Ancient China [antikvár]

Introduction The earher history of China, both pohtical and cultural, has remained to western people largely unknown. China was to the Romans, in Gibbon's words, "remote and inaccessible"; so it continued, in all senses, until the 19th century, and its earlier history has been equally obscure to those who could not read the Chinese historical record. For this reason the Archaeological Exhibition provided by the present Chinese government, and shown in all the major capitals of the western world in 1973 and subsequent years, came as a surprise, and almost as a source of bewilderment, to many who saw it. They did not find the familiar objects of well-known Chinese art: very little porcelain, and that late in the periods represented; hardly any of the famous landscape painting; but a rich display of antique bronzes, early fine pottery, frescoes and sculp-mres, both large and small, which seemed alien to the accepted forms of Chinese art. Yet this art is the formative background to and direct predecessor of the later tradition. In part it is the art of China before the advent of Buddhism; in the later examples, from the T'ang (618-906 ad), that new influence is clear and manifest. In the period of roughly 3,000 years from the earhest record of Chinese art and civilization to the end of the T'ang, the era which can be described as "ancient" (and medieval) China, as opposed to modem or recent, there had been a long and varied series of changes and developments, not only in art but also in the social, religious and political aspects of society. From an originally tribal, then feudal, society, China had emerged as a centralized empire covering approximately the same area as the modern Peoples' Republic. The foundation thus laid was built upon, and continued from T'ang times until the present day: China, under changing dynasties and regimes, is still essentially the centrally organized and administered empire which the T'ang revived and transmitted as the national ideal. For these reasons, just as European civilization would be hardly inteUigible if nothing were known of its Classical and later development before the Renaissance - the "rebirth" of the ancient culture in what was then the contemporary setting - so Chinese civilization cannot be properly assessed without knowledge of its classical background and T'ang "renaissance." In the 19th and early 20th centuries it was reasonable for the west to disregard China: a remote, if no longer inaccessible, country clearly in political decline, and apparently also in a state of cultural stagnation. The general inabihty to read the Chinese language, combined with the almost exclusive interest in the classical past among the few who had this skill, contributed to the widespread, almost universal, belief that China had no history other than a dreary and repetitious "cycle of Cathay" - not worth "one glorious hour" of Europe's dramatic story. It also led to a total disregard of the forces already stirring in Chinese society, which were, in a confused and protracted series of crises, to end in the Chinese Revolution of our time and the foundation of the present regime. But that event can no longer be disregarded: the policies of aloof disdain for developments unwelcome or judged menacing have been abandoned. There is now a need to know, to assess and to imderstand not only what has recently happened, but something of the national heritage which has been revived, discarded or modified by the Chinese people themselves who, acting under their own leadership, accept or reject, in part or altogether, the examples and the theories which as a modern society China has received from the rest of the world. The judgments and views of observers of the modern transformation have now been widely disseminated; less has been done to inform the general public concerning the ancient and middle periods of Chinese history and civilization. This book is an attempt to contribute to filling this gap, by relating the history of the Chinese people in earlier ages to the art they produced, a history still vivid and relevant to the Chinese of today, and an art which is the direct ancestor of that which followed in the past five centuries. The development of a culture is to some degree determined by the geographical environment in which it grows. In the west we do not always give great weight to this consideration; we accept that there is a difference between the civilizations of western and eastern Europe, or between both of these and that of western Asia, but we do not usually stress the environmental reasons for this, though we do give great weight to ethnic and historical causes. In China the question has to be treated from a different point of view. The area in which the Chinese civilization arose and spread is very sharply defined and geographically isolated from the neighboring regions, which have very diverse characters and climates. The reason for the individuality of the Chinese culture, and its independence from outside influences for a very long formative period, lies therefore in the simple fact that the Chinese could not communicate with any other people of comparable development, and thus made a society with marked peculiarities of both material and intellectual achievement.