Indeed, it was protectionism in China that was the cause of its massive downfall when the first great emperor of the Ming dynasty, Zhu Di, died. Zhu Di had not only expelled the Mongolians from China, rebuilt and extended the Great Wall of China (as also the Great Canal of China), encouraged theatre, literature, philosophy, astronomy and other sciences, but had also encouraged sea-trade with other countries, particularly in his latter years in the form of large fleets of 'Treasure Ships' -- the smallest of which were far larger (with water-tight bulkheads) than those of Columbus many years later in Europe. When he died in 1424, aged 64, and his son, Zhu Ghaozhi, ascended the throne, an edict was issued: all the treasure ships were stopped and Chinese imports and exports were brought to an end. It was then that China entered its long period of decline. The process was gradual but relentless and, by the time of the 20th century, the country was so weak that it was prey to many other countries, such as Britain, America and Japan which exploited it mercilessly.
It took the advent of communism and the defeat of private armies for something like the old mandarin system of selection -- which had previously existed for almost 1,500 years -- to reassert itself. The present-day selection system that was initiated by Den Xaioping 20 years ago has now come to fruition in the membership of the Politburo that was given approval early this year. Now that China is catching up fast on the rest of the developed world and will probably overtake most of it in terms of the standard of living of its people, it would be fascinating to know just how different its culture might be compared with, say, that of America in a few decades' time. The present writer will never know, nor, probably, will most of present readers, but it is to be hoped that it will be different from much of the grime and crime that which we have today in our large cities.
To give some idea of what it was like to live in China's largest city, Hangzhou, during the Song dynasty -- preceding Zhu Ghaozhi's disastrous decision in the Ming dynasty, here is a superb description from Charles Murray's recently published book, Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800BC to 1950.
In almost every conceivable way, life in 12th century Hangzhou was incomparably better than life in Ehropean capitals for centuries to come. The only cities that I can think of that come close to it in both commercial prosperity and the arts (they are, of course, closely linked) are Venice and Florence during Renaissance times. Human Accomplishment is a stupendous book, incidentally, and the first attempt to quantify individual genius in the arts and sciences in terms of cultural origina and geographical distribution. Certainly one of the seminal books of this year and I strongly recommend it as a Christmas present to yourself this year.
Keith Hudson
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For a portrait of China in all its imperial grandeur, the Ming Dynasty (13681644) that sponsored Zheng He's voyages would be a good place to remain. But the apogee of Chinese culture as a whole is more often taken to be the Song Dynasty (960-1279), "glorious in art as in poetry and philosophy, the period which for Asia stands in history as the Periclean age in Europe," as one historian put it. Our point of departure is Hangzhou, the capital of Song China, the city Marco Polo called Kinsay.
Hangzhou became the capital by happenstance. In 1127, it was still a minor provincial city, midway between the Yangtze and the trading ports of the southeast China coast, chosen as a refuge by an emperor fleeing nomad barbarians. He chose a beautiful place. To the west was a large artificial lake (constructed more than 500 years earlier -- a reminder of the staggering span of Chinese continuity), backed by the graceful curve of low-lying mountains. To the east, upon a spreading plain,"... there sparkle, like fishes' scales, the bright-colored tiles of a thousand roofs," one visitor wrote. "One would say it was landscape composed by a painter."
Sparkle was an apt word. Hangzhou, like other Chinese cities, was unimaginably clean by Western standards of that time. The crenellated walls of the old city, also built some 500 years earlier, 30 feet high and 10 feet thick, were freshly whitewashed every month. The streets were cleaned frequently. Each year, the canals that crisscrossed the city were dredged and cleaned. The homes of the rich had cesspools. The poor collected their night soil in buckets that were carried off each day to central collection points. Hangzhou's standards for hygiene wouldn't be approached in Europe until late in the 19th century, and then only in the most advanced cities.
