History of the World Chapter 7: E Pluribus Unum (Patreon)

As we have pushed to 400 BC in the Middle East, Europe and India, empires have risen and fallen and creeds created and lost. However, there has been one major center of civilization that has existed existed for thousands of years and unlike almost all the others we’ve spoken of, still exists today and is reviving to become a dominant world power. It existed completely in isolation from the rest of the world and developed in its own civilization along its own parallels. I am of course speaking of China.

Yet Another River Valley Civilization

On the eastern edge of the Eurasian continent flows three rivers from the high impenetrable mountains of the Himalayas. Across thousands of miles they travel through the plains into the Pacific Ocean. From North to South they are the Yellow, Yangtze and Pearl. This forms the heartland of what would become China. Forming the same rough latitudes as the United States and Roman Empire, China holds the temperate fertile zone. The north, on the verge of the Mongolian steppe, is cold and dry, while the South is steeped in humidity and jungles. This land was likely settled by modern humans 40,000 years ago, replacing the homo erectus, an earlier breed of humans who survived until human arrival in East Asia.

Along these rivers began the agriculture much like that that took place in the Near East. At likely the same time period, 10,000 BC, and possibly for the same reasons, agriculture started in China. Two different crops started in China, spreading outwards to the whole region. The habitable part of China that supports 90 percent of the population can be divided into two sections. In the north, beneath the Taiga forests of Siberia and the Mongolian grasslands is the North Chinese Plain, watered by the Yellow River. This region is relatively dry but still originally forested and has a climate similar to the Mid-Levels of America between roughly New York and North Carolina. In this China, along the banks of the Yellow River millet was domesticated. Millet is a nasty crop with little nutrients and a terrible taste but provided sustenance nonetheless. The millet growers expanded outwards across China, Tibet and settling in Korea as well.

The second China is the country south of the Yangtze with a humid and tropical climate. The American climate would be Florida, but instead of merely being a peninsula, it occupies half of China proper’s landmass. Along the banks of the Yangtze, on the some of the most fertile lands on earth, rice developed. From there, rice spread south into South-East Asia. Both of these migrations almost entirely replaced the native peoples that were relatives of the modern Ainus and Australian Aboriginals. They became one of the many races to vanish into behind the veil of prehistory, with us only now realizing their former extent due to genetics.

China had a wide and wealthy variety Neolithic cultures, known especially for their clay pot manufacturing. The most advanced cultures were in the South of China. The Tai peoples, relatives of their modern namesakes in South-East Asia dominated the Southern half of China. The coast of China was dominated by the Yayoi seafaring people who formed a coastal conglomerate stretching from the South of Japan to Malaysia. They were likely relatives of the modern Polynesians who are the indigenous inhabitants of Taiwan. The northern forests of China, near modern Beijing were inhabited by pig herding forest peoples and the northwest was inhabited by Siberian-Turkic herders.

The Yellow River is one of the longest in the world, flowing through the deserts of the Gobi and the wide open fertile fields of Northern China. The climate is for the most part wet and good. Areas this nice don’t tend to start civilizations, so what forced the people to submit to authority and eventually congregate in cities? The land around the river is marshy and flat, thus meaning that the river is incredibly unstable, thus meaning that it changes direction very quickly and radically. In recorded history the flow of the Yellow has changed by hundreds of miles and can change direction in a radically in a few months. The Yellow floods frequently and when it does, violently. Floods of the Yellow River are some of the bloodiest natural disasters in history. Rice is also an irrigation crop, requiring submerging in water to grow properly. This means that central authority had to manage the men to manage the violent river. Civilization started for the same reasons it started in Mesopotamia or Egypt albeit with a less brutal sun.

And Yet Again Another Chariot Empire

China at this point was not unified or even a concept. China was in this era a collection of tribal warlords littering the Yellow River’s Valley. They were in the era of development that had human sacrifice but not writing. They were slowly climbing the ladder of civilization and developing an advanced material culture. This came to an end around 1700 BC when a single leader was able to unify some of the tribes along the banks of the Yellow into the Shang Dynasty. The Indo-Europeans, arriving in the oasis of Western China likely imported the chariot into the region. Like everywhere else, this resulted in political unification. The Indo-Europeans also likely introduced wheat, which quickly became the dominant crop in the North of China, surpassing the unappetizing millet. In Chinese culture in those days, nepotism and the idea that any man would hold power due to his father was abhorred. Thus, the Emperor was chosen by a council of elders until this became ceremonial and then symbolic and then nonexistent. China became a monarchy and a centralized one at that. The maintenance of the irrigation canals and dams along the river resulted in a absolutism not dissimilar to that of Egypt or Mesopotamia.

