
Li Yue (born 1611), who also became the first of the Chinese dramatic
critics. What he had to say about the art of the theatre, and about
aesthetics in general, is still worth reading.
About the middle of the nineteenth century the influence of Europe
became more and more marked. Translation began with Yen Fu (1853-1921),
who translated the first philosophical and scientific books and books
on social questions and made his compatriots acquainted with Western
thought. At the same time Lin Shu (1852-1924) translated the first
Western short stories and novels. With these two began the new style,
which was soon elaborated by Liang Ch'i-ch'ao, a collaborator of Sun
Yat-sen's, and by others, and which ultimately produced the “literary
revolution” of 1917. Translation has continued to this day; almost
every book of outstanding importance in world literature is translated
within a few months of its appearance, and on the average these
translations are of a fairly high level.
Particularly fine work was produced in the field of porcelain in the
Manchu epoch. In 1680 the famous kilns in the province of Kiangsi were
reopened, and porcelain that is among the most artistically perfect in
the world was fired in them. Among the new colours were especially
green shades (one group is known as famille verte) and also
black and yellow compositions. Monochrome porcelain also developed
further, including very fine dark blue, brilliant red (called
“ox-blood"), and white. In the eighteenth century, however, there began
an unmistakable decline, which has continued to this day, although
there are still a few craftsmen and a few kilns that produce
outstanding work (usually attempts to imitate old models), often in
small factories.
In painting, European influence soon shows itself. The best-known
example of this is Lang Shih-ning, an Italian missionary whose original
name was Giuseppe Castiglione (1688-1766); he began to work in China in
1715. He learned the Chinese method of painting, but introduced a
number of technical tricks of European painters, which were adopted in
general practice in China, especially by the official court painters:
the painting of the scholars who lived in seclusion remained
uninfluenced. Dutch flower-painting also had some influence in China as
early as the eighteenth century.
The missionaries played an important part at court. The first Manchu
emperors were as generous in this matter as the Mongols had been, and
allowed the foreigners to work in peace. They showed special interest
in the European science introduced by the missionaries; they had less
sympathy for their religious message. The missionaries, for their part,
sent to Europe enthusiastic accounts of the wonderful conditions in
China, and so helped to popularize the idea that was being formed in
Europe of an “enlightened", a constitutional, monarchy. The leaders of
the Enlightenment read these reports with enthusiasm, with the result
that they had an influence on the French Revolution. Confucius was
found particularly attractive, and was regarded as a forerunner of the
Enlightenment. The “Monadism” of the philosopher Leibniz was influenced
by these reports.
The missionaries gained a reputation at court as “scientists", and
in this they were of service both to China and to Europe. The behaviour
of the European merchants who followed the missions, spreading
gradually in growing numbers along the coasts of China, was not by any
means so irreproachable. The Chinese were certainly justified when they
declared that European ships often made landings on the coast and
simply looted, just as the Japanese had done before them. Reports of
this came to the court, and as captured foreigners described themselves
as “Christians” and also seemed to have some connection with the
missionaries living at court, and as disputes had broken out among the
missionaries themselves in connection with papal ecclesiastical policy,
in the Yung-cheng period (1723-1736; the name of the emperor was Shih
Tsung) Christianity was placed under a general ban, being regarded as a
secret political organization.
5 Relations with the outer world
During the Yung-cheng period there was long-continued guerrilla
fighting with natives in south-west China. The pressure of population
in China sought an outlet in emigration. More and more Chinese moved
into the south-west, and took the land from the natives, and the
fighting was the consequence of this.
At the beginning of the Ch'ien-lung period (1736-1796), fighting
started again in Turkestan. Mongols, now called Kalmuks, defeated by
the Chinese, had migrated to the Ili region, where after heavy fighting
they gained supremacy over some of the Kazaks and other Turkish peoples
living there and in western Turkestan. Some Kazak tribes went over to
the Russians, and in 1735 the Russian colonialists founded the town of
Orenburg in the western Kazak region. The Kalmuks fought the Chinese
without cessation until, in 1739, they entered into an agreement under
which they ceded half their territory to Manchu China, retaining only
the Ili region. The Kalmuks subsequently reunited with other sections
of the Kazaks against the Chinese. In 1754 peace was again concluded
with China, but it was followed by raids on both sides, so that the
Manchus determined to enter on a great campaign against the Ili region.
This ended with a decisive victory for the Chinese (1755). In the years
that followed, however, the Chinese began to be afraid that the various
Kazak tribes might unite in order to occupy the territory of the
Kalmuks, which was almost unpopulated owing to the mass slaughter of
Kalmuks by the Chinese. Unrest began among the Mohammedans throughout
the neighbouring western Turkestan, and the same Chinese generals who
had fought the Kalmuks marched into Turkestan and captured the
Mohammedan city states of Uch, Kashgar, and Yarkand.
The reinforcements for these campaigns, and for the garrisons which
in the following decades were stationed in the Ili region and in the
west of eastern Turkestan, marched along the road from Peking that
leads northward through Mongolia to the far distant Uliassutai and
Kobdo. The cost of transport for one shih (about 66 lb.)
amounted to 120 pieces of silver. In 1781 certain economies were
introduced, but between 1781 and 1791 over 30,000 tons, making some 8
tons a day, was transported to that region. The cost of transport for
supplies alone amounted in the course of time to the not inconsiderable
sum of 120,000,000 pieces of silver. In addition to this there was the
cost of the transported goods and of the pay of soldiers and of the
administration. These figures apply to the period of occupation, of
relative peace: during the actual wars of conquest the expenditure was
naturally far higher. Thus these campaigns, though I do not think they
brought actual economic ruin to China, were nevertheless a costly
enterprise, and one which produced little positive advantage.
