Anyone else discovered the trick that when their are alternate spelling methods of foreign words, if you split the difference between the two spellings you often get closer to the correct sound than either of them.
I have been doing this for years (where possible) and feel it is often pretty successful with Asian/indigenous words.
I have noticed that in particular for the sound represented by "q" in hanyu pinyin. Wade-Giles represents it as ch', but in older representations it is commonly spelled ts (tsingtao (qingdao) beer, tsinghua (qinghua) university).
It is quite true that, to the English ear, the Mandarin sound is ambiguous between those two representations. But I'm curious how you would go about attempting to split the difference.
Another example that appears in the post is that Wade-Giles represented pinyin "r" as "j". This is easy to explain - the sound can be anywhere along the continuum between the sound of the R in "row" and the sound of the SI in "vision", and I assume J was picked to represent that second sound, possibly with an eye toward French.
But while pinyin "q" is a case of an intermediate sound, pinyin "r" isn't really. Every point on the continuum is a legitimate pronunciation of the Mandarin sound; what you get will differ from speaker to speaker and even from utterance to utterance holding the speaker constant.
Except that Pinyin is now the official rendering of Putonghua in Latin script. All translations going forward will be in Pinyin. All serious Western scholarship is being rendered in Pinyin.
I never understood what I was supposed to do with those apostrophes ('). Supposedly they are aspirations, but once I started learning Putonghua, I could not see any correlation between the WG spellings and the Beijing way of pronunciation. At least with Pinyin and its tonal notations, one can figure out how the word should be pronounced (once you've got 4 tones for each vowel sound down, and all those subtle frictives in Beijing-style Putonghua mastered).
Why should we care? “Rome” is Roma. “Cologne” is Köln. Beijing can be called whatever the Chinese want in China. Here in the US, we should use a romanization designed for Americans, not whatever happens to be official over there.
But “Beijing” is what the Chinese want it called in China, being the pinyin romanization of 北京! “Peking” is the older English name, borrowed from a Portuguese transliteration, and that sees relatively little use now except when in relation to things still associated with the older name like Peking Duck.
Come to think of it, I‘m not sure why I wrote this comment…
Americans should just use the Yale romanization system, which was actually designed so that Americans can pronounce something reasonable close to correct by just reading it. Under no circumstances should pinyin be used with a generalist American reading audience. It’s a great romanization system—for people who speak Mandarin. Everyone who speaks English but not Mandarin should use Yale.
"Maybe in some alternate universe a Ming-era person discovers that lightning can be tamed like fire - would that have helped? I’m not aware of any experiments with electricity, though they did have gunpowder and printing presses. "
They were not ready for a scientific revolution. At this point the Chinese believed the earth was flat and they didn't even have Euclidean geometry. Not that they weren't smart! They were highly intelligent, it's just they didn't have the cultural apparatus for scientific investigation. A good example is Chinese astronomy. Right around this time period Chinenese astronomy was a state monopoly conducted by the Bureau of Mathematics and Astronomy, under the Ministry of Rites. It was part of the Ministry of Rites because the sole purpose of Astronomy was to prepare an annual calendar that identified lucky and unlucky days. The calendar's primary purpose is to establish the days certain rites will occur on. Astronomer's studied the stars so they could predict the equinoxes and eclipses so that rites would happen at the right time.
In 1603 the Chinese scholar Xu Guanqi converts to Christianity under the influence of his friend Matteo Ricci, a Jesuit priest who came to China as a missionary. Ricci has been sharing western knowledge with Xu, and together they decide to translate all of western science into Chinese. By 1610 they've published translations explaining geometry, Ptolemaic astronomy (not the best science, but at least the Earth is a sphere and the math works), and other odds and ends. Note that this is still 1610 and the scientific revolution is just kicking off in Europe: all Xu is doing is trying to get China caught up with Europe's mathematical and astronomical knowledge circa 500 AD or so.
Xu challenges the Chinese astronomers to a face off to prove which system is better, with the Jesuits making their own calendar to compare to the Chinese calendar. The Jesuit calendar is so much more accurate than the Bureau's that the Emperor grants Xu permission to translate and publish the remainder of Western science into Chinese. A Jesuit priest returns to Europe to recruit more astronomer-missionaries and collect books of science.
So what happens from there? What happens is the eunuchs and other bureaucrats get pissed off at some rando showing up and rocking the boat (and tradition! The Earth is a sphere? How radical!). The Minister of Rites manages to put the Jesuit missionaries on trial for disparaging Chinese rites. Though none are executed, many are banished and the rest stop publicly spreading scientific knowledge and try to keep their nose clean. In 1619 the priest they sent to get more books arrives with 7,000 of them, plus something special: a brand new telescope! While all this was happening in China the telescope was invented, spread across Europe, and was being used to make amazing new astronomical discoveries. The moons of Jupiter! The transit of Venus! Craters on the moon! It's a big moment, and China has just received this state of the art invention from across the world.
Of course, the Chinese won't let him in because the Jesuits are persona-non-grata with the bureaucracy right now. He sneaks in anyway, and by 1622 court politics have shifted enough that the Jesuits are back in business. They set up shop and by 1626 have published a Chinese treatise on the telescope and all the cool discoveries that have already been made with it. Wang Cheng publishes "Diagrams and Explanation of the Marvelous Devices of the Far West" where he expounds on the telescope and its value for navigation, warfare, astronomy, etc. One difficulty is that the Chinese do not have the technical skill to grind glass lenses, and have no science of optics. Still, the knowledge is here and there are people excited to spread it.
In 1629 another showdown is held, this time with the task of predicting when the next day's solar eclipse will occur. The Jesuit astronomers predict the start time and duration down to the minute, while the Bureau of Calendar's is off on the start by an hour and the duration by almost two hours. The Emperor is impressed enough to put Xu in charge of a Calendar Reform Project. The Jesuits translate more works on state-of-the art astronomy from letters they receive from Europe: they publish books on Tycho's model of the solar system, and in 1632 they use Tycho's system to predict the conjunction of Mars and Venus. The old Chinese system is off by eight days. The current leader of the Jesuit astronomer-priests, Schall, is appointed the head of the Bureau of Calendars.
So at this point China has all the knowledge it needs to kick off a scientific revolution, the kind that is happening simultaneously in Europe. The trouble is that they don't have the cultural institutions for it. They have the fuel, they have the spark, but there's no oxygen in the room.
The Imperial Bureaucracy is against this whole project from the get go, and the only thing that holds them back is the Emperor's support. When the Emperor dies in 1664 the new Emperor is told by his officials that the Calendar Reform project is just an excuse to propagate Christianity, upset tradition, and destabilize China. Schall is accused of creating calendars that cause state rites to occur at inauspicious times, leading to the death of the previous Emperor. The project heads are imprisoned. Schall is sentenced to death by dismemberment and the rest of his group are sentenced to exile after flogging. The sentence is commuted to house arrest after the princess dowager intervenes on their behalf, but the project is dead. The Jesuits are thrown out and the Chinese officials who worked for them are beheaded for treason. An anti-western official who has no knowledge of mathematics or astronomy is chosen as the new head of the Bureau of Calendars. They return to the old methods for the most part, choosing tradition over accuracy.
This isn't the last battle: in 1669 the Jesuits hold a new series of face offs against the Bureau, winning each one. The new Emperor becomes interested in western science, but doesn't do much about it and his successor has no interest whatsoever.
Meanwhile in Europe the scientific revolution is a wildfire that can't be stopped.
I know this is an overlong comment, but I find it very interesting. As far as I can tell it is the institutions and cultural ideas that made the difference. In China astronomy was only done by the Imperial Bureaucracy, and was subject to bureaucratic politics. Tradition and stability was valued much higher than the pursuit of knowledge or competence: I mean, look what happened to that General in the book review, he was highly competent but died penniless because he might have caused instability. In Europe knowledge wasn't controlled by the state but by the universities. Decentralized and independent they were able to pass on knew knowledge rapidly and weren't beholden to concerns about stability. People were sharing discoveries left and right, building their own telescopes, publishing papers about what they found, having debates about the implications. The telescope was invented in 1608, and by 1610 Galileo has already published "The Starry Messenger", by 1611 Kepler has invented an improved telescope, and soon every astronomer in Europe has one. At the same time that China is throwing the Jesuits out of the Bureau and going back a flat earth model, Isaac Newton is crafting the first reflecting telescope.
All that to say, China was well suited to thousands of years of stability and completely unsuited for a scientific revolution.
Interestingly, I believe that Chinese astronomers had noted that the angle to the sun is different at different points on earth. But since they believed the earth was flat, rather than a sphere, they didn’t do the calculation Eratosthenes did to find the circumference of the earth, but instead used the base of a triangle and its two angles to calculate what they thought was the distance to the sun.
Thanks for the link. Reading it also drove something else home for me: the Jesuits in 1600 couldn't have been the first time the Chinese were exposed to the idea that the world is a sphere. They directly traded with plenty of Arab, Persian, and Indian cultures that knew the world was round. It reminds me of the Macartney Embassy to China in 1793: they tried to impress the Chinese with Western inventions and trade goods, but they were viewed as barbarians (like every other nation outside the Empire) and were snubbed. The Emperor sent a letter to King George III stating "Our Celestial Empire possesses all things in prolific abundance and lacks no product within its borders. There is therefore no need to import the manufactures of outside barbarians in exchange for our own produce." That same attitude must have prevented outside scientific ideas from catching on in China from trade.
The letter is definitely worth a read, by the way. It's dripping with condescension.
That’s not how I read that thread. I read it as Cochran insisting that Mayans didn’t know astronomy, because he claimed they didn’t know the earth was a sphere, but not providing any reason to think the Mayans didn’t know the earth was a sphere.
I don’t know who that guy (Cochran) is, but to be fair to him, the consensus view is that the Mayans thought our world was a plane—maybe an infinite plane.
They had really comprehensive astronomical records as everyone knows, but even though that can give you a strong predictive power and sophisticated calendar, it doesn’t mean you have a strong underlying grasp of what’s happening mechanically in the heavens: just like the Chinese, in this instance.
Cochran was responding to a claim that some Amerindians (later to be specified as Mayans) not merely knew astronomy but were "hundreds of years ahead of “western civilization”" in both that & mathematics.
Yeah, that strikes me as a claim that is unverifiable and unfalsifiable, rather than false. There's surely many individual bits of understanding that each culture had that the others wouldn't have for centuries.
I would guess that in the specific field of mathematics, western Europeans really were far ahead of anyone outside of the Old World. There was no mathematics the Amerindians knew about that Europeans didn't.
> In Europe knowledge wasn't controlled by the state but by the universities.
Another oft-repeated explanation of the same phenomenon is to give credit to Europe having several states, all competing with each other. The state with a navy that didn't adopt a useful thing like telescope would be seriously disadvantaged. To take an example related to calendars and the 1580s, there was a period when the Gregorian calendar was adopted non-uniformly: pious non-Catholic monarchs made a great show of not adopting the Popist invention ... except until the discrepancy with the calendar months and the reality became increasingly embarrassing. The Russian empire most famously was a hold-out, which is why the October Revolution happened in November ...
True! When the telescope was first invented the Dutch state tried to keep it a secret for military purposes. That didn't work at all, and within the year you have Galileo making his own.
Interesting, a longer comment might have included the effect of the protestant rebellion on the flourishing (in some cases) and suppression (in others) of knowledge in post-medieval Europe.
This is an excellent comment, and I think your conclusions are more or less correct, only I doubt very much the core issue was cultural ideas, tradition or stability. Rather, the problem was, as usual, greedy shitheads. The literal dickless wonders running the show didn't really take exception to some calendrical quibble which, as you note yourself, they couldn't be bothered to even learn about; they took exception to a decrease in their own power. They hated being shown up by upstarts, and worse, by some foreign barbarian ones! If these new guys gain power in the machine, then someone else must lose it, and there's nobody else around but the null brigade; they might not be destabilizing China, but they're sure as fuck destabilizing the eunuchs' cushy setup. They couldn't care less about China if they tried anyway, as evidenced by their conduct.
The only problem here that can be imputed to tradition is the specific tradition of keeping all these career academics around in positions of power, which is something that ought to alarm the conscientious observer of modern America.
I think this is basically right, but overestimates the eunuch problem and underestimates the bureaucrat problem.
All the bureaucrats are chosen based on a system that boils down to competitive essay-writing, with all the essays on a handful of classics and written in a specific format. One result is that your whole elite, while theoretically drawn from the whole country, is selected to be a very specific type of person. A worse result is that all the excess capacity of elites is sunk into a zero-sum essay-writing game. There's no slack in the system - anyone who takes time to learn about the universe will get outcompeted by someone who used that time to read more Confucius. The result is the same thing we're starting to have - a 2-dimensional elite who are very good at the test we use to select them, but totally devoid of all other merits.
In Europe, by contrast, most of society was still largely hereditary, and the lack of competition resulted in a large number of people with mounds of resources who can do whatever they liked. Most of them just ate and hunted, but some of them advanced civilisation. What competition there was boiled down to getting the monarch to like you (for which novelty, and patronising arts and culture, was a decent strat), or getting other aristocrats to think you're cool (ditto). This then creates a market for secondary industries like lens grinders.
The Eunuchs should be a countervailing force, and possibly sometimes were (Zheng He) but the Chinese opinion generally was that they were too venial. They were also basically servants, so didn't have their own independent wealth/power base to start doing cool experiments.
Interestingly, this isn't something where we've coincidentally fallen for the same trap as the Chinese. The British East India Company saw the Chinese system, loved it, and copied it. Then the British copied it from the EIC as Travelyanism. Then the old American Progressives (Teddy Roosevelt and co) copied the British and introduced it to America (the Pendleton Act). That then metastasised into the idea of meritocracy, soaked into the fabric of American thought, and was shipped back to Europe with the GIs. Which I guess gives the Chinese a fitting revenge for the Opium wars or something.
I think there are also parliamentary debates on the Northcote-Travelyan reforms where some of the Tories predict what will happen with reference to China stagnating, but Hansard's search function isn't working for me today
Interesting how people often warn about the dangers of too much STEM education and not enough humanities, and yet we have a historical example of an opposite extreme.
I'm not sure how you equate the limited curriculum of the Chinese exam system with the modern study of the humanities, unless your categorisation is that all non-STEM subjects are by definition humanities. Done properly, humanities is a thinking education, encouraging challenging orthodoxies (it isn't always done well). I don't see a system based around what was in effect a system of showing adherence to a prescribed set of texts as humanities so much as a form of demonstrating adherence to a belief system, so I don't think we can define the Chinese competitive exams as humanities, and we might be better defining it as a way of recruiting a priesthood.
It's really similar to the old literae humaniores courses you still get at a few places (possibly just Oxford), but with Confucius instead of Virgil. Modern humanities courses are derived from it, but in dumbed down and in English.
Showing adherence to a prescribed set of texts is also the entirety of a humanities course - you're given a set of books to read then you write essays about them.
Possibly for literary studies, but that clearly doesn't apply to history or philosophy where texts are starting points for investigation. And you won't get a top grade in a humanities programme by simply demonstrating knowledge of the texts and their accepted interpretation; it's about displaying thought and research skills as well. At base, a good university education in any subject is to prepare students to ask the question 'what happens if I do this?'.
I'm not saying there are not badly-taught courses where faithfullness to the text and the prescribed ideology for interpreting it is required. But that is not modern humanities any more than the Ming-period competitive examination.
I once knew a fellow of Chinese extraction who liked to theorize that so many generations of putting priority on writing essays might not have been effective governance but may have resulted in the higher average Chinese IQ. (He drew a parallel to the Jewish IQ and the history of prioritizing study of the Torah.) I did not quibble with him then, and I present this defense of this type of education without comment.
It's potentially viable, but the killer stat is whether mandarin fertility/child mortality was higher or lower than the rest of the population. Although (taking this and running speculatively with it), didn't China used to have a lot of famines? That could presumably increase Mandarin fitness if they and their children were more likely to survive them than peasants were.
Also, are the Chinese smarter than the Japanese? Otherwise that's a hint that it's something else, as the Japanese were feudal (albeit stereotypically with a lot more strategy and scheming than their Teutonic counterparts).
The SAT is pretty much an IQ test, so has pretty much the opposite result - it selects for smart people.
The idea that the meritocracy is bad is one of those provocative ideas that is quite wrong on examining it for about five minutes. It yields much better results.
There's a reason why meritocratic countries advance so much faster than more primitive, backwards ones.
The key is actually operating mostly on merit and not other things that people try to substitute for merit.
China was a meritocracy, and Europe wasn’t, at the time Europe overtook China. Realistically, the Imperial examination boils down to the effort you put in plus how smart you are. The current education system in the West is the same, plus varying degrees of corruption.
If you chose the leadership of a country purely by IQ, then up to any point well into the 60s you’d end up with a Communist country. The same would apply to more conventional meritocracy, but that at least has the advantage of filtering out the weird ones, which would be the real danger of the IQ-only system; you’d end up with half the budget going towards anime.
Empirically, there doesn’t seem to be any evidence that meritocracy produces better results than either democracy of the hereditary principle.
Secondly, China wasn't a meritocracy. It didn't select for people who were best at leading. That is what meritocracy IS - it is about having merit at the thing you do, not in some ethereal sense. This is precisely why capitalism works so well - you are rewarded by generating value for other people.
People who think "merit" is just about raw IQ aren't living in reality. IQ makes you more able to posses actually useful forms of merit, but IQ itself doesn't actually mean anything - it doesn't matter how smart you are if you spend all your time navel gazing or engaging in other useless or frivolous activity.
The reason why IQ tests can be useful is because they let you find the people who have the highest ability cap. But simply giving people IQ tests is not sufficient to determine merit at a particular job or occupation, because lots of other things are involved in merit as well. In the end, the person with the highest IQ is not necessarily the person with the most merit, and indeed, it is not uncommon for the person with the most merit not to be the highest IQ person but the person with fairly high IQ but very high diligence and thus willingness to hone skills beyond the point of diminishing returns.
I agree with the capitalism point, but do western bureaucracies select for people who are best at leading? Despite the popular Rotschild-related conspiracy theories, the most successful capitalists don't in fact wield most of the power.
1) They were until Communism actually started to fail, even though most other people weren't convinced.
2) This version of meritocracy (the best person to do the job should do the job) is too vague to be meaningful as it can't be operationalised. The person who thinks the best leaders will be produced by taking children of current leaders and raising them from birth to be confident and decisive enough to rule and the person who thinks the best leaders will be produced by sending the people with the best SATs to Harvard, then having them work at McKinsey for a bit before becoming congressional staffers are both "meritocrats."
"Meritocracy" meaning "the people who should lead us are the people who are best at leading" is question-begging bordering on tautology. Actual meritocracy, both in the view of the man who coined it and every time it's now used, means selecting leaders/functionaries/bureaucrats through competitive examination, which is the Imperial Chinese system. There's an element of motte-and-bailey between the two definitions now that it's not just a term of abuse, but most people understand it to mean the current Western system but shorn of it's plutocratic skew.
The European "scientific revolution" of the 16th and 17th Centuries that you're talking about was largely a revolution in entrepreneurial alchemy. The flood of silver from the Spanish conquest was upsetting economies all over Europe, causing extreme inflation—and especially in Central Europe, where the older metal economies of Central European kingdoms were being disrupted—rulers started hiring alchemists to produce gold. It turned out that silver thalers had enough gold in them that could be extracted to make the first wave of entrepreneurial alchemists seem rather successful! Of course, a lot of the alchemists were total failures (and many of them were executed as charlatans). But that led to more explicit contracts (which led to the development of contract law across Europe—without which a modern economy can't run). And rulers also invested in mining technology to more efficiently extract metals (and the alchemists were there helping out with the process of metal refining).
With tight finances in an inflationary economy, rulers would sometimes sell stock in these mining and metallurgical enterprises to fund them. Thus the modern corporation as owned by stockholders evolved alongside the boom in entrepreneurial alchemy (again spurring along the European economy). There are pictures from that period depicting large factories with hundreds of workers toiling over refining equipment. Many of these became something like research labs, where once they gave up on the pipe dreams of transmutation, they started exploiting secondary technologies that had practical uses—such as the reliable production of potassium nitrate (which was used in older alchemical experiments, but which found a new use in the burgeoning firearms industry of the time). And lest you think I'm exaggerating the importance of the early alchemical entrepreneurs on the development of a modern European economy and sciences, remember that during this period the people we now consider to be scientific luminaries—such as Newton and Boyle—regarded themselves as alchemists. Most of Newton's notebooks are alchemical in nature. Calculus and the law of gravity were just some ideas that he tossed off along the way in his search for Van Helmont's alchahest (sort of a universal alchemical solvent). As a reference, The Business of Alchemy: Science and Culture in the Holy Roman Empire by Pamela H. Smith, is well worth reading.
Anyway, China didn't have the destabilizing influx of New World silver, and its rulers didn't have to adapt to a vast inflationary cycle disrupting their ordered economies. Likewise, as far I as I can tell Chinese alchemists were only interested in creating life-extending elixirs, and the only gold they were obsessed with was the false gold that was the basis of their elixir theory. (Whatever false gold was, I don't know.)
Alchemy was certainly relevant for some of the things that came later (notably Boyle and Lavoisier and Dalton’s work that turned the earth and fire elemental system upside down) but I would have thought that Galileo and Kepler and Copernicus, not to mention Vesalius and other claimed starting points of the Scientific Revolution, were somewhat independent of alchemy.
Lee Smolin in his book, Time Reborn, regards Leibnitz as being the first philosopher/scientist to start thinking about the cosmos in a new theoretical way—one that was unconnected to the mechanistic clockwork universe that was inherited from Aristotelian predecessors. Smolin argues that Leibnitz saw time to be a function of the nature of the universe, rather than something that was outside and separate from Newton's clockwork universe. Einstein may have been influenced by Leibnitz when he formulated General Relativity (speculation).
But if we were to look for the origin of the experimental method, I think that would be with the 11th Century's Ibn al-Haytham who was the first to connect the Greek idea of a hypothesis with the process of reproducible experimentation to confirm the hypothesis. So I would qualify Ibn al-Haytham as the world's first scientist—in the modern definition of science. I think there was some argument a while back about whether Newton read an early translation of al Haytham's treatise on optics, but I'm kind of vague about the details.
Not that Kepler and Galileo didn't provide significant stepping stones in the understanding of our cosmos, but even though today we consider them to be early astronomers, they would have seen themselves working in the traditions of astrology and a calendrical knowledge. After all, why did kings and potentates fund the work of our early "astronomers"? They wanted a better way of predicting future events (i.e. astrology).
Lol! I knew I'd provoke a strong response from some of ACX folks!
The Business of Alchemy: Science and Culture in the Holy Roman Empire by Pamela H. Smith, is well worth reading. Next year I'll do a book report on it.
I would also direct you to Newton's notebooks. Just looking over the first 50 entries in the catalog of his notes and notebooks, 47 are about subjects related to alchemy and hermetic knowledge. Newton's primary intellectual occupation was alchemy. The stuff we remember him for was but a small part of what he was about.
Here are some links to pics of some 16th and 17th Century alchemical enterprises. As you can see, alchemical labs were common enough for contemporary artists to depict them, and they display all the signs of a top-down organizational structure, as well as evidence of extensive logistical organization — after all a significant number of craft workers were involved in the creation of the devices that they were using (a holdover of these craft guilds would be the glassblowers who staffed 20th Century chemistry labs). Also, it would take a significant input of capital to fund these projects. So what we're seeing in these pictures are the first organized experimental enterprises whose ultimate goal was to create value from experimental knowledge.
I am not saying the connections made are wrong. It’s that the connections aren’t “the difference”, and that there are 50 other series of connections you could make.
But China has suffered from inflation far before anyone else, with their invention of Fiat currency hundreds of years before it happened in the West. I think this is too narrow of a view of Science (to bring it down only to Alchemy) and while this is an interesting perspective, I do not think it explains the full, or even the majority of the differences.
I don't know about the fiat currencies of China. Do you have some links?
However, Europe did have a lot of competing states—which China did not—except in interregnums between dynasties. The competitive political pressures during an inflationary era and the threat of the Ottomans Empire on Central European states may have made spurred new economic models as well as research into things that states would find of practical use. Bacon opined that "science" was about the creation of useful things, and he disparaged wasting time on theory if it wasn't towards of goal of utility.
Bacon did do that for sure, but can we hold it against him that way back then he did not know that almost all theoretical research will turn out to be practical too - something people today do not know.
> Anyway, China didn't have the destabilizing influx of New World silver, and its rulers didn't have to adapt to a vast inflationary cycle disrupting their ordered economies
I thought the opposite. The Ming had a massive inflationary problem with their paper money, and the Philippines was basically jointly colonized by Chinese merchants and the Spanish to exchange Mexican silver (high demand in China) for goods like like silk and porcelain.
Amazing comment - I lived across from Xu Guanqi's park, house and museum, and I loved to spend time there. He was, in his acceptance but also cleverness, ahead of his time, and it is a shame that the system around him was not made to accept his ideas. In his area of town, Xujiahui, still a Catholic church stands, a remnant of those times, and quite beautiful even to my atheist eyes. Still, history is repeating itself and the church is often closed and its existence is uncertain in the future due to the prime location it takes up.
Anyhow, thank you for the tale, more detailed than the one I knew, about Xu.
It's a great story, but I don't think it supports your conclusion.
The fact that X didn't happen in China doesn't mean it *couldn't* happen in China; the fact that X did happen in Europe doesn't mean that it was particularly or more likely to happen in Europe.
Consider this possibility: that in fact there was approximately a 50:50 chance that a scientific revolution would happen in China in the 1600s; and the same chance that one would happen in Europe. The coins were tossed, and as luck has it, Europe came up heads, China tails. If this is true, then looking in the tea leaves of Chinese history for why it came up tails is useless. It was just a historical happenstance.
Now I haven't given any evidence for this, only a just-so story. But I think accepting that some things are down to chance is a much better starting point than going into the study of history determined to find the reasons why X.
The Chinese divide the sky into four houses, as we would cut an apple into four pieces, each with an ancient symbolic animal: the Canglong for the East and Spring, the Vermilion Bird for the South and Summer, the White Tiger for the West and Autumn, and the Xuanwu (or "gloomy warrior") for the North and Winter. The northern arch of the polar region, which immediately surrounds the Emperor's pole star, is considered to be a separate central yellow palace in a similar symbolic relationship to the five elements. This view of the five elements permeates the entire Chinese philosophy of nature. In addition, there is a more important division of the heavens than this.
