In Our Time - The Han Synthesis

Episode Date: October 14, 2004

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Han Synthesis philosophies of China. In The Analects the Chinese sage Confucius says of statecraft: "He who exercises government by means of his virtue may be compared to the north polar star, which keeps its place and all the stars turn to it".Confucianism had been all but outlawed under the Chin Emperor, but in 206 BC the Han dynasty came to power and held sway for over 400 years. They brought Confucian thought to the heart of government, his favourite books became set texts for the world's first civil service exam and in a grand intellectual project 'The Great Tao' was combined with 'The Five Phases' and with the Yin and the Yang.Who were the Han? How did they bring these strands of thought together into the great founding moment of Chinese culture? And what drove them to their extraordinary intellectual task?With Christopher Cullen, Director of the Needham Research Institute; Carol Michaelson, Assistant Keeper of Chinese Art in the Department of Asia at the British Museum; Roel Sterckx, Lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Cambridge.

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 four. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, in the analects, the Chinese sage Confucius says of statecraft, he who exercises government by means of his virtue may be compared to the North Polar Star, which keeps its place and all the stars turn to it.

saying such as this made a reputation which has endured for 2,500 years. Confucianism had been all but outlawed under the Chin Emperor, but in 206 BC the Han dynasty came to power and held sway for over 400 years. They brought Confucian thought to the heart of government. His favourite books became set texts for the world's first civil service exam, and in a grand intellectual project, the great Tao was combined with the five phases and with the yin and a yang.

Who were the Han? How did they bring these strands of thought together into the great founding moment of Chinese culture and what drove them to their extraordinary intellectual task? With me to discuss what sinologists call the Han synthesis is Christopher Cullen, director of the Needham Research Institute in Cambridge, Carol Michelson, assistant keeper of Chinese art and the Department of Asia at the British Museum, and Rul Sturkes, lecturer in Chinese studies at the University of Cambridge. Christopher Cullen, the Han dynasty succeeded the Chin,

which was the first unified dynasty of China and gave China its name. What did the Chin Dynasty achieved? First of all, what did the Chin dynasty achieve? What the Chin dynasty achieved was to put a definitive end to the chaos of the warring states period in which China had been a little like medieval Europe, divided just before the Chin into seven great states in a condition of almost permanent warfare with one another.

This is 221B. That's right, that's right. They extinguished all those states. They pulled down the old feudal order under which China had been run up to that time. They set up a form of government by civil servants, all directly responsible to the emperor, working under a rigid system of rules with rewards and punishments laid down for pretty well every possible human action.

And they, I think you can say, gave an image of a unified China which has lasted ever since as at least an aspiration for China but what they didn't do was actually to make the system stable. But nevertheless, looking at those 15 years before we move another hand,

which is the subject of this programme, when I was reading about it, it is extraordinary. In 15 years, this emperor built roads, canal systems, postal system, established a civil service, broke the feudal lords, made the feudal lords come to his capital and then with him.

We have evidence that he did all that in that short of time, did he, and got this massive continent country into, as it were, one centralised shape? It certainly was a huge achievement, but it is true. He didn't just get the idea himself and start doing it from scratch. These ideas have been around and put in practice in some states, especially the state of Chin, before the Chin dynasty actually achieved its huge military triumph and was able to put those ideas into practice over the whole empire.

But certainly nobody can. deny that this was an extraordinary, not very nice human being, not one perhaps one would have liked to have been close to or even been ruled by, but certainly an extraordinary person who did something unparalleled in most, I think, of human history. Now, by a series of court maneuvers which backfired, the weak son succeeded instead of the strong son, and then the Han dynasty came in. That was founded by the rebel leader who was a farmer and or a monk called Luipang. Leobang, right.

How did he get power then? He's a good example of the chin system backfiring, because like at least one other rebel, and doubtless many others at the end of the chin, he was in charge of actually taking a draft of convicts, I think about 300 or at least conscript labour to the capital. Because of heavy rain, he found out he was going to be late arriving. That simply meant he was going to be decapitated,

because turning up late was a draft of convict was a capital offence. So quite sensibly he said to his fellow convicts, well, gentlemen, it seems that we're all in trouble, so why don't we all go off together? And he founded what was at first a bandit group. And it was out of many, many such groups that the huge upsurge of popular discontent manifested itself. Leobang happened to come out on top,

a very clever strategist with much peasant cunning, who eventually outwitted Aristot. aristocratic leaders who had much more military experience than he did. Carol Michelson, New Bang, the first Han emperor, was attracted to Confucianism. Now, why was that? Well, he certainly wasn't attracted to Confucianism at the beginning of his career as leader. There are incidents recorded in the histories where he met up with a whole lot of Confucian literati. And he showed his contempt for them by snatching the hat off one of them and urinating into it.