The Chinese Bronze Age was not very similar to that of any other culture. Bronze was rare in China due to a lack of tin. This meant that Bronze wasn’t used for many practical purposes such as weapons, but instead was used mainly to construct enormous gorgeous well decorated urns. We aren’t sure what purpose these serve, but considering ancient cultures, it was likely a show off for the ruling classes or for some religious purpose. We also find the origins of Chinese writing. The Shang communicated with their gods and ancestors by inscribing words into the shells of turtles. This is a direct ancestor of modern Chinese script and also the first signs of the ancestor worship that still rules in China, even though it is the unnoticed bedrock of Chinese religion.

The Empire Falls into Anarchy

The Shang ruled for a couple hundred years until they were replaced by the Zhou dynasty around 1050 BC. Later history remembers the final king of the Shang as some horrific murderer, tyrannical, sexually deviant monster, thus resulting in the noble Duke of Zhou replacing him. The battle that took place was apparently mightily heroic, with the Zhou outnumbered 10 to 1, but triumphing nonetheless. However, it seems likely a large part of this was revisionist work by the later Zhou dynasty to justify their power.

The Zhou were likely semi-civilized lords on the North-Western steppe frontier of the empire, likely of Turkic extraction. They were able to seize power by building alliances with the tribes of the grasslands, using them to destroy the Shang.However, the Zhou did much more than this to justify their power. They developed the concept of the Mandate of Heaven. All ancient religions have a broad overly powerful sky god, in the West this became gods like Thor or Zeus, in the Orient it became the broad non human concept of heaven. This notion of heaven likely comes from Tengriist notions of sky worship that are common among the nomadic tribes of the region. The worship of heaven was overlayed over the previous ancestor worship, animistic and folk traditions to create the unofficial, if most powerful and basic tenets of faith in China.This heaven watched out of the Middle kingdom and gave Emperor the right to manage China and maintain order. If the Emperor was tyrannical and especially immoral, then Heaven would remove its approval and show its displeasure. This would come in the form of floods, famines and peasant rebellions (apparently the peasants were mindless tools of Heaven instead of thinking individuals who would rebel for their own reasons). At this point, the Empire would be toppled and a new more just Emperor would rise to power. Thus the immoral Shang came to be replaced by the moral and just Zhou dynasty, at least in the Zhou view. This idea of the Mandate of Heaven would exist for all of Chinese history and would be invoked even in the Tiananmen square riots of the 1991.

Similarly to the Norman conquest of England, the Zhou parceled out their empire to their Turkic nomadic partners in conquest. These spread out across the far reaches of the realm, enserfing the peasantry and becoming feudal lords with time. To maintain their empire, the Zhou started to appoint relatives and favorites in positions of power throughout the reaches of the empire. Over time this resulted in a feudalism that would be very similar to that would develop in Europe 2,000 years later. The feudal lords in many areas gained power greater than that of the Emperor. The peasants were forced into abysmal poverty, living in huts sunken into the dirt that would be generous for pigs. The society was the classic Bronze Age one, with haughty honor and spear wielding chariot riders for an aristocracy and downtrodden peasants on the bottom. China however never created a priest class on the same level as that of the Near Eastern civilizations, thus resulting in massive later implications to Chinese faith.

The Emperors were thus unable to maintain control over the society. The barbarians teamed up with a rival claimant to the throne to destroy the capital and kill the Emperor. The perpetrators were defeated, but it left no strong central force. The nobles elected a new king who would be sufficiently limp and the capital was moved into Eastern China towards an undefended location where the Emperor could be easily controlled by the warrior aristocracy. The Dukes and lords gained independence in anything but name. After this point, the Zhou monarchs would no longer be kings, but unimportant figureheads while the real politicking would be done by their “vassals”.

From this point would come 400 years of wars that would result in the reunification of China. These wars are almost a Shakespearean tragedy, starting out relatively pleasantly and over time developing into a barbaric hells-scape through every side’s need to win the struggle. It started out as a series of low level aristocratic wars called the Spring and Autumn Period. These were noble wars between different lords who fought against each other in chariot. All the sides involved had a civilized chivalric code that kept war from become too cruel. There are stories of armies purposely shrinking their size to maintain equal numbers with their enemies so to make the battle fair and honorable. Like the Trojan wars, wars were lost and won based around small warrior classes while the peasantry remained cannon fodder.

