Chronology Entry
Year
1983
Text
Snyder, Gary. Walls within walls [ID D29198].
City Walls
Dwelling within walls was normal for the Chinese people of the plains and valleys. In the early Han dynasty there were an estimated 37,844 walled settlements of various sizes, with perhaps 60 million people living behind them. Walls are a striking part of the Chinese landscape even today, the gently slanted stone walls of a provincial capital, broken by occasional towers that project two or three stories higher yet, rising through the mist fronting a river or lake, or mirrored in half-flooded fields.
Early Neolithic settlements (called "Yang-shao") had no walls. Instead they were surrounded by ditches or moats about fifteen feet wide and deep. These were probably to keep out animals; deer are notorious nibblers on orchards and vegetable gardens. Digs of Yang-shao settlements have turned up few, if any, fighting weapons. Later Neolithic settlements (called "Lung-shan") have tamped-earth fortifications and weapons.
Around the fifth century B.C., as the Eastern Chou dynasty slipped toward the era of "Warring States", the basic style of walled city began to take shape.
The type consisted of at least three contrasting spatial units: a small enclosure which was the aristocratic and administrative centre, mixed (in early times) with dependent tradesmen and artisans; industrial and commercial quarters, with residences, in a large enclosure; farmlands immediately beyond the city walls. In the warring states period sometimes three successive ramparts were built, suggesting a need to extend protection to increasingly large areas of commercial activity. Another change lay in the strengthening of the outer walls at the expense of the walls of the inner citadel, which were allowed to go into decay.
The city of Hsia-tu, in the state of Yen, is estimated to have been ten square miles within the walls.
There were also the "great walls" to keep out the northern nomad tribesmen, the walls originally built by the states of Ch'in, Yen, and Chao. When Ch'in became the first all-China empire, 221 B.C., it joined together previous sections to make a more continuous barrier.
The dominant element of the Han dynasty townscape was the wall. It separated a settlement from the outlying fields, and by creating an enclosure facilitated the regimentation of life within ... it had the character of a succession of walled-in rectangles. There was the town wall with gates on the four sides. Within the wall the settlement was partitioned into a number of wards. Ch'ang-an itself had as many as 160 wards. Streets separated the wards, which were in turn surrounded by walls. Each ward had only one gate opening to the street during Han times, and contained up to one hundred households, each of which was again surrounded by a wall. The inhabitants, to get out of town, would thus have to pass through three sets of gates: that of their house, that of their ward, and that of their town. Moreover, all the gates were guarded and closed up at night.
Lovers, criminals, and spies climbing over these walls after dark is a staple in Chinese storytelling.
T'ang dynasty cities had a little more nightlife than those of the Han, and larger, looser markets, with special quarters for the Persian, Turkish, and Arab traders. The plan of the capital city of Ch'ang-an followed in good part the old ritual ideal—"The Polar star and the celestial meridian writ small became the royal palace and the main north—south streets through the city". The north—south streets were 450-feet wide. The upper classes were in the eastern sector and the working people in the west. Each wing had its own market area. There were also vacant lots with vegetable gardens and pasture within the walls. The great city was spacious and open.
Such city planning seemed to work, but no one could have foreseen the relentless (if fluctuating) rise of population, especially after the year 1100, when the number first exceeded one hundred million. Part of the later rise reflects an increase in the size of the Chinese territory and the inclusion of people considered non-Chinese in earlier times. After 1100 there were five urban centers south of the Huai river with more than a million people each.
Flying Money
Between the ninth and the thirteenth centuries China became what it basically was to be into modern times. During the three centuries of the Sung dynasty not only people but wealth and high culture moved south and toward towns. In the early twelfth century only 6 percent of the population was urban, but by the fourteenth an estimated 33 percent were living in or around large cities.6 In the second phase of the T'ang dynasty, after An Lu-shan's rebellion, the tax base was changed from per capita to a straight land tax. This meant that wealthy manors that had long been exempt began to pay taxes. It was the first of a series of shifts or tendencies with profound effects. Some of the changes were:
• a people's corvée army evolved into an army of mercenaries manor-owning country gentlemen often became absentee landlords
• cumbersome metal coin was replaced by paper money
• a rustic naïveté gave way to a street-wise hedonism
• interest in cultural diversity yielded to a China-centered cultural chauvinism
• regional agricultural self-sufficiency gave way to cash-crop specialization
• status determined by family connections declined, and a greater emphasis on status derived from high ranks in the government examinations developed
• hiking through the mountains was replaced by tending an artificially wild-looking backyard garden.
The society that began to emerge we can recognize at many points as analogous to what we now consider "modern"—but more convivial and peaceful. It was the best society one could hope to see in a world of high population and dwindling resources. It was a kind of human cultural climax, from which the contemporary world may still have much to learn. The sophistication of social devices was remarkable:
Local tax collectors developed the corollary function of wholesalers or brokers, gathering the local surplus of agricultural or manufactured goods for sale to transport to merchants. The latter ranged from itinerant peddlers to large-scale, monopolistic operators. An extensive network of inns that developed to accommodate these traveling merchants became the inn system that was to continue with little change until recent times.
Old and already effective farming skills were enhanced by new tools, seeds, plants, and a broad exchange of information through the exhaustive agricultural encyclopedias and treatises now made available by mass woodblock printing. The poet and administrator Su Shih wrote a prose piece on a unique new rice-transplanting device that looked like a wooden hobbyhorse. In rice seed alone a revolution took place: a drought-resistant seed from central Vietnam came to be used widely. It could be grown on poorer soil, and so expanded available rice acreage. "By Sung times almost all of the types in use before the middle of T'ang had disappeared . . . a southern Sung gazeteer for the county of Ch'ang-shu in the lower Yangtze delta lists twenty-one kinds of moderate gluten rice, eight of high gluten rice, four of low gluten rice and ten miscellaneous varieties as being cultivated there". Mark Elvin says that by the thirteenth century China had the most sophisticated agriculture in the world, with India the only possible rival.
Increased contact with the market made the Chinese peasantry into a class of adaptable, rational, profit-oriented, petty entrepreneurs. A wide range of new occupations opened up in the countryside. In the hills, timber was grown for the booming boatbuilding industry and for the construction of houses in the expanding cities. Vegetables and fruit were produced for urban consumption. All sorts of oils were pressed for cooking, lighting, waterproofing, and to go into haircreams and medicines. Sugar was refined, crystallized, used as a preservative. Fish were raised in ponds and reservoirs to the point where the rearing of newly-hatched young fish for stock became a major business.
Trade and commerce weren't new to China, though. In the first century, B.C. Ssu-ma Ch'ien wrote:
from the age of Emperor Shun and the Hsia dynasty down to the present, ears and eyes have always longed for the ultimate in beautiful sounds and forms, mouths have desired to taste the best in grass-fed and grain-fed animals, bodies have delighted in ease and comfort, and hearts have swelled with pride at the glories of powers and ability. So long have these habits been allowed to permeate the lives of the people that, though one were to go from door to door preaching the subtle arguments of the Taoists, he could never succeed in changing them.
