When China contained the world
The Tang Dynasty is to a great extent a contemporary favorite because of the norms of the modern day West. It was a notionally native dynasty which was also open to outside influences and was strengthened by its cosmopolitan tenor. The merit-based industry of the Song lacks scale and romantic glamor. The Ming withdrew from the world after the the voyages of Zheng He. And the Manchus were outsiders and so were more exotic than cosmopolitan. During the ancient Han Dynasty the Chinese were the world for all practical purposes.
This tendency of co-opting the Tang for modern needs, a case-study of China as a cosmopolitan empire, not only is flat and lacks nuance, but ignores other aspects of this period in Chinese history which Western moderns may find unappealing. The Tang were characterized by the dominance of aristocratic values, a cabal of elite noble lineages in the capital who for all practical purposes monopolized the bureaucracy. Its foreign conquests were often done via native proxies, and divide and conquer (sound familiar?). During the second half of the Tang period the dynasty was in decline, and was given to bouts of persecution of disfavored foreign religions (all except for Daoism), and massacres of foreigners. All this is not to say that the Tang were “bad.” Or frankly “good.” It seems that such judgments bear less fruit than a genuine descriptive examination of the history and culture of this distinctive period in Chinese history. That is what China’s Cosmopolitan Empire: The Tang Dynasty does, even if the title naturally catches the attention of the typical Western reader.
I come to this with some knowledge of this region and period, having read works such as T’ang China: The Rise of the East in World History. A more accurate title for China’s Cosmopolitan Empire might have been “China’s Last Empire,” insofar as I have pointed out before that the Manchu administered areas outside China proper differently from China for most of that dynasty’s history. Of course the claim that the Tang are native, while the Manchu are foreign, is to some extent a matter of art. The Li family of the Tang dynasty likely emerged out of the milieu of partly barbarized borderland warlords who dominated north China after the fall of the Han. Likely they had Turk and Xianbei ancestors, and they maintained many of the customs and outlooks of these non-Han peoples. Emperor Taizong fought like a nomad when necessary with native skill. The early Tang developed symbiotic relationships with nomadic federations such as that of the Uyghurs to buttress their Empire and guard their borders, relationships cemented by the fact that the early Tang emperors could move with ease among the barbarians because of shared experiences, values and background. When Taizong broke the Turks he took upon himself a barbarian title in addition to his role as emperor of China, subsuming within himself what had previously been rival opposites. It is notable the early Tang apparently also practiced the horse sacrifice on occasion, a common feature of Central Eurasian societies.
Of course unlike the Manchu and the Yuan (Mongol) the Tang were not alien overlords despite their partial Central Eurasian provenance. The Li family claimed descent from Laozi, patronized Chinese high culture on a grand scale, and the emperors themselves were civilized aesthetes who produced original poetry. Unlike the Yuan and Manchu the non-Han populations which settled in China proper during the early generations of the Tang dynasty were not given a superior status to the natives, and on the contrary like the Li family themselves many of these individuals assimilated to a Han identity and constructed false genealogies to elide the fact of their foreign provenance. It would be wrong to suggest I think that the Tang produced a hybrid culture, rather, they fostered a cosmpolitanism with Chinese characteristics.
If you are reading this now likely you will have read my review of Empires of the Silk Road. It was fascinating to read China’s Cosmopolitan Empire in the wake of that work because the intersection of concepts, facts and trends were palpable. The Tang dynasty was a period when China was a Central Eurasian power, operating in a three-way game with the Turks to the north and the Tibetans to the south. The scope of the Tang’s reach is evident when one considers that in 751 Chinese proxy forces (there were very few Han in the notional Chinese force) were defeated by outriders of the Abbasid Caliphate along with their Tibetan allies at the river Talas. Up to this point Chinese and Muslim political and culture influence vied in the Fergana valley, which today spans parts of Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. It is likely that the battle itself is important only in hindsight, but it marks a convenient turning point when Central Asia irrevocably shifted its focus west to the world of Islam, and lost its ancient connections to the east and China.