and on another occasion when he was being lectured by a Confucian literatus with a passage from the Book of Songs, he said, I don't need that, I won this kingdom on horseback and without any education. But the literatus said, but are you going to be able to rule it on horseback? And he realised that, in fact, his new nobility, the people that he appointed to noble positions within the court

were in fact raw soldiers who didn't know any of the people. about the ceremonies and rights of conducting diplomatic occasions and that they were going to need some sort of tradition and ceremony to sort of get them through these rights. So that he needed to go back to sort of Confucian traditions. And when he tried to change the order of succession, he also realized that there was an enormous amount of anti-Confucian opposition to this. And so he came to realize that he was going to have to rely on Confucian precepts.

he realised that he had inadvertently become a rebel as such because of the fact of the unreasoning absolutism of the autocratic chin government. So he was anti-legalist. And so he went towards Confucian principles that he realized that he as a peasant had suffered terribly under the autocratic system. And that the Confucian precept of the ruler should have some sort of moral regard for his people

like the father should have for his son was something that actually, meant that you would gain the loyalty of the people. So it was a sort of pragmatic sort of response. Rules, Sturk, nevertheless, as far as I can understand it, the first-hand ruler and a few subsequent rulers, took on, although they said they were much kinder and more benign than the Chin Empire, they took on an awful lot

on board of what the Chin had done in terms of centralisation, in terms of rule and that sort of thing. So there's a very long overlap. They dare and change things for quite a while because Chin had obviously been blessed by heavenly powers to get there in the first place. It is indeed true for the first 50 or 60 years. One could say that the Han did in fact continue some of the institutions and some of the way of thinking that was present in the Qin dynasty.

One of the problems the Liu Klan had was that Liu Pang had the reward all the people from his clan for assisting him in victory. So all the way up till the 150s BC, he actually grounded lands and thieves to these people to appease them and gradually. keep them away from the capital, which was really the center of power. The legal codes, which, you know, were pretty stringent during the Qin dynasty, were perpetuated to a certain degree. Generally, we see, you know, slight reforms in the penal code where torture and punishments

and executions were sort of conceived of as much lighter. But as a matter of fact, that is not really until sort of the long reign of the fifth Han Emperor Han Wu-Di that we actually see a conscious effort to integrate a new symbolism and to integrate a new cosmology and ritual system to declare oneself as something that differs from Qin. This is a great place to pause

because Han Wu Di was ruled for 53 years he's at the center of this great changes again. But what was fascinating for me was that it took over 100 years before they moved to change things like colors and ritual symbols and that sort of thing, because they so revered the tune or were too frightened to move. Can you tell us why it took so long, given that they're a new dynasty, away they go,

and even a hundred years later they still think, well, can we change red to black and so on? Well, I mean, one of the precepts of Chinese thinking at the time is you need to be pretty much assured of your own legitimacy to rule before you can actually argue that your predecessor somehow got it wrong. And it wasn't really until Hamoudi that all the mechanisms military economically were in place then actually confidently the emperor could go out and then really claim himself as the incumbent of a new cosmic cycle

which was different from Chin. So what had needed to be in place then rule by the time he came along? He ruled from 141 to 87 BC, yes. Well, a number of things that needed to happen was one needed to gradually move away from the idea of universal military service which was something of course

that the Chin that the Chin dynasty was run on, a gradual move towards professional armies, protecting the borders by establishing military colonies in which you can have soldiers that were productive in peacetime and assumed the role of warriors during wartime. The economy, taxation, was a very important aspect of Hamoudi's reforms, monopolies on salt and iron. In other words, make sure that there is enough money in the Treasury to really, you know, or run an effective system. Chris Khan.

This is what, I mean, yes, this is certainly what happened, but I'm wondering if I was asking what are the preconditions for the dynastic confidence to make these changes, one could find it in the accounts given of the state of affairs when Han Wudi took over. It was a bit like at the beginning of the reign of Henry VIII and England, where you'd had very careful rulers beforehand. You'd had Wendie and Jingdi.

