welcome back today we deal with the resurgence of Empire in East Asia which means China yet again and we know by now certainly that China looms large in our class and in world history that's true of course throughout world history up until the present in recent decades China has come back to being one of the world's major powers again but China I think is the most impressive culture social group in all of world history in the following way I'm not choosing sides here just in the following way it's impressive in many ways but I think it's it's unequaled in this sense that I think it's the most consistent culture going from the beginnings of recorded history until the present that's had sort of a basically continuous you know with few interruptions shelf life other cultures and empires have come and gone and China in one form or another seems to have endured all the way through right up until the present and it's thriving right yet again so getting down to business William McNeill one of the pioneers of teaching writing world history in his classic book the rise of the West a history of the human community says quote the date 1000 CE II appropriately symbolizes a deeply significant change in Chinese social history for about that time when the bureaucratic reorganization of the first song dynasty rulers had taken full effect China's social and economic structures attained a new and is approved lasting balance between rural and urban elements that is between officials landlords and peasants on the one hand merchants and artisans on the other so though this has been a process that we've looked in on already he's saying here that around 1,000 just to have a nice round approximate number is about the time that Chinese sort of society really kind of was bought balanced together in ways that maintained solidity from this point forward socially and culturally but then politically and economically as well here's a map of China through the three dynasties that we'll look at here the Sui dynasty tongue and song and the map doesn't tell you that much if you don't know the geography of Asia that well but it is somewhat important I don't stress this as much as some do but it's someone important in history to know your geography if you if you do it certainly makes it easier to understand certain things so it wouldn't hurt you if this map doesn't help find other ones to scoop out the the geography on this here and again it was something else if possible so the first dynasty is sui dynasty short lived as but significant as it says at the top and our beloved author Jerry Bentley at all says that young Jean Emperor imposed tight political discipline on his state and then extended his rule to the rest of China by 589 the houses we ruled all of China so we've seen centralization and unification in China before but again from this point forward it takes on I think a more tightly knit sort of you know tightly woven aspect to it so the first emperor of this dynasty was able to maintain discipline and establish a centralized system of bureaucracy that only gets better over time as we'll see he is known for China is known for during this period large-scale public works huge architectural masterpieces palaces greeneries or down-to-earth but of the utmost importance economically for survival and human flourishing walls additions to the Great Wall of China canals which primarily means at least in terms of historical significance the Grand Canal which will come back to a little bit later but a marvelous engineering achievement at that point in world history the the Emperor young also increased a taxation which we usually it was a bad thing I guess it depends on what side of the taxation you're on but this did allow China to be able to sort of do a lot more you know have a larger military be able to flex its muscles more maintain law and order within its you know Kingdom with an empire but showing us that Chinese history has had lots of bouts of instability the emperor was assassinated in six Beaufort CD I'm not gonna go into the details for reasons of time but so China is moving in an ever more centralized ordered direction in terms of political economic social order but that assassination certainly says something to the contrary so back to the Grand Canal this was a engineering achievement that was marveled at foreign wine and for good reason I think about how long ago this was and a man-made canal I wasn't the Oh me canal built by the way they built a lot of them this is the most impressive one twelve hundred forty miles long was apparently about forty feet wide at least in some places had roads going along both sides of it went from Hangzhou capital in the south to Xiang Xiang on in the West so it went from sort of a basically a southern cap but northern western capital and this went from one to the other basically Bentley says investment paid enormous dividends this investment paid enormous dividends for the future it integrated the economies of northern and southern China thereby establishing an economic foundation for political and cultural unity so the canal linked northern and southern China economically but but Bentley saying is surely correct is it also helped to link it politically and culturally as well this is one of the complexities of studying understanding history and that is the way that things political cultural economic social hang together and influence each other so often something that happens in the political sphere affects the others something happens in the economic sphere as you see here technological sphere this year establish influences the others so this kind of a mutual either mutually beneficial or sometimes majorly destructive a way in which these various aspects of history work together in this case it was certainly productive and beneficial for China and in a big way over the long haul Bentley as if anything is understating that that quote right there next we get to the Tong dynasty the one that follows a rebel group and we'll leave it at that for now again showing that there's still some instability a lot of the back and forth centralized power being coming more effective but not completely effective if you know one dynasty after another however long it may last or however short-lived you know Falls from power but a ruler rose to the top named Tong haeseong who became the next Emperor and the founder of beginner of the Tong dynasty his rise to power was violence but he was a very effective ruler which isn't uncommon in history around the world so I hate to get into power he had to or he did shouldn't say he had to he elite though he probably did have to knock a lot of heads together that's putting it rather nicely but ruled effectively as well he appears to have led and governed based on Confucian principles remember the Confucius whole philosophy and we'll see it again later in the lectures well his whole philosophy was centered around public service mostly for officials but also how individuals in a society had a duty you know how duties larger than their own individual interests but Confucian educational the perfusionist or their system which was still around at this time and beyond was mainly trying to instill certain principles to properly educate civil civil servants and Todd was very much apparently enamored of this and stuck to it so a Tong Tong Taizong one of many that will see that keeps China on the Confucian path as its kind of official philosophy particularly for government officials a transportation network was continued here more canals roads horses the system of runners like a Pony Express without the ponies people running with messages of kind of relaying them and about 9600 or 10,000 of them employed to get like a a mail service before there were airplanes and you know Amazon and Frederick's and all those things the equal field system looms large in the Tong dynasty in Chinese history as a departure from what we've seen in other places for the most part and even a departure from Chinese history before this time period although it doesn't last for that long one could say as we'll see that it comes back in the modern world in China civil service exams based on merit this wasn't no it goes back to Confucius and sure enough the exams are based on what a Confucian education so civil service exams based on Confucius is learning the texts that he emphasised his own thought also during the period here especially under a Tong Tong is the tendency of China to look for chances to expand militarily and it does so moving into not without resistance but successfully in the end