REVIEW: Imperial China, by F.W. Mote
Imperial China: 900-1800, F.W. Mote (Harvard University Press, 1999).
I have a friend who’s really into ducks. Obsessed, actually. You might be watching a completely normal movie with him, like Casablanca, and he’ll want to freeze the film on the frame where there’s a duck in the background and carefully examine it. Or you might be discussing some minor celebrity and he’ll proudly inform you that they once had a pet duck and that while Wikipedia says it was a Muscovy duck, he has in fact determined that it was a Moulard. I enter conversations with him torn between terror at the fact that he will inevitably turn it towards ducks, and wonder at what opening he will seize on to do so.1
Sometimes I worry that I’m turning into that guy but for barbarians. One of the very first reviews I wrote here was of James Scott’s The Art of Not Being Governed. That book is about the peoples who inhabit the rugged and hilly region of Southeast Asia known as Zomia, centered around the border between China and Laos. Scott is interested in the practices employed by the “barbarians” — the hill people — to resist domination by the much more numerous and organized “civilized” people living around them. He argues that many of the negative associations we have with barbarism — illiteracy, itinerancy, cousin marriage, religious messianism, and so on — are actually either deliberately adopted or emerge out of a process of cultural evolution that’s optimizing for ungovernability.
Zomia was an effective refuge from the state (in fact it still is — Dan Wang has a beautiful essay about fleeing to the exact same area to escape China’s zero-COVID policies). But what really stuck in my head from Scott’s book was the idea that barbarism is mostly a state of mind and a set of social practices and habits that could be employed anywhere. To be a barbarian is just to recognize that the world is full of forces vastly more powerful than you and coldly indifferent to your survival, be they criminal gangs, nation states, multinational corporations, fanatical social movements, artificial intelligences, or plain old egregores. When one of these entities turns its baleful gaze upon you, your options are to submit and be consumed, or go down fighting in a pointless last stand. But the barbarian chooses a different path — he hides in plain sight, adopts protective coloration, stays on the move, becomes an extremophile clinging to the marginal biomes and the “debatable lands”: a minnow living in crevices too poor and too narrow to interest the leviathans. And if worst comes to worst and he finds himself facing one of those monsters, then he makes himself as indigestible and unappealing a meal as he can manage.
That all sounds great, so why doesn’t everybody do it? The reason is that to be a barbarian carries serious costs. Some of those costs are material: the leviathans of the state, the corporation, etc., aren’t interested in your barbarian biome for a reason (probably because it kind of sucks). Other costs are intellectual and cultural: to be a barbarian is often to have no history or education (it can be used against you), and barbarian societies are often crippled and debased as a result. And some of the costs are psychological and spiritual: to live as a barbarian is to live as a hunted prey animal, always with a wariness verging on paranoia, building a protective shell around you that can make normal human relations even with close family impossible. Last year I read and reviewed the memoir of a modern American barbarian that makes all three of these forms of poverty all too apparent.
It’s possible that my obsession with barbarism, its pluses and minuses, is just part of my being a lunatic in Umberto Eco’s sense of the word. But I think it much more simply stems from an interest in Chinese history, which makes the polarity between civilization and barbarism terribly explicit. Since being a barbarian is not a binary choice but a spectrum, and since it also isn’t an innate quality but one that you (yes, you!) can dial up or down in response to incentives, what we see across the millennia is a great human wave sloshing back and forth across the borders of Chinese civilization. In times of peace and plenty, the deal offered by the state is pretty good. Yes, you are paying taxes and doing corvée labor for the Son of Heaven, but in return you get wealth, culture, and some amount of predictability. When famine and civil war stalk the land, the deal suddenly seems much worse and millions of former citizens suddenly become marginally more barbaric in their practices because it is simply in their interest to do so.
Nowhere is this more apparent than during the dark ages that followed the disintegration of the Jin dynasty. Countless millions of people simply vanished from the census rolls, melted into the hills or the swamps or the steppe, built fortified redoubts, and began lynching any tax collector or recruiting officer foolish enough to come knocking. Yes, plenty defected and joined the steppe hordes that began ravaging the borders of the empire (barbarians in the classical sense) but countless more defected and became “inner barbarians” — some of them roving brigands and agents of chaos, others islands of safety and order, but either way their wealth and labor inaccessible to the crumbling central authority. This naturally made the “deal” offered by the state even worse for those who remained under its control, causing a self-reinforcing feedback loop where the next most marginal stratum started to defect as well (something similar happened in Rome on several occasions).