Ssu-ma did short biographies of famous commoners who made fortunes by buying low and selling high, gambling on surplus and dearth. The merchant Chi-jan of the fifth century B.C. said, "When an article has become extremely expensive, it will surely fall in price, and when it has become extremely cheap then the price will begin to rise. Dispose of expensive goods as though they were so much filth and dirt; buy up cheap goods as though they were pearls and jade. Wealth and currency should be allowed to flow as freely as water"
This trade was conducted with rolls of silk, bales of rice, salt, or copper cash as the media of exchange. Cash was often scarce, and by mid-T'ang it was noted that mining the copper and minting and transporting new coin cost twice as much as its face value as money. All sorts of "flying money"— promissory notes, letters of credit, and private-issue proto-money—were succeeded by government-issue paper money in the eleventh century. During the thirteenth century, and under the Mongols in the early fourteenth, the government even accepted paper money for the payment of taxes. Marco Polo was astonished to see paper used just as though it were metal. If the flow of currency began to falter, the government instantly offered silver or gold as payment for paper. "For seventeen or eighteen years the value of paper money did not fluctuate."
The Southern Capital
In the coastal province of Chekiang, south of Shanghai, there are still some upland areas of Miao population. In the fifth century A.D., when Hsieh Ling-yun walked the hills and worked on his rural estate, the greater part of the province was considered barbarian. It is named for the Che River, which reaches into the southern slopes of the Huang moun¬tains, and the jooo-foot hills on the Kiangsi-Anhwei border. The river is famous for the tidal bore that plays in its mouth at Hangchou bay. A decade after the fall of the Northern Sung capital K'ai-feng to the Juchen (Chin), the town of Lin-an, at the river mouth, was declared the new capital. The émigré emperor, his court, and crowds of refugees of the northern ruling class settled in. The name was changed to Hang-chou.
In earlier times the Lin-an area had been a marsh. The main river was channelized and subsidiary streams dammed in the fifth century A.D. The original town grew then on land between the lake thus formed, "West Lake", and the main Che River. It has come to be considered one of the most scenic places in China. Great care has been taken to keep the shallow lake clean. It was a true public park, with laws against planting water-chestnut (which would rapidly spread) or dumping trash in the water. Public pavilions, docks, and shade areas were built. Zoning restrictions designated acceptable architectural styles. Buddhist temples were looked on with favor; one of the most famous structures overlooking the lake was the pagoda at Thunder Point. Built of blue glazed brick, it was 170 feet high.
Po Chu-i had served as prefect there in the ninth century, and Su Shih did major maintenance and improvement on the lake when he was briefly prefect in the late eleventh century. The causeway on the lake is named after him.
In 1136 Hang-chou had a population of around two hundred thousand. In 1170 this had become half a million, and in 1275 it was well over a million and perhaps the largest single concentration of human beings in the world at that time. It may also have been the richest. The capital fell to the Mongols in 1279, after a siege of several years. Marco Polo was in the city soon after it surrendered (he worked for Khubilai Khan for seventeen years) and has left eloquent description:
On one side is a lake of fresh water, very clear. On the other is a huge river, which entering by many channels, diffused throughout the city, carries away all its filth and then flows into the lake, from which it flows out towards the Ocean. This makes the air very wholesome. And through every part of the city it is possible to travel either by land or by these streams. The streets and watercourses alike are very wide, so that carts and boats can readily pass along them to carry provisions for the inhabitants.
There are ten principal marketplaces, not to speak of innumer-able local ones. These are square, being a half a mile each way. In front of them lies a main thoroughfare, 40 paces wide, which runs straight from one end of the city to the other. It is crossed by many bridges . . . and every four miles, there is one of these squares... And in each of these squares, three days in the week, there is a gathering of 40 to 50 thousand people, who come to market bringing everything that could be desired to sustain life. There is always abundance of victuals, both wild game, such as roebuck, stags, harts, hares, and rabbits, and of fowls, such as partridges, pheasants, francolins, quails, hens, capons, and as many ducks and geese as can be told... Then there are the shambles, where they slaughter the bigger animals, such as calves, oxen, kid, and lambs, whose flesh is eaten by the rich and upper classes. The others, the lower orders, do not scruple to eat all sorts of unclean flesh.
All the ten squares are surrounded by high buildings, and below these are shops in which every sort of craft is practised and every sort of luxury is on sale, including spices, gems, and pearls. In some shops nothing is sold but spiced rice wine, which is being made all the time, fresh, and very cheap.
Hang-chou was kept spotless. The authorities had the streets cleaned and refuse piled at key points where it was loaded into boats. The boats in turn converged and took it out to the country in convoys. Nightsoil (human waste) was collected by corporations each with their own gathering territory who sold it to the intensive truck gardens of the eastern suburbs. (Contrary to common opinion in the West, the use of nightsoil does not pose a health problem if it is aged properly before applying—as it usually is. I poured and gardened with it myself as a Zen student in Japan.) Marco Polo's account of what he and the Mongols called Kinsai (from Hsing-ts'ai, "temporary residence of the emperor") describes 3000 public baths. "I assure you they are the finest baths and the best and big¬gest in the world—indeed they are big enough to accommodate a hun¬dred men or women at once."
The rich, bustling life of thirteenth-century southern China set the tone for seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Osaka and Tokyo. (In reading Jacques Gernet and Marco Polo on Hang-chou, I find myself reliving moments in the Kyoto of the 1950s and '60s. A coffee shop on Kawaramachi full of chic Western-dressed youth, called "Den-en" after T'ao Ch'ien's poetry of "fields and gardens". A public bath in the Gion proud of its tradition of extra-hot bathwater, to please the ladies of the quarter and the late-night drinkers and gamblers. A small modern-style bar called Tesu—when asked what the name meant, the modish lady who owned it said, "Why of course, from Tess of the D'Urbervilles.") Such cities, though crowded, are not dangerous. Our American image of a city as a faceless network of commercial canyons, bordered by suburbs where no one ever goes on foot, reflects little of the conditions of city life in pre-modern cultures. Like a huge village, Hang-chou had about fifteen major festivals a year. In one of these the emperor opened up part of the palace grounds for the street entertainers to put on a street-life show for the people of the court.
Marco Polo:
The natives of Kinsia are men of peace . . . they have no skills in handling arms and do not keep any in their houses. There is prevalent among them a dislike and distaste for strife or any sort of disagreement. They pursue their trades and handicrafts with great diligence and honesty. They love one another so devotedly that a whole district might seem, from the friendly and neighborly spirit that rules among men and women, to be a single household.
If they come across some poor man by day, who is unable to work on account of illness, they have him taken to one of the hospitals, of which there are great numbers throughout the city, built by the ancient kings and lavishly endowed. And when he is cured, he is compelled to practice some trade.
Life in the city went on virtually without cease; the bars and brothels closed around two A.M. and the abattoirs started up at three. Till late at night, illuminated pleasure boats drifted on the lake with clan or guild or fraternity parties singing and drinking and eating. Boats of all sizes and styles were available for hire.