This advanced municipal administration was carried out in a metropolis that dwarfed any city in the West. After the fall of Rome, Europe had become a rural landscape dotted with market towns. Even as late as the 12th century, the populations of Paris and London numbered no more than a few tens of thousands each -- we cannot know exactly, because the concept of official statistics lay far in the future. The city-states of northern Italy were growing, but even the largest of them had not reached the 100,000 mark at the end of the 12th century. Hangzhou in the 12th century numbered over a million people. How do we know?
Because China had for some centuries been conducting regular censuses, listing the names and ages of every member of every family, their exact location, and, if they were farmers, the size of their cultivated holding.
Hangzhou had extremes of wealth and poverty. Parts of the city were traversed by wide, well-drained avenues of smoothed stone, and the houses of the wealthy stood on ample, walled plots. In other parts, the streets were narrow and crooked, with multi-storey houses crowded on each side where half a dozen people might live in a single small room. Increased urbanization also led to overcrowding, homelessness, and pauperization of the city's unemployed who had become disconnected from their families remaining in the countryside. Hangzhou responded in various ways. Food warehouses supported by special taxes were set aside for the indigent. Private charities specialized in caring for orphans and old people, burying paupers, and providing schooling for indigent children. As in the case of Rome before and London later, commendable responses to need coexisted side by side with accepted practices that today are felonies. One of the reasons that orphanages were required was that infants were commonly abandoned on the streets by parents who could afford no more children -- so commonly that the practice was banned in 1138, though with only partial success.
Whether the lives of the impoverished were conspicuously better or worse in Hangzhou than in ancient Rome or Georgian London is hard to say from our distant vantage point. But for persons outside that extreme group, at least some of Hangzhou's public amenities were available to all. Where Rome had its public baths, so did Hangzhou -- three thousand of them, according to Marco Polo, who observed that the people of Hangzhou "are very cleanly in their persons." He was even more impressed with the public facilities on the lake:
- In the middle of the Lake there are two Islands, on each of which
stands a
- palatial edifice with an incredibly large number of rooms and separate pavil-
- ions. And when anyone desired to hold a marriage feast, or to give a big ban-
- quet, it used to be done at one of these palaces. And everything would be
- found there ready to order, such as dishes, napkins and tablecloths and what-
- ever else was needful. These furnishings were acquired and maintained at
- common expense by the citizens in these palaces constructed by them for
- this purpose. Sometimes there would be at these palaces a hundred different
- parties. . . and yet all would find good accommodation in the different apart-
- ments and pavilions, and that in so well ordered a manner that one party was
- never in the way of another.
- palatial edifice with an incredibly large number of rooms and separate pavil-
One may get a sense of the scope of Hangzhou's administrative capability from statistics. In the 13 months from October 1268 to November 1269, for example, we know from the surviving records that a project to renovate the bridges of Hangzhou was carried out, involving 117 bridges within the ramparts and another 230 in the suburbs. Half of them were rebuilt from scratch, and the other half repaired. Low bridges were heightened and narrow ones widened. This was just one routine municipal project, routinely reported.