But that isn’t the sort of interplay between civilization and barbarism that most people think of when it comes to Chinese history. No, people imagine the “conquest dynasties”: the vast armies of mounted warriors sweeping in from the steppe, slaughtering or coopting the authorities and intelligentsia, setting themselves up as a separate ruling caste above the conquered agriculturalists, and then slowly being absorbed culturally and genetically, like a rock shattering the surface of a placid lake before sinking out of sight. The two most famous examples of this happening — the Mongols becoming the Yuan dynasty and the Manchurians becoming the Qing — both exemplify this process of assimilation and Sinification. Historically, to conquer China is to be conquered by her. The weight of her history, tradition, wealth, ritual, and raw human biomass act like a black hole, swallowing arrogant foreign rulers without a trace.2 Their descendants might continue to rule, but they would be Chinese.
Those are the most famous episodes, but perhaps not the most profound. I was shocked when I first learned that the Tang dynasty, that ancient golden age of Chinese sophistication and might — the people who the Chinese themselves view as the ones who set them on their civilizational course — were also a “conquest dynasty” of sorts. It’s more subtle than with the Mongols, but it’s still there: the Tang imperial family, and a big swathe of their aristocracy, came out of the mixed-blood military leadership caste that propped up the crumbling Sui dynasty. It’s actually very analogous to the late Western Roman empire. As with most 5th century Roman generals, the late Sui generals tended to have mixed ancestry — Chinese (Roman) enough to move fluently through the imperial court and to be accepted by their countrymen, but Turkic (Germanic) enough to possess the barbarian’s freedom of spirit, and to retain the tribal allegiance of a horde of warriors. The Tang made steppe customs trendy among the Chinese: things like archery, falconry, and pants. And then they too were Sinified and forgot who they once were (though at the very end they remembered).
There’s a strain of (mostly Western) Sinologists who like to describe China as a “hybrid civilization,” but I’ve always thought of it as more of a sinusoidal one. Or perhaps there are two different sine waves that are in phase with each other — one the cycle of the common people oscillating between settled and pliable agriculturalism and a more independent and “barbarous” existence in the hills.3 The other is the cycle of dynasties, the eternal pattern whereby a wealthy empire becomes consumed by its own decadence, rots internally under a series of weak rulers, is overthrown by a strong and barbarous people, achieves a golden age through the hybrid synthesis of barbarian vigor and civilizational subtlety, and then becomes decadent again. Yes, yes, it’s literally just ibn Khaldun’s theory of dynastic cycles (or for that matter Aristotle, or Turchin, or Strauss-Howe, or a million other such), but the difference is that the Chinese have actually seen it happen, very dramatically, over and over again through recorded history. Western theorists of generational cycles are always making the most hilarious stretches (“the panic of 1870 is a lot like the fall of Rome…”) because they lack adequate historical fuel for their insane monomania. Chinese theorists have no such problem, which makes it ironic that cyclical theories are part of the fringe over there just like they are here.
This is all a very long way of getting around to why I’m so interested in the Khitans.
You may think you’ve never heard of the Khitans (Chinese: 契丹 or “qidan”), but you probably have, albeit indirectly. “Khitan” is their ethnonym within their own proto-Mongolic branch of the Altaic languages. In the Turkic languages a little further West, the same people are called “Khitai.” A splinter group of the Khitans who settled in Dzhungaria and Transoxiana called themselves the “Kara-Khitai” (Black Khitans), a name that should be instantly recognizable to anybody who played Age of Empires II. If you prefer Paradox map-painting games to more traditional RTS, they do also show up in the Crusader Kings series, resulting in memes like this one. Oh dear, where was I? Right, the Khitans. The word “Khitai,” via a continent-wide game of Chinese whispers (get it?), became “Cathay,” which the confused Europeans took as the name of the Middle Kingdom itself, finally resulting in the birth of a wonderful airline.
