Early Medieval China: A Sourcebook

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Introduction

T

he Six Dynasties period is also variously referred to in modern Western scholarship as Early Medieval China, the Northern and Southern Dynasties, and the Period of Division or Disunion. It was the longest period of political fragmentation in China’s imperial history and appears to have had a definite beginning and ending. It began when Cao Pi, the head of the powerful Cao family, deposed the last emperor of the Eastern Han and founded the Wei dynasty in 220 c.e. It ended when Yang Jian, the founder of the Sui dynasty, reunified China under his rule in 589. During this span of political fragmentation, there was a brief period of unity. The Western Jin dynasty managed to hold China together for several decades, from the destruction of the Wu kingdom in 280 to the sack of Luoyang in 311, even though the dynasty itself endured a civil war fought among members of the ruling house from 291 to 306.

In turn, the sack of Luoyang by the Xiongnu leaders Liu Cong and Liu Yao marked the beginning of the nomadic invasions from northern China and a succession of alien regimes. During this time, with the support of émigré elites in southern China, Sima Rui established a new dynasty in the name of Jin. From this time on, the large region south of the Yangtze River was ruled by a string of dynasties founded by Han Chinese elites. Despite a number of ambitious campaigns launched by various Northern and Southern regimes, this geographical and political division persisted until the Sui dynasty, arguably the

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last Northern dynasty, conquered Chen, the last Southern dynasty, in 589 and thus once again brought China together under one sovereignty.

This narrative, with its emphasis on the rise and fall of political entities, obscures profound and complex continuities, as well as changes in the society.

China in 300 was vastly different from China in 600. However one parses it, politically or geographically, China in 300 more or less continued Han dynasty traditions and practices. In contrast, China in 600 was not a re-creation of Han uniformity but a new order forged through many drastic and thorough transformations that took place in the intervening centuries, an order that had its own ideological foundation, ethnic makeup, and economic infrastructure.

The changes in northern China were abrupt and drastic, the most apparent being the changes in ethnic makeup and relationships. Just before the fourth century, massive numbers of people termed “barbarians” by the Han people began migrating into the traditional Chinese heartland. Traditional historiography specifically names and discusses the so-called Five Barbarians (wu hu 五胡)—Xiongnu, Xianbei, Jie, Di, and Qiang—who conquered the North and established, either simultaneously or consecutively, their own political regimes.

But the picture of ethnic diversity in the North was in fact much more complicated. Other non-Han ethnic peoples, such as the Sogdians, Turks, and Koreans, also played significant roles in shaping the culture and politics. The manifestations of the tension between the non-Han and the Han peoples also varied across places and times, displayed either violently in political upheavals or more peacefully in ritual debates at court. The degree of tension between the two should not, however, be exaggerated, as the rivalries and confrontations among the non-Han ethnic groups were often even more intense and violent.

The conquest of northern China by non-Han ethnic groups was not simply the result of the persistent confrontations between steppe nomads and sedentary peoples or the collapse of the once mighty Han Empire, as traditional historiography often asserts. Instead, it was part of a much larger and lengthy process that connected the Eurasian steppe and China, a process that brought peoples, ideas, and cultures into contact with those of China, which were shaped and reshaped by those interactions. The interests of the non-Han ethnic groups in controlling the Chinese heartland were as much a matter of shrewd investment as of raw ambition. For example, the Qiang people had a significant presence in northwestern China, where they served in the Han frontier army during the last decades of the dynasty. Then, after the collapse of orderly rule, they fought mostly for control of the territories they had already inhabited for several generations.

Similarly, any linear representation of cultural assimilation and the sinicizing process in the North is problematic. The non-Han ethnic “invaders” had a more sophisticated understanding of China than traditional historians gave them credit for, and in some cases, they had a better grasp of Chinese cultural traditions than did those who invaded the same areas decades later. The early

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leaders of the Five Barbarians clearly were familiar with, if not fully in command of, the subtleties of the codes of conduct, symbols of power, and forces of ideology—in short, Han statecraft. They readily utilized and manipulated these elements to their own advantage, as well as mixing them with elements from their own cultures to achieve effective rule. Liu Yuan, the Xiongnu leader who established the first non-Han regime in the North, rallied his people with the rhetoric of restoring the Xiongnu Empire and gained support from the native Chinese by emphasizing his familial tie with the Han imperial house. In this early stage, although the ruling elites of these non-Han ethnic groups were not hostile to Chinese culture, they did not necessarily embrace it. Any overt push toward sinicization tended to cause resentment, resistance, and even armed confrontation, and it continued to have such effects well into the second half of the Northern Dynasties.

