A History of China (25 page)

The Later Han/Zhao’s efforts to fuse a nomadic military society with a Chinese-style administration thus foundered. Shortly after the proclamation of the dynasty, Shi Le (274–333), one of the commanders who opposed the dynasty’s acculturation to China, began covertly to undermine his increasingly sinicized confreres by organizing leaders against them. Moving cautiously and gradually, he finally rebelled, crushed the Later Han/Zhao, and established his own Later Zhao dynasty. The Later Han/Zhao rulers had recognized the importance of creating a bureaucracy to administer their domains, but they did not succeed in attracting the support of nomadic pastoral leaders for this effort. Their inability to persuade these leaders of the need for a Chinese-style administration spelled disaster. Relying principally on Chinese officials to help them proved to be insufficient to maintain their fragile confederation. They could not retain the loyalty of nomadic leaders who were unaccustomed to a regular stable governmental organization.

Yet, ironically, Shi Le and other more traditionally minded leaders who persisted in raids and conquests also could not maintain the allegiance of their own people beyond one generation because such loyalty was granted to a specific person and could not readily be bequeathed or transferred to successors or descendants. Thus Shi Le’s nephew Shi Hu (295–349) was faced with the disaffection of most of his father’s previously staunch allies, and their hostility eventually led to a complete rift, culminating within a few years in the collapse of the Later Zhao dynasty. The first attempt of a steppe people to create a Chinese-style administration thus failed.

The peoples and tribes northeast of China, along the Manchurian frontier, proved to be more effective in establishing more-enduring Chinese-style dynasties. The regions they inhabited had a mixed economy of pastoral nomadism, subsistence agriculture, and hunting and fishing. The sedentary agricultural domain gave rise to a Chinese-style administration, providing experience and exposure to a more tightly centralized bureaucratic system. Success in establishing control over north China entailed both military power and a bureaucracy, which the peoples of the northeast frontier developed more readily than had the steppe nomads directly north of China. A leader who aspired to govern China needed to satisfy and yet tame his own people’s military force and its leaders, organize an administration capable of ruling the Chinese, and also gradually limit the authority of their own chiefs. The governor or eventually emperor had to dominate both the tribes and the bureaucracy. He would rely mostly on Chinese to staff the bureaucracy but would retain military power for his own people.

The Yan (337–370) dynasties, composed principally of the Xianbei peoples, witnessed the first attempt to handle this delicate balancing act. Founded in the middle of the fourth century, the Former Yan made great strides toward administration of an empire. Its rulers recruited Chinese advisers to help them govern; the Chinese were willing to serve the Yan because, unlike the Chinese dynasties, it had maintained order and stability. Thus the Yan began to expand from its base in Liaodong and shortly incorporated much of the modern provinces of Anhui, Hunan, and Shaanxi, subjugating or sometimes merely assimilating both Chinese and non-Chinese peoples in their new domains. By 342, it had resisted an incursion from the marauder Shi Hu and had planned and constructed a splendid capital in Longcheng, west of the Longshan mountains in the modern province of Liaoning, partly to celebrate this success. Ironically, as the Yan rulers accommodated to Chinese culture, they eventually confronted the same problems as the Chinese dynasties in the south. To attract the support of Chinese advisers, as well as the Chinese landowning elite, they made financial concessions, which weakened them considerably and exposed their vulnerabilities. Similarly, like other groups from the region north of China, they encountered difficulties in developing a regular and orderly system of succession to the throne, which was still more debilitating to the dynasty. In short, they could not balance the traditional military and the Chinese bureaucratic traditions without major disruptions and without giving in to one or the other.

The Yan rulers’ fiscally damaging accommodation to the Chinese elite and their internal squabbles and divisions finally proved to be their undoing. In 370, Fu Jian (337–385), a leader of the Di peoples of southwestern China and Tibet and emperor of a Chinese-style dynasty known as the Former Qin (perhaps to conjure up images of the Qin dynasty, which had reunified China after the Warring States period), conquered and destroyed the Yan dynasty en route to his own attempt to unify China. However, Fu subsequently failed because of his inability to control his underlings. Like non-Chinese rulers from across the northern Chinese borders, he could retain his people’s loyalty only through fear and through military successes. When he extended his conquests to much of north China, they remained with him. However, in 383, when he apparently suffered a defeat at the battle of the Fei River in an effort to expand into south China, his associates began to sever their links with him, and within a couple of years he had been murdered.