In addition to its public facilities, Hangzhou numbered hundreds of tea-houses, restaurants, theatres, and hotels. In the West, the concept of sumptuous dining and lodging outside the private home took an oddly long time to develop -- taverns serving meals had existed since ancient times, but the first luxury restaurant didn't open until 1782. It wasn't until the 19th century that European travelers could begin to count on finding decent public accommodations. In Hangzhou of the 12th century, one could get cheap-but-good noodles, meat pies, or oysters from small shops, as one does in today's East Asia. Those with more money to spend could choose a tea-house in a garden landscaped with dwarf pines and hung with brightly colored lanterns, or they could dine in one of the large restaurants hung with works of celebrated painters and calligraphers and set with fine porcelain. If it were a hot summer day, the diner might want to choose among the refreshing iced drinks -- or iced foods, for that matter -- that were widely available. In medieval Europe of the 12th century, the food of the rich still consisted largely of slabs of flesh of one kind or another, heavily spiced to hide signs of rot. In the restaurants of Hangzhou, one contemporary wrote, "Hundreds of orders are given on all sides: this person wants something hot, another something cold, a third something tepid, a fourth something chilled; one wants cooked food, another raw, another chooses roasted, another grilled." The variety of Chinese food was as broad then as it is today, and the people of Hangzhou could get just about any kind they wanted -- not just their own cuisine, but the cuisines of distant provinces as well. As today, the Chinese delighted in the restaurant that served one special dish. There was the sweet soya soup at the Mixed-Wares Market, the fish soup of Mother Song outside the Cash-Reserve Gate, and pig cooked in ashes at the Longevity-and-Compassion Palace. Fifteen major markets dotted Hangzhou, each large enough to handle thousands of sellers and buyers at one time. The specialization was staggering, with more than 200 shops selling nothing but varieties of salted fish.
The market in food was just one aspect of an economy that employed many elements of modern commerce. Paper money had appeared in the 10th century in the form of bills of exchange ("flying money") to pay for goods purchased from distant areas. Then private bankers began issuing certificates of deposit that could be cashed for a three percent service charge. In 1023, one of the most famous of these banks was acquired by the government and the certificates of deposit were converted to the first government-backed paper money. The abacus, a primitive version of which had existed as early as 400BC, had reached its final design by the Song, enabling arithmetic calculation faster than any mechanical device until well into the 20th century.
China's was a national economy, as goods moved along a road system that rivaled the Romans' and an even more extensive water system. Tens of thousands of ships traveled the coastal sea-routes, the Yellow and Yangtze rivers, and a vast system of internal canals and improved waterways. Documents from the Song describe 10 types of sea-going vessels, 21 types of functionally specific vessels (for example, floating restaurants, passenger boats, ferries, manure boats), 20 vessels categorized by structure (including man-powered paddle-wheel boats), and 35 types of craft grouped by the river system they traveled or by port of origin.
Oils, sugar, silk, lacquer ware, porcelain, iron and copper goods, rice, and timber were routinely shipped throughout the nation. We know, for example, that a Daoist temple constructed in Kaifeng in north central China in the 11th cenutry was constructed of pinewood brought from Gansu and Shanxi, cedar from Shanxi, catalpa wood, camphor-tree wood and oak from Hunan and Jiangxi, zeikova wood from Hunan and Zhejiang, cryptomeria from Hunan, and several other woods from Hubei and Shanxi. Agriculture was already specialized by the Song, with an economy that supported tea plantations, silk cultivation, cattle ranching, and fish farming.
Specialization had also reached into industrial processes. China did much more than merely invent paper, for example. By the Song Dynasty, the paper industry was turning out papers for dozens of uses -- elegant, heavy stock for formal correspondence, light-weight, inexpensive paper for everyday use, and specialized papers suitable for painting, money, printing, wrapping, lanterns -- and for the toilet as well. The magnitude of paper production was immense. Just one city in Hunan contributed 1.8 million sheets to the government annually in lieu of taxes.Or there is the case of iron production. Song China in the 11 century seems to have produced as much iron as would be produced in all of Europe in 1700, and the real price of iron fell to levels that would not be seen in Europe until the turn of the 19th century.
Specialization in agriculture and industry demanded correspondingly sophisticated economic organization. China during the Song had already developed a system of brokers that mediated between local and central markets. Wholesale and retail were concepts thoroughly understood in Song China. So were contracts, interest, joint stock ventures, distributorships, franchises, warehousing, and commissions. Song China had professional managers, running businesses owned by others not related by blood. Money managers existed in Song China, investing funds on behalf of clients.
