In Our Time - China's Warring States period

Episode Date: April 1, 2004

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the astonishing productivity of the Chinese Golden Age. 400 BC to 200 AD is known as the Axial Age, when great civilisations in Asia and the Mediterranean forged the ideas that dominated the next two thousand years. In China the equivalent to the Golden Age in Greece was the Warring States Period. It was a time of political turmoil, economic change and intellectual ferment that laid the foundations for the first Chinese Empire. Astronomy was systematised, the principles of Yin and Yang were invented, Confucianism grew and Taoism emerged, as a hundred schools of thought are reputed to have vied for the patronage of rival kings.Why was a period of war such a fertile age for culture and thought, what kinds of ideas were developed and how do they still inform the thinking of nearly a fifth of the world’s population?With Dr Chris Cullen, Director of the Needham Research Institute at Cambridge University; Dr Vivienne Lo, Lecturer at the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine; Carol Michaelson, Assistant Keeper of Chinese Art in the Department of Oriental Antiquities at the British Museum.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, 400 BC to 200 AD is known as the Axiol Age, when great civilizations in Asia and the Mediterranean forged the ideas that dominated the next 2,000 years.

In China, the equivalent to the Golden Age in Greece was the warring states period. It was a time of political turmoil, economic change, and intellectual ferment that laid the foundations for the first Chinese empire. Astronomy was systematized, acupuncture developed, the principles of yin and yang were invented. Confucianism grew, and Taoism emerged as a hundred schools of thought are reputed to abide for the patronage of rival kings. Why was a period of war such a fertile age for culture and thought? What kind of ideas were developed, and how do they still inform the thinking of? of nearly a fifth of the world's population.

With me to discuss the warring states period in China, Chris Cullen, director of the Needham Research Institute at Cambridge University, Carl Michelson, assistant keeper of Chinese art in the Department of Asia at the British Museum, and Vivian Lowe lecturer at the Welcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine. Chris Cullen, the period when the great ideas in Chinese philosophy flourish was the warring states period, but what about the era before then? Can you give us a picture of the political setup in early China until we get there? Certainly. I think it's most important to think how the past looked to the people in the warring states period.

If they looked back and said, how have we got here? How has our world become as it was? Quite a lot of them saw an ideal age that had existed once, say, around 1,000 BC in the early Joe dynasty, when there'd been righteous kings ruling an orderly country, everything tied together, and afterwards things went wrong, principally went wrong around 770 BC, when the central feudal order of the Zhou dynasty collapsed. The Joe kings lost their power, they became a little like the Pope in medieval Europe, honoured, but without any military strength. And China began to be something rather like Europe in medieval times,

a series of kingdoms that all recognised themselves as having some cultural unity, rather like Christendom, say, but capable of going to war with one another, which was the beginning of what was called in China, the spring and autumn period from about 770 BC. But still there were rules as to how you conducted your warfare. This was a gentlemanly business taking place between people who recognised themselves as being at least second cousins twice removed, so to speak.

What the warring states brought, as its name implies, was a sense that there weren't. really any rules anymore except to win. China was divided into essentially seven great states, each one of which saw itself as potentially ruling the whole of China, if only it could manage to destroy everybody else, seize their economic resources, use their population as a labour force, destroy the military force of their enemies, and take over everything, and establish a new unified rule of China to replace the old journey. dynasty feudalism, which was seen as a golden age in the past, something, however, for a new ruler to restore,

which was what was eventually done by the Chin dynasty in 221 BC, but they didn't last for very long. The permanent job was done by the Han. We're talking about an extremely large territory, and you've been talking about it as a place, which is one of the first puzzles in this conversation. How culturally homogenous was ancient China, and if so, how did it become homogeneous? We tend to look back on China, certainly think it's China. They all speak Chinese, they are all Chinese and so on. But in fact, again, at the time, it looked very different.

If you see the way that the thinker we call Mengza or Menzius in the Latin version, around 320 BC looked at the world, when he looked, say, at people living south of the Yangtze River, So far as he was concerned, they were strange people who spoke a language that sounded like the twittering of birds, any further south, and they did things like eat monkeys and so on. So for him, civilised China meant a rather narrow area around the Yellow River. And even within that, the languages that people spoke were different enough,

so you might feel you needed an interpreter if you travel a few hundred miles. So it certainly wasn't a place that was any more culturally homogeneous again than, say, medieval Europe was. And yet you're talking about a period of time, 1,000 BC, when it was thought to be, had been one place, one empire. And so the languages must have been close enough for that to happen. Or did they have a massive industry of interpreters?