They are roofed over with decks on which stand men with poles which they thrust into the bottom of the lake. . . . The deck is painted inside with various colours and designs and so is the whole barge, and all around it are windows that can be opened or shut so that the banqueters ranged along the sides can look this way and that and feast their eyes on the diversity and beauty of the scenes through which they are passing. . . . On one side it skirts the city, so that the barge commands a distant view of all its grandeur and loveliness, its temples, palaces, monasteries, and gardens with their towering trees, running down to the water's edge. On the lake itself is the endless procession of barges thronged with pleasure-seekers. For the people of this city think of nothing else, once they have done the work of their craft or their trade, but to spend a part of the day with their womenfolk or with hired women in enjoying themselves whether in these barges or in riding about the city in carriages.
Produce and firewood came into the city by boat, the latter some distance from the hills of the interior. At the very least seventy tons of rice a day were consumed. Shoppers at the market discriminated between "new-milled rice, husked winter rice, first quality white rice, rice with lotus-pink grains, yellow-eared rice, rice on the stalk, ordinary rice, glutinous rice" and many others. There were some great places to eat:
Formerly the best known specialities were the sweet soya soup at the Mixed-wares Market, pig cooked in ashes in front of Longevity- and-Compassion Palace, the fish-soup of Mother Sung outside the Cash-reserve Gate, and rice served with mutton. Later, around the years 1241—1252, there were, among other things, the boiled pork from Wei-the-Big-Knife at the Cat Bridge, and the honey fritters from Chou-number-five in front of the Five-span Pavilion.
By the tenth century, woodblock printing was in common use. Literacy and learning spread, so that the earlier, simpler division of society into an illiterate mass and a literate Confucian elite no longer applied. Merchants, wandering monks, peasant-entrepreneurs, daughters of substantial merchants—all read books. "Catalogs, encyclopedias, and treatises appeared which dealt with a wide variety of topics: monographs on curious rocks, on jades, on coins, on inks, on bamboos, on plum-trees... treatises on painting and calligraphy; geographical works. The first general and unofficial histories of China made their appearances." The West Lake, already famous from its association with two of China's most highly regarded poets, gave its name to the "Poetry Society of the Western Lake", which counted both natives of the city and visiting literati among its members. It held picnics, banquets, and competitions, and the winning poems were circulated through the society. Hang-chou was a world of soft-handed scholars, dainty-stepping maidens raised behind closed doors, hustling town dandies, urban laborers, just-arrived country girls whose looks would determine if they'd work in a back kitchen or a teahouse.
The best rhinoceros skins are to be found
at Ch'ien's, as you go down from the canal
to the little Ch'ing-hu lake.
The finest turbans at K'ang-number-three's
in the street of the Worn Cash-coin;
The best place for used books at the bookstalls
under the big trees near the summer-house of the Orange Tree Garden;
Wicker cages in Ironwire Lane,
Ivory combs at Fei’s
Folding fans at Coal Bridge.
Most people rose early, finished work early, and left time in the afternoon for shopping and social calls. About three A.M. in the summer, and four in the winter, the bells of the Buddhist temples on the outskirts would begin to boom. At four or five in the morning, Buddhist and Taoist monks were walking down the lanes, beating a rhythm on the hand-held "wooden fish" and calling out the morning's weather—"a light snow just starting"—and announcing the day's events, whether preparations for a festival, a court reception, or a building-code hearing. "Imperial audiences were held at five or six o’clock in the morning. Seven o'clock was considered to be already late in the day."
Hats and Buckles
At the time of the Mongol conquest poor people still had some meat to eat, a little pork or fish. In recent centuries meat has been a once or twice-a-year treat. The wealthy could also afford wild game. There were no sanctions, apparently, against market hunting, though shoppers were warned to beware of donkey or horsemeat being sold as venison. The deforestation that had been predicted by Shen Kua two centuries earlier (he was almost exactly contemporary with Su Shih) was well underway. Sung economic expansion stimulated remarkable industrial development—"comparable to that which took place during the earlier phases of England's industrial revolution". The quantity of iron produced during the Northern Sung period was not matched again until the nineteenth century. Tuan Yi-fu summarizes:
The rapid growth of ironworks exerted pressure on timber resources, which were already heavily pressed to meet the needs of large city populations and of shipbuilding. Many hundreds of thousands of tons of charcoal were swallowed up by the metal industries. In addition, there was the demand for charcoal in the manufacture of salt, alum, bricks, tiles and liquor. The Northern Sung period must be seen as a time of rapid deforestation. North China suffered first... Firewood and charcoal for the cities and the industries had to be transported from the South. There was an acute shortage which was partially met by the effective substitution of coal for charcoal in the eleventh century.
Wetlands were drained. It seems the expansion of ricefields into "wastelands" or marshes often went against the interests and desires of the local people, who relied on ponds and estuaries for fishing and gathering edible water plants. Large landowners or the government itself undertook these projects, looking for profits or taxes. (The chain of events that led to the execution of Hsieh Ling-yun started with his plan to drain the Hui-chung lake, near the modern town of Shao-hsing. This lake was on public land, but a landowner of Hsieh's stature could usually have expected to get away with it. The governor of the province however was an old rival, and his enmity combined with the reports of clashes between local peasants and Hsieh's armed retainers opened the way to a charge of rebellion.) In the late Sung the government encouraged small farmers, by granting tax exemptions, to go into marshy grounds on the Yangtze delta. The loss was not only wild food previously gathered by the poor, but habitat for waterfowl and other members of the marshy ecosystems.
Along with wetlands and forests, the people as a whole were losing accurate knowledge of nature. For the past few centuries it has been believed in China that tortoises were female to the male of snakes; a bronze statuette shows a tortoise and snake copulating. The correct information of sunburned naked boys or old fishermen who knew better became no account. The harmless gecko (wall lizard) and the toad came to be considered poisonous. The big-shouldered wild boar, Sus scrofa, which appears in Han hunting scenes, and is still the type of pig in T'ang art, is replaced in the art of later dynasties by the sway-backed droop-eared domestic pig type.
From Shang to Ch'in times animals and insects appear in Chinese art in the conventionalized forms sometimes associated with the "Scythian" art of ancient central Asia. None of the designs are floral, and those which seem so are actually loops and spirals of insects and reptiles. Realistic animals appear from the Han dynasty onward—deer being chased by hounds, a tiger with a collar. Later representation of animals tends more and more to cleave to symbolic and legendary significance. "Everything in their painting, carved panels, lacquered screens, pieces of tapestry or embroidery, stone bas-reliefs, or the decorations on furniture and buildings means something. It is this fact that helps to explain why certain animals appear with great frequency, while others equally well known occur but seldom, or are altogether absent." Thus leopards were far more common in China than tigers, yet are rarely seen in art. Other animals that seldom appear are the hedgehog, shrews and moles, the common muskshrew of the southeast, the scaly anteater, the civets, and many rodents including the porcupine. Insects are often represented in many media. In Han times jade cicadas were placed in the mouth of the dead. Entirely lifelike hairy-clawed crabs were constructed in bronze. In Sowerby's study on "nature in Chinese art" we find included a glass snuff bottle with a butterfly in low relief on black glass; an unidentified fish in jade; a marble seal with a toad carved on the top; realistic scroll paintings of carp, minnows, knife-fish, mandarin fish, catfish, and bitterlings; a split bamboo with a wasp inside all carved in ivory; an unglazed statue of a Bactrian camel; a lifelike elephant with a harness from the Six Dynasties period; and a bronze buckle inlaid in silver, in the form of a rhinoceros.
