tribe of the west, as the founder of the Chou dynasty in 1122 B.C. himself showed when he addressed his neighbours and allies, the eight other states of the west, and exhorted them, as equals, to assist him in the conquest of China. It was only in 771 B.C. that the original Chou appanage (since 1122 the western half of the imperial appanage) had been ceded to Ts’in, which in 984 was a petty state, still of the “adjunct-function” (_cf._ page 144) type, and not “sovereign.” In 984 there was no intermediate sovereign “power” between the Emperor and the Tartars, with whom, in fact, he had been directly engaged in war independently of Ts’in. He was as much under Tartar social influences as was Ts’in: in fact, the Chou principality, under the Shang dynasty, was a sort of first edition of Ts’in principality under the Chou dynasty. Just as in 1122 B.C. Chou ousted Shang as the imperial house, so in 221 B.C. Ts’in definitely replaced Chou.
2. If Duke Muh distinguished himself by Tartar conquests, so did the Emperor Muh before him, and the authorities are all agreed on this point.
3. If in 984 B.C. the long-standing orthodox Chinese literary capacity was unequal to this effort, how is it that semi-barbarous Ts’in, the least literary of all the states (not only Chinese, but also half-Chinese), into which state records had only been introduced at all in 753 B.C., was able to compose such a book; or, if not to write the book, then to dictate so sustained and connected a story? Besides, the Emperor Muh left several inscriptions carved on stone during the progress of his travels.
4. The instances M. Chavannes cites of the tombs of Yü and Shun in South China, as being parallel instances of appropriation by orthodox Chinese of semi-Chinese traditions have already been put to quite another use above, as tending to show, on the contrary, that those two Emperors either came from the south, or had ancestral traditions in the south; (see pp. 138,191).
5. Finally, about a third of the Travels is taken up with a description of the incestuous intrigue with Lady _Ki_, and of her sumptuous ritual funeral. Why should Duke Muh trouble himself about the rites due to members of the Ki family, to which the Emperor belonged, but he himself did not? Why should the warlike Duke Muh (who had just then been recommended by an adviser (an ex- Chinese, since become a Tartar) to adopt simple Tartar ways instead of worrying himself with the Odes and the Book “as _the Chinese did_”) waste his time in pomp and ritual? ( see p. 180). Again, when, as the Travels tell us, various vassal rulers from orthodox China (even so far as Shan Tung in the extreme east) arrived to pay their respects to the Emperor as their liege-lord, how is it possible to suppose that these orthodox counts and barons would come to pay court to a semi-barbarian count (for that was all he was) like Duke Muh (as he is posthumously called), one of their equals, a man who took no part in the durbar affairs, and who, on account of his human sacrifices, was not even thought fit to become an emergency Protector of China? What could the semi- Tartar ruler of Ts’in have known of all these wearisome refinements in pomp, mourning, and music? Once more, the place the Emperor started from and came back to, though part of _his_ appanage in 984 B.C. and possessing an ancestral Chou temple, was not part of the Ts’in dominions in 650 B.C., and never possessed a Ts’in temple: if not independent, it was at that time a bone of contention between Ts’in and Ts’u, and by no means a safe place for equipping pleasure expeditions. Finally, if it is marvellous that the Chou Annals of Sz-ma Ts’ien do not give full details of the voyage, is it not at least equally marvellous that the Ts’in Annals should not mention it in 650 B.C., when M. Chavannes supposes it took place, whilst they do so mention it under 984 B.C., when he thinks it did not take place? All accounts agree that the ancestor of Ts’in (named) was there with the Emperor as charioteer; he was, as we have seen, equally ancestor of Chao, and the Chao Annals of Sz-ma Ts’ien say exactly what the Ts’in Annals say.
Hence we may gratefully accept Professor Chavannes’ most illuminating proofs, so far as they tend to show that the Travels of the Emperor Muh are genuine history for a tour no farther than the middle Tarim Valley; but, so far as Duke Muh of Ts’in is concerned, he must be eliminated from all consideration of the matter, and we must ascribe the tour, as the Chinese do, to the Emperor Muh. Lastly, are there any _proved_ instances of such radical tamperings with history by the Chinese annalists as M. Chavannes suggests? I do not know of any; and such superficial tamperings as there are the Chinese critics always expose, _coûte_ que _coûte_, even though Confucius himself be the tamperer.
CHAPTER XXXVI
ANCIENT JAPAN
The development of China is not only elucidated by documents and events probably antecedent to the strictly historical period, such as the supposed voyage of an Emperor to the Far West, but it is also made easier to understand when we consider its possible indirect effects upon Japan. The barbarian kingdom of Wu does not really appear in Chinese history at all, even by name, until the year 585 B.C. It was found then that it had traditions of its own, and a line of kings extending back to the beginning of the Chou dynasty (1122 B.C.), and even farther beyond. In 585 B.C. the new King, Shou-mêng, hitherto an unknown and obscure vassal of Ts’u, altogether beyond the ken of orthodox China, felt quite strong enough, as we have seen in Chapter VII., to strike out an independent line of his own. It is a singular thing that, when the Japanese set about constructing a nomenclature (on Chinese posthumous lines) for their newly discovered back history in the eighth century A.D., they should have fixed upon exactly this year 585 B.C. for the death of their supposed first Mikado Jimmu (i.e. _Shên-wu_, the “divinely martial”). The next three Kings of Wu, all of whom, like himself, bore dissyllabic and meaningless barbarian names, were sons of Shou-mêng, and a fourth son was the cultured Ki-chah, who visited orthodox China several times, both as a spy and in order to improve himself. Then follow two sons of the last and first, respectively, of the said three brothers. The second of these royal cousins was killed in battle, and his son Fu-ch’ai vowed a terrible, vengeance against Ts’u, whose capital he subsequently took and sacked in 506 B.C. Now appears upon the scene his own vassal, Yiieh, and at first Wu gets the best of it in battle. Bloodthirsty wars follow between the two, full of picturesque and convincing detail, until at last the King of Yiieh, in turn, has the King of Wu at his mercy; but he was, though a barbarian, magnanimously disposed, and accordingly he offered Fu-ch’ai the island of Chusan (so well known to us on account of our troops having occupied it in 1840) and three hundred married families to keep him company. But Fu-ch’ai was too proud to accept this Elba, the more especially so because he had it on his conscience that he had been acting throughout against the earnest advice of his faithful minister (a Ts’u renegade), whom he had put to death for his frankness. This adviser as he perished had cried out: “Don’t forget to pluck my eyes out and stick them on the east gate, so that I may witness the entry of the Yiieh troops!” He therefore committed suicide, first veiling his face because, as he said: “I have no face to offer my adviser when I meet him in the next world; if, on the other hand, the dead have no knowledge, then it does not matter what I do.” After the beginning of our Christian era, when the direct communication between Japan (overland _viâ_ Corea) and China (also by sea to Wu) was first officially noticed by the historians, it was recorded by the Chinese annalists that part of Fu-ch’ai’s personal following had escaped in ships towards the east, and had founded a state in Japan. But it must not be forgotten that then (473 B.C.) orthodox China had never yet heard of Japan in any form, though of course it is possible that the maritime states of Wu and Yiieh may have had junk intercourse with many islands in the Pacific.
We have already ventured upon a few remarks upon this subject in Chapter XXIII., but so much is apt to be made out of slight historical materials-such, for instance, as the pleasure expedition of a Chinese emperor in 984 B.C. to the Tarim Valley– that it may be useful to suggest the true proportions, and the modest possible bearing of this “Japanese” migration–assuming the slender record of it to be true; and the basis of truth is by no means a broad one; still less is it capable of sustaining a heavy superstructure.
Any one visiting Japan will notice that there are several distinct types of men in that country, the squat and vulgar, the oval-faced and refined, and many variations of these two; just as, in England, we have the Norman, Saxon, Irish, and Scotch types of face, with many other _nuances_. It is also clear from the kitchen-midden and other prehistoric remains; from the presence, even now, in Japan of the bearded Ainus (a word meaning in their own language “men”); and from the numerous accounts of Ainu- Japanese wars in both Chinese and Japanese history, that there were (as there still are) manners, and possibly yet other men, in ancient Japan, both very different from the manners and appearance of the cultured and gifted race, viewed as a homogeneous whole, we are now so proud to have as our political allies. But that brings us no nearer a historical solution, It is a persistent way with all ethnologists to search out whence this or that race came. Of course all races move and mingle, and must always have moved and mingled, when by so doing they could better their circumstances of life; but even if movement has taken place in Japan as it has elsewhere, there is no reason why, if comparatively uncivilized Japanese displaced Ainus, Ainus should not have, before that, displaced quite uncivilized Japanese; or, if other races came over the seas to displace the people already there, the natives already there should not have, later on, ejected these new-comers by sea routes.
In other words, it is quite futile (unless we can lay hands on definite objects, or definite facts recorded–even definite traditions) to try and account for hypothetical movements in prehistoric times. We are totally ignorant of early Teutonic, Hungarian, and Celtic movements-though, thanks solely to Chinese records, we are pretty certain, within defined limits, about early Turkish movements. How much more, then, must we be ignorant about the Japanese movements? If “people” must have come from somewhere, whence did these arrivals start, and why should they not go back; or why not meet other movers going to the place whence they themselves started? If we are to accept the only historical records or quasi-records we possess at all, that is, the Chinese records, then we must accept them for what they are worth on the face of them, and neither add to nor mutilate them; imperfect things that do exist are necessarily better than imaginary things that might have existed in their place. A few hundred families at most, we are told, escaped; and if it be true that they went intentionally to Japan, it is probable that the expert Wu sailors (none existed elsewhere in China) had already for long known the way thither, or to Quelpaert and Tsushima, which practically means to both Corea and Japan; in fact, if they sailed east from Ningpo, there is no other place to knock up against, even if the special intention were not there. Everything tends to show that Fu-ch’ai, though perhaps a barbarian in 473 B.C., was of orthodox if remote pedigree dating from 1200 B.C., and that the ruling class of Wu was very different from the “barbarians” by whom (as we are specifically told) Wu was surrounded; the situation was like that of the Egyptians and Phoenicians, like Cecrops and Cadmus, amongst the earliest barbarous Greeks. It amounts, then, to this, that, just as Chinese colonies and adventurers emerged under the stress of increased population, or under the impulses of curiosity, tyranny, and ambition, to found states in Ts’u, Ts’in, Tsin, Ts’i, Lu, Wu, Yüeh, and other places round the central nucleus, so (they being the sole possessors of that magic _POWER_, “records”) other parties would from time to time sally forth either from the same orthodox centre, or from the semi-orthodox places surrounding that centre, to still remoter spots, such as, for instance, Corea, Japan, Formosa, Annam, Burma, Tibet, and Yiin Nan. Fu-ch’ai’s surviving friends had indeed a very lively stimulus indeed-the fear of instant death-to drive them tumultuously over the seas; and doubtless, as they must have been perfectly harmless after tossing about hungry in open boats for weeks together, they would be as welcome to the Japanese king, or to the petty chief or chiefs who received the waifs, as in our own times was the honest sailor Will Adams when he drifted friendless to Japan, and whose statue now adorns a great Japanese city as that of a man who was, in a humble way, also a “civilizer” of Japan (600 A.D.). Doubtless, many Wu words, or Chinese words as then pronounced in Wu, had already been brought over by fishermen; but here at last was a great haul of (possibly) books and the way to interpret them; at least there was a great haul of the best class of the Wu ruling folk. It is true that the first Japanese envoys who came to China made as much of their Wu “origin” as they could; firstly, because it probably paid them as traders to do so; secondly, because it necessarily gave them a respectable status in China; and, thirdly, because they were, in the first century of our era, gradually beginning to understand the mystic power of the Chinese written character, and they would therefore naturally take an intense interest in all records, rumours, traditions, and fables about themselves, which they would embellish and “confirm” whenever it suited their interests to do so. Which of us does not begin to furbish up his pedigree when he is made a peer of the realm?