The story was that the state granaries were so full of grey, that it was overflowing outside and rotting in the rain, that you couldn't conduct a proper audit of the state reserves of money because there'd been money in that treasury that had been there so long that the strings that held the cash together, Chinese money has a hold in the middle, you thread the string to it, had rotted away. So there was this great sense, we've really come good.

The country is very rich, on the whole, it's peaceful because of the policies that rule was saying, the borders are secure. heaven really has blessed us. We don't have to worry anymore about being a bunch of peasant upstarts. As Liu Bang had almost certainly thought he might have been compared to the rulers of an ancient aristocratic state like Chin. And he brings...

Is this a note that we begin to develop the Chinese civil service here, Carol Michelson? Yes, Wudi decides to sort of institute, not an exam system at this time, but a series of recommendations by the local officials to the central government of people who were seen to be particularly well educated in the classics, in the Confucian classics particularly. So Confucianism takes a grip right at the centre of government through people having to be educated in it in order to serve it, yes.

Absolutely. It's the set books, the set books, the five classics, he sets up these five professors of the five Confucian main texts in 136 BC. And that's conventionally taken as the beginning. of the enthronement of Confucianism as the ideology. And it means, of course, Confucianism is going to change because you can't go from having a way of thought that has been essentially kept as a private property of lineages of scholars

to it being the state ideology without it being massively co-opted and adapted to the aims of the state. That's certainly what happened to Confucianism. Confucianism after the hand wasn't the same as before. So can we now begin to talk about the core ideas in this hand synthesis was there any, can you find evidence of any single impetus? Was it just a drift towards a synthesis? Or did Woonly say we're going to bring these things together,

intellectually together, as part of bringing the whole country together and so on? Yes, many people would say that before the Han dynasty, the ideas of yin and yang, for instance, in the five phases, live essentially in the minds of people who do technical things, who talk about music theory, divination and so on. But what the Han scholars do when they build up this great explanation of why the emperor is not only just a good thing because he's a good chap is right, is natural, is they take these ideas of yin yang and the five phases, and they build them into a story of why our empire is a product of cosmic order. So there's the great ultimate, the great Tao at the top, and then there's yin and yang, and then there are five phases. Can we talk about it as that sort of pyramid?

Can you just briefly say, what is meant? then, 2,000 years ago, by the great ultimate, what are Yin and Yang, and how do they relate to the five phases? Why does this three-tier cake of thought cover everything? Let's talk about yin and yang. They're not really mysterious things at all. Europeans like to genuflect before Eastern wisdom, but these are the thoughts of very practical people

who use these concepts for all kinds of everyday purposes. To talk in Yin Yang terms means looking at processes always as taking part in two phases, a phase essentially of outward activity and growth and a phase of consolidation and the gathering of resources. The outward bursting the activity, that's the Yang phase. The gathering of resources, that's the yin phase. If you look at the human body,

you can say that its organs provide a yin substrate which enables activities to take place, like the stomach has to have certain yin powers, just to be there and ready to do that. but when it's digesting, then it's in its yang phase and so on, which means that there's no use if you've got a starving patient shoveling food down because you have to build up the yin powers of the stomach before it can do the yang digestion you need and so on.

So it gives you practical guidance, you see. The five phases are a more complicated and sophisticated way, again, of looking at processes by dividing them into these five phases named after five natural activities in the world. Shuehō mujintu. We remind ourselves in Chinese. Water, fire, wood, metal and earth. It's ridiculous in childhood, but could you say those in Chinese?

Shuiho Mu Jintu. It's the only way I can never remember them in English. It's like 30 days I said. And why these five? Because they relate, don't they? I mean, water breeds plants of which is wood, wood, wood. makes fire, fire leaves ashes, which is earth, inside earth is metals. That's it. Metals grow in the earth, the fire and water condenses on cold metal.

And we're back to the start. But how far, can you just develop this further, car? Because it went further and further that this was all comprehensive, wasn't it? Well, it was. And as far as sort of material culture is concerned, you can see it's in sort of the four directions, the fact that there are bronzes that represent, for instance, the red phoenix of the south and the green dragon of the east and the white tiger of the west,

and the snake and tortoise, the black symbol of the north. But I think from the sort of archaeological evidence point of view, the Taoism particularly had one of the most important aspects of it was its sort of concentration on the facet of immortality. There's this eternal quest for immortality, the fact that Chin Shih Huang Di, the emperor, and then the earlier Han emperors particularly, sought from their alchemists this elixia

that was going to give them this eternal life. And so you see this manifested in things like incense burners in the tombs. Because particularly from the reign of Wudi when they started travelling to the west and tales of these wondrous sort of strange countries that had never been seen before came back into China. They began to imagine immortal paradises. where the immortal soul might live.