In addition to this, these wars brought China into conflict with the
European colonial powers. In the years during which the Chinese armies
were fighting in the Ili region, the Russians were putting out their
feelers in that direction, and the Chinese annals show plainly how the
Russians intervened in the fighting with the Kalmuks and Kazaks. The Hi
region remained thereafter a bone of contention between China and
Russia, until it finally went to Russia, bit by bit, between 1847 and
1881. The Kalmuks and Kazaks played a special part in Russo-Chinese
relations. The Chinese had sent a mission to the Kalmuks farthest west,
by the lower Volga, and had entered into relations with them, as early
as 1714. As Russian pressure on the Volga region continually grew,
these Kalmuks (mainly the Turgut tribe), who had lived there since
1630, decided to return into Chinese territory (1771). During this
enormously difficult migration, almost entirely through hostile
territory, a large number of the Turgut perished; 85,000, however,
reached the Hi region, where they were settled by the Chinese on the
lands of the eastern Kalmuks, who had been largely exterminated.
In the south, too, the Chinese came into direct touch with the
European powers. In 1757 the English occupied Calcutta, and in 1766 the
province of Bengal. In 1767 a Manchu general, Ming Jui, who had been
victorious in the fighting for eastern Turkestan, marched against
Burma, which was made a dependency once more in 1769. And in 1790-1791
the Chinese conquered Nepal, south of Tibet, because Nepalese had made
two attacks on Tibet. Thus English and Chinese political interests came
here into contact.
For the Ch'ien-lung period's many wars of conquest there seem to
have been two main reasons. The first was the need for security. The
Mongols had to be overthrown because otherwise the homeland of the
Manchus was menaced; in order to make sure of the suppression of the
eastern Mongols, the western Mongols (Kalmuks) had to be overthrown; to
make them harmless, Turkestan and the Ili region had to be conquered;
Tibet was needed for the security of Turkestan and Mongolia—and so on.
Vast territories, however, were conquered in this process which were of
no economic value, and most of which actually cost a great deal of
money and brought nothing in. They were conquered simply for security.
That advantage had been gained: an aggressor would have to cross great
areas of unproductive territory, with difficult conditions for
reinforcements, before he could actually reach China. In the second
place, the Chinese may actually have noticed the efforts that were
being made by the European powers, especially Russia and England, to
divide Asia among themselves, and accordingly they made sure of their
own good share.
6 Decline; revolts
The period of Ch'ien-lung is not only that of the greatest expansion
of the Chinese empire, but also that of the greatest prosperity under
the Manchu regime. But there began at the same time to be signs of
internal decline. If we are to fix a particular year for this, perhaps
it should be the year 1774, in which came the first great popular
rising, in the province of Shantung. In 1775 there came another popular
rising, in Honan—that of the “Society of the White Lotus”. This
society, which had long existed as a secret organization and had played
a part in the Ming epoch, had been reorganized by a man named Liu Sung.
Liu Sung was captured and was condemned to penal servitude. His
followers, however, regrouped themselves, particularly in the province
of Anhui. These risings had been produced, as always, by excessive
oppression of the people by the government or the governing class. As,
however, the anger of the population was naturally directed also
against the idle Manchus of the cities, who lived on their state
pensions, did no work, and behaved as a ruling class, the government
saw in these movements a nationalist spirit, and took drastic steps
against them. The popular leaders now altered their program, and
acclaimed a supposed descendant from the Ming dynasty as the future
emperor. Government troops caught the leader of the “White Lotus"
agitation, but he succeeded in escaping. In the regions through which
the society had spread, there then began a sort of Inquisition, of
exceptional ferocity. Six provinces were affected, and in and around
the single city of Wuch'ang in four months more than 20,000 people were
beheaded. The cost of the rising to the government ran into millions.
In answer to this oppression, the popular leaders tightened their
organization and marched north-west from the western provinces of which
they had gained control. The rising was suppressed only by a very big
military operation, and not until 1802. There had been very heavy
fighting between 1793 and 1802—just when in Europe, in the French
Revolution, another oppressed population won its freedom.
The Ch'ien-lung emperor abdicated on New Year's Day, 1795, after
ruling for sixty years. He died in 1799. His successor was Jen Tsung
(1796-1821; reign name: Chia-ch'ing). In the course of his reign the
rising of the “White Lotus” was suppressed, but in 1813 there began a
new rising, this time in North China—again that of a secret
organization, the “Society of Heaven's Law”. One of its leaders bribed
some eunuchs, and penetrated with a group of followers into the palace;
he threw himself upon the emperor, who was only saved through the
intervention of his son. At the same time the rising spread in the
provinces. Once more the government succeeded in suppressing it and
capturing the leaders. But the memory of these risings was kept alive
among the Chinese people. For the government failed to realize that the
actual cause of the risings was the general impoverishment, and saw in
them a nationalist movement, thus actually arousing a national
consciousness, stronger than in the Ming epoch, among the middle and
lower classes of the people, together with hatred of the Manchus. They
were held responsible for every evil suffered, regardless of the fact
that similar evils had existed earlier.
7 European Imperialism in the Far East
With the Tao-kuang period (1821-1850) began a new period in Chinese
history, which came to an end only in 1911.
In foreign affairs these ninety years were marked by the steadily
growing influence of the Western powers, aimed at turning China into a
colony. Culturally this period was that of the gradual infiltration of
Western civilization into the Far East; it was recognized in China that
it was necessary to learn from the West. In home affairs we see the
collapse of the dynasty and the destruction of the unity of the empire;
of four great civil wars, one almost brought the dynasty to its end.
North and South China, the coastal area and the interior, developed in
different ways.
Great Britain had made several attempts to improve her trade
relations with China, but the mission of 1793 had no success, and that
of 1816 also failed. English merchants, like all foreign merchants,
were only permitted to settle in a small area adjoining Canton and at
Macao, and were only permitted to trade with a particular group of
monopolists, known as the “Hong”. The Hong had to pay taxes to the
state, but they had a wonderful opportunity of enriching themselves.
The Europeans were entirely at their mercy, for they were not allowed
to travel inland, and they were not allowed to try to negotiate with
other merchants, to secure lower prices by competition.