Since ancient times, the Chinese equator (as opposed to the ecliptic) has been divided into 28 parts, called the 28 constellations (lunar stations), with seven constellations in each house, each of which is marked by a special constellation, counting from a particular fixed star (distance star), so that each constellation occupies a very different equatorial area. The circles of time separating the constellations radiate out from the celestial pole, like a network of orange petals in the sky, with some constellations located above the equator and others distributed north and south of it.
Chinese astronomy has a long history of development. By the Han Dynasty, there were already schools of thought such as Gai Tian, Xuan Yi and Hun Tian. According to Gai Tian, the sky is like a lid, and the center of the lid is the north pole. XuanYi said that the sky has no fixed shape and the sun, moon and stars "float naturally in the void" and are not attached to the "heavenly body". The Huntian says that the sky is like an egg shell and the earth is like the yolk of an egg, and that the sky and the earth stand on air and carry water.
"When the Emperor dies in 1664 the new Emperor is told by his officials that the Calendar Reform project is just an excuse to propagate Christianity, upset tradition, and destabilize China."
I don't know about destabilizing tradition, but the Jesuits were missionaries. No matter their good intentions, they did wish to propagate Christianity, and upset tradition in the meantime.
What I'm getting at here is just that the accusations against them weren't exactly false. I don't know if we can infer anything about the Chinese readiness to accept new technology, because the story seems completely explainable by hostility to foreign religion and culture. Hardly unique to the Chinese.
I agree, that the spread of Christianity in China would upset tradition. But so would the spread of new ideas in general! If the concern was the spread of Christianity alone, then keep the translated books and kick out the missionaries. They had proven multiple times by that point that the Ptolemaic (and by this time Tychonic) system worked better than the Chinese system. Yet when they kicked out the Jesuits they didn't replace them with a traditional Chinese official using the new knowledge, they replaced them with a traditional Chinese official using the traditional Chinese method.
Take in contrast Europe, which was still reeling from it's own religious upsetting of tradition: the Protestant Reformation. That movement certainly brought significant amounts of instability and war: it practically tore Europe apart (the 30 years war kicked of in 1618, remember). Hans Lippershey (the inventor of the telescope) was a Protestant: yet Catholic Galileo still used his invention. Tycho and Kepler were Protestants, yet that didn't stop Catholic astronomers from using Tycho's tables and adopting Kepler's ellipses. The Pope censured Galileo and banned books on heliocentrism, and yet that didn't stop European (even most Catholic) astronomers from using heliocentric systems in their work.
I think the primary difference is that there was no institution in Europe that was capable of stopping the spread of new scientific knowledge, and at least one institution (the university system) that actively encouraged the spread. That second part is important: I'm sure the Emperor didn't care much whether common folk believed the Earth was round or flat, but without independent institutions of education where new ideas were rewarded with prestige, who was going to bother to debate it?
Tangential, but important. Re. "Probably the biggest thing I learned is that human history is little more than 5000 years of gang war": This is a common complaint about humanity, but unjust. I think we should rephrase it as, "The history we've chosen to write is little more than 5000 years of gang war." Taking that as your baseline for human nature is like basing your expectations about life on Hollywood blockbusters. Only in the past 30 years have historians begun to look at the everyday life of ordinary people, which makes up the vast majority of human history.
True. My grandfather lived for 88 years, but if you asked me about him the first thing that would come to mind was that he fought in WWII. That was just two years of his 88 year life, which was primarily spent in peaceful work and loving parenting. It's just not as interesting to talk about.
It’s not interesting to *him* to talk about. But I really would be much more interested in knowing about what we’re the differences in daily life between someone living in 1500s China and someone living in 1700s Europe and someone living in 1200s Tenochtitlan than knowing who killed whom on which battlefield.
I agree, I wish there were more works about "years of no significance", where you could see what life was like at such-and-such a place and such-and-such a time when there isn't tremendous upheaval.
You might be interested in Giusto Traina's '428 AD : An Ordinary Year at the End of the Roman Empire', another book about a year where no big catastrophe happened but a hundred ominous small events make things look increasingly grim for the empire (danger zone for cherry-picking, admittedly). I haven't read it yet but I do own it! I'll get around to it... Someday.
I didn't know Herodotus wrote in 1990! Thanks for the tip. I'd heard that the Iliad and Odyssey were a concoction of the 1970's. Herodotus being a 90's phenomenon makes sense in that context.
You're right that the OP certainly overstates the murder monkey take on history. But it's a hook, and hooks indicate the type of fish wished for. And we, my friend, are loose fish.
I suppose you're talking about the parts of book 2 about the Egyptians. Fair enough. But it's only about 1/10th of the Histories, which are mostly about wars, the histories of noble families, and legends.
Herodotus includes ethnographic details about virtually all the peoples mentioned in the Histories. I'm not sure what percentage is ethnography vs. wars vs. noble families vs. legends (which, given the Classical Greek mindset, can't be clearly delineated from ethnography anyway), but it's definitely much more than 10% (heck, the Egyptian section alone is more than 10%).
As a holder of a PhD in history awarded 20 years ago, think this statement about historians only looking at everyday life in the last thirty years is demonstrably wrong. The Annales school of historians have had a consistent focus on everyday life and using this as bottom-up history for almost 80 years, based on earlier research by scholars such as Bloch, and there was a similar strand of Soviet historical research (cynically, because it was the only area where one could ignore Marx but produce acceptable results). Less focusedly, even the great patrician English historians of the early-twentieth century, the A.J.P. Taylor and F.M. Stenton types, were producing work on lived experience alongside other historical narratives. I don't know American historiography well enough to say for certain that social history was a norm in the early-mid-twentieth century, but if be rather surprised if it wasn't. It certainly isn't an innovation of the 1990s anyway.
You may be commenting on popular history here, which might be more true (there were popular books looking at everyday life for the millennium of Domesday Book in 1986 but that's not way off your 30 years), but it seems a bit odd to say historians, whose primary outputs are academic papers and monographs, are not studying something because the companies that produce popular history don't publish books in those areas. Commissioning editors are not historians.
But... what would you estimate is the fraction of peer-reviewed history articles published since 2000 which focused on the lives of ordinary people, divided by the fraction of such articles published before 1960 (not counting studies of societies which left no evidence of a ruling class)? If that ratio is more than 10, then my statement may not be True-with-a-capital-T, but is still basically correct.
I never meant there were literally no such articles earlier, only that there's been a very marked increase in them. And 1990 isn't a hard line, but was my attempt to pick out the inflection point in the sigma curve describing the fraction of attention historians pay to the lower classes. You should read it not as if it were in the context of claiming priority on a new discovery, but in the context of being a qualitative description of what you expect to find in a history journal today versus many years ago. I stated it in simple terms to avoid writing this very paragraph.
I would have said there is an inflection point that begins with the Annales' school. But having read several 19th century books, it's not like social history and individual life were ignored in earlier history research. There is definitely a lot more clout given to social history today, given that the medieval history textbook I teach from has been gutted some of my preferred political and economic material and replaced it with additional social history, which, while extremely valuable does not fit within the goals of my intro course. The correct view is boring: social history has more clout within the academy today than it did in the past, but that doesn't mean social history was ignored and irrelevant among previous generations.
I agree with John here, that social history is not a new field, but it is currently receiving more focus, although I suspect that other than in specific sub-disciplines such as agricultural history this may have peaked.
I'd date this increased focus from the 1970s though, where it seems to the in with the postmodernist turn. So you're not wrong, but perhaps missing the backstory in your original comment.
You may also be correct on the ratio of articles, but as I have a view that modern articles have a lower bar to cross to get published (this doesn't mean they're worse mind you) due to more opportunities to do so, I'm not sure this would be statistically meaningful.
>Only in the past 30 years have historians begun to look at the everyday life of ordinary people, which makes up the vast majority of human history.
I know this to be false, for I've read March Bloch's "The Feodal Society", which was published in 1939 (so not in the last 30, but the last 80+ years), and ot was, except for the first chapter (which relates to the "gang wars" that threatened Europe in the early middle age), entirely dedicated to the organization of society, it's judicial rules, it's way to handle contracts, how social classes gained or lost privileges or burdens, etc etc.
The big problem with history and books regarding history of the World, is that the authors very often don't even know the language/ languages of the era or region.
5 thousands years of gang wars it's a description which ' fit' perfectly within Western culture, especially in those countries where English is the only known language ( plus maybe another one or two, used by minorities).
That's like quoting Dostoevsky without reading his works in Russian language.
You can watch ' Throne in blood ' by Akira Kurosawa and after few minutes you recognise Shakespeare's work but rarely can you translate papers, sources, books, you name it from other languages into English without losing the main 'spirit '.
I wish I could read more books about the history of different countries around the World written by authors who rely on their own researches based on solid knowledge of the original language/ languages.
Your parentheses beside the English being the only known language immediately hilights the problems with that statement, particularly that you previously said 5000 years of gang violence. English isn’t a old language and is relatively new to Britain. Do we really have to read Dostoevsky in Russian? Maybe for the language but not the themes.
<i>English isn’t a old language and is relatively new to Britain.</i>
Huh? English has been spoken in Britain for over 1500 years. Even if you only count modern English as "proper" English, that's still 500 years, which is (as far as I can tell) pretty much normal for European languages.
Old English is clearly not German, as they come from different branches of the West Germanic languages. Old English is the most extremely-different from Old High German of the West Germanic languages, possibly because there's no actual evidence for it being spoken in proximity as it is only recorded in Britain. It's clearly English though in that much of the language we type here is derived from it.
A major theme which either Mr. Huang or the reviewer has overlooked is that the role of Emperor in China is more significantly about unification and preservation of same than temporal power per se.
Just as a king in a feudal structure is ultimately beneficial in adjudicating between the feudal lords at last resort - the Emperor of China is intended to be the focal point upon which Chinese unity is preserved. This is why concepts like the "mandate of Heaven" are important: failure in the form of rebellion or mass suffering as precondition to rebellion are signs that an Emperor is failing in his most basic function. OF course, in reality the size and sheer scale of China in the pre-computer, pre-electrical communications era required devolution of execution of policy; the Hanlin examinations and the Imperial Bureaucracy was created to try and enable extension of Imperial policies to the far-flung corners of China.
If you look at the efforts by certain governors during the late Qing dynasty to build modern industry, for example, in the face of overall higher level bureaucratic indifference - it gives an idea of how such a ponderous bureaucratic beast operates.
But then again, it shouldn't be surprising that a scion of the post-Qing revolutionaries should denigrate the regime that was overthrown - especially since the "democratic" governments of China succeeding the Qing were notable primarily for failing both to improve Chinese society and economy as well as to preserve China's unity.
> I’ll also include the Pinyin version in parentheses where the spelling of the Wade-Giles version is significantly different, like this: Peking (Beijing).
But the Wade-Giles version of 北京 is not significantly different from beijing. It's pei-ching. The name "Peking" has nothing to do with Wade-Giles.
> His personal name combined the characters for “joy” and “king.”
It seems like it would have been incredibly disruptive for such common characters (樂王? Maybe 喜王?) to fall under the imperial name taboo. Particularly in the case of 王, which is now and was then one of the most common surnames in China.
Checking Wikipedia, I see that the Wanli Emperor's name was 翊鈞. Neither character has any sense remotely related to joy or kings. I don't see any mention in the wikipedia article that he changed his name upon taking the throne, though this was done by other emperors if they felt their name would be too disruptive.
What happened here? What name are you referring to?
The second character has the “jun1” sound and is sound/tone as 君, which does mean monarch. A similar explanation exists for the first character 翊, which sounds like 怡 and does mean joy/happy
It sounds like you're suggesting that Wanli was one of the emperors who substituted homophones into his name upon ascending the throne, in order to lessen the burden on everyone else, and wikipedia just isn't mentioning it.
But I don't think that's actually a possibility. All male members[1] of the Ming imperial family were legally required to have names that conformed to the system established by the first Ming emperor. The first character of their name was taken from a generation poem (normal for any classy Chinese family), and the second one included a radical from the 五行, with the radicals progressing through a conventional sequence generation by generation. (As far as I know, this elaboration on the scheme was unique to the Ming imperial family, but I don't know a lot.)
And here are some of the personal names of the Wanli Emperor's brothers:
翊釴
翊鈴
翊鏐
It looks painfully clear that the poem character for Wanli's generation was 翊, not 怡, and the element radical for his generation was 金, which is present in 鈞, but not in 君. He couldn't legally have been named 怡君.
It's possible there was some concept called 怡君 and the Wanli emperor was named 翊鈞 in reference to that. On the other hand, the 汉语大词典 has no entry for 怡君.
[1] Judging by the names of the princesses, they used a generation character in their names too, but not the same one that the boys used. They did not use 五行 radicals - they all seem to have used 女 radicals in the second character of their name. I don't know whether this was also required or just felt to make sense.
Nicely done, Mr. Watts. I didn't know that interesting fact about the "five force" tradition in Ming imperial names. A small correction, really to Julien's idea: 翊 (yì) and 怡 (yí) were and are not homonyms, even though a modern English reader might understandably think they were.
You aren’t wrong, I was merely suggesting a possibility of how the author got “joy king” from WanLi’s name. Who knows until the author themselves explain
A couple of points. The reviewer is clearly not familiar with Chinese or Chinese history, so there are quite a few mistakes of this kind. (For example, "Nurhaci is the founder of the Manchu" makes no sense, but it's easy to get confused in a foreign history.) Huang's book does use Wade-Giles, so the reviewer's right in general. But because major place names were often an exception in texts discussing China (English scholarship used "postal spellings"), he chose a poor example in Peking. No way for the reviewer to know.
I don't have Huang's book so I can't figure out how the reviewer came to make his statement about the Wanli Emperor's personal name. Huang was a good scholar, so if he made that statement there must be a basis for it. The way that the reviewer's sentence is constructed, the implied name would presumably be 瓅 (li), combining "king" 王 (loosely understood, in this case, since the form actually stands for a different character) and 樂 (joy), in a single character. However, no online or print source records a personal name with that character, and my guess is that this is just a misunderstanding of something Huang wrote.
Placed alongside Scott's comment and Jack's response, I think this post is going to look like satire, but I really am this dull.
'Nurhaci is the founder of the Manchu' makes complete sense to me. He created the confederation of Jurchen tribes which then adopted the Manchu national identity. This process involved classifying some incorporated groups together as 'official' clans when they did not in fact have a prior genealogical relationship, so it makes sense to consider him the 'founder' of the people.
Well, "Manchu" is an ethnonym. As you say, Nurhaci brought Jurchen tribes into a confederation, so "Nurchaci was the founder of the Manchu confederacy" would make sense. And the elaboration of common genealogical narratives might translate to, "Nurhaci was the founder of the Manchu national identity" (although it's an odd use of "founder" and the word "Manchu" was not adopted as an ethnonym till after Nurhaci's death). I guessed the reviewer's meaning was intended to be, "Nurhaci was the founder of the Manchu Dynasty," which he retrospectively was regarded to have been by the dynastic cult itself, which referred to him by a Chinese imperial title. But "Nurhaci was the founder of the Manchu" is like "Bismarck was the founder of the German." I don't think the sentence makes sense, and there are various ways to construe what idea the author might have intended. Among the possible ones, the notion you're proposing, "Nurhaci was the founder of the Manchu people" seems simply wrong, although I did suspect this might be what the reviewer meant. The Jurchens were a self-conscious ethnic group, sharing a common language, territory, religion, and tradition long before Nurhaci.
hmm the original sentence was perfectly intelligible to me even if technically a word may have been missing. Doesn't seem sufficient to support your claim that reviewer has shallow knowledge of China matters. You mentioned there are a lot of similar mistakes maybe offer a couple different examples?
Well, it's unkind to pile on. The reviewer acknowledges he's not knowledgeable about China, so it's not a criticism to say he makes some mistakes as a result. At one point in discussing the continuity of Chinese history he comments that the "last century or two" appear different, but actually carry on the continuity. There's not much you can lump together between the last two centuries in China. The first is solidly an extension of the Imperial order--no visitor to 19th century China would have said, "You know, I see continuities with the distant past," because the proper response would have been, "Well, duh!" The last century has been an abrupt break, no matter how much cultural influence the past seems to hold, and discerning continuities is an interesting analytic task. The extinction of the Imperial state in 1911 is a paradigm shift unlike any in China since the third century BCE.
At another point, the reviewer refers to the core curriculum of the exam system as "The Four Classics of Taoism and Confucianism." There is no such corpus. The "Four Books and Five Classics" is the standard term for the Confucian classical canon; Taoism had little role to play in the exam curriculum, but its two earliest texts (contemporary with the Four Books) were universally known and admired (and still are). This sort of muddle is like the error of taking "Peking" to be Wade-Giles transcription, and my point was that missteps like these don't really matter here. They don't affect the reviewer's goals or the perspective he's trying to convey--he's representing himself honestly as a newcomer to Chinese history, and it's unfair to ask that he show command of the details to convey an outsider perspective.
By the way, what did you take his sentence about Nurhaci to mean? I actually thought he'd simply left off an -s ("founder of the Manchus"), and that it was 50/50 whether he meant the ethnic group or the Dynastic line, with a little overage odds on something else, like TheBard's "national identity" or military system, etc.
Hi - anonymous reviewer here - for some reason I thought "Manchu" was both plural and singular, like "moose." Good to know it should be either "Manchus" or "Manchu confederacy" (in my mind, those are approximately the same thing). And yeah, I assumed anything with "old-school spelling" was Wade-Giles, hence "Peking." Thanks for the info!
Wikipedia presents Wanli, the regnal name that he took on receiving the mandate of heaven, in traditional characters as: 萬曆帝
I get:
萬 = great number (usually translated as 10,000)
曆 = calendar
帝 = heaven's son (which we usually translate as Emperor)
I suspect that 萬曆 would translate roughly as "Great Age Son of Heaven" as in Emperor of an Age of Greatness (as in an age that will live for 10,000 years).
HIs given name was 朱翊鈞.
朱 = Vermillion, which is an imperial color as well as being a surname
翊 = the most likely meaning of this character is respect (IMO)
鈞 = and jūn is an honorific, isn't it? Noble, honorable.
So, Vermillion, Worthy of Respect, or Vermillion Noble Respect, is my take on his given name. I don't know where the author got Joy from.
Reign titles are an unusual Chinese institution. Emperors were responsible for setting the annual calendar (advised by specialists in the bureaucracy), because the solunar calendar used in traditional China required constant adjustment to track the solar (agricultural) year, using leap months (5 every 17 years, if I recall--think of how "Chinese New Year" jumps around). There was no tradition of consecutive year dating: years were designated by a 60-item (sexagenary) cycle that kept recurring, so, for example, 2022 is designated identically with 1962. Reign-period dating was a device to give each year an individual designation.
Starting in 163 BCE, the Chinese emperors would declare reign period designations with elegant, two-character titles, and years were designated on the formula XX #, as in Wan-li 15 (roughly, 1587). Emperors could replace reign titles with new ones as they wished--Empress Wu of the Tang period, China's only fully acknowledged female emperor, used 16 different reign titles over a period of 21 years, changing in mid-year several times. None of these reign titles had anything to do with the emperor's name. Emperors had a personal name (e.g., 朱翊鈞 --朱,by the way, has nothing to do with being an imperial color; it's a common surname, and the Ming founder bore it as a child, when he was a poor farmer's orphan, a monk in a failing monastery, and a beggar . . . his fortunes changed), and they also had an imperial name, unique to them within a dynasty (although often repeated among dynasties). Zhu Yijun's 朱翊鈞 imperial name was Shenzong 神宗. He is "Emperor Shenzong." He is also "*The* Wanli Emperor," but only because the Ming ditched the custom of changing reign titles at will, and set a precedent of one per emperor, so emperors for the first time could be referred to by their reign names, which held through 1911.
Wanli 萬曆 is a pretty orthodox reign title. It means 10,000 (innumerable) calendar[-years]. In Chinese, "10,000 years" (wansui 萬歲) is a traditional wish for an emperor ("May the king live forever!"). It's more recognizable to Americans in its Japanese form: "banzai!"--written identically-- which many of us Boomers learned as the enthusiastic cry of kamikaze pilots in World War II as they tried to immolate themselves by crashing into and sinking US warships. (In fact, that emperor did live a very long time indeed.) Wanli's choice is a prediction that his reign would be long, and it turned out to be a prescient selection.
So the Wanli Emperor had two names (actually, he had more, but I want to avoid any hint of detail here): his personal name, Zhu Yijun, and his imperial name, Shenzong. The "zong 宗" in Shenzong means "ancestor," and was used as an honorific in the imperial names of all but the last Ming emperor. The word "shen 神" means "spirit," "sentient," "amazing," and other senses associated with the idea of a life-force in people that also lives on after death in some ghostly sense. It's conceivable that Ray Huang knew of some usage of "shen" that could be construed as joyful, in which case, he might have said that "Shenzong" meant joyful king. "Joyful" is not one of the sixteen definitions I find for 神 in encyclopedic dictionaries, but who could deny that it is joyful to be sentient? However, there's a certain irony in this, because imperial names such as Shenzong were bestowed only at the point of post-sentience, the dynastic successor bestowing the name upon his recently deceased predecessor (usually, Dad). That's why the last Ming emperor does not have such a name. Of course, the Wanli emperor's son might have been joyful to finally have the opportunity to name his father while he himself was still sentient. Sadly, he was dead within less than a month, having, according to the histories, overindulged in the joy of his new harem. (Take warning, Prince Charles!)
Thanks for the detailed comment! Fascinating! But for which names did the Imperial naming taboo apply? For their reign period names? Or their other names?
I believe the naming taboo applies to the name the Emperor used before becoming Emperor. The other names were ways to avoid using the taboo name.
I figure the naming taboo didn't apply to the family name; if it did the whole imperial family would have to change their name whenever there was a new Emperor.
In general, Bullseye's got it right. Naming taboos concerned personal names, and were part of general practice, beyond the imperial family. Men from literate families would avoid using characters in their fathers' personal names, or would write them with missing strokes, etc. Obviously, to apply this to family names would be to eliminate family names.
There's a nice example that comes up when searching on the Wanli 萬曆 reign title. During the subsequent Qing Dynasty, one of the most dominant emperors was the Qianlong Emperor (always referred to this way, by his reign title). The Qianlong Emperor's personal name was Hongli 弘曆, which, as you can see, shares a character with Wanli. So after the Qianlong Emperor's ascension to the throne in 1735, Qing Dynasty documents use an alternative character, li 歷, whenever the word represented by 曆 came up: Wanli 萬曆 thus was written 萬歷. That practice stopped with the fall of the Qing house.
> 帝 = heaven's son (which we usually translate as Emperor)
This is completely backwards; 帝 is (part of) the formal title "emperor", and it would be a mistake to translate it any other way. When it is the (full) title given to mythological figures, there is an English-language tradition of translating it as "thearch", but that is obviously not relevant here.
Son of Heaven is a traditional epithet of the Chinese emperor, and it is written 天子, where 天 means heaven and 子 means son. But 帝 is just a title.
Nice that you picked up on this, Michael. Di 帝 is an older term than Tian 天 (Heaven) and Tianzi 天子 (son of Heaven).
beowulf888 isn't wrong if by "=" he means "the identical person as," and the antecedent for "which" is the word "di 帝". But it would be wrong to say that the word "di 帝" means "Son of Heaven." ("Heaven's son" may be a little too intimate and literal: "Son of Heaven" was understood figuratively, meaning Heaven's cherished choice for the throne.)
By the way, "thearch" is used to refer to living rulers too--its just a translation option for "di," whenever it refers to a ruler. Personally, I think it's misleading for real rulers, confusing rulers thought to be sanctioned by a divinity with rulers who are in some sense divine in their persons--although some Chinese rulers clearly shared that confusion! But "emperor" does miss the religious associations of "di."
Michael, yes, I should have been more careful in what I wrote. Your criticisms are totally valid.
Robert, you said what I should have said.
And, yes, I was reluctant to translate 帝 as emperor because of the associations of di with divinity. But, on second thought, even though Augustus was the first to claim the title of Imperator (in Western history)—i.e. one who commands—and though it was a title with political connotations—a whole divinity cult grew up around the Roman emperors. So di and emperor should probably be considered equivalent. I stand corrected.
Hi - I'm the anonymous reviewer. Mea culpa! I definitely misidentified the characters which comprised the Wan-Li Emperor's given name.
Tried to figure out where I got that mistaken idea, but it's not in Huang's book, and I couldn't find it in my notes or on the internet either. It's possible I accidentally copypasted the wrong characters into a translation bot.
Sorry about the confusion, and thanks for pointing out the error! If I reprint this review anywhere else, I'll be sure to emend that line.
If you'll permit a fussier comment on the same topic - elsewhere in your review, you mention 'a specially commissioned jacket with the character for “felicity” embroidered on it', and I think this shows some significant misunderstandings about how languages work.
The Chinese and English languages are unrelated and there is no reason to expect a rare word in one of the languages to correspond to a particular word from the other side of the divide. As such, referring to "the" Chinese character for an English word is unlikely to make conceptual sense. You got lucky, sort of, with "joy" and "king" because 樂 and 王 are so prominent in Chinese that they instantly suggest themselves. But even there, it's not like anyone is going to say "joy" if they're asked how to translate 樂. The English word is relatively obscure. (And the Chinese characters aren't really "words" in the modern language - for example, the vernacular word for "king" is 國王, not 王 - but it's fine to use them on their own for symbolic purposes; they definitely do convey meaning in isolation.)
This is a much bigger problem for "felicity", which is less well-defined in English than "joy" is. ("Happiness"? [How would that be different from "joy"?] "Good luck"? "Skill"? "Something particularly fitting to the situation"?) All of those call for different translations and often even when a translation is picked they don't suggest a particular character. My top three guesses for what "the character for felicity" was meant to refer to are 吉, 幸, and 福, which should together cover the senses of "happiness", "positive circumstances", and "good luck", but those are just guesses, they completely fail to cover some English senses of the word "felicity", and there's no real way to choose between them based on the hint.