As to the bulk of the Japanese race, be it mixed or unmixed, it is surely in the main to be found now where it always was, or close by? It is no more depreciating to early Japan to give her a dynasty of Chinese adventurers, or perhaps to give her only hereditary Chinese advisers and scribes, than it is derogatory to the states of Europe to possess dynasties which belong by their origin, as a general rule, to almost any place but the countries they now govern as sovereigns. As to the ancient chiefs or kings of Japan, some of their genuine native names may have been preserved in the memories of men; whether they were or not, they were, even without records, as “ancient” chiefs as the best recorded chiefs of Egypt, Babylonia, or China; and it must be remembered that Egyptian and Babylonian records were non-existent to us for all practical purposes during many thousands of years, until we recently discovered how to read them: that is to say, what was once no history at all–the present condition of the prehistoric races of High Asia–suddenly becomes history when we find the records and know how to read them.
When, a few centuries later on, the Japanese had begun thoroughly to understand Chinese books, they decided to have an historical outfit of their own; they took what vague traditions they had, and, in the absence of any long-forgotten genuine records, or visible remains having part of the effect of records, simply fitted on to their heroes, real or imaginary, the Chinese posthumous system, and a selection of the historical facts recorded about the Chinese. Even the Emperor Muh in China was not so named until he died. If a man can be given a complimentary title three years after death (that was the Chinese rule at first), why not give it him 300 years after his death? The king or chief hitherto known, whether accurately or not, whether honestly or not, as X, had most certainly existed; that is, the tenth great-grandfather of the reigning prince; the ninth, eighth, and so on; must positively have been there at some remote period of the past. By calling him Jimmu (a Chinese emperor had already been posthumously so called) he is none the less there than he was before he was called Jimmu, and his new title therefore does not make him less of an entity than he was before. And so on with all the other Japanese emperors who, in the eighth century A.D., were similarly provided with imaginary names. Possibly this is how the Japanese argued with themselves when they set about the task. The situation is a curious one, and perhaps unique in the world; but it does not matter much (as suggested in Chapter XXXI.) so long as we keep imagination separate from real evidence.
CHAPTER XXXVII
ETHICS
We propose to say a few words now about peculiar customs which had vogue all over or in certain parts of China; of course some of them may be traced back to the “Rites of Chou,” and to what is prescribed therein; but general administrative schemes representing in general terms things as they ought to be, or as the Chou federal and feudal oligarchy would have liked them to be, do not give us such a life-like picture of ancient China as specific accounts of definite events which really did happen. Take, for instance, the peculiar formalities connected with abject surrender.
After a great defeat in 699 B.C., just when Ts’u was beginning to emerge from its narrow confines between the Han and Yang-tsz Rivers, the defeated Ts’u generals had themselves bound in fetters, or with ropes, in order to await their king’s pleasure. In 654, when Ts’u had one of the small orthodox states (in the Ho Nan nucleus) at its mercy, the baron presented himself with his hands tied behind, a piece of jade in his mouth, followed by his suite in mourning, carrying his coffin. It is evident that at this date Ts’u was still “barbarous,” for the king had to ask what it all meant. It was explained to him that, when the Chou founder conquered China, and mutilated the last Shang dynasty emperor, that emperor’s elder brother by an inferior mother had presented himself before the founder half naked, with his hands tied behind his back, his left hand leading a ram (or goat), and his right carrying sedge for wrapping round the sacrificial victim; he was enfeoffed as Duke of Sung. In 537 the same thing happened to a later King of Ts’u in connection with another petty principality, and the king had to be reminded of the 654 precedent. Thus there must have been records of some kind in Ts’u at an early date. In 645 B.C., when the ruler of Ts’in took prisoner his brother-in- law, the ruler of Tsin, and was seriously contemplating the annexation of Tsin, together with the duty of discharging Tsin sacrifices, his own sister, with bare feet, wearing mourning, and bound with a mourning belt, intercedes successfully for her husband. In 597 B.C. the ruler of the important orthodox state of Cheng went through the form of dragging along, with the upper part of his own body uncovered, a ram or goat into the presence of the King of Ts’u. In 511, when the ruler of Lu had to fly the country and throw himself upon the generosity of Tsin, in order to escape from the dangerous machinations of the intriguing great families of Lu, the six Tsin statesmen (who were themselves at that moment, as heads of great private clans, gradually undermining their own prince’s rights) sent for the arch-intriguer, and called upon him to explain his conduct. At that time Lu was coquetting between its two powerful neighbours, Tsin and Ts’i. The conspirator duly presented himself before the Areopagus of Tsin grandees, barefoot and attired in common cloth (_i.e._ not of silk, but of hemp), in order to explain to them the circumstances of the duke’s exile: it is characteristic of the times, and also of the frankness of history, to find it added that he succeeded in bribing the grandees to give an unjust decision. When the Kings of Yüeh and Wu were in turn at each other’s mercy, in 494 and 473 respectively, their envoys, in offering submission, in each case advanced to the conqueror “walking on the knees,” with bust bared: this knee-walking suggests Annamese, Siamese, and possibly Japanese forms rather than Chinese. The Wu servants at dinner are said to have “waited” on their knees. The third and last August Emperor in 207 submitted to the conquering Han dynasty seated in an unadorned chariot, drawn by a white horse (with signs of mourning), carrying his seal-sash round his neck (figurative of hanging or strangling himself), and offered the seals of the Son of Heaven to the Prince of Han.
Something has already been said about the rules of succession in Ts’u and Ts’in. When the Duke of Sung just mentioned died, in 1078 B.C., he was succeeded by his younger brother because his own son was dead; this was in accordance with the Shang dynasty’s ritual laws. Even the Warrior King himself, founder of the Chou dynasty, was not the eldest son of his father, the (posthumously) Civilian King; the latter had set aside the elder of the two sons; and it will be remembered that, several generations before that, two of the royal Chou brothers had voluntarily retired to colonize the Wu Jungle country, in order that their younger brother, father of the future Civilian King, might succeed to the then extremely limited vassal state of Chou. Later on, in 729, a Duke of Sung on his death-bed bequeathed the succession to his younger brother instead of to his own son, on the ground that the rule is, “son to father, younger to elder brother”–a “universal rule” approved by Mencius in later times. The younger brother in this case thrice refused the kingly crown, but at last accepted, and Confucius in his history censures the act, which, it is considered, contributed to Sung’s ultimate downfall. (It must be remembered that Confucius’ ancestors were themselves of royal Sung extraction.) In 652 the younger brother by the superior spouse wished, at his father’s death-bed, to cede his right to the succession of Sung to his elder brother by an inferior wife; the dying father commended the spirit, but forbade the proposed sacrifice of prior right, and the elder therefore served the younger as counsellor. In 493 a Duke of Sung, irritated on account of his eldest son having left the country, nominated a younger son as successor, and after his death his wife confirmed by decree her late husband’s nomination; but the younger brother firmly declined, on the ground that the rule of succession was a fixed one, and that he was unworthy to perform the sacrifices to the gods of the land and grain. It is a curious coincidence that the question of status in wives affects the present rulers of both China and Japan. Though the dowager was Empress-Mother, she always ceded the pas to the senior dowager, who had no children. And as to the Mikado’s mother, who died last October, she was, it seems, never officially considered as an Empress.
In 817 B.C. the Emperor himself is censured by history for having, “contrary to rule,” wished to set up as ruler of Lu a second son in preference to the elder son; he repeated the act in 796, as has already been explained in Chapter XX., when a few other instances were cited to illustrate the general rule in China. At this time the waning power of the emperors still evidently flickered. In 608, through the meddlesome political interference of Ts’i, a concubine’s son succeeded to the Lu throne in preference to the legitimate wife’s son; curiously enough, the legitimate wife was a Ts’i princess. The result of this irregularity was that the “three powerful families” of Lu (themselves descendants of the ruling family) grew restless, and the state began to decline. On the death of a King of Ts’u in 516, it was proposed to put on the throne, instead of the king’s young son, the king’s younger brother by an inferior mother, on the ground that the mother of the young son in question was the wife obtained from Ts’in by the king for marriage to his eldest son (who had since joined the king’s enemies), which young lady the king had subsequently decided to marry himself. Even under this irregular and complicated family tangle, the proposed succession was disapproved by the counsellors, on the ground that irregular successions invariably produced trouble in the state. In the year 450 B.C. the ruler of Ts’i insisted, against advice, on the succession of a younger son by a favourite concubine in preference to his elder sons by superior mothers, including the first and most dignified spouse. But here, again, the powerful families intervened; one of the elder sons, who had fled to Lu, was brought back secretly in a sack; the wrongful successor was murdered, and the “powerful family” which took the lead in state affairs soon afterwards, to the horror of Confucius, by intrigue and by further assassination, secured the Ts’i throne for itself. It will thus be noticed that all the great states except Ts’in had their full share of succession troubles.
There were several customs practised in warfare which are worthy of short notice. In 633 B.C. a Ts’u general, in the interests of discipline, flogged several military men, and “had the ears of others pierced by arrows, according to military regulation.” In 639 this same king had sent as a present to some princesses of other states, who had congratulated him on his victory over Sung, “a pile of the enemy’s left ears.” As the historians express their disgust at this indelicate act, it was presumably not an orthodox practice, at all events in this particular form. In 607 there were captured from Sung 450 war-chariots and 250 soldiers; the latter had their left ears cut off; in this case the victors were CHÊNG troops, acting under Ts’u’s orders, and it is presumed that CHÊNG officers cut off the ears under Ts’u’s commands. A few years later two or three Ts’u generals were discussing what the ancients did when they challenged for a battle; it was decided that the best “form” was to rush up to the entrenchments, cut off an enemy’s left ear, carry him away in your chariot, and rush back to your own camp. As there is a special Chinese character or pictograph for “ears cut off in battle,” it thus appears that to a certain extent even the orthodox Chinese practised the “scalping” art, which was doubtless intended to furnish easy proof of claims for reward based upon prowess; in fact, even in modern official Chinese, a decapitated head is called a “head-step,” an expression evidently dating from the time when a step in rank was given for each head or group of heads taken.
Rulers, whether the Emperor or vassals, faced south in the exercise of their sovereign powers. Thus, when the Duke of Chou, after the death of his brother the Martial King, acted as Regent pending the minority of the Martial King’s son, his own nephew, he faced south; but he faced north once more when he resumed his status of subject. It has already been mentioned, in Chapter XX., that in 640 B.C. the state of Lu made the south gate of the Lu capital the Law Gate, because it was by the south gates that all rulers’ commands emanated. In 546 a counsellor of Ts’u explained to the king how, since Tsin influence had predominated in the orthodox state of CHÊNG, this last had ceased to “face south towards its former protector.” Thus, though the Emperor faces south towards the sun, and his subjects in turn face north in his honour, those subjects face their other protector in whatever direction he may lie, supposing the Emperor’s protection to be inadequate. It is evidently the same principle as “bowing towards the east,” and “turning towards Mecca,” both of which formalities must be modified according to place. In 315 B.C., when Yen (the Peking plain) had become one of the six independent kingdoms, a usurper (to whom the King of Yen had foolishly committed full powers) “turned south” to perform acts of sovereignty in the king’s name. In 700 B.C., in the orthodox state of Wei, we hear of “princes of the left and right,” which is explained to mean “sons of mothers whose official place is left or right of the principal spouse.” Right used to be more honourable than left in China, but left now takes precedence of right. Thus the provinces of Shan Tung and Shan Si are also called “Left of the Mountains” and “Right of the Mountains,” because the Emperor faces south. Notwithstanding, the ancient phraseology sometimes survives; for instance, “stands right of him” means “is better than he is,” and “to left him” means “to prove him wrong or worse.” All _yamêns_ in China face south; there are rare exceptions, usually owing to building difficulties. Once, in the province of Kwei Chou, I was officially invited by the mandarin to take my seat on his right instead of on his left, because, as he explained, his _yamên_ door did not face south, but _west_; and, he added, it was more honourable for me, as an official guest, to sit north, facing west, than to sit south, facing west. In Canton, the Viceroy used out of courtesy to sit south, facing north, and make his own interpreter sit north, facing south; the consul sat east, facing west, and the consul’s interpreter sat west, facing east. But the consul could not have presumed to occupy the north seat thus given to an inferior on the principle of de _minimis_ non _curat lex_; nor was the Viceroy willing to assert his “command” to a guest. In 436 the armies of Yiieh marching north through Ho Nan called the Chinese places lying to their west the “left” towns; but that was perhaps because Yiieh came marching from the south. In 221 B.C., when for the first time South China to the sea became part of the imperial dominions, the Emperor’s territory was described as extending southward to the “north-facing houses.” Hong Kong and Canton are just on the tropical line; but the island of Hainan, and also Tonquin, are actually in the tropics. Whether the houses there do really face north–which I have never noticed–or whether the expression is merely symbolical, I cannot say; but the idea is “to the regions where, when the sun is on the tropic, you have to turn north to see him.”
