The History of China - #205 - Hangzhou: A City by the Bay

Episode Date: December 13, 2020

You might not be able to go on a real holiday - but today we take a little audio trip to the city of Hangzhou, Zhejiang... famed across the millennia for its beautiful bay, canals, and the famous West Lake. This is no ordinary tourist get-away, though, because we'll be skipping across time, looking at the highlights of its early history. Time Period Covered: ca. 5,000 BCE- ca. 960 CE Major Sources: Cotterell, Arthur. The Imperial Capitals of China – An Inside View of the Celestial Empire. Giles, Lionel (tr.) Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. Loewe, Michael and Edward L. Shaughnessey. The Cambridge History of Ancient China. Mote, F.W. Imperial China.(900-1800). Rossabi, Morris. China Among Equals: the Middle Kingdom and its Neighbors, 10th-14th centuries. Schmidt, J. D. Within the Human Realm: The Poetry of Huang Zunxian, 1848-1905. Yan, Zi. Famous Temples in China. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to an Airwave Media Podcast. TD Direct Investing offers live support. So whether you're a newbie or a seasoned pro, you can make your investing steps count. And if you're like me and think a TFSA stands for Total Fund Savings Adventure, maybe reach out to TD Direct Investing. Hello and welcome to the History of China.

Episode 205. Hangzhou, a city by the bay. I have never traveled to Hangzhou's West Lake, but seem to have met it in my dreams someplace, a vague and indistinct expanse of water and clouds where lotus leaves merge with weeping willow branches. Now that I see Lake Abundant lying before me, 10,000 hectares of blue-glazed tiles, I would love to address this question to Master Su. Is Hangzhou's West Lake better than that of the West Lake of Yingzhou? More than a week I've been suffering from summer heat, when this marvelous lake splashes its light on my eyes. I suddenly suspect I'm in the middle of some painting and wonder if I might have just awakened from a dream. Whatever is the meaning of human existence that I should race around frantically for fourscore years? Brown dust buries the head of my horse, and I labor on and on without knowing I'm exhausted.

Alas, I cannot sprout an immortal's wings. I cannot avoid the trammels of the mundane world. I desire to reserve a plot of land for myself, some property where I can make plans for the approach of old age. Clouds float at leisure around the lake. I cannot sleep because I long for them. Gulls and herons, I just vowed to become a recluse. Please fly up and announce my intentions to heaven. A Trip to Lake Abundant by Huang Zunxian, circa 1870. Today, we're actually going to be doing a little mini-quest along the path of this epic sprawling tale.

Now, this had actually been slated to be what would have been about five episodes of going micro on a particular place in China. That place in question is, of course, as it's said in the title, Hangzhou. Unfortunately, that project ultimately got scrapped. Oh well. So rather than this serving as an intro into an entire arc, this is going to be a one-off. A little mental vacation, as it were, in this, the darkest time of the darkest year. An invitation to, at least in your mind's eye and ears, take a trip to this city by the bay. So, first, a little background info for any of you who might not really even know what the heck Hangzhou is, or why you should care.

Some of you may have never even heard of the city, which you'll quickly realize is absolutely wild because it's just, well, you definitely should have, and we're going to correct that now. You've of course heard of the megalopolises that make up China's big four central municipalities. I'm talking Beijing, Shanghai, Chongqing, and Tianjin. And you've probably heard of the other large cities such as Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Chengdu, Nanjing, and Xi'an. But nestled right there, right underneath China's top 10 list, is Hangzhou, with a tidy 7.6 million people in the city limits, and around about 21 million people in its broader metropolitan area. Now for those of you keeping count, in terms of the city limits, that's about 91% of New York City, or about two LAs or three Chicagos, roughly.