The Europeans concentrated especially on the purchase of silk and
tea; but what could they import into China? The higher the price of the
goods and the smaller the cargo space involved, the better were the
chances of profit for the merchants. It proved, however, that European
woollens or luxury goods could not be sold; the Chinese would probably
have been glad to buy food, but transport was too expensive to permit
profitable business. Thus a new article was soon discovered—opium,
carried from India to China: the price was high and the cargo space
involved was very small. The Chinese were familiar with opium, and
bought it readily. Accordingly, from 1800 onwards opium became more and
more the chief article of trade, especially for the English, who were
able to bring it conveniently from India. Opium is harmful to the
people; the opium trade resulted in certain groups of merchants being
inordinately enriched; a great deal of Chinese money went abroad. The
government became apprehensive and sent Lin Tse-hsue as its
commissioner to Canton. In 1839 he prohibited the opium trade and
burned the chests of opium found in British possession. The British
view was that to tolerate the Chinese action might mean the destruction
of British trade in the Far East and that, on the other hand, it might
be possible by active intervention to compel the Chinese to open other
ports to European trade and to shake off the monopoly of the Canton
merchants. In 1840 British ships-of-war appeared off the south-eastern
coast of China and bombarded it. In 1841 the Chinese opened
negotiations and dismissed Lin Tse-hsue. As the Chinese concessions
were regarded as inadequate, hostilities continued; the British entered
the Yangtze estuary and threatened Nanking. In this first armed
conflict with the West, China found herself defenceless owing to her
lack of a navy, and it was also found that the European weapons were
far superior to those of the Chinese. In 1842 China was compelled to
capitulate: under the Treaty of Nanking Hong Kong was ceded to Great
Britain, a war indemnity was paid, certain ports were thrown open to
European trade, and the monopoly was brought to an end. A great deal of
opium came, however, into China through smuggling—regrettably, for the
state lost the customs revenue!
This treaty introduced the period of the Capitulations. It contained
the dangerous clause which added most to China's misfortunes—the Most
Favoured Nation clause, providing that if China granted any privilege
to any other state, that privilege should also automatically be granted
to Great Britain. In connection with this treaty it was agreed that the
Chinese customs should be supervised by European consuls; and a trade
treaty was granted. Similar treaties followed in 1844 with France and
the United States. The missionaries returned; until 1860, however, they
were only permitted to work in the treaty ports. Shanghai was thrown
open in 1843, and developed with extraordinary rapidity from a town to
a city of a million and a centre of world-wide importance.
The terms of the Nanking Treaty were not observed by either side;
both evaded them. In order to facilitate the smuggling, the British had
permitted certain Chinese junks to fly the British flag. This also
enabled these vessels to be protected by British ships-of-war from
pirates, which at that time were very numerous off the southern coast
owing to the economic depression. The Chinese, for their part, placed
every possible obstacle in the way of the British. In 1856 the Chinese
held up a ship sailing under the British flag, pulled down its flag,
and arrested the crew on suspicion of smuggling. In connection with
this and other events, Britain decided to go to war. Thus began the
“Lorcha War” of 1857, in which France joined for the sake of the booty
to be expected. Britain had just ended the Crimean War, and was engaged
in heavy fighting against the Moguls in India. Consequently only a
small force of a few thousand men could be landed in China; Canton,
however, was bombarded, and also the forts of Tientsin. There still
seemed no prospect of gaining the desired objectives by negotiation,
and in 1860 a new expedition was fitted out, this time some 20,000
strong. The troops landed at Tientsin and marched on Peking; the
emperor fled to Jehol and did not return; he died in 1861. The new
Treaty of Tientsin (1860) provided for (a) the opening of further ports
to European traders; (b) the session of Kowloon, the strip of land
lying opposite Hong Kong; (c) the establishment of a British legation
in Peking; (d) freedom of navigation along the Yangtze; (e) permission
for British subjects to purchase land in China; (f) the British to be
subject to their own consular courts and not to the Chinese courts; (g)
missionary activity to be permitted throughout the country. In addition
to this, the commercial treaty was revised, the opium trade was
permitted once more, and a war indemnity was to be paid by China. In
the eyes of Europe, Britain had now succeeded in turning China not
actually into a colony, but at all events into a semi-colony; China
must be expected soon to share the fate of India. China, however, with
her very different conceptions of intercourse between states, did not
realize the full import of these terms; some of them were regarded as
concessions on unimportant points, which there was no harm in granting
to the trading “barbarians", as had been done in the past; some were
regarded as simple injustices, which at a given moment could be swept
away by administrative action.
But the result of this European penetration was that China's balance
of trade was adverse, and became more and more so, as under the
commercial treaties she could neither stop the importation of European
goods nor set a duty on them; and on the other hand she could not
compel foreigners to buy Chinese goods. The efflux of silver brought
general impoverishment to China, widespread financial stringency to the
state, and continuous financial crises and inflation. China had never
had much liquid capital, and she was soon compelled to take up foreign
loans in order to pay her debts. At that time internal loans were out
of the question (the first internal loan was floated in 1894): the
population did not even know what a state loan meant; consequently the
loans had to be issued abroad. This, however, entailed the giving of
securities, generally in the form of economic privileges. Under the
Most Favoured Nation clause, however, these privileges had then to be
granted to other states which had made no loans to China. Clearly a
vicious spiral, which in the end could only bring disaster.
The only exception to the general impoverishment, in which not only
the peasants but the old upper classes were involved, was a certain
section of the trading community and the middle class, which had grown
rich through its dealings with the Europeans. These people now
accumulated capital, became Europeanized with their staffs, acquired
land from the impoverished gentry, and sent their sons abroad to
foreign universities. They founded the first industrial undertakings,
and learned European capitalist methods. This class was, of course, to
be found mainly in the treaty ports in the south and in their environs.
The south, as far north as Shanghai, became more modern and more
advanced; the north made no advance. In the south, European ways of
thought were learnt, and Chinese and European theories were compared.
Criticism began. The first revolutionary societies were formed in this
atmosphere in the south.
8 Risings in Turkestan and within China: the T'ai P'ing Rebellion
But the emperor Hsuean Tsung (reign name Tao-kuang), a man in poor
health though not without ability, had much graver anxieties than those
caused by the Europeans. He did not yet fully realize the seriousness
of the European peril.