But what of the world of the sciences? The answer is maddeningly incomprehensible to a Westerner. It is as if the Chinese periodically dipped into the world of science and effortlessly pulled out a few gems, then ignored them. Some of these Chinese discoveries have become the stuff of conventional wisdom -- gunpowder and paper being the most famous. But the recountings by Westerners give these discoveries the flavor of accidents, as if the Chinese stumbled onto something and then didn't know what to do with it.
Unsystematic the discoveries may have been, but there was nothing accidental about them. Rather, they represent sheer cognitive ingenuity of a remarkable order. When next you read the cliche that East Asians are intelligent but lack creative flair, consider, for example, Chinese mathematics. China had no Euclid, no body of mathematical logic that started from first premises. Nonetheless, by the middle of the 3rh century the Chinese already knew the value of pi to five decimal places; by the end of the 5th century, they knew it lay between 3.1415926 and 3.1415927 (the best the West had done was four decimal places). By the middle of teh 7th century, Chinese mathematicians had methods for dealing with indeterminate equations, arithmetical and geometric progressions, and the computation of otherwise immeasurable distance through a form of trigonometry. Chinese mathematicians of the Song Dynasty knew how to extract fourth roots, deal with equations containing powers up to the tenth, and had anticipated a method for obtaining approximate solutions to numerical equations that would not be developed in the West until 1819. None of these accomplishments was produced from a theoretical system, but through the creativity of individual scholars.
By the time of the Song, Chinese astronomy could call on a thousand years of observations of sunspots. The armillary had been fully developed for 900 years in China, as had planetaria. Centuries before the Song, the Chinese had identified the precession of the equinox and knew that the year is not exactly 365.25 days. During the Song itself, Chinese astronomers correctly demonstrated the causes of solar and lunar eclipses. But again there was no theory, no Ptolemaic characterization of the universe. The Chinese simply discovered certain things. Shen Gua, writing in 1086, outlined the principles of erosion, uplift, and sedimentation that are the foundation of earth science, principles that would not be developed in the West for centuries, but his book. Dream Pool Essays, sits alone, an anomaly.
Chinese medicine, unlike Chinese science, was backed by abundant theory, but that theory is so alien to the Western understanding of physiology and pharmacology that Western scientists even today are only beginning to understand the degree to which Chinese medicine is coordinate with modern science. It worked, however, for a wide range of ailments. If you were going to be ill in the 12th century and were given a choice of living in Europe or China, there is no question about the right decision. Western medicine in the 12th century had forgotten most of what had been known by the Greeks and Romans. Chinese physicians of the 12th century could alleviate pain more effectively than Westerners had ever been able to do -- acupuncture is a Chinese medical technique that Western physicians have learned to take seriously -- and could treat their patients effectively for a wide variety of serious diseases.
The vibrant Song economy and its eclectic scientific achievements coexisted with an intellectual and aesthetic high culture. Like the upper classes of Rome, the upper classes of Song China drew on an artistic heritage that stretched centuries into the past, including access to a vast body of work that is lost to us today. Unlike Rome, Song China did not live passively off that heritage. The canons of Chinese art that stretched back to the Han a thousand years earlier are thought by many to have reached their peak in the Song. It was an art that is still accessible to the modern eye. In many ways, Chinese art of the Song -- spare of line, secular, often impressionistic -- speaks directly to today's artistic sensibility.
Art was cherished. "The delight [the Chinese] take in decoration, in painting and in architecture, leads them to spend in this way sums of money that would astonish you," wrote Marco Polo. Nor was this passion limited to the rich. Li Qingzhao, a famous woman poet of the Song, recalled how her husband, De Fu, would take advantage of every break from his university studies to pawn his clothing for a bit of cash and go to Xiang Guo Temple in search of old prints. He would buy some fruit along with his newly acquired treasures to bring home.