Hangzhou is the capital and largest city of Zhejiang province, which is the coastal province on the southern bank of the Yangtze River, and then all the way down until it hits the nine impassable mountains of Fujian in the far south. It sits at the mouth of the Hangzhou Bay, just south of Shanghai, and if you take a fast train just about anywhere west or south of Shanghai, you'll almost certainly be making at least a quick stop at Hangzhou South Station to let just a whole bunch of people on and off. Besides the bay that feeds into the Pacific Ocean, and thereby the wider world, the other major geographic feature, and arguably the even more famous one, is Shihu,

the West Lake referred to in Huang Zun Xian's poem at the beginning of this episode, so-called because it sits to the west of the city proper. West Lake has been an object of fascination and repose, and the subject of paintings and poetry for millennia, and it's really no wonder at all. Today though, we're going to leave the modern, shining metropolis of Hangzhou behind and step into our good old trusty way back machine and go way way back like really way back to the earliest prehistoric records that we have of this eventual city by the bay. It's little wonder that early humans would settle in such a region. It has after all just about everything you could possibly want. It's

got rivers, it's got lakes, it's got the ocean, and a mild temperate climate. The earliest known settlement that has been discovered in the region is known as the Hamudu civilization, a name, appropriately enough, that roughly translates to governess of the river crossing. This Neolithic civilization seems to have arisen around the mid-5th millennia BC, or around 7,500 years ago, and lasted for about 2,200 years, primarily along the ancient sea coasts and the marshes that were then surrounding it. It seems to have been closely associated with, and possibly directly interacted with or even been a part of, the larger Majiabang civilization, which existed across modern Jiangsu and northern Zhejiang. This was, it should be

pointed out, not a Chinese civilization in the typical sense we would think of it, at least not in the same way that we'd refer to the various Neolithic cultures of the Mid-Yellow River Valley, such as the Longshan or Arlito cultures that would arise in the north later. Notably, it was the earliest known Yangtze River civilization that appears to have first cultivated rice in what would later become China. This speaks directly to the modern re-understanding of the development of early Chinese civilization as having come about not as some radiative property of a mega-civilization stemming solely from the Yellow River, but instead a co-developmental process of multitudinous, independent, and interdependent regional civilizations that were only in great time amalgamated into a quote-unquote singular

cultural entity. Historian of prehistoric Chinese civilizations, Guangzhe Chang, writes further of their dietary and cultural practices, quote, to rice, the people of these cultures made extensive use of the area's freshwater plants, such as the water caltrop, fox nuts, lotus seeds, water spinach, cattail, and rush. Many dwellings were timber structures built on piles along riverbanks or lakeshores with floors above the water. Fish, shellfish, and animal remains, including domestic dogs, pigs, and water buffalo, are extremely abundant in the kitchen middens, end quote. Recent genetic studies of unearthed remains from these early Yue peoples strongly indicate that they were directly tied to the Tai Karai people of Southeast Asia, indicating a northward migration, which, given the importation of rice cultivation to the Yangtze Valley, tracks pretty darn well.

In spite of the many similarities to the Majabang civilization, the Hamudu nevertheless show distinct points of differentiation, probably most notably in their pottery, though certainly similar in form and style. Chong points out that while most Majabang pottery pieces recovered have been brown in color, the Hamudus are mostly black, a distinctive mixture of clay and coal. In terms of design, such pieces have cord markings and patterns often depicting birds, as well as other motifs, both realistic and ritualistic. The most distinctive is a type of round-bottom food cooker, with a ridge around the neck so it can be suspended from a ring in an oven.

In terms of technology, the hamoudou seem to have been primarily using a combination of wood and bone implements, unsurprising given the region's relatively scarcer stone resources. Fortunately for archaeologists, and therefore us as well, much of the Hamadou's dig strata has been well-preserved underneath the waterline, which led to it being well-preserved until the modern period. Implements unearthed in the digs conducted between 1973 and 1978 include bone plows, arrowheads, needles, whistles, knives, spearheads, spades, pestles, as well as carved bone ivory implements and items of apparently ceremonial and or aesthetic nature. The Hamadou were eventually supplanted by the last of the area's Neolithic cultures to live in the Hangzhou region.