A point of honour in China was not to make war on an enemy who was in mourning, but this rule seems to have been honoured in the breach as much as in the observance thereof. Two centuries before the Chou dynasty came into power, an emperor of the Shang dynasty distinguished himself by not speaking at all during the three years he occupied the mourning hut near the grave. As we have seen, the first rulers of Lu (as a Chou fief) modified existing customs, and introduced the three years’ mourning rule there. In connection with a Sung funeral in 651 B.C., it is explained that the bier lay between the two front pillars, and not, as with the Chou dynasty, on the top of the west side steps; it will be remembered that Sung represented the sacrifices of the extinct Shang dynasty. That same year the future Second Protector (then a refugee among the Tartars) declined to put in a claim to the Tsin succession against his brothers “because he had not been in mourning whilst a fugitive.” In 642 Sung and her allies made war on Ts’i, which was then mourning for the First Protector; by a just Nemesis the Tartars came to the rescue and saved Ts’i. In 627, after the Second Protector’s death, Ts’in declared war, whilst Tsin was mourning, upon a petty orthodox principality belonging to the same clan as Tsin and the Emperor, and belonging also to the Tsin vassal system. This so enraged the new ruler of Tsin that he dyed his white mourning clothes black, so as to avenge the insult, and yet not to outrage the rites: moreover, white was unlucky in warfare: victorious over Ts’in, he then proceeded to mourn for his father, and ever after that black was adopted, by way of memento, as the national colour of Tsin. In 626 and 622 the Emperor sent high officers to represent him at Lu funerals, and to carry gems to place in deceased’s mouth, “to show that he (the Emperor) had not the heart to leave the deceased unsupplied with food.” In 581 the ruler of Lu, being on a visit to Tsin, was forcibly detained by Tsin, in order to swell the importance of a Tsin ruler’s funeral. Lu (like the petty orthodox states of Wei, Sung, CHÊNG, etc., further south) was nearly always under the rival political constraint of either Ts’i, Tsin, or Ts’u; and this factor must accordingly also be taken into account in explaining Confucius’ longing for the good old days of imperial predominance. In 572 Tsin attacked Cheng, though of the same clan as itself, whilst in mourning; but in 567 semi-barbarian Ts’u set a good example to orthodox Tsin by withdrawing its troops out of deference to a later official mourning then in force in Cheng: in 564 the King of Ts’u withdrew his armies home altogether on account of the mourning due to his own deceased mother. In 560 barbarian Wu attacked Ts’u whilst in mourning for the above king (the one who first conquered the Canton region for Ts’u); but, here again, by a just Nemesis, Wu’s army was cut to pieces, and Wu’s own ally, Tsin, censured her for having done such an improper thing. In 544 the prime minister of Tsin mourned for his Ts’u co- signatory of the celebrated Peace Conference Treaty of 546; and this graceful act is explained to be in accordance with the rites. In 544 Ts’u herself was in mourning, and in accordance with the terms of the Peace Conference Treaty, under which the Tsin vassals and the Ts’u vassals were to pay their respects to Ts’u and Tsin respectively–Ts’in and Ts’i, as great powers, being excused, or, rather, discreetly left alone–Ts’u put great pressure on Lu to secure the personal presence of the Lu ruler at the Ts’u funeral. The orthodox duke did not at all like this “truckling to a barbarian”; but one of his counsellors suggested behaving before the corpse as he would behave to a vassal of his own: this was done, and the unsophisticated Ts’u was none the wiser at the time, though, later on, the king discovered the pious fraud. In 514 B.C. Wu wished to attack Ts’u while, mourning, and the virtuous Ki- chah was promptly sent by Wu to sound Tsin about the _facheuse situation._ At a Lu funeral in 509, it was explained that the new duke could only mount the throne after the burial was over; it was added “even the Son of Heaven’s commands do not run in Lu during this critical period; _á fortiori_ is the duke not capable of transacting his own subjects’ business.” But long before this, when the First Protector died, in 643, his body lay for sixty-seven days in the coffin unattended, whilst his five sons were wrangling about the succession; in fact, the worms were observed crawling out of the coffin. These painful details have a powerful historical interest, for when (as mentioned on p. 209) his tomb was opened nearly 1000 years later, dogs had to be sent in ahead to test the air, as the stench was so great. In 492 an unpopular prince of Wei was in Tsin, which state had an interest in placing him on the throne. There happened to be in Tsin at that moment a scoundrel who had fled to Tsin from Lu, because he had found Confucius too strong for him in Lu; and this man suggested to Tsin that it would be a good plan to send seventy Wei men back to Wei in mourning clothes and sash, so as to make the Wei people think that the prince was dead, and thus gain an opportunity to “run him in” by surprise, and set him up as ruler. In 489, when the King of Ts’u died in the field of battle, his three brothers, all of whom had declined his offer of the throne, but one of whom had at last accepted in order to give the dying man peace, decided to conceal the king’s death from the army whilst they sent for his son by a Yiieh mother, pleading that the king had been non _compos mentis_ when he proposed an irregular succession, and that the promise made to him was, therefore, of no avail. In 485 Lu and Wu joined in an attack upon Ts’i during the latter’s mourning–a particularly disgraceful political combination: no wonder Confucius was hastily sent for from the state of CH’ÊN, whither he had previously retired in disgust at the corruption of his native land. In 481 a conspiracy which was going on in Ts’i was delayed because one of the chief actors, being in mourning, could not attend to public business of any kind. In 332 B.C. Ts’i took ten towns from Yen by successfully attacking her whilst in mourning; one of the travelling diplomats and intriguers so common in China at that period insisted upon the towns being restored. This was at the exact moment when the philosopher Mencius, who seems to have also been a great political _dilettante_, was circulating to and fro between such monarchs as the Kings of Ts’i and Ngwei, alias _Liang_, as is fully explained in the still extant book of Mencius.
All the above quaint instances, novel though they may be in detail, strongly recall to us in principle our own “rules” of international law, which are always liable to unexpected “construction” according to the exigencies of war and the power wielded by the “constructor.” Inter _arma leges silent_. As usual in these ritual matters, Ts’in is distinguished by total absence of mention.
CHAPTER XXXVIII
WOMEN AND MORALS
So far as it is possible to judge from the concrete instances in which women are mentioned, it appears that in ancient Chinese times their confinement and seclusion was neither nominally nor actively so strict as it has been in later days, and they seem to have been much more companionable to men than they have been ever since the ridiculous foot-squeezing fashion came into vogue over a thousand years ago. When the Martial King addressed his semi- barbarous western allies, as he prepared his march upon the last Shang Emperor in 1122 B.C., he observed: “The ancient proverb says the hen crows not in the morn; when she does, the house will fall”–in allusion to the interference of the debauched Emperor’s favourite concubine in public affairs; and we have seen, under the heading of Law in Chapter XX., how one of the imperial statutes, proclaimed or read regularly in the vassal kingdoms, prohibited the meddling of women in public business. But, in spite of this, so far as promoting the succession rights and political interests of their own children goes, wives and concubines certainly exerted considerable influence, whether legitimate or not, in all the states. The murder of an Emperor and flight of his successor in 771 B.C. was in its inception owing to the intrigues of women about Court. A few years only after that event, we find the orthodox ruler of Wei marrying a beautiful Ts’i princess (her beauty is a matter of history, and is celebrated in the Odes, which are themselves a popular form of history); and then, because she had no children, further marrying a princess of Ch’en. This princess unfortunately lost her offspring; but her sister also enjoyed the prince’s favour, and her son was, after her death, given in adoption to the first childless Ts’i wife. This son succeeded to the Wei throne, but was ultimately murdered by a younger brother born of a concubine, who was next succeeded by still another younger brother, whose queen had also been one of his father’s concubines. Thus in the most orthodox states (Wei was of the imperial clan), the rites often seem not to have counted for much in practice.–This book, it must here be repeated, deals with specific recorded facts, and not with civilization as it _ought_ to have been under the Rites of _Chou._–So, even in comparatively modern China, 1500 years later, the third emperor of the T’ang dynasty married his father’s concubine, and she ultimately reigned as empress in her own right, which is in itself an outrage upon the “rites.”
In 694 B.C. the ruler of Lu (also of the imperial clan) married a Ts’i princess, who, as has been stated in Chapter XXXIV., not only had incestuous relations with her brother of Ts’i, but led that brother to procure the murder of her husband. In connection with this woman’s further visit to Ts’i two years later, the rule is cited: “Women, when once married, should not recross the frontier.” The same rule is quoted in 655 when a Lu princess, who had married a petty mesne-vassal of Lu in 670, recrossed the Lu frontier in order to visit her son in Lu.
The Second Protector, during his wanderings, we know, married first a Tartar wife and then a Ts’i wife, both of whom showed disinterested affection for him, and genuine regard for his rights to the Tsin succession, Yet the ruler of Ts’in supplied him with five more royal girls, of whom one had already been married to the Second Protector’s predecessor and nephew, the Marquess of Tsin. It is but fair to the memory of this uxorious Tsin ruler to say that he only took her over under protest, and under the immediate stress of political urgencies; he ultimately made her his principal spouse at the expressed desire of his ally the Ts’in ruler. He must have later married a daughter of the Emperor too, for, after the succession of a son and grandson, another of his sons named “Black Buttocks,” being the youngest, and also “son of a Chou mother,” came to the throne. Thus in those troublous times the honour of imperial princesses evidently did not count for very much at the great vassal courts. The readiness of Ts’in to induce the Tsin ruler to take over his nephew’s wife (being a Ts’in princess) accentuates the semi-Tartar civilization of Ts’in at least, if not of Tsin too; for both Hiung-nu (200 B.C.) and Turks (A.D. 500) had a fixed rule that a Khan successor should take over all his predecessor’s women, with the single exception of his own natural mother. In the year 630 the King of Ts’u married or carried off two CHÊNG sisters (of the imperial clan). The ruler of CHÊNG had been insolent to the future Second Protector during his wanderings in the year 637, and, in order to avoid that Protector’s vengeance, had been subsequently obliged to throw himself under Ts’u protection. “This ignoring of the rites by the King of Ts’u will result in his failing to secure the Protectorship,” it was said. However, these princesses, though of the imperial _Ki_ clan by marriage into it, were really daughters of a CHÊNG ruler by two separate Ts’i and Ts’u wives: moreover, previous to the accession of the Hia dynasty (in 2205 B.C.), a Chinese elective Emperor had married the two daughters of his predecessor, whose own son was unworthy to succeed: and, generally, apart from this precedent, the rule against marrying two sisters, even if it existed, seems to have been loosely applied (_cf._ Chapter XXXIII.).
In connection with the Cheng succession in 629, it is mentioned that “the wife’s sons being all dead, X, being wisest of the secondary wives’ or concubines’ sons, is most eligible” (_cf._ Chapter XXXVII.).
Great political complications arose in connection with a clever and beautiful princess of Cheng who had had various _liaisons_ with high personages in the state of Ch’en and elsewhere; in the end she was carried off in 589 by a treacherous Ts’u statesman to Tsin; and indirectly this adventure led to his being charged by Tsin with a mission to Wu; to the subsequent entry of Wu into the conclave of federal princes; and to the ultimate sacking of the Ts’u capital by the King of Wu in 506: it is easy to read between the lines that the Kings of Ts’u were considered unusually arbitrary and tyrannical rulers; over and over again we find that their most capable statesmen took service with powers inimical to Ts’u. In 581 the ruler of Cheng, being forcibly detained in Tsin whilst on a political visit there, was temporarily replaced in Cheng by his elder brother, born of an inferior wife.
A marriage between the two states of Sung and Lu having been arranged, the imperial clan states of Lu and Wei had certain duties to perform at the wedding, which took place in 583; and it is recorded that the latter sent “handmaids” The explanation given is a little involved, but it seems to throw some light on the marriage of sisters question. It seems that the legitimate spouse and her “left and right handmaids” were each entitled to three “cousins or younger sisters” of the same clan-name as themselves, “thus making a total of nine girls, the idea being to broaden the base of succession.” Not content with this, Lu sent a special envoy to Sung the next year to “lecture” the princess. It is explained that “women at home are under the power of their father; married, under that of their husbands.” Tsin also sent handmaids this year. It is further explained that “handmaids are a trifling matter, and they are only mentioned in this Lu princess case because her marriage turned out so badly.” The following year Ts’i despatched handmaids, but, “being of a different clan-name, Ts’i was not ritual in doing so.”