[Illustration: 16 The imperial summer palace of the Manchu rulers,
at Jehol. Photo H. Hammer-Morrisson.]
[Illustration: 17 Tower on the city wall of Peking. Photo H.
Hammer-Morrisson.]
In Turkestan, where Turkish Mohammedans lived under Chinese rule,
conditions were far from being as the Chinese desired. The Chinese, a
fundamentally rationalistic people, regarded religion as a purely
political matter, and accordingly required every citizen to take part
in the official form of worship. Subject to that, he might privately
belong to any other religion. To a Mohammedan, this was impossible and
intolerable. The Mohammedans were only ready to practice their own
religion, and absolutely refused to take part in any other. The Chinese
also tried to apply to Turkestan in other matters the same legislation
that applied to all China, but this proved irreconcilable with the
demands made by Islam on its followers. All this produced continual
unrest.
Turkestan had a feudal system of government with a number of feudal
lords (beg), who tried to maintain their influence and who had
the support of the Mohammedan population. The Chinese had come to
Turkestan as soldiers and officials, to administer the country. They
regarded themselves as the lords of the land and occupied themselves
with the extraction of taxes. Most of the officials were also
associated with the Chinese merchants who travelled throughout
Turkestan and as far as Siberia. The conflicts implicit in this
situation produced great Mohammedan risings in the nineteenth century.
The first came in 1825-1827; in 1845 a second rising flamed up, and
thirty years later these revolts led to the temporary loss of the whole
of Turkestan.
In 1848, native unrest began in the province of Hunan, as a result
of the constantly growing pressure of the Chinese settlers on the
native population; in the same year there was unrest farther south, in
the province of Kwangsi, this time in connection with the influence of
the Europeans. The leader was a quite simple man of Hakka blood, Hung
Hsiu-ch'uean (born 1814), who gathered impoverished Hakka peasants
round him as every peasant leader had done in the past. Very often the
nucleus of these peasant movements had been a secret society with a
particular religious tinge; this time the peasant revolutionaries came
forward as at the same time the preachers of a new religion of their
own. Hung had heard of Christianity from missionaries (1837), and he
mixed up Christian ideas with those of ancient China and proclaimed to
his followers a doctrine that promised the Kingdom of God on earth. He
called himself “Christ's younger brother", and his kingdom was to be
called T'ai P'ing (“Supreme Peace"). He made his first comrades,
charcoal makers, local doctors, peddlers and farmers, into kings, and
made himself emperor. At bottom the movement, like all similar ones
before it, was not religious but social; and it produced a great
response from the peasants. The program of the T'ai P'ing, in some
points influenced by Christian ideas but more so by traditional Chinese
thought, was in many points revolutionary: (a) all property was
communal property; (b) land was classified into categories according to
its fertility and equally distributed among men and women. Every
producer kept of the produce as much as he and his family needed and
delivered the rest into the communal granary; (c) administration and
tax systems were revised; (d) women were given equal rights: they
fought together with men in the army and had access to official
position. They had to marry, but monogamy was requested; (e) the use of
opium, tobacco and alcohol was prohibited, prostitution was illegal;
(f) foreigners were regarded as equals, capitulations as the Manchus
had accepted were not recognized. A large part of the officials, and
particularly of the soldiers sent against the revolutionaries, were
Manchus, and consequently the movement very soon became a nationalist
movement, much as the popular movement at the end of the Mongol epoch
had done. Hung made rapid progress; in 1852 he captured Hankow, and in
1853 Nanking, the important centre in the east. With clear political
insight he made Nanking his capital. In this he returned to the old
traditions of the beginning of the Ming epoch, no doubt expecting in
this way to attract support from the eastern Chinese gentry, who had no
liking for a capital far away in the north. He made a parade of
adhesion to the ancient Chinese tradition: his followers cut off their
pigtails and allowed their hair to grow as in the past.
He did not succeed, however, in carrying his reforms from the stage
of sporadic action to a systematic reorganization of the country, and
he also failed to enlist the elements needed for this as for all other
administrative work, so that the good start soon degenerated into a
terrorist regime.
Hung's followers pressed on from Nanking, and in 1853-1855 they
advanced nearly to Tientsin; but they failed to capture Peking itself.
The new T'ai P'ing state faced the Europeans with big problems.
Should they work with it or against it? The T'ai P'ing always insisted
that they were Christians; the missionaries hoped now to have the
opportunity of converting all China to Christianity. The T'ai P'ing
treated the missionaries well but did not let them operate. After long
hesitation and much vacillation, however, the Europeans placed
themselves on the side of the Manchus. Not out of any belief that the
T'ai P'ing movement was without justification, but because they had
concluded treaties with the Manchu government and given loans to it, of
which nothing would have remained if the Manchus had fallen; because
they preferred the weak Manchu government to a strong T'ai P'ing
government; and because they disliked the socialistic element in many
of the measured adopted by the T'ai P'ing.
At first it seemed as if the Manchus would be able to cope unaided
with the T'ai P'ing, but the same thing happened as at the end of the
Mongol rule: the imperial armies, consisting of the “banners” of the
Manchus, the Mongols, and some Chinese, had lost their military skill
in the long years of peace; they had lost their old fighting spirit and
were glad to be able to live in peace on their state pensions. Now
three men came to the fore—a Mongol named Seng-ko-lin-ch'in, a man of
great personal bravery, who defended the interests of the Manchu
rulers; and two Chinese, Tseng Kuo-fan (1811-1892) and Li Hung-chang
(1823-1901), who were in the service of the Manchus but used their
position simply to further the interests of the gentry. The Mongol
saved Peking from capture by the T'ai P'ing. The two Chinese were
living in central China, and there they recruited, Li at his own
expense and Tseng out of the resources at his disposal as a provincial
governor, a sort of militia, consisting of peasants out to protect
their homes from destruction by the peasants of the T'ai P'ing. Thus
the peasants of central China, all suffering from impoverishment, were
divided into two groups, one following the T'ai P'ing, the other
following Tseng Kuo-fan. Tseng's army, too, might be described as a
“national” army, because Tseng was not fighting for the interests of
the Manchus. Thus the peasants, all anti-Manchu, could choose between
two sides, between the T'ai P'ing and Tseng Kuo-fan. Although Tseng
represented the gentry and was thus against the simple common people,
peasants fought in masses on his side, for he paid better, and
especially more regularly. Tseng, being a good strategist, won
successes and gained adherents. Thus by 1856 the T'ai P'ing were
pressed back on Nanking and some of the towns round it; in 1864 Nanking
was captured.