Right, the Khitans. There they were, grazing their flocks on the Greater Khingan Mountains, just bein’ a horde, doing horde stuff. Suddenly, opportunity fell into their laps: the Tang empire was unravelling. The bustling cities and ports of Northeastern China were sitting right there, defenseless, full of gold, and skilled craftsmen, and all the soft and delicate sensuality of settled life. It was about to happen again, right? The nomadic horsemen riding in from the wild steppe, pillaging the effete townspeople and becoming their masters, only to succumb to pleasure and become effete in turn, the endless cycle of history? How could it be avoided? Here is how Mote (yes, we’ve finally gotten to the book) describes their Catch-22:
…the Khitans probably saw quite clearly that when a steppe people by degrees gave up its nomadic mobility in exchange for the more comfortable sedentary life, it ran great risks of having to compete with the Chinese on their ground. Losing in that way their comparative advantage inevitably cost the nomads their cultural integrity; they slowly became just “little Chinese”… no steppe people on China’s borders could become sinified and survive, except by migrating into China and being absorbed — another form of extinction… the warning to nomadic peoples was clear: they must master the art of drawing resources from China without sacrificing their steppe integrity… The wealth that could be wrung from it could give mastery over all Inner Asia.
The Khitan response to this pickle was unlike any I’ve ever heard. Roughly half of the Khitan aristocracy, including the royal clan, immediately adopted Chinese customs,4 moved to the city, and began building a bureaucracy. The other half, including the clan that Khitan kings traditionally picked their wives from, stayed in the steppe and had nothing to do with any of this. They then established two governments, two sets of laws,5 two taxation regimes, two writing systems, two of everything. One was civilized, the other was barbarian. Two completely incompatible social structures living side-by-side, passing through each other, but never interacting. Like dark matter, or like life-forms with mirror chirality. As a Khitan subject, you belonged to just one of these systems (if you were low class, you were sometimes allowed to pick!), and only that system had any authority over you.
The only point of official contact between the two worlds was at the top, where the Khitan king spent half the year reigning as a Chinese-style emperor, and half of it touring around his nomadic subjects as Great Khan in a mobile court. The Khitans recognized that although the king was theoretically 50-50, extended exposure to civilization would tend to Sinify him over time, and his descendants even more so. This is why they mandated that every empress was a pure-strain barbarian from a wild clan. They expected these formidable women to wield influence over their sons and to ensure that as the years rolled past and the royal clan grew more and more Chinese, they would be replenished each generation with the barbarian perspective of their mothers. This totally worked, but also resulted in no end of conflict between the empresses and their palace retainers, who exemplified different worlds.6
Sometimes you read about a social or legal system, and you are just certain that it could not be stable. I had this reaction reading about the Spartan diarchy as a kid, and I had it again reading about the Khitans last year. But their system not only endured, it flourished, and eventually turned into the Liao Dynasty which ruled China for centuries. And it functioned basically as it said it would on the tin — the civilized parts of their empire keeping things efficient and organized, supporting craftsmen and tradespeople; while the Strategic Nomad Reserve was always there ready to be called on in times of war, and prevented the administration from getting too soft and decadent.
I learned about the Khitans in F.W. Mote’s wonderful Imperial China: 900-1800, and I bring them up mostly as a way of explaining why I cannot do this book justice, while still attempting to give you a taste of why it’s great. The book, like it says in the title, covers nine hundred years of history of a continent-sized region. It is over one thousand pages long, and those are large pages with small type. To call it a doorstopper of a book is to imply the existence of a very big door. Everything I have just told you about the Khitans, and a whole lot more besides, fits into roughly the first 3% of this book, and it only gets denser and more action-packed from there. Everything I have just told you about the Khitans is a tangent in this book, and it is full of many more such wonderful, thought-provoking tangents.