Well, that's right, certainly. People look back to that age as a golden age of unity, and certainly everybody in those days acknowledged the overall hegemony of the King of Joe. but actually the actual people who were, quote, ruling each bit of China at the time were a small minority usually, living in settlements that were ritual centres

and around them were masses of tribal people still not really assimilated at all to the high culture of the Joe, the ones that later got stigmatised as barbarians. But certainly... We're still talking in this period, a massive period of about six, seven hundred years, of a massive landmass with 50 million people in, which is an enormous number of people in one place,

or however big the place at that time. The population of Britain spread over the whole of China. Yeah, but still, I mean, the population of Britain at that particular time was what? It was half a million. So we're talking huge numbers, and they're coming back towards a sort of unity. Vivian Low, this year is now also known as the period of 100 schools of thought. And in these warring states, intellectuals and intellectualism highly prized, you tell us a bit about that?

Yes, in the spring and autumn period in the warring states, there was a class of Shi, which is loosely translated as knights, but there were really a class of educated people who were allowed to take up arms. So it's in this group that we find the philosophers developing out of. And especially as we come down into the warring states, we find that they're congregating at the courts of the kids, particular kings in Chi especially. That's one of the seven great states.

That's one of the seven great states. And in Chin as well, which was the state that finally unified China in 221. And they're really selling their ideas, selling their often practical ideas about government, but also ideas about human nature. And they're in dispute about what is the right way. and the way the Tao is very much the object of their attention at that time. Can you just unravel that, the way of the Tao?

What do you mean by that? Well, each of the philosophers had a Tao, had the right way to behave, the right way to... The Tao is the right way? The right way, yeah. And it later becomes co-opted by the Taoists. But at that time, everybody is arguing as to which would be the right way, particularly in government.

I mean, Confucius is very concerned about government. Confucius is in that break at the end of the spring and autumn period at the beginning of the warring states. And along with the philosophers, there are also technical advisors, people who are involved in divination. I think going right back to the Shang period, one of the mobile groups of people are these diviners who are advising the kings of the states on every matter of government. When to go to war, what the conditions are, what the king's illness is caused by. Exactly, all of those sorts of things. But the intellectuals, are they being called up by these warring kings?

Because we're talking about, as Chris has said, people conquering, taking over. At the same time, he mentioned the aristocratic forms of war. If your chariot got stuck, they didn't kill you because you're allowed to get your chariot out of the mud and then you could fight again. So it's a curious mixture is going on here between, it seems to me, I mean, between a formal, a formal view and a view that can be thought through and just the good old massacre. in each other to get on top of the heap. That's what Confucius is worried about. Confucius is worried about the fact that

the old days when there were rules to warfare, when people knew their place and so on, are breaking up as these big states are beginning to employ new officials whose father wasn't an official just because they're good at their jobs, just because they're good at winning wars and so on. Can I come back to you for one moment, Vivian?

Can I just, I'm not quite clear as to what the, the, the, the emperors of these states, the leaders of these warring states, were finally getting out of the intellectuals. Did they have, like them hanging around? I mean, put it at its very crudest and loosest. Were they getting specific aid from them? Divination, I can understand.

What about ways of life? Divination is very practical. I think Confucius thought himself as the guardian of the rituals of the early period of Joe. So certainly there is rituals associated with, and these are just as important as getting a chariot. out of the mud. Also, the legitimacy of your rule is justified by the kinds of rituals that you carry out through this period.

So that's one element. So it's a search for legitimacy in that sense. At one level it's for legitimacy. At another level, it's very practical. It's about the administration of your state. A lot of the arguments are about administration. with the increase in military power and conscription of peasants in the warring states, there was an enormous increase in bureaucracy.

And it's much to do with the sort of structures of state too. Yeah. Karen Michelson, what does archaeology tell us about this period? One of the key archaeological sites, as I understand it, is the Marquis of Yee's tomb, where one of the things, an extraordinary set of 65. five bells were found, which can still be played today over 2,000 years ago. So what does that tomb tell us?

