Why the West Rules--For Now (152 page)

^*
By the first century
BCE
cast iron was common in China; wrought iron, made by heating ore to 1,650°F and repeatedly hammering the soft “bloom” this produces, was the only technique known in the West until the fourteenth century
CE
.

^*
There is a problem here: Zhaodun’s story is set around 610
BCE
, but crossbows became common only in the mid fifth century. Some historians conclude from such discrepancies that the
Zuozhuan
is really a bundle of folktales, growing by accretions as they were retold over the centuries, expressing generalized ideals but telling us little about real advisers and rulers. This, though, may be too skeptical. While much in the Zhaodun story is clearly fantastic, the compilers of the
Zuozhuan
apparently had access to good sources and seem to give us at least some sense of institutional and intellectual changes.

^*
Not all, though. The Mahavira (roughly 497–425
BCE
), founding father of Jainism, came from Magadha, India’s most powerful state. Zoroaster, whom some historians include among the Axial Age masters, was Iranian, although he lived—probably some time between 1400 and 600
BCE
—while Persia was still marginal to the Western core. (I do not discuss Zoroaster here because the evidence is so messy.)

^*
The rabbinic schools flourished particularly in the first century
BCE
and the first few centuries
CE
.

^*
Some intellectual historians and many New Age devotees turn this on its head, keeping the East-West distinction but arguing that Eastern/South Asian thought liberates the human spirit while Western abstraction puts a straitjacket on it.

^*
That is, the whole world that Polybius knew about; he had no idea what Qin was doing.

^*
The four great powers (Jin, Qi, Chu, and Qin) of the sixth century
BCE
became six when Jin split into three states (Hann, Wei, and Zhao) after a civil war. Some historians include Yan, around modern Beijing, as a seventh great power.

^*
Literally: Alexander was a foot shorter than the Persian king, and the first time he jumped on the throne his feet did not reach the ground. They dangled in a most ungodlike way until a courtier rushed up with a footstool.

^*
The Qin Great Wall is not the iconic stone barrier you can visit on day trips from Beijing (that one dates mostly to the sixteenth century
CE
). Nor is it true that the Great Wall can be seen from orbiting spacecraft, let alone from the moon.

^*
This is what Confucian scholars claimed, at least; many modern historians suspect that the gentry embellished the story. The cutting-in-two of peasants, however, seems indisputable.

^*
There are a lot of different ways to refer to Chinese emperors. Each had one or more names of his own (Liu Bang was also known as Liu Ji) and each was also assigned at least one “temple name” (Liu became Gaodi, but was also known as Gaozu, “High Progenitor”). To avoid confusion, I will refer to all emperors by the temple name used in Anne Paludan’s useful book
The Chronicle of the Chinese Emperors
. Where there are multiple emperors with the same names, I add the name of their dynasty too (for example, Han Wudi, Liang Wudi, and so on).

^*
In those days before soap, people who could afford it got clean by oiling up, then scraping themselves down. That may not be to everyone’s taste, but compared to using urine as toothpaste (which one Roman poet mentions, albeit in mockery), it was positively hygienic. Genuine soap, and toothpaste, were invented a thousand years later in China.

^*
This is how the poet Chuci described the luxuries in an account of Chang’an’s palaces in 208
BCE
, although these particular delights have not yet turned up in excavations.

^*
Historians often call the period 202
BCE
–9
CE
the Western Han, because the capital was at Chang’an in the west, and the period 25–220
CE
the Eastern Han, because the capital was at Luoyang in the east. Others prefer to speak of Former and Later Han.

^*
Jin had been the name of one of the great warring states of the eighth through fifth centuries
BCE
. Most of the new states created in the period of disunion in 220–589
CE
reused older names to make their rule seem legitimate, apparently unconcerned by the confusion this would cause for students today.

^*
So called to distinguish it from the “Western Jin” who had ruled all China from Chang’an between 280 and 316
CE
.

^*
He did, though, take the evenings off to write
The Meditations
, one of the classics of Stoic philosophy.

^*
This assumes, of course, that Basiliskos actually was a bungling idiot. The Romans preferred conspiracy theories, accusing Basiliskos of taking bribes and almost lynching him.

^*
Once again, the terminology is confusing. The Xianbei borrowed their name from the ancient kingdom of Wei (445–225
BCE
) mentioned in
Chapter 5
. To distinguish the Xianbei state from the earlier kingdom, some historians call it Tuoba Wei (named after the Xianbei clan that ran the state); others prefer Northern Wei, the usage I follow here.

