Michael Loewe

Warring States Political History

The two and a half centuries commonly known as the age of the Warring States (481–221 B.C.) witnessed the creation of the major political institutions that defined early imperial China. The old league of cities ruled by the Zhou nobility was replaced by a system of territorial states built around unchallenged monarchs who commanded a large number of dependent officials. These in turn were employed to register and mobilize the individual peasant households, primarily for the sake of imposing universal military service. The mass peasant armies of the period entailed the emergence of military specialists who were masters of the theories and techniques of warfare. At the same time, the needs of diplomatic maneuver produced theorists of stratagem and persuasion who formulated new models of interstate relations. The Zhou world was also reinvented as a geographic entity, both through expansion to the south and the southwest and through new patterns of physical mobility that marked differences of status. However, the writings of this period present no tidy portrait of politics or institutions. Since written materials were still rare, difficult to produce, and not widely diffused, “books” tended to emerge, evolve, and survive as the legacy of groups who defined themselves through loyalty to a common master. Members of these groups sought patrons who took an interest in the wisdom or expertise that they claimed to offer. As a consequence, the writings that preserve information about the political history of the period are pragmatic and factional. They are devoted to the policies, philosophies, and actions of those who actively participated in creating the new states, and they defend these actions or philosophies as uniquely efficacious.

The Spring and Autumn Period

This chapter is an account of various transformations that took place during the Spring and Autumn period (770–481 B.C.). It covers the transition from a Zhou feudal system to a multistate system; from the expansion of the Zhou into the Yellow River drainage to the ancient China that spanned the Yellow and Yangzi Rivers and the highlands in the north and the west; from an economy based on manorial management to a market economy; and from a family-based society to one based upon great social mobility. The most significant development in this period was a major break through in the intellectual sphere, in which the moral values of Confucius provided an innovative reinterpretation of feudal ethics. This break through brought Chinese culture into a Jaspersian “Axial Age” of civilization. Thereafter, intellectuals served not only as officials in government but, of more profound impact, also as cultural carriers who interpreted the meaning of life and ideals of society. This new condition in the intellectual sphere continued beyond the Spring and Autumn period, remaining characteristic through out Chinese history. In other words, this break through initiated in the Spring and Autumn period would eventually lead China to develop a persistent, collective identity – Chinese civilization.

The Northern Frontier in Pre–Imperial China

The northern frontier of China has long been recognized as something more than a simple line separating natural zones, political entities, or ethnic groups. This frontier has been represented as the birthplace of independent cultures and the habitat of peoples whose lifestyle, economic activities, social customs, and religious beliefs became, from the Bronze Age onward, gradually but increasingly distant from the civilization of the Central Plain. This distinct cultural region, often called the “Northern Zone” of China, comprises the interlocking desert, steppe, and forest regions from Heilong jiang and Jilin in the east to Xinjiang in the west. The frontier between China and the north has also been envisaged as a bundle of routes and avenues of communications through which peoples, ideas, goods, and faiths flowed incessantly between West and East. In economic terms, it provided the Chinese with a source of foreign goods as well as a market for domestic production. The process by which the northern frontier acquired these qualifications was a long one. While its complexities cannot be captured in a single image, the Great Wall – this symbolic and material line that came into existence as a unified system of fortifications with the establishment of the Qin empire in 221 B.C. – can be seen as the culmination of a long process of cultural differentiation that embraces several aspects.

Crisis and conflict in Han China, 104 BC to AD 9

First published in 1974. This volume illustrates the growth of two attitudes towards government in China during the first century B.C., the one progressive, realist and forward looking, the other conservative, idealist and harking back to the past. It demonstrates the close relationship that existed between political decisions, intellectual policy and the choice of religious observances of state, whilst showing how personal ambitions and the intrigues of the palace were intimately involved with the interplay of these two basis attitudes.

China on the Eve of the Historical Period

This volume describes a history of ancient China, though the term China, as the name of a modern country, did not exist until recent times. The civilization that we have come to identify with present-day China began to be formed perhaps a few thousand years ago, but its geographic scope has undergone continuous change, at no other time coinciding with the present political borders. Therefore, it should be borne in mind that in this chapter the geographical stage here called China is more like a short-hand name for one part of East Asia, east of the Altai Mountains and the Tibetan Plateau. This is an area where early hominids came to settle, as they did in the rest of Eurasia, furnishing the basic populations among which an agricultural way of life began some ten thousand years ago. It is only then that one begins to recognize with in this area a distinctive civilization later to be called Chinese. When we describe the beginnings of the area’s human history, we cannot describe it totally separately from the rest of the human world before 10,000 years ago. the palaeographic stage of east asia and its settlement by humans In 1859 Charles Darwin presented his theory of evolution by natural selection, immediately generating an impassioned debate on the “antiquity of man.” He called on evidence from stratigraphical and faunal correlations, and although in the subsequent century and a half scientists in a number of disciplines have accumulated a great deal of new information, even now only a sketchy and controversial story can be told.