Manchuria Korea Tibet and others other areas of East Asia will follow there were continued and actually increasing tributes here meaning peoples that were conquered or at least subdued often need to be tributary states as they're often called which means they sort of swear allegiance to the emperor if they do that they're pretty much left alone to govern you know as virtually independent Kingdom as well see in Korea's case it's a good example but they're expected to pay taxes tributes which it actually looks like gift-giving it's sort of done in the form of respectful giving of gifts to someone in this case to the Emperor and but it's really a form of Taxation and foreign dignitaries were expected to come to China with bearing gifts and they better be valuable gifts and then bow cow towels in Chinese his dream to bow and the proper way before the Emperor so bring taxes bring gifts and show respect for your Overlord Emperor and then you can go back to Korea or wherever else it is that's you know in this category of tributary state and pretty much carry on independent governance towards the middle of the dynasty we see but but weakening the dynasty fatally as it turns out is a major rebellion by on Liu Shan a general an officer in the Chinese army but he rose up in rebellion and he he was defeated but only after eight years of trying that this is reminiscent of what we saw in ancient Rome where personal armies word against the government or against each other and sometimes you know we're difficult to defeat even though they weren't the official army of the Empire with the government so on lashauwn's rebellion was put down after eight years but it did except leave the han dynasty in extremely weak conditions also nomadic Turks were invited in mainly at first excuse me to help ward off and defeat the rebellion by on the shot but afterwards they didn't leave and this caused social unrest as well there was another revolt the hung shower revolt which in some ways was kind of a take from the rich give to the poor a endeavor nonetheless again we see effective centralization alongside or coming before and then followed by bouts of pushback against it so it sounds contradictory and it's difficult I think the difficult balance here because we're saying over the long run started this you know for a unit saying so China is effectively centralizing control and it's kind of moving towards perfecting how to make government we're a ball from a central location a capital city but then we see examples to the contrary again and again I think the main point is that in the long run and maybe this is another aspect of trying to seize who they could be seen as incredible that China is able to sort of snap back to place or leaders are able to snap sort of the system back into place even after these sometimes terrible and wrenching revolts and you know events of great instability professor Bentley again says much of the tanks success was due to the energy ability and policies of the dynasties second emperor Todd Tyson Tyson was both ambitious and ruthless in making his way to the imperial throne he murdered two of his brothers and pushed his father aside meaning he just you know said I'm taking over once on the throne however he displayed a high sense of duty and strove conscientiously to ride an effective stable government he built a splendid Capitol at Shaolin and he saw himself as a Confucian ruler who needed heeded the interest of his subjects so he was an enlightened ruler but one who could and would be violent but when he felt he needed to be it's easy to look at these guys who come to power through viciousness and cruelty and mass shedding of blood as you know just brutes anywhere in the world but keep in mind that the time period you know there weren't too many Kings emperors worldwide they got to power you know by being nice there are a few examples of Kings II think elected for instance by their people or at least by you know leaders amongst the people representing people but not too many most of the time it's a rough tough you know something in some cases I'm not saying here a homicidal maniac who you know gets everybody else out of the way because he can't so whether it's Europe Asia the Middle East wherever else it is it's it's the norm for leaders to come to power by through brutality and force it was the way things worked when we go that far back into history under Sean's rebellion mentioned before Barry Cunliffe who have quoted before writing a great book about the development of Eurasia and through the contacts between Europe and Asia says in 1755 on LeSean former horse dealer who had risen in the ranks of the Chinese army proclaimed himself Emperor building on general disquiet arising from the excesses of the Tang court he led a rebellion that was to last for eight years excesses of the Tong Court means that the starving or poor peasant masses were increasingly angry at the monarchy or you know royal family living in splendor while seemingly you know oblivious to the plight of the poor which also happens a lot in world history although the Tong dynasty survived the economic infrastructure of the country had been greatly weakened and the unity of the state had been shaken strong central rule had broken down and instead the country was divided into some forty semi independent governments under military control so there's a little more specifics on centralized rule temporarily again breaking down the equal field system that comes during the the Tong I'll let Bentley start us off here its purpose was to ensure an equitable distribution of land and to avoid the concentration of landed property it had caused social problems during the Han Dynasty through favours bribery intimidation of administrators influential families found ways to retain land scheduled for each to be distribution nevertheless during the second half of the Tang Dynasty the system provided a foundation for stability on press and prosperity in the Chinese countryside so what is this what will we call this today yes you said it socialism and since in the twentieth century into the 20th birth century world in China we know that socialism has been a thing one has to sort of wonder even this went away for a long time how much it may have had an influence on what comes about in the 20th century I'm not saying this is the same as you know modern socialism in most wastes but it has certain elements to it here the redistribution of property especially by force or coercion meaning people aren't asked owning up the property they're told and it can be enforced is enforced is one of the hallmarks of socialism this is I think an interesting case to study I think it's pretty clear that worldwide my own viewpoint here but socialism has failed wherever it's been tried this might be the one exception I can think of that is interesting and worth studying if you're interested in socialism and whether it's workable or not I would look to the equal field system and see how that was done and why it seems to have worked why it didn't in the end last and so forth civil service based on merit can we've already introduced this but just a little more on it from Bentley again the Tang Dynasty relied heavily on a bureaucracy based on merit as reflected by performance on civil service exams from the ranks of candidates who had progressed through the Confucian educational system and mastered a sophisticated curriculum concentrating on the classic works of Chinese literature and philosophy so first this is continuing the Confucian tradition of remember Confucius whole philosophy in many ways was centered around training gifted and you know good civil servants to run the country effectively so and China is way ahead of the world on this the Western world Europe and the United States don't start doing this kind of stuff until like the 19th century even the late 19th century that this is hundreds and hundreds of years before most countries in the world even considered the possibility even thought of the possibility of giving important jobs in administration and government to the people that were most qualified based on their education and their performance on exams after their education seems pretty common sense to us today but most of the time people got their positions in government worldwide at this time it well after because of who they knew what family they were born into etc sometimes that meant they got good candidates but sometimes they got poor ones some rich guy from the nobility might have an elder son that he's able to use his influence his social standing