This was known as the Liangzhu culture, and they inhabited the area from about 3400 to 2250 BCE. The Liangzhu shows significant signs of social stratification, as well as a shamanistic social and religious order. Highly organized cemeteries have been unearthed to show large amassment of wealth and its believed need in the afterlife. Again from Chang, quote, 24 lithic implements, 9 ivory objects, 1 shark's tooth, and 170, or 511 single pieces, of jade. At Yaoshan, only about 5 kilometers northeast of Fanshan, an earthen altar, square in shape and constructed with three layers of earth of different colors, was built. It served as a small cemetery, probably devoted to persons engaged in religious rituals. Among the 11 Liangzhu culture tombs here, Tomb 7 produced 160 sets and pieces of jade, three stone axes, four pottery vessels,

one piece of lacquerware, and four shark's teeth. These jade pieces are primarily of two distinct varieties, respectively called bi and tong. Tong were square, symbolizing the earth, while Bi pieces were round, symbolizing heaven. Together, they're thought to have been powerful shamanistic tokens that endowed the bearer with the ability to ascend from earth to heaven, and it seems that their accumulation was probably one of the principal ways by which the Liangzhu people could accumulate and display their material wealth and power, both in this life and the next. Further evidence of the stratification of Liangzhu society, as compared to their more communal Hamudu forebears, is in their living arrangements. Elites and their followers no longer lived in villages, but in nodes with

centers of power woven into networks large and small. The Liangzhu excavation uncovered at least a dozen such hamlets over an area of several square kilometers. The seemingly sudden disappearance of the Liang Zhu culture just before the dawn of the quasi-historical period of the Xia Dynasty and beyond is quite an interesting mystery. After reaching the height of their power across the region about 4,200 years ago, their archaeological records quite suddenly vanish. Evidence suggests that this was brought about by rising water levels at that time leading to widespread flooding and the people abandoning the area. But there's also a very interesting theory that Lake Tai, which is just west of nearby Suzhou, might have been formed as an impact crater from an asteroid that smashed into the area at that time, annihilating just about everyone. That theory, though, is pretty heavily rebuffed by later research that finds very little,

which is to say, no, geological evidence of so recent an impact. Lake Tai, they determined, was indeed likely a crater lake, but far more ancient than 4,200 years old. More like 70 million years old. Oh well. It was a fun story while it lasted. Let's shift narrative gears now, though, and fast forward to the historical period, and to be more specific, the spring and autumn period from the 8th to 5th centuries BC that saw the slow-motion collapse of the Zhou Dynasty and the outbreak of

chaos that was the Warring States Period. Hangzhou in this period existed outside the purview of the ancient Zhou Kingdom, as one of the northernmost holdings outside the purview of the ancient Zhou Kingdom, as one of the northernmost holdings in the independent Kingdom of Yue. The specific nature and makeup of the people and culture in the historical annals of the period, and later compiled by the likes of Sima Qian in the Han Dynasty, are hazy at best. Giving about as much due consideration as ancient historians tended to ever do for supposedly barbarian periphery states, the states of Yue and its peoples were most frequently referred to by the dismissive term Bai Yue, or the Hundred Yue Tribes, that was applied to just about everyone from the coastal south all the way from Shanghai down to Vietnam. The kingdom of Yue itself claimed to have been founded by a distant relative of the ruling house of the state of Xia to the north, a claim that Professor Xu Yun Xu brushes off,

like the claim of Wu immediately north of Yue to be stemming from a cadet branch of the Zhou clan, as doubtful. He writes, quote, Indeed, Yue never concealed the fact that its cultural background was that of coastal dwellers, a background shared by numerous subgroups of people referred to as the various Yue. The early history of this state is by no means clear. It seems that Wu and Yue were recognized in literary sources as appearing almost simultaneously as a contending pair in the south. Beginning in 510 BC, when Wu invaded Yue, they battled with each other constantly to control the fertile rice-growing land of the Yangtze Delta. End quote. Napoleon Bonaparte rose from obscurity to become the most

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Find The Age of Napoleon wherever you get your podcasts. The internecine wars between Wu and Yue were, of course, brutal blood vendetta affairs that carried on across entire generations. As put in Sun Tzu's The Art of War, quote, the men of Wu and the people of Yue hate each other, but when they are sailing in the same boat and meet with a storm, they will save each other, just like a left hand helping a right, end quote. In 496 BC, for instance, the king of Wu was killed in the aftermath of a battle while invading Yue. Three years later, his son and heir, King Fucai, took up his father's sword and cause, thereafter forcing the king of Yue, Goujian, to surrender to its northern enemy. In the afterglow of this stunning victory, King Fucai was apparently eager to expand his dominion