While in the central provinces the T'ai P'ing rebellion was raging,
China was suffering grave setbacks owing to the Lorcha War of 1856; and
there were also great and serious risings in other parts of the
country. In 1855 the Yellow River had changed its course, entering the
sea once more at Tientsin, to the great loss of the regions of Honan
and Anhui. In these two central provinces the peasant rising of the
so-called “Nien Fei” had begun, but it only became formidable after
1855, owing to the increasing misery of the peasants. This purely
peasant revolt was not suppressed by the Manchu government until 1868,
after many collisions. Then, however, there began the so-called
“Mohammedan risings”. Here there are, in all, five movements to
distinguish: (1) the Mohammedan rising in Kansu (1864-5); (2) the Salar
movement in Shensi; (3) the Mohammedan revolt in Yuennan (1855-1873);
(4) the rising in Kansu (1895); (5) the rebellion of Yakub Beg in
Turkestan (from 1866 onward).
While we are fairly well informed about the other popular risings of
this period, the Mohammedan revolts have not yet been well studied. We
know from unofficial accounts that these risings were suppressed with
great brutality. To this day there are many Mohammedans in, for
instance, Yuennan, but the revolt there is said to have cost a million
lives. The figures all rest on very rough estimates: in Kansu the
population is said to have fallen from fifteen millions to one million;
the Turkestan revolt is said to have cost ten million lives. There are
no reliable statistics; but it is understandable that at that time the
population of China must have fallen considerably, especially if we
bear in mind the equally ferocious suppression of the risings of the
T'ai P'ing and the Nien Fei within China, and smaller risings of which
we have made no mention.
The Mohammedan risings were not elements of a general Mohammedan
revolt, but separate events only incidentally connected with each
other. The risings had different causes. An important factor was the
general distress in China. This was partly due to the fact that the
officials were exploiting the peasant population more ruthlessly than
ever. In addition to this, owing to the national feeling which had been
aroused in so unfortunate a way, the Chinese felt a revulsion against
non-Chinese, such as the Salars, who were of Turkish race. Here there
were always possibilities of friction, which might have been removed
with a little consideration but which swelled to importance through the
tactless behaviour of Chinese officials. Finally there came divisions
among the Mohammedans of China which led to fighting between
themselves.
All these risings were marked by two characteristics. They had no
general political aim such as the founding of a great and universal
Islamic state. Separate states were founded, but they were too small to
endure; they would have needed the protection of great states. But they
were not moved by any pan-Islamic idea. Secondly, they all took place
on Chinese soil, and all the Mohammedans involved, except in the rising
of the Salars, were Chinese. These Chinese who became Mohammedans are
called Dungans. The Dungans are, of course, no longer pure Chinese,
because Chinese who have gone over to Islam readily form mixed
marriages with Islamic non-Chinese, that is to say with Turks and
Mongols.
The revolt, however, of Yakub Beg in Turkestan had a quite different
character. Yakub Beg (his Chinese name was An Chi-yeh) had risen to the
Chinese governorship when he made himself ruler of Kashgar. In 1866 he
began to try to make himself independent of Chinese control. He
conquered Ili, and then in a rapid campaign made himself master of all
Turkestan.
His state had a much better prospect of endurance than the other
Mohammedan states. He had full control of it from 1874. Turkestan was
connected with China only by the few routes that led between the desert
and the Tibetan mountains. The state was supported against China by
Russia, which was continually pressing eastward, and in the south by
Great Britain, which was pressing towards Tibet. Farther west was the
great Ottoman empire; the attempt to gain direct contact with it was
not hopeless in itself, and this was recognized at Istanbul. Missions
went to and fro, and Turkish officers came to Yakub Beg and organized
his army; Yakub Beg recognized the Turkish sultan as Khalif. He also
concluded treaties with Russia and Great Britain. But in spite of all
this he was unable to maintain his hold of Turkestan. In 1877 the
famous Chinese general Tso Tsung-t'ang (1812-1885), who had fought
against the T'ai P'ing and also against the Mohammedans in Kansu,
marched into Turkestan and ended Yakub Beg's rule.
Yakub was defeated, however, not so much by Chinese superiority as
by a combination of circumstances. In order to build up his kingdom he
was compelled to impose heavy taxation, and this made him unpopular
with his own followers: they had to pay taxes under the Chinese, but
the Chinese collection had been much less rigorous than that of Yakub
Beg. It was technically impossible for the Ottoman empire to give him
any aid, even had its internal situation permitted it. Britain and
Russia would probably have been glad to see a weakening of the Chinese
hold over Turkestan, but they did not want a strong new state there,
once they had found that neither of them could control the country
while it was in Yakub Beg's hands. In 1881 Russia occupied the Ili
region, Yakub's first conquest. In the end the two great powers
considered it better for Turkestan to return officially into the hands
of the weakened China, hoping that in practice they would be able to
bring Turkestan more and more under their control. Consequently, when
in 1880, three years after the removal of Yakub Beg, China sent a
mission to Russia with the request for the return of the Ili region to
her, Russia gave way, and the Treaty of Ili was concluded, ending for
the time the Russian penetration of Turkestan. In 1882 the Manchu
government raised Turkestan to a “new frontier” (Sinkiang) with a
special administration.
This process of colonial penetration of Turkestan continued. Until
the end of the first world war there was no fundamental change in the
situation in the country, owing to the rivalry between Great Britain
and Russia. But after 1920 a period began in which Turkestan became
almost independent, under a number of rulers of parts of the country.