power to get into a important job position it's possible the son is incompetent not good at it now of course even through a system that you know it's basically like ours today that requires education degrees dams etc you still find incompetent people in every profession here and there so it's certainly not perfect but it's way better I think than the system that the rest of the world was still going by at the time when China had already done something of incredible value this is one of I think the most effective ways to show the the ways in which China sometimes just as jaw-dropping things in terms of sort of the sophistication of its culture and society this one is way ahead if it way have the curve there's a second point I think that that needs to be made here if the Confucian educational system lasting through and Beyond the Tang Dynasty is primarily focused on educating future civil servants meaning having government jobs they're like you know pushing paper and sometimes making policy but administrative jobs government jobs you know making political economic policy decisions why would the curriculum in school concentrate on the classic works of Chinese literature and philosophy what our literature and philosophy have to do with policy and economics and write lawmaking etc Administrative Procedures policy what does have to do with that well it seemingly nothing but it's surprising when you look at here and later on other places in the world where this is done and it it works apparently extremely well the British do something like this later on in fact up until the 20th century and beyond the British ruling classes the elites sent their you know mostly young men to Oxford and Cambridge they sent them to study or that what they mainly mainly study if they wanted to go into a government career was literature and philosophy reading the classics of the British case ancient Greece and ancient Rome and enlightenment works you know after the 18th century in China of course it's the four books from the ancient Chinese culture but nonetheless we get back to the question why literature and philosophy how could that be good training for governing well you have to deal with people when you govern when you govern when you're in administration in fact it's I think one of the most important attributes you need to have to do a job effectively it's not the only one and by reading literature and philosophy it only just sharpens your thinking skills your analytical skills does that too but studying virtually anything I can do that but in literature for instance you end up at least if you're reading that the great works of literature wherever it is whenever it is at what part of the world is doesn't matter you're coming across writers who understand human psychology however intuitively sometimes by training I guess and so you're learning all three of the personality and character types and you're learning how sort of people will get along in the world and you might say which would be a valid point well I can just do that on my own my own life by the people I meet and sort of paying attention to who does what and what kind of personnel they seem to be like and this person seems to be like that person or this person seems to be like my uncle you know realize until you put things together about how life works and personalities interact people interact by our experience true but by adding literature it's kind of like you're doubling tripling quadrupling the number of people that you can meet that give you the kind of psychological insight so I think literature and philosophy are much better you know subjects as a curriculum to study for governing then I think it would be you know then all sepal would recognize the the Chinese system worked it produced really good effective talented governors and so did the British system later on and there are some others in the world - we won't go into as far as military and foreign policy in the tongue Bentley again soon after its foundation powerful and dynamic tongs they began to flex its military muscles and the North Pond forces brought Manchuria under Imperial Authority and forced the Shilla Kingdom and Korea to acknowledge the tongue as overlord to the south Tong armies conquered the northern part of Vietnam to the west they extended tong authority almost as far as the RLC and a portion of the high plateau of Tibet Undertown control territorially the tong empire ranks is one of the largest in chinese history you can see from the map at the bottom barely my tongue is in the the bright yellow and they extended the Empire way to the west that's the part that almost to the ROC but into into Indochina as well even into northern northern death and Manchuria in the north so there was a lot of military aggrandize Minh during this a kingdom and this is the this extended the tributary system Chiney China began to be known as think of itself as the Middle Kingdom yes that's what they call it the Middle Kingdom as funny as that may sound and its tributary system or the people around it that basically agreed to recognize the emperor as their overlord and themselves as a facile to that Emperor and areas in gold around on the map in you know and gold around the bright yellow were all tributary states at one time or another or brought in during this time again Korea is maybe the most talked about example of it which we'll come back to but you see on the left a picture of different I don't know how it is might be fictional in the sense in this case but the kind of the process the formal process and ceremonies involved in kowtow before the Emperor and paying tributes paying giving gifts and sort of you know behaving with the proper etiquette and protocol and respect before and to the Emperor we now move to the Song Dynasty the third of our kingdoms here changes in government in China all of them might basically retain the same structure and institutions like the administrative institutions tax system of the others so it's it's not as tumultuous as it might sound my thing is not too much at all simply because if one family unseats another one is happening oftentimes here one group from a regional area of traina unseats the leaders that came originally from a different area of China they're still that there's still some continuity in the sense that the the institutional structure is pretty much the same now sometimes one Empire one ruler emphasizes one thing more than something else so the institution's do change and their importance and in their functions you know in the way they do things to some degree but there's still an underlying continuity and similarity so this I think needs to be understood as well so that the next sort of crucial emperor here is song at Izu you see here he subsidized warlords already subdued warlords subsidized that wouldn't have worked very well I could have tried that I guess but this then is alluding to the fact that before the song was established by this Emperor there had been another period of relative decentralization and feuding local regional warlords so the first thing he had to do to acquire power and keep it was subdue them by force and so once again a lot of bloodshed and knocking of heads in order to bring the centralized hierarchical kingdom back he greatly enlarged the already pretty large bureaucracy which ended up being both a blessing and a curse it was quite expensive the more larger bureaucracy the more civil servants you have to pay and more bills you have to pay overall but China was definitely more effectively centralized than ever under the Song Dynasty what you see here was a pretty long-lived dynasty it lasts for a number of centuries but there were problems and the the decision-making from the top wasn't always sound oftentimes bureaucrats in regional areas were allowed to lead armies which ended up boomeranging back on the Dynasty China what else is new can't stop the nomads but during this period they became increasingly difficult to maintain the nomads from the north are still that the big thorn in Chinese government's aside this james mcclelland says and science and technology in world history centralization of power in the hands of the emperor and ruled by a governing bureaucracy the Mandarin is known reached new heights under the song the bureaucracy consisted of hundred thousand civil servants allowed direct control by the Emperor down to the village level no intermediary or independent bodies existed in China to challenge the authority of the Emperor or the Mandarin it so first the Mandarin it mandarins is a term for elites and