Throughout the history of early medieval China, warfare was common.

Since the North was more frequently at war, one might assume that it was consumed by violence and chaos. But the Northern society often enjoyed periods of remarkable stability and economic growth as well, especially during the rule of stronger regimes. The population displacement, the breakdown of infrastructure, and the decline of locally entrenched powers offered newly arrived nonHan conquerors rare opportunities to build their sociopolitical control by possessing and allocating human and material resources. For the first time in the history of imperial China, a government could directly control and redistribute previously cultivated land on a scale that revolutionized the methods of taxation and fundamentally altered the economy. As they were incorporated in the new political order, the rural communities maintained roughly the same structure they had at the end of the Han. This structural stability thus made them the best channels through which to propagate the political ideologies, social conduct, and religious practices fostered by the Northern regimes.

The changes in the South matched those of the North in scale and complexity. While all Southern Dynasties were founded by ethnically Han elites, their social and political foundations were not consistently the same. One widely accepted view among scholars is as follows: the Southern Dynasties were politically weak and militarily incompetent; the Southern rulers often succumbed to the dominance of the great clans and had little ability to impose effective government; and the Southern courts were superior in culture and economy only when compared with their Northern neighbors. This view is rather simplistic, however. The rulers of the Southern Dynasties were often just as politically ambitious and creative as their non-Han counterparts in the North. They were equally adept at manipulating existing cultural and political elements to shape their political identity and assert imperial authority. Although the Southern courts did not achieve any lasting victories in reclaiming the Chinese heartland, they were able to fend off the numerous military offensives launched by Northern regimes. The length of the political division between the North and

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the South was therefore more a testament to these rulers’ considerable political resolve and organizational skills than to their failures in these areas.

Modern scholars, especially those in Japan and the West, have often labeled the Six Dynasties as an age of aristocratic rule. Many Marxist historians in China, in contrast, have called the Six Dynasties a period of “feudalism.”

Although neither of these anachronistic characterizations captures the idiosyncratic nature of the period, they do call attention to the dominant influence of kinship-based groups in social and political life. These groups, whether they were the Great Clans of Shandong or leading nomadic tribes, constantly challenged the model of imperial authority developed in the Han dynasty. Compared with other periods in the history of imperial China, in the Six Dynasties the social and political status of an individual depended more on the social recognition of his family and reputation than on the office he held. That is, the channels for social mobility and access to political power were less often open to those who were not members of these exclusive groups. These kinship-based groups, however, were generally conscious of their privileged position in society, and in turn, their efforts to sustain that position sustained the society. Because their longevity ensured the survival of many cultural and political traditions, we find it difficult to support the claim that these kinship-based groups always placed private interests ahead of imperial authority or the public good.

The hereditary status enjoyed by members of these kinship-based groups may indeed have been aristocratic, but there were different kinds of aristocracy during this period. For example, even the Great Clans of Shandong had varied interactions with the imperial authorities and the society at large, and each of them managed these interactions differently depending on their own relative geographical and political dominance. Having sketched, in the briefest terms possible, the overall shape of this period’s history, we turn next to the organization and rationale of this volume.

Academic readers will immediately notice that this volume is organized thematically, with the texts arranged to suggest new ways of thinking about the period. The six parts offer a categorization that focuses less on modern disciplinary boundaries and more on the issues and discursive spheres that animated the early medieval period. We feel that a thematic organization better captures both the cross-fertilization of various fields and the complex realities of the period. By transcending modern disciplinary boundaries (or, even when most of the entries in the parts are texts that might fall under the purview of a single discipline, by choosing and introducing them thematically), we sought to avoid the academic arbitrariness in labeling texts from early medieval China as historical, literary, or religious. Most of the texts that survived from this period were produced by writers who saw themselves first and foremost as literati and who shared the goal of connecting their writings with the grand cultural and political traditions they inherited. By reading these texts outside a particular

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disciplinary boundary, they may be seen through a different set of lenses and appreciated for their rich texture. For example, Sun Chuo’s memorial to the Eastern Jin throne concerning whether to move the capital from Jiankang back to Luoyang was written in parallel prose and is at once a calculated political work, a masterly piece of rhetoric, and a dazzling display of literary art. In another case, stories of paranormal events both featured what we today think of as “religious” topics and were understood by their authors and readers as a subbranch of history.