Then, from 1928 onward, a more and more thorough penetration by Russia
began, so that by 1940 Turkestan could almost be called a Soviet
Republic. The second world war diverted Russian attention to the West,
and at the same time compelled the Chinese to retreat into the interior
from the Japanese, so that by 1943 the country was more firmly held by
the Chinese government than it had been for seventy years. After the
creation of the People's Democracy mass immigration into Sinkiang
began, in connection with the development of oil fields and of many new
industries in the border area between Sinkiang and China proper. Roads
and air communications opened Sinkiang. Yet, the differences between
immigrant Chinese and local, Muslim Turks, continue to play a role.
9 Collision with Japan; further Capitulations
The reign of Wen Tsung (reign name Hsien-feng 1851-1861) was marked
throughout by the T'ai P'ing and other rebellions and by wars with the
Europeans, and that of Mu Tsung (reign name T'ung-chih: 1862-1874) by
the great Mohammedan disturbances. There began also a conflict with
Japan which lasted until 1945. Mu Tsung came to the throne as a child
of five, and never played a part of his own. It had been the general
rule for princes to serve as regents for minors on the imperial throne,
but this time the princes concerned won such notoriety through their
intrigues that the Peking court circles decided to entrust the regency
to two concubines of the late emperor. One of these, called Tz[)u] Hsi
(born 1835), of the Manchu tribe of the Yehe-Nara, quickly gained the
upper hand. The empress Tz[)u] Hsi was one of the strongest
personalities of the later nineteenth century who played an active part
in Chinese political life. She played a more active part than any
emperor had played for many decades.
Meanwhile great changes had taken place in Japan. The restoration of
the Meiji had ended the age of feudalism, at least on the surface.
Japan rapidly became Westernized, and at the same time entered on an
imperialist policy. Her aims from 1868 onward were clear, and remained
unaltered until the end of the second World War: she was to be
surrounded by a wide girdle of territories under Japanese domination,
in order to prevent the approach of any enemy to the Japanese homeland.
This girdle was divided into several zones—(1) the inner zone with the
Kurile Islands, Sakhalin, Korea, the Ryukyu archipelago, and Formosa;
(2) the outer zone with the Marianne, Philippine, and Caroline Islands,
eastern China, Manchuria, and eastern Siberia; (3) the third zone, not
clearly defined, including especially the Netherlands Indies,
Indo-China, and the whole of China, a zone of undefined extent. The
outward form of this subjugated region was to be that of the Greater
Japanese Empire, described as the Imperium of the Yellow Race (the main
ideas were contained in the Tanaka Memorandum 1927 and in the Tada
Interview of 1936). Round Japan, moreover, a girdle was to be created
of producers of raw materials and purchasers of manufactures, to
provide Japanese industry with a market. Japan had sent a delegation of
amity to China as early as 1869, and a first Sino-Japanese treaty was
signed in 1871; from then on, Japan began to carry out her
imperialistic plans. In 1874 she attacked the Ryukyu islands and
Formosa on the pretext that some Japanese had been murdered there.
Under the treaty of 1874 Japan withdrew once more, only demanding a
substantial indemnity; but in 1876, in violation of the treaty and
without a declaration of war, she annexed the Ryukyu Islands. In 1876
began the Japanese penetration into Korea; by 1885 she had reached the
stage of a declaration that Korea was a joint sphere of interest of
China and Japan; until then China's protectorate over Korea had been
unchallenged. At the same time (1876) Great Britain had secured further
Capitulations in the Chefoo Convention; in 1862 France had acquired
Cochin China, in 1864 Cambodia, in 1874 Tongking, and in 1883 Annam.
This led in 1884 to war between France and China, in which the French
did not by any means gain an indubitable victory; but the Treaty of
Tientsin left them with their acquisitions.
Meanwhile, at the beginning of 1875, the young Chinese emperor died
of smallpox, without issue. Under the influence of the two empresses,
who still remained regents, a cousin of the dead emperor, the
three-year-old prince Tsai T'ien was chosen as emperor Te Tsung (reign
name Kuang-hsue: 1875-1909). He came of age in 1889 and took over the
government of the country. The empress Tz[)u] Hsi retired, but did not
really relinquish the reins.
In 1894 the Sino-Japanese War broke out over Korea, as an outcome of
the undefined position that had existed since 1885 owing to the
imperialistic policy of the Japanese. China had created a North China
squadron, but this was all that can be regarded as Chinese preparation
for the long-expected war. The Governor General of Chihli (now
Hopei—the province in which Peking is situated), Li Hung-chang, was a
general who had done good service, but he lost the war, and at
Shimonoseki (1895) he had to sign a treaty on very harsh terms, in
which China relinquished her protectorate over Korea and lost Formosa.
The intervention of France, Germany, and Russia compelled Japan to
content herself with these acquisitions, abandoning her demand for
South Manchuria.
10 Russia in Manchuria
After the Crimean War, Russia had turned her attention once more to
the East. There had been hostilities with China over eastern Siberia,
which were brought to an end in 1858 by the Treaty of Aigun, under
which China ceded certain territories in northern Manchuria. This made
possible the founding of Vladivostok in 1860. Russia received Sakhalin
from Japan in 1875 in exchange for the Kurile Islands. She received
from China the important Port Arthur as a leased territory, and then
tried to secure the whole of South Manchuria. This brought Japan's
policy of expansion into conflict with Russia's plans in the Far East.
Russia wanted Manchuria in order to be able to pursue a policy in the
Pacific; but Japan herself planned to march into Manchuria from Korea,
of which she already had possession. This imperialist rivalry made war
inevitable: Russia lost the war; under the Treaty of Portsmouth in 1905
Russia gave Japan the main railway through Manchuria, with adjoining
territory. Thus Manchuria became Japan's sphere of influence and was
lost to the Manchus without their being consulted in any way. The
Japanese penetration of Manchuria then proceeded stage by stage, not
without occasional setbacks, until she had occupied the whole of
Manchuria from 1932 to 1945. After the end of the second world war,
Manchuria was returned to China, with certain reservations in favour of
the Soviet Union, which were later revoked.