And you see these incense burners in the shapes of mountains, where the mountains could in fact be the Kunun Mountains in the West, where Shi Wang Wu, the queen mother of the West, presided over the immortal paradise there. Alternatively, there were magical islands in the eastern sea, one called Pang Lai. Is this a comparatively new entry into China's culture that there is everlasting life?

No, that's not true. I mean, they'd always, well, there's a lack of sort of literature about exactly what they thought they were going on to. And Confucius particularly said he didn't know that there was an afterlife and therefore he wasn't going to talk about it. But there was always a conception that there was going to be a life after death. Otherwise, it wouldn't be in any reason to take with them to the tomb, the various objects that they had done from Neolithic times.

What I'd like to know here, though, is what place did Confucianism play in this and how did it take to other things being synthesized with it, other ideas and other notions? Is it possible to answer that? It is possible, as long as we realize, that who Confucius was and what his role was, was something that was debated in the Han. The Confucius of the Han is not the Confucius, you know,

of the 6th and 5th century BC. And as a matter of fact, there was a serious factional debate within the Han court as to which texts do claim authority and which text can be attributed to Confucius or not. They're conquering everybody, knocking hell out of the nomads up on the northern borders, and arguing about the text to justify that. You have one group of scholars who actually are aiming to sort of extol confusions, much more to sort of a semi-divine figure, who, you know, rules, or basically whose rule again, you know,

is backed up by this five-phase in Yin Yang cosmology. On the other hand, you have a group of scholars who say, well, no, the real confucius is the old confucius. It was a teacher, and the texts which they purportedly rediscovered in the walls of Confucius' house were thought to be the genuine one. The old texts. That's right, the old texts. Where does Chi, is that how I pronounce it, Christopher? Why does Chi fit into this? I don't think we can say that Chi belongs to any particular school of thought at this time.

What is it exactly? Ah, we need another programme for this, but quickly, quickly. I think you can say that Chi refers both to... the activity of, say, that goes on in a human body or goes on in the weather going on around us or even in the activities of a powerful individual in society, it also refers in some way to the stuff that enables that activity to take place. Some say that it's a word that originally referred,

say, to the beautiful fragrant steam that comes off cooking food, which in some senses, as my mother would have said, the goodness of the food. But at this time, it doesn't belong to somebody. It's not a controversial thing. A person who is powerful has lots of chi. The universe has chi, which indeed manifests itself

through the succession of the five phases. And obviously one wants to be in touch with this power that manifests itself. So how do you get in touch? How do you get in touch? You get in touch by doing things, as Roel was saying earlier, for instance, making sure that at court,

people wear the right colour, that you conduct, sacrifices using the right ritual implements that essentially, and we haven't mentioned this yet very much, that you play the right kind of music, because music, just as the Pythagorean said in the West, is governed supremely by number. And you therefore try to use, for instance, the pitch, the size of the standard yellow bell pitch pipe, as the basis of your numerology, for instance. And this was an explicit project that I think reached its peak perhaps in the law. work or around the beginning of the Christian era of Leocin, who derived an entire astronomical

system and metrological system and musical system based essentially on this cosmic numerology. And Carol, how does the archaeology of the time, as it were, back this up or affirm this? What evidence do we get from the archaeology of the time? The material evidence of the ideas at Ruhlin and Christopher have been talking about? Well, again, going back to the idea of immortality. and perhaps of Chi as well, the fact that Chi didn't necessarily die when the body, the physical body died. And so the idea was to try and keep the physical body alive as long as possible

or whole as long as possible. So you get jade suits in the Han Dynasty, and it's a phenomenon that is actually exclusive to the Han Dynasty. It doesn't appear before, and it certainly doesn't appear after. What do these jade suits do? Well, they were supposedly there to keep the body whole. They were restricted to royalty by sumptuary, laws. They were very, very expensive, very time-consuming. The idea was that jade was a very,

very hard mineral. You can't in fact carve it, although we talk about carving jade. You can only abrade it and wear it away. And a jade soup blowing to someone called Liu Shang right up in the north of China in Manchang had 2,498 plaques in it, which would have taken about 10 years to make it's established. Each plaque would have to be cut, polished, beveled, and then four holes drilled into each of the planks in order to sew it together with gold thread if you were an emperor, silver thread if you were an empress, bronze thread if you were a concubine.