The Tavghach, a people known in Chinese transcription as the Tuoba, turned out to be the most sophisticated, successful, and influential of the northern peoples whom the Chinese had encountered. The Chinese sources record that the Tavghach, part of the Xianbei peoples, had devised their own written script, which would give them the signal honor of having developed the first written language of any of the Altaic groups, but no evidence of this script has survived. Nonetheless, creation of a written language indicated a significant advance and provided the potential for a true administrative structure. Yet the Tuoba did not dispense with reliance on the military. Their leaders were simply more successful at the balancing act of maintaining strong links with both their own armies and the sedentary bureaucracy. They did this by establishing two parallel lines of organization – one for the military directed by the ­commanders who proclaimed their loyalty to the Tuoba emperor, and the other for the bureaucracy with Chinese advisers and administrators under the emperor’s supervision. On the one hand, this system offered enormous power to the emperor; on the other, it averted conflicts between the Chinese and Tuoba leadership because they had overlapping but different responsibilities. Each group was cohesive and performed its functions separately but remained under the direction of one man, the emperor.

Such unity enabled the Tuoba to annex additional lands and increase their power. As they incorporated new territories, they assumed the Chinese ­dynastic name of Northern Wei (386–534). They first attacked (and in 410 overwhelmed) the remnants of the declining Yan dynasty, thus adding much of northwest China to their lands. Having succeeded in this campaign, they then built a capital in Pingcheng, east of the modern city of Datong, along the frontiers between the steppes and the Chinese cultural areas. Steppe peoples would doubtless construe this choice of a site for the capital, so close to China, as an indication of growing acculturation to Chinese civilization. The Rouran, an amalgamation of nomadic groups north of the Wei in modern Mongolia, became dominant in the steppes. Not bound by the limitations of traditional Chinese dynasties, the Wei could compete with the Rouran not only within China but also in the steppes. In 425, their troops launched an attack all the way to northern Mongolia and defeated the Rouran. From that time on, the Rouran were on the defensive, and in 458 the Wei dealt them a devastating blow, compelling them to migrate west toward central Asia, where they occupied several towns and oases along the Silk Roads. The Northern Wei eventually forced the Rouran to move even farther west, where they probably merged with other groups to become known to Europeans as the Avars.

While the Wei gained victories over various groups, they were increasingly involved with China and its culture. Yet the Tuoba elite had to avoid an overly close identification with China if they were to maintain their identity, and for the first decades of their rule they managed to maintain their distance. However, they needed a system of thought or philosophy to justify their rule and to gain the acquiescence, if not support, of the Chinese majority whom they had subjugated and were now attempting to govern. Their own religious views were too rudimentary to contribute, in Chinese eyes, to their legitimacy.

Buddhism offered a splendid vehicle for the Wei’s needs, but it encountered challenges before becoming the dominant religion. North China had been exposed to Buddhism over several centuries, and the first Wei emperor, recognizing Buddhism’s potential, had recruited a monk to supervise the monasteries and to act as a political adviser. The patronage of the first two Wei emperors resulted in numerous conversions among the Tuoba. Yet Buddhism also ­elicited hostility among Daoist monks and Confucian scholars, who tried to sway court sentiment against the Buddhists. Several prominent Confucians – who were concerned about Buddhism’s espousal of tax exemptions and celibacy for monks, its denigration of a hierarchical system where each acted according to his or her own social status, and its advocacy of a modified retreat from ­society – initiated a campaign to persuade Emperor Wu (424–452) to restrain the Buddhists. Their efforts bore fruit, as Wu issued an edict that led to repression in 446. With the explicit support of the court, monasteries were razed and scriptures were burned and an unknown number of monks were killed.

Emperor Wu’s death and the accession of Emperor Wencheng altered court attitudes toward Buddhism. The Wencheng emperor issued an edict reversing the discriminatory policies and the repression sanctioned by his predecessor. He and, after his death, his widow provided funds for the construction of temples and stupas (i.e. reliquaries). In addition, the Northern Wei ruler began to supply both manual laborers and farm hands to perform chores in the monasteries and to work their lands. He and subsequent rulers turned over so-called Buddhist Households to the monasteries to labor on the Buddhist estates. This patronage fostered the growth of the monasteries; Chinese sources record that there were about two million monks and nuns by the end of the dynasty.