Those connections were not, and are not, trivial. The few generations of the Tang were at the tail end of what sometimes is termed the “Buddhist Age.” During this period Buddhism served as a common cultural connection across much of Asia to the east of Persia. Though the city states of Central Asia were multireligious, it is arguable that Buddhism was the most prominent of those religions. It was from Central Asia that Buddhism arrived in China, and flourished in the centuries after the fall of Han. Though Buddhism was likely in decline relative to what we now term Hinduism in South Asia, it was still a relatively vital cultural force, and far more prevalent in what are today Afghanistan and Pakistan, as well as in the east in Bengal. In Empires of the Silk Road Christopher Beckwith argues that many Indian concepts and institutions which came to shape Islamic culture during the Abbasid Caliphate were actually transmitted via Buddhism (it is clear that there were Buddhists in Sindh when the Arab armies conquered it). The Barmakid family which was extremely powerful during the early years of the Abbasids was of course from the Buddhist priesthood of Balkh. And just as ideas flowed west from Buddhist northwest India, so they flowed east from Buddhist Central Asia. Indian Buddhist eminences also took the route through Central Asia to China to spread their teachings or aid in translations. During these early centuries Buddhism was an exotic foreign religion in China, not indigenized, and the Silk Road was the vector via which came a stream of foreign sacred objects and texts from India. To the east the Silla kingdom of Korea and the Fujiwaras of Japan patronized Buddhism as part of their imperialistic project, resulting in several decades in which Buddhistmonks could take advantage of an international network which flowed uninterrupted from South Asia to Japan.
Of course very few Indian or Central Asia monks went to Japan. Rather, much more likely was that Indian, Central Asian, Chinese, Korean and Japanese Buddhists would meet in Chang’an, the capital of the Tang which also lay at the eastern terminus of the Silk Road. Though India was the Jerusalem of Buddhism, China quickly became its Rome and Constantinople. The process of indigenization of Buddhism in China was lent a helping hand by the armies of the caliphs, as the 7th century progressed the Muslims pushed into Afghanistan and the marches of South Asia, and conquered the Buddhist and Hindu kings who patronized the great monasteries. Prominent Buddhists, such as the Barmakid family, no doubt converted to Islam. With the Tang withdrawal from Central Asia after 750 Islam totally absorbed the former Buddhist city-states. The international was broken, and China had to rely on its own resources. It is an odd parallelism that to a great extent the eruption of Islam, and its absorption of the lands from with Europe and China were evangelized in their respective dominant institutional religions, led to the rise of a self-conscious Christian West and Buddhist East. Europe was the faith, and the faith was Europe, because Islam and swallowed whole the domains of eastern Christianity. Similarly, as the centuries progressed the holy sites of Buddhism were to fall under the sway of Islamicized Turkish warlords (this dynamic was unfortunately on display with the destruction of the Buddhas of Bamyan).
But the resources of Buddhism in China were many. The Tang era is generally thought to be the period when Buddhism was most powerful and esteemed as an institutional religion across the Chinese class structure. The anti-Buddhist Confucian Han Yu was speaking from a position of weakness in relative comparison to the disdain or contempt which later Confucian scholars would exhibit toward Buddhism. It must also be noted that Buddhism was not officially the most favored religion during this period, Daoism was. One of the ways in which the Tang ruling family emphasized their Chinese character was their descent from Laozi, and they tacitly tolerated attacks upon Buddhism as a debased foreign religion which was inappropriate for the Chinese by prominent Daoists. This is a contrast to what occurred during the reign of Khubilai Khan, who favored the Buddhists and forced the Daoists to cease their attacks. Nevertheless, this is a case where the Tang did not eat their own dog food; Buddhism was patronized extensively, given favor, and the monasteries accumulated great wealth. The similarities to medieval Catholic Christianity are manifold, as bequests by wealthy individuals were often a form of operational tax evasion, and Tang armies marched with the blessing of Buddhist abbots. Buddhist ideas spread across China, and stories were told of how ignorant individuals were sent to hell for sacrificing animals to native gods. The monasteries became so powerful that during the later years of the dynasty there was a great persecution which ultimately destroyed Buddhism’s status as an elite religion, and reserved for it the role of the opium of the masses. When the first Jesuits arrived in China they dressed as Buddhist priests to assimilate, but found they received no hearing from the powers that be. They were dismissed due to their low status as clerics in a popular religion. That is, Buddhism (in later years the Catholic missionaries tried very hard to make their religion distinctive from Pure Land Buddhism).