As these wars continued, they became bloodier. The smaller lordships were sucked into larger and larger nations as the ones that failed were digested by those who succeeded. These nations had to become larger in order to fight the other larger kingdoms. These came by names like Wu in the South-East, Qin in the West, Qi in the East, Chu in the South, Han in the Middle, Yan in the North-East and Zhao in the North-West. Over time, Zhao, Qin and Han cannabalized the others to become the main power player. The peasants, who had until recently been not considered worthy of warfare, were recruited en-mass to serve in the armies of the separate kingdoms. The age of iron had come and with it the age of the chariot went. This meant that the small armies of charioteers were replaced by massive armies of peasant armored troops. This resulted in massive armies with incredible bloodshed as one army of conscripts faced off against another. The nobility became less and less important in the wars they started and were shoved to the peripheries of their societies. The dictators and kings who could lead the massive infantry armies were those who would succeed. The Age of Spring and Autumn came to pass into the Age of Warring States. China experienced twice as many wars as Europe did in the Early Modern Period in this era and with each conflict the maelstrom of death grew darker and darker. Unlike Europe, in which the wars solidified the independence and disunity of the European states, the Chinese wars resulted in greater and greater unification. In the flat North Chinese plain, there were no geographic barriers that would’ve aided the cause of disunity. Symbolic of the horror of these wars was the repeating crossbow, or Cho Ku Nu. The Chinese crossbows could fire multiple arrows without reloading. This level of firepower would not be seen in the rest of the world until the 19th century. The battle of Changing had trench warfare, dragging on for months until one side made a fatal error that allowed one side to win. Armies numbered in the hundreds of thousands, sizes not to be seen outside of China until the world wars. This rapidly increased the bloodshed of the wars involved, almost creating an Industrial level of war.

The Emperor looked upon from the side, powerless and incapable. He had become purely a spiritual figure, much like the Pope in the Middle Ages, without temporal power. He spent his days pursuing the arts and ceremony. However, out of this age of blood came many figures who would be decisive to China’s development.

Symbolic in one way of this age was the soldier-writer Sun Tzu. He was the general for the Eastern Kingdom of Wu, encompassing the area around roughly modern Shanghai. It was large, but the malarial climate meant it had a small population. The much larger kingdom of Chu invaded the kingdom. Sun Tzu decided to abandon Wu itself to the invader and strike into Chu. He fought a guerrilla campaign that wore down the enemy army and defeated it. He believed in fighting the enemy force instead of their cities and always using surprise and guile instead of blunt force and great numbers. A battle won without fighting is always superior to a battle by bloody combat. He wrote of this in his famous book, the Art of War, which is still used as a manual today. If only more generals in the bloody years to come were to take his advice.

China, the land of Philosophy

A figure with much more long term importance was Confucius, a bureaucrat and government minister around 500 BC, but a figure who would become China’s anti prophet. Like Buddha, who was of the same era, he cared not for the gods. The subject of making life easier for men was more important than ethereal metaphysics. Confucius saw disorder all around him with the Warring States and tried to search for an answer to solve it. Since the basic foundation of all social orders is the family, to support the larger structures such as religions and governments, one must stabilize the family. To stabilize the family, the young must respect the old and the women, the men. In exchange for this respect, the old should guide the young. This fit in well with China’s age old ancestor worship. The nation was like a giant family and the government, the father. As any bureaucrat would agree, ceremony was seen as vital to the functioning of society. Confucius himself was known in his time for being an encyclopedia of ceremonies and he believed they should be applied to smooth the greases of interaction. Confucius, having erudite knowledge himself, believed in the importance of education. Confucius died with a large following and universally known for his respect. His followers included famous figures like Mencius, who expanded upon his philosophy and was like the St Paul of the philosophy.

Confucianism silently expanded to become a dominant philosophy of China. The effects of this upon Chinese society were great. Confucius’ focus on education endowed this trait upon all the nations his philosophy would touch. Chinese scholarship were dominated by the Confucians until 20th century AD. The bureaucrats, educated men and with Confucius himself among their number, took Confucianism very well and as the bureaucrats later gained control over Chinese society. Confucianism rose high with their star. Monarchs liked an ideology that told people to obey their rulers and be good, stable members of society. Although it can never be proven, Confucianism likely gave China a higher level of stability than most societies, with the China of Confucius’ day still in existence today, unlike almost any other civilization. Similarly, Confucianism is still the dominant Chinese belief structure, even if so subliminally. It resulted in China becoming what anthropologists call shame based societies to maintain social order. This is opposed to the Abrahamic societies that tend to be guilt based and base social control upon internalizing guilt and wondering “what would God think.”