All of which is just to illustrate that the concept of "the" word that translates a word from language X into language Y doesn't generally exist. If I were phrasing it, I'd prefer to say something like 'a jacket with the character 吉 ["felicity"] on it'.
Ah - well, good to know, but I'm afraid the book doesn't include the Chinese character in question. The sentence I'm referencing is on p. 72 of my paperback edition and reads: "This service pleased Wan-li so much that he authorized the first grand-secretary to wear on the site a special jacket with the double image of the character 'felicity' embroidered on the front, which signified a commission unique in both color and design and possessing a distinguished personal touch."
You've fallen into a nest of nitpickers, Anon1587, and it's hard not to get stung. The character in question is xi 喜, and the double form is 囍. No possible way for you to know that.
Michael, the following link shows an image of the jacket and the relevant paragraph of the Chinese version of Ray Huang's book, if you expand the text in the header section (click 显示全部): https://www.zhihu.com/question/352922118
Not a bad review. Not a fan of the odd aside about being uncontaminated by "culture war" toxicity -- not sure really what it means (and controversies that are currently in vogue may reach back into the events of the past) -- but that's a minor point. The general impression I get is similar to How To Read Lacan by Slavoj Zizek, as described in Slate Star Codex.
This review depicts the book, as I remember it, with reasonable accuracy; its analysis is interesting, but ranges far afield from the book's topic and ropes in a variety of external sources. Not a bad choice, though a little eccentric. The Ming dynasty is one of the more interesting eras of Chinese history. Of course, there are so many distinct episodes within the lifespan of the dynasty that you might as well divide it up -- the glorious early days, rebellion and exploration; the incredibly weird hedonism of the Jiajing reign; the chaos of the dynasty's collapse, with Ming princelings scattered to the winds (the tales of various loyalist holdouts in southeast Asia are fascinating, usually with resistance coalesced around some minor descendant of the imperial house, ending with the fall of the Kingdom of Tungning) (and don't get me started on the ennobled Ming descendants who survived until the last days of the Qing, part of a tradition dating back to antiquity where the victorious new dynasty would grant some minor fief to the scions of the old) (but I digress).
Anyways, more attention paid to Chinese history is nice.
Every age has its own culture wars. Before the left was obsessed with cishetwhitesupremacy, it was obsessed with corporate domination and before that, fascism; before the right was obsessed with globalists, it was worried about communists and before that, Catholics, Jews, and anarchists.
To quote C.S. Lewis, in a passage I think most people here would appreciate:
"The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books. Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes. They will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us. Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction. To be sure, the books of the future would be just as good a corrective as the books of the past, but unfortunately we cannot get at them."
Yes - that C.S. Lewis quote says exactly what I was trying to get at in my little aside about "uncontaminated by culture war toxicity." As usual, he expressed himself with much more clarity than I managed to muster.
Lewis and George Orwell are my two all-time favorite writers for expressing clear ideas about ethics and morality in straightforward English prose. Thank you for posting that highly relevant quote!
Only tangentially related to the book, but I enjoy seeing the founder of my religion, Mary Baker Eddy, mentioned. I grew up in Christian Science and am still moderately active in the community.
A microcosm of a few religions trends in America, today it's role of "zany American religion" is better served by the more influential Mormonism.
A lot of religions are purely stupid, but Christian Science telling people to avoid medicine at least resulted in them steering clear of something that was mostly harmful at the time.
I quite like the framing this review gives to its subject. It seems relevant and worthwhile without actually being comparable to events of today.
The comparison of the Chinese imperial structure with other, typically more ancient god-kings is also one I'd not thought of before, and not seen taken seriously in ages (older historical accounts readily made such comparisons, and others, but in ways, and based on such negative views, that I have never pondered or engaged with them).
Indeed...but it was the way of Persian and Roman civilization. It may have been more common than the reverse for much of human history; even the European kings claimed to have divine right even though they weren't actually deified.
I recently read Asimov's Foundation trilogy, which was inspired by Gibbon (whom I admittedly haven't read). Your bit about the distrusted general reminded me of "The General" from Foundation & Empire, although that bit was supposed to be inspired by the Byzantine general Bellisarius specifically.
Going off on a tangent, while looking up something in the selected letters of Tolkien, I came across this footnote to a letter of 1967:
"I have read all that E. R. Eddison wrote, in spite of his peculiarly bad nomenclature and personal philosophy. I was greatly taken by the book that was (I believe) the runner-up when The L. R. was given the Fantasy Award: Death of Grass. I enjoy the S.F. of Isaac Azimov. Above these, I was recently deeply engaged in the books of Mary Renault; especially the two about Theseus, The King Must Die, and The Bull from the Sea. A few days ago I actually received a card of appreciation from her; perhaps the piece of 'Fan-mail' that gives me most pleasure."
I was especially surprised by his mention of "The Death of Grass" because that's one of John Christopher's post-apocalypse novels, which includes things like (taken from the Wikipedia summary) "Picking up a travelling companion in a gun shop owner named Pirrie after an attempt to procure arms, they find they must sacrifice many of their morals in order to stay alive. At one point, when their food supply runs out, they kill a family to take their bread. The protagonist justifies this with the belief that "it was them or us."
The distrust of competent generals is understandable, even if it does saw off the branch the empire is sitting on; after all, if your top military guy is spectacularly successful at toppling foreign kings, that just shows how spectacularly successful he could be at toppling *you*, especially in an empire where top military guys have done just that to previous emperors and founded their own dynasties. Throw in political jealousy and rivalry dripping poison into the emperor's ear, and really a prudent general would always make sure to not be *that* competent, if he wants to live to a peaceful old age that is not blighted by poverty and exile.
I took an "overview of East Asian History" class, as one of my distribution credits (I was double majoring in Cognitive Science and Computer Science), and we read this book for the class, and it made enough of an impression that I only had to see the year, to know what the rest of the title was. Highly, highly recommended.
Bouncing hard off this one as well. Just to start off with - look, man, it's all well and good to praise a book for being "blessedly uncontaminated by any current 'culture war' toxicity". But adopting the historical-revisionist mindset of projecting modern sensibilities into the past is...exactly what's done here, over and over? There is more than a whiff of "exotic Orientalism" voyeuristic eyebrow-raising. Look what those crazy yellows got up to, back in the day! This seems like a bad case of base rate fallacy...everything everywhere was luridly barbaric by our current standards in 1587, or other years of slightly more significance. A good history book will give me the contemporary view of someone back in the day...not cast aspersions from the high horses of hundreds of years of progress. It's hard to take a timeless message along the lines of "history is important to learn from!" when it's delivered with such a flippant tone.
And...really...why 1587? I don't think this is satisfactorily answered. What makes 1587 a better year than 1586 or 1588? If there's a strangely coincidental confluence of events which end up having far-reaching historical consequences, does that not retroactively make 1587 a year of significance? Is this just one of those things like the 1619 Project that picks an arbitrary Schelling date to define as a synecdoche, cherry blossom-picking just-so historical events to justify a narrative? It is indeed weird for a book to forthrightly point out the irrelevance of its topic, especially because I don't think the content really disproves it. Like, I know they're comparing very different eras, but I honestly got a lot more Chinese-history-edification out of Scott's Dictator Book Club post on Xi Jinping. Focused history on a concrete topic, not a compilation of slices-of-day-in-the-life-ofs. (Even if they're about the Emperor. Especially if they're about the Emperor...the account here sure makes it look like the Mandate of Heaven effectively made Wan-li just as much an impotent eunuch as actual castration, with true power in the civil service and scholars of Confucian tradition. Absolute Monarchy: It's Self-Recommending But Self-Refuting.)
Speaking of focus, that's another ding on this review for me...it genuinely does meander all over the place. Not sure if it's due to the book being that way, or it's only the review, but dissembling on a wide variety of topics - and even dropping parts of __other additional books__ in! - is just really disorienting. I had trouble anchoring on some coherent thesis(es), and kept being unsure where the review was building to as its Big Takeaway. Then at the very end, it's like, can we learn anything from 1587? Big Shrug! And I'm like...okay, but then why read and review this book?
Finally, I feel obligated to note that...and this isn't really specific to this review, it's a more general issue...there's a Typical Mind failure mode when Westerners discuss Asia. Lots of baffling cultural tics make way more sense when viewed through a collectivist vs. individualist lens...when centering the epistemics of tradition and ancestors vs. rational empiricism. I'm a pretty-whitewashed 3rd generation, and only have a small shard of Chinese culture-thought to draw on...but that little bit is enough to see the mindset difference. To billions of people, it's us who are the strange exotic aliens with weird barbaric values. All models are wrong, some models are useful...as the review says, if your culture lasts several millennia, clearly something's being done right. China, ah, finds a way.
Accusing someone of ‘exoticizing’ is one of those bland, tone-based accusations that’s nearly impossible to defend against while remaining insubstantial and wholly dependent on the eye of the beholder. I didn’t get that from the review at all. While I have my problems with it, I find your comment particularly uninsightful because the majority of it is dedicated to this, which yields nothing.
It also seems weird that you’re asking why about the year. That seems like it was covered already.
Wait, what? You're "a pretty-whitewashed 3rd generation", but you're accusing full-bore Chinese Guy Ray Huang of... orientalist exoticizing? Of the country where he was born and grew up? And you weren't? How do you cube that orb?
I took it to be the reviewer getting taken to task, what else do you make of such gems as "A charming idiosyncrasy of his style is how he refers to Ming dynasty China as “our Empire”
Why the devil should the man not refer to it as "our Empire"? He was native Chinese, born and raised in China before emigrating to the United States. He's as much claim to call it "our/my Empire" as any other Chinese native born in China. The reviewer makes it sound like some 'charming idiosyncrasy' - oh, those quaint natives and their colourful ways!
If avalancheGenesis has a chip on their shoulders, then so do I, because this is the exact thing I noted in my record of impressions of the book review contestants: "review is pitched a little too much towards Exotic Orientalism despite everything". And I'm not any generation Chinese.
It's a serious idiosyncracy in history writing to use a phrase like "our Empire". It's even more idiosyncratic if you consider this was written in English and there's a reasonable presumption that the majority of readers would therefore not be of Chinese descent. Whilst this could be a 'royal' plural (and 'my Empire' certainly wouldn't work) it doesn't seem unreasonable to note this stylistic quirk not normally found in the western academic tradition within which the review author carefully located Huang's later career including this book. It's the equivalent of me writing of the British Raj as "our Empire": technically unproblematic but stylistically unusual. Yes, Huang could do this, but it's odd in a work of academic history. And to highlight this is hardly exotic orientalism, although I'd suggest there is a risk of the same in seeking to defend a stylistic quirk in the basis the writer was Chjnese?
Right. Why would we assume that any Chinese person who was born in the Republic of China, immigrated to the US in the 1950s, earned a PhD in history, and wrote a book in the 1980s... would naturally refer to the empire that existed prior to his birth as "our Empire"? Huang evidently took it upon himself to be a representative of Chinese imperial civilization to the West, even though he had never lived in it. It is an understandable choice given the immense continuous history of Chinese civilization, and the pride that many Chinese feel in the same. But it is still a bold and unusual individual choice for a US-trained history PhD to frame an entire academic English history book in this way. And it is one the reviewer praises genuinely and unreservedly... which I think is abundantly clear, if we can but stop imagining on his face a patronizing smirk that doesn't exist.
Anonymous reviewer here. I understood the "our" in "our Empire" to include me. As the author speaking to the reader, saying, like "Let's look at our empire we're discussing here, and see what we can learn." Sort of like Mr. Rogers calling me his neighbor, when I used to watch Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood on TV.
Neither Ray Huang nor I have ever been subjects of the Ming dynasty, and I'm not even Chinese. But if we think of it as "our" empire, it seems more present, evokes a more sympathetic perspective. And I'd be flattered if someone called my writing "charmingly idiosyncratic."
I actually read the review as being a bit of a veiled slap at our own encroaching ideological orthodoxy in the West. See, the Chinese did this, and their culture stagnated; if we let progressives turn our universities into religious schools, we will stagnate and be overtaken by the Chinese.
And the author does mention the inquisitions, slavery, and witch-burnings in Europe at the same time.
Ming Imperial court life may well have been weird, but so too were other courts if you look at them with an outsider's eye; the Wanli Emperor ruled 1572-1620 and for one European country, the contemporaneous monarchs in Britain were Elizabeth I (until 1603) and James VI & I after her.
Look at the mythology consciously created and propagated around Elizabeth in her role as the Virgin Queen (even that title used about her) and the stylised portraiture to emphasise that she was a monarch (even semi-divine) and not an ordinary human: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portraiture_of_Elizabeth_I
A template style for her face to be used in all subsequent portraits, symbols representing masculine attributes to make her equal to other foreign princes, representing her as a Vestal Virgin out of Roman legend, and giving her phoenixes, snakes, eyes on her dress, etc. as well as the masques, progresses, and other court functions laid down for her to perform. This is not realism, and it's every bit as 'weird' as Chinese imperial iconography for the role of the emperor.
"The Rainbow Portrait
The Rainbow Portrait, c. 1600–02, attributed to Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger
Attributed to Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger, perhaps the most heavily symbolic portrait of the queen is the Rainbow Portrait at Hatfield House. It was painted around 1600–1602, when the queen was in her sixties. In this painting, an ageless Elizabeth appears dressed as if for a masque, in a linen bodice embroidered with spring flowers and a mantle draped over one shoulder, her hair loose beneath a fantastical headdress. She wears symbols out of the popular emblem books, including the cloak with eyes and ears, the serpent of wisdom, and the celestial armillary sphere, and carries a rainbow with the motto non sine sole iris ("no rainbow without the sun"). Strong suggests that the complex "programme" for this image may be the work of the poet John Davies, whose Hymns to Astraea honouring the queen use much of the same imagery, and suggests it was commissioned by Robert Cecil as part of the decor for Elizabeth's visit in 1602, when a "shrine to Astraea" featured in the entertainments of what would prove to be the "last great festival of the reign"."
It's funny you mention "exotic Orientalism" because that's exactly the same note I put down in my record of the book reviews (since we're going to be voting on them, I'm keeping a list of impressions of each one).
Great minds think alike?
As for why 1587, I think that would be a good question to ask the author of this book. Did he ever explain why he picked this particular year? My own impression is that it's because it's *not* a spectacular year, not a landmark one where normally the dividing line would be put, e.g. "the emperor withdrew from active participation in court life in 1600 so that is the year decline of the dynasty started". It seems perhaps to be that the rift between emperor and officials started 1586/1587 when he wanted to appoint his third son as successor and his ministers opposed him. So really the dominoes started toppling then, and not when he fully retired and refused to carry out his duties. But because it was never permitted to become an open, public cause of conflict, it didn't seem important at the time, not like one of the Big Dates historians generally point at as "this is when it began". It looked like just another year mid-reign, not anything big or special, but it was the seed from which the eventual failure of the dynasty grew.
There is also a certain irony in that the power struggle over making sure primogeniture was preserved ended with the eldest son being made crown prince, but after becoming emperor he only ruled one year before dying suddenly. All that bitterness and in-fighting for nothing!
Oh, you're back, excellent! I'm glad I decided to sleep on defending my sloppily provocative review-of-the-review, rather than attempt such litigation drunk and angry. Feels better to not be a completely lonely dissenting voice, even in a heterodox space.
Yes, I probably should have couched the assertion in safer language like "an impression"...I knew it was gonna open the can of rhetorical worms that is Tone Argument. While I feel it's entirely possible to do a Close Reading-style line-by-line breakdown analysis*...that's way too long for a comment and I don't think anyone would read it/be persuaded? So it really does just come down to "idk man, it wasn't really any one specific thing that was said, just my subjective impression". Consuming history with a smirk on one's face, or something like that...
Regarding the disputed significance of 1587, I think that is certainly *one* possible explanation. It may indeed have been put more clearly in the actual book. These Underrated Years Actually Had Huge Impacts On History (You Won't Believe #1587!). But there were other potential theses floated by the review...for example, that it *isn't* so much like 1587 was a sleeper hit. More that it was, genuinely, truly, completely, painfully average for a Qing dynasty calendar year. 1587 is just Tuesday! And yet, this totally median (mean might be more accurate for history-summations, not sure) representative-year was still filled with such-and-such signs of Obvious Nonsense, Governmental Dysfunction, and Endemic Scleroticness. Therefore: the writing was on the wall, you didn't need an especially noteworthy year to note that there was something rotten in the state of China. ("You" being either later historians who dropped the ball, or perhaps Chinese contemporaries who wanted to right the ship - it's unclear.) I think this is an equally valid read, but it's of course in opposing tension with the former explanation as you put it. A thing is either significant, or not! This competing-Ship-of-Theses tension doesn't get resolved by the end of the review, and so I was left scratching my head. "Why 1587?" was the question I started the review with, and ended with no clear answer still...
The primogeniture thing I think could have used more depth...it's a central "plot", as far as histories have plots anyway. Quite a number of the events revolve around this core dispute in some fashion; even if it wasn't a direct causal link, The Inheritance Spat taking up so much popular + governmental attention and resources surely contributed to e.g. misunderestimaging the Manchu incursion. I get the gravity, being the firstborn of a Chinese immigrant family who grew up with in-kind-if-not-degree similar expectations of inheriting the family business, propagating our legacy, bringing honour to the sacrifices of our ancestors, etc, etc. It's a heavy crown to wear, and I certainly rebelled against it in teenage-hedonism ways too! But that's sort of hard to explain cross-cultural context. It probably would have made for a stronger review to focus on shoring up this load-bearing concept of Confucian thought and tradition, moreso than...the other books cited.
You also reminded me of another nitpick: the Wan-li Emperor is depicted as vindictive and stubborn (years-long succession dispute! he orders people punished for their insolence!), but simultaneously passive and slothful. I guess it could be a character evolution, with gradual disillusionment once the pleasures of money and women wore off. Felt a bit like two different people being described though. Perhaps that's intentional: the occasional tantrum-rattling of the cage bars just helps illustrate that the bars exist. There was never any real threat of this particular Emperor bucking his puppetmasters - he wasn't like his rebel uncle. A Scandal In Name Only (SINO).
I think what happened was that the emperor came up against the limits of his power, and protested the only way available to him: by refusing to go through the steps of the dance.
He is supposedly the ultimate power in the entire empire, with even the movements of the heavenly bodies affected by his actions. But he can't persuade his bureaucracy into backing his choice of successor, and he can't command them. So if they are going to be stubborn, so is he. It is passive-aggressive and vindictive, but here is someone whose life is constrained within limited borders (so that rulers can justifiably complain that a poor commoner is much freer than they are) and who has been told he can have whatever he wants - except the things he really wants.
If he goes ahead and does his duty, he's surrendering to those who opposed them. The only protest he can make is this kind of childish "okay, see how well you get on with running the empire if the emperor doesn't make any decisions" withdrawal, so that's what he does. Retires from public life, refuses to make any appointments, leaves them to stew waiting for the purely formal but also vitally necessary signing-off on everything. A stronger character might have been able to impose his will on the bureaucracy, generally by finding some kind of plot going on with the potential crown prince to seize the throne and having the excuse to execute or exile him so the favoured candidate could take h is place, but the Wanli emperor wasn't that type of leader (maybe all the better, would it really have improved the chances of the dynasty to have someone ruthless enough to arrange the show-trial and execution of his own son?)
Isn't a simpler explanation for the choice of year that if your main thesis is the trend to decline, then it's best to focus on the quotidian rather than the momentous? Most years have something grand and notable (such as Drake's exploits in Spain, elsewhere the same year). That gets in the way of a narrative pointing out a gently declining trend.
Hi, avalancheGenesis - anonymous reviewer of 1587 here. Thought I'd respond to a few of your specific points.
"Consuming history with a smirk on one's face," well yeah, that's me - sorry if you find that irritating: it's whistling past the graveyard, really. Without a little snark and ironic detachment, history is just too endlessly depressing to contemplate.
I'd argue that "voyeuristic eyebrow-raising" is both a common and relatively benign way to react to the chaos and folly of human affairs.
Yes, "everything everywhere was luridly barbaric by our current standards" - and so the past affords no end of opportunities for voyeuristic eyebrow-raising.
I get how one might have "trouble anchoring on some coherent thesis(es) ... being unsure where the review was building to as its Big Takeaway" - since my review doesn't really have a thesis with a Big Takeaway.
"Then at the very end, it's like, can we learn anything from 1587? Big Shrug!"
Yeah, kind of a Big Shrug. That's accurate. So you're like "okay, but then why read and review this book?"
Paradoxically enough I guess, that was kinda the point. The title announces it's a year of no significance. So why read it? Is there a point? What if there isn't?
Why read about this particular year, or place, or culture? Why read about any of them? I still think history doesn't amount to much more than 5000 years of gang war. And none of our primate shenanigans really matter at all, in the grand scheme of things.
Nevertheless, most of us story-telling apes find stories interesting - maybe especially when they're mostly true stories. Maybe especially if they're set long ago and far away.
The parts where you start throwing shade about "exoticist Orientalizing" or whatever, I'm not into that. "Crazy yellows"?! No, I don't talk like that and I'd rather you didn't. My talk of barbaric decadence pointedly included some non-Asian examples, and I could easily provide a multitude of further examples from every. single. culture. ever. Bizarre behavior, folly and malice are wicked easy to find amongst any and all humans. There's obviously no "race" or "culture" with a monopoly on stupid-ass bullshit.
I see how it might be "hard to take a timeless message along the lines of 'history is important to learn from!' delivered with a flippant tone' but I'm all about the flippant tone, and innocent of any desire to proclaim Timeless Messages about Important Things. I happened to be reading 1587 when Scott announced the book review contest, and thought "what the hell, why not write this one up - it's a cool book, and reminded me of some other interesting stuff."
As for your criticism that my review "genuinely does meander all over the place," yes: that is true. I just happen to enjoy meandering all over the place, and figured some other folks might enjoy that style of writing as well. Cheers!
[NB: I was halfway through writing a mea culpa response when Substack abruptly ate the comment (they really gotta fix that, whatever the issue is...only ever happens on ACX...), so apologies for roughness - the first draft of this genuinely did sound better. Best attempt at reconstituting:]
I knew this was bound to happen sooner or later - one of the actual book reviewers finding one of the several critical replies I've posted during this contest, and replying directly...well, time to face the music.
Let me start off by saying I really appreciate your gracious and charitable reply. It's far better than my caustic and ill-considered comment deserves. Though I've been negative on other reviews, this time was inordinately nasty and combative; the negative replies amply demonstrate that almost no one else agreed with my tone or content. (Ironically, this is the only book review my comments have gotten any meaningful engagement - *that* is truly depressing. Bad incentives abound.) Normally I'd attempt a rearguard action of replying to each critical reply in turn, but...this time, I really have gotten out over my skis, and I choose not to defend the largely-indefensible. I'm leaving the comment up without edit, and fully owning all the shameful black marks - sometimes you just gotta take the L. My sincere apologies for any hurt feelings.
I think one true crux is that I tend to hold a history-half-full view...I see hope and progress whereas you see chaos and despair. So in retrospect, now that I understand where you're coming from, I indeed see the wisdom in adopting an agnostically neutral approach to history. And this is a particularly perfect book for such exercise. Many of the other reviews (enjoyable or not) have had pre-assumed conclusions attached to their historical ramblings, so it's definitely a comparative advantage that yours does not. Hat tip for that insight, and I regret not seeing it sooner. Big Shrug really isn't negative or positive, it just...is. History not as a cautionary tale, but as a context mirror to reflect back the present.
Yes, the shade-throwing was particularly embarrassing, and I regret that most of all. Your very-civil reply shows just how large a maturity gap lies between us. I *knew* it was bad and dumb and aggressive, totally stupid to keep in the post - and yet did it anyway, more fool me. That's even worse than being ignorant of potential offense, and I've got no excuse.
There is a small kernel that I do stand by: I really did get a growing sense of stomach-churning discomfort the farther I read into this review, and that felt worth pointing out somehow...the sense of something being "off", even if it was vague and inchoate and hard to explain to others. It does lie somewhere in the direction of fundamental epistemic differences...the way collective and individual cultures think, the relative values of truth and morality, tradition and ancestry and realpolitik. China plays Defect in the Global Prisoner's Dilemma, and from a certain perspective, that's just smart. Ultimately wrong and counterproductive, perhaps, yet...there's a reason Nash equilibria exist, and centuries of our China policy have yet to drag them into a Cooperate-Cooperate payout. I feel like this is a fundamental error which crops up a lot...but it really does deserve a fleshed-out post, a serious effort. Not some childish innuendo. I did a disservice not just to you, but also undermined my own argument by couching it in such a shitty vehicle. Again, full apologies with no excuses - this is ACX, we have higher standards, I should have known better.
Lastly, I'll partially walk back the charge of meandering as well: to the extent it exists, I think that's on the book as much as on you. If I understand your description of the chapter layouts, Huang doesn't present events in anything like a neat chronological fashion, nor is it centralized around one single "protagonist" or "plot", exactly. So one could either try to wrangle order and structure out of this sprawling tableau, or just...roll with it. Write a review that works with the book's format, rather than struggling against it. You chose to do that, own it, and I think that's fine. Not my preferred style difference, but others do like it, and we've had both types throughout the contest.
Thank you again for the considerate reply. I really need to work harder on being a Principle of Charity maximalist, even in the context of competitive cash-prize book reviews. It's one thing to be mean to long-dead authors, quite another to be mean to peer reviewers. What would we do without peer review? For all the good and all the bad, the annual SSC/ACX Book Review Contest has always been one of the highlights of this blog, and I should encourage it rather than be a spoilsport.
That's cool - thanks; I appreciate your reply! Can't disagree with a damn thing you've said now. ;-)
The "bad incentives abound" situation is fucked up, I agree. Reminds me a bit of Scott's "Toxoplasma of Rage" post.
Just glad there's a place like this on the internet, where people can still hear varied opinions, agree to disagree and/or hash out their differences without getting all flamey all the time.
FWIW I didn't get the "exotic orientalism" vibe from the review. Yes, ancient/medieval China was exotic by our current standards, but then, so are most ancient/medieval cultures, European ones included.