What do those bells tell us about what the civilisation of the time? I think it shows the great wealth of the period for a start. At a time when it was a period of war, one state, you know, vying with another for Hegemony within China. And they were presumably having to use great quantities of bronze just to make the weapons to fight these wars. Yet even so, this rather small state in the sort of center of China today, the state of Zang, of which Marquis E was the head, was buried with 10 tons of bronze, ritual bronzes, bronzes for offering food to the ancestors, but also this magnificent set of 65 bells, which are very important for musicologists, particularly today, because each of the bells has an inscription on it. explaining what tones the bells can play.

The bells have no clappers at that time, so they're hit with wooden mallets, and the two tones that each bell can play are actually marked on the bell. It actually dates the tomb as well, because there is one bell that was given by the King of Chu, who was one of the major sort of warring contenders of the time, as a funerary present to the Marquis when he died.

And it also tells us... What's the date on that? 433, BC. And we know that there were seven tones and we know there were about five octaves. And the bells, as you said, can in fact still be played, although we don't have any scores of the time. But there were many other objects in the tomb.

And it just, I think it shows that they were at war at that time, but still able to spend huge amounts of money on sort of luxury goods. And a lot of the cultural differences that you find in the objects in say the spring and autumn period and even earlier are being broken down as they go conquering from, one state to another, taking booty from one state to another, and then copying artifacts, so that there are less sort of cultural differences than there were before. Vivians told us something, we'll go into in more detail in a few minutes,

about the importance of intellectuals and divinness to these warring chiefs, king, emperors. Did you find from the two archaeological avenues the importance of music, say, as well as other cultures, A music more important than other areas of culture? Well, music was always very important at the warring states' courts. It was used in state ceremonies and rituals, and Confucius spoke about the right kind of music that should be played in the wrong kind of music that was lascivious and sort of might lead to corrupt thoughts, whatever.

So music was an important element. It was also used in war. You actually took bells and drums into war, and you used bells when you were retreating and drums when you were going to attack. And also they used to play, music to induce the shamans to get into trances. So it was an important part of ritual generally. And some of the lacquered wooden chest that you find in the Marquisy of Zung's tomb have pictures of mythological characters on them and including pictures and representations of the magic

mushrooms that, probably like marijuana, to induce the trances in the shamans of the time. So the shamans could speak out of what we would call unconscious. and say deep truths as prophets are supposed to have done throughout different civilizations before, and since there's a text there

in that tomb called the Elegies of Chew. What does that tell us? Well, it's not in that tomb, but it's of that period. But I was just going to say also that he did take 22 musicians with him.

He actually had them slaughtered specifically to play the musical instruments in his tomb. Oh, career, isn't it? So, I mean, it really, I think he was particularly musical, this but Marquis and it was something he intended to go on

enjoying in the afterlife. But the elegies of Chu are... So musical he slaughtered them. It's quite a thought isn't it? I'm a really musical man off with your head. Do shoot the pianist he's doing his vest. Right, sorry, back to this. We're supposedly

written by someone called Chu Yuan who lived around 338 BC and died about 278. And he was a loyal minister to one of the kings of Chu and he was libeled and slanted by various enemies within the court and was banished.

And he wrote various poems about his discontentment of not being recognised, his strength not being recognised by the King of Chu. So we have the warring states and we're coming to the sort of next formation of an empire with Chin from the state of Chin in a moment or two. But let's go through the main ideas for the next section, as it were. We've talked about these many ideas of the main ideas. Chris, can you just, Chris Cullen, can you give us a background with Confucius, the 6th century BC?

If anybody knows anything about Chinese philosophy, they say Confucius. Now, he was just before the warring states, but less than a century before. What was his main tenets and what influence did he have? Confucius is seeing the world around him breaking up with the loss of all that he had. holds dear that he believes has come from the golden age of the past, from the Joe Kings, that is, with people behaving according to proper ritual, people doing their jobs because it was their duty, not because they wanted to make money out of them and get promotion and so on, people respecting the authority of the Joe King, and he saw all that falling to pieces. Now, some people

might have said that just meant he was against progress. He said everything that is valuable in our culture is being destroyed. And I'm the person who has to try to recall people to this. And that's rather how he describes himself. He says, I'm not an innovator, I'm someone who just loves antiquity and is going to tell people about it. The other thing about Confucius that is important to notice as we look forward into the warring stage and he stands around just the end of the spring and autumn period is that he doesn't find himself with any opponents.

He goes to rulers and tries to persuade them and more or less they don't listen to him. Sometimes people ask him questions as disciples and he answers them or puts them down, but he doesn't run up against another rival of his own status. And that's the difference in the warring states. In the warring states there are lots of people, each with their own different point of view, and they have to argue with one another.