this really are these are really Nobles people from wealthy you know families with a long family history of being rich and powerful old money families not you know somebody making a fortune you know in the recent past but families that have been rich and powerful and handed their big pieces of land in the States down generation after generation and they stay powerful with huge social status and the Gov the government's the Emperor's this case song kazoo you know leaned on them because they were generally the ones that got the Confucian education basically a college degree and were sometimes the brightest people you know in the room so this is now streamlined even more and enlarged than ever book than ever before the mandarins as we'll see will eventually come into they'll have a rival in advising and being administrators for Emperor's but we'll save that to say that this all gave the import directly meant that there was sort of no separation of powers at least in a verdict and a vertical sense really not in horizontal sense either in our system for instance just to give us something to play this off of today in the United States we have federal government state government and local government and all of them do have some rights and no areas of independent operation outside of the other in resistance to the other doing things you know there are way this wasn't true in China here at this time the emperor could and sometimes did have an impact down at the village level so there weren't really any local institutions that would be later on but not now and regional institutions beyond the regional nobles but in a sense the the in version of the song are effectively doing noble power in order to get this sort of channel of power straight from the Emperor all the way down to the village level without any intermediaries in between there was a Chinese Golden Age during the Song Dynasty particularly with regard to technological or architectural achievements in the arts in general the the civil exams of course continued civil service exams so McClellan again on this the Song Dynasty and the Renaissance accompanying the song command attention in many ways the song period represents the zenith of traditional China the several centuries of song rule from the Golden Age of science and technology and they provide an effective point of contrast with contemporary developments elsewhere in the world so he's giving China they deserved a compliment they're saying that its culture was astonishing in its vibrance during this period we see some of the architecture and cultural achievements technological once their shipbuilding want being one of them which will come back to urbanization a population growth is happening during history as well Ian Morris in his fantabulous book the West why the West rules for now and the very title meaning that China is the country that's on the rise and likely to become number one in the world again sometime soon that says for the thousand years leading up to 1700 the biggest cities were clearly Chinese with Japanese ones often close behind first Zhang on then - and later Hangzhou came close to or passed a million residents between 800 and 1,200 C western cities by contrast were never more than half that size there weren't many of them at that in the West Ian worse in this and other books uses a metric for what he calls social development how socially developed is a society is a culture and one of the metrics used is the size of cities for metrics over all that it uses to sort of see social complexity and social development so during this period not surprisingly and this you know this corner of social development one of the four pieces he uses to to assess this China is far and away the leader so population was growing and partially in relation to it cities were growing over a million all right that's around the you 1000 to have a city of a million or more already that's just astounding patriarchy and Chinese culture we know the Chinese culture like almost all cultures throughout the world long ago you know were they kept women write it down and I kept women from being involved in any kind of male activities with rare exceptions politically or economically speaking and the the patriarchy in Chinese society from our modern viewpoint can look is particularly cruel so fester family again talking about the in general right the misogynistic system that kept women under the control of man and then more specifically about the Chinese practice of foot-binding says tongue and song China experienced a tightening of patriarchal social structures which perhaps reflected a concern to preserve family fortunes through enhanced family solidarity during the Song Dynasty the veneration of family ancestors became much more elaborate so that we know that goes deep deep back into the Chinese past a big part of religious worship and ceremonies as worshipping your ancestors now during this period more of it is but going out like the gravesite of ancestors and having services and ceremonies there rather than in the home or some work somewhere else he goes on to say that strengthened patriarchal Authority also helps to explain the popularity of foot binding which spread widely during the song era women with bound feet could not walk easily or naturally like the practice of veiling women in Mediterranean and Muslim lands foot binding placed women under tight supervision of their husbands or other male Guardians who then managed the women's affairs in the interests of the larger family and if you look it up and it's kind of gruesome to do the you see that the drawing on the left there of the woman's foot or feet is actually not inaccurate they wrapped them so often and so tightly that it deformed the growth of the foot and so you have this little tiny these little tiny feet I don't mean that they're just miniaturized and small they're mangled they become a small but it's not it's not that the foot binding just miniaturizes them it miniaturizes them by mangling them and sort of having toes kind of crumple together sort of as a natural well unnatural growth so it's certainly a cruel was a cruel practice it must have been incredibly painful and it's clearly I did I mean had other more subtle features to it but most obviously and certainly true is the fact that if a woman has feet that are tiny and know that they're painful to to walk on because they've been deliberately misformed or deformed then a woman's gonna have a much harder time getting around and getting away from her husband or whatever males and a family she's supposed to you know be under you know control of so this is the the most striking in some ways the most unique aspect of Chinese patriarchal culture throughout their history the lady emperor wu xiao an incredible story and our textbook goes into a little of this but not not too much it's interesting to read about if you find book they can give you more depth but she's also known as wu zetian daughter of a local official so her father was a you know somewhat of some importance because she became a concubine at the royal court Emperor's had concubines he had multiple women at their disposal like a harem when today one thing what did them but she attracted extra notice due to her intelligence wit and beauty she became kind of a legendary figure in Chinese history she eventually became the concubine of the Emperor himself and then his wife Emperor was so taken with her that he made her his wife and when the Emperor had a stroke she ended up running the government when the Emperor died she claimed in the Imperial title for herself and though there was much opposition she actually pulled it off and ruled as Emperor or Empress for years she shrewdly organized secret police brutally crushed dissent she understood that as a woman she had enemies there was tons of opposition to her plots and attempts to take her out of power in a misogynistic you know male chauvinist society they're not going to take it well many people aren't anyway when there's a woman at the top as Empress so so she had to be very adapt a very clever she was and be brutal to survive and she was all of those things but she ruled effectively as well by strengthening the civil service even more patronizing the Buddhists mean helping to fund them and support them putting down rebellions organizing foreign military campaigns she opened administrative positions to talented commoners which really hadn't been done before there was probably an occasional one here there but now allowing the the Confucian educational system training civil