If anything, this review is a cautionary tale. Here we have a seemingly ordinary year in a long and storied history of a glorious empire; and empire that had endured for a thousand years. Their civilization appears to be so stable that it might endure for a thousand years more; and yet, what is it that they actually spend their time doing ? They spend it on endless infighting in the palace bureaucracy; deadly clashes over minute points of ideology; and jockeying for position. Meanwhile, their nominal overlord never even leaves the palace. He doesn't know (and his shadow cabinet seemingly doesn't care) that serious military threats are brewing on the borders; the rest of the world is overtaking China technologically (and, in fact, *exists*); and the last competent administrators of his glorious empire are dying or retiring with no worthy replacements.
I'd just like to say that this sentence may be one of my favourite sentences I read on ACX all year:
"Metonymy is rarely useful as a lifehack, but Japanese emperors agree that this one weird trick will save you several hours of sitting motionless on a throne."
Agreed, this was a key line and an excellent use of the word.
However, the devout Taoist of the 16th century might argue that this attempt to evade the royal duties is precisely why things went to hell.
Zizek might remark that this represents the beginning of the end for the transition from feudalism to capitalism, where the nature of kingship is no longer superstitiously invested in the body of the monarch, but instead is recognized as a function of the relationship between the monarch and the people.
I had two main questions after reading this. The first, as avalancheGenesis mentions, is why 1587?
The second is, how did the civil service initially assert itself over an emperor in a newish dynasty? Did this happen with the founding emperor? Founders were conquerors; they probably had some strength of character. It seems more likely that the civil service would assert itself over a subsequent emperor - an inheritor rather than a conqueror. But how?
Other thoughts: I am reminded of an old saying about the Catholic Church: 'Popes come and go, but the Curia lasts forever.'
Yes, that's the most frustrating thing about the highly restricted time-frame. The review portrays the authority of civil servants over the emperor as a static situation. My reasoning is that this is highly unlikely to have been the case right at the foundation of the dynasty. How exactly do civil servants assert themselves over someone who has just chased the Mongols back to the steppe? Probably, they don't.
So, when did the civil servants gain this authority? As the first Ming emperor aged? During the reign of his successor? Later? And how did they do it?
One fascinating thing is that the system of eunuchs and ossified bureaucracy that barely can react is something very familiar to near-end Qing dynasty ... the Manchu successors to Qing dynasty.
My understanding is that the bureaucracy for a large managed to survive the changes in ruling dynasties: after you have conquered the empire, you need the tools to manage it. As running an empire can be a very different task than conquering one, the per-existing bureaucratic system had an edge against any other options, as the scholar-civil servants were available and they knew how to manage the country according to their system.
According to Wikipedia [1], the most salient part of the imperial Chinese bureaucracy, the written civil service examinations were first introduced in 600s and "became dominant during the Song dynasty (960–1279)".
Once you've chased the Mongols back to the steppes and plonked your backside down on the throne, now you need to rule the empire you have newly acquired. And that's a different matter to commanding an army and winning wars, as Alexander the Great demonstrates.
So you need a civil service. You need record-keepers who can take in the reports from the various provinces about taxes, famines, floods, and the like and give you digests on them so you know if people are starving and blaming you and likely to rise up in a peasant rebellion that you need to put down.
Active, newly-minted emperors who won the throne by conquest can impose their own authority on the bureaucracy, but they can't do without the bureaucracy, and they certainly can't do away with it. Unless they fire (and execute or exile) every single member of the last administration, they've inherited the ministers and officials. They need to delegate authority since no one person can run the entire empire by themselves, so they need recommendations about "who would be a good magistrate for this district?" and so on. Our new emperor can try putting his friends and trusted aides into positions of high authority, but that can cause problems of its own (see the travails of Ulysses S. Grant).
And then after the new emperor passes on, his successor ascends the throne, and he's the son/cousin/nephew who is a peacetime emperor, not the one who chased the Mongols back to the steppes. So gradually, over time, the demands of the office occupy the emperor and the civil service - because it is the main institution that maintains continuity - assumes more power and influence. A lot of institutional inertia builds up. Compare Trump and "draining the swamp", and all the anonymous and not so anonymous declarations by people working in bureaus and offices of this-and-that that they would refuse to carry out his orders, or stories in the papers about 'official X boasted he simply never carried out any of the president's instructions'.
Chinese officials wouldn't dare be this open because it would literally be their head on the chopping block, but they could certainly use the same tactics of delay and obfuscation and red-tape to block and harry an unpopular emperor. Indeed, it might be a lot *easier* to chase the Mongols back to the steppe than take on the court eunuchs, ministers, and civil service to overhaul the entire thing top-to-bottom.
It's a bit odd to me that both the reviewer and many comments insist on China's stability and longevity compared to Europe. To me it seems obvious that this is a pure outsider's perspective; it's what the Big Eastern Region looks like from outside to a European, or maybe what we like it to be as a literary trope, and then we try to impose that on the real world for aesthetic purposes. As a matter of factual circumstance, on the other hand, it doesn't really hold up:
In the broad sense, the French ancien régime, from the direct Capetian line to the end of the House of Bourbon, lasted almost exactly 800 years: 987-1789. This conservatively covers, counting as few as possible, at least the Song, Yuan, Ming and Qing dynasties. During this period, wars in France were almost exclusively narrow disputes about lineage and succession, while the Chinese social system collapsed, then collapsed again, the empire started out completely splintered and only slowly reformed, the Mongols invaded and took over, the Manchus invaded and took over, etc. etc.
You can say that the Chinese were much more aggressive about pushing *narratives* about stability and continuity, but you could also suggest that this was a more or less feeble necessity to try to retain legitimacy, while the French kings never needed to do anything like that since they never really ran into more problems than "the last guy was homosexual/insane/shot while hunting before an obvious heir could be minted, now does his nephew who looks exactly the same inherit the throne, or will it be his cousin who looks exactly the same?"
I think the point lies elsewhere, Anonymous. From the centuries immediately after the first unification of the largest densely populated part of what we call China now (which would be 221 BCE) until 1911, there was a broad understanding of the expanding / contracting / unified / fragmented region was part of a single entity. Moreover, the governmental system that was first elaborated in the years surrounding 221 BCE, and which proved to be extremely successful (a modified form of meritocratic bureaucracy, with centralized and decentralized nodes), was repeatedly adopted and adapted from dynasty to dynasty, even by non-Chinese rulers who controlled only portions of China during periods of fragmentation. The bureaucratic model supporting the monarchial core became increasingly based on competitive examination as hereditary and personalistic elements waned, and the basic curriculum, while modified in various ways, remained grounded in the same pre-Imperial Era texts from the first century BCE on (though impersonal formal examination only came to dominate in the centuries surrounding 1000 CE).
The fact that there were shifts in the hereditary line controlling the imperial center was accepted from an early period as a normal part of the enduring state. The transitions could be socially cataclysmic and include interruptions of unified legitimacy, as you point out, but the nature of the state evolved in stable ways, undergoing reform rather than replacement. Even the most non-Chinese of invading dynasties, the Mongols, adapted to the Chinese system, reinstating the exams to populate a largely Chinese bureaucracy after the conquest period.
This, by the way, is the insider's view. Imperially authorized historiography produced large-scale "standard" histories dynasty by dynasty (each adding to the corpus and account of the newly displaced last dynasty), modeling the accounts on one another, examining developments in largely consistent institutional and cultural categories (e.g., dynastic reigns, calendrics, economy, law, ritual, literature, prominent persons). These accounts produced and reflected the idea of the dynastic cycle (dynamic founding / decline / revival / final decline and replacement), which was viewed as a norm within a perennial state. This was reflected in time itself, which was charted via imperial reign years, the continuity of time being marked via monarchial succession in an enduring state (a practice that predates the Imperial Era). The primary convention for referring to an historical year was of the form, simply, "Wanli 22" (the 22nd year of the Wanli Emperor's reign), without indication of dynasty. Imperial succession to the throne was eternal; dynastic houses were transient.
While from the outside analysts note how great the differences are between early and late Imperial states if you compare them directly, the fact that precedent had so strong a pull over a two-millennium stretch means that this was the product of gradual development within a recognized structure.
I'm sorry, I must have phrased myself very poorly somehow, since this:
"Imperially authorized historiography produced large-scale 'standard' histories dynasty by dynasty (each adding to the corpus and account of the newly displaced last dynasty), modeling the accounts on one another" etc. is exactly what I meant by the Chinese aggressively pushing narratives about stability and continuity due to the grave lack of the things themselves, while they were still needed for legitimacy.
However, you're absolutely right that this is a kind of insider view; let's say the "inside sucker" view as opposed to the "dispassionate inside analysis" one. I guess the more accurate framing is that the West bought into the narrative to some extent and found it useful/imagination fuel.
"While from the outside analysts note how great the differences are between early and late Imperial states if you compare them directly, the fact that precedent had so strong a pull over a two-millennium stretch means that this was the product of gradual development within a recognized structure."
I don't think this is correct; imputing stability to China due to the preservation of *a* bureaucratic system (not, as you note, the same one across the centuries) strikes me as similar to saying that the USA is in continuity with Rome due to the existence of a senatorial system, or that every medieval European country was in reality part of the same state due to the continuity of Catholicism. Certainly, there is cultural continuity in China as there is in every cultural region; but this doesn't mean that the nation per se has been stable or that the successor states in that territory have all been the same one. (Others referenced the medieval European fondness for imputing continuity with Rome; however, anyone observing this sees it for the there-was-an-attempt-level attempt it is, despite Cicero's speeches and Suetonius' History of the Twelve Caesars still being classics.)
There's no longer a state calling itself Rome, let alone one overlapping substantially with the ancient empire's boundaries and having a similar language and culture. If a state did exist that fit those criteria, even if it couldn't claim unbroken continuity to the ancient Roman Empire, it would be justified in calling itself Roman.
Well there sort of is. Italia was the central region of Rome and Italian might be arbitrarily pretty close to ancient Latin in a way that modern Chinese is to ancient Chinese. Not sure in that last, but seems possible.
Ethnically there was perhaps more change in Italy whereas the Han only extended their dominance in China?
Anonymous, I'm long winded, but not enough to attempt to illustrate the difference in discontinuity between various eras of Chinese history and those of European states. But you raise a pretty fair analogy when you mention Catholicism. Catholicism certainly underwent many changes over time, was disrupted by schisms, and included important regional variants. Yet its doctrinal and structural core remains recognizably continuous, despite evolutionary change that makes the early and contemporary churches seem very different. This seems pretty fair as a comparison with the continuity of the Chinese state. Perhaps the analogy would be even better if Catholicism was conceived only up to Vatican II, since to that point the liturgical church retained both the texts and the language of its early centuries, just as government office in 1910 China required rote retention of the full corpus of classical texts, demonstrated through double-blind anonymous examination scores, with mastery of classical Chinese essential, since that was the language of government. This is somewhat different from the "continuity" of a US Senate consciously designed to emulate features of the Roman institution after gap of 1300 years, so I'm not sure your comparison works.
Of course an complex institution like the Chinese bureaucracy changed over time, and dramatically so because of the scale of time involved. But that is what continuous living institutions do: to survive they must change. When they can no longer adapt, as the Chinese system could not after the disruptions following Western challenges, they end. The Chinese system was remarkably able to adapt to enormous changes. I think it seems discontinuous to you only because you're looking at the two endpoints and ignoring the string that connects them.
I'm no scholar of Chinese history, but isn't it the case that the people of what is broadly known as China today had something like four times as many wars per decade as Europe with vastly more casualties? If so, we ought to compare the overall stability to this baseline -- the fact that the Chinese system maintained any believable semblance of stability in the face of such pressures is genuinely remarkable.
I don't know how you could quantify wars/battles, to make that sort of comparison. Casualties, perhaps--China's population has generally been greater than Europe's. The thing about the stability of the Chinese system is that it rests on an enormous institution: a civil service bureaucracy staffed through a double-blind series of exams. Most countries today use systems like this, even autocracies (which traditional China was), although China's old Civil Service exam system is now widely replicated through testing regimes administered by colleges, and graduate degree hurdles, rather than just government tests.
China had a "Deep State." Most rulers, whether Chinese or foreign invaders, discovered that to govern a country the size and population of all Europe, that's what you needed. What I think is most remarkable is that fact that this modernistic state model (meritocratic bureaucracy, but not yet including exams) was designed by political thinkers in the 4th and 3rd centuries BCE, and then actually implemented in a highly disciplined form as a revolutionary development in 221 BCE. That dynasty was quickly overthrown after a decade and a half, for various reasons, but the rebels who succeeded it decided that the basic form of the state they'd rebelled against was actually pretty good, and something they needed. So they tweaked it instead of trashing it, and that became the pattern thereafter.
In regards to the reviewer's statement that "China is one of the oldest civilizations on Earth." Certainly, the Chinese like to claim that!—but I think that's an illusion created by the durability of a single writing system used across millennia. But even though the symbols of their writing system remained fairly static, the spoken language changed drastically over centuries—so that if the 2nd Century's Gaozu Son of Heaven (founder of the Han Dynasty) were brought via time machine to meet the 16th Century's Wanli Son of Heaven each would have had as much trouble understanding each other as the 16th Century's Holy Roman Emperor Maximillian would have had talking to Charlemagne. The Goazu Emperor the Wanli Emperor would have had to resort to writing notes to each other, and even then there may have been large misunderstandings because the characters they were writing could take on new meanings over the centuries. However, in the later case, Emperor Maximillian and Charlemagne would have likely been able to talk to each other using Latin. In fact, Emperor Maximillian would have very likely been able to talk to the Emperor Augustus in Latin.
Back to China, though. Not only did the Chinese language evolve, but customs also changed, and the Middle Kingdom expanded under the “good Sons of Heaven” and contracted under the “bad Sons of Heaven.” The empire of the Tang had a much different shape than the Empire of the Han, and the empire of the Ming looked much different from that of the Tang. The capitols moved around. Court etiquette changed drastically between dynasties. On several occasions, vast amounts of literature were burned by certain Sons of Heaven who wished to erase the past. Barbarians invaded and occasionally mounted the Dragon throne to form non-Han dynasties. Certainly, modern China can *claim* to be the world’s oldest civilization but that has about as much truth as Maximillian II’s claim to being the heir of Augustus.
I think you have a point: a civilization isn't necessarily the same thing as a continuous state.
Maybe the difference why it looks wondrous to use is that we can no longer call the Western civilization is a competitor, as we collectively gave it a killing blow during the 20th century: Emperor Maximillian could have tried to converse with Augustus, but today practically nobody important talks in Latin anymore, and even fewer study classical Greek. Important buildings do no longer seek to emulate Greek-Roman important buildings with important-looking columns. And so on.
Very true about that killing blow. It seems to me that the post WWI modern world should be considered a distinctly different civilization from what went before.
Why do you believe that Latin underwent no change between Augustus and Maximillian, while claiming that Chinese underwent major changes over the same period? As far as I can tell the spoken Latin taught today would be unrecognizable to the ancients, and there are large changes in the written language also over the centuries (though perhaps less over the last five).
Well, I'm not an expert in Latin — but AFAIK, Latin pedagogy hasn't changed much over time. As a beginning student, I was given pieces of Cicero and Virgil to translate. Niccolò di Machiavelli, mentioned that he learned Latin the same way. So I assumed that Latin students always started from the Classics. Maybe this is a mistaken assumption on my part. Granted Church Latin added all sorts of vocabulary that the Romans didn't have, but I assume a modern speaker of Latin could make themselves understood to Roman of the 1st Century.
As for Chinese, the Putonghua we speak today is vastly different from Old or Middle Chinese. The rhyming tables from the Tang Dynasty (Middle Chinese) show a great change in vowel pronunciations. Cribbing from a list of differences that I saved...
Old Chinese, aka Archaic Chinese (Shang, Zhou, up through Warring States Period)
1. Was an inflected language
2. Used suffix *-s to nominalize a verb
3. Rich with consonant clusters
4. Had a three-way distinction between voiced, voiceless unaspirated, and voiceless aspirated consonants
5. Had one rhotic consonant *r (which could be an alveolar trill [r], with an alveolar tap or flap [ɾ] as allophone between clusters)
6. Probab used a simple system of six vowels
7. Probably used “minor vowels”
8. Didn’t have labial fricatives
9. Didn’t have tones. But instead, it had consonant clusters at the end of the syllable, which developed into tone distinctions in Middle Chinese.
Middle Chinese (Han, Tang, Song Dynasties)
1. Became an isolating language (i.e. with a one morpheme per word ratio, and with no inflectional morphology whatsoever).
2. Used few if any consonant clusters
3. Still distinguished voiced, voiceless unaspirated, and voiceless aspirated consonants
4. Allowed syllables to end in three stop codas /p t k/ and nasal codas /m n ŋ/
5. Lost the rhotic consonant
6. Developed Tones
Guangdonghua speakers claim they're speaking a Chinese closer to that of the Tang Dynasty. In fact, they like to call themselves the People of Tang! I suspect this should be taken with a grain of salt, but it sure pisses off the Putonghua speakers. Neither language is mutually intelligible.
Modern Chinese (northern Han peoples, aka Mandarin):
1. Was an analytic language
2. Didn’t rely consonant clusters
3. Only differentiated voiceless unaspirated and voiceless aspirated consonants
4. Developed labial fricatives
5. In the process of developing the rhotic consonant in modern Chinese
6. The stop codas /p t k/ had merged into a glottal stop
For the Beijing variety of Putonghua
Around the early 17th century
1. /k kʰ x/ were palatalized before the close front vowels
4. The merge of /ts tsʰ s/ into /tɕ tɕʰ ɕ/ before close front vowels (new trend)
5. /j/→/ɻ/ in the initial of some words (e.g. 容 and 榮)
6. /iaɪ/→/iɛ/ (e.g. 街 /tɕiaɪ/→/tɕiɛ/)
20th century
1. Completion of the /ts tsʰ s/→/tɕ tɕʰ ɕ/ merger in 1932.
2. Some varieties of Northern Mandarin continued to distinguish the two as late as 1940s, as evidenced by the distinction made in Sin Wenz.
3. /jaɪ/→/ja/ (e.g. 崖)
4. More agglutinative*, but still an analytic language
5. Doesn’t have consonant clusters
6. Only distinguished voiceless unaspirated and voiceless aspirated
7. Has one labial fricative
8. Consists of open syllables and those ending with nasals and glides only
Anyway, the modern Chinese languages (Putonghua, Guangdonghua, Hakka, etc.), like the Romance languages, are either mutually unintelligible and/or partially intelligible. Since these all developed within the last thousand years, I don't think a modern Putonghua speaker could go back to the Qin court and be understood.
So, this is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but a whimper?
Things go along by inertia for a long while, but all the time there is rot eating away at the foundations, until eventually it all collapses - not in a big explosion, but due to a lot of small things all happening over time until they build up. No big exciting Historic Year, just one more year like all the others where nothing much happens - until it all happens.
I do have to harrumph slightly at this bit:
"This reminded me of a couple of current Chinese practices: how military officers sometimes place pins in the collars of soldiers' uniforms to correct their posture when they're ordered to stand at attention, and how preschool students are “required to sit in their seats with their arms at their sides, and their feet flat on a line of tape on the ground ... not an easy task for three-year-olds.”
This points toward an old and deep aspect of Chinese culture: the belief that stillness holds great power and should be cultivated. This is true whether you’re a soldier, a preschooler, or the emperor of China."
Well, I'm neither Chinese nor ever lived in China, but when I was four and five and six and seven going to school, we were made to sit "lámha i bhfolach" which means "hands hidden", i.e. sitting up straight at your desk with your arms behind your back, hands clasped, feet on the floor. We didn't have tape on the ground for the placement of our feet, I don't know how the nuns missed that one. So "stillness holds great power and should be cultivated" isn't uniquely Chinese.
As for restrictions on the emperor, yes, rulers who are considered divine or to have special relationships with the powers ruling heaven and earth do have a lot of restrictions on them: be it tabu, géasa, or the likes. See the restrictions around the Roman priest of Jupiter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamen_Dialis
Or the Irish saga "The Destruction of Da Derga's Hostel" when the king is forced through circumstances to break, one by one, the géasa (sacred prohibitions) binding him and thus is destroyed by his enemies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Togail_Bruidne_D%C3%A1_Derga
Excellent counter-example from the Irish. One could also mention the accounts of Roman soldiers dying at their posts because no-one came to relieve them (of thirst, and perhaps also at Pompeii?). I believe a Russian cavalry group of some size froze to death remaining at their posts as well. What's more, rites of passage the world over contain motionless silent vigils (especially at night).
Someone with a better grasp of neuroscience might be able to speak intelligently about training the NoGo pathways in the basal ganglia (and perhaps how the lack of such training in contemporary culture/education exacerbates the shortening attention spans).
The book review is remarkably well written. It is a great example of people, who I assume, grown up in western culture understands the rationales behind Chinese traditions and their influence in political pathway.
People love to deep-fry small fish. Chinese authors, especially at that time, would have packed a lot of material in very few words. I find "minimally, lightly" to be way too surface level. Whether I'm right in this particular instance is for historians to decide; how often was leaving local hierachies and culture intact a good management decision and does that vary across different cultures? Does it allow more abuse/taxation/conscription? But I really think that that is what's meant here.
I think the book is well worth reading (I have to admit I haven't, even though I think it might have been assigned reading when I was at university!), but I think the reviewer here hasn't followed through fully enough on the realisation than human history is just gang warfare.
This is something I've been thinking about quite a lot recently, particularly in the context of traditional Chinese history, which is all about trying to draw moral lessons from the past. The problem is that history in general may well be the study of *the very worst human beings alive.* These are the gang leaders who rose to the top of the stinking pile. And I'm not sure we should grant them any additional understanding because they were constrained by tradition. Ultimately, these people are just thugs. Wanli was, as noted, someone who used women as playthings, and happily continued the tradition of mutilating the men who worked around him (eunuchs). The rest of the state existed, as the review notes, primarily to fulfill tax quotas.
Obviously, this is a bit of a bolshie, revolutionary view of history. But I think it was a slightly odd choice of Huang to focus so much on the emperor and a few of his close buddies. Lots of other things were happening in China at that time - though admittedly, harder to discover because they weren't written about at the time.
1587 in the West: The first item on Wikipedia's list of events for that year is the beheading of Mary Queen of Scots which in turn triggers the Spanish Armada. Also in that year and third on that list is the first engagement of that war, when Drake raids Cadiz and singes the beard of the Spanish King. The drama of Europe in that age is laid out by Garrett Mattingly in The Armada. Highly recomended.
Hi - I'm the anonymous reviewer of 1587: A Year of No Significance. I set up an anonymous email account so I can contribute a few comments and replies without violating the contest rules. If anyone has any particular questions, ask away - and thank you all for your interest!
I'll paraphrase my comment earlier: Fan-fucking tastic review. Take my money, you have my vote. Please post where we can find other writings (post-contest, of course).
The Ming Dynasty and the Taliban have a lot in common: both try to preserve the traditions of old and are very rigid about it, even in the face of far superior foes.
That's pretty much the role of queens in most human societies as well. Europe is highly unusual in having regent queens.
Fascinating.
A subject of which I knew so little that I didn't even know I knew so little.
This review makes me want to buy the book
Anyone else discovered the trick that when their are alternate spelling methods of foreign words, if you split the difference between the two spellings you often get closer to the correct sound than either of them.
I have been doing this for years (where possible) and feel it is often pretty successful with Asian/indigenous words.
I have noticed that in particular for the sound represented by "q" in hanyu pinyin. Wade-Giles represents it as ch', but in older representations it is commonly spelled ts (tsingtao (qingdao) beer, tsinghua (qinghua) university).
It is quite true that, to the English ear, the Mandarin sound is ambiguous between those two representations. But I'm curious how you would go about attempting to split the difference.
Another example that appears in the post is that Wade-Giles represented pinyin "r" as "j". This is easy to explain - the sound can be anywhere along the continuum between the sound of the R in "row" and the sound of the SI in "vision", and I assume J was picked to represent that second sound, possibly with an eye toward French.
But while pinyin "q" is a case of an intermediate sound, pinyin "r" isn't really. Every point on the continuum is a legitimate pronunciation of the Mandarin sound; what you get will differ from speaker to speaker and even from utterance to utterance holding the speaker constant.
I much prefer the Wade-Giles rendering. The familiarity makes the words more memorable, and it isn't any less accurate overall than Pinyin.
Except that Pinyin is now the official rendering of Putonghua in Latin script. All translations going forward will be in Pinyin. All serious Western scholarship is being rendered in Pinyin.
An unfortunate choice, in my opinion.
I never understood what I was supposed to do with those apostrophes ('). Supposedly they are aspirations, but once I started learning Putonghua, I could not see any correlation between the WG spellings and the Beijing way of pronunciation. At least with Pinyin and its tonal notations, one can figure out how the word should be pronounced (once you've got 4 tones for each vowel sound down, and all those subtle frictives in Beijing-style Putonghua mastered).
Why should we care? “Rome” is Roma. “Cologne” is Köln. Beijing can be called whatever the Chinese want in China. Here in the US, we should use a romanization designed for Americans, not whatever happens to be official over there.
But “Beijing” is what the Chinese want it called in China, being the pinyin romanization of 北京! “Peking” is the older English name, borrowed from a Portuguese transliteration, and that sees relatively little use now except when in relation to things still associated with the older name like Peking Duck.
Come to think of it, I‘m not sure why I wrote this comment…
My opinion is that there was no reason to move away from "Peking", which was fine.
What's unforgivable is that we moved away from "Canton" to the unreadable "Guangzhou"—which is not the name of the place in Cantonese!
Americans should just use the Yale romanization system, which was actually designed so that Americans can pronounce something reasonable close to correct by just reading it. Under no circumstances should pinyin be used with a generalist American reading audience. It’s a great romanization system—for people who speak Mandarin. Everyone who speaks English but not Mandarin should use Yale.
"Maybe in some alternate universe a Ming-era person discovers that lightning can be tamed like fire - would that have helped? I’m not aware of any experiments with electricity, though they did have gunpowder and printing presses. "
They were not ready for a scientific revolution. At this point the Chinese believed the earth was flat and they didn't even have Euclidean geometry. Not that they weren't smart! They were highly intelligent, it's just they didn't have the cultural apparatus for scientific investigation. A good example is Chinese astronomy. Right around this time period Chinenese astronomy was a state monopoly conducted by the Bureau of Mathematics and Astronomy, under the Ministry of Rites. It was part of the Ministry of Rites because the sole purpose of Astronomy was to prepare an annual calendar that identified lucky and unlucky days. The calendar's primary purpose is to establish the days certain rites will occur on. Astronomer's studied the stars so they could predict the equinoxes and eclipses so that rites would happen at the right time.