When you read the works of, say, the second great Confucian thinker, or after Confucius, Mencius, around 320 BC, one of his disciples says, why are you so interested in arguing all the time? And he says, the fact is that the world is full of the words of all kind of, the world is full of the words of Yang and Moore, naming their two great opponents of Confuciism.

I have to argue with them, otherwise truth will fall to the ground. So it's a move from an age of reminding Confucius to an age of argument when there are many different points of view as to where we should go. Vivian, can we take that on with you then? How were his ideas developed by his disciples? Take Menchus, for instance. How did he develop Confucius' ideas?

I think Confucius had a great emphasis on ritual and hierarchy in this life. He was not concerned so much about the spirits. In fact, he said if we can't serve man in this life, then how can we serve the spirits? Much more important to get our social structures correct. And he worries about, I mean, he does worry about whether heaven exists and whether heaven actually backs his. mission, but heavens are rather abstract feature, and it's not spirits in a sort of more concrete

sense. Now, Mencius, I think his great contribution was thinking about, he believed in the goodness of human nature, and that was really the core of one of the disputes that was going on during the warring states. But you were born with moral virtue. He says one of the stories is that if anybody sees a child falling in a way, then their response is going to be from the heart, essentially. However bad they are.

However bad they are, their response is from the heart. So everybody is essentially educable. And that's really core because then that develops into the whole notion of education that is so strong in China. And the idea that you can change somebody for the better. So there's a sort of plant metaphor that he uses where there are sprouts of virtue that we're all born with. and if you put somebody in the right environment,

then they will grow towards the good. On the other hand, there are other philosophers who are seen to be in the Confucian tradition like Shenz, who thinks that you have to be quite rigorously controlled and disciplined in order to develop in the right way. And, of course, those two streams are very strong. Can I develop that second stream with Carol Michelson. Let's take the word legalism, the term legalism,

to cover what Vivian was. referring to that other stream, which just as Mencius thought, as it were, we were born good with moral virtue and could be educated, in due goodness, the belief, as I think is a, we were born bad and have to be disciplined and punished into behaving well. Can you just develop that a little and tell us how powerful that idea was? Well, the prime exponent of that philosophy was someone called Shangyang or Gong Songyang who died in 338 BC. And he was a minister of way, who was totally unappreciated by his ruler, so he moved to the state of Chin.

And he applied a lot of his practices to the state of Chin. And in fact, it was through the new administrative practices he instituted there, that Chin began to become the most powerful state in the warring state period. To him, through this philosopher, that Chin was the warring state king who was on the up. He was the warrior on horseback, who was the conqueror. But this man came in and codified, he stopped, he said being on horseback wasn't enough.

You had to be able to run these things. Is there something in that? What he could run was set up some sort of totalitarian system. Is that right? Well, he believed in the ruler being paramount, but he believed in the rule of law. He believed that man was intrinsically bad and needed to be controlled by very draconian systems of laws.

But there should also be effective systems of rewards as well, so there should be punishments and rewards in order to control man. And he abolished the aristocracy, Zhang Young, and he set up a new hierarchy of military ranks, which was dependent on the number of heads, severed heads that you managed to capture in any one battle, basically. And he also set up this system of mutual responsibility, whereby he grouped families into five or ten families,

and then each person within that group was responsible for the other. So if one person committed a crime within that group, then everybody within that group would have to suffer the punishment that was relevant to that crime. And that persisted in Chinese society right through to Mao until today, didn't it? Not quite the same draconian degree at all periods, but certainly Chin Chih Huang Di when he came to the throne followed through with the legalist principles.

And it resulted in a very effective system of government. And Chin state, which before had been one of the most, most peripheral states and regarded as sort of semi-barbarian by a lot of the other warring states became the most effective fighting force amongst the warring state contenders and the most effective administrative unit. Was this Chris as a result of the matching of the warrior power with the intellectual idea? It's a good idea to knock them off before you could on the program. Never mind. That's a first. That's a first. Never mind. Sorry. Was this? Chin was a state with huge potential

because it was out there on the western marches, on the frontier, and it had the challenge of having to deal with a lot of unassimilated people around it that were always threatening it and so on. And that also meant it didn't have any other, quote, Chinese states on its western borders. So it didn't have to defend against sophisticated enemies there. And it did certainly feel itself to be, you know, we're a bit of a hick-hick, people here. You know, we haven't got much culture. We need to get some culture, get some organisation in. And when Shangyang came from the great, sophisticated state of way with his