and glory by taking up the title of Ba, or hegemon, a title then held by the sovereign of Jin. In order to display his power and rule, Fucai ordered the beginning of a construction project that will seem very familiar indeed to anyone who's ever been to Hangzhou, a canal linking north to south. Now, granted, his version of north to south was only between Wu and Yue. Even so, it would turn out that he'd bitten off rather more than he could ultimately chew. No large-scale canal would reach Hangzhou, or wider Yue, until, well, the Grand Canal itself a thousand years later, constructed by the short-lived Sui Dynasty, but more on that in a little bit. Anyways, King Fucai's delusions of grandeur didn't last long. Gojian of Yue was chomping

at the bit to avenge his nation's humiliation at the hands of their hated enemy. While the King of Wu peacocked and postured in the north and assumed the title of Ba, Goujian, quote, with the remnants of his army consisting of only 5,000 men, attempted in every way possible to increase Yue's manpower and to store up food and wealth. He vowed that he would devote one decade to the task of regaining Yue's strength and another decade to training his people, end quote. The time to carry out his vengeance arrived at last in 482 BC, when the armies of Wu were far from home on campaign in the north. The armies of Yue invaded, easily defeating the defensive garrisons left behind

and killing the heir apparent of Wu, Prince You. King Fucai hurried back south and quickly offered generous peace terms which were accepted by the King of Yue, not because Goujian was feeling forgiving, mind you, but because he determined that his army didn't possess sufficient strength to completely destroy Wu in a single campaign. For the time being, he retreated back to his territory and bided his time. A decade later, the Blade of Yue would come crashing down upon Wu for a final, fatal time. Besieged within his capital city for three years, Wu fell to the force of Yue in 470 BC, with King Fucai hanging himself in order to avoid capture.

With this victory in hand, and the territory of Wu at his mercy, Gojian of Yue became what Fucai had only pretended to be, the Ba Hegemon, and the undisputed strongest power of the era, even if just temporarily. Again, from Shu, quote, After Wu fell, Goujian led his triumphant army to a conference of rulers and delegates of the northern states at Shu Zhou. From there, Yue sent tribute to the Zhou royal court, a gesture signifying its status as Ba. This conference was the last at which a Ba was recognized. The end of the struggle between Wu and Yue probably

marks the end of the Ba system. Indeed, Sima Qian, the greatest historian of the Han dynasty, assigned the first year of his Table of the Six States to 475 BC. This symbolized the beginning of a new era. End quote. All right, well, I'm treading dangerously close to getting off track entirely and delving straight back into the warring states altogether. Let's take the opportunity now to reel this back in to what we can say about old Hangzhou at this time. Unsurprisingly, not a whole heck of a lot, but we'll give it a solid try anyway. The oldest name that we know of for the settlement is today's Yuhang District, which for a very long period of time was thought

to be what amounted to a historical misprint of Yuhang, meaning Yu's fairy. This was a reference, of course, to the story of the mythical ancient sovereign and founder of the Xia Dynasty, Yu the Great, gathering his myriad lords together at Mount Kuaiji near the end of his life around 2000 BC. More recent reanalysis of this long-standing interpretation of the name, however, pretty conclusively indicate that such an explanation is a later folk invention. Yuhang is almost definitely an ancient transliteration of an old Baiyue place name, pronounced in Old Chinese as something like La Gang. Through the course of ancient China's Bronze Age, and especially the Warring States Period, the Wu and Yue regions became renowned across wider China as being able to produce blades of

war of near-mythical quality. Iron was likewise cast at this time, but was regarded as being of a lower quality than that of bronze, almost certainly because of the latter's enduring golden sheen versus the former's capacity to quickly rust. Indeed, one of the most famous ancient Chinese blades that you can find on display is the blade of King Goujian, and it's noted that it was recovered in incredible quality, still sharp and still shining. As such, and not without some degree of irony, iron was typically relegated to making farming tools, while bronze was reserved for weapons of war. Xu writes, the bronze. Wu and Yue bronze swords discovered in recent years confirm that they were made by this legendary method, still sharp and bright after thousands of years. One such sword was made of an iron blade on a bronze hilt, while another, dating from the spring and autumn period, was made with a steel stem and bronze guard. This latter sword is the earliest example in China of