servants which was a ticket to a an elite life too talented a common people that weren't born into the right family so this is a was incredibly I think important reform because it just increases the talent pool so brings even more effective governor's administrators she was finally forced out of power at age 80 incredibly and so uh our text says an energetic and effective ruler a woman who publicly and officially wielded power in originally rigidly patriarchal society other women exercised influence indirectly or even ruled from behind a screen so to speak but Wu Xiao was the only woman in Chinese history to claim the imperial title and rule as Emperor so an extraordinary figure in Chinese and world history technological developments was at a premium in the Song Dynasty all kinds of technological achievements many in which were copied by the rest of the world Europeans that the Arabs in the Middle East other groups to the further to the west or list to the west of China information technology among them as Ian Morris says Chinese artisans first made paper from mulberry bark in 105 C II and wood pulp paper was common by about 700 Arabs learned of paper around 750 but Italians started buying it from them after 1150 and making it on their own by about twelve seventy six by then Chinese publishers had been using engraved wood blocks to print paper books for five centuries and using movable type for two centuries Europeans only borrowed or reinvented wood blocks around 1375 and movable type around 1430 so a remarkable technological advance and again way ahead of the curve ahead of the rest of the world you also see here gunpowder weapons primitive cannon and the upper left the Chinese pioneered gunpowder technology cannons rifles equivalent thereof iron smelting iron iron making something pottery ceramics porcelain in this case became a huge demand on world markets and the upper right now you see a an example of sort of the block printing methods the technology there so that and many many other things are part of the the Renaissance of the Song Dynasty in the Golden Age shipbuilding is another aspect of the Golden Age that Lee says the Song Dynasty re-imposed centralized imperial rule in the late 10th century though it survived for more than three centuries the Song Dynasty never built a very powerful state that's somewhat opened the question and different historians have different takes on it so Emily of course hasn't one song rulers mistrusted military leaders and they placed much more emphasis on civil administration industry education and the arts than on military affairs now that part is true and this is what Bentley means when he say we didn't build a very powerful state they built the strong centralized state in terms of adding on and supplementing strengthening the administrative system the political institutions economic institutions educational institutions but they didn't do very well when it came to military affairs as we talked about briefly in the slide any too much military decision-making power over to administrators and sometimes at the regional level which ended up proving a big problem as far as economic development is concerned this is a very general statement about both the top and the song dynasties maybe most importantly I guess easily the most important they put to use a new fast ripening rice you could have two crops each season instead of one so crop yields went up accordingly by a great deal and of course more food almost anywhere and everywhere world history means larger population we know that was a formula way back in Chinese history in a previous unit we learned that the sort of formula of emperors for a long time had been you want more land you want higher crop yields since you can have higher population so you can draft more man into an army and have overwhelming numbers when you go into battle against the enemy the Chinese also learned to grow cotton they had already been producing tea but in this era the increased production of tea by a pretty large amount forget the number the estimated number and agricultural surpluses partly because of the vast ripening rice meaning you have more than you can consume increased taxation it also increased trade so just fast growing ice alone as a singular economic development had a tremendous positive impact on not just the economy but again a spillover effect we talked about before into politics and to economics society culture population etc and we also see the beginnings of a market economy in China during these dynasties William McNeill saying that in a year of normal harvests full efficiency provided the imperial court with more grain and other foodstuffs that I could use by about the middle of the 8th century therefore Imperial officials began to extent exchange surplus grain for various luxury goods the effect was to create or vastly expand a market for the most highly skilled artisan wares find silks porcelains lacquer work and the like in all regions of China a substantial oral argument of the artisan and merchant classes naturally ensued as well as regional specialization so again there's a lot of synergy going on here a lot of mutually reinforcing elements to all this but just from that short statement alone I think you can see that the economy is just taking off in multiple ways [Music] and for multiple reasons but all again mutually reinforcing so market conditions a market economy is on the rise in China and this also helps to explain Chinese you know overall power and number-one presence terms of power its economy in in Asia high productivity according to Bentley and trade brought the Tong on the song economy a dynamism that China's borders could not restrain Chinese consumers developed a taste for exotic Goods estimated trade throughout much of the eastern hemisphere spices from the islands of Southeast Asia made their way to China along with products as diverse as Kingfisher feathers tortoiseshell from Vietnam pearls incense of India horses and melons from Central Asia which became the symbols of a refined elegant lifestyle so a vibrant trade is also another feature of China's growing market economy it's the West of course of course Europe in the United States that are usually thought of as sort of the countries that kind of invented the market economies but not so China had a thriving one already by this time here and I said a number of slides back when referring to the equal field system that it's an interesting experiment and socialism in China but by this time right now China's economic system has moved in a different direction you can't have an equal fuel system and property you know divided at least relatively equally and within a market system if they don't that those two just don't go together so it'd be interesting and a little bit but to sort of compare the equal fuel system earlier in this era with market economy that's becoming increasingly dominant and effective in this latter era also economically and this is a great significance the beginnings of a money economy MacNeill although coins had been known in China for centuries they came into widespread use only after the convenience of converting tax income into a standard easily transportable a standard easily transportable measure of value became apparent official figures show that in the air 747 49 only three points in three point nine percent of the government's income to cash form whereas by 1065 this figure had risen to 51.6% of a greatly enlarged economy so a fairly short amount of time from historical historical perspective you see China moving from basically a barter economy to a money economy and not mentioned in this quote but mentioned in our textbook is the fact that by the song the they were also issuing notes of paper money as well and when an economy gets big enough I mean it's gotta have paper currency and it's got have increasingly sophisticated economic and sort of monetary institutions and mechanisms or it just can't keep up so in history whenever and wherever it occurs the move to a money economy is of tremendous importance it changes a great deal and it usually means that that society you know its wealth is growing and that it's you know with now the monetary system they have in place it's going to continue to grow among other things being able to buy with money which is just like a no-brainer for us today but keep in mind you didn't invent it did I so but once it happens you realize how necessary it is to the fact because what what about when you had to you needed a product and you didn't have money there was no money so may