252. Growth and Spread of Chinese Civilization
Chou China at first embraced most of Shensi and Honan, southern Shansi and Chihli, and western Shantung. It was feudal, and practically as separatist as mediæval Germany. The chief functions of the over-king were to perform sacrifices, to admonish the kings and princes, and to govern his small dynastic domain. Unity lay not so much in an effective organization as in an idea, the feeling of a common race and especially of a common civilization. This idea has persisted to the present. It is adhesion to the culture of China, to its deep roots, its permanence, its humanities, that has always made Chinamen feel themselves Chinamen; has in fact sooner or later turned into Chinamen all alien elements, whether they were intrusive conquerors or primitive folk, that came to be included within the limits of the realm. In this way common customs and ideals already united the dozen or more larger Chou states and hundreds of dependencies; and chronic internal warfare did not prevent this era from being the age of Confucius, Laotse, Mencius and the other great sages that from the sixth to the fourth centuries formulated the typical Chinese character and attitude.
During the latter part of the Chou period began a gradual reduction of the number of feudal states, due to the larger swallowing the smaller. By the middle of the third century, two of these had emerged as preponderant: Ts’in in the west, centering about the Wei valley, and Ch’u on the south, along the middle Yangtse. Both were frontier states, less cultivated and hardier than the others, and regarded as barbarian or only half Chinese. Ts’in may have included some Hunnish absorptions; Ch’u very likely represented the rule of a Chinese dynasty over a native population whose original affiliations may have been either with the non-Sinitic Anamese of to-day, with the Shan-Siamese division, or with some closer branch of the Sinitic family, but who were gradually assimilating the culture and speech of the northern old China. At last, in 223 B.C., Ch’u fell before Ts’in, and within two years the remaining states in the northeast collapsed. For the first time China, from nearly its present frontier to south of the Yangtse, was effectively under one active ruler, Shi Hwang-ti, the “first emperor.” His dynasty crumbled almost at his death, but only to be succeeded by the famous Han line, under which, in the two centuries before and the two after Christ, China extended, consolidated, and prospered. The boundaries of the empire were pushed, in name at least, to virtually their present limits; and though political control may often have been slight, cultural influence progressed rapidly south of the Yangtse, much as Gaul became Romanized at the same time. Even the survival of half-independent barbarian groups here and there in the south and west has its parallel in the persistence of Keltic speech in French Brittany. By the seventh to ninth centuries after Christ, when the empire flourished once more under the Tang dynasty, the mass of southern China may be considered to have been substantially assimilated. Even the southern coast, which was the last area to be integrated, and which retains to-day the greatest dialectic differentiations and autonomous tendencies, had become part of the Chinese polity and civilization. The consequence was that when in the thirteenth century the Mongols and in the seventeenth the Manchus conquered the empire, they accomplished little more than the overthrow of one dynasty by another. The course of Chinese culture went on undisturbed, as it had in several previous historic periods when half of the realm passed temporarily under the sway of nomads or barbarians from the north.
A considerable measure of the cultural predominance of China over her neighbors is to be ascribed to her more numerous population, which in turn was partly due to the cultural advance. The Chinese were the first nation to maintain a system of fairly reliable census records. In the first century and a half after Christ, under the Hans, ten censuses showed from 29 to 83 million inhabitants, the average being 63 millions, or about the same as the estimated population of the Roman empire at its height; somewhat more than that of Europe when America was discovered. A thousand years later, between 1021 and 1580, eight censuses yielded from 43 to 100 millions, with an average of 62 millions. Under the Manchus the population gradually rose from 125 millions in 1736 to 380 in 1881. To-day, the northern half of China is about twice as populous as the southern, and the eastern half exceeds the western in the same ratio. This superior density of population in the northeast reflects the fact that ancient China was the northeast. The same grounding in the past is evident in the fact that from the time of the Chous until the Mongol conquest in 1268, the imperial capitals lay mainly in Shensi or Honan, the core of the old kingdom.
Many ingredients of modern Chinese civilization, and most of its distinctive color, have been present in it since the opening of the historic period. Such are the use of hemp and silk as the typical textile materials; of jade as the precious stone of the nation; the tremendous, life-long moral authority accorded to parents, and the associated worship of ancestors; the unusual respect and rewards for learning; a professed contempt for war and emotional activity; aversion for mythological and metaphysical, scientific, or any other sort of speculation, and coupled therewith an unflagging interest in practical ethics, in the cultivation of character, in the finer shaping of the relations of individuals. These and other leanings endow Chinese civilization with something persistently idiomatic, with a quality of coherent originality. If this civilization were less great, China and the countries influenced by it would be spoken of as constituting what among barbarous and savage peoples we call a culture-area. In the widest perspective, they are such. China, India, the West—which in this view of course includes the Near East as well as Europe—are the three great focal centers of civilization in the eastern hemisphere. Their cultures have risen far above those of the intervening and peripheral nations. Until quite recent centuries, the three have run their courses with approximately equal achievement. And while exchanging elements since prehistoric times, they have each molded both what they borrowed and what they devised into a unified and distinctive design, have stamped it with original patterns. In short, culture development in China, India, and the Occident has been coördinate.
Of course, this distinctness of the three great regions of Old World civilization does not imply that diffusion of culture elements between them ever ceased. It is the form more than the content of civilization that is peculiar to the three areas. From India, for instance, China derived Buddhism, which was accorded a reception under the Hans and cultivated with fervor in the following centuries. Cotton came in the wake of the religion—first as a rare and valuable textile, then to be grown. The West, within the historic period, gave glass and perhaps the impulse toward a Chinese “invention”—porcelain, a glazed-through pottery. In recent centuries the West acted as transmitter for several elements of American origin, tobacco, for example, and maize, which quickly became an important food-plant in parts of China. There have even been reimportations. Gunpowder is said to have been used for fireworks in China in the fifth century, for war in the twelfth, but its employment for the propulsion of missiles from firearms is due to introduction by the Altaic nations in the fifteenth century. From the fourth century B.C. on, there are repeated references in Chinese sources to the magnetic needle and to “south-pointing chariots”—apparently a compass-like device used on land, though probably only as a mechanical toy. Then the needle was applied to geomantic purposes, until Arab or other foreign sailors took it up as a true mariner’s compass, and in the eleventh or twelfth century reintroduced it to the Chinese as an instrument of navigation.
Nor was civilization as stagnant in China as the outsider is likely to think, who becomes aware first of all of its persistent native flavor. The old war chariot, for instance, went out of use about contemporaneously in China and the West. Printing from engraved blocks was in vogue in the sixth century after Christ, from movable clay types in the dynasties between the Tangs and the Mongols, from metal types not much later, since the art was established among the imitating Koreans in the fifteenth century. A system of classifying the numerous characters was invented before the Tangs; the modern one of grouping them according to 214 radicals, under the Mings. True encyclopædias were first compiled in the fourteenth century—four hundred years earlier than in the West. The system of awarding office on the basis of literary examinations took root under the Hans and became organized under the Tangs. The earliest poetry, three thousand years ago, was rimed, and had four or five monosyllabic words in the line. In the Tang time, the line became extended to seven words; and still later was the origin of the peculiar rhythm of alternating tones—a system by which every other word was one bearing the “even” tone and those between any of the other tones. Paper making is said to date from the Hans, and paper money was first issued—disastrously as in some of the first Western attempts—under the Mongols. These and dozens of other instances that might be compiled exemplify, as does the history of ancient Egypt, that even those cultures constantly move to which one is tempted to apply the stigma “conservative” or “tradition-bound.”