The precise functions of these paranymphs, or under-studies of wives, together with the rules governing their selection, are doubtless clearly enough described in the Rites of _Chou_; but we are only dealing here with concrete facts as recorded.
In 526 B.C., when Ts’in gave a princess in marriage to the Ts’u heir, the Ts’u king decided to keep her for himself (see p. 234). Only a few years before that, Ts’u had given a princess of her own in marriage to the heir-apparent of one of the petty orthodox states (imperial clan), and the reigning father had had improper relations with her, which in the end led to his murder by his son; thus Ts’u, however delinquent, had already been given a bad example by the imperial clan.
After his humiliating defeat by the King of Wu in 494 B.C., the King of Yiieh introduced a veritable _Lex Julia_ into his dominions, in order to increase the population more quickly, and to prepare for his great revenge. Robust men were forbidden to marry old women, and old men to marry robust women. Parents were punished if girls were not married by the time they were seventeen, and if boys were not married by twenty. _Enceinte_ women had to be placed under the care of public midwives. For every boy born, a royal bounty of two pots of wine and a dog were given: for every girl born, two pots of wine and a sucking-pig;– the dog, it is explained, being figurative of outdoor, the pig of internal economy. Triplets were to be suckled at the public expense; twins to be fed, when big enough, at the public expense. The chief wife’s son must be mourned, with absence from official duty, for three years; other sons for two; and both kinds of son were to be equally buried with weeping and wailing. Orphans, and the sons of sick or poor widows, were to receive official employment. Distinguished sons were to have their apartments cleansed for them, and had to be well fed and handsomely clothed. Learned men from other states were to be officially welcomed in the ancestral temple. With reference to this curious law, which is totally un-Chinese in its startling originality, it may be mentioned that it seems to have gradually led to that laxity of morals in ancient Yiieh which is still proverbial in those parts; for, when the First August Emperor was touring over his new empire in 212 B.C., he left an inscription (still on record) at the old Yiieh capital, denouncing the “pig-like adultery” of the region, and, more especially, the remarrying of widows already in possession of children. Only a few years ago, proclamations appeared in this region denouncing the pernicious custom of forcing widows to remarry. Although Kwan-tsz is supposed to have “invented” the Babylonian woman for Ts’i, nothing is said in any ancient Chinese history about common prostitution; nor is female infanticide ever mentioned. In 502 B.C. the Lu revolutionary, already mentioned in Chapter XXXVII., who was driven to Tsin by Confucius’ astute measures, had, before leaving Lu, formed a plot to murder all the sons, by wives, of the three “powerful families” who were intriguing against the ducal rights, and to put concubine sons-being creatures of his own-in their place; thus the succession principles applied not only to ruling families, but also to private houses; though, as a matter of fact, these three were all, in their origin, descended from previous ruling dukes. As explained in Chapters XII. and XXXIII., after five generations a fresh “family” is supposed to spring out of the common clan.
In spite of Wu’s barbarism, the fact of its belonging, by remote origin, to the imperial clan (through its first: ruler having magnanimously migrated from Chou before Chou conquered China in 1122), made it technically incest for Lu to intermarry with Wu; thus, when in 482 B.C., a Wu princess (evidently forced for political purposes upon Lu) died, her husband, the ruler of Lu, was obliged to refrain from a public burial, as has been explained in Chapter XXXIII. on Names.
CHAPTER XXXIX
GEOGRAPHICAL KNOWLEDGE
It will have been noticed that, even in strictly historical times subsequent to 842 B.C., orthodox China was, _mutatis mutandis_, like orthodox Greece, a petty territory surrounded by a fringe of little-known regions, such as Macedonia, Asia Minor, Phoenicia, Egypt, and Italy; not to say distant Marseilles, and the Pillars of Hercules-all places at best very little visited except by navigators, and even then only by a few specially enterprising navigators or desperate adventurers; though later on Greek influence and Greek colonies soon began to replace the Phoenician, and to exhibit surrounding countries in a more correct and definite light.
As touches the surrounding regions of ancient China, and the knowledge of it possessed by the orthodox nucleus, such traditions as there are all point to acquaintance with the south and east rather than with the north and west. Persons who are persistently bent on bringing the earliest Chinese from the Tower of Babel by way of the Tarim Valley, are eager to seize upon the faintest tradition, or what seems to them an apparent tradition, in support of these preconceived views; ignoring the obviously just argument that, if we are to pay any attention to mere traditions at all, we must in common fairness give priority in value to such traditions as there are, rather than such traditions as are not, but only as might be. For instance, there was a Chinese tradition that the founder of the Hia dynasty (2205 B.C.) was, in a sense, somehow connected with the barbarous kingdom of Yiieh, inasmuch as the great-great-grandson of the founder of the Hia empire a century later enfeoffed a son by a concubine in that remote region. The earliest Chinese mention of Japan is that it lay to the east of Yiieh, and that the Japanese used to come and trade with Yiieh. If the Japanese traditions, on the other hand, as first put into independent writing in the eighth century A.D., are worth anything, then the Japanese pretend that their ancestors were present at a durbar held by the above-mentioned great-great- grandson of the Hia founder; and they also firmly derive their ruling houses (both king and princes) from the kingdom of Wu. We have seen in former chapters that both Wu and Yiieh, the most ancient capitals of which were within 200 miles of each other, spoke one language, and that both were derived (_i.e._, the administrative caste was derived) from two separate Chinese imperial dynasties. Now, the founder of the Hia dynasty is celebrated above all things for his travels in, and his geography of China, usually called the “Tribute of Yii” (his name),–a still existing work, the real origin of which may be obscure, but which has come down to us in the Book (of History). This geography is not only accurate, but it even now throws great light upon the original direction of river-courses which have since changed; in this work there is not the faintest tradition or indirect mention of any Chinese having ever migrated into China from the west.
There is no foundation, however, for the supposition, favoured by some European writers, that the Nine Tripods (frequently mentioned above) contained upon their surface “maps” of the empire; they merely contained a summary, or a collection of pictures, symbolizing the various tribute nations. On the other hand, there is no trace in the “Tribute of Yii” of any knowledge of China south of the Yarig-tsz River, south of its mouths, and south of its connection with the lakes of Hu Nan. The “province” of Yang Chou is vaguely said to extend from the Hwai River “south to the sea.” The “Blackwater” is the only river mentioned which exhibits any knowledge of the west (i.e. of the west half of modern Kan Suh province), and this “Blackwater” was crossed in 984 B.C. by the Emperor Muh.
Then there is the tradition of Vii’s predecessor, the Emperor Shun, who, as mentioned in the last chapter, married the two daughters of the Emperor Yao, and is buried at a point just south of the Lake Tung-t’ing, in the modern province of Hu Nan: it is certain that in 219 B.C., when the First August Emperor was on tour, the mountain where the grave lay was pointed out to him at a distance, if he did not actually go up to it. Again, the grandfather of the Warrior King who founded the Chou dynasty in 1122 B.C. was, as already repeatedly pointed out, only a younger brother, his two elder brothers having migrated to the Jungle, and, proceeding thence eastward, founded a colony in Wu (half-way between Nanking and Shanghai). Both Wu and Yiieh, for very many centuries after that, were extremely petty states of only 50 or 60 miles in extent, and for all practical purposes of history may be considered to have been one and the same region, to wit, the flat, canal-cut territory through which the much-disputed Shanghai- Hangchow railway is to run. After the death of the Martial King, when his brother the Duke of Chou was Regent for his son, the duke incurred the suspicion of other brethren and relatives as to his motives, and had to retire for some time to Ts’u, or, as it was then called, the Jungle country, for two years. There is a tradition that a mission from one of the southern Yiieh states found its way to the Duke of Chou, who is supposed to have fitted up for the envoys a cart with a compass attached to it, in order to keep the cart’s head steadily south. This tradition, which only appears as a _tradition_ in one of the dynastic histories of the fifth century A. D., is not given at all in the earlier standard history, and it is by no means proved that the undoubtedly early Chinese knowledge of the loadstone extended to the making of compasses. Yet, as Rénan has justly pointed out in effect, in his masterly evidences of Gospel truth, a weak tradition is better worth considering than no tradition at all. Besides, there is some slight indirect confirmation of this, for in 880 B.C. or thereabout, a King of Ts’u gave one of his younger sons a Yiieh kingdom bearing almost the same double name as that Yüeh kingdom from which the envoys in 1080 B.C. came to the Duke of Chou; in each case the first part of the double name was Yiieh, and the second part only differed slightly. Again, in or about 820, some of the sons of the king exiled themselves to a place vaguely defined as “somewhere south of the Han River,” which can scarcely mean anything other than “the country of the Shan or Siamese races,” who lived then in and around Yiin Nan, and some of whom are still known by the vague name used as here in 820 B.C. The vagueness of habitat simply means that all south of the Han and Yang-tsz was _terra_ incognita to China proper. There is another tradition, unsupported by standard history, to the effect that the Martial King enfeoffed a faithful minister of the emperor and dynasty he had just supplanted as a vassal in Corea. Here, again, if the emperor’s own grandfather, or grand-uncles and trusted friends, could find their way to Wu, and, later, to Japan, not to mention Shan Tung and the Peking plain, it is reasonable to permit a respected adherent of the dethroned monarch to find his way to Corea, the more in that the centre of administrative gravity of Corea was then Liao Tung and South Manchuria–at the utmost the north part of modern Corea–rather than the Corean peninsula.
In the year 649 the First Protector began to boast of having done as much as any of the’ three dynasties, Hia, Shang, and Chou, during the 1500 years before him; he then defines the area of his glory, which is circumscribed by (at the very utmost) the west part of Shan Si, the south part of Ho Nan, the north part of the Peking plain, and the Gulf of “Pechelee.” The Second Protector, when he safely reached his ancestral throne after nineteen years of wanderings as Pretender, said to his faithful Tartar henchman and father-in-law: “I have made the tour of the whole world (or whole empire) with you.” As a matter of fact, he had been with the Tartars, certainly in central, and possibly also in northern Shan Si; in Ts’i, which means the northern part of Shan Tung and southern part of Chih Li; thence across the four small orthodox states of Sung, Wei, Ts’ao, and CHÊNG (which simply means up the Yellow River valley into Ho Nan), to Ts’u; and thence Ts’in fetched him to put him on the Tsin throne. The Emperor was already an obscure figure-head beneath all political notice, and no other parts of what we now call China were known to the Protector, even by name. As we shall see in a later chapter, Confucius covered the same ground, except that he never went to Tsin or to Tartarland. The first bare mention of Yiieh is in 670 B.C., when the new King of Ts’u, who had assassinated his elder brother, and who therefore wished to make amends for this crime and for his father’s rude conquests, and to consolidate his position by putting himself on good behaviour to federal China, made dutiful advances to Lu and to the Emperor (these two minor powers then best representing the old ritual civilization). The Emperor replied: “Go on conquering the barbarians and Yiieh, but let the Hia (i.e. orthodox Chinese) states alone.” In 601 Ts’u and Wu came to a friendly understanding about their mutual frontiers, and Yiieh was also admitted to the conclave or _entente_; but this was a local act, and had nothing whatever to do with China proper, which first hears of Yiieh as an independent or semi-independent power in 536, when the King of Ts’u, with a string of conquered orthodox Chinese princes in train as his allies, and also a Yiieh contingent, makes war on Wu. In later days there is evidence showing that there was not much general knowledge of China as a whole, and that interstate intercourse was chiefly confined to next-door neighbours. For instance, when Tsin boldly marched an army upon Ts’i in 589 B.C., it was considered a remarkable thing that Tsin chariots should actually gaze upon the sea. In 560, when the Ts’i minister and philosopher, Yen-tsz, was in Ts’u as envoy, and the Ts’u courtiers were playing tricks upon him (as previously narrated in Chapter IX.) he said: “I have heard it stated that when once you get south of the Hwai River the oranges are good. In the same way, we northerners produce but sorry rogues; the genuine article reaches its perfection in Ts’u.” Thus, even at this date, the Yang-tsz was regarded much as the Romans of the Empire regarded the Danube–as a sort of vague barrier between _civis_ and _barbarus_. In no sense was the Ts’u capital–at no time were the bulk of the Ts’u dominions–south of that Great River; nor, in fact, were the capitals of Wu and Yiieh south of it either, for one of the three mouths (the northernmost was as now), corresponded to the Soochow Creek and the Wusung River, as they pass through the Shanghai settlement of to-day; whilst the other ancient mouth entered the sea at modern Hangchow. We have given various other evidence above to show that, even earlier than this, the Yang-tsz was an unexplored region, known, and that only imperfectly and locally, to the Ts’u government alone. In the year 656 B.C. the First Protector called Ts’u to book because, in 1003 B.C., the Emperor had made a tour to the Great River and had never returned (see Chapter XX-XV.). Again, when the imperial power collapsed in 771 B.C., the first Earl of CHÊNG (a relative of the Emperor) consulted the imperial astrologer as to where he had better establish his new fief: his own idea was to settle southwards on the borders of the Yang-tsz; but he was dissuaded from this step on the ground that the Ts’u power would grow accordingly as the Chou power declined, and thus CHÊNG would all the easier fall a prey to Ts’u in the future if she migrated now so far south. The astrologer makes another observation which supports the view that Ts’u and orthodox China were originally of the same prehistoric stock. He says: “When the remote ancestor of Ts’u did good service to the Emperor (2400 B.C.), his renown was great, yet his descendants never became so flourishing as those of the Chou family.” In 597 B.C., when the Earl of CHÊNG really was at the mercy of Ts’u, he said: “If you choose to send me south of the Yang-tsz towards the South Sea, I shall not have the right to object”; meaning, “no exile, however remote, is too severe for my deserts.” In 549, when the Tsin generals were marching against Ts’u, they were particularly anxious to find good CHÊNG guides who knew the routes well. Finally, in 541, a Tsin statesman made the following observations to a prince (afterwards king) of Ts’u, who was then on a mission to Tsin, by way of illustrating for his visitor the conquests and distant expeditions of ancient times:–
“The Emperor Shun (who married Yao’s two daughters, and employed the founder of the Hia dynasty as his minister) was obliged to imprison the prince of the Three Miao (in Hu Nan; the savages of Hu Nan and Kwei Chou provinces are still called _Miao_); the Hia dynasty had to deal with quarrels in (modern) Shan Tung and Shen Si; the Shang dynasty had to do the same in (modern) Kiang Su; the early Chou monarchs the same in (modern) North Kiang Su and South Shan Tung: but, now that there are no able emperors, all the vassals are at loggerheads. Wu and P’uh (the supposed Shan or Siamese region above referred to) are giving you trouble; but it is no one’s concern but yours.”