Another faith came almost as a foil to Confucianism. No one is entirely sure where Taoism came from, myths go back into the hundreds of years before Confucius of Taoist wizards who would wander the wild lands of China. Likely based off earlier Chinese folk traditions, combined and synthesized in a later age. Its main figurehead was Lao Tze, who gave the faith popularity. Its main belief was in the unity of the universe, in which a man and man in general had to find their place and stability. Taoism believed in the gathering of secret knowledge and the recluse of nature. It scorned machinery and urban life, thinking the rural life preferable. Thus, like Confucianism, it had a basically conservative outlook (which was reasonable in a world falling apart in the bloodshed of the Warring States). Magical spells could be learned and gathered as well as wisdom. The faith was symbolized in a series of incredible saints that perfectly exemplified its tenets. If one gathered enough hidden knowledge, one would be able to attain immortality. It eventually became a philosophy very popular among the upper classes, since retiring to a “Taoist” lifestyle really ended up entailing living on a large reclusive estate with plenty of servants to support all of one’s needs. It was an appropriate retirement for a wealthy bureaucrat who had already spent most of his life indoors.

This reclusive, individual, mystical philosophy was a perfect counterweight to the practical, collectivist and social philosophy of Confucianism. The beauty of China is that these philosophies were able to live together peacefully. In China there is no monopoly of belief as there is in the Abrahamic lands. A Chinese gentleman could publicly be Confucian, privately follow the Taoist rituals and meanwhile worship his ancestors on the proper occasions. Thus today China exists with separate strains of ancestor worship, Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism and Communism making a uniquely Chinese combination. It would be a stretch to say China never struggled with religious wars (that would mean excepting the Taiping Rebellion, the third bloodiest war in history and fought in China and some rebellions in the 12th century), but it struggled with them much less than any other civilization. A strange aspect of China is that it is the only world civilization where the philosophers beat the theologians. Philosophy is usually meant for the educated few and plays to rationality, while religion to the many and to emotions. However, in China, the gods never took dominance over the theories of man. There is neither the Polytheism of India or the Ancient Greeks or the single deity of the Abrahamic Religions in China. The closest thing to it the ancestor worship, but in general the Chinese worship man and his capabilities along with a deeply impersonal, yet somewhat fair universe. The religions of China were centered on humanity, either with Confucianism being entirely focused on human affairs, ancestor worship focused on other humans and with Heaven mainly being a weather vane for human society. This resulted in China never developing a priest class of any real importance and leading it down a route quite different from any other world civilization.

The Empire is Re-Formed

Although it was so fertile in matters of the mind, the Wars between the States had to end. In the West of China lay the land of Qin. Starting out as a small kingdom, it expanded westward into barbarian lands to become the largest state in China. Their connection with the Western nomadic tribes allowed them to use them as mercenaries in their militaries. This gave their militaries a respectable cavalry component. They built roads into the mountains to conquer the fertile, but isolated valley of Szechuan, thus bringing it into Chinese civilization and greatly increasing their size. The Dukes here were quite innovative and adopted technologies and policies quickly.

They were the Prussia of the ancient world, building a very centralized and militaristic state. They abolished slavery, thus leading to a ban that has stayed for all of Chinese history. They stopped recognizing the nobility, with meritocratic talent being the main form of advancement in government and the military. The nobility were centralized in the capital where they could be closely watched, removed from their estates. This in turn liberated the peasantry. They replaced the subservience to the nobility with subservience to the state. The Qin crafted a philosophy called legalism that viewed the state and its interests and paramount to society. A citizens’ duty was to unquestionably follow one’s rulers decisions.This grew out of the Confucian’s estimation on the importance of loyalty to the state. Society was to be controlled and micromanaged by the state for supposedly the citizens’ benefit. Punishments were doled out to a draconian extent since disobedience was an attack of the functioning of society. In summary, it is a practical opposite of libertarianism. As part of their micromanagement the Qin banned merchants in their Duchy out of the Confucian view that they contributed nothing to society, thus creating a long history of Chinese disrespect of that profession. The peasant has been the highest regarded and worst treated member of Chinese society for its entire history. The philosophers and bureaucrats of the Chinese court described the peasant as the backbone of the nation and a moral high, but allowed them to live in crushing poverty and degradation. Qin over time became one of two main players in Warring Kingdoms alongside Zhao.

The bastard son of the king, Qi Shi Huangdi became king of the Qin. He led their forces in battle and defeated the other kingdoms in massive battles, thus bringing the Warring States period to an end, bringing China into unity after half a millennium of disunity. He abolished the Emperor, who even though he was only symbolic, still was an important symbol. China was unified kingdom for the first time in 500 years and Qi declared himself the Emperor and has ever since been known as the first Emperor of China. He would create a line in China that would last until the 20th century and continues in form today. How would China continue under a unified regime and with the ideas of Confucius and Lao Tze? How would China react to the rest of the world? These are questions that will be answered by the forward march of history, which goes onward whether or not any of the participants desire it.