CHAPTER XI.

FROM THE THREE KINGDOMS TO THE SOUY DYNASTY.

(221-620 A.D.)

THE history of the next 400 years may be passed over briefly, not that it is wanting in matter of human interest, but because the enduring features of Chinese civilization are elaborated in the flourishing days of a united empire. Yet we must not exaggerate the extent to which the country as a whole is affected by the intervening periods of comparative anarchy or disruption. Of course the people suffered severely from the outbreaks of rebellion and civil war which heralded and succeeded every change of dynasty, but outside the actual seat of war, life went on as usual, and there was seldom a time when, taking the empire all through, disorder was not the exception and peaceful industry the rule; so that, even during the most inglorious periods, the habits of settled application, which had always characterized the peasantry, were able to go on gradually and silently gathering the strength of a second nature, till they appear as the essential and dominant feature of the whole social body.

Ssema-tsien, and later historians and philosophers after him, speak as of an everlasting law, of the sequence of prosperity and decay; but on looking back over the 2,000 years during which the history of China has been recorded at length, we see that in each period of prosperity, the standard of civilization and well-being stands a degree higher than that of the last corresponding period. The proportion of the population untouched by the horrors of civil disorder was greater during the period of the three kingdoms, which followed the fall of the Eastern Hans, than in the days of the Warring States before the reunion of the empire under Chi-hoang-ti. The prosperity of the Tang Dynasty was wider spread and more deeply rooted than that of the Hans, and the reaction under the Five Posterior dynasties did not reproduce all the anarchy of the Three kingdoms.1 Chinese literature reached its golden age under the Sung Dynasty, which in most other respects was an advance upon that of Tang, and henceforward the whole empire was never broken up into disordered fragments. The Mongols sought to keep the empire in the state they found it, since in no other could its sovereignty be so rich a prize. The native Ming Dynasty, which succeeded the warlike Yuen, was, as compared with the latter, as the politic Tang emperors compared to the

1 For the order of the dynasties see Appendix L, and for specimens of the materials available for the history of China even in its obscurer periods, Pfizmaier, Nachrichten aus d. Geschichte d. Nördlichen Thsi.

military Hans, exercising with less effort a more potent sway; while there can be little question that the founders of the Mantchu Dynasty were centuries ahead in civilization of Genghis and Kubla.

Whether the civilization of the masses in China proper has made much progress between the days of Marco Polo and of Father Ricci, or between those of Ricci and Dr. Legge, is not so easy to determine; but the civilization, such as it is, has never ceased to spread over a wider area, and, while its volume does not detract from its vitality, there is always the presumption in human affairs that the quantity of a force will in some measure re-act upon its quality. It is a reasonable conjecture that there has been as much progress, in regard to the minor details which constitute the finish of material civilization, during the last five or six centuries in China as during the last five or six decades in Europe. This kind of progress, like the motion of a glacier, is easily mistaken for a state of rest; but 2,000 years of it are no more than sufficient to account for the positive level of general culture and comfort in the Middle Kingdom of to-day.

After the fall of the Hans the empire was divided, for forty-five years, into three kingdoms. This is the period celebrated in the San-kwo-chi, a vast historical romance with a large substratum of fact, from which Chinese dramatists are chiefly wont to derive the plots and incidents of their historic plays. Of the three kingdoms, the most powerful bore the name of Wei, and included the northern provinces of China with Loyang for its capital. The second, of which the capital was ultimately fixed at Nanking, embraced most of the south; while the after Hans, who alone claimed the throne by inheritance, were restricted to the provinces of the south-west, of which Tching-tu-fu was the natural capital. The empire was reunited in 265 A.D., after which six minor dynasties reigned in succession ; the fourth of these bore the name of Sung, but must not be confounded with the great dynasty which preceded the Mongols. The empire was again divided on its accession, 420 A.D., and the Sung and successive imperial dynasties ruled over Southern China; while a Tatar dynasty, which had taken the name of Wei, was supreme in the north. This period lasted from 420 A.D. to 589 A.D. and is called the age of the Northern and Southern Empires.