The poor rhinoceros. A hat of some sort, and a girdle or belt with a buckle, were essential to male dress. Gernet says:
These were the two things which distinguished the Chinese from the barbarian... the finest girdles had plaques or buckles in jade, in gold, or in rhinoceros horn. The horn was imported from India, and in particular Bengal, which was supposed to have the best horn... "The Chinese" says an Arab account of the ninth century, "makes from this horn girdles which fetch a price of two or three thousand dinars or more..." The astonishing prices fetched by these horns and the intense delight taken by Chinese in ornaments made from them can hardly be explained by their rarity value alone: superstition as well as artistic taste must lie at the root of this passion. And indeed we find that "sometimes the horn is in the image of a man, or a peacock, or a fish or some other thing.
Distant Hills
For those men who passed the civil service examinations and accepted official posts, travel from place to place became a way of life. They were commonly transferred every three years. Su Shih was born in Szechwan near the foot of Mount Omei in 1037. Like many who rose to political and keep looking. There is another kind ot “staying put that flourisned in some circles during the Sung, namely the meditation practice of Ch'an Buddhism, zazen. What some Sung poets and thinkers might have lost in sense of natural place was balanced to some extent by a better understanding of natural self. A different sort of grounding occurred.
Much of the distinctive quality of Sung poetry can be attributed to the influence of the relentless and original Su Shih. Su was also an advanced Ch'an practicer, which is evident in his resolute, penetrating, sensitive body of work. The Ch'an influence is not at its best in the poems about monks or temples; we find it in plainer places. But when Su says of the sky, "How pleasant—that we have no thought of each other" it should not be taken as an expression of the heartlessness or remoteness of nature. Within the mutual mindlessness: of sky and self the Ch’an practicer enacts the vivid energy and form of each blade of grass, each pebble. The obsession that T’ang poets had with impermanence was a sentimental response to the commonly perceived stress of Mahayana Buddhism on transience and evanescence. Ch’an teachers never bothered with self-pity. They brought a playful and courageous style of give-and-take to the study of impermanent phenomena. I suspect that Sung poets were more dyed with the true spirit of Ch’an than those of the T’ang. From the standpoint of the natural environment, the T’ang view can almost be reversed—it seems the mountains and rivers, or at least their forests and creatures, soils and beds, are more fragile than we thought. Human beings grimly endure.
The Bore
The rulers and courtiers of Hang-chou never fully grasped the seriousness of the Mongol threat. Dallying in the parks, challenging each others' connoisseurship, they carried aestheticism to impressive levels. Mongka Khan, who ravaged Tibet, and his brother Kubilai left southern Sung on the back burner for a decade or so while they consolidated their northern and western borders.
In Hang-chou every September the people of the city thronged out to the banks of the Che River to witness a spectacle belonging to a scale even larger—their own unwitting point of contact with the dragons of the whole planetary water cycle. This was the annual high-point of the tidal bore which came in from the bay, up the river, and right by the town. Viewing platforms were erected for the emperor and his family. One year when the huge wall of water came rushing up, a surprise wind rose behind it, and the eagre went over the barriers and drowned Mount Bur khan Khaldun.
Sung dynasty China was a high-water mark of civilization. Joseph Needham and Mark Elvin believe thirteenth-century China was on the verge of a Western-style technological revolution; at least many of the preconditions were there. (It would be foolish to assume that such an evolution is necessarily desirable.) The Mongol conquest was a blow to the culture, but even without it, China would probably have gone through the same process—a stabilization, fading of innovation and experiment, and a long slow retreat of both economy and creativity. Even after we grant this decline, it must be pointed out that no Occidental culture can approach the time-scale of stability and relative prosperity this decline encompassed. Reischauer's comment that "there are few historic parallels except among primitive peoples" strikes far.
Lively though it was, the Sung had severe problems. Half the people of the Northern Sung were tenant farmers paying half their farm income as rent to the landlords. Declining natural resources and growing population ended experimental ventures into labor-saving devices: materials grew expensive as labor became cheap. Smaller farms, overworked soil, and higher population brought tax revenue and personal income down. The frontier territories of the south and southwest were saturated. In spite of all the (almost self-congratulatory) social concern of the Neo-Confucian philosophers, no analysis went deep enough. Thousands of people who worked in the salt marshes of the Huai River valleys were virtua slaves.
Far north of the sinicized Juchen and their captured realm, across th Ordos and the Gobi, lived the Mongol tribes. Some Mongol groups associated Mount Burkham Khaldun, near the head of the Onon River (tributary of the Amur) and south-southeast of Lake Baikal, with thei legendary ancestors the Blue Wolf and his wife the Fallow Deer. About 1185 an eighteen-year-old youth named Temujin fled for his life to the slopes of this mountain, pursued by rival Mongol horsemen of the Merk tribe. For days they pursued him through the willow thickets and swamps of the densely forested upland. They could follow his horse's tracks bi they could not catch up with him. Eventually the Merkit contentet themselves with taking some women from the camps below, and left. The Secret History of the Mongols has Temujin saying, as he descends the mou tain,
Though it seemed that I'd be crushed like
a louse, I escaped to Mount
Burkham Khaldun.
The mountain has saved my life and my horse.
Leading my horse down the elk-paths, making
my tent from the willow branches, I
went up Mount Burkhan.
Though I was frightened and ran like an insect,
I was shielded by Mount Burkhan Khaldun.
Every morning I'll offer a sacrifice to
Mount Burkhan.
Every day I'll pray to the mountains.
Then striking his breast with his hand,
he knelt nine times to the sun.
Sprinkling offerings of mare's milk in the air,
And he prayed.
This survivor, who had lived for years with his abandoned mother and brothers by trapping ground squirrels and marmots, snaring ducks, and fishing, went on to be chosen the supreme leader of all the Turko-Mongol tribes. At the gathering or quriltai of 1206 he was given the title "Jenghiz Khan". After that, he began his first campaign in northern China, attacking the cities of the Tungusic Chin. Many campaigns and victories later the Buddhist monk Li Chih-ch'ang visited him at his headquarters in Karakorum. Jenghiz Khan is reported as saying,
Heaven is weary of the inordinate luxury of China. I remain in the wild region of the north, I return to simplicity and seek moderation once more. As for the garments that I wear and the meals that I eat, I have the same rags and the same food as cowherds and grooms, and I treat the soldiers as my brothers.
Jenghiz Khan did not exactly live a simple life, but he was determined and tough. He was also a brilliant military strategist. Many grassland nomad warriors before him had won victories from the Chinese or Turko- Iranians, but none left behind an empire and the beginnings of an admin¬istration. This was partly because he paid close attention to the engineers and architects among his prisoners of war, and they taught him how to besiege a city and how to broach the walls.