By the end of the Tang Buddhism was no longer a foreign religion which held some glamor for the elite. Rather, it was an indigenized popular cult. Tang cosmpolitanism seemed to exhibit a tendency whereby the foreign transmuted and became native. Whereas earlier rebellions relied on Daoism, institutional Buddhism became a new avenue for secret societies and organizations of sedition. In fact, during the 18th and 19th century Hui Islamic revivalists had to use terms derived from Pure Land Buddhism in the course of fomenting revolt because symbolism from that sect had percolated into the consciousness of the general Chinese population to the extent of it becoming common semantic currency. One aspect of the later Tang that led to the emergence of the Song which might be of foreign provenance was the rise of military bands cemented by bonds of fictive kinship. This is not a novel idea, as it as occurred in several societies, but in light of the central role of real kinship in the Confucian order, and the strong Turkic influence on the Tang, one has to wonder if this is the Central Eurasian comitatus emerging in a Chinese context, totally extracted and now assimilated. But one must not make too much of this, even if the Song Dynasty arose in part propelled by traditions and customs which the Tang imported from the steppe, it became the civilian Chinese dynasty par excellence.
This deeper texture often renders characterizations of cosmopolitan or xenophobic trite. A simple narrative of the Tang is that the period between 600 and 750 was one of cosmopolitan expansionism, while that after 750 was one of slow long xenophobic decline. Descriptively this is not false, but it is not as if China was insulated from the rest of the world, and moved along an endogenous track. The Buddhist Age, in which Tang China was the preeminent state, gave way after 750 to what was operationally an Islamic Age, when the Abbasid Caliphs were for one century near a world empire, from the borders of China to the margins of the Atlantic. The inward focus of the Tang was partially a function of a collapse of a greater world order which had nourished them and against which they had tested their mettle. The trade routes which allowed for the Sogdians to flourish frayed, with the arc of the Caliphate expanding outward and cutting the ties which bound the older civilized centers together. Though I am cautious about a hydraulic metaphor, it seems not too much a stretch that the rise of Islam and the decline of the Tang operated in concert.
Obviously I’ve just skimmed some interesting points in this book. I haven’t discussed literature, city planning, rural life or the nature of the mercantile cities of the lower Yangtze. It’s all in there and all worthy of note, but, I want to get back to the point about cosmpolitanism. There were many foreigners in China during this period. Tang Guangzhou was a city dominated by foreigners, with Arabs being especially prominent. In much of northern China Uyghurs dominated money-lending. There are many physical depictions of people of western Eurasian appearance in artifacts from the Tang period. Where are these people’s genes? I pointed out that one problem with an Indo-European origin for ancient Chinese in Empires of the Silk Road is that the genetic data seem clear that the Han people are very distinct from those to the west. And, that groups like Uyghurs are recent hybridization events between two distinct gene pools from western and eastern Eurasia. There are isolated cases of prominent generals in ancient China who were of reputed western origin who turn out to have genes which indicate that they were western. But the modern data from China show very little (if any) western ancestry.