11 Reform and reaction: the Boxer Rising
China had lost the war with Japan because she was entirely without
modern armament. While Japan went to work at once with all her energy
to emulate Western industrialization, the ruling class in China had
shown a marked repugnance to any modernization; and the centre of this
conservatism was the dowager empress Tz[)u] Hsi. She was a woman of
strong personality, but too uneducated—in the modern sense—to be able
to realize that modernization was an absolute necessity for China if it
was to remain an independent state. The empress failed to realize that
the Europeans were fundamentally different from the neighbouring tribes
or the pirates of the past; she had not the capacity to acquire a
general grasp of the realities of world politics. She felt
instinctively that Europeanization would wreck the foundations of the
power of the Manchus and the gentry, and would bring another class, the
middle class and the merchants, into power.
There were reasonable men, however, who had seen the necessity of
reform—especially Li Hung-chang, who has already been mentioned. In
1896 he went on a mission to Moscow, and then toured Europe. The
reformers were, however, divided into two groups. One group advocated
the acquisition of a certain amount of technical knowledge from abroad
and its introduction by slow reforms, without altering the social
structure of the state or the composition of the government. The others
held that the state needed fundamental changes, and that superficial
loans from Europe were not enough. The failure in the war with Japan
made the general desire for reform more and more insistent not only in
the country but in Peking. Until now Japan had been despised as a
barbarian state; now Japan had won! The Europeans had been despised;
now they were all cutting bits out of China for themselves, extracting
from the government one privilege after another, and quite openly
dividing China into “spheres of interest", obviously as the prelude to
annexation of the whole country.
In Europe at that time the question was being discussed over and
over again, why Japan had so quickly succeeded in making herself a
modern power, and why China was not succeeding in doing so; the
Japanese were praised for their capacity and the Chinese blamed for
their lassitude. Both in Europe and in Chinese circles it was
overlooked that there were fundamental differences in the social
structures of the two countries. The basis of the modern capitalist
states of the West is the middle class. Japan had for centuries had a
middle class (the merchants) that had entered into a symbiosis with the
feudal lords. For the middle class the transition to modern capitalism,
and for the feudal lords the way to Western imperialism, was easy. In
China there was only a weak middle class, vegetating under the
dominance of the gentry; the middle class had still to gain the
strength to liberate itself before it could become the support for a
capitalistic state. And the gentry were still strong enough to maintain
their dominance and so to prevent a radical reconstruction; all they
would agree to were a few reforms from which they might hope to secure
an increase of power for their own ends.
In 1895 and in 1698 a scholar, K'ang Yo-wei, who was admitted into
the presence of the emperor, submitted to him memoranda in which he
called for radical reform. K'ang was a scholar who belonged to the
empiricist school of philosophy of the early Manchu period, the
so-called Han school. He was a man of strong and persuasive
personality, and had such an influence on the emperor that in 1898 the
emperor issued several edicts ordering the fundamental reorganization
of education, law, trade, communications, and the army. These laws were
not at all bad in themselves; they would have paved the way for a
liberalization of Chinese society. But they aroused the utmost hatred
in the conservative gentry and also in the moderate reformers among the
gentry. K'ang Yo-wei and his followers, to whom a number of well-known
modern scholars belonged, had strong support in South China. We have
already mentioned that owing to the increased penetration of European
goods and ideas, South China had become more progressive than the
north; this had added to the tension already existing for other reasons
between north and south. In foreign policy the north was more
favourable to Russia and radically opposed to Japan and Great Britain;
the south was in favour of co-operation with Britain and Japan, in
order to learn from those two states how reform could be carried
through. In the north the men of the south were suspected of being
anti-Manchu and revolutionary in feeling. This was to some extent true,
though K'ang Yo-wei and his friends were as yet largely unconscious of
it.
When the empress Tz[)u] Hsi saw that the emperor was actually
thinking about reforms, she went to work with lightning speed. Very
soon the reformers had to flee; those who failed to make good their
escape were arrested and executed. The emperor was made a prisoner in a
palace near Peking, and remained a captive until his death; the empress
resumed her regency on his behalf. The period of reforms lasted only
for a few months of 1898. A leading part in the extermination of the
reformers was played by troops from Kansu under the command of a
Mohammedan, Tung Fu-hsiang. General Yuean Shih-k'ai, who was then
stationed at Tientsin in command of 7,000 troops with modern equipment,
the only ones in China, could have removed the empress and protected
the reformers; but he was already pursuing a personal policy, and
thought it safer to give the reformers no help.
There now began, from 1898, a thoroughly reactionary rule of the
dowager empress. But China's general situation permitted no
breathing-space. In 1900 came the so-called Boxer Rising, a new popular
movement against the gentry and the Manchus similar to the many that
had preceded it. The Peking government succeeded, however, in
negotiations that brought the movement into the service of the
government and directed it against the foreigners. This removed the
danger to the government and at the same time helped it against the
hated foreigners. But incidents resulted which the Peking government
had not anticipated. An international army was sent to China, and
marched from Tientsin against Peking, to liberate the besieged European
legations and to punish the government. The Europeans captured Peking
(1900); the dowager empress and her prisoner, the emperor, had to flee;
some of the palaces were looted. The peace treaty that followed exacted
further concessions from China to the Europeans and enormous war
indemnities, the payment of which continued into the 1940's, though
most of the states placed the money at China's disposal for educational
purposes. When in 1902 the dowager empress returned to Peking and put
the emperor back into his palace-prison, she was forced by what had
happened to realize that at all events a certain measure of reform was
necessary. The reforms, however, which she decreed, mainly in 1904,
were very modest and were never fully carried out. They were only
intended to make an impression on the outer world and to appease the
continually growing body of supporters of the reform party, especially
numerous in South China. The south remained, nevertheless, a focus of
hostility to the Manchus. After his failure in 1898, K'ang Yo-wei went
to Europe, and no longer played any important political part. His place
was soon taken by a young Chinese physician who had been living abroad,
Sun Yat-sen (1866-1925), who turned the reform party into a
middle-class revolutionary party.