steel with a certain amount of carbon, 0.5 to 0.6%, that had been worked repeatedly. End quote. Now, I certainly don't know near enough about smithing in general to comment on the quality of steel produced in the Warring States period by Yue, or what 0.5 to 0.6% carbon actually means when it comes to steel making, but by all accounts this is essentially the Damascus steel or Valyrian steel of China in this era. It's just apparently light years ahead of its time in any of the other Chinese states, much less East Asia as a whole. In addition to this rapid advancement of metallurgy in the south, so too was developing the first of China's glazed pottery production that can truly

be called ceramics. The mastery of control over kiln fires needed for both smithing and pottery making go hand in hand, and so it seems hardly coincidental that Yue, having mastered one, would have mastered the other at or near the same time. It's pointed out that the Chinese word for pottery, Tao, and that of metallurgy, ye, are commonly linked into the compound expression taoye, meaning the transformation of character, indicating that they've virtually always been understood as going hand in hand. It wouldn't be until China's first truly imperial dynastic order, the Qin of course, that what we know as Hangzhou would truly begin to develop.

Though certainly the shortest of China's dynastic periods, totaling only about 14 years from start to finish, it nevertheless left an indelible mark on the centuries and millennia to follow. It was during the first emperor, Qin Shi Huang's successful conquest and grand unification of the warring states into the Qin Empire, that the settlement that would one day be known as Hangzhou makes its first real appearance as a distinct and recognizable formal region that would ultimately become the city that we know today. Like the rest of his grand empire, Qin organized the region around the Hangzhou Bay into counties and commanderies, this one called Qiantang. So it would remain for the four centuries of the Han dynasty to follow, and through the three kingdoms. Though the Hangzhou region was claimed as a part of Sun Qian's Wu Kingdom in the tripartite conflict that wracked the late 3rd century, Hangzhou itself

remained essentially a backwater, nearby but largely unutilized by the commandery of Kuaiji. As such, given the widespread chaos that gripped the Chinese states between the 3rd and 4th centuries, it wouldn't be until the 4th to 5th centuries CE that further real developments would begin. When the Yangtze Delta began to be viewed as more than just a backwater refuge for the Yellow River empires politically down and out, but instead a region to be deliberately colonized and settled. Its status as a regional place of importance was sealed as of the year 589, when the newly ascendant, and likewise short-lived, Sui dynasty proclaimed it as the seat of the Hang Prefecture, aka Hangzhou. The city itself was, at this time, you may remember,

called Yuhang. This entitled the city, such as it were, to begin construction of that real marker of residential importance, a city wall, a project that it would begin undertaking two years later in 591. Its status was further bolstered from merely regional to empire-wide renown when Hangzhou was selected to be the southernmost terminus of the Sui regime's grandest, most ambitious, and ultimately ruinous, megaproject, a canal that would forever bind the North to the South together as one. A good canal. A great canal. No, wait, a grand canal. Yeah, that one's got legs. Though the Sui dynasty would shortly trip on its own shoelaces, thanks in no small part to its own overzealous commitment to the Grand Canal project, at its citizens' own expense, as well as a few campaigns against the northeastern kingdom of Goguryeo that went, um, well, what is a word that is worse than catastrophic?

Ultimately, the Sui's third and last emperor, Yang, was forced to flee to the south in order to escape popular uprisings against his disastrous policies. He did not flee to Hangzhou, but instead to Jiangdu, modern Yangzhou, after which the Yangtze River gets its common English name, where he would stay in seclusion and increasingly unawares of the chaos his own tyranny had set off outside his palace for the subsequent two years from 616 to 618, until his remaining generals finally got fed up with him, launched a coup, and strangled the last Sui emperor to death with his own scarf after they couldn't find any convenient poison for him to swallow. So passed

Yang the Slothful, though it's said that he had to be reburied several times because the heavens were so angry with him that lightning kept striking his tomb. Regardless, with him and the dead husk of the Sui out of the way, the road was paved for the victory of Li Yuan and the rise of the Tang Dynasty. Hangzhou would remain a regionally important terminus of the Grand Canal Project that the Tang took up from the Sui and continued to expand upon over the course of its lifetime. But otherwise, it largely managed to keep itself out of the imperial limelight through much of the Tang period, even the tumultuous periods in the mid-to-late dynasty.