This volume is organized around six themes: • • • • • •

Part I. The North and the South Part II. Governing Mechanisms and Social Reality Part III. Cultural Capital Part IV. Imaging Self and Other Part V. Everyday Life Part VI. Relations with the Unseen World

We decided on these six themes because they best capture some of the major dynamic developments of the period. We also are using them to address specific scholarly agendas of our own: • To highlight areas of scholarship that have seen remarkable advancement in recent years (such as parts IV and VI) • To bring attention to areas that could and should be further developed (such as parts III and V) by adapting prevalent and useful cultural theories (i.e., Pierre Bourdieu’s “cultural capital” and Michel de Certeau’s “everyday life”) • To provide the cultural and historical contexts for the period that will lay the foundation for future research projects (such as parts I and II)

Texts that are included in one part could certainly be used to highlight the theme of another part. This interconnection of themes is due to both the richness of the sources themselves and the sophistication of scholarly interpretations that cut across genres and disciplines. For example, Shen Yue’s “Impeaching Wang Yuan” in part II, “Governing Mechanisms and Social Reality,” could easily be placed in part V, “Everyday Life,” where it would illuminate the selfdefinition of social class and the economic interests of the gentry elite in the Southern Dynasties. Likewise, excerpts from the Outer Chapters of The Master Who Embraces Simplicity included in part I, “The North and the South,” would contribute much to the topics of self-reference and autobiography featured in part IV, “Imaging Self and Other.” The thematic categories proposed in this volume are thus intended to highlight, rather than limit, the complexities of the early medieval period.

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During the early medieval period, various group identities were continually redefined through challenges and adaptations. The physical and social landscapes faced by the people of this era changed more rapidly than in any recent generations. Large-scale conquests and resettlements led to frequent restructurings of the relationship between the land and the people. Also during this period, many new political forms and ideologies were formed. All regimes, whether in the North or the South, attempted to augment their political authority by refashioning existing political models or even inventing new ones in the name of emulating the past. On a smaller scale, the gentry class, in particular, used its social advantage and cultural capital to make gains in the political sphere, sharing power with the ruler, especially in the Eastern Jin dynasty.

Cultural enterprises became both a vehicle for individual expression and the articulation of a unique personality, as well as a means to gain sociopolitical privileges. Negotiations between traditional and newly imported religions led the people of that time to consider anew their ontological understanding of their own existence and the mundane and supernatural world around them.

The boundaries among the various religious teachings often blurred: religious teachings (e.g., canon, vocabulary, ideas, and practices) were shaped by the interactions with one another, and scholars today are (prudently) far less certain about the origins of certain notions. Material culture also became much more complex and rich in this period. Everyday objects and activities became the subject matter of intellectual elites’ writings. New forms of urban planning, architecture, apparel, food, and furnishings appeared, leading to, as well as reinforced by, emerging lifestyles and social behaviors. As with the changes and improvements to the physical environment, new tactics that allowed people to negotiate the rapidly shifting everyday realities also became much more discernible.

The entries in each of the six parts in this volume illustrate in an interdisciplinary way the part’s main theme and open with a critical narrative providing the historical and conceptual background for that particular subject. In most cases, the contributing scholars, each with a particular expertise, selected a text or a set of excerpts that he or she deemed best to demonstrate a given subject.

Part I, “The North and the South,” explores the ways in which, as imagined cultural spheres, the ideas of the North and the South were constructed and reflected on in contemporary sources. Although the conceptualization of the “North” and the “South” has a long history, today these two terms most commonly refer to the cultural and political divisions created when the seminomadic tribesmen who had long settled within the Chinese borders forced the Western Jin court to flee from the Chinese heartland—that is, the Yellow River basin. Subsequently, some remnants of the Chinese ruling elite set up the Eastern Jin dynasty south of the Yangzi River. Its establishment left a North that was ruled by a number of short-lived non- or semi-Chinese regimes and a South ruled by a sequence of Chinese dynasties, with the Yangzi River serving