12 End of the dynasty
Meanwhile the dowager empress held her own. General Yuean Shih-k'ai,
who had played so dubious a part in 1898, was not impeccably loyal to
her, and remained unreliable. He was beyond challenge the strongest man
in the country, for he possessed the only modern army; but he was still
biding his time.
In 1908 the dowager empress fell ill; she was seventy-four years
old. When she felt that her end was near, she seems to have had the
captive emperor Te Tsung assassinated (at 5 p.m. on November 14th); she
herself died next day (November 15th, 2 p.m.): she was evidently
determined that this man, whom she had ill-treated and oppressed all
his life, should not regain independence. As Te Tsung had no children,
she nominated on the day of her death the two-year-old prince P'u Yi as
emperor (reign name Hsuean-t'ung, 1909-1911).
The fact that another child was to reign and a new regency to act
for him, together with all the failures in home and foreign policy,
brought further strength to the revolutionary party. The government
believed that it could only maintain itself if it allowed Yuean
Shih-k'ai, the commander of the modern troops, to come to power. The
chief regent, however, worked against Yuean Shih-k'ai and dismissed him
at the beginning of 1909; Yuean's supporters remained at their posts.
Yuean himself now entered into relations with the revolutionaries,
whose centre was Canton, and whose undisputed leader was now Sun
Yat-sen. At this time Sun and his supporters had already made attempts
at revolution, but without success, as his following was as yet too
small. It consisted mainly of young intellectuals who had been educated
in Europe and America; the great mass of the Chinese people remained
unconvinced: the common people could not understand the new ideals, and
the middle class did not entirely trust the young intellectuals.
The state of China in 1911 was as lamentable as could be: the
European states, Russia, America, and Japan regarded China as a field
for their own plans, and in their calculations paid scarcely any
attention to the Chinese government. Foreign capital was penetrating
everywhere in the form of loans or railway and other enterprises. If it
had not been for the mutual rivalries of the powers, China would long
ago have been annexed by one of them. The government needed a great
deal of money for the payment of the war indemnities, and for carrying
out the few reforms at last decided on. In order to get money from the
provinces, it had to permit the viceroys even more freedom than they
already possessed. The result was a spectacle altogether resembling
that of the end of the T'ang dynasty, about A.D. 900: the various
governors were trying to make themselves independent. In addition to
this there was the revolutionary movement in the south.
The government made some concession to the progressives, by
providing the first beginnings of parliamentary rule. In 1910 a
national assembly was convoked. It had a Lower House with
representatives of the provinces (provincial diets were also set up),
and an Upper House, in which sat representatives of the imperial house,
the nobility, the gentry, and also the protectorates. The members of
the Upper House were all nominated by the regent. It very soon proved
that the members of the Lower House, mainly representatives of the
provincial gentry, had a much more practical outlook than the
routineers of Peking. Thus the Lower House grew in importance, a fact
which, of course, brought grist to the mills of the revolutionary
movement.
In 1910 the first risings directed actually against the regency took
place, in the province of Hunan. In 1911 the “railway disturbances"
broke out in western China as a reply of the railway shareholders in
the province of Szechwan to the government decree of nationalization of
all the railways. The modernist students, most of whom were sons of
merchants who owned railway shares, supported the movement, and the
government was unable to control them. At the same time a great
anti-Manchu revolution began in Wuch'ang, one of the cities of which
Wuhan, on the Yangtze, now consists. The revolution was the result of
government action against a group of terrorists. Its leader was an
officer named Li Yuean-hung. The Manchus soon had some success in this
quarter, but the other provincial governors now rose in rapid
succession, repudiated the Manchus, and declared themselves
independent. Most of the Manchu garrisons in the provinces were
murdered. The governors remained at the head of their troops in their
provinces, and for the moment made common cause with the
revolutionaries, from whom they meant to break free at the first
opportunity. The Manchus themselves failed at first to realize the
gravity of the revolutionary movement; they then fell into
panic-stricken desperation. As a last resource, Yuean Shih-k'ai was
recalled (November 10th, 1911) and made prime minister.
Yuean's excellent troops were loyal to his person, and he could have
made use of them in fighting on behalf of the dynasty. But a victory
would have brought no personal gain to him; for his personal plans he
considered that the anti-Manchu side provided the springboard he
needed. The revolutionaries, for their part, had no choice but to win
over Yuean Shih-k'ai for the sake of his troops, since they were not
themselves strong enough to get rid of the Manchus, or even to wrest
concessions from them, so long as the Manchus were defended by Yuean's
army. Thus Yuean and the revolutionaries were forced into each other's
arms. He then began negotiations with them, explaining to the imperial
house that the dynasty could only be saved by concessions. The
revolutionaries—apart from their desire to neutralize the prime
minister and general, if not to bring him over to their side—were also
readier than ever to negotiate, because they were short of money and
unable to obtain loans from abroad, and because they could not
themselves gain control of the individual governors. The negotiations,
which had been carried on at Shanghai, were broken off on December
18th, 1911, because the revolutionaries demanded a republic, but the
imperial house was only ready to grant a constitutional monarchy.
Meanwhile the revolutionaries set up a provisional government at
Nanking (December 29th, 1911), with Sun Yat-sen as president and Li
Yuean-hung as vice-president. Yuean Shih-k'ai now declared to the
imperial house that the monarchy could no longer be defended, as his
troops were too unreliable, and he induced the Manchu government to
issue an edict on February 12th, 1912, in which they renounced the
throne of China and declared the Republic to be the constitutional form
of state. The young emperor of the Hsuean-t'ung period, after the
Japanese conquest of Manchuria in 1931, was installed there. He was,
however, entirely without power during the melancholy years of his
nominal rule, which lasted until 1945.
In 1912 the Manchu dynasty came in reality to its end. On the news
of the abdication of the imperial house, Sun Yat-sen resigned in
Nanking, and recommended Yuean Shih-k'ai as president.