City Walls
Dwelling within walls was normal for the Chinese people of the plains and valleys. In the early Han dynasty there were an estimated 37,844 walled settlements of various sizes, with perhaps 60 million people living behind them. Walls are a striking part of the Chinese landscape even today, the gently slanted stone walls of a provincial capital, broken by occasional towers that project two or three stories higher yet, rising through the mist fronting a river or lake, or mirrored in half-flooded fields.
Early Neolithic settlements (called "Yang-shao") had no walls. Instead they were surrounded by ditches or moats about fifteen feet wide and deep. These were probably to keep out animals; deer are notorious nibblers on orchards and vegetable gardens. Digs of Yang-shao settlements have turned up few, if any, fighting weapons. Later Neolithic settlements (called "Lung-shan") have tamped-earth fortifications and weapons.
Around the fifth century B.C., as the Eastern Chou dynasty slipped toward the era of "Warring States", the basic style of walled city began to take shape.
The type consisted of at least three contrasting spatial units: a small enclosure which was the aristocratic and administrative centre, mixed (in early times) with dependent tradesmen and artisans; industrial and commercial quarters, with residences, in a large enclosure; farmlands immediately beyond the city walls. In the warring states period sometimes three successive ramparts were built, suggesting a need to extend protection to increasingly large areas of commercial activity. Another change lay in the strengthening of the outer walls at the expense of the walls of the inner citadel, which were allowed to go into decay.
The city of Hsia-tu, in the state of Yen, is estimated to have been ten square miles within the walls.
There were also the "great walls" to keep out the northern nomad tribesmen, the walls originally built by the states of Ch'in, Yen, and Chao. When Ch'in became the first all-China empire, 221 B.C., it joined together previous sections to make a more continuous barrier.
The dominant element of the Han dynasty townscape was the wall. It separated a settlement from the outlying fields, and by creating an enclosure facilitated the regimentation of life within ... it had the character of a succession of walled-in rectangles. There was the town wall with gates on the four sides. Within the wall the settlement was partitioned into a number of wards. Ch'ang-an itself had as many as 160 wards. Streets separated the wards, which were in turn surrounded by walls. Each ward had only one gate opening to the street during Han times, and contained up to one hundred households, each of which was again surrounded by a wall. The inhabitants, to get out of town, would thus have to pass through three sets of gates: that of their house, that of their ward, and that of their town. Moreover, all the gates were guarded and closed up at night.
Lovers, criminals, and spies climbing over these walls after dark is a staple in Chinese storytelling.
T'ang dynasty cities had a little more nightlife than those of the Han, and larger, looser markets, with special quarters for the Persian, Turkish, and Arab traders. The plan of the capital city of Ch'ang-an followed in good part the old ritual ideal—"The Polar star and the celestial meridian writ small became the royal palace and the main north—south streets through the city". The north—south streets were 450-feet wide. The upper classes were in the eastern sector and the working people in the west. Each wing had its own market area. There were also vacant lots with vegetable gardens and pasture within the walls. The great city was spacious and open.
Such city planning seemed to work, but no one could have foreseen the relentless (if fluctuating) rise of population, especially after the year 1100, when the number first exceeded one hundred million. Part of the later rise reflects an increase in the size of the Chinese territory and the inclusion of people considered non-Chinese in earlier times. After 1100 there were five urban centers south of the Huai river with more than a million people each.
Flying Money
Between the ninth and the thirteenth centuries China became what it basically was to be into modern times. During the three centuries of the Sung dynasty not only people but wealth and high culture moved south and toward towns. In the early twelfth century only 6 percent of the population was urban, but by the fourteenth an estimated 33 percent were living in or around large cities.6 In the second phase of the T'ang dynasty, after An Lu-shan's rebellion, the tax base was changed from per capita to a straight land tax. This meant that wealthy manors that had long been exempt began to pay taxes. It was the first of a series of shifts or tendencies with profound effects. Some of the changes were:
• a people's corvée army evolved into an army of mercenaries manor-owning country gentlemen often became absentee landlords
• cumbersome metal coin was replaced by paper money
• a rustic naïveté gave way to a street-wise hedonism
• interest in cultural diversity yielded to a China-centered cultural chauvinism
• regional agricultural self-sufficiency gave way to cash-crop specialization
• status determined by family connections declined, and a greater emphasis on status derived from high ranks in the government examinations developed
• hiking through the mountains was replaced by tending an artificially wild-looking backyard garden.
The society that began to emerge we can recognize at many points as analogous to what we now consider "modern"—but more convivial and peaceful. It was the best society one could hope to see in a world of high population and dwindling resources. It was a kind of human cultural climax, from which the contemporary world may still have much to learn. The sophistication of social devices was remarkable:
Local tax collectors developed the corollary function of wholesalers or brokers, gathering the local surplus of agricultural or manufactured goods for sale to transport to merchants. The latter ranged from itinerant peddlers to large-scale, monopolistic operators. An extensive network of inns that developed to accommodate these traveling merchants became the inn system that was to continue with little change until recent times.
Old and already effective farming skills were enhanced by new tools, seeds, plants, and a broad exchange of information through the exhaustive agricultural encyclopedias and treatises now made available by mass woodblock printing. The poet and administrator Su Shih wrote a prose piece on a unique new rice-transplanting device that looked like a wooden hobbyhorse. In rice seed alone a revolution took place: a drought-resistant seed from central Vietnam came to be used widely. It could be grown on poorer soil, and so expanded available rice acreage. "By Sung times almost all of the types in use before the middle of T'ang had disappeared . . . a southern Sung gazeteer for the county of Ch'ang-shu in the lower Yangtze delta lists twenty-one kinds of moderate gluten rice, eight of high gluten rice, four of low gluten rice and ten miscellaneous varieties as being cultivated there". Mark Elvin says that by the thirteenth century China had the most sophisticated agriculture in the world, with India the only possible rival.
Increased contact with the market made the Chinese peasantry into a class of adaptable, rational, profit-oriented, petty entrepreneurs. A wide range of new occupations opened up in the countryside. In the hills, timber was grown for the booming boatbuilding industry and for the construction of houses in the expanding cities. Vegetables and fruit were produced for urban consumption. All sorts of oils were pressed for cooking, lighting, waterproofing, and to go into haircreams and medicines. Sugar was refined, crystallized, used as a preservative. Fish were raised in ponds and reservoirs to the point where the rearing of newly-hatched young fish for stock became a major business.
Trade and commerce weren't new to China, though. In the first century, B.C. Ssu-ma Ch'ien wrote:
from the age of Emperor Shun and the Hsia dynasty down to the present, ears and eyes have always longed for the ultimate in beautiful sounds and forms, mouths have desired to taste the best in grass-fed and grain-fed animals, bodies have delighted in ease and comfort, and hearts have swelled with pride at the glories of powers and ability. So long have these habits been allowed to permeate the lives of the people that, though one were to go from door to door preaching the subtle arguments of the Taoists, he could never succeed in changing them.