^*
“Paperwork” is the right word. Genuine paper, invented in Han China, became widespread in the seventh century.

^*
When Britain reorganized its civil service in the 1880s it introduced self-consciously similar examinations, testing bright young men on their knowledge of Greek and Latin classics before sending them off to govern India, and even now British civil servants are still known as mandarins. Nineteenth-century conservatives saw exams as part of a sinister plot to “Chinesify” Britain.

^*
Humans, not rats, spread the plague. Moving on foot, the average rat relocates barely a quarter of a mile during its two-year lifespan; left to rats, the plague would have advanced merely twelve miles per century.

^*
Historians use “Turkic” to describe steppe nomads ancestral to the modern Turks, who migrated to what we now call Turkey only in the eleventh century.

^*
The technical term is Monophysite, from the Greek for “one nature.”

^*
Distant relatives of the Turks at the other end of the steppe highway whom Heraclius hired to invade Mesopotamia in the 620s.

^*
Guifei actually means “consort”; Yang’s own name was Yuhuan, but the title Guifeihas stuck.

^*
As was mentioned earlier, historians generally switch from the Greek name Mesopotamia to the Arabic name Iraq for the lands between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers with the seventh-century Muslim conquest.

^*
Caliphs continued in Baghdad until 1258 (and “shadow caliphs” carried on even later in Cairo), but like the kings of Zhou China after 771
BCE
, they were mere figure-heads. Emirs would normally mention the caliph in their Friday prayers but otherwise ignore him.

^*
Charlemagne’s actual name was Carolus; Charlemagne is a Gallicized version of Carolus Magnus, “Charles the Great.”

^*
Irene was a worthy rival to Theodora and Wu; she seized the throne in 797 after having her own son’s eyes gouged out to disqualify him from ruling.

^*
Ifriqiya is an Arabized version of Africa, the Roman name for Tunisia.

^†
Radical in the sense that they belonged to the Isma‘ili Shiite sect, which often used violence to oppose what it saw as illegitimate Sunni regimes, rather than the “Twelver” Shiites, who awaited more peacefully the return of the hidden twelfth imam.

^*
I would like to thank Dr. Hans-Peter Stika for his analysis of these finds.

^*
There are several ways to transliterate Turkic names; some historians prefer Qarluq to Karluk, Qarakhanid to Karakhanid, and Saljuq to Seljuk.

^*
In most years the Song issued about a billion bronze coins plus notes valued at 1.25 billion coins. The notes were fully convertible back to bronze, guaranteed by a reserve of 360 million coins.

^*
A hundred catties are roughly 130 pounds; rovings are twisted fibers.

^*
Eleventh-century tax registers are extraordinarily difficult to interpret, and some historians think the increase was smaller. None, however, denies that it rose significantly or disputes its consequences for energy use.

^†
After a curfew was lifted in 1063.

^*
Per capita energy capture rose in the East from an average of roughly 4,000 kilocalories per person per day (for all purposes) around 14,000
BCE
(4.29 points on the index of social development) to 27,000 kilocalories in 1
BCE/CE
(29.35 points). In the West it rose from roughly the same level around 14,000
BCE
to around 31,000 kilocalories (33.70 points) in 1
BCE/CE
.

^*
A euphemism for prostitution.

^†
The poet’s idea of the sound of a bellows.

^*
Even today, a few historians still wonder whether Marco actually went to China.

^*
Historians normally divide the Song period into the Northern Song phase (960–1127), when the dynasty ruled most of China from Kaifeng, and a Southern Song phase (1127–1279), when it ruled only southern China from Hangzhou.

^*
Historians sometimes call him Chinggis Khan. That is closer to the Mongol pronunciation than Genghis, the name Persian writers used, but Genghis is now conventional.

^†
According to legend, though, this was only after Jamuka had betrayed him and, on being caught, had asked Temujin to execute him.

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The Mongols considered this an honorable form of death because it shed no blood.

^*
This famous name is actually a misunderstanding of the city’s Chinese name, normally transliterated as Shangdu. The site of Khubilai’s palace is currently under excavation.

^*
This name was invented only in 1832; fourteenth-century Europeans spoke of “the great mortality,” while Chinese and Arabic sources each used half a dozen names.

^*
The chronicler Gabriele de’ Mussi (who was in Italy at the time) insisted that the Mongols used catapults to hurl plague-ridden corpses into Caffa. Most historians suspect—more prosaically—that rats carried plague-bearing fleas from the besiegers’ camp into the city.