It was in the year 335 A.D., in one of the seventeen small kingdoms which divided China during the short and feeble rule of the T'sin Imperial Dynasty, that natives of the empire were first allowed to take Buddhist monastic vows. Fifteen years later there were as many as forty-two pagodas enumerated at Loyang, and the Taoists began to deprecate the antagonism of the religion, which they saw was likely to prove a dangerous rival, by claiming Buddha as an incarnation of Lao-tsze; but the overture was met by a revision of the elastic Buddhist chronology throwing the date of Prince Sakhya Mouni far enough back to exclude the possibility of such a derogatory hypothesis. In 400 A.D., the first of the string of Chinese pilgrims to the land of Buddha began his recorded travels, and from Fahien and his successors, the Brahmans quoted by the Armenian Cosmas,

(550 A.D.) learnt to think of China as equal in size to half the world. In 518 an embassy was sent from the Northern empire to bring Buddhist books from India, and the division of the empire was known in the West without prejudice to the reputation of the people, of whom a writer early in the 7th century tells us that "they have just laws and their life is full of temperate wisdom."

In 435 A.D., a provincial governor addressed a memorial to the emperor on the dangerous spread of Buddhism in the past 400 years. Temples of Fo, he complains, are to be seen in the smallest villages; to say nothing of the waste of labour, valuable building materials, stone, bricks, and timber are thrown away upon these useless structures, while quantities of gold, silver, and copper, that might otherwise be used in the public service, are consumed to make the idols worshipped by the perverted people. The memorialist concludes by begging that the temples may be destroyed and the materials used for the repair of public buildings. The Emperor approved of the suggestion, and issued an edict in accordance with it, almost exactly to the same effect as those which, 1,300 years later, put a stop to the spread of Catholic Christianity in China.1

We may be sure that at the earlier, as at the later date, there was no intolerance of speculative opinion at work. The Chinese dread of clerical aggression is purely civil and economical. The temporal authority cared nothing about the beliefs or opinions of its subjects, but it claimed to control their conduct, and it was contrary to the public interest that they should systematically waste their substance in endowing convents. Their money was their own as long as they spent it properly-in nourishing parents and children, in paying taxes and performing the customary ceremonies,—but if the emperor's subjects tried to subsidize an independent, spiritual authority by temporal gifts, it was at their peril, and the gifts were liable to be confiscated, like the treasures of a rebellious prince.

The material progress of Buddhism was not arrested and scarcely checked by these edicts, but they were really successful in resisting the dangerwhich the biography of Hiouen-thsang shows not to have been chimerical -of the machinery of public instruction falling into the hands of the heresiarchs and being used to train priests for the service of the religious sects, instead of scholars for the service of the State. Hitherto, as subsequently, independent scholars had led the way in literature, and the imperial colleges depended for their popularity and success upon the eminence of the teachers they could enlist.

The doom of orthodoxy would have been sealed if its defence had been abandoned to the State schools, while heretical teachers succeeded to the place and influence of the unofficial Confucianists. Naturally the new teachers fought less hard for the control of the schools, about which they cared little, than for the endowments of temples and monasteries, about which they cared a great deal; and so the state of antagonism was perpetuated between the few, who knew much and believed little, and the

1 De Mailla, v. p. 42.

many, whose credulity was to be excused by their ignorance. As regarded temporalities, the struggle with Buddhism did not reach its height for some centuries, but the intellectual supremacy of Confucianism was not seriously endangered by its rivalry after the stringent measures of the 5th century.