The two most lavish examples of government patronage were the con­struction of the Yungang and Longmen caves. The Yungang caves, built just a few miles from the Northern Wei capital in modern Datong, consisted of sculptures carved out of the rock. Some were colossal depictions of the figures in the Buddhist pantheon while others were smaller and more detailed and included representations from the Buddha’s life. Although the court initially donated most of the funds for these sculptures, wealthy patrons eventually offered vast sums to pay for inscriptions and carved images in order to gain merit or Karma. Many of the sculptures exhibited Indian and central Asian influences, and indeed the whole idea of cave sculptures derived from south and central Asian sources, principally from the state of Bamiyan in modern Afghanistan. As impressive as Yungang is, the cave complex at Longmen, near the city of Luoyang, to which the Wei shifted its capital in 494, is an equally extraordinary site. Situated adjacent to the nearby Luo River, the highly revered cave temples of Longmen contain sculptures and inscriptions produced primarily in the Wei and later dynasties. The region’s gray limestone provided the material for the creation of images of greater delicacy than in the past and laid the foundations for a unique Chinese style that differed from the Indian and central Asian depictions.

Figure 4.1
Ancient stone carvings of bodhisattvas at the Longmen Grottoes in Luoyang, China. © Michael Gray / iStockphoto

The inscriptions reveal the political and social significance of the construction of cave temples. A few praised the emperor or an aristocrat; others offered prayers for the continued glory of the dynasty. The inscriptions funded by monks and lay people emphasized religious merit and assistance in securing a better life on Earth. Apparent in most of the inscriptions is the strong link between the state and Buddhism; many offered lavish praise and support for the emperor and the dynasty. Such expressions ensured Wei patronage and the apparent selection of Buddhism as the court religion. The inscriptions also show Chinese influence in the repeated references to the welfare of the family and the ancestors – vital conceptions to the Chinese and another indication of the flexibility of Buddhism and its ability to accommodate to native beliefs. This adaptability of the Buddhists in doctrine and practice served and attracted the Wei elite, but it also helped to gain adherents among the Chinese population. The attraction of the Wei to a more sophisticated religion, which also converted many Chinese, marked a transition toward greater sinicization.

Another indication of the Wei’s efforts to accommodate to Chinese practices was its attempt to devise a mechanism of land distribution that ensured a reliable source of tax revenues. This creation of a land and tax structure is all the more remarkable when one considers that the Tuoba had scant experience with such regular administrative processes. Late in the fifth century, the Wei mandated an “equal-field” system – an imaginative method to retain peasants on the tax rolls instead of having them work as tenants on the often tax-free estates of the large landowners or aristocrats. To preserve its revenue sources, the Wei recognized that it needed to prevent the shifting of peasants into the private economy. It therefore “nationalized” all the land not directly owned by the estates and distributed it equally among working adults. Each would receive the same amount of land, of which only a relatively paltry portion, allotted for the growth of mulberry trees essential for silk production, could become private property. Control of the land reverted to the state when the peasant died or became too old to farm, and the government then redistributed it to young peasants who had reached adulthood and could assume the responsibilities of farming. In return for the state’s generous grant, the recipient was required to provide taxes of grain and silk or other textiles produced on “his” land and to perform corvée labor for the central government or the local authorities. Later the court also imposed militia obligations on the ­peasants and sent some to the frontiers to form military colonies (
tuntian
). In addition, the government inaugurated a system of local organization, under the direction of a leader, to provide for self-defense, collection of taxes, and proper harmonious relations within the group. Because the “equal-field” ­system temporarily met the Wei’s revenue requirements, it became a model for the two dynasties (Sui and Tang) that subsequently reunified China. Each modified and expanded upon the Wei system of land ownership and taxation. Even more impressive for a so-called barbarian (i.e. non-Chinese) dynasty, the military and local organizational systems the Wei introduced were imitated by other Chinese dynasties and ironically became perceived to be characteristically “Chinese.”