new proposals for running things, he was welcome, certainly. And that's why he got the free hand he did. But he didn't end very well. Unlike retiring CEOs of even unsuccessful corporations nowadays, who get a lovely package, when the chin state tired of him and thought he was getting a bit uppish. He was torn apart by wild horses, I seem to remember. That was his severance package, you could say. Oh dear. It's that phone that's set you off. Let's just go through a few more

of the ideas before we come to the chin taking over and forming China and then it goes to the Hang, the history which goes for 400 years and comparable with Grico, Roman in length of time and so on. Another set of ideas were from the Moists.

Can you briskly tell us about the Moists, which was a sort of communism with a rather tough iron... They're just the sort of people Confucius wouldn't have liked, for a start. They were not people of good family. If anything, it looks even as though

the founder of it, Maudi himself, may even have been someone who'd actually been branded on the face as a criminal at some stage. Their idea is, All this ritual, all these elaborate funerals like the Marquis that we heard about earlier, this is just a waste of resources. This does nobody any good.

All that should be done, when we're thinking about what should a public policy be, we should say, does it work and is it actually useful? And one of the most useless things, of course, that a state can do is to go to war because of the huge waste of resources involved there. They were therefore essentially against aggressive warfare, but not pacifists. There were actually organised bodies of moists sworn to loyalty to their leader

who would hire their services to any state that was being attacked to train its people in defensive siege warfare, things like the use of poison gases to put into tunnels the enemy who were digging under the walls, things like that. All this underpinned by a morality, not based like Confucius, on the idea of, you know,

your duty is to your ruler, your duty is to your father, the further away people are from you, the less duty you have to them. The Moes said, that's why we have wars, because a king regards his own people as to be cared for, but not the people of another state. Maudza said, you should have an undifferentiated care for everybody,

so that every single person you meet you treat as your own brother or your own father. Keeping going to the ideas of the time, Havian Lowe, we know something about the medical ideas of it. We hear of them. acupuncture was developed at this time, invented before this time. Can you give us some idea of the development in medicine, which is people who know very little about China, like ancient China myself, that's one of the things that emanates from the vague idea of China, this

knowledge of, this early knowledge of effective medicines? Yes, I think the sort of acupuncture that developed actually a little, well, late warring states' early imperial times. It's very different to what we think of nowadays. First of all, they didn't in this early period have fine needles and the earliest reference talk about stones. So that immediately brings into question what were they doing?

It's not this fine. There could be hot stones, but also some of the earliest writings from the tomb at Marwandaway talk about, the writing is very close to petty surgery. But it's melding with ideas that are coming from the Yin Yang specialists.

And these are people who... Who are the Ying Yang Specialists? The In Yang Specialists, there are not many records, contemporary records of them. Really, we know about them through Samar Chen, who actually is through the lens of Samar Chen's histories in the Han period, that we see much of the warring states.

He talks about the Yingyang specialists, and particularly Zōyen, who is purportedly the... the origin of the Yin Yang theories. Yin and Yang are essentially a way of ordering the world, and later on also the Ushing, the five agents. They're a way of classifying the world, both in terms of space and in time.

So the earliest correspondences with Yin and Yang will be heaven and earth, for example, day and night. So you have this sort of spatotemporal sense, which is used in the military, in divination, but also in medicine. Because it becomes very elaborate, doesn't it? It becomes feminine, masculine, dark light, as you say. You have space, time.

Then you also have social structures, so you have the elder son, the younger son, father, with women, of course, at the bottom. And you have ways of behaving, yes. And the first elaborated correlations are from this very important to him at Marwant-A which is 168P.C. Can we go out to you then, Carol, about the tomb evidence?

What Vivian's been talking about and Tai Chi as well. So I'm trying to bring to an end to talk about ideas before we move on. What's archaeological evidence backs that up or affirms that? Well, as Vivian is talking about the tomb of Mawang Day. This is a three-tomb complex with a mother, a father and a son. And in the tomb of the son, there was some manuscript. found, showing exercises, actually graphic descriptions and illustrations of breathing exercises and physical exercises.