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as the natural border between the two. For more than two hundred years, no Northern regime was able to conquer the South, and no Southern regime could reclaim much of the lost land in the North; each developed a unique blend of cultures, ethnicities, and social and political institutions that responded to domestic necessities and foreign challenges. The entries in part I suggest that the shifting boundary between the two depended as much on political-military realities as on the discursive and geographical spheres in which the speakers were situated. Warfare and massive deracination exposed an unprecedented number of people to languages, customs, topographies, and climates different from their own. The repeated displacement of social and cultural institutions also introduced new complications and challenged established boundaries, real or imaginary. The process of differentiating between the North and the South and assigning them attributes was also one of self-realization for the residents of the respective locales. Common identities were solidified when one party encountered “the other,” either literally or figuratively. Recent studies of literature, especially poetry, have demonstrated how cultural imagination often superseded actual experience in complex and ambivalent representations of the other, be it the North or the South. The landmark memorials by Huan Wen and Sun Chuo that circulated in the Eastern Jin court concerning the prospect of returning to Luoyang are prime examples of confl icted longings: returning to native lands that had been laid waste by wars or staying safely in a strange new place that was becoming home. Aside from being a bibliophile of all things “Daoist,” Ge Hong also made some of the most astute observations on the adaptation, transformation, and vulgarization of Northern culture in the South. Li Xiaobo and Zhang Chang, emissaries of the warring Northern Wei and Liu Song states, respectively, engaged in a dazzling verbal duel outside the besieged city, Pengcheng, playing on themes of cultural and political differences. The entries in part I therefore focus not only on the differences between the North and the South but also on the processes that produced and shaped them and the political mechanisms that underlay them.

The early medieval period witnessed dramatic reorganizations of the social and political order and the impact of new ideologies on those structural changes.

The Han imperial model, which still overshadowed its variant political successors through its institutional legacy and its presence in the public imagination, was repeatedly challenged by both domestic and foreign interventions and improvisations. The entries in part II, “Governing Mechanisms and Social Reality,” address these changes on multiple levels. The focus is on the processes through which ideologies, both cultural and political, were constructed, accepted, and reevaluated, as well as on their social and economic implications.

Part II reexamines some well-known developments, such as the Nine Ranks system (the basis for official selection and employment), the economic policies adopted by the Southern state(s) to advance the interests of its ruling members, and the contesting views on marriage that defined the status of the social elite.

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It also deals with matters that have not yet received adequate scholarly attention in the West, such as the reorganization of local administration and the state patronage of religion in border regions. The bamboo slips excavated from Changsha and the commemorative Buddhist stele of Gaochang are prime examples. The former reveals both the changes and the continuities of the Han dynasty and the Wu kingdom in their respective systems for managing local populations, while the latter highlights the power of religious patronage in shaping the identity of a multiethnic state. In the past, the study of elite ideologies of this period has often overemphasized “mysterious learning” (xuanxue) or “pure talk” (qingtan), which explored the ontological nature of social and political values among the intellectual elite. Part II offers a long-overdue survey of the presence of the classical tradition in scholarly, particularly classicist (often termed “Confucian”), commentaries in various intellectual enterprises of the period, including historiography, lexicography, and cosmography. The entries here suggest that classicism played a role even in the formation of both Buddhist and Daoist scholastic traditions, including their canons. Rather than treat this period as one in which classical learning was in decline—as has been the recent scholarly norm—part II approaches it as a time in which the skills developed through classical learning were being applied to broader areas of the production and organization of knowledge.

In part III, “Cultural Capital,” the concept of knowledge, competence, and accomplishments that were accumulated and transmitted within the literati class provides a useful framework for examining literature and the arts. The notion of cultural capital enables us to pose complex questions about the production, organization, and evaluation of “culture” in one of the most intellectually creative periods in Chinese history. What were the cultural issues and phenomena associated with the conception of wen (defined as “refined literature”), and how could cultural competence and intellectual stock be converted into sociopolitical gain? The entries in part III examine the major building blocks of cultural capital for early medieval literati: the arts of discourse and poetry writing (which defined the intellectual elite), literary theory and criticism (which accounted for literary production), and treatises on collection and classification (which took stock of accumulated cultural wealth). The rhetorical art of argument is illustrated by Xi Kang’s major essay “Sound Is Without Sadness or Joy,” which also constitutes an important document on early medieval music theory. The selections of poems by influential writers of the period, such as Sun Chuo, Xiao Gang, and Liu Xiaochuo, demonstrate the increasingly complex art of poetic composition. These examples also underscore the increasing importance of poetry as an indicator of cultural literacy and social legitimacy.

