Tanner - China: a history 1 From Neolithic cultures through the Great Qing Empire (10,000 BCE-1799 CE)

CHINA

A History

VOLUME 1

CHINA

A History

VOLUME 1
FROM NEOLITHIC CULTURES
THROUGH THE GREAT QING EMPIRE
10,000 BCE1799 CE

Harold M. Tanner

Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.
Indianapolis/Cambridge

Copyright 2010 by Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.

All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America

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Cover design by Abigail Coyle
Interior design by Elizabeth L. Wilson
Maps by Tracy Ellen Smith
Composition by Agnews, Inc.
Printed at Sheridan Books, Inc.

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Oracle bone, Shang dynasty, page 47. Copyright 2004 Herr Klubeisser.
Terracotta Officer, page 91. Copyright 2006 Tor Svensson.
Terracotta Army, page 93. Copyright 2006 Tor Svensson.

Every reasonable effort has been made to contact the rights holders of copyrighted materials in this book. The author and the publisher would be grateful for any additional information and will address any errors or omissions in subsequent printings of the book.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Tanner, Harold Miles.

China : a history / Harold M. Tanner.

v. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contents: v. 1. From Neolithic cultures through the Great Qing Empire

(10,000 BCE1799 CE)v. 2. From the Great Qing Empire through the Peoples Republic of China (16442009).

ISBN 978-1-60384-202-0 (v. 1 : paper)ISBN 978-1-60384-203-7 (v. 1 : cloth)

ISBN 978-1-60384-204-4 (v. 2 : paper)ISBN 978-1-60384-205-1 (v. 2 : cloth)

1. ChinaHistory. I. Title.

DS735.T34 2010

ePub ISBN: 978-1-60384-565-6

CONTENTS

The page numbers in curly braces {} correspond to the print edition of this title.

{vii}

My education in Chinas history, language, and culture has been a long journeyboth real and metaphoricala journey in which this book marks only a milestone, not an end. It has taken me from my home in New Jersey to Taiwan and China, to London and New York City, and to my new home in Texas. The many people who have helped me along the way have enriched my knowledge and transformed my thinking, though perhaps not as thoroughly as they would have liked. Their teaching, advice, and support have made this book possible. The list of those to thank begins with my teachers: Parry Jones, who introduced me to the study of Chinas history at the Princeton Day School in New Jersey; Stuart Schram, Paul Chen, and Ian Nish at London Universitys School of Oriental and African Studies; and at Columbia University, Madeleine Zelin, Andrew Nathan, Tom Bernstein, Gari Ledyard, Bob Hymes, Wm. Theodore de Bary, Irene Bloom, Morris Rossabi, and Hans Beilenstein. I hope that this book reflects, at least in some small way, the breadth and depth of the education that I have been fortunate enough to receive from these and other teachers over the years.

Friends and colleagues near and far also made important contributions to what turned out to be a much larger project than I had anticipated. The University of North Texas and its Department of History have been supportive, particularly in granting me a semester of paid leave during which I wrote a large portion of the manuscript. I thank Johan Elverskog for his insights on religion, the Mongols, and Central Asia, and Margherita Zanasi for her comments on a number of chapters. Special thanks are due to Sarah Schneewind. Her encouragement of this project, close reading, and frank comments on many chapters were particularly helpful and well beyond the call of duty. I have also benefited tremendously from the comments of the external reviewers for this book: Joanna Waley-Cohen, Ruth Dunnell, Paul Fischer, Charles W. Hayford, Roland Higgins, Michael Loewe, Peter Perdue, Caroline Reeves, and Roger Thompson. I am grateful to my editor, Deborah Wilkes, for recruiting such notable scholars and for performing all the other tasks required to turn my ideas into a manuscript, and the manuscript into a book. Tracy Ellen Smith of Creative Design Resources has done a remarkable job {viii} of transforming my often unrealistic ideas into maps. While expressing my thanks to all those who have assisted in making this book possible, I reserve to myself the responsibility for any remaining errors or infelicities of style.

Finally, but most importantly, I offer my deepest thanks to my wife, Yiyun, and our children, Sophia and William. For years, and with good grace, they have made the sacrifices that seem to go along with research and writing, allowing me to work on too many evenings, too many weekends, and too many otherwise perfectly beautiful summer days, and putting up with my trips to archives and conferences. This book is for them, with my love and affection.

{ix}

Chinese names in this text have been written using the Hanyu pinyin system of Romanization. Most words are pronounced roughly the way an English-speaker would guess. There are a few important exceptions to this rule: c is pronounced as ts, q as ch, and x more or less like s. I have used nonpinyin spellings for a few individuals and entities whose names have become universally recognized under those earlier spellings in English-language literature. Thus, Sun Yat-sen (known in Chinese as Sun Wen or Sun Yixian), Chiang Kai-shek (pinyin Jiang Jieshi), the Kwantung Army (pinyin Guandong Army), and Manchukuo.

Mongolian names have been rendered in line with the system used in Christopher P. Atwood, Encyclopedia of Mongolian and the Mongol Empire (New York: Facts on File, 2004), ix. For Tibetan names, I have followed the system used by the International Association of Tibetan Studies (online at http://thdl.org).

{x}

Chinese characters from the Zhou Dynasty divination text, the Book of Changes (Yi jing), have been used as symbols for the Introduction and for each of the three parts of this book. The Book of Changes uses sixty-four hexagrams (combinations of broken and unbroken lines) to represent the stages of change in a cyclically changing universe. The hexagrams used in this text, their names, and their meanings are as follows:

Introduction: (qian) The Creative. The first hexagram of the Book of Changes, qian symbolizes beginnings, justice, the way of the superior man, and the primal creative force of the universe.

Part I: (shihe) Biting Through. This, the twenty-first hexagram, refers to the establishment of institutions and the judicious, yet forceful use of laws and punishments to bring about order and harmony.

Part II: (dayou) Possession in Great Measure. The fourteenth hexagram stands for blessings extended to all, just as the sun in the heavens shines equally on all below, bringing clarity and order to the world.