One immediately wonders about the adequacies of the samples we have now. The HapMap had 45 unrelated Chinese from Beijing. The overseas samples are mostly from people whose families are derived from Fujian or Guangdong. But what about Guangdong? Where did the foreigners in Guangzhou go? The easiest explanation is that they were all massacred as is described in the histories. But could all foreigners in China have been massacred? Were they all recognizably foreign? As it happens Chinese speaking Muslims carry a significant western quanta of ancestry, even if it is the minority. The origin stories for this group all derive from men who arrived from western Asia, so this stands to reason. And, it shows that western ancestry does exist in some Chinese populations in China proper. So is there another reason that it is not evident among the Han? I will give a reason that Greg Cochran gave years ago for why the area around Rome is not dominated by Greek genes: the foreigners lived in cities, and the cities were demographic sinks. The cultural cosmpolitanism of Tang China had important long term historical consequences. But its genetic cosmpolitanism was less significant because the locus of that cosmpolitanism was centered around evolutionary dead-ends. The cities of yore live on in faded memory, but their blood has long gone extinct.
“the foreigners lived in cities, and the cities were demographic sinks”
Was this true even in ancient times?
My Chinese teacher in Taiwan was a Hui (Chinese Muslim). According to her, the Hui disfavor marriage with Chinese and would rather marry a Uighur, a foreign Muslim, or any foreigner. This doesn’t mean that the Hui don’t marry Chinese, just that there is a conscious, constant struggle to maintain a distinct identity. “Chinese culture is stroinger than anything, even Islam”, she said, not happily.
As far as I could tell, the Taiwan Hui were pretty well assimilated and modern-oriented, though many of them were concentrated in relatively lowly professions.
Let me recommend again Lewis’s “Sanctioned Violence” book. A frequemnt theme in contemporary Sinology is that the early Sinologists, almost all Catholic or Protestant missionaries, too strongly favored the Confucian strain in Chinese culture, which was never as dominant as it pretended to be. This was exacerbated by the fact that certain aspects of Ch’ing COnfucianism and government could be assimilated to Enlightenment ideas (e.g., the absence of a hereditary aristocracy).
One alternate tradition, the military tradition as opposed to the Confucian civil tradition, was more likely to be foreign, Buddhist, or Taoist, and often had frequent connection to the wives of the emperors. Sexiness and romanticism seemed to be associated with military men and families, and I heard rumors to that effect in Taiwan too.
joe, much more true in the past than today. the USA was the first nation where cities became more healthful than rural areas in the early 20th century because of public health campaigns.
“the foreigners lived in cities, and the cities were demographic sinks”
Jared Diamond’s book Collapse also mention that small population with limited genentic pool vanished on some those small islands. Could these foreigners inbred themself into extinction in China?
Again Chariots might not be good indication of IE estabolished civilization in China. The same is true for nuclear weapons in moden China, which does not indicate Amercans invasion into China and bringing nukes into china. Diffusion is right word for many technology. So paper or gun powder is reverse example.
Could these foreigners inbred themself into extinction in China?
unlikely. cities are not like islands at all, people are always moving in. and there’s plenty of evidence of admixture (e.g., the western general whose dna was recovered from the northern and southern dynasties period had an east asian wife). look at the hui.
I think that the Habsburgs and the Bedouins have proved that it is very hard to inbreed into extinction. I posted a Habsburg genealogy here awhile back where there were about 20 ancestors in the generation where there should have been 64, and my bet is that the inbreeding got worse if you traced back farther,
I knew a Habsurg-American whose family was from Croatia once (but which had no Croatian ancestry). He had the jaw and the bad health but also a certain degree of aristocratic confidence.
I think that the Habsburgs and the Bedouins have proved that it is very hard to inbreed into extinction
but the hapsburgs weren’t average people living on subsistence. their mortality rate would have been much higher if they’d had challenging lives i bet. as it is, after a few centuries the spanish branch actually did succumb to the problems of inbreeding. as for the bedouins, there’s evidence that inbreeding rates have *increased* in most arab societies recently. also, the bedouin have more black african ancestry through the matrinlineage that most city arabs, suggesting that they were relatively exogamous in some ways (probably because of their mobility and role in trafficking slaves).
btw, i think what diamond is talking about is basically mutational meltdown:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutational_meltdown
Again Chariots might not be good indication of IE estabolished civilization in China.
who is arguing for this on this weblog btw?