As cultural capital accumulated, efforts to manage, categorize, and rank the components of the literary heritage multiplied as well. Anthology making (Zhi Yu’s “Discourse on Literary Compositions Divided by Genre”) and literary criticism (Pei Ziye’s “Discourse on Insect Carving” and Zhong Rong’s Grades of the

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Poets) aimed to organize the literary tradition and set standards in the face of a proliferation of texts. As texts multiplied and were disseminated in the book culture of the latter part of the early medieval period, scholars attempted to collect the books of the realm (Xiao Yi’s private collection contained eighty thousand scrolls, not counting the imperial library collection that was later added to his own) and to catalog the books of the realm (Ruan Xiaoxu’s Seven Records).

Two early documents on book collection and cataloging, Ruan Xiaoxu’s preface to his bibliographic catalog and an excerpt from Xiao Yi’s Master of the Golden Tower, moreover reveal how the literati conceived of their libraries and their organization.

Part IV, “Imaging Self and Other,” examines the practices of fashioning the past, oneself, and others (including a transcendent, radical “other,” the Buddha).

It includes translations of biographies of recluses (excerpts from Huangfu Mi’s Accounts of High-Minded Men), a hugely important category for understanding early medieval social and political values, as well as excerpts from Liu Shao’s Treatise on Personality (a major political work that became the foundation for official selection during this period) and the fifth-century collection of stories about the gentry class, Recent Anecdotes from the Talk of the Ages, both of which highlight the major issues of the day: selfhood, identity, character appraisal, and the classification of human types and conduct. Poems by Xiao Tong and his courtiers illustrate literary group identity, and the texts on self-narration (Tao Yuanming and Jiang Yan) foreground issues of self-representation. How to narrate oneself or others was a crucial question for Chinese historiography, inasmuch as the history of China is arguably recounted through the lives of individuals rather than institutions. The entries in part IV thus challenge the prevailing view that the early medieval period witnessed the rise of individualism and the awareness of self hood. Although there is no doubt that Han social values and behavioral norms were seriously (and sometimes comically) challenged in the Wei and Jin dynasties, it is equally certain that people living before this era had experienced self-awareness as unique individuals. Accordingly, part IV offers another set of vantage points from which to view the complex social changes of the era: an expansion of typological models, the development of an elaborate classification of behavior and of a sophisticated vocabulary for character appraisal, and experimentation with literary forms of self-representation. Rather than suggesting the rise of self-awareness (another recently prevalent scholarly trope concerning our period), these early medieval developments point to the rise of a more sophisticated articulation of notions of selfhood and personality.

One of the new areas of research that this volume incorporates is the study of material culture and everyday life in early medieval China. Both transmitted and recently excavated sources offer insight into how people during this period lived each day and articulated the meaning of life through acts such as consumption, production, and possession. Part V, “Everyday Life,” deals with the

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material condition of everyday surroundings, on the one hand, and the newly invented or repackaged concepts that helped regulate, reshape, and/or give new interpretations to everyday experiences, on the other. The texts translated and discussed here include ritual and festival calendars (around which people’s lives were organized), dietary habits, domestic relationships, child custody and litigations, and the estate culture of the landed gentry.

Finally, whereas the study of the religions of the early medieval period has boomed in the past twenty years, much of recent scholarship has tended to focus on one of the major traditions—predominantly Buddhism and Daoism—in isolation from other religious currents. But people often participated in more than one of these traditions; the “great traditions” model left other aspects of religion out of the picture; and many elements of China’s religions were formed in conversation with (or in explicit opposition to) elements of others. Therefore, rather than being organized according to the great traditions or “isms,” part VI, “Relations with the Unseen World,” focuses on a single unifying theme: relations between human beings and the denizens of the unseen world of spirits, gods, and buddhas. The selections in this part are from previously untranslated scriptures, biographies, narratives of anomalies, treatises, and documents placed in tombs. Although Western-language studies and translations of religious texts of this period have multiplied dramatically in recent years, we still lack translations of many important works and also genres of texts (such as sacred biographies and other short narratives, inscriptions, and tomb documents) usually ignored in favor of the major scriptures and treatises. Part VI builds on the momentum of recent scholarship by introducing a few of the many texts that have not yet been adequately studied.