From all this it is quite plain, though the Chinese historians and philosophers never seem to have discerned it clearly themselves, that the cultivated or orthodox Chinese, that is, the group of closely related monosyllabic and tonic tribes which alone possessed the art of writing, and thus inevitably took the lead and gradually civilized the rest, covered but a very small area of ground even at the time of Confucius’ death in 479 B.C., and were completely ignorant of everything but the bare names of all the regions surrounding this orthodox nucleus, which nucleus was therefore rightly called the “Central State,” as China is, by extension, now still called.
[Illustration: MAP
1. Si-ngan Fu (and Hien-yang opposite, on the north bank of the River Wei), marked with circles in a lozenge, were the capitals of China, off and on, from 220 B.C. for over a thousand years. The ancient capital of the Chou dynasty, forsaken in 771 B.C., is marked with a cross in a circle and is west of Si-ngan. In 771 B.C. the Emperor fled east to his “east capital” (founded 300 years before that date), which then became the sole metropolis, called _Loh_ (from the river on which it stands); it is also marked with a cross inside a circle and is practically the modern Ho-nan Fu; it has, off and on, been the capital of all China, alternately with Si-ngan Fu, in later times.
2. The ford where the first Chou Emperor (122 B.C.) made an appointment with all his vassals is marked by two dotted lines across the Yellow River.
3. The two dots in a half-circle mark the spot whither Tsin “summoned” the Emperor to the durbar of 632 B.C. After this, Tsin obtained from the Emperor cession of the strip between the Yellow River and the Ts’in River (nothing to do with Ts’in state).
4. There is a second River Loh separating Ts’in state from Tsin state. The territory between this River Loh and the Yellow River was alternately held by Tsin and Ts’in.
5. The territory between the more southerly River Loh and the Yellow River and River I was the shorn imperial appanage after Ts’in had in 771 B.C. obtained the west half; after Tsin in 632 had obtained the remaining north half; and after Ts’u had nibbled away the petty orthodox vassals south of latitude 34″.]
CHAPTER XL
TOMBS AND REMAINS
The Chinese, with the single exception of their Great Wall, have always been flimsy builders, and there is accordingly very little left in the way of monuments to prove the antiquity of their civilization. Mention has already been made of the tombs of the Emperors Shun and Yii (2200 B.C.). The tomb of another Hia dynasty emperor (1837 B.C.) lay twenty miles north of Yung-ning in Ho Nan,’ where Ts’in, in 627 B.C., was annihilated by Tsin (see p. 30). The tomb (long. 115ø, lat. 33ø) of the King of Ts’u who died in 689 B.C. was pillaged about 500 years later, but landslips defeated the thieves’ objects. The First Protector’s tomb, seven miles south of his capital in Shan Tung–the town still marked on the maps as Lin-tsz–was desecrated in A.D. 312. A small pond of mercury was found inside, besides arms, valuables, and the bones of those buried with him. The palace of the Ts’u king of 617 B.C.,–son of the one whose death that year was respectfully chronicled by Confucius–is still the yam&. or _protorium_ of the district magistrate at King-thou Fu, and can perhaps even yet be seen from any passing steamers that circulate above the treaty- port of Sha-shf. There is a doubt about the date of this king’s tomb (d. 593); some place it near the palace, others over 100 miles north, near the modern city of Siang-yang. It is possible that, after the sacking of the capital by Wu, in 506, the bodies of former kings were at once removed to the new temporary capital (far to the north) to which the old name was given. For instance, it is certain that the king who died in 545 was buried quite close to the capital (King-thou Fu). Ki-chah’s tomb, with Confucius’ inscription upon it in ancient character, is still shown at a place ten miles west of Kiang-yin (where the modern forts are, below Nanking) and twenty miles east of Ch’ang-chou; probably the new “British” railway passes quite close to the place, as do the steamers: for the past 400 years sacrifices have been annually offered to Ki-chah’s memory: as Confucius never visited Wu, the inscription, if genuine, must have been sent thither. The tomb of Ki-chah’s nephew, King of Wu, is still to be seen outside one of the gates of Soochow; or, rather, the temple built on the site is there, for the tomb itself was desecrated and pillaged by the armies of Yueh, when they sacked the capital in 482. There was, originally, a triple copper coffin, a small pond, and some water birds made of gold (probably symbolic of sport), arms, valuables, etc.; but nothing is said of human beings having been sacrificed. It was said (2000 years ago) that elephants had been employed in carrying the earth and building materials for this tomb. In 506 the vengeful Ts’u officer who had fled to Wu, and had incited the King of Wu to do all he could to ruin Ts’u, actually opened the royal grave, in or near the capital, and flogged the corpse of the dead king who had so grievously offended him and his family.
In the year 501 the original bow and sceptre given by the warrior king to his brother, the Duke of Chou, founder of the State of Lu, was stolen from its resting-place, but was luckily recovered the following year. Incidentally this statement is of value; for when the King of Ts’u, as narrated above, was making his demands upon the Emperor, one of his grievances was that he possessed no relics of the founder such as the presents which had been made by him to Ts’i, Lu, Yen, Tsin, and other favoured states of no greater status than his own. The above are only a few instances out of many which show how, from age to age, the Chinese have seen with their own eyes things which in the vista of the distance now seem to us uncertain and incredible. As usual, Ts’in gives us nothing in the way of antiquity; another proof that, until she conceived the idea of conquering China, she was totally unknown (internally) to orthodox China. Confucius’ own house, temple, grave, and park form an absolutely unbroken link with the past. There are remains and the relics of the Duke of Chou in the immediate neighbourhood, and it must not be forgotten that the Duke of Chou and his ritual system were Confucius’ models: as Confucius insisted, “I am only a transmitter of antiquity.” Moderns, and especially foreigners, have forgotten or reck nothing about the Duke of Chou; yet his remains and temples were just as much a matter of visible history to Confucius as Confucius’ grounds are to us. Each successive generation in China alludes to existing antiquities, or to contemporaneous objects which have since become antiquities, with the quiet confidence of those who actually possess, and who doubt not of their possessions. The very _lacunae_ are pointed out by themselves–no scepticism of ours is required; for whenever any historian, or any less formal writer, has outstepped the bounds of truth or probability, the critics are immediately there, and they always frankly say what they believe. In a word, the Chinese documents, be they iron, stone, wood, silk, paper, buildings, or graves; and their traditions, are the sole evidence we possess: Chinese critics were the sole critics of that evidence; and they are the sole light by which we foreigners can become critics. The great Chinese defect in criticism is the failure to work out general principles, and to criticize constructively as well as analytically. Their history is a rule of thumb, hand to mouth, diary sort of arrangement, like a vast museum of genuine but unclassified and unticketed objects. But there is no good reason whatever for our doubting the genuineness of either traditions or documents beyond the point of scepticism to which native Chinese doubts go, for it must be remembered that no foreigner possesses one tenth of the mass of Chinese learning that the professional literatus easily assimilates. All we can do is to re-group, and extract principles.
CHAPTER XLI
THE TARTARS
It is important to insist on the very close relations that existed between the Chinese and the Tartars from the very earliest times. All that we are told for certain is that they were north and west of the older dynasties, and especially in occupation of the Upper Wei River, on the lower part of which the old metropolis of Si- ngan Fu lies; which means that they were exactly where we find them in Confucian times, and where we find them now, except that they have been pushed a little further back, and that Chinese colonists have appropriated most of the oases. The Chou ancestor who died in 1231, _i.e._ the father of the founders of Wu, and the great-grandfather of the founder of the Chou dynasty (1122), had to abandon to the encroaching Tartars his appanage on the Upper King River (a northern tributary of the Wei, which runs almost parallel with it, and joins it at Si-ngan Fu), and was obliged to move southwards to the Upper Wei River. For nearly 1000 years previous to this, his ancestors, who had originally been forced to fly to the Tartars in order to avoid the misgovernment of the third Hia emperor, had lived among and had, whilst continuing the Chinese art of cultivating, partly become Tartars; for in 1231 B.C. the migrating host is said to have renounced Tartar manners, and to have devoted themselves seriously to building and cultivating; from which it necessarily follows that Tartar manners must for some time have been definitely adopted by the Chou family. The grandson of the migrator, the father of the Chou founder, had various little wars with a tribe called the Dog Tartars. Over 1000 years after that first flight to Tartardom, we have seen that the Emperor Muh, great-grandson of the Chou founder, not only had brushes with the Tartars, but extended his tours amongst them to the Lower Tarim Valley, Turfan, Harashar, and possibly even as far as Urumtsi and Kuché; but certainly no farther. Two hundred years later, again, the then ruling Emperor was defeated by the Tartars in (modern) Central Shan Si province, and the descendant in the sixth generation of the Ts’in Jehu who had conducted the Emperor Muh’s chariot into Tartarland, only just succeeded in saving the Emperor’s life; but this family of Chao, which was thus (_cf._ p. 206) of one and the same descent with the Ts’in family, subsequently found its account in abandoning the imperial interest altogether, and in serving the rising principality of Tsin (Shan Si), where it became one of the “six families,” three of which six in 403 B.C. were ultimately recognized by the Emperor as independent rulers. As we have said over and over again, in 772 B.C. the Chou Emperor, through female intrigues, got into trouble with the Tartars, and was killed: his successor had to move the metropolis east to (modern) Ho-nan Fu, thus abandoning the western part of his patrimony–the semi-Tartar half–to Ts’in. Thus Ts’in in 771 B.C. was to the Chou Emperors what Chou, previous to 1200 B.C., had been to the Shang Emperors.