Hand fitness video. Yes. But basically sort of trying to sort of prolong life, ways of prolonging life and with ideas of immortality. And of course this is a time when people are ingesting elix of immortality. The Taoists are providing the rules. rulers with various very poisonous substances to take, which it is hoped will make them immortal. And the Chin Chihuan Di Emperor and a lot of the early Han emperors used to send out expeditions

trying to find the places where the immortals were going to live. And probably brought on early deaths for themselves by ingesting these totally poisonous elixias. There were many types of medical manuscript in that tomb. First, that one. And actually, it's wrong to call it tight. really because Taiji is a very modern phenomenon. It wasn't even martial. Taiji is a soft martial art.

There are books from other tombs that tell us what actually was going on. And many of these treatments were for pain. Others of them, there are actually copying of the animal world. So there's the bear walk and various sort of animal type movements. But there are also the earliest representations of the body drawn in lines, you know, this sort of proto-acupuncture. What do you actually mean by this drawn-in line? Just the lines of the main arteries?

Well, that's very interesting. The earliest figurine to show the lines, and it's not necessarily associated with acupuncture at this point or with medicine even, clearly shows elements of the superficial veins, but also the muscular structure. The texts that are associated, well, not associated with a particular figurine,

but in other tombs, talk about a sensory experience of the body, so about pain, about roots of pain and that kinds of structures of the body. The lines also congregate around the sense organs. So it's an interesting mix of empirical observation of the body, but also theoretical ideas. So in later texts, we certainly have these lines associated with the rivers of China, for example. And then in acupuncture you have the point names which are clearly modelled on astronomical models of the... And the body itself became a metaphor for a great number of things. The liver was the general, yes, and the heart is the lord and ruler.

And so the physiology is worked out in this sort of bureaucratic and imperial terms. A great number of ideas milling around there while these great wars are going on, which have come to an end, not wars don't come to an end, but these wars come to an end with the Chin as being supreme. And when Chin took over what became China, what ideas did he take in, and was that first recapturing of the whole of China horse news,

was that a template for the great Han dynasty, which then ran for 400 years after it and then the ideas fed right through China for the next 2,000 years. In reality, yes, though nobody ever found it very comfortable to admit it. It was very, very convenient for the founders of the Han dynasty

which took over from the chin after its collapse in 206 BC to say, that was a terrible time, wasn't it? All those harsh laws, you know, the country under the yoke of a single, centralised despotism, getting a head cut off for a traffic offence and so on. It'll be quite different with us.

Actually, what they actually did was to keep most of the laws and procedures, certainly all the administrative procedures in place, but eventually learned to cloak it in a velvet glove, whereby under the Emperor Wu, who reigned for, rather like Queen Victoria, for a very long and prosperous reign from, I think, 155 BC, under the Emperor Wu, the state adopted Confucianism as the official system of thought, and did to other systems of thought

what the chin had tried to do to Confucianism, that is effectively to suppress it and to declare it illegitimate. But just a little more detail from the three of you, so what did the chin, after the warring states, what did they take into this great 400-year-old dynasty, which is matched by the Greco-Roman over here, what did they take into it in terms of just the outline of the ideas that they took into it, which were then velvatized, if you wish,

and so forth. But can you start and then I go around the table? What the chin took in was two things. Firstly, they took in very explicitly the ideas of the group of thinkers that we've called the legalists. That's the ones who give you the ruthless realpolitik for running a state where the ruler is in control of everything. There are rules. You act according to the rules. You get a reward. You don't. You get a heavy punishment. That was how they said they were going to run things. And other ideas were not to be given a hearing. Indeed, in 213 BC, there was a massive suppression of all other schools of thought what is called rather exaggeratedly, historically, the burning of the books

where you weren't allowed to possess Confucian books or books of any other school of thought other than legalism. But another strong element in the thinking of the Chin, particularly on behalf of the Chin Emperor, was the beginnings of this idea that if you wanted to be an effective ruler, your state had to be in harmony with the cosmos. there's dispute about exactly how much of this went on, how much of this is read back by later historians.

But it does look, for instance, though it was very important to the first Chin king that he thought his dynasty was under the patronage of the power of water, which correlates with the colour black and so on, so court robes are black. And indeed, the Han state actually carries that on, because the hand state sees itself as in many ways

as a successor of the chin. To come back to two archaeological levels, Karl Michelson, and the tomb of the Chin Emperor has got this, among other things, this extraordinary terracotta army. So we're now talking of a civilisation which has a strong belief in an ex-life. Was this, did this pervade or was this just among the courts, the rulers?