Ssu-ma did short biographies of famous commoners who made fortunes by buying low and selling high, gambling on surplus and dearth. The merchant Chi-jan of the fifth century B.C. said, "When an article has become extremely expensive, it will surely fall in price, and when it has become extremely cheap then the price will begin to rise. Dispose of expensive goods as though they were so much filth and dirt; buy up cheap goods as though they were pearls and jade. Wealth and currency should be allowed to flow as freely as water"
This trade was conducted with rolls of silk, bales of rice, salt, or copper cash as the media of exchange. Cash was often scarce, and by mid-T'ang it was noted that mining the copper and minting and transporting new coin cost twice as much as its face value as money. All sorts of "flying money"— promissory notes, letters of credit, and private-issue proto-money—were succeeded by government-issue paper money in the eleventh century. During the thirteenth century, and under the Mongols in the early fourteenth, the government even accepted paper money for the payment of taxes. Marco Polo was astonished to see paper used just as though it were metal. If the flow of currency began to falter, the government instantly offered silver or gold as payment for paper. "For seventeen or eighteen years the value of paper money did not fluctuate."
The Southern Capital
In the coastal province of Chekiang, south of Shanghai, there are still some upland areas of Miao population. In the fifth century A.D., when Hsieh Ling-yun walked the hills and worked on his rural estate, the greater part of the province was considered barbarian. It is named for the Che River, which reaches into the southern slopes of the Huang moun¬tains, and the jooo-foot hills on the Kiangsi-Anhwei border. The river is famous for the tidal bore that plays in its mouth at Hangchou bay. A decade after the fall of the Northern Sung capital K'ai-feng to the Juchen (Chin), the town of Lin-an, at the river mouth, was declared the new capital. The émigré emperor, his court, and crowds of refugees of the northern ruling class settled in. The name was changed to Hang-chou.
In earlier times the Lin-an area had been a marsh. The main river was channelized and subsidiary streams dammed in the fifth century A.D. The original town grew then on land between the lake thus formed, "West Lake", and the main Che River. It has come to be considered one of the most scenic places in China. Great care has been taken to keep the shallow lake clean. It was a true public park, with laws against planting water-chestnut (which would rapidly spread) or dumping trash in the water. Public pavilions, docks, and shade areas were built. Zoning restrictions designated acceptable architectural styles. Buddhist temples were looked on with favor; one of the most famous structures overlooking the lake was the pagoda at Thunder Point. Built of blue glazed brick, it was 170 feet high.
Po Chu-i had served as prefect there in the ninth century, and Su Shih did major maintenance and improvement on the lake when he was briefly prefect in the late eleventh century. The causeway on the lake is named after him.
In 1136 Hang-chou had a population of around two hundred thousand. In 1170 this had become half a million, and in 1275 it was well over a million and perhaps the largest single concentration of human beings in the world at that time. It may also have been the richest. The capital fell to the Mongols in 1279, after a siege of several years. Marco Polo was in the city soon after it surrendered (he worked for Khubilai Khan for seventeen years) and has left eloquent description:
On one side is a lake of fresh water, very clear. On the other is a huge river, which entering by many channels, diffused throughout the city, carries away all its filth and then flows into the lake, from which it flows out towards the Ocean. This makes the air very wholesome. And through every part of the city it is possible to travel either by land or by these streams. The streets and watercourses alike are very wide, so that carts and boats can readily pass along them to carry provisions for the inhabitants.
There are ten principal marketplaces, not to speak of innumer-able local ones. These are square, being a half a mile each way. In front of them lies a main thoroughfare, 40 paces wide, which runs straight from one end of the city to the other. It is crossed by many bridges . . . and every four miles, there is one of these squares... And in each of these squares, three days in the week, there is a gathering of 40 to 50 thousand people, who come to market bringing everything that could be desired to sustain life. There is always abundance of victuals, both wild game, such as roebuck, stags, harts, hares, and rabbits, and of fowls, such as partridges, pheasants, francolins, quails, hens, capons, and as many ducks and geese as can be told... Then there are the shambles, where they slaughter the bigger animals, such as calves, oxen, kid, and lambs, whose flesh is eaten by the rich and upper classes. The others, the lower orders, do not scruple to eat all sorts of unclean flesh.
All the ten squares are surrounded by high buildings, and below these are shops in which every sort of craft is practised and every sort of luxury is on sale, including spices, gems, and pearls. In some shops nothing is sold but spiced rice wine, which is being made all the time, fresh, and very cheap.
Hang-chou was kept spotless. The authorities had the streets cleaned and refuse piled at key points where it was loaded into boats. The boats in turn converged and took it out to the country in convoys. Nightsoil (human waste) was collected by corporations each with their own gathering territory who sold it to the intensive truck gardens of the eastern suburbs. (Contrary to common opinion in the West, the use of nightsoil does not pose a health problem if it is aged properly before applying—as it usually is. I poured and gardened with it myself as a Zen student in Japan.) Marco Polo's account of what he and the Mongols called Kinsai (from Hsing-ts'ai, "temporary residence of the emperor") describes 3000 public baths. "I assure you they are the finest baths and the best and big¬gest in the world—indeed they are big enough to accommodate a hun¬dred men or women at once."
The rich, bustling life of thirteenth-century southern China set the tone for seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Osaka and Tokyo. (In reading Jacques Gernet and Marco Polo on Hang-chou, I find myself reliving moments in the Kyoto of the 1950s and '60s. A coffee shop on Kawaramachi full of chic Western-dressed youth, called "Den-en" after T'ao Ch'ien's poetry of "fields and gardens". A public bath in the Gion proud of its tradition of extra-hot bathwater, to please the ladies of the quarter and the late-night drinkers and gamblers. A small modern-style bar called Tesu—when asked what the name meant, the modish lady who owned it said, "Why of course, from Tess of the D'Urbervilles.") Such cities, though crowded, are not dangerous. Our American image of a city as a faceless network of commercial canyons, bordered by suburbs where no one ever goes on foot, reflects little of the conditions of city life in pre-modern cultures. Like a huge village, Hang-chou had about fifteen major festivals a year. In one of these the emperor opened up part of the palace grounds for the street entertainers to put on a street-life show for the people of the court.
Marco Polo:
The natives of Kinsia are men of peace . . . they have no skills in handling arms and do not keep any in their houses. There is prevalent among them a dislike and distaste for strife or any sort of disagreement. They pursue their trades and handicrafts with great diligence and honesty. They love one another so devotedly that a whole district might seem, from the friendly and neighborly spirit that rules among men and women, to be a single household.
If they come across some poor man by day, who is unable to work on account of illness, they have him taken to one of the hospitals, of which there are great numbers throughout the city, built by the ancient kings and lavishly endowed. And when he is cured, he is compelled to practice some trade.
Life in the city went on virtually without cease; the bars and brothels closed around two A.M. and the abattoirs started up at three. Till late at night, illuminated pleasure boats drifted on the lake with clan or guild or fraternity parties singing and drinking and eating. Boats of all sizes and styles were available for hire.