We now come to strictly historical times, and we shall have no difficulty in showing that even then–h _fortiori_ in times not strictly historical–the various Tartar tribes were still in practical possession of the whole north bank of the Yellow River, all the way from the Desert to the sea. In fact, in 494 B.C., when the King of Wu sent a giant’s bone to Lu for further explanation, Confucius said that the “Long Tartars” (who had frequent fights with Lu in the seventh century B.C.) used to extend south-east into (modern) Kiang Su, almost as far as the mouth of the Yang-tsz River: he also says that, had it not been for the energy of the First Protector and his statesman adviser, the philosopher Kwan- tsz of Ts’i, orthodox China would certainly have become Tartarized. It was Confucius also whose learning enabled him to recognize a (Manchu) arrow found in the body of a migrating goose. In the eighth and seventh centuries B.C. the Tartars made repeated and obstinate attacks upon Yen (Peking plain), Ts’i (coast Chih Li and north Shan Tung), Wei (south Chih Li and north Ho Nan), Sung (extreme east Ho Nan), Ts’ao (central Ho Nan), and the Emperor’s territory (west Ho Nan). This situation explains to us why the Protector system arose in China, in competition with the waning imperial power. Ts’in and Tsin, being already half Tartar themselves, were always well able to cope with and even to annex the Tartar tribes in their immediate vicinity; but orthodox China was ever a prey to the more easterly Tartar attacks; and thus the Emperors, threatened by Ts’u to their south, and in a measure also by Ts’in and Tsin to their north and west, not only could not any longer protect their orthodox vassals lying towards the east from Tartar attacks, but could not even protect themselves.
It was Ts’i that drove back the Mongol-Manchu tribes and rescued Yen in 662; it was the Ts’i ruler who led a coalition of princes against other groups of Tartars and placed back on his ancestral throne the ruler of Wei, who had been driven from his country by Tartars in 658; it was the First Protector, ruler of Ts’i, who managed to pacify the more westerly Tartars we find persistently menacing the Emperor in 648; to whose rescue the Tartars came in 642, when a coalition of orthodox Chinese princes shamelessly took advantage of the First Protector’s death to attack Ts’i during the mourning period. Now it was that the Second Protector, still a refugee among his Tartar relatives, started for Ts’i, his original idea being to replace the philosopher Kwan-tsz as adviser to the First Protector; but, shortly after he reached Ts’i, the First Protector died, and it was only by stratagem that his friends succeeded in rescuing the future Second Protector from the arms of his Ts’i Delilah and his _d’elices de_ Capue. His chief adviser, and at the same time his brother-in-law from a Tartar point of view, was the lineal descendant of the Chao man who had saved the Emperor in 800 B.C. He set out, _via_ the orthodox states, for his own country. These petty orthodox states, such as Wei, Cheng, and Ts’ao, which did not then see their way to profit politically by the Pretender’s visit, paid the penalty of their meanness and their rudeness to him later on. Sung was polite, as at that time Sung and Ts’u were both aiming at the Protectorship. Ts’u’s hospitality was bluff and good-natured, the King being too strong to fear, and too unsophisticated to intrigue after Chinese fashion. Just then news coming from Ts’in that the Pretender’s brothers had all resigned or died, and that his chance had now come, the Pretender hurried to Tsin, regained his throne, and was acclaimed Protector of China exactly at the critical moment when a strong hand was urgently required to check the particular ambitions of Ts’in, Ts’i, and Ts’u. Ts’u was too barbarous; Sung was too pedantic; Tsin alone had unrivalled experience both of Tartars and Eastern barbarians, and also of Southern barbarians (Ts’u). Probably it was only the fact of the Tsin ruling family bearing the same clan-name as the Emperor that had decided Tsin throughout to be orthodox Chinese instead of Tartar. The Tartar family into which the Second Protector had married as a comparatively young man was, however, also of the imperial clan- name, i.e. it was of orthodox Chinese origin, but (even like the Chou imperial family at one time) it had adopted Tartar customs. A large number of the one thousand or more petty Chinese principalities, attached not directly to the Emperor, but to the greater vassals as mesne lords, were in the same predicament; that is to say, they were of Chinese origin, but they had found that it paid them best to adopt barbarian ways. It was exactly as though Scipio should settle in Carthage, and become a Carthaginian: C’sar in Gaul, and adopt Gallic customs; and so on with other Roman adventurers who should find a comfortable _gîte_ in Persia, Asia Minor, Syria, Egypt, or even in Britain and Germany.
The main point upon which to fix the attention is this. The Chinese nucleus was very small, and only by rudely thrusting aside incompetent emperors and fussy ritual did it succeed in emancipating itself from Tartar bondage. That this is not an exaggerated view is additionally plain from the fact that Tartars have, even since Confucian times, ruled more and longer than have Chinese over North China; the Mongols (1260-1368) were the first Tartars to rule over all China, and nominally over all West Asia; the Manchus (1643-1908) are the first Tartars to rule all China, all Manchuria, and all Mongolia, at all effectively; and they have even added parts of Turkestan, with Tibet, Nepaul, and other countries over which the Peking imperial Mongol influence was always very shadowy.
CHAPTER XLII
MUSIC
In these pictures of ancient Chinese life which we are endeavouring to present, the idea is to repeat from every point of view the main characteristics of that life, so that a strange and unfamiliar subject, very loosely depicted in the straggling annals of antiquity, may receive fresh rays of light from every possible quarter, and thus stand out clearer as a connected whole.
Take, for instance, the subject of music, which always played in Chinese ceremonial a prominent part not easy for us now to understand. One of the chief sights of the modern Confucian residence is the music-room, containing specimens of all the ancient musical instruments, which, on occasion, are still played upon in chorus; a picture of them has been published by Father Tschepe. (See page 128.) According to the description given by this European visitor, the music is of a most discordant and ear- splitting description: but that does not necessarily dispose of the question; for even parts of Wagner’s Ring are a meaningless clang to those who hear the music for the first time, and who are unable to read the score or to follow out the “classical” style. As we have said before, the ancient emperors, at their banquets given to vassals and others, always had musical accompaniment.
In 626 B.C., when the ruler of Ts’in received a mission from “the Tartar king” (probably a local king or chief), he was much struck with the sagacity of the envoy sent to him. This envoy still spoke the Tsin language or dialect; but his parents, who were of Tsin origin, had adopted Tartar manners. The envoy was also an author, and his work, in two sections, had survived at least up to the second century B.C.: he is classed amongst the “Miscellaneous Writers.” The subject of the conversation was the superiority of simple Tartar administration as compared with the intricate ritual of the Odes, the Book, the Rites, and the “Music” of orthodox China. The beginnings of Lao-tsz’s Taoism seem to peep out from this Tartar’s words, just as they do with other “Miscellaneous” authors. The wily Ts’in ruler, in order to secure this clever envoy for his own service, sent two bands of female musicians as a present to the Tartar king, so as to make him less virile; 140 years later the cunning ruler of Ts’i did much the same thing in order to prevent the Duke of Lu from growing too strong; and the immediate consequence was that Confucius left his fickle master in disgust. Ki-chah, Prince of Wu, was entertained whilst at Lu with specimens of music from the different states. When he came to the Ts’in music, he said: “Ha! ha! the words are Chinese! When Ts’in becomes quite Chinese, it will have a great future.” This remark suggests a Ts’in language or dialect different from that of Tsin, and also from that of more orthodox China. In 546 B.C., when a mission from Ts ‘u to Tsin was accompanied by a high officer from the disputed orthodox state of Ts’ai lying between those two great powers, the theory of music as an adjunct to government was discussed. Confucius’ view a century later was that music best reflected a nation’s manners, and that in good old times authority was manifested quite as much in rites and ceremonies as in laws and pronouncements. Previous to that, in 582, it had been discovered that Ts’u had a musical style of her own; and in 579, when the Tsin envoy was received there in state, among other instruments of music observed there were suspended bells.
Thus both Ts’in and Ts’u at this date were still in the learning stage. Before ridiculing the idea that music could in any way serve as a substitute for preaching or commanding, we must reflect upon the awe-inspiring contribution of music to our own religious services, not to mention the “speaking” effect of our Western nocturnes, symphonies, and operatic music generally.
In 562 B.C., when a statesman of Tsin (whose fame in this connection endures to our own days) succeeded in establishing a permanent understanding with the Tartars, based upon joint trading rights and reasonable mutual concessions, the principle of interesting the Tartars in cultivation, industry, and so on; as a reward for his distinguished services, he was presented with certain music, which meant that he had the political right to have certain musical airs performed in his presence. This concession ceases to seem ridiculous or even strange to us if we reflect what an honour it would have been to, say, the Duke of Wellington, or to Nelson, had the right to play “God Save the King” at dinner been granted to his family band of musicians. Four centuries before this, when the Emperor Muh made his tour amongst the Tartars, he always commanded that one particular musical air (named) should be struck up by his musicians on certain occasions (always stated in the narrative). In Tsin, and probably elsewhere, music-masters seem to have combined soothsaying and philosophy with their functions; thus, in 558 the music-master of that state was questioned on the arts of good government, to which he replied: “Goodness and justice”–two special antipathies, by the way, of Lao-tsz the Taoist, who lived about this time as an archive-keeper at the metropolis. In the year 555, either this same man or another musical prophet in Tsin reassured his fellow- countrymen who were dreading a Ts’u invasion with the following words: “I have just been conducting a song consisting of north and south airs, and the latter sound as though the south would be defeated.” But music also had its lighter uses, for we have seen in Chapter VI. how in 549 two Tsin generals took their ease in a comfortable cart, playing the banjo, whilst passing through Cheng to attack Ts’u. Music was used at worship as well as at court; in 527 the ruler of Lu, as a mark of respect for one of his deceased ministers, abandoned the playing of music, which otherwise would have been a constituent part of the sacrifice or worship he had in hand at the moment. Even in modern China, music is prohibited during solemn periods of mourning, and officials are often degraded for attending theatrical performances on solemn fasts. In 212 B.C., when the First August Emperor was, like Saul or Belshazzar, beginning to grow sad at the contemplation of his lonely and unloved greatness, he was suddenly startled at the fall of a meteoric stone, bearing upon it what looked like a warning inscription. He at once ordered his learned men to compose some music treating of “true men” and immortals, in order to exorcise the evil omen; it may be mentioned that this emperor’s Taoist proclivities have apparently had the indirect result that the word “true man” has come century by century down to us, with the meaning of “Taoist priest,” or “Taoist inspired person.”
CHAPTER XLIII
WEALTH, SPORTS, ETC.
A traveller in modern China may still wonder at the utter absence of any sign of wealth or luxury except in the very largest towns. Fine clothes, jewels, concubines, rich food, aphrodisiacs, opium, land, cattle–these represent “wealth” as conceived by the Chinese rich man’s mind. In 655 Ts’in is said to have paid five ram-skins to Ts’u in order to secure the services of a coveted adviser. Not many years after that, when the future Second Protector was making his terms with the King of Ts’u, he remarked: “What can I do for you in return? You already possess all the slaves, musicians, treasures, silks, feathers, ivory, and leather you can want.” In 606 a magnificent turtle was sent as a new year’s dinner present from Ts’u to Cheng; in modern China this form of politeness would never do at all, as the turtle has acquired an evil reputation as a term of abuse, akin to the Spanish use or abuse of the word “garlic”: however, I myself once experienced, when inland, far away from the sea, a curious compliment in the shape of a live crab two inches long (sent to me as a great honour) in a small jar. Of course chairs were unknown, and even the highest sat or squatted on mats; not necessarily on the ground, but spread on couches. Hence the word survives the object, just as with us (“covers” at dinner are “provided” but never seen; thus in China a host is “east mat” and a guest “west mat.”) In 626, when the ruler of Ts’in was talking politics with the Tartar envoy just mentioned above, he allowed him, as a special favour, to sit alongside of his own mat (on the couch). These couches probably resembled the modern settee, sofa, _k’ang,_ or divan, such as all visitors to China have seen and sat on. Tea was quite unknown in those days, and is not mentioned before the seventh century A.D.; but possibly wine may have been served, as tea is now, on a low table between the two seats. “Tartar couches” (possibly Turkish divans) are frequently mentioned, even in the field of battle, and in comparatively modern times. In 300 B.C. Ts’u made a present to a distinguished renegade prince of the Ts’i house of an “elephant couch,” by which is probably meant a couch inlaid with ivory, in the present well-known Annamese style.