In 1603 the Chinese scholar Xu Guanqi converts to Christianity under the influence of his friend Matteo Ricci, a Jesuit priest who came to China as a missionary. Ricci has been sharing western knowledge with Xu, and together they decide to translate all of western science into Chinese. By 1610 they've published translations explaining geometry, Ptolemaic astronomy (not the best science, but at least the Earth is a sphere and the math works), and other odds and ends. Note that this is still 1610 and the scientific revolution is just kicking off in Europe: all Xu is doing is trying to get China caught up with Europe's mathematical and astronomical knowledge circa 500 AD or so.
Xu challenges the Chinese astronomers to a face off to prove which system is better, with the Jesuits making their own calendar to compare to the Chinese calendar. The Jesuit calendar is so much more accurate than the Bureau's that the Emperor grants Xu permission to translate and publish the remainder of Western science into Chinese. A Jesuit priest returns to Europe to recruit more astronomer-missionaries and collect books of science.
So what happens from there? What happens is the eunuchs and other bureaucrats get pissed off at some rando showing up and rocking the boat (and tradition! The Earth is a sphere? How radical!). The Minister of Rites manages to put the Jesuit missionaries on trial for disparaging Chinese rites. Though none are executed, many are banished and the rest stop publicly spreading scientific knowledge and try to keep their nose clean. In 1619 the priest they sent to get more books arrives with 7,000 of them, plus something special: a brand new telescope! While all this was happening in China the telescope was invented, spread across Europe, and was being used to make amazing new astronomical discoveries. The moons of Jupiter! The transit of Venus! Craters on the moon! It's a big moment, and China has just received this state of the art invention from across the world.
Of course, the Chinese won't let him in because the Jesuits are persona-non-grata with the bureaucracy right now. He sneaks in anyway, and by 1622 court politics have shifted enough that the Jesuits are back in business. They set up shop and by 1626 have published a Chinese treatise on the telescope and all the cool discoveries that have already been made with it. Wang Cheng publishes "Diagrams and Explanation of the Marvelous Devices of the Far West" where he expounds on the telescope and its value for navigation, warfare, astronomy, etc. One difficulty is that the Chinese do not have the technical skill to grind glass lenses, and have no science of optics. Still, the knowledge is here and there are people excited to spread it.
In 1629 another showdown is held, this time with the task of predicting when the next day's solar eclipse will occur. The Jesuit astronomers predict the start time and duration down to the minute, while the Bureau of Calendar's is off on the start by an hour and the duration by almost two hours. The Emperor is impressed enough to put Xu in charge of a Calendar Reform Project. The Jesuits translate more works on state-of-the art astronomy from letters they receive from Europe: they publish books on Tycho's model of the solar system, and in 1632 they use Tycho's system to predict the conjunction of Mars and Venus. The old Chinese system is off by eight days. The current leader of the Jesuit astronomer-priests, Schall, is appointed the head of the Bureau of Calendars.
So at this point China has all the knowledge it needs to kick off a scientific revolution, the kind that is happening simultaneously in Europe. The trouble is that they don't have the cultural institutions for it. They have the fuel, they have the spark, but there's no oxygen in the room.
The Imperial Bureaucracy is against this whole project from the get go, and the only thing that holds them back is the Emperor's support. When the Emperor dies in 1664 the new Emperor is told by his officials that the Calendar Reform project is just an excuse to propagate Christianity, upset tradition, and destabilize China. Schall is accused of creating calendars that cause state rites to occur at inauspicious times, leading to the death of the previous Emperor. The project heads are imprisoned. Schall is sentenced to death by dismemberment and the rest of his group are sentenced to exile after flogging. The sentence is commuted to house arrest after the princess dowager intervenes on their behalf, but the project is dead. The Jesuits are thrown out and the Chinese officials who worked for them are beheaded for treason. An anti-western official who has no knowledge of mathematics or astronomy is chosen as the new head of the Bureau of Calendars. They return to the old methods for the most part, choosing tradition over accuracy.
This isn't the last battle: in 1669 the Jesuits hold a new series of face offs against the Bureau, winning each one. The new Emperor becomes interested in western science, but doesn't do much about it and his successor has no interest whatsoever.
Meanwhile in Europe the scientific revolution is a wildfire that can't be stopped.
I know this is an overlong comment, but I find it very interesting. As far as I can tell it is the institutions and cultural ideas that made the difference. In China astronomy was only done by the Imperial Bureaucracy, and was subject to bureaucratic politics. Tradition and stability was valued much higher than the pursuit of knowledge or competence: I mean, look what happened to that General in the book review, he was highly competent but died penniless because he might have caused instability. In Europe knowledge wasn't controlled by the state but by the universities. Decentralized and independent they were able to pass on knew knowledge rapidly and weren't beholden to concerns about stability. People were sharing discoveries left and right, building their own telescopes, publishing papers about what they found, having debates about the implications. The telescope was invented in 1608, and by 1610 Galileo has already published "The Starry Messenger", by 1611 Kepler has invented an improved telescope, and soon every astronomer in Europe has one. At the same time that China is throwing the Jesuits out of the Bureau and going back a flat earth model, Isaac Newton is crafting the first reflecting telescope.
All that to say, China was well suited to thousands of years of stability and completely unsuited for a scientific revolution.
Interestingly, I believe that Chinese astronomers had noted that the angle to the sun is different at different points on earth. But since they believed the earth was flat, rather than a sphere, they didn’t do the calculation Eratosthenes did to find the circumference of the earth, but instead used the base of a triangle and its two angles to calculate what they thought was the distance to the sun.
See some discussion here: https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/46534/before-european-influence-circa-1600-did-any-chinese-believe-the-earth-was-sphe
Thanks for the link. Reading it also drove something else home for me: the Jesuits in 1600 couldn't have been the first time the Chinese were exposed to the idea that the world is a sphere. They directly traded with plenty of Arab, Persian, and Indian cultures that knew the world was round. It reminds me of the Macartney Embassy to China in 1793: they tried to impress the Chinese with Western inventions and trade goods, but they were viewed as barbarians (like every other nation outside the Empire) and were snubbed. The Emperor sent a letter to King George III stating "Our Celestial Empire possesses all things in prolific abundance and lacks no product within its borders. There is therefore no need to import the manufactures of outside barbarians in exchange for our own produce." That same attitude must have prevented outside scientific ideas from catching on in China from trade.
The letter is definitely worth a read, by the way. It's dripping with condescension.
https://marcuse.faculty.history.ucsb.edu/classes/2c/texts/1792QianlongLetterGeorgeIII.htm
About a year ago Greg Cochran was arguing with someone about whether the Mayans knew the Earth to be a sphere.
https://twitter.com/gcochran99/status/1447407768244084738
His interlocutor refused to believe a civilization could know astronomy but not that.
That’s not how I read that thread. I read it as Cochran insisting that Mayans didn’t know astronomy, because he claimed they didn’t know the earth was a sphere, but not providing any reason to think the Mayans didn’t know the earth was a sphere.
I don’t know who that guy (Cochran) is, but to be fair to him, the consensus view is that the Mayans thought our world was a plane—maybe an infinite plane.
They had really comprehensive astronomical records as everyone knows, but even though that can give you a strong predictive power and sophisticated calendar, it doesn’t mean you have a strong underlying grasp of what’s happening mechanically in the heavens: just like the Chinese, in this instance.
Cochran was responding to a claim that some Amerindians (later to be specified as Mayans) not merely knew astronomy but were "hundreds of years ahead of “western civilization”" in both that & mathematics.
Yeah, that strikes me as a claim that is unverifiable and unfalsifiable, rather than false. There's surely many individual bits of understanding that each culture had that the others wouldn't have for centuries.
I would guess that in the specific field of mathematics, western Europeans really were far ahead of anyone outside of the Old World. There was no mathematics the Amerindians knew about that Europeans didn't.
I appreciate the effort you put into writing this comment.
> In Europe knowledge wasn't controlled by the state but by the universities.
Another oft-repeated explanation of the same phenomenon is to give credit to Europe having several states, all competing with each other. The state with a navy that didn't adopt a useful thing like telescope would be seriously disadvantaged. To take an example related to calendars and the 1580s, there was a period when the Gregorian calendar was adopted non-uniformly: pious non-Catholic monarchs made a great show of not adopting the Popist invention ... except until the discrepancy with the calendar months and the reality became increasingly embarrassing. The Russian empire most famously was a hold-out, which is why the October Revolution happened in November ...
True! When the telescope was first invented the Dutch state tried to keep it a secret for military purposes. That didn't work at all, and within the year you have Galileo making his own.
Interesting, a longer comment might have included the effect of the protestant rebellion on the flourishing (in some cases) and suppression (in others) of knowledge in post-medieval Europe.
This is an excellent comment, and I think your conclusions are more or less correct, only I doubt very much the core issue was cultural ideas, tradition or stability. Rather, the problem was, as usual, greedy shitheads. The literal dickless wonders running the show didn't really take exception to some calendrical quibble which, as you note yourself, they couldn't be bothered to even learn about; they took exception to a decrease in their own power. They hated being shown up by upstarts, and worse, by some foreign barbarian ones! If these new guys gain power in the machine, then someone else must lose it, and there's nobody else around but the null brigade; they might not be destabilizing China, but they're sure as fuck destabilizing the eunuchs' cushy setup. They couldn't care less about China if they tried anyway, as evidenced by their conduct.
The only problem here that can be imputed to tradition is the specific tradition of keeping all these career academics around in positions of power, which is something that ought to alarm the conscientious observer of modern America.
I think this is basically right, but overestimates the eunuch problem and underestimates the bureaucrat problem.
All the bureaucrats are chosen based on a system that boils down to competitive essay-writing, with all the essays on a handful of classics and written in a specific format. One result is that your whole elite, while theoretically drawn from the whole country, is selected to be a very specific type of person. A worse result is that all the excess capacity of elites is sunk into a zero-sum essay-writing game. There's no slack in the system - anyone who takes time to learn about the universe will get outcompeted by someone who used that time to read more Confucius. The result is the same thing we're starting to have - a 2-dimensional elite who are very good at the test we use to select them, but totally devoid of all other merits.
In Europe, by contrast, most of society was still largely hereditary, and the lack of competition resulted in a large number of people with mounds of resources who can do whatever they liked. Most of them just ate and hunted, but some of them advanced civilisation. What competition there was boiled down to getting the monarch to like you (for which novelty, and patronising arts and culture, was a decent strat), or getting other aristocrats to think you're cool (ditto). This then creates a market for secondary industries like lens grinders.
The Eunuchs should be a countervailing force, and possibly sometimes were (Zheng He) but the Chinese opinion generally was that they were too venial. They were also basically servants, so didn't have their own independent wealth/power base to start doing cool experiments.
Interestingly, this isn't something where we've coincidentally fallen for the same trap as the Chinese. The British East India Company saw the Chinese system, loved it, and copied it. Then the British copied it from the EIC as Travelyanism. Then the old American Progressives (Teddy Roosevelt and co) copied the British and introduced it to America (the Pendleton Act). That then metastasised into the idea of meritocracy, soaked into the fabric of American thought, and was shipped back to Europe with the GIs. Which I guess gives the Chinese a fitting revenge for the Opium wars or something.
the last para is interesting never heard of this before. do you have some sources / references i can look into?
Available on google books, albeit from a liberal pro-professional civil service angle:
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=6zR7Nsts5zcC&pg=PA5&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=3#v=onepage&q&f=false
I think there are also parliamentary debates on the Northcote-Travelyan reforms where some of the Tories predict what will happen with reference to China stagnating, but Hansard's search function isn't working for me today
Interesting how people often warn about the dangers of too much STEM education and not enough humanities, and yet we have a historical example of an opposite extreme.
I'm not sure how you equate the limited curriculum of the Chinese exam system with the modern study of the humanities, unless your categorisation is that all non-STEM subjects are by definition humanities. Done properly, humanities is a thinking education, encouraging challenging orthodoxies (it isn't always done well). I don't see a system based around what was in effect a system of showing adherence to a prescribed set of texts as humanities so much as a form of demonstrating adherence to a belief system, so I don't think we can define the Chinese competitive exams as humanities, and we might be better defining it as a way of recruiting a priesthood.
It's really similar to the old literae humaniores courses you still get at a few places (possibly just Oxford), but with Confucius instead of Virgil. Modern humanities courses are derived from it, but in dumbed down and in English.
Showing adherence to a prescribed set of texts is also the entirety of a humanities course - you're given a set of books to read then you write essays about them.
Possibly for literary studies, but that clearly doesn't apply to history or philosophy where texts are starting points for investigation. And you won't get a top grade in a humanities programme by simply demonstrating knowledge of the texts and their accepted interpretation; it's about displaying thought and research skills as well. At base, a good university education in any subject is to prepare students to ask the question 'what happens if I do this?'.
I'm not saying there are not badly-taught courses where faithfullness to the text and the prescribed ideology for interpreting it is required. But that is not modern humanities any more than the Ming-period competitive examination.
I once knew a fellow of Chinese extraction who liked to theorize that so many generations of putting priority on writing essays might not have been effective governance but may have resulted in the higher average Chinese IQ. (He drew a parallel to the Jewish IQ and the history of prioritizing study of the Torah.) I did not quibble with him then, and I present this defense of this type of education without comment.
It's potentially viable, but the killer stat is whether mandarin fertility/child mortality was higher or lower than the rest of the population. Although (taking this and running speculatively with it), didn't China used to have a lot of famines? That could presumably increase Mandarin fitness if they and their children were more likely to survive them than peasants were.
Also, are the Chinese smarter than the Japanese? Otherwise that's a hint that it's something else, as the Japanese were feudal (albeit stereotypically with a lot more strategy and scheming than their Teutonic counterparts).
Yet another example in the endless struggle between Wordcels and Shape-Rotators.
The SAT is pretty much an IQ test, so has pretty much the opposite result - it selects for smart people.
The idea that the meritocracy is bad is one of those provocative ideas that is quite wrong on examining it for about five minutes. It yields much better results.
There's a reason why meritocratic countries advance so much faster than more primitive, backwards ones.
The key is actually operating mostly on merit and not other things that people try to substitute for merit.
China was a meritocracy, and Europe wasn’t, at the time Europe overtook China. Realistically, the Imperial examination boils down to the effort you put in plus how smart you are. The current education system in the West is the same, plus varying degrees of corruption.
If you chose the leadership of a country purely by IQ, then up to any point well into the 60s you’d end up with a Communist country. The same would apply to more conventional meritocracy, but that at least has the advantage of filtering out the weird ones, which would be the real danger of the IQ-only system; you’d end up with half the budget going towards anime.
Empirically, there doesn’t seem to be any evidence that meritocracy produces better results than either democracy of the hereditary principle.
First off, smart people mostly aren't communists.
Secondly, China wasn't a meritocracy. It didn't select for people who were best at leading. That is what meritocracy IS - it is about having merit at the thing you do, not in some ethereal sense. This is precisely why capitalism works so well - you are rewarded by generating value for other people.
People who think "merit" is just about raw IQ aren't living in reality. IQ makes you more able to posses actually useful forms of merit, but IQ itself doesn't actually mean anything - it doesn't matter how smart you are if you spend all your time navel gazing or engaging in other useless or frivolous activity.
The reason why IQ tests can be useful is because they let you find the people who have the highest ability cap. But simply giving people IQ tests is not sufficient to determine merit at a particular job or occupation, because lots of other things are involved in merit as well. In the end, the person with the highest IQ is not necessarily the person with the most merit, and indeed, it is not uncommon for the person with the most merit not to be the highest IQ person but the person with fairly high IQ but very high diligence and thus willingness to hone skills beyond the point of diminishing returns.
I agree with the capitalism point, but do western bureaucracies select for people who are best at leading? Despite the popular Rotschild-related conspiracy theories, the most successful capitalists don't in fact wield most of the power.
1) They were until Communism actually started to fail, even though most other people weren't convinced.
2) This version of meritocracy (the best person to do the job should do the job) is too vague to be meaningful as it can't be operationalised. The person who thinks the best leaders will be produced by taking children of current leaders and raising them from birth to be confident and decisive enough to rule and the person who thinks the best leaders will be produced by sending the people with the best SATs to Harvard, then having them work at McKinsey for a bit before becoming congressional staffers are both "meritocrats."
"Meritocracy" meaning "the people who should lead us are the people who are best at leading" is question-begging bordering on tautology. Actual meritocracy, both in the view of the man who coined it and every time it's now used, means selecting leaders/functionaries/bureaucrats through competitive examination, which is the Imperial Chinese system. There's an element of motte-and-bailey between the two definitions now that it's not just a term of abuse, but most people understand it to mean the current Western system but shorn of it's plutocratic skew.
The European "scientific revolution" of the 16th and 17th Centuries that you're talking about was largely a revolution in entrepreneurial alchemy. The flood of silver from the Spanish conquest was upsetting economies all over Europe, causing extreme inflation—and especially in Central Europe, where the older metal economies of Central European kingdoms were being disrupted—rulers started hiring alchemists to produce gold. It turned out that silver thalers had enough gold in them that could be extracted to make the first wave of entrepreneurial alchemists seem rather successful! Of course, a lot of the alchemists were total failures (and many of them were executed as charlatans). But that led to more explicit contracts (which led to the development of contract law across Europe—without which a modern economy can't run). And rulers also invested in mining technology to more efficiently extract metals (and the alchemists were there helping out with the process of metal refining).
With tight finances in an inflationary economy, rulers would sometimes sell stock in these mining and metallurgical enterprises to fund them. Thus the modern corporation as owned by stockholders evolved alongside the boom in entrepreneurial alchemy (again spurring along the European economy). There are pictures from that period depicting large factories with hundreds of workers toiling over refining equipment. Many of these became something like research labs, where once they gave up on the pipe dreams of transmutation, they started exploiting secondary technologies that had practical uses—such as the reliable production of potassium nitrate (which was used in older alchemical experiments, but which found a new use in the burgeoning firearms industry of the time). And lest you think I'm exaggerating the importance of the early alchemical entrepreneurs on the development of a modern European economy and sciences, remember that during this period the people we now consider to be scientific luminaries—such as Newton and Boyle—regarded themselves as alchemists. Most of Newton's notebooks are alchemical in nature. Calculus and the law of gravity were just some ideas that he tossed off along the way in his search for Van Helmont's alchahest (sort of a universal alchemical solvent). As a reference, The Business of Alchemy: Science and Culture in the Holy Roman Empire by Pamela H. Smith, is well worth reading.
Anyway, China didn't have the destabilizing influx of New World silver, and its rulers didn't have to adapt to a vast inflationary cycle disrupting their ordered economies. Likewise, as far I as I can tell Chinese alchemists were only interested in creating life-extending elixirs, and the only gold they were obsessed with was the false gold that was the basis of their elixir theory. (Whatever false gold was, I don't know.)
Alchemy was certainly relevant for some of the things that came later (notably Boyle and Lavoisier and Dalton’s work that turned the earth and fire elemental system upside down) but I would have thought that Galileo and Kepler and Copernicus, not to mention Vesalius and other claimed starting points of the Scientific Revolution, were somewhat independent of alchemy.
Lee Smolin in his book, Time Reborn, regards Leibnitz as being the first philosopher/scientist to start thinking about the cosmos in a new theoretical way—one that was unconnected to the mechanistic clockwork universe that was inherited from Aristotelian predecessors. Smolin argues that Leibnitz saw time to be a function of the nature of the universe, rather than something that was outside and separate from Newton's clockwork universe. Einstein may have been influenced by Leibnitz when he formulated General Relativity (speculation).
But if we were to look for the origin of the experimental method, I think that would be with the 11th Century's Ibn al-Haytham who was the first to connect the Greek idea of a hypothesis with the process of reproducible experimentation to confirm the hypothesis. So I would qualify Ibn al-Haytham as the world's first scientist—in the modern definition of science. I think there was some argument a while back about whether Newton read an early translation of al Haytham's treatise on optics, but I'm kind of vague about the details.
Not that Kepler and Galileo didn't provide significant stepping stones in the understanding of our cosmos, but even though today we consider them to be early astronomers, they would have seen themselves working in the traditions of astrology and a calendrical knowledge. After all, why did kings and potentates fund the work of our early "astronomers"? They wanted a better way of predicting future events (i.e. astrology).
I don’t find that story even a little convincing. You could make a similar story for 50 other things.
Lol! I knew I'd provoke a strong response from some of ACX folks!
The Business of Alchemy: Science and Culture in the Holy Roman Empire by Pamela H. Smith, is well worth reading. Next year I'll do a book report on it.
More soon, while I address Kenny's comment.
I would also direct you to Newton's notebooks. Just looking over the first 50 entries in the catalog of his notes and notebooks, 47 are about subjects related to alchemy and hermetic knowledge. Newton's primary intellectual occupation was alchemy. The stuff we remember him for was but a small part of what he was about.
https://www.newtonproject.ox.ac.uk/texts/newtons-works/alchemical
Here are some links to pics of some 16th and 17th Century alchemical enterprises. As you can see, alchemical labs were common enough for contemporary artists to depict them, and they display all the signs of a top-down organizational structure, as well as evidence of extensive logistical organization — after all a significant number of craft workers were involved in the creation of the devices that they were using (a holdover of these craft guilds would be the glassblowers who staffed 20th Century chemistry labs). Also, it would take a significant input of capital to fund these projects. So what we're seeing in these pictures are the first organized experimental enterprises whose ultimate goal was to create value from experimental knowledge.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Alchemical_Laboratory_-_Project_Gutenberg_eText_14218.jpg
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pieter_Bruegel_the_Elder_-_The_Alchemist.JPG
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5f/Early_Italian_Pharmacy_17th_century_fa_2000.001.263.tif
https://www.sciencephoto.com/media/1004507/view/distillation-16th-century
I am not saying the connections made are wrong. It’s that the connections aren’t “the difference”, and that there are 50 other series of connections you could make.
But China has suffered from inflation far before anyone else, with their invention of Fiat currency hundreds of years before it happened in the West. I think this is too narrow of a view of Science (to bring it down only to Alchemy) and while this is an interesting perspective, I do not think it explains the full, or even the majority of the differences.
I don't know about the fiat currencies of China. Do you have some links?
However, Europe did have a lot of competing states—which China did not—except in interregnums between dynasties. The competitive political pressures during an inflationary era and the threat of the Ottomans Empire on Central European states may have made spurred new economic models as well as research into things that states would find of practical use. Bacon opined that "science" was about the creation of useful things, and he disparaged wasting time on theory if it wasn't towards of goal of utility.
A quick google search should send you in the right direction, the big one was the twelfth century one.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/26314818
This is a gold selling website - but who would be more credible in talking about ancient inflation:
https://www.bullionvault.com/gold-news/china_paper_money_chinese_printing_ming_marco_polo_072120083
Bacon did do that for sure, but can we hold it against him that way back then he did not know that almost all theoretical research will turn out to be practical too - something people today do not know.
> Anyway, China didn't have the destabilizing influx of New World silver, and its rulers didn't have to adapt to a vast inflationary cycle disrupting their ordered economies
I thought the opposite. The Ming had a massive inflationary problem with their paper money, and the Philippines was basically jointly colonized by Chinese merchants and the Spanish to exchange Mexican silver (high demand in China) for goods like like silk and porcelain.
Yea the Chinese market was particularly damaged by Spanish silver.
Amazing comment - I lived across from Xu Guanqi's park, house and museum, and I loved to spend time there. He was, in his acceptance but also cleverness, ahead of his time, and it is a shame that the system around him was not made to accept his ideas. In his area of town, Xujiahui, still a Catholic church stands, a remnant of those times, and quite beautiful even to my atheist eyes. Still, history is repeating itself and the church is often closed and its existence is uncertain in the future due to the prime location it takes up.
Anyhow, thank you for the tale, more detailed than the one I knew, about Xu.
It's a great story, but I don't think it supports your conclusion.
The fact that X didn't happen in China doesn't mean it *couldn't* happen in China; the fact that X did happen in Europe doesn't mean that it was particularly or more likely to happen in Europe.
Consider this possibility: that in fact there was approximately a 50:50 chance that a scientific revolution would happen in China in the 1600s; and the same chance that one would happen in Europe. The coins were tossed, and as luck has it, Europe came up heads, China tails. If this is true, then looking in the tea leaves of Chinese history for why it came up tails is useless. It was just a historical happenstance.
Now I haven't given any evidence for this, only a just-so story. But I think accepting that some things are down to chance is a much better starting point than going into the study of history determined to find the reasons why X.
中国人把天空分成四宫，象我们将一个苹果切成四大块那样，每一部分有一古代象征性的动物：苍龙为东方和春，朱雀为南方和夏，白虎为西方和秋，玄武（或“阴沉的武士”）为北方和冬。而紧围着天帝极星的北拱极区按类似于五行的象征性关系又认为是独立的中央黄宫。这种五行观贯穿在整个中国的自然哲学中。此外，还有一个比这更重要的天区分划。
The Chinese divide the sky into four houses, as we would cut an apple into four pieces, each with an ancient symbolic animal: the Canglong for the East and Spring, the Vermilion Bird for the South and Summer, the White Tiger for the West and Autumn, and the Xuanwu (or "gloomy warrior") for the North and Winter. The northern arch of the polar region, which immediately surrounds the Emperor's pole star, is considered to be a separate central yellow palace in a similar symbolic relationship to the five elements. This view of the five elements permeates the entire Chinese philosophy of nature. In addition, there is a more important division of the heavens than this.
从远古以来，中国的赤道（与黄道相对）被分成28份，称作28宿（月站），每宫七宿，每宿由一特殊的星座标定，从其中某一特定的定标星（距星）起算，因而每一宿所占的赤道范围有很大差别。将各宿隔开的时圈从天极辐射出来，象被天空网成许多桔子瓣，某些宿位于赤道之上，另一些分布于赤道南北。
Since ancient times, the Chinese equator (as opposed to the ecliptic) has been divided into 28 parts, called the 28 constellations (lunar stations), with seven constellations in each house, each of which is marked by a special constellation, counting from a particular fixed star (distance star), so that each constellation occupies a very different equatorial area. The circles of time separating the constellations radiate out from the celestial pole, like a network of orange petals in the sky, with some constellations located above the equator and others distributed north and south of it.