So we are 3,000 words into this review, and I have not gotten to the remaining 97% of the book. But that’s okay, because in a sense it’s all just about the same thing. Don’t get me wrong, Mote’s book is extraordinarily wide-ranging. It covers everything from the development of Neo-Confucian philosophy to the economics of water transport, and from Tibetan military adventures to Song dynasty literary trends. It is mostly about a thousand years of Chinese history and all the many events that occurred, but there, pulsing under the surface, is the age-old confrontation between city and steppe. Sometimes it’s a steady heartbeat, sometimes the anguished throbbing of an infected tooth, but it never stops, it goes on and on. What to do about the troublesome neighbors, and what it means for us to be us and for them to be them is the central question of Chinese history, certainly in this period and perhaps for all times before and after as well. The Khitans are a tangent, but Mote begins the book with them because they stand in for a thousand years of conflict and identity crisis and reconciliation repeated again and again.
So instead of trying to summarize the book, I will tell you about another, very different tangent. Of necessity, Mote mostly sticks to the big picture, the broad themes, the huge wars and social movements and cataclysmic events. But every so often he breaks that rule and zooms way in on particular people and places, and none more so than for the man, the ultimate player character of the second millennium, the least likely conqueror of all time. No, of course I’m not talking about Genghis Khan, I’m talking about the guy who made him look like a chump — the “abundantly martial” (洪武), the “great progenitor” (太祖), the peasant boy who founded the Ming dynasty, Zhu Yuanzhang.
In the 1370s, John V Palaiologos received a letter7 from the Far East addressed to the Emperor of “Fu Lin” (an ancient Chinese word for Rome), apologizing for the fact that there had been no correspondence for the past 700 years:
To the Esteemed Emperor of the Great Roman Empire: We write to you across the vast expanse of the seas, having heard of your illustrious reign and the grandeur of your nation, the ‘Romaioi’ as our merchants have informed us. We, too, have recently restored order to our land after a period of turmoil… But when the nation began to arouse itself, We, as a simple peasant of Huaiyu, conceived the patriotic idea to save the people.
In the modern era, many leaders exaggerate the humbleness of their origins. In antiquity, this was less common. But the Ming founder had no need to exaggerate. He wasn’t just a “simple peasant,” he was an orphan from Anhui province, then and now one of the poorest regions of China. Pretty much any time has been a bad time to be a peasant from Anhui province, but this time was especially bad — the Yuan (Mongol) dynasty had lost the Mandate of Heaven. It was easy to tell that the gods were enraged, because first drought, then locusts had swept through the land and the people were subsisting on grass and tree bark. And now, to finish the job, the plague was here. Zhu’s father and mother both quickly succumbed, and then his elder siblings (he was the youngest of many) began to die as well. He and one surviving brother watched their family die one by one — too poor to call a doctor, too poor to eat, too poor even to pay for a burial. The corpses lay in the house, and Zhu Yuanzhang and his brother lay together on the ground and wept.
When the brothers recovered from their illness, they carried the corpses of their family to a barren field, and a sudden flash food triggered a landslide that covered the bodies.8 This “heaven burial” was actually the second of the many miracles and omens said to have occurred in Zhu Yuanzhang’s life. The first was that as a baby he had nearly died, until his mother had promised to dedicate him to a nearby Buddhist temple. Sitting by his parents’ graves, he remembered this story, asked himself what he would do if he had 10x more agency, then shaved his head and went to become the Huangjue Temple’s newest novice. But things were not much better at the temple: famine and plague had arrived there too, and soon after his arrival the head monk announced that all of the brethren would have to go out into the wilderness, perform ceremonies, beg, and earn their own keep. But Zhu Yuanzhang had just arrived: he did not know how to chant sutras, he did not know how to perform ceremonies, so he went out into the devastated land as a fake monk and a con artist. He learned to roam in the hill country and to sleep in dry streambeds, he learned to predict the changes of wind and weather, learned to avoid trouble from wild animals and brigands, learned about the common people, how to impress and how to beg. He wandered all over the Huai River valley, learning…
When the ruling authorities have so obviously provoked the ire of the gods, strange things begin to happen. Cults and secret societies spread like mushrooms after the rain. In 14th century China, in Anhui province, the most powerful of these cults was the Red Turbans, whose doctrine was a bizarre combination of apocalyptic Buddhism and Manichean Christianity. A secret underground cult trying to overthrow the government might find some use in a wandering fake monk/con-artist familiar with every wrinkle of the landscape and constantly traveling from place to place. Such a person would be very good at escaping notice right under the authorities’ searching eyes, and could carry coded messages, say, or report on troop movements. We don’t know whether Zhu Yuanzhang began working for the Red Turbans at this time, all we know is that one day while he was away begging, government troops were tipped off that there were links between Huangjue Temple and the growing rebellion, and burned the place to the ground. Upon returning and seeing the smoldering ruins and the bodies of his friends, Zhu Yuanzhang once again changed careers and joined the Red Turban army.