In 589 B.C., when Tsin troops reached the Ts’i capital and the sea (as already related in Chapters VI. and XXXIX. under the heads of Armies and Geographical Knowledge), T’si endeavoured to purchase peace by offering to the victor the state treasure in the shape of precious utensils. In 551 a rich man of Ts’u was considered insolently showy because he possessed forty horses. In 545 the envoy from Cheng, acting under the Peace Conference agreement so often previously described and alluded to, brings presents of furs and silks to Ts’u; and in 537 Tsin speaks of such articles as often being presented to Ts’u. In 494, when the King of Yiieh received his great defeat at the hands of the King of Wu, his first desperate idea was to kill his wives and children, burn his valuables, and seek death at the head of his troops; but the inevitable wily Chinese adviser was at hand, and the King ended by taking his mentor’s advice and successfully bribing the Wu general (a Ts’u renegade) with presents of women and valuables. When this shrewd Chinese adviser of the Yueh king had, by his sagacious counsels, at last secured the final defeat of Wu, he packed up his portable valuables, pearls, and jades, collected his family and clients, and went away by sea, never to come back. As a matter of fact, he settled in Ts’i, where he made an enormous fortune in the fish trade, and ultimately became the traditional Croesus of China, his name being quite as well known to modern Chinese through the Confucian historians, as the name of Croesus is to modern Europeans through Herodotus. He had, between the two defeats of Yiieh by Wu and Wu by Yiieh, served for several years as a spy in Wu, and the fact of his reaching Shan Tung by sea confirms in principle the story of the family of his contemporary, the King of Wu, having similarly escaped to Japan. The place where he landed was probably the same as where the celebrated pilgrim Fah Hien landed, after his Indian pilgrimage, in 415 A.D., i.e., at the German port of Ts’ing-tao.
We do not hear much of gold in the earlier times, but in 237 B.C., when Ts’in was straining every nerve to conquer China, the (future) First August Emperor was advised that “it would not cost more than 300,000 pounds weight in gold to bribe the ministers of all the states in league against Ts’in.” Yet in 643 B.C., on the death of the First Protector, the orthodox state of Cheng (lying between Ts’i and Tsin to the north and Ts’u to the south), was bribed with “metal” of some sort–probably gold or silver–to abandon Ts’i. In 538 the celebrated Cheng statesman Tsz-ch’an informs his Ts’u colleagues that the Tsin officers “think of nothing but money.” What kind of money this was is doubtful, but it will be remembered that about this time the “powerful family” of Lu had succeeded in bribing the Tsin ministers, or the “six great families” then managing Tsin, to deny justice to the fugitive Lu duke. In 513 B.C. the powerful Wu king who made (modern) Soochow his capital is said to have possessed both iron and gold mines, and it is stated that not even China proper could turn out better weapons. Large “cash” are said to have been coined by the Emperor who reigned from 540 to 520 B.C.; and in 450 B.C. the King of Ts’u is reported to have “closed his _depot_ of the three moneys.” As only copper was coined, it is not easy to say now what the other two “moneys” were. In 318 B.C. a bribe of “one hundred golds” was given by Yen to one of the well-known political diplomats or intriguers then forming leagues with or against Ts’in; it is not known for certain how much this was at that particular time and place; but a century or two later it meant, under the Ts’in dynasty, twenty-four ounces; during the Han dynasty, conquerors of the Ts’in dynasty, it was only about half that. Cooks seem to have held official positions of considerable dignity. “Meat-eaters” in Confucian times was a term for “officials” or “the rich.” Thus when the haughty King of Wu was suddenly recalled home, from his high-handed durbar with Tsin, Lu, and other orthodox states, to go and deal with his formidable enemy of Yueh, he turned quite pale. By dint of bold “bluff” he managed after all to gain most of his political points, and to retire from an awkward corner with honour; but Chinese spies had their eyes on him none the less, and reported to the watchful enemy that “meat-eaters are not usually blackfaced”–meaning that the King of Wu evidently had some very recent bad news on his mind, for “the well-fed do not usually look care-worn.”
Silk was universally known. When the Second Protector (to be) was dallying with his lady-love in Ts’i, the maid of his mistress happened to overhear important conversations from her post in a mulberry tree; the presumption is that she was collecting leaves for the silkworms. Again in 519, a century later, there was a dispute on the Ts’u-Wu frontier (North An Hwei province), about the possession of certain mulberry trees. Cotton (_Gossypium_) was unknown in China, and the poorer classes wore garments of hempen materials; the cotton tree (_Bombyx_) was known in the south, but then (as now) the catkins could not be woven into cloth. It was never the custom of officers in China to wear swords, until in 409 B.C. Ts’in introduced the practice; but it probably never extended to orthodox China, so far, at least, as civilians’ were concerned. The three dynasties of Hia, Shang, and Chou had all made use of jade or malachite rings, tablets, sceptres, and so on, as marks of official rank.
As to sports, hunting, and especially fowling, seem to have been the most popular pastimes. In 660 a prince of Wei (orthodox) is said to have had a passion for egret fights. In 539 four-horsed chariots are mentioned as being used in a great Ts’u hunt south of the modern Teh-an in northern Hu Peh province, then mostly jungle: these hunts were used as a sort of training for war as well as for sport. The celebrated “stone drums” discovered in the seventh century A.D. near the old Chou capital describe the war-hunts of the active emperor mentioned in Chapter XLI. As might be expected, Yen (Peking plain) would be well off for horses-to this day brought by the Mongols in droves to Peking: in 539 it is said of Yen: “She was never a strong power, in spite of her numerous horses.” In 534 a great hunt in Lu is described with much detail; here also chariots were used, and their shafts were reared in opposite rows with their tips meeting above, so as to form a “shaft gate,” on which, besides, a flag was kept flying. The entrance to Chinese official _yamens_ is still called “the shaft gate”;-in fact, the _ya_ was orginally a flag, and “_yamen_” simply means “flag gate.” In the Middle Ages the Turkish Khans’ encampments were always spoken of as their ya–thus: “from hence 1500 miles north-west to the Khan’s _ya_.” Cockfighting was a common sport in Ts’i and Lu. In 517 B.C. two prominent Lu functionaries had a quarrel because one had put metal spurs on his bird, whilst the other had scattered mustard in the feathers of his fighting cock: owing to the ambiguity or double meaning of one of the pictographs employed, it is not quite certain that “mustard in the wings” may not mean “a metal helmet on the head.” Lifting weights was (as now) a favourite exercise; in 307 a Ts’in prince died from the effects of a strain produced in trying to lift a heavy metal tripod. In Ts’i games at ball, including a kind of football, were played. As a rule, however, it is to be feared that the wealthy Chinese classes in ancient (as in modern) times found their chief recreation in feasting, literary bouts, and female society. Curiously enough, nothing is said of gambling. Women are depicted at their looms, or engaged upon the silk industry; but it is singular how very little is said of home life, of how the houses were constructed, of how the hours of leisure were passed. In modern China the bulk of the male rural population rises with or before the dawn, and is engaged upon field or garden work until the shades of evening fall in; there is no artificial light adequate for purposes of needlework or private study; even the consolations of tobacco and tea–not to say opium, and now newspapers–were unknown in Confucian days. It is presumed, therefore, that life was even more humdrum than it is now, except that women at least had feet to walk upon. We gain some glimpses of excessive taxation and popular misery, forced labour and the press-gang; of callous luxury on the part of the rich, from the pages of Lao-tsz and Mencius; the Book of Odes also tells us much about the pathetic sadness of the people under their taskmasters’ hands. In all countries popular habits change slowly; in none more so than in China. We are driven, therefore, by comparison with the life of to-day to conclude that life in those times was sufficiently wretched, and it is therefore not to be wondered at that the miserable people readily sold their services to the first ambitious adventurer who could protect them, and feed them from day to day.
CHAPTER XLIV
CONFUCIUS
Confucius has hitherto appeared to many of us Westerners as a stiff, incomprehensible individual, resting his claim to immortality upon sententious nothingnesses directed to no obvious practical purpose; but, from the slight sketches of the manners of the times in which he lived given above, it will be apparent that he was a practical man with a definite object in view, and that both his barebones history and his jerky moral teachings were the best he could do with sorry material, and in the face of inveterate corruption and tyranny. It has been explained how the Warrior King who conquered China for the Chou family in 1122, about a dozen years later enfeoffed the elder brother of the last Shang dynasty emperor in the country of Sung, where he ruled the greater part of what was left of the late dynasty’s immediate _entourage_, and kept up the sacrifices. This is what Confucius meant when he said: “There remain not in K’i sufficient indications of what the institutions of the Hia dynasty were; but I have studied in Sung what survives of the Shang dynasty institutions. In practice I follow the Chou dynasty institutions, as I have studied them at home in Lu.” K’i was a very petty state of marquess rank situated near Lu, to which, indeed, it was subordinate; but just as Sung had, as representatives of the Shang dynasty, the privilege of carrying out certain imperial sacrifices, so had K’i, as representatives of the Hia dynasty (enfeoffed by Chou in 1122), an equal right to distinction. Confucius’ ancestors were natives of Sung and scions of the ducal family reigning there; in fact, in 893 his ancestor ought to have succeeded to the Sung throne: in 710 B.C. the last of these ancestors to hold high official rank in Sung was killed, together with his princely master; and several generations after that the great-grandfather of Confucius, in order to avoid the secular spite of the powerful family who had so killed his ancestor, decided to migrate to Lu. In other words, he just crossed the modern Grand Canal (then the river Sz, which rose in Lu), and moved a few days’ journey north-east to the nearest civilized state of any standing. Confucius’ father is no mythical personage, but a stout, common soldier, whose doughty deeds under three successive dukes are mentioned in the Lu history quite in a casual and regular way. When still quite a child, Confucius disclosed a curious fancy for playing with sacrificial objects and practising ceremonies, just as English children in the nursery sometimes play at “being parson and sexton,” and at “having feasts.” When he grew up to manhood, a high officer of Lu foretold his future greatness, not only on account of his precociously grave demeanour, but also because he was in direct descent from the Shang dynasty, and because the intrigues that had taken place in Sung had deprived him of his succession rights there also. This high officer’s two sons, both frequently mentioned by various contemporary authors, and one of whom subsequently went with Confucius to visit Lao-tsz at the imperial court, thereupon studied the rites under the man of whom their father had spoken so well. The only official appointment in Lu that Confucius was able to obtain at this period was that of steward to one of the “powerful families” then engaged in the task, so congenial in those times all over China, of undermining the ducal authority; this appointment was a kind of stewardship, in which his duties consisted in tallying the measures of grain and checking the heads of cattle. One of the two sons of the above-mentioned statesman who had foreseen Confucius’ distinction, some time after this submitted a request to the ruler of Lu that he might proceed in company with Confucius to visit the imperial capital; and it is supposed by Sz-ma Ts’ien, the historian of 100 B.C., that this was the occasion on which took place the philosopher’s famous interview with Lao-tsz. In this connection there are two or three remarks to make. In the first place, it is recorded of nearly all the vassal states that they either did pay visits to, or wished to visit, the metropolis; and that royal dukes and royal historians, either at vassal request or under imperial instruction, took part in advising vassal states. In the second place, as Confucius then held no high office, his visit, being a private affair, would not be considered worth mentioning in the Lu annals, and it would therefore almost follow as a matter of course that the young man who accompanied him, being of official status by birth, would count as the chief personage. In the third place, there is no instance in the Confucian histories of a mere archive-keeper or a mere philosopher being mentioned on account of his importance in that capacity. Such men as Tsz-ch’an, Shuh Hiang, Ki-chah, and the other distinguished “ritualists” of the time, are not mentioned so much on account of their abstract teachings as they are on account of their being able statesmen, competent to stave off the rising tide of revolutionary opinions. Even Confucius himself only appears in contemporary annals as an able administrator and diplomat; there is no particular mention of his “school,” and, _a fortiori,_ he himself does not mention Lao-tsz’s “school,” even if Lao-tsz had one; for he disapproved of Lao-tsz’s republican and democratic way of construing the ancient _tao._ Finally, neither Confucius nor Lao-tsz, however great their local reputations, were yet universally “great”; they were consequently as little the objects of hero-worship as was Shakespeare when he was at the height of his activity; and of the living Shakespeare we know next to nothing. At this time Lu was in a quandary, surrounded by the rival great powers of Tsin, Ts’i, and Ts’u, all three of which absolutely ignored the Emperor, except so far as they might succeed in using him and his ritualistic prestige as a cat’s-paw in their own selfish interests. When Confucius was thirty years of age (522 B.C.) the ruler of Ts’i, accompanied by his minister the philosopher Yen-tsz, paid a visit to Lu, and had a discussion with Confucius upon the question: “How did Ts’in, from beginnings so small and obscure, reach her present commanding position?” Besides this, the Ts’i ruler and his henchman Yen-tsz both took the opportunity to study the rites at Lu. This fact seems to support the (later) statement that Confucius had himself been to study the rites at the metropolis, and also to explain Confucius’ own confession that he did not understand much about the Hia dynasty institutions that used to exist in K’i,–a state lying eastward of Ts’i. In 520 the last envoy ever sent from Lu to the Chou metropolis reported on his return that the imperial family was in a state of feud and anarchy: if, as it is stated, this was really the last envoy from Lu, then Confucius and his friend must have visited Lao-tsz before the former reached the age of thirty. Tsin and Lu were both now in a revolutionary condition, and a struggle with the “powerful families” was going on in each case; it was also beginning in Ts’i, and in principle seems to have been exactly akin to our English struggle between King John and his barons (as champions of popular rights) against the greed of the tax-collector. To avoid home troubles, Confucius at the age of thirty-five went to Ts’i, in order, if possible, to serve his friend the Marquess, who had a few years before consulted him about the rise of Ts’in. There perhaps it was that he found an opportunity to study the music of the Hia dynasty at the petty state of K’i, only one day’s journey east of the Ts’i capital, on the north-east frontier of Lu; and then it must have been that he formed his opinion about the surviving Hia rites. His advice to the reigning prince of Ts’i was so highly appreciated that it was proposed to confer an estate upon him. It is interesting to note that the jealous Yen-tsz (who was much admired as a companionable man by Confucius) protested against this grant, on the ground that “men of his views are sophistical rhetoricians, intoxicated with the exuberance of their own verbosity; incompetent to administer the people; wasting time and money upon expensive funerals. Life is too short to waste in trying to get to the bottom of these inane studies.” From this it will be seen that Lao-tsz was by no means alone in despising Confucius’ conservative and ritualistic views, though it is quite possible that Yen-tsz may still have respected him as a man and a politician. Finally, Confucius, finding that the Ts’i ministers were all arrayed against him, and that the Marquess fain confessed himself too old to fight his battles for him, quitted the country and returned home. His own duke died in exile in 510 B.C., power remaining in the intriguing hands of an influential private family; and for at least ten years Confucius held no office in his native land, but spent his time in editing the Odes, the Book, the Chou Rites, and the Music; by some it is even thought that he not only edited but composed the Book (of History), or put together afresh such parts of the old Book as suited his didactic purposes. Meanwhile the private family intrigues went on more actively than ever; until at last, in 501, when Confucius was fifty years of age, the most formidable agitator of them all, finding his position untenable, escaped to Ts’i; it even seems that Confucius placed, or thought of placing, his services at the disposal of one of these rebel subjects. Possibly it was in view of such contingencies that the reigning duke at last gave Confucius a post as governor of a town, where his administration was so admirable that he soon passed through higher posts to that of Chief Justice, or Minister of Justice. Confucius’ views on law are well known. He totally disapproved of Tsz-ch’an’s publication of the law in the orthodox state of Cheng, as explained in Chapter XX., holding that the judge should always “declare” the law, and make the punishment fit the crime, instead of giving the people opportunities to test how far they could strain the literal terms of the law. He also said: “I am like others in administering the law; I apply it to each case; it is necessary to slay one in order not to have to slay more. The ancients understood prevention better than we do now; at present all we can hope to do is to avoid punishing unjustly. The ancients strove to save a prisoner’s life; now we can only do our best to prove his guilt. However, better let a guilty man go free than slay an innocent one.”