中国天文学发展的历史是悠久的。到汉代已有盖天、宣夜和浑天等学派。盖天说认为，天如盖，盖心是北极，天盖左旋，日月星辰右转。宣夜说认为天无定形，日月星辰“自然浮生虚空之中”，并不附着于“天体”之上。浑天说认为天如蛋壳，地如蛋黄，天地乘气而立，载水而行。
Chinese astronomy has a long history of development. By the Han Dynasty, there were already schools of thought such as Gai Tian, Xuan Yi and Hun Tian. According to Gai Tian, the sky is like a lid, and the center of the lid is the north pole. XuanYi said that the sky has no fixed shape and the sun, moon and stars "float naturally in the void" and are not attached to the "heavenly body". The Huntian says that the sky is like an egg shell and the earth is like the yolk of an egg, and that the sky and the earth stand on air and carry water.
https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%BC%A0%E8%A1%A1
"When the Emperor dies in 1664 the new Emperor is told by his officials that the Calendar Reform project is just an excuse to propagate Christianity, upset tradition, and destabilize China."
I don't know about destabilizing tradition, but the Jesuits were missionaries. No matter their good intentions, they did wish to propagate Christianity, and upset tradition in the meantime.
What I'm getting at here is just that the accusations against them weren't exactly false. I don't know if we can infer anything about the Chinese readiness to accept new technology, because the story seems completely explainable by hostility to foreign religion and culture. Hardly unique to the Chinese.
I agree, that the spread of Christianity in China would upset tradition. But so would the spread of new ideas in general! If the concern was the spread of Christianity alone, then keep the translated books and kick out the missionaries. They had proven multiple times by that point that the Ptolemaic (and by this time Tychonic) system worked better than the Chinese system. Yet when they kicked out the Jesuits they didn't replace them with a traditional Chinese official using the new knowledge, they replaced them with a traditional Chinese official using the traditional Chinese method.
Take in contrast Europe, which was still reeling from it's own religious upsetting of tradition: the Protestant Reformation. That movement certainly brought significant amounts of instability and war: it practically tore Europe apart (the 30 years war kicked of in 1618, remember). Hans Lippershey (the inventor of the telescope) was a Protestant: yet Catholic Galileo still used his invention. Tycho and Kepler were Protestants, yet that didn't stop Catholic astronomers from using Tycho's tables and adopting Kepler's ellipses. The Pope censured Galileo and banned books on heliocentrism, and yet that didn't stop European (even most Catholic) astronomers from using heliocentric systems in their work.
I think the primary difference is that there was no institution in Europe that was capable of stopping the spread of new scientific knowledge, and at least one institution (the university system) that actively encouraged the spread. That second part is important: I'm sure the Emperor didn't care much whether common folk believed the Earth was round or flat, but without independent institutions of education where new ideas were rewarded with prestige, who was going to bother to debate it?
Your comment was more interesting than the book review itself.
If you liked it then I’d suggest checking out this blog post, it’s where I first learned about it and got most of my info.
http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2011/04/far-seeing-looking-glass-goes-to-china.html?m=1
Thanks, I've read it now and liked seeing more of the comparison with Europe's progress.
Tangential, but important. Re. "Probably the biggest thing I learned is that human history is little more than 5000 years of gang war": This is a common complaint about humanity, but unjust. I think we should rephrase it as, "The history we've chosen to write is little more than 5000 years of gang war." Taking that as your baseline for human nature is like basing your expectations about life on Hollywood blockbusters. Only in the past 30 years have historians begun to look at the everyday life of ordinary people, which makes up the vast majority of human history.
True. My grandfather lived for 88 years, but if you asked me about him the first thing that would come to mind was that he fought in WWII. That was just two years of his 88 year life, which was primarily spent in peaceful work and loving parenting. It's just not as interesting to talk about.
It’s not interesting to *him* to talk about. But I really would be much more interested in knowing about what we’re the differences in daily life between someone living in 1500s China and someone living in 1700s Europe and someone living in 1200s Tenochtitlan than knowing who killed whom on which battlefield.
I agree, I wish there were more works about "years of no significance", where you could see what life was like at such-and-such a place and such-and-such a time when there isn't tremendous upheaval.
One potential such book is Jacques Gernet's, Daily Life in China on the Eve of the Mongol Invasion.
You might be interested in Giusto Traina's '428 AD : An Ordinary Year at the End of the Roman Empire', another book about a year where no big catastrophe happened but a hundred ominous small events make things look increasingly grim for the empire (danger zone for cherry-picking, admittedly). I haven't read it yet but I do own it! I'll get around to it... Someday.
I didn't know Herodotus wrote in 1990! Thanks for the tip. I'd heard that the Iliad and Odyssey were a concoction of the 1970's. Herodotus being a 90's phenomenon makes sense in that context.
You're right that the OP certainly overstates the murder monkey take on history. But it's a hook, and hooks indicate the type of fish wished for. And we, my friend, are loose fish.
I suppose you're talking about the parts of book 2 about the Egyptians. Fair enough. But it's only about 1/10th of the Histories, which are mostly about wars, the histories of noble families, and legends.
+1
Herodotus includes ethnographic details about virtually all the peoples mentioned in the Histories. I'm not sure what percentage is ethnography vs. wars vs. noble families vs. legends (which, given the Classical Greek mindset, can't be clearly delineated from ethnography anyway), but it's definitely much more than 10% (heck, the Egyptian section alone is more than 10%).
The study of culture is a lot more than 10% of the Egyptian book, but that's the one book of 6 with the most of it. Hence my guesstimate of 1/10.
Writing of wars, nobility, and legends can be ethnography, but it can't be "the everyday life of ordinary people".
+2
Thanks for bringing up Herodotus - I love that guy! Now I want to go re-read him again
As a holder of a PhD in history awarded 20 years ago, think this statement about historians only looking at everyday life in the last thirty years is demonstrably wrong. The Annales school of historians have had a consistent focus on everyday life and using this as bottom-up history for almost 80 years, based on earlier research by scholars such as Bloch, and there was a similar strand of Soviet historical research (cynically, because it was the only area where one could ignore Marx but produce acceptable results). Less focusedly, even the great patrician English historians of the early-twentieth century, the A.J.P. Taylor and F.M. Stenton types, were producing work on lived experience alongside other historical narratives. I don't know American historiography well enough to say for certain that social history was a norm in the early-mid-twentieth century, but if be rather surprised if it wasn't. It certainly isn't an innovation of the 1990s anyway.
You may be commenting on popular history here, which might be more true (there were popular books looking at everyday life for the millennium of Domesday Book in 1986 but that's not way off your 30 years), but it seems a bit odd to say historians, whose primary outputs are academic papers and monographs, are not studying something because the companies that produce popular history don't publish books in those areas. Commissioning editors are not historians.
+3
But... what would you estimate is the fraction of peer-reviewed history articles published since 2000 which focused on the lives of ordinary people, divided by the fraction of such articles published before 1960 (not counting studies of societies which left no evidence of a ruling class)? If that ratio is more than 10, then my statement may not be True-with-a-capital-T, but is still basically correct.
I never meant there were literally no such articles earlier, only that there's been a very marked increase in them. And 1990 isn't a hard line, but was my attempt to pick out the inflection point in the sigma curve describing the fraction of attention historians pay to the lower classes. You should read it not as if it were in the context of claiming priority on a new discovery, but in the context of being a qualitative description of what you expect to find in a history journal today versus many years ago. I stated it in simple terms to avoid writing this very paragraph.
I would have said there is an inflection point that begins with the Annales' school. But having read several 19th century books, it's not like social history and individual life were ignored in earlier history research. There is definitely a lot more clout given to social history today, given that the medieval history textbook I teach from has been gutted some of my preferred political and economic material and replaced it with additional social history, which, while extremely valuable does not fit within the goals of my intro course. The correct view is boring: social history has more clout within the academy today than it did in the past, but that doesn't mean social history was ignored and irrelevant among previous generations.
I agree with John here, that social history is not a new field, but it is currently receiving more focus, although I suspect that other than in specific sub-disciplines such as agricultural history this may have peaked.
I'd date this increased focus from the 1970s though, where it seems to the in with the postmodernist turn. So you're not wrong, but perhaps missing the backstory in your original comment.
You may also be correct on the ratio of articles, but as I have a view that modern articles have a lower bar to cross to get published (this doesn't mean they're worse mind you) due to more opportunities to do so, I'm not sure this would be statistically meaningful.
>Only in the past 30 years have historians begun to look at the everyday life of ordinary people, which makes up the vast majority of human history.
I know this to be false, for I've read March Bloch's "The Feodal Society", which was published in 1939 (so not in the last 30, but the last 80+ years), and ot was, except for the first chapter (which relates to the "gang wars" that threatened Europe in the early middle age), entirely dedicated to the organization of society, it's judicial rules, it's way to handle contracts, how social classes gained or lost privileges or burdens, etc etc.
The big problem with history and books regarding history of the World, is that the authors very often don't even know the language/ languages of the era or region.
5 thousands years of gang wars it's a description which ' fit' perfectly within Western culture, especially in those countries where English is the only known language ( plus maybe another one or two, used by minorities).
That's like quoting Dostoevsky without reading his works in Russian language.
You can watch ' Throne in blood ' by Akira Kurosawa and after few minutes you recognise Shakespeare's work but rarely can you translate papers, sources, books, you name it from other languages into English without losing the main 'spirit '.
I wish I could read more books about the history of different countries around the World written by authors who rely on their own researches based on solid knowledge of the original language/ languages.
Your parentheses beside the English being the only known language immediately hilights the problems with that statement, particularly that you previously said 5000 years of gang violence. English isn’t a old language and is relatively new to Britain. Do we really have to read Dostoevsky in Russian? Maybe for the language but not the themes.
'5000 year of gang violence' was a quote from another comment not mine. Regards
<i>English isn’t a old language and is relatively new to Britain.</i>
Huh? English has been spoken in Britain for over 1500 years. Even if you only count modern English as "proper" English, that's still 500 years, which is (as far as I can tell) pretty much normal for European languages.
Old English really isn’t English, it’s German. Anyway I said relatively new to Britain. There are older languages indigenous to Britain.
Old English is clearly not German, as they come from different branches of the West Germanic languages. Old English is the most extremely-different from Old High German of the West Germanic languages, possibly because there's no actual evidence for it being spoken in proximity as it is only recorded in Britain. It's clearly English though in that much of the language we type here is derived from it.
A major theme which either Mr. Huang or the reviewer has overlooked is that the role of Emperor in China is more significantly about unification and preservation of same than temporal power per se.
Just as a king in a feudal structure is ultimately beneficial in adjudicating between the feudal lords at last resort - the Emperor of China is intended to be the focal point upon which Chinese unity is preserved. This is why concepts like the "mandate of Heaven" are important: failure in the form of rebellion or mass suffering as precondition to rebellion are signs that an Emperor is failing in his most basic function. OF course, in reality the size and sheer scale of China in the pre-computer, pre-electrical communications era required devolution of execution of policy; the Hanlin examinations and the Imperial Bureaucracy was created to try and enable extension of Imperial policies to the far-flung corners of China.
If you look at the efforts by certain governors during the late Qing dynasty to build modern industry, for example, in the face of overall higher level bureaucratic indifference - it gives an idea of how such a ponderous bureaucratic beast operates.
But then again, it shouldn't be surprising that a scion of the post-Qing revolutionaries should denigrate the regime that was overthrown - especially since the "democratic" governments of China succeeding the Qing were notable primarily for failing both to improve Chinese society and economy as well as to preserve China's unity.
He's denigrating the regime BEFORE the one that was overthrown.
> I’ll also include the Pinyin version in parentheses where the spelling of the Wade-Giles version is significantly different, like this: Peking (Beijing).
But the Wade-Giles version of 北京 is not significantly different from beijing. It's pei-ching. The name "Peking" has nothing to do with Wade-Giles.
> His personal name combined the characters for “joy” and “king.”
It seems like it would have been incredibly disruptive for such common characters (樂王? Maybe 喜王?) to fall under the imperial name taboo. Particularly in the case of 王, which is now and was then one of the most common surnames in China.
Checking Wikipedia, I see that the Wanli Emperor's name was 翊鈞. Neither character has any sense remotely related to joy or kings. I don't see any mention in the wikipedia article that he changed his name upon taking the throne, though this was done by other emperors if they felt their name would be too disruptive.
What happened here? What name are you referring to?
Maybe he was just joyking.
😁
lol
The second character has the “jun1” sound and is sound/tone as 君, which does mean monarch. A similar explanation exists for the first character 翊, which sounds like 怡 and does mean joy/happy
It sounds like you're suggesting that Wanli was one of the emperors who substituted homophones into his name upon ascending the throne, in order to lessen the burden on everyone else, and wikipedia just isn't mentioning it.
But I don't think that's actually a possibility. All male members[1] of the Ming imperial family were legally required to have names that conformed to the system established by the first Ming emperor. The first character of their name was taken from a generation poem (normal for any classy Chinese family), and the second one included a radical from the 五行, with the radicals progressing through a conventional sequence generation by generation. (As far as I know, this elaboration on the scheme was unique to the Ming imperial family, but I don't know a lot.)
And here are some of the personal names of the Wanli Emperor's brothers:
翊釴
翊鈴
翊鏐
It looks painfully clear that the poem character for Wanli's generation was 翊, not 怡, and the element radical for his generation was 金, which is present in 鈞, but not in 君. He couldn't legally have been named 怡君.
It's possible there was some concept called 怡君 and the Wanli emperor was named 翊鈞 in reference to that. On the other hand, the 汉语大词典 has no entry for 怡君.
[1] Judging by the names of the princesses, they used a generation character in their names too, but not the same one that the boys used. They did not use 五行 radicals - they all seem to have used 女 radicals in the second character of their name. I don't know whether this was also required or just felt to make sense.
Nicely done, Mr. Watts. I didn't know that interesting fact about the "five force" tradition in Ming imperial names. A small correction, really to Julien's idea: 翊 (yì) and 怡 (yí) were and are not homonyms, even though a modern English reader might understandably think they were.
You aren’t wrong, I was merely suggesting a possibility of how the author got “joy king” from WanLi’s name. Who knows until the author themselves explain
All im saying is they they sound similar and may be why the author of this post wrote this.
Also in Chinese it’s very common to use homophones for wit/humor/other purposes which is why I suggested it
A couple of points. The reviewer is clearly not familiar with Chinese or Chinese history, so there are quite a few mistakes of this kind. (For example, "Nurhaci is the founder of the Manchu" makes no sense, but it's easy to get confused in a foreign history.) Huang's book does use Wade-Giles, so the reviewer's right in general. But because major place names were often an exception in texts discussing China (English scholarship used "postal spellings"), he chose a poor example in Peking. No way for the reviewer to know.
I don't have Huang's book so I can't figure out how the reviewer came to make his statement about the Wanli Emperor's personal name. Huang was a good scholar, so if he made that statement there must be a basis for it. The way that the reviewer's sentence is constructed, the implied name would presumably be 瓅 (li), combining "king" 王 (loosely understood, in this case, since the form actually stands for a different character) and 樂 (joy), in a single character. However, no online or print source records a personal name with that character, and my guess is that this is just a misunderstanding of something Huang wrote.
Placed alongside Scott's comment and Jack's response, I think this post is going to look like satire, but I really am this dull.
'Nurhaci is the founder of the Manchu' makes complete sense to me. He created the confederation of Jurchen tribes which then adopted the Manchu national identity. This process involved classifying some incorporated groups together as 'official' clans when they did not in fact have a prior genealogical relationship, so it makes sense to consider him the 'founder' of the people.
Well, "Manchu" is an ethnonym. As you say, Nurhaci brought Jurchen tribes into a confederation, so "Nurchaci was the founder of the Manchu confederacy" would make sense. And the elaboration of common genealogical narratives might translate to, "Nurhaci was the founder of the Manchu national identity" (although it's an odd use of "founder" and the word "Manchu" was not adopted as an ethnonym till after Nurhaci's death). I guessed the reviewer's meaning was intended to be, "Nurhaci was the founder of the Manchu Dynasty," which he retrospectively was regarded to have been by the dynastic cult itself, which referred to him by a Chinese imperial title. But "Nurhaci was the founder of the Manchu" is like "Bismarck was the founder of the German." I don't think the sentence makes sense, and there are various ways to construe what idea the author might have intended. Among the possible ones, the notion you're proposing, "Nurhaci was the founder of the Manchu people" seems simply wrong, although I did suspect this might be what the reviewer meant. The Jurchens were a self-conscious ethnic group, sharing a common language, territory, religion, and tradition long before Nurhaci.
hmm the original sentence was perfectly intelligible to me even if technically a word may have been missing. Doesn't seem sufficient to support your claim that reviewer has shallow knowledge of China matters. You mentioned there are a lot of similar mistakes maybe offer a couple different examples?
Well, it's unkind to pile on. The reviewer acknowledges he's not knowledgeable about China, so it's not a criticism to say he makes some mistakes as a result. At one point in discussing the continuity of Chinese history he comments that the "last century or two" appear different, but actually carry on the continuity. There's not much you can lump together between the last two centuries in China. The first is solidly an extension of the Imperial order--no visitor to 19th century China would have said, "You know, I see continuities with the distant past," because the proper response would have been, "Well, duh!" The last century has been an abrupt break, no matter how much cultural influence the past seems to hold, and discerning continuities is an interesting analytic task. The extinction of the Imperial state in 1911 is a paradigm shift unlike any in China since the third century BCE.
At another point, the reviewer refers to the core curriculum of the exam system as "The Four Classics of Taoism and Confucianism." There is no such corpus. The "Four Books and Five Classics" is the standard term for the Confucian classical canon; Taoism had little role to play in the exam curriculum, but its two earliest texts (contemporary with the Four Books) were universally known and admired (and still are). This sort of muddle is like the error of taking "Peking" to be Wade-Giles transcription, and my point was that missteps like these don't really matter here. They don't affect the reviewer's goals or the perspective he's trying to convey--he's representing himself honestly as a newcomer to Chinese history, and it's unfair to ask that he show command of the details to convey an outsider perspective.
By the way, what did you take his sentence about Nurhaci to mean? I actually thought he'd simply left off an -s ("founder of the Manchus"), and that it was 50/50 whether he meant the ethnic group or the Dynastic line, with a little overage odds on something else, like TheBard's "national identity" or military system, etc.
Hi - anonymous reviewer here - for some reason I thought "Manchu" was both plural and singular, like "moose." Good to know it should be either "Manchus" or "Manchu confederacy" (in my mind, those are approximately the same thing). And yeah, I assumed anything with "old-school spelling" was Wade-Giles, hence "Peking." Thanks for the info!
Wikipedia presents Wanli, the regnal name that he took on receiving the mandate of heaven, in traditional characters as: 萬曆帝
I get:
萬 = great number (usually translated as 10,000)
曆 = calendar
帝 = heaven's son (which we usually translate as Emperor)
I suspect that 萬曆 would translate roughly as "Great Age Son of Heaven" as in Emperor of an Age of Greatness (as in an age that will live for 10,000 years).
HIs given name was 朱翊鈞.
朱 = Vermillion, which is an imperial color as well as being a surname
翊 = the most likely meaning of this character is respect (IMO)
鈞 = and jūn is an honorific, isn't it? Noble, honorable.
So, Vermillion, Worthy of Respect, or Vermillion Noble Respect, is my take on his given name. I don't know where the author got Joy from.
Reign titles are an unusual Chinese institution. Emperors were responsible for setting the annual calendar (advised by specialists in the bureaucracy), because the solunar calendar used in traditional China required constant adjustment to track the solar (agricultural) year, using leap months (5 every 17 years, if I recall--think of how "Chinese New Year" jumps around). There was no tradition of consecutive year dating: years were designated by a 60-item (sexagenary) cycle that kept recurring, so, for example, 2022 is designated identically with 1962. Reign-period dating was a device to give each year an individual designation.
Starting in 163 BCE, the Chinese emperors would declare reign period designations with elegant, two-character titles, and years were designated on the formula XX #, as in Wan-li 15 (roughly, 1587). Emperors could replace reign titles with new ones as they wished--Empress Wu of the Tang period, China's only fully acknowledged female emperor, used 16 different reign titles over a period of 21 years, changing in mid-year several times. None of these reign titles had anything to do with the emperor's name. Emperors had a personal name (e.g., 朱翊鈞 --朱,by the way, has nothing to do with being an imperial color; it's a common surname, and the Ming founder bore it as a child, when he was a poor farmer's orphan, a monk in a failing monastery, and a beggar . . . his fortunes changed), and they also had an imperial name, unique to them within a dynasty (although often repeated among dynasties). Zhu Yijun's 朱翊鈞 imperial name was Shenzong 神宗. He is "Emperor Shenzong." He is also "*The* Wanli Emperor," but only because the Ming ditched the custom of changing reign titles at will, and set a precedent of one per emperor, so emperors for the first time could be referred to by their reign names, which held through 1911.
Wanli 萬曆 is a pretty orthodox reign title. It means 10,000 (innumerable) calendar[-years]. In Chinese, "10,000 years" (wansui 萬歲) is a traditional wish for an emperor ("May the king live forever!"). It's more recognizable to Americans in its Japanese form: "banzai!"--written identically-- which many of us Boomers learned as the enthusiastic cry of kamikaze pilots in World War II as they tried to immolate themselves by crashing into and sinking US warships. (In fact, that emperor did live a very long time indeed.) Wanli's choice is a prediction that his reign would be long, and it turned out to be a prescient selection.
So the Wanli Emperor had two names (actually, he had more, but I want to avoid any hint of detail here): his personal name, Zhu Yijun, and his imperial name, Shenzong. The "zong 宗" in Shenzong means "ancestor," and was used as an honorific in the imperial names of all but the last Ming emperor. The word "shen 神" means "spirit," "sentient," "amazing," and other senses associated with the idea of a life-force in people that also lives on after death in some ghostly sense. It's conceivable that Ray Huang knew of some usage of "shen" that could be construed as joyful, in which case, he might have said that "Shenzong" meant joyful king. "Joyful" is not one of the sixteen definitions I find for 神 in encyclopedic dictionaries, but who could deny that it is joyful to be sentient? However, there's a certain irony in this, because imperial names such as Shenzong were bestowed only at the point of post-sentience, the dynastic successor bestowing the name upon his recently deceased predecessor (usually, Dad). That's why the last Ming emperor does not have such a name. Of course, the Wanli emperor's son might have been joyful to finally have the opportunity to name his father while he himself was still sentient. Sadly, he was dead within less than a month, having, according to the histories, overindulged in the joy of his new harem. (Take warning, Prince Charles!)
Thanks for the detailed comment! Fascinating! But for which names did the Imperial naming taboo apply? For their reign period names? Or their other names?
I believe the naming taboo applies to the name the Emperor used before becoming Emperor. The other names were ways to avoid using the taboo name.
I figure the naming taboo didn't apply to the family name; if it did the whole imperial family would have to change their name whenever there was a new Emperor.
In general, Bullseye's got it right. Naming taboos concerned personal names, and were part of general practice, beyond the imperial family. Men from literate families would avoid using characters in their fathers' personal names, or would write them with missing strokes, etc. Obviously, to apply this to family names would be to eliminate family names.
There's a nice example that comes up when searching on the Wanli 萬曆 reign title. During the subsequent Qing Dynasty, one of the most dominant emperors was the Qianlong Emperor (always referred to this way, by his reign title). The Qianlong Emperor's personal name was Hongli 弘曆, which, as you can see, shares a character with Wanli. So after the Qianlong Emperor's ascension to the throne in 1735, Qing Dynasty documents use an alternative character, li 歷, whenever the word represented by 曆 came up: Wanli 萬曆 thus was written 萬歷. That practice stopped with the fall of the Qing house.
> 帝 = heaven's son (which we usually translate as Emperor)
This is completely backwards; 帝 is (part of) the formal title "emperor", and it would be a mistake to translate it any other way. When it is the (full) title given to mythological figures, there is an English-language tradition of translating it as "thearch", but that is obviously not relevant here.
Son of Heaven is a traditional epithet of the Chinese emperor, and it is written 天子, where 天 means heaven and 子 means son. But 帝 is just a title.
Nice that you picked up on this, Michael. Di 帝 is an older term than Tian 天 (Heaven) and Tianzi 天子 (son of Heaven).
beowulf888 isn't wrong if by "=" he means "the identical person as," and the antecedent for "which" is the word "di 帝". But it would be wrong to say that the word "di 帝" means "Son of Heaven." ("Heaven's son" may be a little too intimate and literal: "Son of Heaven" was understood figuratively, meaning Heaven's cherished choice for the throne.)
By the way, "thearch" is used to refer to living rulers too--its just a translation option for "di," whenever it refers to a ruler. Personally, I think it's misleading for real rulers, confusing rulers thought to be sanctioned by a divinity with rulers who are in some sense divine in their persons--although some Chinese rulers clearly shared that confusion! But "emperor" does miss the religious associations of "di."
Good points both of you!
Michael, yes, I should have been more careful in what I wrote. Your criticisms are totally valid.
Robert, you said what I should have said.
And, yes, I was reluctant to translate 帝 as emperor because of the associations of di with divinity. But, on second thought, even though Augustus was the first to claim the title of Imperator (in Western history)—i.e. one who commands—and though it was a title with political connotations—a whole divinity cult grew up around the Roman emperors. So di and emperor should probably be considered equivalent. I stand corrected.
Hi - I'm the anonymous reviewer. Mea culpa! I definitely misidentified the characters which comprised the Wan-Li Emperor's given name.
Tried to figure out where I got that mistaken idea, but it's not in Huang's book, and I couldn't find it in my notes or on the internet either. It's possible I accidentally copypasted the wrong characters into a translation bot.
Sorry about the confusion, and thanks for pointing out the error! If I reprint this review anywhere else, I'll be sure to emend that line.
If you'll permit a fussier comment on the same topic - elsewhere in your review, you mention 'a specially commissioned jacket with the character for “felicity” embroidered on it', and I think this shows some significant misunderstandings about how languages work.