Invade the World
Invite the World
The Li family claimed descent from Kings of the Western Liang and earlier as military men during the Han. While I wouldn’t be surprised if they also claimed descent from Confucius, that wouldn’t be there primary source of legitimacy. Icing on the cake as it were. While there were plenty of mixed Han/Nomadic states during the sixteen kingdoms era, the Western Liang wasn’t one of them. That is not to say that genealogically speaking, the Li family did not include ancestry of foreign provenance, as they most certainly did (witness the diffusion of bloodlines in Europe with German nobles in Russia, Dutch Kings in England, French nobles ruling Sweden, German origin English descended monarchs everywhere), but I find it a stretch to describe them as culturally mixed barbarians when they themselves would most likely have been offended by such an utterance.
Also I am poleaxed that you completely omit mention of the effects of An Lushan’s rebellion on the subsequent decline of the Tang empire.
Uyghurs were involved in Tang dynasty history. They are natural Euroasian with some Caucasoid feature like blue eyes. However, Tang emperors had always treat them as barbarians or mercenaries. These barbarians often switch side during tang time (today also). Well, that is what mercenaries are. No loyalty.
‘the western general whose dna was recovered from the northern and southern dynasties period had an east asian wife’
- Razib, could you explain this?
There is a very simple reason why cities were demographic sinks in ancient China. Most prominent cities in China, although having thousand-year histories, can only trace continuity back to the Ming, like Xian. If a city was lucky enough to escape being massacred and burnt down during one invasion, it wasn’t lucky enough during the next revolution. If I remember correctly, Xian was basically rebuilt from ashes during either the Ming or Qing. This is also why when you visit China, all the cities basically look like they are McDonaldly franchised with the same modern urban planning and concrete buildings.
There was quite extensive steppe and Central Asian involvement in Chinese life during the Tang dynasty, especially in the military and in trade. Partly this was simply because of the westward expansion of China during this era.
Before the Li family became the royal family, they were from western China and were intermarried with Turks. A few of its members adopted a quasi-Turkish lifestyle, and various foreign products and customs became chic. (Persians and Arabs in the ports in the South also also contributed). As time went on, though, relations with the Turks became unfriendly.
This question is heavily-argued in a not necessarily very fruitful way. The traditional Chinese view was so Sinocentric that the official history of the Yuan doesn’t really tell you that Genghis Khan was not in any way Chinese. The traditional Sinological view also mostly accepted a Confucian definition of China which minimized relations to non-Chinese, and debts to them.
Against that, though, as my Muslim Chinese teacher said, Chinese culture is one of the most powerfully assimilative cultures ever, and non-Han have always been outnumbered in China by something like 10 or 20 to 1.
An Lu-Shan was a Sogdian (Central Asian Iranian, like a Tajik roughly) who held high positions in the military, rebelled toward the end of the dynasty, and was defeated with Uighur help.
Of the great Chinese dynasties, the Tang was the one most influenced by foreigners (unless you count the Yuan as a great Chinese dynasty, which it isn’t).
This ancient painting show that Tang General Gou ziyi made Uighurs switch side on battle field by convincing them who would have final victory.
Also I am poleaxed that you completely omit mention of the effects of An Lushan’s rebellion on the subsequent decline of the Tang empire.
i don’t think that the rebellion of such a nature was particularly unexpected considering the political strategy the tang were employing.
Uyghurs were involved in Tang dynasty history. They are natural Euroasian with some Caucasoid feature like blue eyes.
just a minor note: the uyghurs of that period are not really the ancestors of the people we term uyghurs today. they were more stereotypically turkic steppe nomads. the modern uyghurs emerged from an amalgamation of turkic peoples with the natives of the tarim basin around ~1000.