The Red Turban rebellion poses many questions to the amateur historian, but the one I keep coming back to is this: “How much military potential was there in your elementary school class?” The men of Anhui Province who armed themselves with farm implements and began killing officials and opening prisons were not trained. Very few of them had ever served in the army,9 certainly none of them had read the military classics, or studied strategy or tactics or logistics. China, unlike feudal Europe or Japan, was an agrarian society without military tradition and without a fighting aristocracy to inspire imitation from the lower classes. And yet, within a few decades, a small circle of Zhu Yuanzhang’s childhood friends had risen to prominence as extraordinarily successful generals and staff officers. The closest comparison I have for it is Napoleon, who also seemed to constantly be cultivating genius-level battlefield commanders out of every rando close to him. Mote is as confused as I am, and can only say, “It is a striking demonstration of the high quality of the human resources available to a political leader.” Come the moment, and the men will come.
When he joined the Red Turbans (or when he “joined” officially), Zhu Yuanzhang was put in command of a platoon of ten men. As with most startups, the Red Turbans were an organization where seniority did not matter much, and where demonstrated success resulted in rapid accrual of additional responsibilities. Zhu Yuanzhang immediately established a reputation for bravery and competence, was given more men to command, and then began racking up an incredible record of battlefield successes, resulting in further promotion. His meteoric rise quickly attracted another small army, of “advisors.” You have to understand: every Confucian scholar-official has spent his entire life training for this moment. The empire is crumbling, the mandate is slipping, and an unlettered peasant is on the make and clearly favored by the gods. Confucian gentlemen watch minor military skirmishes the way private wealth managers watch SEC Form D filings: like vultures. You want to pounce when the young man is clearly on a trajectory for greatness, but not successful in the eyes of the world just yet. That is when he can be guided… molded… it’s for his own good, and the good of the country.
Unfortunately, they all failed. Upon his (relatively bloodless) final defeat of the Mongols and accession to the throne, Zhu Yuanzhang constructed a ruling ideology and a system of government more hostile to intellectual sophistication and political dynamism than any China had seen in centuries. One of his first imperial acts was to order an intricate clockwork mechanism built for his predecessor smashed. Next he set about terrorizing the literati by ordering the gruesome execution of thousands of officials. There is a real irony to this, but in the long polarity between steppe and civilization that governs Chinese history, it has sometimes been the barbarian warlords who favored philosophy and the arts, while all too often civilization has curdled into madness and grievously persecuted her own best and brightest. The first real emperor of unified China set the pattern and thereby coined the phrase “焚書坑儒” or “burn the books and bury the scholars.”
A key component of this reign of terror was the privatization of government, in the sense that it became a “family matter.” Prior to Zhu Yuanzhang, the emperor’s control of officialdom was far from absolute. But the ancient sages themselves had defended familial despotism and the absolute authority of the patriarch over his descendants, so by defining matters of governance as a “family matter,” Zhu Yuanzhang very cleverly established the ideological basis for absolute monarchy, and did so in a way that the Confucian bureaucracy would find difficult to oppose without seeming hypocritical. His great schema for how Ming governance should run forever was called the “Ancestral Injunctions,” and written in the style of a wise father giving stern instructions to his descendants. This guaranteed that they would be especially hard for any future emperor to modify.
History might have turned out very differently had the second Ming emperor, Zhu Yuanzhang’s grandson and a “liberal” reformer, managed to stay on the throne, but he was usurped by his uncle the Prince of Yan (modern day Beijing). The Prince murdered his nephew and much of the royal family, then carved a bloody swathe through the intelligentsia. One of the most respected Confucian scholars was brought to the palace and ordered to endorse the usurpation. When he refused and instead accused the new emperor of murder, he was beaten by the guards. Undeterred, he continued to revile and berate the emperor, who then ordered that his tongue be cut out to silence him. As the blood poured out of his mouth, the prostrate scholar used the tip of his finger to continue tracing out curses and accusations in his own blood on the palace pavement. Finally, he was taken away and executed by gradual dismemberment, and his relatives and associates exterminated “to the tenth degree of relationship.” Since he had several times proctored the imperial examinations, this effectively meant a purge of every civil service official and their families. In this way, the pattern of relationship between emperor and bureaucracy begun by Zhu Yuanzhang was confirmed.