No, I think it pervaded, basically. But the tomb of Tintiwang-D hasn't been opened. And it's one of the things we were discussing before the programme. We hope it might happen in our... our lifetime, but it's a huge problem, conservation problem for the Chinese. And as you said, they found this army on the periphery of the tomb. And that's three pits filled with terracotta warriors who were there presumably to serve the emperor in the afterlife. And he did also take with him all his childless concubines as human sacrifices to serve him in the afterlife. But the influence

of Confucius was beginning to sort of prevail now. And so there were also many models of servants taken with them as well to act as substitutes for the human sacrifices. But I think the great thing that Chincha Huang Di did was to homogenize the area over which he sort of took control by sort of imposing one legal system over the whole empire, one coinage system, one system of weights and measures, one system of writing. And that's the glue that's kept China together, the fact that they might all talk different dialects all around China, but the writing system, the characters, can always be understood. And that's one of the most important things that he did.

Do you agree with what Chris was saying that the Han dynasty took over really, based itself on what the Chin had done? Oh, yes, indeed, in terms of the real politic of the military machine that it used, the Han had to legitimize it in itself in other ways and to use this system. of correspondence is for legitimation in another way, and the rituals to heaven and earth became extremely important at that time, in order to somehow get away from the ethos of the chin. It is a massive area, but then I was thinking it's not entirely without relevance to the West,

with the Roman Empire, which then in that part of the world was a massive area. But it just seemed an enormous area to run, administering, should really even just to put it to space. I think the bureaucracy is another element that was developed at that time and actually has contributed to the continuity of China. I think of what comes from that period down to the modern age in China. One very interesting thing is that, of course, in the ancient Mediterranean world, there are some democracies in some places for some times.

In China, there is no ancient example of the phenomenon of political democracy at all. the emphasis is always on looking upwards to the person of the ruler. If you have an argument, you're in court trying to sell your policy to the head man. You're never in an assembly of equals where somebody can challenge you. And that makes a big difference. But there's also this ethos of education and a meritocracy, which sort of somehow mitigates against that. Is there a sense in which we could say,

I mean, this is obviously the beginning of another programme, there's another discussion, that one of the key differences between the Greco-Roman and the Chinese is the emphasis on argument and discussion in the West, let's call it that, and looking for the right way in the East. Is that a defining difference? Broadly speaking, I would say that's right. There are all kinds of shades one can do to that.

One can point to examples in China where there is open discussion between people on relatively equal terms. But by and large, nothing like so much as there was, say in 4th-5th century, Athens, for instance, which makes a difference to the way people cast their thoughts. If any moment can always be challenged by somebody who says, what's your reason for thinking that? Let's get right back to basics.

You stress basics. You tend to look for starting points that everyone must agree from. Like in mathematics, you start for nucleid elements from just a few assumptions and try to prove everything from that. Chinese mathematics works differently. The assumption is that you're dealing with a teacher who's going to explain to you how to solve problems and so on. That's just one example.

You talk, Carl, Michelson, about this great tomb not being opened up yet for reasons which are quite complicated. But it hasn't been done. Do you expect to find a great deal more? Do you think that there's a great deal more just simply to be discovered about this period? Without a doubt, basically. They do practice rescue archaeology. The Chinese, if they're digging foundations for a hospital and they come across the tomb, they'll open it up and research it.

But they haven't got the resources at the moment because there's just so much available. And they found this army to the right of the tomb, to the east of the tomb. They might well find another army to the west of the tomb. And in 1999 they found an armoury to the south of the actual tomb, which they found spare sets of stone armour,

which were presumably there to reinforce the terracotta warriors should they need reinforcing in the afterlife. And we haven't had time even to talk about the great technical advances they made. What I'm most frightened about, you know, with that tomb, is if his library is in there. Because if his library is in there, and they open it, and we find that, then all the discussions we've had this morning

will have to start again completely from scratch. That keeps us in business. I'm not too... Do you think it could be as radical as that, Vivian? Yes, every find we have completely turns everything over, because up into a certain point, all we had was the transmitted literature, and that was edited through the generations over and over again.

And then now we're getting all this material directly from the tombs. It means we have to rewrite history constantly. Good. Well, I'm rather... It's rather a relief. Thank you all very much indeed. Next week we're talking about the idea of the fall and its influence on the West. And thank you very much for listening.

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