Razib, could you explain this?
mitochondrial DNA was extracted out of a tomb of a chinese general of reputed barbarian provenance from the 6th century. it was haplogroup U, definitely western eurasian (common in europe). his wife, who i believed was buried with him, had an eastern eurasian haplogroup.
Ah this is where I part ways with you Razib. While the power of the Marxist school of historiography which attributes events to underlying socio-economic phenomenon is compelling, I have to admit it does have it’s limitations. One of which is it’s heavy handed reliance on inevitabilities and omittance of the importance of the individual. I don’t think there was anything inevitable about the Anshi rebellion, but rather that it resulted from a series of glaringly obvious errors by emperor Xuanzong. An Lushan should have been executed for insubordination early in his career but for the emperor’s clemency. Multiple reports from other officials that pointed out that An Lushan was planning sedition were ignored. An Lushan was given THREE simultaneous governorships in the heart of Northern China by the emperor despite the obvious concentration of power away from the court that this caused. The final draw was when Xuanzong actually dismissed a whole slew of generals and appointed a new group of non-Han all recommended by An Lushan. This had to have required a degree of obliviousness that seems nigh superhuman. An Lushan’s power ultimately derived from what the Tang Court chose to give and not from his Sogdian connections. It was his political acumen and toadying that got him as far as it did, not military skill. If An Lushan had died from falling off his horse, then the An Shi rebellion would have never occurred. A decade of civil war would have been avoided, and subsequently the latter Tang’s dependence on local gentry elites and foreign barbarians like the Uighurs to raise manpower would have never emerged.
jing, perhaps. i assume that tang barbarian federates would have gotten out of control in 800, or 850, if not 750. in any political order there is a small percentage change that the order will collapse in a given year. so naturally that means that collapse or unraveling will occur *at some point* it is possible that individual circumstances around the rebellion of 750 were deviated from expectation, insofar as the tang order might have been robust for another 50 or 100 years. that might have resulted in a whole host of historical differences. for example, after the battle of talas the tang were organizing for another wave of attacks to the west to beat back the arabs, but with the an lushan rebellion obviously that was not possible. an extra century of tang political robusticity might have resulted in the world of islam stabilizing further to th west than it eventually did.
but i wans’t interested in focusing on these sorts of narrative hinges in this post.
re: ren’s comment. there is something to this, but i think the same can be said for many western cities. rome went from 1 million to 50,000 in 150 years between 500 and 650. unlike chinese cities the monuments remain, but the people are likely immigrants from the countryside. what i am saying about cities is a model like so occurs:
city population = (migration) + (natural increase of natives)
i believe that “natural increase of natives” was generally actually negative in sign, and moderate in magnitude. in contrast during times of peak political stability and power of great cities migration was very positive. so cities swelled. when that political stability and power abated, migration ceased, and the natural decrease kicked in to shrink them back down to size.
The Li family was intermarried with Turks? I had the impression that it was with Xianbei, a Mongolic or Tungusic people.
The Li family was intermarried with Turks? I had the impression that it was with Xianbei, a Mongolic or Tungusic people.
both. “turk” is something of a catchall term from what i can term.
I see. But given that the Gokturks were a major player during the Tang Dynasty, shouldn’t they be distinguished from the Eastern Eurasian Xianbei who migrated into China centuries earlier? Some readers might get the impression that the Tang imperial line was related to the Gokturks, which was not the case as far as I know.
eventine, the author above mentions xianbei and “turkic peoples.” but yes, i do think your point that usage of the term like this might be very confusing is accurate, as it is somewhat anachronistic (just like talking about the relationship between and ancient uyghurs is probably anachronistic).
“Dutch Kings in England”: just the one. But Frogs, Krauts and Jocks galore, plus Danes and Welshish. Even a few Englishmen.
But Frogs, Krauts and Jocks galore, plus Danes and Welshish.