have used this example in class before forgive me I know I used it sometime this semester I forget if it was your class but it's worth repeating here that if you're the you own an apple orchard and you have some dental work place to be done you have a root you know you know a tooth that's killing you and it's a root you know you need you don't know that at first so you decide to go to the dentist's but there's no money and it hasn't been invented yet what do you do take a you know a barrel of apples five miles into town or no wagon five miles into town stop at the dentist and say hey mister minister would you put my tooth give me a root canal if I give you this basket of apples well okay I mean could work that what if he doesn't want the animals what doesn't need the apples what if he says hey I'd love to but you know you bad luck for you what do you mean well just about an hour ago another guy that owns an apple orchard came and needed his tooth pulled and he brought me a wagon of apples already I don't need any more apples so you don't have any thing to exchange with him for the service that you desperately need because what you have our apples so you know trade and barter of course can't work it worked for thousands of years before many economies but money economies tend towards economic growth in a big way because it just smoothes transactions and deals that might not be able to may be made it some cases couldn't be made other otherwise so this this again whenever and wherever you see it the move to primarily or exclusively a money economy is a big step forward in terms of complexity and you know economic development the establishment of Buddhism in town and saw China so Buddhism had already been around India they were already some places in China where it was starting to catch on but it kind of takes off during these dynasties as well they're really kind of two types of Buddhism Theravada Buddhism and Mahayana Buddhism the latter of which generally is more appealing to large swathes of a population so quoting from Stephen Prothero who have used it before as an expert on religion this great book called God is not one says Mahayana Buddhists gave the world a radically new interpretation of the Buddha Mahayana scheme to see him as his eternal and omniscient a supernatural being who could answer prayers and reward devotion with the emergence of the Mahayana School Buddhism moved undeniably into the family of religions meaning this made it a religion that was likely to become popular and would grow to become you know it wasn't a world religion it's not considered a world religion if for people you know adhere to it and what he's saying is that among other things what the Mahayana Buddhists did that their counterparts did not is they made the religion easier to practice so that it's appealing more people the the other elements of Buddhism other brands so to speak were more taxing required more commitment were harder to do a card more discipline more effort more time and so it wasn't appealing to the masses it would only be appealing was only appealing to those who could and would make the full commitment so professor Bentley says in Mahayana Buddhism it became possible no this is still profit oh sorry it became possible to get nirvana through outside assistance for the self-reliance through devotion to a body Bodhisattva was a spiritual guide who would use his merit to take away your suffering in this way it became much easier to achieve Nirvana and lay people became fuller participants in the Buddhist community that's just a fancy way of saying what I did which is it Mahayana Buddhism which again kind of takes off in China and has sponsored even by the government pushed forward by the government helped by the government makes being a Buddhist easier and makes it then more popular that's by the way that's true in lots of religions they have those wings to them that are about or become to be about popularizing pop verses around making the religion more popular there was one particular city Silk Road Oasis and boy was it a Silk Road Oh a sis it's almost the definition of Oasis that's of course a modern picture but a place called Wong between better forager period this place along the Silk Roads was a a major sort of point on the map from which Buddhism spread to along the roads Silk Roads and then fully engulfed in China over the centuries Bentley the Mahayana Buddhism gradually found a popular following in town and song China Buddhism came over the Silk Roads residents of Oasis cities in Central Asia Asia they converted to Buddhism as early as the 1st or 2nd centuries and cee and the Oasis became sited sites of Buddhist missionary efforts by the 4th century a sizable Buddhist community had emerged in Dunhuang in western China between 6 and 1600 1,000 but is to built hundreds of cave temples in the vicinity of the hung and decorated them with murals depicting events in the lives of the Buddha and the Bodhisattvas they also assembled libraries of religious literature and operated script Korea too Buddhist texts missions supported by establishments such as those at Dunhuang called Buddhism to establish a foothold in China so this is sort of one of the steps along the way of you know China becoming more and more influenced by this growing eventual world religion whether word script oriya means a place where texts are caps books are kept and produced and in those days both in Europe and Asia what that meant usually was monks religious you know leaders or clerics copying texts the laborious seemingly boring work of copying texts right they didn't have printers they didn't have computers didn't even have copy machines no Xerox copy machines didn't have presses that could mass-produce things so most of the time you had to write out again the block printing we talked about is a growing exception to this but much of the time it's still about copying texts by by my hand that's where as Toria does buddhism in its relation to other religions since there are lots of them in China you know Taoism is there Confucianism in some ways is a religion in some ways it's a philosophy so there was a lot of competition but Buddhism attracted according to Bentley Chinese interest partly because of its high standards of morality its intellectual sophistication and its promise of salvation practical concerns also helped to account for its appeal in some ways Buddhism posed the challenge to Chinese cultural and social traditions Buddhist theologians typically took written texts as points of departure for elaborate speculative investigations into metaphysical themes such as the nature of the soul so metaphysical means that metaphysical themes investigations of this type means that that Buddhists Buddhism was a religion that sort of delve very deeply into sort of philosophical speculation about ultimate things that's what metaphysics is so asking the questions like why are we here is there a god why is there a universe etc etc and not all religions go into that kind of thing as as much Buddhism is one of those in the world that does or at least some types of Buddhism among Chinese intellectuals only Confucius placed great emphasis on written texts and they devoted their energies mostly to practical rather than metaphysical issues which we should already know right we know that Confucian education relies on literacy and great attention paid to Chinese literature philosophy from the past true but we also know that Confucius whole program and philosophy was primarily about training educating civil servants for practical jobs so it's not a philosophy religion Confucianism that is that's prone to thinking about you know why is the universe here instead of not here that's not a practical question at least from their perspective not going to help to get you know more effective government get your career advanced as a Confucian scholar slash civil servant Dallas had limited interest at all in written texts of any kind so I've only kind of picked one difference here there are lots of others between Buddhism and the other religions already in China but one of them is sort of the approach to texts and what kind of questions are asked about those texts and what kind of questions are asked in religion as a whole new Confucianism was a big influence during these dynasties meaning Confucianism made a comeback not exactly the same but the core curriculum and core ideas are pretty much still the same so that part is true you can see on the right right the core curriculum is still Confucius Confucius's own acolytes anxious we talked about