Confucius’ old friend the ruler of Ts’i was still alive (he reigned fifty-eight years, one of the longest reigns on record in Chinese history), and he had just suffered serious humiliation at the hands of the barbarous King of Wu, to whose heir-apparent he had been obliged to send one of his daughters in marriage. The Protectorate of China was going a-begging for want of a worthy sovereign, and it looked at one time as though Confucius’ stern and efficient administration would secure the coveted prize for Lu. The Marquess of Ts’i therefore formed a treacherous plot to assassinate both master and man, and with this end in view sent an envoy to propose a friendly conference. It was on this occasion that Confucius uttered his famous saying (quoted, however, from what “he had heard”) that “they who discuss by diplomacy should always have the support of a military backing.” A couple of generals accordingly accompanied the party to the trysting-place; and it is presumed that the generals had a force of soldiers with them, even though the indispensable common people be not worth mention in Chinese history. In conformity with practice, an altar or dai’s was constructed; wine was offered, and the usual rites were being fulfilled to the utmost, when suddenly a Ts’i officer advanced rapidly and said: “I now propose to introduce some foreign musicians,” a band of whom at once entered the arena, with brandished weapons, waving feathers, and noisy yells. Confucius saw through this sinister manoeuvre at once, and, hastily mounting the dais (except, out of respect, the last step), expostulated in the plainest terms. The ruler of Ts’i was so ashamed of his position that he at once sent the dancers away. But a second group of mountebanks were promptly introduced in spite of this check. Confucius was so angry, that he demanded their instant execution under the law (presumably a general imperial law) “providing the punishment of death for those who should excite animosity between princes.” Heads and legs soon covered the ground; and Confucius played his other cards so well that he secured, in the sequel, a formal treaty, actually surrendering to Lu certain territories that had unlawfully been held for some years by Ts’i. On the other hand, Lu had to promise to aid Ts’i with 22,500 men in case Ts’i should engage in any “foreign” war–probably alluding to Wu. Two or three years after that stirring event there was civil war in Lu, owing to Confucius having insisted on the “barons” dismantling their private fortresses.
At the age of fifty-six Confucius left his post as Minister of Justice to take up that of First Counsellor: his first act was to put to death a grandee who was sowing disorder in the state. It was during these years of supreme administration that complete order was restored throughout the country; thieves disappeared; “sucking-pigs and lambs were sold for honest prices”; and there was general content and rejoicing throughout the land. All this made the neighbouring people of Ts’i more and more uneasy, even to the point of fearing annexation by Lu. The wily old Marquess therefore, again at the instigation of the man who had planned the attempted assassination of 500 B.C., made a selection of eighty of the most beautiful women Ts’i could produce, besides thirty four- horsed chariots of the most magnificent description. The reigning Marquess of Lu, as well as his “powerful family” friend against whom Confucius had once thought of taking arms (who, indeed, acted as intermediary) both fell into the trap: public duty and sacrifices were neglected; and the result was that Confucius at once threw up his offices and left the country in disgust. His first visit was to Wei (imperial clan), the capital city of which state then stood on the Yellow River, in the extreme north-east part of modern Ho Nan province; and through this capital the river then ran: the metropolis of one of the very ancient emperors previous to the Hia dynasty had nearly 2000 years before been in the immediate neighbourhood, as also had been the last capital of the Shang dynasty, of which, as we have seen, Confucius was a distant scion. After a few months’ stay there, he was suspected and calumniated; so he decided to move on, although the ruler of Wei had generously appropriated to him a salary (in grain) suitable to his high rank. He accordingly proceeded eastwards to a town belonging to Sung (in the extreme south of modern Chih Li province): here he had the misfortune to be mistaken for the dangerous individual who had fled from Lu to Ts’i in 501, in consequence of which he returned to stay in Wei with his friend K’u-peh-yuh, who, as mentioned in Chapter XXVIII., had been visited by Ki-chah of Wu in 544 B.C. Here, as a distinguished traveller, he was asked (practically commanded) by one of the ruler’s wives to pay her a visit; and, though the reluctant visit was paid with all propriety and reserve, the fact that this woman was at the time suspected of having committed incest with her own brother is considered by uncompromising native critics to leave a slight stain on Confucius’ character. Worse still, the reigning prince took his wife out for a drive with a eunuch sitting in the same carriage, ordering the sage to follow the party in an inferior carriage. This was too much for Confucius, who then resumed his original journey through Sung, from which he had turned back, and proceeded to the small state of Ts’ao (imperial clan; still called Ts’ao-thou, extreme south-west of modern Shan Tung province). To-day he would have had to cross the Yellow River, but of course none is here mentioned, as Confucius had already left it behind at the Wei capital: in fact, he had been on the right bank ever since he left his own country. This was 495 B.C. After a short stay in Ts’ao, the philosopher proceeded south towards the capital of Sung (modern Kwei-teh Fu in the extreme east of Ho Nan). For some reason the Minister of War there wished to assassinate him–probably because the arch-intriguer whom Confucius had driven out of Lu in 501, and who had taken refuge first in Ts’i and then in Sung, had calumniated him there. Confucius thereupon made his way westwards, over the various headwaters of the River Hwai, to Cheng (imperial clan), the state which had been for a generation so admirably administered by Tsz- ch’an: in fact, a man outside the city gate observed “how like Tsz-ch’an” the stranger looked. Some accounts make out that Tsz- ch’an was then only just dead, but the better opinion is that he had already then been dead for twenty-seven years: in any case it is curious that Confucius, who was a very tall man, should twice be mistaken for other persons. Thence Confucius turned back south- east to the orthodox state of Ch’en (modern Ch’en-chou Fu in Eastern Ho Nan). This was one of the very oldest principalities in China, dating from even before the Hia dynasty (2205 B.C.); and the Warrior King of Chou, after conquering the empire in 1122 B.C., had industriously sought out the most suitable lineal descendant to take over the ancient fee of his remote ancestor, and continue the sacrifices.
Confucius remained in Ch’en over three years, and during that time the barbarian King of Wu annexed several neighbouring towns, whilst Tsin and Ts’u ravaged the surrounding country in turn, in their rival efforts to secure a predominant influence there. Here it was, too, that a bird of prey, pierced with a strange arrow, fell near the prince’s palace: from the wood used in making the arrow and the peculiar stone barb employed to tip it, Confucius was able to explain that the bird must have flown from (modern) Manchuria. (This annual flight of bustards and geese, to and from the Steppes, may be observed any winter to-day.) He next turned north, and arrived once more at the spot in Sung he had visited in 496: here he was arrested, but set free on his solemn promise that he would not go to Wei, which state at the moment was considering the advisability of attacking that very Sung town. Confucius deliberately broke his plighted word, on the ground that “promises extorted by violence are void, and are not recognized by the gods.” (These words, which, after all, are good English law, were quoted by the irate Chang Chf-tung when Russia “extorted” the Livadia Treaty from Ch’unghou.) On his arrival in Wei, he advised his old friend, the Wei duke, to attack the Sung town he had just left. But the duke thought it best to have the Yellow River between himself and the rival states of Ts’u and Tsin (this specific mention of the Yellow River as being west of a city in long. 114ø 30′ E. is interesting). The latter state, Tsin, then held most of the left bank. Confucius even thought of accepting the invitation of a Tsin rebel to go and assist him: this was just at the moment when the “six families” were gradually breaking up the once powerful northern orthodox state. He also hesitated whether he would not do better, as the prince of Wei would not employ him, to proceed west to Tsin in order there to serve one of the contending six families: in fact he actually got as far as the Yellow River (another proof that it must then have run on the west side of Wei-hwei Fu in Ho Nan); but turned back to Wei on hearing unfavourable news from the Tsin capital (in south Shan Si). As the Wei prince treated him somewhat cavalierly during an interview, he decided to go back once more due south to the ancient state of Ch’en. Here (492) he heard news of the destruction by fire of some of the Lu ancestral temples, and of the death of the “powerful family” minister whose disgraceful conduct with the singing girls had led to his departure from Lu in disgust. This minister was a sort of hereditary _maire du palais_, an arrangement which seems to have been customary in many states, and his last words to his son were: “When you succeed me, send for Confucius: my administration has failed: I did wrong in dismissing him.” The son had not the courage to ask Confucius himself, but he sent instead for one of the philosopher’s disciples, and it was arranged with Confucius’ friends that this disciple on taking office should send for Confucius himself, who really wished to be employed in Lu again. Meanwhile Confucius decided to visit the orthodox state of Ts’ai (imperial clan), lying to the south of Che’n: the capital of this state had been originally a town on the upper waters of the Hwai River, right in the heart of modern Ho Nan province; but, under stress of the Tsin and T’su wars, it had twice moved its chief city eastwards, and owing to a Ts’u invasion, it was now (491) on the main Hwai River in modern An Hwei province, and was at the moment under the political influence of Wu; it is not