The 400 years before the accession of the Tang Dynasty belong to the Dark Ages of Chinese history. It was complained that not one in forty of the dignitaries employed at court knew how to handle a pencil.1 The State colleges seem to have degenerated into boarding schools for a class of privileged idlers, as their endowments survived, while the custom of employing collegians fell into abeyance. The private schools, which generally enjoyed and deserved the confidence of the learned, were refused all official countenance, apparently from the suspicion that voluntary schools, as we may call them, were destined to promote the interest of religious sects rather than disinterested study of the native classics; and even if this suspicion was to some extent justified by fact, it is certain that the discouragement of all private schools indifferently had an injurious effect on the standard of education.2

No material change in the condition of the industrial population took place during this period. The T'sin (280-419 A.D.) divided able-bodied workers into classes according to age, giving each a certain allowance of land, with extra quantities for nobles and princes. This example was followed by the northern Wei Dynasty, and in 485 the latter made a serious attempt to revive the agrarian policy of the ancients. Every adult male was allowed 40 mow for corn and every female 20, besides 20 mow for mulberry trees allotted to every house, which latter portion became inalienable. Land in excess of this amount was not confiscated, but was allowed to be sold, which the duty fields were not. At the beginning of the same century the Government endeavoured to promote the plantation of mulberry trees and the cultivation of waste lands by giving distinctions to the families which had oxen for the plough. It is curious that those who had no oxen were expected to have slaves, for the law seems intended to limit the number of slaves held by one owner, while it is scarcely likely that cultivators too poor to have any oxen should have too many slaves. Eight slaves, the number allowed to a married householder, were reckoned for purposes of cultivation as equivalent to a yoke of ten oxen.1

By the legislation in force between 477 A.D. and 499 A.D., all cultivators had a certain share of land allotted to them; land held in excess of this allowance only might be sold, and no excess might be bought. If a householder died, leaving no representative, his relations, i.e. the clan or family community, received the inheritance in preference to strangers; but failing direct representatives, the State resumed possession of the land, in which the grantee had nominally only a life interest. Migration was again recognised by the State as a means of providing for surplus population, and if

1 Essai sur l'Instruction publique en Chine, p. 211. 3 Journ. As., l.c., p. 289.

2 De Mailla, v. pp. 45, 54. 4 Ib., p. 287.

the people refused to move when in want, they were compelled to cut down their trees and plough up their orchards to leave more room for grain. Northern China was colonized at this time, and it was noted that property was much less unequally divided there than in the south, where positive legislation could not entirely undo the effects of feudalism and the concentration of wealth in a few hands, which had gone on in times of disorder.

It is not clear how the enactment providing for home colonies was carried out in fully settled parts, where there were few or no waste lands at the disposal of the Crown ; but in 484 A.D. the system of paying officers by salaries instead of land grants was introduced,1 and this change would no doubt set free a good deal of State property. At all events, in the next century we read of persons renting the public lands, so that these cannot have been exhausted by the allotments.

The system of land tenure was never independent of that of taxation. From the days of Chow two main sources of revenue had always been recognised-the land tax, which was liable to fall off when from any cause the cultivators ceased to form the bulk of the population, and the personal tax, paid in respect of what we should still call personal property. The government allotments of land were not apparently intended to represent what was required for the maintenance of a family, but only to furnish wherewithal to meet the demands of the tax collector; hence the tax payable in respect of these allotments seems extraordinarily high for China, reaching a third of the produce, while those who rented a whole farm only paid about a tenth, which was always regarded as the legitimate proportion, whether levied under the name of rent or land tax. It is obvious that the condition of free cultivators without land could not become intolerable so long as they were able to rent it on the simple condition of paying the ordinary tax: and as long as the State had land to let on these terms, private agglomerators would be unable to get farmers to pay more to themselves; so that large estates could only be profitable on condition of evading the land tax, or being tilled for the owner by servile labour.

The gradual pacification of the empire was much assisted by the reluctance of the free cultivators to leave their homes, when not suffering from distress, to fight for one feeble ruler rather than another. At the end of the 5th century a general, summoned to lead his troops to a distant province, demurred on the ground that the men of the north do not willingly go far from their homes, and can only be depended on to keep together for short raids where booty is to be got. The mercenary element in the Chinese character was by preference pacific, and it was never necessary to prolong a war for fear of leaving the army out of work.

It appears from the edifying anecdotes preserved in history that the pleasures of the chase were still a snare to Chinese monarchs, but they were seldom left without some superior man to keep before them the moral ideals of earlier and greater days. The hereditary prince while out hunt1 L.c., p. 288.

2 De Mailla, v. p. 188.