before a guy who came after if you should spit carried on the Confucian tradition the four books the Analects as one of the crucial texts that educated Chinese prospective civil servants are studying and mastering in order to pass their exams and to get their education so one of the sort of crucial religious leaders of the time Jews Zhu Shi he seemed pictured on the left and on the right was one of the main practitioners and promoters of this neo Confucius school of thought I don't mean a literal school but school of thought Confucius Confucius message became a major social force well after his death according to Michael Mann in the sources of social power it lasted an incredible 2,000 years until modern times Confucianism was a marvelous instrument of imperial class rule control it appropriated the rationalistic side of salvation as currents leaving more spiritual mystical and turbulent currents to be expressed in quietest private cults like Taoism it also solved several of the contradictions of Empire which the Chinese Empire was also experiencing it added universal values and legitimation to a modified particularism of aristocracy and dynasty it confined egalitarian values to enlarged ruling class it provided unified culture to a ruling class otherwise prone to decentralization and by allowing new entrance into the gentlemen category it could admit educated barbarians into its ruling elite and thus into civilization these were solutions to many of the contradictions that destroyed Rome so what's being said here is not only as this in some ways a religion now is it you know great training for civil servants that makes government more effective but that it also whether it was intentional or not that's maybe not entirely clear some features of it may have been for sure but that it solved a lot of sort of social problems and it helped to sort of solidify unify the culture and sort of unify sort of social and political cultural social and political life so I'm simplifying that quote would be repeating again the development of complex society in Japan we unfortunately don't have enough time to do to pay do Japan justice it's one of my favorite countries in the world I must say I've been there only once but it's been about a month there many years ago and I've wanted to go back ever since and one day I hope I hope I will but Japan it says going back to William McNeil again offered fertile ground for the building of a civilization as the successful transplantation of Chinese patterns of court life and high culture to the islands during the Nara period had shown another period often kind of considered kind of ancient Japan Japanese history yet the Japanese were not long content with wholesale borrowing instead of hastening to adopt the latest nuance of Chinese styles the Japanese between 1000 and 1500 built a society and culture of the own no longer a provincial copy of China's imperial splendor the new Japanese civilization was nonetheless closely related to and largely derived from the Chinese so no doubt as Professor McNeil says here that China was a dream Japan was very much influenced by China as all of China's neighbors were it was a dominant power and a brown are just made out militarily they're culturally influenced as well and for the cultures around them like the Japanese Korean Vietnamese etc to take on so much of Chinese culture you know so deeply and so widely and so consistently it can't be just that they were you know they were forced to at gunpoint to you know take on these cultural attributes it must have been and clearly was that these things works they were appealing their culture their technology their you know their value system whatever it may be if it caught on and lasted in another country in another Kingdom you can bet that it had value to that people and I saw it and acted accordingly so the Japanese are no exception that being said the Japanese proudly maintained and promoted and enhanced over time their own traditions and their own culture it was a little easier for Japan than some of the other Chinese neighbors for the obvious reason that Japan is an island nation right many islands a handful of major islands but the South China Sea between the two places gave them a bit of a cushion they couldn't be invaded and they were but it was hard to do invading across any water body of water is extremely difficult and fraught with danger so their island of status gave them quite a bit of insulation isolation that they used their advantage we're able to carve out their own unique and quite extravagant independent culture but there's no denying that the Chinese culture was sort of infused and synthesized with that in a pretty large way you can see it in the Nara period in Japan the ancient capital don't you see pictures here it's a fabulous place to visit my my actual favorite single event for my month-long trip to Japan and there were many but was something called the nada Deer Park and I was shocked I'd heard about it before but I still didn't really think about it enough until I got there Wow but they have these wild roaming deer in the the deer park and the basically the ancient capital here and unlike in the United States where we shoot deer the it's a sacred animal there and so they protect them and they protect them especially in that Park just I think like no government operating like state park and so the the the deer are wild but they're tame they walk right up to you and that you can buy little bags of food and they'll come right up to you they actually get with their horns kind of aggressive and its kind of and somewhat they'll really harm you but it's kind of scary because they'll come crowding around you sometimes someone with horns and they'll be nosing in trying to bump another one out of the way to get your you know the the nuggets the food that you're feeding them but it's incredible you can hold food in your hands and the deer will eat your hands they don't run off like you know here we're lucky to even see a deer even if you're a deer hunter it's only so often that one comes into interview but in Japan you go to the Nara deer park and they're all over the place roaming while they're walking kind of walk down the streets with you you've got food they don't really want any part of you don't have food but it's it's it's an incredible experience so Nava is in a very wonderful place to visit you know deep history tradition that's a culture that's fascinating McNeil says one of the larisa aristocratic clans in Japan insisted on its precedence over the others although in fact it had never wielded effective authority outside its territory in central Japan that's deliciously vague but let's just leave the family untalked about for now just to keep it simple inspired by the Tong example this gland claimed imperial authority introduced a series of reforms designed to centralize Japanese politics the imperial house established a court modeled on that of the Tong Institute the Chinese style bureaucracy implemented an equal field system provided officials port for Confucianism and Buddhism and in the year 17 moved to a new capital city at Nara that was a replica of the Tong capital it shot on never was Chinese influence more prominent in Japan than during the Nara period so this shows the great influence of China but it's a little misleading because as the texture says it's during this period that China was sort of most influential that the Japanese sort of took and embraced more of Chinese culture here than any other period forthcoming in the next period after the Nara period is that the high-end period and the ham trade and we see here one of the great literary classics of the Chinese kind of ancient and medieval world The Tale of Genji written by a woman named Marie Saki Shikibu Shikibu and this I mean there were other women writers in Japan other places but it wasn't that often that sort of one took on this kind of iconic status since we know women were subordinated to man in this society like we've seen in China and everywhere else but this is clearly the greatest piece of literature and has remained thought of as such ever since our text says the floor for four centuries Heian became that seat of a refined and sophisticated society during the Han period local rulers on the island of Honshu big island mostly recognized the emperor as Japan's supreme political authority unlike their Chinese counterparts whoever Japanese Emperor's rarely ruled but rather served as ceremonial figureheads and symbols of authority which is pretty much true we'll see with the the samurai