A Biographical Dictionary of the Qin, Former Han and Xin Periods (221 BC - AD 24)

This is a unique and conclusive reference work about the 6,000 individual men and women known to us from Chinas formative first empires. Over decennia Michael Loewe (Cambridge, UK) has painstakingly collected all biographical information available. Not only those are dealt with who set the literary forms and intellectual background of traditional China, such as writers, scholars, historians and philosophers, but also those officials who administered the empire, and the military leaders who fought in civil warfare or with Chinas neighbours. The work draws on primary historical sources as interpreted by Chinese, Japanese and Western scholars and as supplemented by archaeological finds and inscriptions. By devoting extensive entries to each of the emperors the author provides the reader with the necessary historical context and gives insight into the dynastic disputes and their far-reaching consequences. No comparable work exists for this important period of Chinese history. Without exaggeration a real must for historians of both China and other cultures.

Language and Writing

No one needs to be persuaded that language plays a fundamental part in any society’s everyday activities and constitutes one of the most durable fibers in the tapestry of human history. Indeed, language is a defining feature of our species. The present chapter describes the structure, history, and setting of the Chinese language, as well as the first appearance and subsequent development of its script, over the millennium from 1200 B.C., the time of the earliest known written record of Chinese, down to the beginning of the imperial era, ca. 200 B.C. While this is primarily a linguistically slanted presentation, it is important to remain aware of the extent to which language history is intertwined with fundamental issues of cultural history in general. The historian may see in language history a rich record of the lives of real people played out in a real world setting and may find clues even to a people’s prehistory. These kinds of broad historical considerations depend on the narrower work of the linguist. For the linguist, language history is the sum of a painstakingly assembled collection of internal analyses of speech forms and phonetic formulas. The historical linguist is concerned with the evolution of sounds, words, and structures of language, and with linguistic affinities per se. The fact that the linguist’s work is accomplished with little reference to the associated nonlinguistic culture enables the linguist to make an especially valuable contribution to the overall historical study of a people by providing a body of evidence largely independent of the historian’s other sources.

Han foreign relations

As Tsou Yens theory increasingly gained currency, Chinas self-image of its geographical situation underwent a fundamental change. The Han Chinese world order not only existed as an idea, but, more important, also expressed itself in an institutional form. The Han world order was defined mainly in terms of the so-called five-zone or wu-fu theory. The five-zone theory played an important historical role in the development of foreign relations during the Han period. Central to the institutional expressions of the Han understanding of world order is the development of the famous tributary system. The first great challenge faced by Han statesmen in their shaping of a foreign policy emanated from the steppe-based empire to the north, that of the Hsiung-nu. On the financial and material side, Hu-han-yeh was rewarded for his participation in the tributary system. The financial part of the tributary system proved to be particularly attractive to the Hsiung-nu.

Spices and Silk: Aspects of World Trade in the First Seven Centuries of the Christian Era

The earliest steps that led to the exchange of ideas, skills, and material goods between the cultures of the East and the West will probably never be more than a matter of surmise; but the literary and archaeological sources of information that start as a slender trickle at the beginning of the Christian era soon develop into a mighty stream and disclose a tale of human endeavour and ingenuity which few historians can fail to find fascinating and stimulating. During the last half-century or so dedicated scholars such as Pelliot have devoted their major research efforts to the meticulous consideration of the minutiae involved in the subject; and, more recently, Joseph Needham has contrived both to continue the work of such predecessors and to draw some of the major conclusions that are the fruits of basic research conducted in several disciplines. Probably the full story of these exchanges can never be told; for the evidence is sadly deficient; balanced inferences that rely on information gathered from both East and West are rarely possible; and, maddeningly enough, the political restrictions of the 20th century now prevent the application of the modern techniques of archaeology, geography, and anthropology in areas where they are most likely to be successful.

Philosophy and religion from Han to Sui

The collapse of the Han dynasty during the second and third centuries AD together with the political, social, and economic troubles that it brought about, resulted in a period of intellectual ferment unequaied in Chinese history except at the end of the Chou period, the end of the Ming dynasty and the revolutions of the twentieth century. Toward the end of the second century BC, Chuang-tzu was well known among a group of literary men gathered at his court by the king of Huai-nan. In the midst of the upheavals of the end of the Han dynasty, the long-concealed layer of popular Taoism rose to the surface in a series of rebellions that broke out in 184. In the midst of this Taoist explosion Buddhism was introduced to China. Real philosophical exegesis of the Chuang-tzu started only with Hsiang Hsiu and Kuo Hsiang, the greatest thinkers of the generation after Ho Yen and Wang Pi.