- We would enjoy examining what he had bought while munching fruit
- together. Two years later, when he got a post in the government, he started
- to make as complete as possible a collection of rubbings or prints from
- bronze or stone inscriptions and other ancient scripts. When a print was not
- available, he would have a copy made and thus our collection of famous cal-
- ligraphy and antiques began. Once a man tried to sell us Xu Xi's painting of
- "Peony" for 200,000 cash, and De Fu asked permission to take it home and
- keep it for a few days and consider. We found no means to buy it and reluc-
- tantly returned it to the owner. De Fu and I were upset about it for days.
- together. Two years later, when he got a post in the government, he started
If art was a high pleasure, literature was a necessity. Chinese cultural life intertwined poetry, philosophy, essays, and narratives into the political life of the nation. A cultivated person was not only expected to be well versed in the classics, he (or she) was also expected to be a skilled writer, especially of poetry. A Chinese tradition of belles-lettres grew up during the Tang and Song Dynasties that transcended even the high importance that had been attached to scholarship in earlier dynasties. Aesthetics were only part of the importance of literature, however. Knowing Chinese literature was also a way to achieve high rank, via the Chinese examination system.
By the time of the Song, the examination system was already centuries old. Of the several categories of examination, the least important, leading only to low positions, were the tests in law and mathematics. The test in the Confucian classics was more prestigious and led to more powerful posts. The most prestigious of all awards was the jin shi, the "presented scholar" degree, based not just on the classics relating to philosophy and governance but on the whole of Chinese literature.
Selecting officials on the basis of their mastery of literature and philosophy had several advantages. It ensured that most Chinese bureaucrats were smart -- the examinations had the effect of screening for IQ as well as the ability to memorize. Another advantage of the examination system was its emphasis on merit over family background, engaging the loyalties of the lower classes by making it possible for a man of humble birth to pass the jin shi and become a mandarin. Still a third advantage was that the examination system co-opted the intellectual classes, who in other societies were often critics of the established order. Intellectuals in traditional China had a ready avenue to power.
Above all, the examination system ensured that throughout the country, voluntarily, each generation of the most talented people in China steeped themselves in the core cultural values of the empire. From a pragmatic standpoint, this was a good thing for preserving cultural continuity. But it was also a good thing because those core cultural values constituted such a remarkable legacy in themselves, amalgamating properties that in the West would be divided into religion and civic culture.
In matters purely religious, China was a mirror image of Rome. In Rome, just about everyone formally acknowledged the Roman gods and hardly anyone believed in them. In China, none of the three major belief systems -- Confucianism, Daoism, Buddhism -- even specified the existence of a god, and the two with temples and priests (Daoism and Buddhism) were followed by small proportions of the Song population. And yet the typical Chinese propitiated the spirits with the punctility of true believers. If the values that we call Chinese did not have as strong a religious component as those of Hindu, Judaic, Christian, and Islamic cultures, they were nonetheless promulgated and, more importantly, lived. Marco Polo, arriving from 13 the century Europe, described the operational effect of this historically unique cultural/religious synthesis in daily life:
The natives of the city [Hangzhou] are men of peaceful character, both from
education and from the example of their kings, whose disposition was the
same. They know nothing of handling arms and keep none in their houses.
You hear of no feuds or noisy quarrels or dissensions of any kind among
them. Both in their commercial dealings and in their manufactures, they are
thoroughly honest and truthful, and there is such a degree of good will and
neighborly attachment among both men and women that one would take
the people who live in the same street to be all one family.
Chinese social life was not as uniformly peaceful as Marco Polo describes, but he was not far off the mark. Classical Chinese culture powerfully fostered an amicable, law-abiding, stable social life, and the reason is no mystery. These issues, not epistemology or metaphysics, were the topics that most deeply occupied Chinese philosophers. Westerners label this tradition Confucian, but by the end of its development it incorporated, like a series of Chinese boxes, glosses upon glosses of ancient texts that go back to at least 800BC and perhaps as far as 1000BC.
Charles Murray, Human Accomplishment (HarperCollins, 2003), pp34-41
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Keith Hudson, Bath, England, <www.evolutionary-economics.org>