Rather, it was able to use this period of relative peace and stability to do what it often does best, relax and enjoy the natural beauty surrounding it. This is perhaps best shown in the great works of art and poetry that came from those who were able to make their homes there. One of the most well-known such literati of this period was in fact the governor of Hangzhou from 822 to 824, Bai Zhuyi, whose works of mixed melancholy and natural beauty were inspiring and evocative enough to painters and poets across not just China, but the wider East Asian world, that he would be not just recognized but emulated for centuries to come. As governor, Bai ordered the reconstruction of the long-abandoned and collapsed system of dams and dikes that controlled the waters of the West Lake. Their lack of maintenance and subsequent failure had resulted in much of the formerly fertile farmlands of the city to have dried out

and become essentially useless. When his dam project was successfully completed, and the drought problem thus relieved, Governor Bai was subsequently able to use much of his remaining tenure in Hangzhou visiting West Lake, which he did by accounts almost daily. He likewise oversaw the reconstruction of the long broken bridge that had once linked the mainland to one of the lake's major islands, called Gushan, or Solitary Hill. Where we're going to finish out in this early history of Hangzhou, though, is the period that would see it truly first gain its place as one of the seven ancient capitals of China, the period of disunion and strife that came about as the result of the ultimate collapse of Tang power around about

the year 907. With the dissolution of the Li clan's authority over the realm in the wake of the devastating Huang Chao rebellions, the rebel lord's former lieutenant, Zhu Wen, established himself as the de facto sovereign of northern China, and went so far as to claim the mantle of the emperor. Not everyone, as you might well imagine, was okay with such a naked power grab. Across the south, the powerful regional warlords split off and announced their independence and resistance to the Zhu government, which had taken to calling itself later Liang. One of these powerful families, the Qians, headed by Qian Liu, had been rather recently made not only the Prince of Yue, but also the Prince of Wu by the failing

Tang regime in a doomed effort to stave off its own impending death. This little windfall thereby enabled Qianlio to proclaim these dual ancient principalities as having, in essence, reclaimed their sovereignty under him as the Kingdom of Wuye, an act that would inspire a host of other southern petty kingdoms to emulate, thus touching off the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period that would last for the subsequent half-century. Qin Liu established his royal capital at… where else? Hangzhou, of course, then called Xifu, meaning essentially West Prefectural Capital. It would serve alongside the likes of Nanjing and Chengdu as one of the three great repositories and guardians of culture and civilization in southern China,

all while the north busied itself repeatedly tearing itself apart over control of the throne. Given its proximity to both the Yangtze River and the Pacific, as well as the Grand Canal, it's no wonder that the Kingdom of Wuye was easily the wealthiest of the ten southern kingdoms, and frequently outstripping even the nominally united northern empires. As such, it enjoyed an unparalleled ability to maintain and patronize vast numbers of artists, poets, and in particular, Buddhist temples, architecture, and paintings. That is where we're going to wind down this episode and finish out our little vacation to ancient Hangzhou. As I said at the top of this episode,

this was initially supposed to be the first of five parts of the locale, but it'll probably just serve as a one-off. I hope it was an enjoyable foray and look back into our earlier eras. But do let me know if this scratched an itch of yours and if there's an interest in having a second part that would cover the back half of the history of Hangzhou, and we'll see if this becomes a two-parter. In the meantime, though, we'll be back to the broader Ming Dynasty next time, and just keep on truckin' through the end of this, the year that never should have been, 2020. And, as always, thanks'm Fry. And I'm Bree from Pontifax, a papal history podcast ranking all of the popes from Peter to Francis. In each episode, we explore the life of a single pope and contextualize their papacy in world history.

And then we rate them based on the success of their papacy, how scandalous they were, their impact on the secular world, what their face looked like, and more. They may even pick up a new patron sainthood on the way. In the end, our most impactful papal bull-worthy popes will battle it out for the keys to the pearly gates and to be the popiest pope who ever poped. You can find Pontifax at pontifax.podbean.com or wherever you find your podcasts and on the Agora Podcast Network. The Civil War and Reconstruction was a pivotal era in American history. When a war was fought to save the Union and to free the slaves. And when the work to rebuild the nation after that war was over

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