Zhu Yuanzhang’s imperial system was explicitly architected for stasis, but real stagnation is only possible in a closed system. Stasis is impossible for China, because imperial senescence merely invites the troublesome neighbors to come and make things more dynamic again. And so, three centuries after Zhu Yuanzhang’s rebellion expelled the Mongols, his distant descendant sat helplessly paralyzed by his Ancestral Injunctions as the nation plunged ever deeper into sclerosis and the Manchurians gathered at the gates. First, they plundered the Ming ancestral tombs and desecrated the bodies of Zhu Yuanzhang and his many children and grandchildren. Then one day the emperor climbed the hill within the imperial grounds and saw the smoke rising from where the invaders were looting and despoiling his city. He might have led the palace guards out in a final sortie, the sort of romantic last stand that schoolboys learn about with tears in their eyes. But instead he attended to his family matters: the Ancestral Injunctions were very clear about what his duties were. First he poisoned his wife, then he drank himself into a stupor and tried to murder all of his daughters and concubines. His sloppy swordsmanship achieved barely any clean kills, and most of them bled to death in agony. Then he hanged himself in a beautiful new shrine that had just been named the “Pavilion of Imperial Longevity.” And with that the Ming dynasty ended, and barbarian rule returned.
It isn’t actually ducks.
Of course there are traces, which I’ve discussed at length in past book reviews. To name just two: the genetic traces of steppe invasion are very apparent in Northern Chinese bloodlines, and the culinary traces of the Qing in particular are still around today.
In Chinese historiography, two terms often used to describe liminal peoples are “cooked” and “raw.” A “cooked” barbarian is on their way to becoming Chinese (or in the case of a civilizational defector, returning to Chinese-ness), a “raw” barbarian is far from assimilability and probably going to cause trouble.
The decisive thing they actually did was to adopt surnames, which as James C. Scott will tell you is about the most forceful possible way to reject your barbarian heritage.
The differences in laws could be extreme. For instance, under Chinese law, as in most “civilized” places, treason was punished with ultimate severity and brutality. But in many “barbarian” cultures, treason isn’t actually a huge deal (almost akin to a playground fight) and defeated rebels are customarily forgiven. The Khitans, again, simply did both. Traitors were executed if they lived under city law, and received amnesty if they were under tribal law.
One such an empress, upon the death of her husband, was asked by a Chinese courtier if she would follow ancient custom and be buried alongside him. She responded: “I of course do not refuse to join the Emperor underground, but my children are young and the country has no leader, so I am not free to do that.” Then she ordered that her right hand be severed at the wrist to represent her within her husband’s tomb.
The letter is now in the Turkish state archives.
Years later as emperor, Zhu Yuanzhang would compose a poem:
“Buried without inner or outer coffins, the bodies wrapped in worn old garments, placed in a scant three-foot grave, and what ceremonial offerings could we make?”
The Yuan dynasty preferred to keep only ethnic Mongols and a few Turkic allies under arms, and heavily discouraged the native Chinese from military activities.
My late father liked to read scholarly Chinese history. I got him the Mote book for Christmas, and he read it twice in the Winter and Spring. He was an undemonstrative man. That Summer, he said to me "That Mote book is REALLY GOOD." Which is the highest praise I ever heard him bestow on any book.
I highly endorse reviewing all historic books through the lens of how they impact classic 4X strategy games.
Also, how similar is the Khitan "okay, THESE guys will be the warriors, riding horses, doing falconry, and THOSE guys will be the bureaucrats, governors and tax collectors, and they'll marry in their groups, but not try to usurp each other's roles, and so we'll get the benefits of both groups" to say, Indian caste systems? Which were, I think, themselves imposed by conquest elites? (People who know Indian history better than me, please insult and correct me)