They are roofed over with decks on which stand men with poles which they thrust into the bottom of the lake. . . . The deck is painted inside with various colours and designs and so is the whole barge, and all around it are windows that can be opened or shut so that the banqueters ranged along the sides can look this way and that and feast their eyes on the diversity and beauty of the scenes through which they are passing. . . . On one side it skirts the city, so that the barge commands a distant view of all its grandeur and loveliness, its temples, palaces, monasteries, and gardens with their towering trees, running down to the water's edge. On the lake itself is the endless procession of barges thronged with pleasure-seekers. For the people of this city think of nothing else, once they have done the work of their craft or their trade, but to spend a part of the day with their womenfolk or with hired women in enjoying themselves whether in these barges or in riding about the city in carriages.
Produce and firewood came into the city by boat, the latter some distance from the hills of the interior. At the very least seventy tons of rice a day were consumed. Shoppers at the market discriminated between "new-milled rice, husked winter rice, first quality white rice, rice with lotus-pink grains, yellow-eared rice, rice on the stalk, ordinary rice, glutinous rice" and many others. There were some great places to eat:
Formerly the best known specialities were the sweet soya soup at the Mixed-wares Market, pig cooked in ashes in front of Longevity- and-Compassion Palace, the fish-soup of Mother Sung outside the Cash-reserve Gate, and rice served with mutton. Later, around the years 1241—1252, there were, among other things, the boiled pork from Wei-the-Big-Knife at the Cat Bridge, and the honey fritters from Chou-number-five in front of the Five-span Pavilion.
By the tenth century, woodblock printing was in common use. Literacy and learning spread, so that the earlier, simpler division of society into an illiterate mass and a literate Confucian elite no longer applied. Merchants, wandering monks, peasant-entrepreneurs, daughters of substantial merchants—all read books. "Catalogs, encyclopedias, and treatises appeared which dealt with a wide variety of topics: monographs on curious rocks, on jades, on coins, on inks, on bamboos, on plum-trees... treatises on painting and calligraphy; geographical works. The first general and unofficial histories of China made their appearances." The West Lake, already famous from its association with two of China's most highly regarded poets, gave its name to the "Poetry Society of the Western Lake", which counted both natives of the city and visiting literati among its members. It held picnics, banquets, and competitions, and the winning poems were circulated through the society. Hang-chou was a world of soft-handed scholars, dainty-stepping maidens raised behind closed doors, hustling town dandies, urban laborers, just-arrived country girls whose looks would determine if they'd work in a back kitchen or a teahouse.
The best rhinoceros skins are to be found
at Ch'ien's, as you go down from the canal
to the little Ch'ing-hu lake.
The finest turbans at K'ang-number-three's
in the street of the Worn Cash-coin;
The best place for used books at the bookstalls
under the big trees near the summer-house of the Orange Tree Garden;
Wicker cages in Ironwire Lane,
Ivory combs at Fei’s
Folding fans at Coal Bridge.
Most people rose early, finished work early, and left time in the afternoon for shopping and social calls. About three A.M. in the summer, and four in the winter, the bells of the Buddhist temples on the outskirts would begin to boom. At four or five in the morning, Buddhist and Taoist monks were walking down the lanes, beating a rhythm on the hand-held "wooden fish" and calling out the morning's weather—"a light snow just starting"—and announcing the day's events, whether preparations for a festival, a court reception, or a building-code hearing. "Imperial audiences were held at five or six o’clock in the morning. Seven o'clock was considered to be already late in the day."
Hats and Buckles
At the time of the Mongol conquest poor people still had some meat to eat, a little pork or fish. In recent centuries meat has been a once or twice-a-year treat. The wealthy could also afford wild game. There were no sanctions, apparently, against market hunting, though shoppers were warned to beware of donkey or horsemeat being sold as venison. The deforestation that had been predicted by Shen Kua two centuries earlier (he was almost exactly contemporary with Su Shih) was well underway. Sung economic expansion stimulated remarkable industrial development—"comparable to that which took place during the earlier phases of England's industrial revolution". The quantity of iron produced during the Northern Sung period was not matched again until the nineteenth century. Tuan Yi-fu summarizes:
The rapid growth of ironworks exerted pressure on timber resources, which were already heavily pressed to meet the needs of large city populations and of shipbuilding. Many hundreds of thousands of tons of charcoal were swallowed up by the metal industries. In addition, there was the demand for charcoal in the manufacture of salt, alum, bricks, tiles and liquor. The Northern Sung period must be seen as a time of rapid deforestation. North China suffered first... Firewood and charcoal for the cities and the industries had to be transported from the South. There was an acute shortage which was partially met by the effective substitution of coal for charcoal in the eleventh century.
Wetlands were drained. It seems the expansion of ricefields into "wastelands" or marshes often went against the interests and desires of the local people, who relied on ponds and estuaries for fishing and gathering edible water plants. Large landowners or the government itself undertook these projects, looking for profits or taxes. (The chain of events that led to the execution of Hsieh Ling-yun started with his plan to drain the Hui-chung lake, near the modern town of Shao-hsing. This lake was on public land, but a landowner of Hsieh's stature could usually have expected to get away with it. The governor of the province however was an old rival, and his enmity combined with the reports of clashes between local peasants and Hsieh's armed retainers opened the way to a charge of rebellion.) In the late Sung the government encouraged small farmers, by granting tax exemptions, to go into marshy grounds on the Yangtze delta. The loss was not only wild food previously gathered by the poor, but habitat for waterfowl and other members of the marshy ecosystems.
Along with wetlands and forests, the people as a whole were losing accurate knowledge of nature. For the past few centuries it has been believed in China that tortoises were female to the male of snakes; a bronze statuette shows a tortoise and snake copulating. The correct information of sunburned naked boys or old fishermen who knew better became no account. The harmless gecko (wall lizard) and the toad came to be considered poisonous. The big-shouldered wild boar, Sus scrofa, which appears in Han hunting scenes, and is still the type of pig in T'ang art, is replaced in the art of later dynasties by the sway-backed droop-eared domestic pig type.
From Shang to Ch'in times animals and insects appear in Chinese art in the conventionalized forms sometimes associated with the "Scythian" art of ancient central Asia. None of the designs are floral, and those which seem so are actually loops and spirals of insects and reptiles. Realistic animals appear from the Han dynasty onward—deer being chased by hounds, a tiger with a collar. Later representation of animals tends more and more to cleave to symbolic and legendary significance. "Everything in their painting, carved panels, lacquered screens, pieces of tapestry or embroidery, stone bas-reliefs, or the decorations on furniture and buildings means something. It is this fact that helps to explain why certain animals appear with great frequency, while others equally well known occur but seldom, or are altogether absent." Thus leopards were far more common in China than tigers, yet are rarely seen in art. Other animals that seldom appear are the hedgehog, shrews and moles, the common muskshrew of the southeast, the scaly anteater, the civets, and many rodents including the porcupine. Insects are often represented in many media. In Han times jade cicadas were placed in the mouth of the dead. Entirely lifelike hairy-clawed crabs were constructed in bronze. In Sowerby's study on "nature in Chinese art" we find included a glass snuff bottle with a butterfly in low relief on black glass; an unidentified fish in jade; a marble seal with a toad carved on the top; realistic scroll paintings of carp, minnows, knife-fish, mandarin fish, catfish, and bitterlings; a split bamboo with a wasp inside all carved in ivory; an unglazed statue of a Bactrian camel; a lifelike elephant with a harness from the Six Dynasties period; and a bronze buckle inlaid in silver, in the form of a rhinoceros.