And in fact, when Leoshen died, presumably ten years after he'd ordered the suit, and he was known as a gourmet, someone who loved wine women and song. His stomach had obviously grown very much more than when he'd been first measured, and in fact they needed about a hundred extra plots, which you can see now today have been inserted into the suit. to come back to these ideas

and what they were actually doing in the last part of the programme the ideas seem to have been at odds with what was actually happening this is not unusual with ideas in any civilisation let's stick to what we're sticking out I mean Confucianists

I understand it had ideas about the economy and ideas about monopoly say let's just take iron and salt the state had a monopoly of iron and salt and Confucians thought this was a bad thing They didn't agree with that monopoly. They also had ideas about warfare.

Now, the state, although taking on the hands on it, isn't it, just didn't take much notice of them, didn't they? So can you develop the clash between the ideas and the reality? Some people have spoken about the politics of this period in terms of a struggle between modernists, as they've been called, and reformists. The modernists being the ones who say everything is to be started from scratch. This is a new world.

And, you know, the state has to be made. made into this huge powerful instrument that will work for everybody's good, that will control indeed the production of basic commodities like salt and iron, that will control prices, that will suppress wicked merchants who are trying to turn a profit by exploiting price differentials, that will defend the state actively and so on so. And others, the reformists, who are looking back, often to the past, to a Confucian past and saying,

wait a minute, this isn't really the kind of thing that a state should do if it wants to endure for a long time, which means always following the model of antiquity. And in 81 BC, there was actually a real debate about this, of which we have, I think, probably a fairly realistic transcript, edited some way after the time. And you can hear representatives of both sides hammering away at one another.

Some saying, but if the government doesn't control prices, then the people will be exploited by wicked merchants who will try to make a profit out of them. The other people say, what you're actually doing is giving people poor quality state manufactured goods and actually suppressing poor, honest craftsmen, trying to make a living. Carol Michelson, did you find the evidence that you studied? Do you find it in these 400 years there was a great change, there was a great cohering? Does the archaeological evidence that you study, Carol, does this bear this out?

It does because there is an increasing sort of feeling that the body is not going to be living if it's afterlife in the tomb. So what you begin to find is that there are models put into the tomb, rather than the very valuable objects that you'd found in earlier times. So this is the connection between the human and the cosmological. Christopher, the Han Dynasty came to an end after over 400 years, which was a very long time at that time. But did the ideas push forward? Had there been, had there been a melding, a coming together,

that sort of synthesis that we've been discussing, stayed, had been rooted in, was now part of China? The very fact that Chinese people, continue to recall themselves Han Ren after the Han Empire had long gone. The fact they still call their writing Han Zha Han characters shows you how powerful the image was that the Han left behind. It certainly did forge the identity of the Chinese state in a pretty definitive way. After that time people thought we wish we could get back to the great days of unity of the Han Empire when the Tang rose in the 7th century.

at last the glories of the Han have returned. And this is the recurrent theme. And the basic stance of the Chinese state towards its subjects and the way it governs them through a civil service, not through an aristocracy. The huge centralising dynamic of the government balanced against the fact that the people themselves are supposed to run their own affairs

according to the basic tenets of morality, and if they're good at that, they won't need to be interfered with by the government. That, I think, has come down a long way, changed in many ways, no doubt, but still seems to be there to some extent to the present day, I would say. And what sort of Confucianism came through and persisted over the next two millennial one way or another? Well, it is a Confucianism, which, you know, first of all, is a practical Confucianism. It basically means you get access to power through the mastery of, you know, the confusion tradition and, you know, the confusion texts.

But I think what is fundamental of, the fundamental idea in hand confusion is, that somehow survives throughout dynastic China is really the idea of a cyclic progression of dynasties, that things, the dynasties will inevitably come to their end once their phase has run its course. I'm afraid our phase has run its course. Very sorry about that. Thank you very much to Chris Cullen, Carol Michelson and Rulstirks. Next time I'll be talking about witchcraft. Thank you very much for listening.

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