Got all the others, but who are “Jocks”?
I believe in A Farewell to Alms Greg Clark favorably contrasted the public health practices in China relative to England as an explanation as to why they had a lower death rate (which has important effects in his Malthusian model).
Jocks = Scots
“The Li family claimed descent from Kings of the Western Liang and earlier as military men during the Han. While I wouldn’t be surprised if they also claimed descent from Confucius, that wouldn’t be there primary source of legitimacy.”
They claimed descent from Lao Tzu, on the grounds that they shared the same surname. This was why Tang emperors frequently favoured religious Daoism, even though the period was a golden age for Sinicized Buddhism.
“Let me recommend again Lewis’s “Sanctioned Violence” book. A frequemnt theme in contemporary Sinology is that the early Sinologists, almost all Catholic or Protestant missionaries, too strongly favored the Confucian strain in Chinese culture, which was never as dominant as it pretended to be. “
Confucianism did not exercise an exclusive hold upon the values and beliefs of the general population, but this did not mean that its position was not dominant. Just look at a list of China’s preeminent thinkers, artists and men of letters after the re-unification of China under the Sui – the vast preponderence of them were of a Confucian background/training, almost by definition. In fact, it is as otiose to say of an educated Chinese during the later imperial period that he was a Confucian as it would be to say of any educated European in the 18th century that he was a Classicist.
I’m surprised no one has mentioned the story of Li Shimin’s son becoming so infatuated with his foreign ancestry that he only spoke Turkish, lived in yurts on the palace grounds, and refused to eat anything but barbequed meat.
I was trying to remember that story, Kenneth.
Within government and the military, though, there were alternate (legalist and militarist) traditions which were somewhat secretive, and they had their own texts and traditions. The Confucian domination came and went, but before the Han and between the fall of Han and the end of the Tang or even later it was intermittent. By Ming and Ching it was pretty absolute, though.
There’s an urban legend about the Lee family, that “true” Lee’s are born with split nails on the last toe of their feet. This is a feature found in my extended family members (except my non-Lee mother). As a youngster, I was told this was the result of our ancestors riding horses with stirrups. My pinky toenails have become somehwat mangled with age but the split toenail feature is very clear on my 2 year-old nephew’s feet.
I wonder if there’s any real validity about the split toenail trait? Is this really something just found on Lee’s or do other people have it?
“The Confucian domination came and went, but before the Han and between the fall of Han and the end of the Tang or even later it was intermittent. By Ming and Ching it was pretty absolute, though.”
My impression is that between Han and Sui there was widespread disillusionment with Confucianism, due to the inability of the state-sanctioned ideoogy to keep the empire intact, and it was for this reason that intellectuals turned to esoteric Daoism and Buddhism during the period. I could be wrong, but I recall that the last noteworthy philosophical Daoists lived during the 3rd century AD – the guys who composed exegeses on Lao Zi and Zhuang Zi, or compiled the final redactions (Wang Bi, for example).
If there are other great Daoist thinkers after that, someone please correct me. My impression again is that after re-unification, with the exception of Chan Buddhists, intellectual types were in general staunchly Confucianism.
“My Chinese teacher in Taiwan was a Hui (Chinese Muslim). According to her, the Hui disfavor marriage with Chinese and would rather marry a Uighur, a foreign Muslim, or any foreigner. This doesn’t mean that the Hui don’t marry Chinese, just that there is a conscious, constant struggle to maintain a distinct identity. “Chinese culture is stroinger than anything, even Islam”, she said, not happily. “
Interesting story about your Hui teacher. I think her insights about Chinese culture are both true and poignant. When you read Chinese imperial history, it teems with so many nations and tribes that just all seem to have discretely disappeared, assimilated into oblivion.
During my time in mainland China, however, I found that Hui tended to be on the nationalistic side of the spectrum – as well as highly disdainful of the Uighurs.