The poor rhinoceros. A hat of some sort, and a girdle or belt with a buckle, were essential to male dress. Gernet says:
These were the two things which distinguished the Chinese from the barbarian... the finest girdles had plaques or buckles in jade, in gold, or in rhinoceros horn. The horn was imported from India, and in particular Bengal, which was supposed to have the best horn... "The Chinese" says an Arab account of the ninth century, "makes from this horn girdles which fetch a price of two or three thousand dinars or more..." The astonishing prices fetched by these horns and the intense delight taken by Chinese in ornaments made from them can hardly be explained by their rarity value alone: superstition as well as artistic taste must lie at the root of this passion. And indeed we find that "sometimes the horn is in the image of a man, or a peacock, or a fish or some other thing.
Distant Hills
For those men who passed the civil service examinations and accepted official posts, travel from place to place became a way of life. They were commonly transferred every three years. Su Shih was born in Szechwan near the foot of Mount Omei in 1037. Like many who rose to political and keep looking. There is another kind ot “staying put that flourisned in some circles during the Sung, namely the meditation practice of Ch'an Buddhism, zazen. What some Sung poets and thinkers might have lost in sense of natural place was balanced to some extent by a better understanding of natural self. A different sort of grounding occurred.
Much of the distinctive quality of Sung poetry can be attributed to the influence of the relentless and original Su Shih. Su was also an advanced Ch'an practicer, which is evident in his resolute, penetrating, sensitive body of work. The Ch'an influence is not at its best in the poems about monks or temples; we find it in plainer places. But when Su says of the sky, "How pleasant—that we have no thought of each other" it should not be taken as an expression of the heartlessness or remoteness of nature. Within the mutual mindlessness: of sky and self the Ch’an practicer enacts the vivid energy and form of each blade of grass, each pebble. The obsession that T’ang poets had with impermanence was a sentimental response to the commonly perceived stress of Mahayana Buddhism on transience and evanescence. Ch’an teachers never bothered with self-pity. They brought a playful and courageous style of give-and-take to the study of impermanent phenomena. I suspect that Sung poets were more dyed with the true spirit of Ch’an than those of the T’ang. From the standpoint of the natural environment, the T’ang view can almost be reversed—it seems the mountains and rivers, or at least their forests and creatures, soils and beds, are more fragile than we thought. Human beings grimly endure.
The Bore
The rulers and courtiers of Hang-chou never fully grasped the seriousness of the Mongol threat. Dallying in the parks, challenging each others' connoisseurship, they carried aestheticism to impressive levels. Mongka Khan, who ravaged Tibet, and his brother Kubilai left southern Sung on the back burner for a decade or so while they consolidated their northern and western borders.
In Hang-chou every September the people of the city thronged out to the banks of the Che River to witness a spectacle belonging to a scale even larger—their own unwitting point of contact with the dragons of the whole planetary water cycle. This was the annual high-point of the tidal bore which came in from the bay, up the river, and right by the town. Viewing platforms were erected for the emperor and his family. One year when the huge wall of water came rushing up, a surprise wind rose behind it, and the eagre went over the barriers and drowned Mount Bur khan Khaldun.
Sung dynasty China was a high-water mark of civilization. Joseph Needham and Mark Elvin believe thirteenth-century China was on the verge of a Western-style technological revolution; at least many of the preconditions were there. (It would be foolish to assume that such an evolution is necessarily desirable.) The Mongol conquest was a blow to the culture, but even without it, China would probably have gone through the same process—a stabilization, fading of innovation and experiment, and a long slow retreat of both economy and creativity. Even after we grant this decline, it must be pointed out that no Occidental culture can approach the time-scale of stability and relative prosperity this decline encompassed. Reischauer's comment that "there are few historic parallels except among primitive peoples" strikes far.
Lively though it was, the Sung had severe problems. Half the people of the Northern Sung were tenant farmers paying half their farm income as rent to the landlords. Declining natural resources and growing population ended experimental ventures into labor-saving devices: materials grew expensive as labor became cheap. Smaller farms, overworked soil, and higher population brought tax revenue and personal income down. The frontier territories of the south and southwest were saturated. In spite of all the (almost self-congratulatory) social concern of the Neo-Confucian philosophers, no analysis went deep enough. Thousands of people who worked in the salt marshes of the Huai River valleys were virtua slaves.
Far north of the sinicized Juchen and their captured realm, across th Ordos and the Gobi, lived the Mongol tribes. Some Mongol groups associated Mount Burkham Khaldun, near the head of the Onon River (tributary of the Amur) and south-southeast of Lake Baikal, with thei legendary ancestors the Blue Wolf and his wife the Fallow Deer. About 1185 an eighteen-year-old youth named Temujin fled for his life to the slopes of this mountain, pursued by rival Mongol horsemen of the Merk tribe. For days they pursued him through the willow thickets and swamps of the densely forested upland. They could follow his horse's tracks bi they could not catch up with him. Eventually the Merkit contentet themselves with taking some women from the camps below, and left. The Secret History of the Mongols has Temujin saying, as he descends the mou tain,
Though it seemed that I'd be crushed like
a louse, I escaped to Mount
Burkham Khaldun.
The mountain has saved my life and my horse.
Leading my horse down the elk-paths, making
my tent from the willow branches, I
went up Mount Burkhan.
Though I was frightened and ran like an insect,
I was shielded by Mount Burkhan Khaldun.
Every morning I'll offer a sacrifice to
Mount Burkhan.
Every day I'll pray to the mountains.
Then striking his breast with his hand,
he knelt nine times to the sun.
Sprinkling offerings of mare's milk in the air,
And he prayed.
This survivor, who had lived for years with his abandoned mother and brothers by trapping ground squirrels and marmots, snaring ducks, and fishing, went on to be chosen the supreme leader of all the Turko-Mongol tribes. At the gathering or quriltai of 1206 he was given the title "Jenghiz Khan". After that, he began his first campaign in northern China, attacking the cities of the Tungusic Chin. Many campaigns and victories later the Buddhist monk Li Chih-ch'ang visited him at his headquarters in Karakorum. Jenghiz Khan is reported as saying,
Heaven is weary of the inordinate luxury of China. I remain in the wild region of the north, I return to simplicity and seek moderation once more. As for the garments that I wear and the meals that I eat, I have the same rags and the same food as cowherds and grooms, and I treat the soldiers as my brothers.
Jenghiz Khan did not exactly live a simple life, but he was determined and tough. He was also a brilliant military strategist. Many grassland nomad warriors before him had won victories from the Chinese or Turko- Iranians, but none left behind an empire and the beginnings of an admin¬istration. This was partly because he paid close attention to the engineers and architects among his prisoners of war, and they taught him how to besiege a city and how to broach the walls.
Subjects
Literature : Occident : United States of America : Prose