The Chinese and English languages are unrelated and there is no reason to expect a rare word in one of the languages to correspond to a particular word from the other side of the divide. As such, referring to "the" Chinese character for an English word is unlikely to make conceptual sense. You got lucky, sort of, with "joy" and "king" because 樂 and 王 are so prominent in Chinese that they instantly suggest themselves. But even there, it's not like anyone is going to say "joy" if they're asked how to translate 樂. The English word is relatively obscure. (And the Chinese characters aren't really "words" in the modern language - for example, the vernacular word for "king" is 國王, not 王 - but it's fine to use them on their own for symbolic purposes; they definitely do convey meaning in isolation.)
This is a much bigger problem for "felicity", which is less well-defined in English than "joy" is. ("Happiness"? [How would that be different from "joy"?] "Good luck"? "Skill"? "Something particularly fitting to the situation"?) All of those call for different translations and often even when a translation is picked they don't suggest a particular character. My top three guesses for what "the character for felicity" was meant to refer to are 吉, 幸, and 福, which should together cover the senses of "happiness", "positive circumstances", and "good luck", but those are just guesses, they completely fail to cover some English senses of the word "felicity", and there's no real way to choose between them based on the hint.
All of which is just to illustrate that the concept of "the" word that translates a word from language X into language Y doesn't generally exist. If I were phrasing it, I'd prefer to say something like 'a jacket with the character 吉 ["felicity"] on it'.
Ah - well, good to know, but I'm afraid the book doesn't include the Chinese character in question. The sentence I'm referencing is on p. 72 of my paperback edition and reads: "This service pleased Wan-li so much that he authorized the first grand-secretary to wear on the site a special jacket with the double image of the character 'felicity' embroidered on the front, which signified a commission unique in both color and design and possessing a distinguished personal touch."
You've fallen into a nest of nitpickers, Anon1587, and it's hard not to get stung. The character in question is xi 喜, and the double form is 囍. No possible way for you to know that.
Michael, the following link shows an image of the jacket and the relevant paragraph of the Chinese version of Ray Huang's book, if you expand the text in the header section (click 显示全部): https://www.zhihu.com/question/352922118
Oh, I enjoy a good nitpicking ;-)
That's a cool-looking jacket!
Not a bad review. Not a fan of the odd aside about being uncontaminated by "culture war" toxicity -- not sure really what it means (and controversies that are currently in vogue may reach back into the events of the past) -- but that's a minor point. The general impression I get is similar to How To Read Lacan by Slavoj Zizek, as described in Slate Star Codex.
This review depicts the book, as I remember it, with reasonable accuracy; its analysis is interesting, but ranges far afield from the book's topic and ropes in a variety of external sources. Not a bad choice, though a little eccentric. The Ming dynasty is one of the more interesting eras of Chinese history. Of course, there are so many distinct episodes within the lifespan of the dynasty that you might as well divide it up -- the glorious early days, rebellion and exploration; the incredibly weird hedonism of the Jiajing reign; the chaos of the dynasty's collapse, with Ming princelings scattered to the winds (the tales of various loyalist holdouts in southeast Asia are fascinating, usually with resistance coalesced around some minor descendant of the imperial house, ending with the fall of the Kingdom of Tungning) (and don't get me started on the ennobled Ming descendants who survived until the last days of the Qing, part of a tradition dating back to antiquity where the victorious new dynasty would grant some minor fief to the scions of the old) (but I digress).
Anyways, more attention paid to Chinese history is nice.
Every age has its own culture wars. Before the left was obsessed with cishetwhitesupremacy, it was obsessed with corporate domination and before that, fascism; before the right was obsessed with globalists, it was worried about communists and before that, Catholics, Jews, and anarchists.
To quote C.S. Lewis, in a passage I think most people here would appreciate:
"The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books. Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes. They will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us. Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction. To be sure, the books of the future would be just as good a corrective as the books of the past, but unfortunately we cannot get at them."
Yes - that C.S. Lewis quote says exactly what I was trying to get at in my little aside about "uncontaminated by culture war toxicity." As usual, he expressed himself with much more clarity than I managed to muster.
Lewis and George Orwell are my two all-time favorite writers for expressing clear ideas about ethics and morality in straightforward English prose. Thank you for posting that highly relevant quote!
Only tangentially related to the book, but I enjoy seeing the founder of my religion, Mary Baker Eddy, mentioned. I grew up in Christian Science and am still moderately active in the community.
A microcosm of a few religions trends in America, today it's role of "zany American religion" is better served by the more influential Mormonism.
A lot of religions are purely stupid, but Christian Science telling people to avoid medicine at least resulted in them steering clear of something that was mostly harmful at the time.
It's too bad Christian Science wasn't started a couple of hundred years earlier.
I quite like the framing this review gives to its subject. It seems relevant and worthwhile without actually being comparable to events of today.
The comparison of the Chinese imperial structure with other, typically more ancient god-kings is also one I'd not thought of before, and not seen taken seriously in ages (older historical accounts readily made such comparisons, and others, but in ways, and based on such negative views, that I have never pondered or engaged with them).
Indeed...but it was the way of Persian and Roman civilization. It may have been more common than the reverse for much of human history; even the European kings claimed to have divine right even though they weren't actually deified.
Thank you!
I recently read Asimov's Foundation trilogy, which was inspired by Gibbon (whom I admittedly haven't read). Your bit about the distrusted general reminded me of "The General" from Foundation & Empire, although that bit was supposed to be inspired by the Byzantine general Bellisarius specifically.
https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2022/06/08/foundation-and-empire/
Going off on a tangent, while looking up something in the selected letters of Tolkien, I came across this footnote to a letter of 1967:
"I have read all that E. R. Eddison wrote, in spite of his peculiarly bad nomenclature and personal philosophy. I was greatly taken by the book that was (I believe) the runner-up when The L. R. was given the Fantasy Award: Death of Grass. I enjoy the S.F. of Isaac Azimov. Above these, I was recently deeply engaged in the books of Mary Renault; especially the two about Theseus, The King Must Die, and The Bull from the Sea. A few days ago I actually received a card of appreciation from her; perhaps the piece of 'Fan-mail' that gives me most pleasure."
I was especially surprised by his mention of "The Death of Grass" because that's one of John Christopher's post-apocalypse novels, which includes things like (taken from the Wikipedia summary) "Picking up a travelling companion in a gun shop owner named Pirrie after an attempt to procure arms, they find they must sacrifice many of their morals in order to stay alive. At one point, when their food supply runs out, they kill a family to take their bread. The protagonist justifies this with the belief that "it was them or us."
The distrust of competent generals is understandable, even if it does saw off the branch the empire is sitting on; after all, if your top military guy is spectacularly successful at toppling foreign kings, that just shows how spectacularly successful he could be at toppling *you*, especially in an empire where top military guys have done just that to previous emperors and founded their own dynasties. Throw in political jealousy and rivalry dripping poison into the emperor's ear, and really a prudent general would always make sure to not be *that* competent, if he wants to live to a peaceful old age that is not blighted by poverty and exile.
I took an "overview of East Asian History" class, as one of my distribution credits (I was double majoring in Cognitive Science and Computer Science), and we read this book for the class, and it made enough of an impression that I only had to see the year, to know what the rest of the title was. Highly, highly recommended.
Bouncing hard off this one as well. Just to start off with - look, man, it's all well and good to praise a book for being "blessedly uncontaminated by any current 'culture war' toxicity". But adopting the historical-revisionist mindset of projecting modern sensibilities into the past is...exactly what's done here, over and over? There is more than a whiff of "exotic Orientalism" voyeuristic eyebrow-raising. Look what those crazy yellows got up to, back in the day! This seems like a bad case of base rate fallacy...everything everywhere was luridly barbaric by our current standards in 1587, or other years of slightly more significance. A good history book will give me the contemporary view of someone back in the day...not cast aspersions from the high horses of hundreds of years of progress. It's hard to take a timeless message along the lines of "history is important to learn from!" when it's delivered with such a flippant tone.
And...really...why 1587? I don't think this is satisfactorily answered. What makes 1587 a better year than 1586 or 1588? If there's a strangely coincidental confluence of events which end up having far-reaching historical consequences, does that not retroactively make 1587 a year of significance? Is this just one of those things like the 1619 Project that picks an arbitrary Schelling date to define as a synecdoche, cherry blossom-picking just-so historical events to justify a narrative? It is indeed weird for a book to forthrightly point out the irrelevance of its topic, especially because I don't think the content really disproves it. Like, I know they're comparing very different eras, but I honestly got a lot more Chinese-history-edification out of Scott's Dictator Book Club post on Xi Jinping. Focused history on a concrete topic, not a compilation of slices-of-day-in-the-life-ofs. (Even if they're about the Emperor. Especially if they're about the Emperor...the account here sure makes it look like the Mandate of Heaven effectively made Wan-li just as much an impotent eunuch as actual castration, with true power in the civil service and scholars of Confucian tradition. Absolute Monarchy: It's Self-Recommending But Self-Refuting.)
Speaking of focus, that's another ding on this review for me...it genuinely does meander all over the place. Not sure if it's due to the book being that way, or it's only the review, but dissembling on a wide variety of topics - and even dropping parts of __other additional books__ in! - is just really disorienting. I had trouble anchoring on some coherent thesis(es), and kept being unsure where the review was building to as its Big Takeaway. Then at the very end, it's like, can we learn anything from 1587? Big Shrug! And I'm like...okay, but then why read and review this book?
Finally, I feel obligated to note that...and this isn't really specific to this review, it's a more general issue...there's a Typical Mind failure mode when Westerners discuss Asia. Lots of baffling cultural tics make way more sense when viewed through a collectivist vs. individualist lens...when centering the epistemics of tradition and ancestors vs. rational empiricism. I'm a pretty-whitewashed 3rd generation, and only have a small shard of Chinese culture-thought to draw on...but that little bit is enough to see the mindset difference. To billions of people, it's us who are the strange exotic aliens with weird barbaric values. All models are wrong, some models are useful...as the review says, if your culture lasts several millennia, clearly something's being done right. China, ah, finds a way.
If you are asking why its 1587 then its
Accusing someone of ‘exoticizing’ is one of those bland, tone-based accusations that’s nearly impossible to defend against while remaining insubstantial and wholly dependent on the eye of the beholder. I didn’t get that from the review at all. While I have my problems with it, I find your comment particularly uninsightful because the majority of it is dedicated to this, which yields nothing.
It also seems weird that you’re asking why about the year. That seems like it was covered already.
Wait, what? You're "a pretty-whitewashed 3rd generation", but you're accusing full-bore Chinese Guy Ray Huang of... orientalist exoticizing? Of the country where he was born and grew up? And you weren't? How do you cube that orb?
To quote an old Slashdot saying, he must be new here. :)
I took it to be the reviewer getting taken to task, what else do you make of such gems as "A charming idiosyncrasy of his style is how he refers to Ming dynasty China as “our Empire”
Why the devil should the man not refer to it as "our Empire"? He was native Chinese, born and raised in China before emigrating to the United States. He's as much claim to call it "our/my Empire" as any other Chinese native born in China. The reviewer makes it sound like some 'charming idiosyncrasy' - oh, those quaint natives and their colourful ways!
If avalancheGenesis has a chip on their shoulders, then so do I, because this is the exact thing I noted in my record of impressions of the book review contestants: "review is pitched a little too much towards Exotic Orientalism despite everything". And I'm not any generation Chinese.
It's a serious idiosyncracy in history writing to use a phrase like "our Empire". It's even more idiosyncratic if you consider this was written in English and there's a reasonable presumption that the majority of readers would therefore not be of Chinese descent. Whilst this could be a 'royal' plural (and 'my Empire' certainly wouldn't work) it doesn't seem unreasonable to note this stylistic quirk not normally found in the western academic tradition within which the review author carefully located Huang's later career including this book. It's the equivalent of me writing of the British Raj as "our Empire": technically unproblematic but stylistically unusual. Yes, Huang could do this, but it's odd in a work of academic history. And to highlight this is hardly exotic orientalism, although I'd suggest there is a risk of the same in seeking to defend a stylistic quirk in the basis the writer was Chjnese?
Right. Why would we assume that any Chinese person who was born in the Republic of China, immigrated to the US in the 1950s, earned a PhD in history, and wrote a book in the 1980s... would naturally refer to the empire that existed prior to his birth as "our Empire"? Huang evidently took it upon himself to be a representative of Chinese imperial civilization to the West, even though he had never lived in it. It is an understandable choice given the immense continuous history of Chinese civilization, and the pride that many Chinese feel in the same. But it is still a bold and unusual individual choice for a US-trained history PhD to frame an entire academic English history book in this way. And it is one the reviewer praises genuinely and unreservedly... which I think is abundantly clear, if we can but stop imagining on his face a patronizing smirk that doesn't exist.
Anonymous reviewer here. I understood the "our" in "our Empire" to include me. As the author speaking to the reader, saying, like "Let's look at our empire we're discussing here, and see what we can learn." Sort of like Mr. Rogers calling me his neighbor, when I used to watch Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood on TV.
Neither Ray Huang nor I have ever been subjects of the Ming dynasty, and I'm not even Chinese. But if we think of it as "our" empire, it seems more present, evokes a more sympathetic perspective. And I'd be flattered if someone called my writing "charmingly idiosyncratic."
> There is more than a whiff of "exotic Orientalism" voyeuristic eyebrow-raising. Look what those crazy yellows got up to, back in the day!
0% the review, 100% your shoulder chip.
agreed
I actually read the review as being a bit of a veiled slap at our own encroaching ideological orthodoxy in the West. See, the Chinese did this, and their culture stagnated; if we let progressives turn our universities into religious schools, we will stagnate and be overtaken by the Chinese.
And the author does mention the inquisitions, slavery, and witch-burnings in Europe at the same time.
The review itself notes that pretty much everyone of that era was a barbarian by modern standards.
Also, there are things to be concerned about people exoticizing. Ming Imperial court life is not one of them. It was WEIRD.
Ming Imperial court life may well have been weird, but so too were other courts if you look at them with an outsider's eye; the Wanli Emperor ruled 1572-1620 and for one European country, the contemporaneous monarchs in Britain were Elizabeth I (until 1603) and James VI & I after her.
Look at the mythology consciously created and propagated around Elizabeth in her role as the Virgin Queen (even that title used about her) and the stylised portraiture to emphasise that she was a monarch (even semi-divine) and not an ordinary human: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portraiture_of_Elizabeth_I
A template style for her face to be used in all subsequent portraits, symbols representing masculine attributes to make her equal to other foreign princes, representing her as a Vestal Virgin out of Roman legend, and giving her phoenixes, snakes, eyes on her dress, etc. as well as the masques, progresses, and other court functions laid down for her to perform. This is not realism, and it's every bit as 'weird' as Chinese imperial iconography for the role of the emperor.
"The Rainbow Portrait
The Rainbow Portrait, c. 1600–02, attributed to Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger
Attributed to Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger, perhaps the most heavily symbolic portrait of the queen is the Rainbow Portrait at Hatfield House. It was painted around 1600–1602, when the queen was in her sixties. In this painting, an ageless Elizabeth appears dressed as if for a masque, in a linen bodice embroidered with spring flowers and a mantle draped over one shoulder, her hair loose beneath a fantastical headdress. She wears symbols out of the popular emblem books, including the cloak with eyes and ears, the serpent of wisdom, and the celestial armillary sphere, and carries a rainbow with the motto non sine sole iris ("no rainbow without the sun"). Strong suggests that the complex "programme" for this image may be the work of the poet John Davies, whose Hymns to Astraea honouring the queen use much of the same imagery, and suggests it was commissioned by Robert Cecil as part of the decor for Elizabeth's visit in 1602, when a "shrine to Astraea" featured in the entertainments of what would prove to be the "last great festival of the reign"."
I would by no means claim that European court life was particularly normal (especially that of England at the time).
The past is another country. They do really weird shit there.
It's funny you mention "exotic Orientalism" because that's exactly the same note I put down in my record of the book reviews (since we're going to be voting on them, I'm keeping a list of impressions of each one).
Great minds think alike?
As for why 1587, I think that would be a good question to ask the author of this book. Did he ever explain why he picked this particular year? My own impression is that it's because it's *not* a spectacular year, not a landmark one where normally the dividing line would be put, e.g. "the emperor withdrew from active participation in court life in 1600 so that is the year decline of the dynasty started". It seems perhaps to be that the rift between emperor and officials started 1586/1587 when he wanted to appoint his third son as successor and his ministers opposed him. So really the dominoes started toppling then, and not when he fully retired and refused to carry out his duties. But because it was never permitted to become an open, public cause of conflict, it didn't seem important at the time, not like one of the Big Dates historians generally point at as "this is when it began". It looked like just another year mid-reign, not anything big or special, but it was the seed from which the eventual failure of the dynasty grew.
There is also a certain irony in that the power struggle over making sure primogeniture was preserved ended with the eldest son being made crown prince, but after becoming emperor he only ruled one year before dying suddenly. All that bitterness and in-fighting for nothing!
Oh, you're back, excellent! I'm glad I decided to sleep on defending my sloppily provocative review-of-the-review, rather than attempt such litigation drunk and angry. Feels better to not be a completely lonely dissenting voice, even in a heterodox space.
Yes, I probably should have couched the assertion in safer language like "an impression"...I knew it was gonna open the can of rhetorical worms that is Tone Argument. While I feel it's entirely possible to do a Close Reading-style line-by-line breakdown analysis*...that's way too long for a comment and I don't think anyone would read it/be persuaded? So it really does just come down to "idk man, it wasn't really any one specific thing that was said, just my subjective impression". Consuming history with a smirk on one's face, or something like that...
Regarding the disputed significance of 1587, I think that is certainly *one* possible explanation. It may indeed have been put more clearly in the actual book. These Underrated Years Actually Had Huge Impacts On History (You Won't Believe #1587!). But there were other potential theses floated by the review...for example, that it *isn't* so much like 1587 was a sleeper hit. More that it was, genuinely, truly, completely, painfully average for a Qing dynasty calendar year. 1587 is just Tuesday! And yet, this totally median (mean might be more accurate for history-summations, not sure) representative-year was still filled with such-and-such signs of Obvious Nonsense, Governmental Dysfunction, and Endemic Scleroticness. Therefore: the writing was on the wall, you didn't need an especially noteworthy year to note that there was something rotten in the state of China. ("You" being either later historians who dropped the ball, or perhaps Chinese contemporaries who wanted to right the ship - it's unclear.) I think this is an equally valid read, but it's of course in opposing tension with the former explanation as you put it. A thing is either significant, or not! This competing-Ship-of-Theses tension doesn't get resolved by the end of the review, and so I was left scratching my head. "Why 1587?" was the question I started the review with, and ended with no clear answer still...
The primogeniture thing I think could have used more depth...it's a central "plot", as far as histories have plots anyway. Quite a number of the events revolve around this core dispute in some fashion; even if it wasn't a direct causal link, The Inheritance Spat taking up so much popular + governmental attention and resources surely contributed to e.g. misunderestimaging the Manchu incursion. I get the gravity, being the firstborn of a Chinese immigrant family who grew up with in-kind-if-not-degree similar expectations of inheriting the family business, propagating our legacy, bringing honour to the sacrifices of our ancestors, etc, etc. It's a heavy crown to wear, and I certainly rebelled against it in teenage-hedonism ways too! But that's sort of hard to explain cross-cultural context. It probably would have made for a stronger review to focus on shoring up this load-bearing concept of Confucian thought and tradition, moreso than...the other books cited.
You also reminded me of another nitpick: the Wan-li Emperor is depicted as vindictive and stubborn (years-long succession dispute! he orders people punished for their insolence!), but simultaneously passive and slothful. I guess it could be a character evolution, with gradual disillusionment once the pleasures of money and women wore off. Felt a bit like two different people being described though. Perhaps that's intentional: the occasional tantrum-rattling of the cage bars just helps illustrate that the bars exist. There was never any real threat of this particular Emperor bucking his puppetmasters - he wasn't like his rebel uncle. A Scandal In Name Only (SINO).
*e.g. https://thezvi.substack.com/p/criticism-of-ea-criticism-contest
I think what happened was that the emperor came up against the limits of his power, and protested the only way available to him: by refusing to go through the steps of the dance.
He is supposedly the ultimate power in the entire empire, with even the movements of the heavenly bodies affected by his actions. But he can't persuade his bureaucracy into backing his choice of successor, and he can't command them. So if they are going to be stubborn, so is he. It is passive-aggressive and vindictive, but here is someone whose life is constrained within limited borders (so that rulers can justifiably complain that a poor commoner is much freer than they are) and who has been told he can have whatever he wants - except the things he really wants.
If he goes ahead and does his duty, he's surrendering to those who opposed them. The only protest he can make is this kind of childish "okay, see how well you get on with running the empire if the emperor doesn't make any decisions" withdrawal, so that's what he does. Retires from public life, refuses to make any appointments, leaves them to stew waiting for the purely formal but also vitally necessary signing-off on everything. A stronger character might have been able to impose his will on the bureaucracy, generally by finding some kind of plot going on with the potential crown prince to seize the throne and having the excuse to execute or exile him so the favoured candidate could take h is place, but the Wanli emperor wasn't that type of leader (maybe all the better, would it really have improved the chances of the dynasty to have someone ruthless enough to arrange the show-trial and execution of his own son?)
Isn't a simpler explanation for the choice of year that if your main thesis is the trend to decline, then it's best to focus on the quotidian rather than the momentous? Most years have something grand and notable (such as Drake's exploits in Spain, elsewhere the same year). That gets in the way of a narrative pointing out a gently declining trend.
Hi, avalancheGenesis - anonymous reviewer of 1587 here. Thought I'd respond to a few of your specific points.
"Consuming history with a smirk on one's face," well yeah, that's me - sorry if you find that irritating: it's whistling past the graveyard, really. Without a little snark and ironic detachment, history is just too endlessly depressing to contemplate.
I'd argue that "voyeuristic eyebrow-raising" is both a common and relatively benign way to react to the chaos and folly of human affairs.
Yes, "everything everywhere was luridly barbaric by our current standards" - and so the past affords no end of opportunities for voyeuristic eyebrow-raising.
I get how one might have "trouble anchoring on some coherent thesis(es) ... being unsure where the review was building to as its Big Takeaway" - since my review doesn't really have a thesis with a Big Takeaway.
"Then at the very end, it's like, can we learn anything from 1587? Big Shrug!"
Yeah, kind of a Big Shrug. That's accurate. So you're like "okay, but then why read and review this book?"
Paradoxically enough I guess, that was kinda the point. The title announces it's a year of no significance. So why read it? Is there a point? What if there isn't?
Why read about this particular year, or place, or culture? Why read about any of them? I still think history doesn't amount to much more than 5000 years of gang war. And none of our primate shenanigans really matter at all, in the grand scheme of things.
Nevertheless, most of us story-telling apes find stories interesting - maybe especially when they're mostly true stories. Maybe especially if they're set long ago and far away.
The parts where you start throwing shade about "exoticist Orientalizing" or whatever, I'm not into that. "Crazy yellows"?! No, I don't talk like that and I'd rather you didn't. My talk of barbaric decadence pointedly included some non-Asian examples, and I could easily provide a multitude of further examples from every. single. culture. ever. Bizarre behavior, folly and malice are wicked easy to find amongst any and all humans. There's obviously no "race" or "culture" with a monopoly on stupid-ass bullshit.
I see how it might be "hard to take a timeless message along the lines of 'history is important to learn from!' delivered with a flippant tone' but I'm all about the flippant tone, and innocent of any desire to proclaim Timeless Messages about Important Things. I happened to be reading 1587 when Scott announced the book review contest, and thought "what the hell, why not write this one up - it's a cool book, and reminded me of some other interesting stuff."
As for your criticism that my review "genuinely does meander all over the place," yes: that is true. I just happen to enjoy meandering all over the place, and figured some other folks might enjoy that style of writing as well. Cheers!
[NB: I was halfway through writing a mea culpa response when Substack abruptly ate the comment (they really gotta fix that, whatever the issue is...only ever happens on ACX...), so apologies for roughness - the first draft of this genuinely did sound better. Best attempt at reconstituting:]
I knew this was bound to happen sooner or later - one of the actual book reviewers finding one of the several critical replies I've posted during this contest, and replying directly...well, time to face the music.
Let me start off by saying I really appreciate your gracious and charitable reply. It's far better than my caustic and ill-considered comment deserves. Though I've been negative on other reviews, this time was inordinately nasty and combative; the negative replies amply demonstrate that almost no one else agreed with my tone or content. (Ironically, this is the only book review my comments have gotten any meaningful engagement - *that* is truly depressing. Bad incentives abound.) Normally I'd attempt a rearguard action of replying to each critical reply in turn, but...this time, I really have gotten out over my skis, and I choose not to defend the largely-indefensible. I'm leaving the comment up without edit, and fully owning all the shameful black marks - sometimes you just gotta take the L. My sincere apologies for any hurt feelings.
I think one true crux is that I tend to hold a history-half-full view...I see hope and progress whereas you see chaos and despair. So in retrospect, now that I understand where you're coming from, I indeed see the wisdom in adopting an agnostically neutral approach to history. And this is a particularly perfect book for such exercise. Many of the other reviews (enjoyable or not) have had pre-assumed conclusions attached to their historical ramblings, so it's definitely a comparative advantage that yours does not. Hat tip for that insight, and I regret not seeing it sooner. Big Shrug really isn't negative or positive, it just...is. History not as a cautionary tale, but as a context mirror to reflect back the present.
Yes, the shade-throwing was particularly embarrassing, and I regret that most of all. Your very-civil reply shows just how large a maturity gap lies between us. I *knew* it was bad and dumb and aggressive, totally stupid to keep in the post - and yet did it anyway, more fool me. That's even worse than being ignorant of potential offense, and I've got no excuse.
There is a small kernel that I do stand by: I really did get a growing sense of stomach-churning discomfort the farther I read into this review, and that felt worth pointing out somehow...the sense of something being "off", even if it was vague and inchoate and hard to explain to others. It does lie somewhere in the direction of fundamental epistemic differences...the way collective and individual cultures think, the relative values of truth and morality, tradition and ancestry and realpolitik. China plays Defect in the Global Prisoner's Dilemma, and from a certain perspective, that's just smart. Ultimately wrong and counterproductive, perhaps, yet...there's a reason Nash equilibria exist, and centuries of our China policy have yet to drag them into a Cooperate-Cooperate payout. I feel like this is a fundamental error which crops up a lot...but it really does deserve a fleshed-out post, a serious effort. Not some childish innuendo. I did a disservice not just to you, but also undermined my own argument by couching it in such a shitty vehicle. Again, full apologies with no excuses - this is ACX, we have higher standards, I should have known better.