Mondo,
I have semi-split pinkie toenails. The outer edge of the toenail is very thick and splits frequently from the rest. My Dad has a similar feature, but in his case the entire pinkie toenail is a narrow thick clump of nail – is this what you’re talking about?
split nails on the last toe of their feet is feature of Han ethnicity, I was told. As a northern Han, I have it too.
Kenn, from what my teacher said the Taiwan Hui, a small minority without (I think) a territorial base, are especially embattled.
On assimilation: F.L.K. Hsu’s “Under the Ancestor’s Shadow” (1948) is an anthropological report on a village in China. Hsu got an anthropology grant to study a supposed Yi village in SW China, but when he got there he found that they were almost entirely Sinified. He resourcefully wrote an anthropological description of a Chinese village. (IIRC these people retained a few customs from their non-Chinese past, which basically had become local Chinese traits. Eberhardt did an enormous, rather fanciful study using local traits to assign various Chinese geographical groups to Tibetan / Lolo / Hmong / Tungus / etc. ancestors.)
The dominance of Confucianism after the Mid-Tang is a reality, but the Confucianism was heavily Buddhicized / Taoized / Legalicized. It was really syncretic under a Confucian flag. The popular religion is eclectic the same way, as I understand, mostly folk + Buddhist + Taoist + Confucian, but with touches of Islam and Christianity sometimes creeping in locally.
Perhaps I should restate it: the Chinese intelligentsia has beeen mostly Confucian for a long time, but there are alternate military / legalist traditions which have maintained themselves in certain families and which, without producing great literature or philosophy, have had a considerable influence on social organization, government, etc. Legalism is condemned almost universally, but there are still important figures who study legalist practice. (As Bismarck said, a good Machiavellian will never admit to being one.)
“Legalism is condemned almost universally, but there are still important figures who study legalist practice. (As Bismarck said, a good Machiavellian will never admit to being one.)”
Nice quote. I think a point worth making is that while Han Feizi is universally reviled, his entire body of work has been kept intact, while so much other stuff (Yin and Yang School for example) has been lost to posterity. People obviously realized that in spite of their moral objections, the man had a great deal to offer.
“the Chinese intelligentsia has beeen mostly Confucian for a long time, but there are alternate military / legalist traditions which have maintained themselves in certain families and which, without producing great literature or philosophy, have had a considerable influence on social organization, government, etc.”
I was just reading yesterday that Wang Yang-ming was heavily into Daoist longevity practices. He is also unusual for an eminent Confucian figure, in that he was a remarkably capable military general (I guess there is also that Hunanese guy who fought against the Taipings). What’s the quote that’s always bandied about by their antiquarian detractors – Zhu Xi was a Buddhist monk, Wang Yangming was a Daoist acolyte?
With regard to Confucianism permeating other adjacent faiths and belief systems – I remember seeing a video in which the civic values of Tibetan Buddhism were enunciated. It was basically just the first few pages of the Confucian “Great Learning” – the passage about how moral conduct on the part of the individual can exert a beneficial influence upon the rest of society. Quoted almost verbatim in fact.
Confucianism lends itself to this kind of cross-adoption and syncretism because at its origins – pre Qin unification – it was a pretty lean, secular ideology. I recall reading (on this site in fact) that while Chinese Muslim scholars objected strenuously to Daoist or Buddhist influence of their faith, they tried very hard to reconcile Islam with Confucian belief – asserting that the Prophet was a sage, etc. They didn’t have any problem at all with that.
I find Song Dynasty Neo-Confucianisn to be quite a bizarre accretion though – as though Neo-Classical Economists decided to weld Dharmic metaphysics to their own beliefs.
I have semi-split pinkie toenails. The outer edge of the toenail is very thick and splits frequently from the rest. My Dad has a similar feature, but in his case the entire pinkie toenail is a narrow thick clump of nail – is this what you’re talking about?
Yep. On my 2 year-old nephew, the split is much more clean. I suspect with age the toenail starts looking more mangly.