and the Shogun's that you know that's the it's pretty well known by people that watch movies on this I read about the the Shogun's and a samurai that the Emperor's were always around but it was the Shogun military warlord that ruled although the the danger of using little quotes like this is it leave so much out but the emperor had to be respected so it's not that he had no say it wasn't just entirely a figurehead why well because in Chinese I'm sorry in Japanese history right up until the modern era the emperor has always been seen as a sacred godlike figure and so the public is always tended to revere the Emperor's so show guys had to be somewhat careful in respecting the emperor and respect and even the Emperor's wishes for fear of angering the public and losing the public's support because of no disrespect for the Emperor so they were figureheads they didn't do day-to-day governing but they had they had some political influence more Aikman Bentleys an expert on this more than I am for sure he's one of the greatest nonetheless I think this is a little misleading but if I put it in the full context of our text it it's partly my fault for that medieval Japan then in a samurai all right some of you are probably already fascinated by this and know something about it it's one of those things that just seems to be interesting to Americans and indeed it is between the 9th and 12th centuries according to Wayne McNeil Japan's precocious Imperial and bureaucratic government gave way to a military regime in which power depended upon rights over land or rights over land and upon personal loyalties between lords and vassals resemblances to European feudalism were fairly close that's true we'll see European feudalism coming up in a while and then requited quite a bit quite a few similarities professional fighting class the samurai came to dominate Japan and developed the code of honor enforceable privately with the sword in cases beyond the scope of a superior Lords court adherence to this code mark the samurai off from the rest of the population local violence became chronic punctuated by a larger scale warfare between rival coalition's of lords and vassals in such a milieu the military life acquired high prestige in direct contrast to Chinese disdain for soldiering so I mentioned it once an earlier unit but though the Chinese armies of course were the key overall to their power East Asia vast power there the Chinese as a whole in terms of their value system they didn't play soldiers sort of very high sort of on the social ladder of social status in Japan they very much did Japan is somewhat reminiscent of Germany later on or German I don't mean the Nazis well before the Nazis Butler German culture had sort of a separate special place for its soldiers and officers in the military and keep them extra extra respect and that's certainly true here the Shogun's eventually kanata this as the the the warlords that are the most at one time or another or the most powerful ones that have the most samurai or most effective samurai on the battlefield and they're able to force the other warlords into submission and they kind of maybe not not as in a centralized official effective way as in china but they're able to unify the country at times but that comes just on the other side of all of this the development of clique complex society in Korea and we just have a little bit of time here Korea has also I've never been there but I'd like to go to South Korea that is right now but we don't have enough time to do justice to all the countries peoples cultures of the world fortunately and here were primarily still talking about China's influence over all so our text says during the 7th century tonk armies conquered much of Korea before the native Shilla dynasty rallied to prevent Chinese domination of the peninsula both tong and silla authorities prefer to avoid a long and costly conflict so they agreed to a political compromise Chinese forces withdrew from Korea and the Shilla King recognized the Tong Emperor as his overlord in theory Korea was a vassal state in a vast Chinese Empire in practice however Korea was in most respects an independent Kingdom although the ruling dynasty prudently maintained cordial relations with its powerful neighbor thus Korea entered into a tributary relationship with China so again I mentioned before that Korea is sort of the the maybe best example but there are many others of states that sort of make this agreement instead of having to try to fight off China which will probably lose doing anyway let's make a deal with them and agree to bow down to them literally and figuratively kowtow you know send them tribute and go and pay respects bow to the Emperor hand over the gifts and go back and then they'll pretty much leave us alone which was pretty much true and as the our text tells us that in the war that established this compromise China saw or believed that it benefited from keeping the war short so this will work out better for us wait no they they probably confident they could have conquered Korea and totally subdued it but it would have been very costly in lives and treasure so they decided no we're gonna we don't need to do that if we can make from a vassal state get them to pay tribute to us that that's all all we need so again we saw in a map in previous slide that there was a sort of a ring of tributary states around tongue and salt train and this would continue for some time but of course there's lots of differences Korea has always had and still does its own unique culture and so they differed in many respects most notably for our purposes aristocrats and royal houses dominated Korean society much more than was the case in China Korea never established a bureaucracy based on merit such as that of the tongue and song although our text does say that they did Institute the civil service exams and all that it just wasn't as crucial in you know deciding who got the jobs that who didn't but in the royal houses dominating risk arrest dominating that we can see okay the nobles in Korea retained more power than they did in China but royal houses means the Emperor's the rulers well what that means is that the the royal houses in Japan tended to stay in place for longer we have seen that the you know the destabilizing feature of what's otherwise of remarkably stable Chinese history is that it's in a one family after another that ends up becoming Emperor from one part of China or another succeeded by another another so that didn't happen as much in in Korea the development of complexity in Vietnam Bently again says Chinese relations with Vietnam were far more tense than with Korea when Tong armies have entered into the land that Chinese called Nam yet they encountered a spirited resistance on the part of the Viet people who said settled in the region around the Red River Tong forces soon won control of Viet towns and cities and they launched efforts to absorb the yetze into Chinese society the earth readily adopted Chinese agricultural methods and irrigation systems as well as Chinese schools and administrative techniques the elites studied Confucian texts after examinations based on chinese style education and get traders marketed their wares in China Vietnamese authorities even entered into tributary relations with the Chinese Court so again a lot of influence on a well the Chinese a lot of influence on another neighboring people yet the viet s-- resented chinese efforts to dominate the saw their land and they mounted a series of revolts against tonk authorities as the tang dynasty fell the vietze won their independence and successfully resisted all the later chinese efforts that imperial expansion to the south so vietnam put up not only a spirited resistance but what in the end was a successful resistance after for a long time for time being dominated by china they were able to throw off the yoke of chinese power and finally like korea vietnam differed from china in many ways many vietnamese retained their indigenous religions in preference to chinese cultural traditions and just to pick out another one women played a much more prominent role in vietnamese society and in the economy then did their counterparts in China Southeast Asian women dominated local and regional markets for centuries and participated actively in business ventures so that's a big difference because you don't see relate anything like that as a tradition as part of the culture accepted part of the culture in China or many other places for that reason so Vietnam and Southeast Asia as a whole stands out in that way