Lastly, I'll partially walk back the charge of meandering as well: to the extent it exists, I think that's on the book as much as on you. If I understand your description of the chapter layouts, Huang doesn't present events in anything like a neat chronological fashion, nor is it centralized around one single "protagonist" or "plot", exactly. So one could either try to wrangle order and structure out of this sprawling tableau, or just...roll with it. Write a review that works with the book's format, rather than struggling against it. You chose to do that, own it, and I think that's fine. Not my preferred style difference, but others do like it, and we've had both types throughout the contest.
Thank you again for the considerate reply. I really need to work harder on being a Principle of Charity maximalist, even in the context of competitive cash-prize book reviews. It's one thing to be mean to long-dead authors, quite another to be mean to peer reviewers. What would we do without peer review? For all the good and all the bad, the annual SSC/ACX Book Review Contest has always been one of the highlights of this blog, and I should encourage it rather than be a spoilsport.
That's cool - thanks; I appreciate your reply! Can't disagree with a damn thing you've said now. ;-)
The "bad incentives abound" situation is fucked up, I agree. Reminds me a bit of Scott's "Toxoplasma of Rage" post.
Just glad there's a place like this on the internet, where people can still hear varied opinions, agree to disagree and/or hash out their differences without getting all flamey all the time.
FWIW I didn't get the "exotic orientalism" vibe from the review. Yes, ancient/medieval China was exotic by our current standards, but then, so are most ancient/medieval cultures, European ones included.
If anything, this review is a cautionary tale. Here we have a seemingly ordinary year in a long and storied history of a glorious empire; and empire that had endured for a thousand years. Their civilization appears to be so stable that it might endure for a thousand years more; and yet, what is it that they actually spend their time doing ? They spend it on endless infighting in the palace bureaucracy; deadly clashes over minute points of ideology; and jockeying for position. Meanwhile, their nominal overlord never even leaves the palace. He doesn't know (and his shadow cabinet seemingly doesn't care) that serious military threats are brewing on the borders; the rest of the world is overtaking China technologically (and, in fact, *exists*); and the last competent administrators of his glorious empire are dying or retiring with no worthy replacements.
Remind you of anything ?
I'd just like to say that this sentence may be one of my favourite sentences I read on ACX all year:
"Metonymy is rarely useful as a lifehack, but Japanese emperors agree that this one weird trick will save you several hours of sitting motionless on a throne."
Agreed, this was a key line and an excellent use of the word.
However, the devout Taoist of the 16th century might argue that this attempt to evade the royal duties is precisely why things went to hell.
Zizek might remark that this represents the beginning of the end for the transition from feudalism to capitalism, where the nature of kingship is no longer superstitiously invested in the body of the monarch, but instead is recognized as a function of the relationship between the monarch and the people.
As a comparison, see https://www.nytimes.com/1981/06/21/books/interesting-times.html
I had two main questions after reading this. The first, as avalancheGenesis mentions, is why 1587?
The second is, how did the civil service initially assert itself over an emperor in a newish dynasty? Did this happen with the founding emperor? Founders were conquerors; they probably had some strength of character. It seems more likely that the civil service would assert itself over a subsequent emperor - an inheritor rather than a conqueror. But how?
Other thoughts: I am reminded of an old saying about the Catholic Church: 'Popes come and go, but the Curia lasts forever.'
What do you mean by "newish dynasty"? The review states that Wan-Li was the 14th Emperor of his dynasty.
Yes, that's the most frustrating thing about the highly restricted time-frame. The review portrays the authority of civil servants over the emperor as a static situation. My reasoning is that this is highly unlikely to have been the case right at the foundation of the dynasty. How exactly do civil servants assert themselves over someone who has just chased the Mongols back to the steppe? Probably, they don't.
So, when did the civil servants gain this authority? As the first Ming emperor aged? During the reign of his successor? Later? And how did they do it?
One fascinating thing is that the system of eunuchs and ossified bureaucracy that barely can react is something very familiar to near-end Qing dynasty ... the Manchu successors to Qing dynasty.
My understanding is that the bureaucracy for a large managed to survive the changes in ruling dynasties: after you have conquered the empire, you need the tools to manage it. As running an empire can be a very different task than conquering one, the per-existing bureaucratic system had an edge against any other options, as the scholar-civil servants were available and they knew how to manage the country according to their system.
According to Wikipedia [1], the most salient part of the imperial Chinese bureaucracy, the written civil service examinations were first introduced in 600s and "became dominant during the Song dynasty (960–1279)".
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_examination
A Chinese version of "Yes, Minister".
Once you've chased the Mongols back to the steppes and plonked your backside down on the throne, now you need to rule the empire you have newly acquired. And that's a different matter to commanding an army and winning wars, as Alexander the Great demonstrates.
So you need a civil service. You need record-keepers who can take in the reports from the various provinces about taxes, famines, floods, and the like and give you digests on them so you know if people are starving and blaming you and likely to rise up in a peasant rebellion that you need to put down.
Active, newly-minted emperors who won the throne by conquest can impose their own authority on the bureaucracy, but they can't do without the bureaucracy, and they certainly can't do away with it. Unless they fire (and execute or exile) every single member of the last administration, they've inherited the ministers and officials. They need to delegate authority since no one person can run the entire empire by themselves, so they need recommendations about "who would be a good magistrate for this district?" and so on. Our new emperor can try putting his friends and trusted aides into positions of high authority, but that can cause problems of its own (see the travails of Ulysses S. Grant).
And then after the new emperor passes on, his successor ascends the throne, and he's the son/cousin/nephew who is a peacetime emperor, not the one who chased the Mongols back to the steppes. So gradually, over time, the demands of the office occupy the emperor and the civil service - because it is the main institution that maintains continuity - assumes more power and influence. A lot of institutional inertia builds up. Compare Trump and "draining the swamp", and all the anonymous and not so anonymous declarations by people working in bureaus and offices of this-and-that that they would refuse to carry out his orders, or stories in the papers about 'official X boasted he simply never carried out any of the president's instructions'.
Chinese officials wouldn't dare be this open because it would literally be their head on the chopping block, but they could certainly use the same tactics of delay and obfuscation and red-tape to block and harry an unpopular emperor. Indeed, it might be a lot *easier* to chase the Mongols back to the steppe than take on the court eunuchs, ministers, and civil service to overhaul the entire thing top-to-bottom.
It's a bit odd to me that both the reviewer and many comments insist on China's stability and longevity compared to Europe. To me it seems obvious that this is a pure outsider's perspective; it's what the Big Eastern Region looks like from outside to a European, or maybe what we like it to be as a literary trope, and then we try to impose that on the real world for aesthetic purposes. As a matter of factual circumstance, on the other hand, it doesn't really hold up:
In the broad sense, the French ancien régime, from the direct Capetian line to the end of the House of Bourbon, lasted almost exactly 800 years: 987-1789. This conservatively covers, counting as few as possible, at least the Song, Yuan, Ming and Qing dynasties. During this period, wars in France were almost exclusively narrow disputes about lineage and succession, while the Chinese social system collapsed, then collapsed again, the empire started out completely splintered and only slowly reformed, the Mongols invaded and took over, the Manchus invaded and took over, etc. etc.
You can say that the Chinese were much more aggressive about pushing *narratives* about stability and continuity, but you could also suggest that this was a more or less feeble necessity to try to retain legitimacy, while the French kings never needed to do anything like that since they never really ran into more problems than "the last guy was homosexual/insane/shot while hunting before an obvious heir could be minted, now does his nephew who looks exactly the same inherit the throne, or will it be his cousin who looks exactly the same?"
Odder still that the review makes this claim but also talks about how the decline and fall of a dynasty is unavoidable.
I think the point lies elsewhere, Anonymous. From the centuries immediately after the first unification of the largest densely populated part of what we call China now (which would be 221 BCE) until 1911, there was a broad understanding of the expanding / contracting / unified / fragmented region was part of a single entity. Moreover, the governmental system that was first elaborated in the years surrounding 221 BCE, and which proved to be extremely successful (a modified form of meritocratic bureaucracy, with centralized and decentralized nodes), was repeatedly adopted and adapted from dynasty to dynasty, even by non-Chinese rulers who controlled only portions of China during periods of fragmentation. The bureaucratic model supporting the monarchial core became increasingly based on competitive examination as hereditary and personalistic elements waned, and the basic curriculum, while modified in various ways, remained grounded in the same pre-Imperial Era texts from the first century BCE on (though impersonal formal examination only came to dominate in the centuries surrounding 1000 CE).
The fact that there were shifts in the hereditary line controlling the imperial center was accepted from an early period as a normal part of the enduring state. The transitions could be socially cataclysmic and include interruptions of unified legitimacy, as you point out, but the nature of the state evolved in stable ways, undergoing reform rather than replacement. Even the most non-Chinese of invading dynasties, the Mongols, adapted to the Chinese system, reinstating the exams to populate a largely Chinese bureaucracy after the conquest period.
This, by the way, is the insider's view. Imperially authorized historiography produced large-scale "standard" histories dynasty by dynasty (each adding to the corpus and account of the newly displaced last dynasty), modeling the accounts on one another, examining developments in largely consistent institutional and cultural categories (e.g., dynastic reigns, calendrics, economy, law, ritual, literature, prominent persons). These accounts produced and reflected the idea of the dynastic cycle (dynamic founding / decline / revival / final decline and replacement), which was viewed as a norm within a perennial state. This was reflected in time itself, which was charted via imperial reign years, the continuity of time being marked via monarchial succession in an enduring state (a practice that predates the Imperial Era). The primary convention for referring to an historical year was of the form, simply, "Wanli 22" (the 22nd year of the Wanli Emperor's reign), without indication of dynasty. Imperial succession to the throne was eternal; dynastic houses were transient.
While from the outside analysts note how great the differences are between early and late Imperial states if you compare them directly, the fact that precedent had so strong a pull over a two-millennium stretch means that this was the product of gradual development within a recognized structure.
I'm sorry, I must have phrased myself very poorly somehow, since this:
"Imperially authorized historiography produced large-scale 'standard' histories dynasty by dynasty (each adding to the corpus and account of the newly displaced last dynasty), modeling the accounts on one another" etc. is exactly what I meant by the Chinese aggressively pushing narratives about stability and continuity due to the grave lack of the things themselves, while they were still needed for legitimacy.
However, you're absolutely right that this is a kind of insider view; let's say the "inside sucker" view as opposed to the "dispassionate inside analysis" one. I guess the more accurate framing is that the West bought into the narrative to some extent and found it useful/imagination fuel.
"While from the outside analysts note how great the differences are between early and late Imperial states if you compare them directly, the fact that precedent had so strong a pull over a two-millennium stretch means that this was the product of gradual development within a recognized structure."
I don't think this is correct; imputing stability to China due to the preservation of *a* bureaucratic system (not, as you note, the same one across the centuries) strikes me as similar to saying that the USA is in continuity with Rome due to the existence of a senatorial system, or that every medieval European country was in reality part of the same state due to the continuity of Catholicism. Certainly, there is cultural continuity in China as there is in every cultural region; but this doesn't mean that the nation per se has been stable or that the successor states in that territory have all been the same one. (Others referenced the medieval European fondness for imputing continuity with Rome; however, anyone observing this sees it for the there-was-an-attempt-level attempt it is, despite Cicero's speeches and Suetonius' History of the Twelve Caesars still being classics.)
There's no longer a state calling itself Rome, let alone one overlapping substantially with the ancient empire's boundaries and having a similar language and culture. If a state did exist that fit those criteria, even if it couldn't claim unbroken continuity to the ancient Roman Empire, it would be justified in calling itself Roman.
Well there sort of is. Italia was the central region of Rome and Italian might be arbitrarily pretty close to ancient Latin in a way that modern Chinese is to ancient Chinese. Not sure in that last, but seems possible.
Ethnically there was perhaps more change in Italy whereas the Han only extended their dominance in China?
Anonymous, I'm long winded, but not enough to attempt to illustrate the difference in discontinuity between various eras of Chinese history and those of European states. But you raise a pretty fair analogy when you mention Catholicism. Catholicism certainly underwent many changes over time, was disrupted by schisms, and included important regional variants. Yet its doctrinal and structural core remains recognizably continuous, despite evolutionary change that makes the early and contemporary churches seem very different. This seems pretty fair as a comparison with the continuity of the Chinese state. Perhaps the analogy would be even better if Catholicism was conceived only up to Vatican II, since to that point the liturgical church retained both the texts and the language of its early centuries, just as government office in 1910 China required rote retention of the full corpus of classical texts, demonstrated through double-blind anonymous examination scores, with mastery of classical Chinese essential, since that was the language of government. This is somewhat different from the "continuity" of a US Senate consciously designed to emulate features of the Roman institution after gap of 1300 years, so I'm not sure your comparison works.
Of course an complex institution like the Chinese bureaucracy changed over time, and dramatically so because of the scale of time involved. But that is what continuous living institutions do: to survive they must change. When they can no longer adapt, as the Chinese system could not after the disruptions following Western challenges, they end. The Chinese system was remarkably able to adapt to enormous changes. I think it seems discontinuous to you only because you're looking at the two endpoints and ignoring the string that connects them.
I'm no scholar of Chinese history, but isn't it the case that the people of what is broadly known as China today had something like four times as many wars per decade as Europe with vastly more casualties? If so, we ought to compare the overall stability to this baseline -- the fact that the Chinese system maintained any believable semblance of stability in the face of such pressures is genuinely remarkable.
I don't know how you could quantify wars/battles, to make that sort of comparison. Casualties, perhaps--China's population has generally been greater than Europe's. The thing about the stability of the Chinese system is that it rests on an enormous institution: a civil service bureaucracy staffed through a double-blind series of exams. Most countries today use systems like this, even autocracies (which traditional China was), although China's old Civil Service exam system is now widely replicated through testing regimes administered by colleges, and graduate degree hurdles, rather than just government tests.
China had a "Deep State." Most rulers, whether Chinese or foreign invaders, discovered that to govern a country the size and population of all Europe, that's what you needed. What I think is most remarkable is that fact that this modernistic state model (meritocratic bureaucracy, but not yet including exams) was designed by political thinkers in the 4th and 3rd centuries BCE, and then actually implemented in a highly disciplined form as a revolutionary development in 221 BCE. That dynasty was quickly overthrown after a decade and a half, for various reasons, but the rebels who succeeded it decided that the basic form of the state they'd rebelled against was actually pretty good, and something they needed. So they tweaked it instead of trashing it, and that became the pattern thereafter.
In regards to the reviewer's statement that "China is one of the oldest civilizations on Earth." Certainly, the Chinese like to claim that!—but I think that's an illusion created by the durability of a single writing system used across millennia. But even though the symbols of their writing system remained fairly static, the spoken language changed drastically over centuries—so that if the 2nd Century's Gaozu Son of Heaven (founder of the Han Dynasty) were brought via time machine to meet the 16th Century's Wanli Son of Heaven each would have had as much trouble understanding each other as the 16th Century's Holy Roman Emperor Maximillian would have had talking to Charlemagne. The Goazu Emperor the Wanli Emperor would have had to resort to writing notes to each other, and even then there may have been large misunderstandings because the characters they were writing could take on new meanings over the centuries. However, in the later case, Emperor Maximillian and Charlemagne would have likely been able to talk to each other using Latin. In fact, Emperor Maximillian would have very likely been able to talk to the Emperor Augustus in Latin.
Back to China, though. Not only did the Chinese language evolve, but customs also changed, and the Middle Kingdom expanded under the “good Sons of Heaven” and contracted under the “bad Sons of Heaven.” The empire of the Tang had a much different shape than the Empire of the Han, and the empire of the Ming looked much different from that of the Tang. The capitols moved around. Court etiquette changed drastically between dynasties. On several occasions, vast amounts of literature were burned by certain Sons of Heaven who wished to erase the past. Barbarians invaded and occasionally mounted the Dragon throne to form non-Han dynasties. Certainly, modern China can *claim* to be the world’s oldest civilization but that has about as much truth as Maximillian II’s claim to being the heir of Augustus.
I think you have a point: a civilization isn't necessarily the same thing as a continuous state.
Maybe the difference why it looks wondrous to use is that we can no longer call the Western civilization is a competitor, as we collectively gave it a killing blow during the 20th century: Emperor Maximillian could have tried to converse with Augustus, but today practically nobody important talks in Latin anymore, and even fewer study classical Greek. Important buildings do no longer seek to emulate Greek-Roman important buildings with important-looking columns. And so on.
Very true about that killing blow. It seems to me that the post WWI modern world should be considered a distinctly different civilization from what went before.
Why do you believe that Latin underwent no change between Augustus and Maximillian, while claiming that Chinese underwent major changes over the same period? As far as I can tell the spoken Latin taught today would be unrecognizable to the ancients, and there are large changes in the written language also over the centuries (though perhaps less over the last five).
Well, I'm not an expert in Latin — but AFAIK, Latin pedagogy hasn't changed much over time. As a beginning student, I was given pieces of Cicero and Virgil to translate. Niccolò di Machiavelli, mentioned that he learned Latin the same way. So I assumed that Latin students always started from the Classics. Maybe this is a mistaken assumption on my part. Granted Church Latin added all sorts of vocabulary that the Romans didn't have, but I assume a modern speaker of Latin could make themselves understood to Roman of the 1st Century.
As for Chinese, the Putonghua we speak today is vastly different from Old or Middle Chinese. The rhyming tables from the Tang Dynasty (Middle Chinese) show a great change in vowel pronunciations. Cribbing from a list of differences that I saved...
Old Chinese, aka Archaic Chinese (Shang, Zhou, up through Warring States Period)
1. Was an inflected language
2. Used suffix *-s to nominalize a verb
3. Rich with consonant clusters
4. Had a three-way distinction between voiced, voiceless unaspirated, and voiceless aspirated consonants
5. Had one rhotic consonant *r (which could be an alveolar trill [r], with an alveolar tap or flap [ɾ] as allophone between clusters)
6. Probab used a simple system of six vowels
7. Probably used “minor vowels”
8. Didn’t have labial fricatives
9. Didn’t have tones. But instead, it had consonant clusters at the end of the syllable, which developed into tone distinctions in Middle Chinese.
Middle Chinese (Han, Tang, Song Dynasties)
1. Became an isolating language (i.e. with a one morpheme per word ratio, and with no inflectional morphology whatsoever).
2. Used few if any consonant clusters
3. Still distinguished voiced, voiceless unaspirated, and voiceless aspirated consonants
4. Allowed syllables to end in three stop codas /p t k/ and nasal codas /m n ŋ/
5. Lost the rhotic consonant
6. Developed Tones
Guangdonghua speakers claim they're speaking a Chinese closer to that of the Tang Dynasty. In fact, they like to call themselves the People of Tang! I suspect this should be taken with a grain of salt, but it sure pisses off the Putonghua speakers. Neither language is mutually intelligible.
Modern Chinese (northern Han peoples, aka Mandarin):
1. Was an analytic language
2. Didn’t rely consonant clusters
3. Only differentiated voiceless unaspirated and voiceless aspirated consonants
4. Developed labial fricatives
5. In the process of developing the rhotic consonant in modern Chinese
6. The stop codas /p t k/ had merged into a glottal stop
For the Beijing variety of Putonghua
Around the early 17th century
1. /k kʰ x/ were palatalized before the close front vowels
2. /k kʰ x/→/c cʰ ç/ (possible transition period)→/tɕ tɕʰ ɕ/ (ongoing trend)
18th and 19th Century
3. Completion of velar palatalization
4. The merge of /ts tsʰ s/ into /tɕ tɕʰ ɕ/ before close front vowels (new trend)
5. /j/→/ɻ/ in the initial of some words (e.g. 容 and 榮)
6. /iaɪ/→/iɛ/ (e.g. 街 /tɕiaɪ/→/tɕiɛ/)
20th century
1. Completion of the /ts tsʰ s/→/tɕ tɕʰ ɕ/ merger in 1932.
2. Some varieties of Northern Mandarin continued to distinguish the two as late as 1940s, as evidenced by the distinction made in Sin Wenz.
3. /jaɪ/→/ja/ (e.g. 崖)
4. More agglutinative*, but still an analytic language
5. Doesn’t have consonant clusters
6. Only distinguished voiceless unaspirated and voiceless aspirated
7. Has one labial fricative
8. Consists of open syllables and those ending with nasals and glides only
Anyway, the modern Chinese languages (Putonghua, Guangdonghua, Hakka, etc.), like the Romance languages, are either mutually unintelligible and/or partially intelligible. Since these all developed within the last thousand years, I don't think a modern Putonghua speaker could go back to the Qin court and be understood.
Thanks for your summary about Chinese changing over time. Fascinating.
Indian civilisation makes a good comparison point.
So, this is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but a whimper?
Things go along by inertia for a long while, but all the time there is rot eating away at the foundations, until eventually it all collapses - not in a big explosion, but due to a lot of small things all happening over time until they build up. No big exciting Historic Year, just one more year like all the others where nothing much happens - until it all happens.
I do have to harrumph slightly at this bit:
"This reminded me of a couple of current Chinese practices: how military officers sometimes place pins in the collars of soldiers' uniforms to correct their posture when they're ordered to stand at attention, and how preschool students are “required to sit in their seats with their arms at their sides, and their feet flat on a line of tape on the ground ... not an easy task for three-year-olds.”
This points toward an old and deep aspect of Chinese culture: the belief that stillness holds great power and should be cultivated. This is true whether you’re a soldier, a preschooler, or the emperor of China."
Well, I'm neither Chinese nor ever lived in China, but when I was four and five and six and seven going to school, we were made to sit "lámha i bhfolach" which means "hands hidden", i.e. sitting up straight at your desk with your arms behind your back, hands clasped, feet on the floor. We didn't have tape on the ground for the placement of our feet, I don't know how the nuns missed that one. So "stillness holds great power and should be cultivated" isn't uniquely Chinese.
As for restrictions on the emperor, yes, rulers who are considered divine or to have special relationships with the powers ruling heaven and earth do have a lot of restrictions on them: be it tabu, géasa, or the likes. See the restrictions around the Roman priest of Jupiter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamen_Dialis
Or the Irish saga "The Destruction of Da Derga's Hostel" when the king is forced through circumstances to break, one by one, the géasa (sacred prohibitions) binding him and thus is destroyed by his enemies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Togail_Bruidne_D%C3%A1_Derga
Excellent counter-example from the Irish. One could also mention the accounts of Roman soldiers dying at their posts because no-one came to relieve them (of thirst, and perhaps also at Pompeii?). I believe a Russian cavalry group of some size froze to death remaining at their posts as well. What's more, rites of passage the world over contain motionless silent vigils (especially at night).
Someone with a better grasp of neuroscience might be able to speak intelligently about training the NoGo pathways in the basal ganglia (and perhaps how the lack of such training in contemporary culture/education exacerbates the shortening attention spans).
The book review is remarkably well written. It is a great example of people, who I assume, grown up in western culture understands the rationales behind Chinese traditions and their influence in political pathway.
I like your style. You're an excellent writer.
One of the best reviews I've read here. Good stuff.
You do not cook a small fish "minimally, lightly".
You cook a small fish while leaving the head, spine and locomotive organs intact. Which, coincidentally, is a 1:1 analogue of the preceding paragraph.
I find that insightful and I like your description. But one can argue that both descriptions amount to the same, don't they?
People love to deep-fry small fish. Chinese authors, especially at that time, would have packed a lot of material in very few words. I find "minimally, lightly" to be way too surface level. Whether I'm right in this particular instance is for historians to decide; how often was leaving local hierachies and culture intact a good management decision and does that vary across different cultures? Does it allow more abuse/taxation/conscription? But I really think that that is what's meant here.
Ah, now I get it. Thank you. That one flew right over my head.
I think the book is well worth reading (I have to admit I haven't, even though I think it might have been assigned reading when I was at university!), but I think the reviewer here hasn't followed through fully enough on the realisation than human history is just gang warfare.
This is something I've been thinking about quite a lot recently, particularly in the context of traditional Chinese history, which is all about trying to draw moral lessons from the past. The problem is that history in general may well be the study of *the very worst human beings alive.* These are the gang leaders who rose to the top of the stinking pile. And I'm not sure we should grant them any additional understanding because they were constrained by tradition. Ultimately, these people are just thugs. Wanli was, as noted, someone who used women as playthings, and happily continued the tradition of mutilating the men who worked around him (eunuchs). The rest of the state existed, as the review notes, primarily to fulfill tax quotas.
Obviously, this is a bit of a bolshie, revolutionary view of history. But I think it was a slightly odd choice of Huang to focus so much on the emperor and a few of his close buddies. Lots of other things were happening in China at that time - though admittedly, harder to discover because they weren't written about at the time.
Gormenghast is also similar fiction-- at least the beginning where Titus is theoretically the ruler, but actually completely controlled by custom.
1587 in the West: The first item on Wikipedia's list of events for that year is the beheading of Mary Queen of Scots which in turn triggers the Spanish Armada. Also in that year and third on that list is the first engagement of that war, when Drake raids Cadiz and singes the beard of the Spanish King. The drama of Europe in that age is laid out by Garrett Mattingly in The Armada. Highly recomended.
https://www.amazon.com/Armada-Garrett-Mattingly/dp/0618565914
The Ming recieved another off ramp five years latter when the Jesuits arrived. They were unable to take that one as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesuit_China_missions
Hi - I'm the anonymous reviewer of 1587: A Year of No Significance. I set up an anonymous email account so I can contribute a few comments and replies without violating the contest rules. If anyone has any particular questions, ask away - and thank you all for your interest!
I'll paraphrase my comment earlier: Fan-fucking tastic review. Take my money, you have my vote. Please post where we can find other writings (post-contest, of course).
Thank you very much!
This was a fantastic summary of this book - my only fear is that the review is better than the book, but I guess we'll have to see!
The Ming Dynasty and the Taliban have a lot in common: both try to preserve the traditions of old and are very rigid about it, even in the face of far superior foes.