At last at last at last!

[camwyn]

I finally got off my miserable bum and finished another Chinese History Update!



Okay, folks. Welcome to the last entry (I am so not going to do the Spring and Autumn period!) dealing with the Zhou dynasty, however indirectly that might be done. This one's been a long time in coming and I really haven't got any excuse for it; I suppose I could blame it on school, work, what have you, but the fact of the matter is that it just sort of slipped by the wayside on my part. My apologies to all of you, as we've still got several thousand years of history to go with the Middle Kingdom and this kind of pace isn't helping at all.

The distinction between the Warring States period and the times before it is a little arbitrary. With dynasties you generally get nice clean markers - emperors die, new emperors get clapped on the throne - but in this case there was still technically a dynasty on the throne. That'd be our old buddies the Zhou. Remember, a few lessons back, the Zhou found themselves staring an especially unpleasant fact in the face? That fact was this: nobody gave a rat's patoot about them any more. They were still enthroned, sorta, but they were there because SOMEBODY had to run the official sacrifices and keep giving Heaven the impression that people were doing exactly as they were supposed to. Meanwhile, the individual states that had composed the Middle Kingdom were busy beating the crap out of each other; the regional rulers had given off calling themselves dukes or lords or hegemons or whatever and just went straight to the big title: wang, or king.

Those of you who read Penny Arcade? Shut up.

Ahem. The years of the Zhou dynasty are pretty neatly divided by the year in which they ran like scared bunnies for the city of Loyang - 771 BCE. (Hey, I don't blame them for running either. Incoming barbarians would scare me, too.) Before that? Western Zhou. After that? Eastern Zhou. And the Eastern Zhou years were divided too, thanks to writers like Confucius. The early portion of the Eastern Zhou period (early being a relative term, we're talking centuries here) is referred to as the Spring and Autumn period. The later centuries are the Warring States period. Unfortunately, the exact point of the change is a matter of debate - I've seen 475 BCE, 401 BCE, 499 BCE, and a couple of other years given as the start of this time frame. I believe the commonly used marker for the date in question is the destruction of the ruling family of the Qi state, but given that you generally record exactly when you've offed all your enemies, the lack of a really definite date is enough to make me suspicious. The important thing to know is that the Middle Kingdom had fallen into an awful lot of teeny tiny states to begin with (legend and popular history
put the count at 1,000) and that by this nebulous point within the fifth century BCE, they'd been fighting for AGES. Long enough that the little guys got swallowed up and annexed to / assimilated into the big guys. If you nose around the Daodejing long enough you'll find a few segments where the author blithely talks about how a small state is best off if it gets absorbed by a larger state, rather than trying to make itself a larger state, because this is part of the natural way. Well, he wasn't talking empty theory, unlike SOME philosophers I know. He'd SEEN. You do what you can to survive.

These big guys were the states of Qin, Wei, Hann, Zhao, Yan, Qi, and Chu. You can find a pretty nice map of these guys here
- thank the nice people at chinahistory.de while you're at it, they've been very helpful as a source. ("Wait a minute," I can hear some of you saying, "since when does Chinese use doubled consonants for anything at all?" Well, my friends, it doesn't. That's a Western invention to distinguish the state of Han(n) from the Han Dynasty, which won't be coming around for a few lessons yet. The characters used in Chinese are different. The sound is the same in English. Now be still and let me finish the lesson.) These states' rulers proclaimed themselves kings, happily left our buddies in Loyang to tend the altars of grain and soil, and got to the serious business of trying to work out who REALLY ought to be in charge. You had serious armies being built, fortifications being put into place, gigantic public-works projects like a number of individual walls along the northern border, irrigation projects being dug all over the place, you name it - everyone was trying to centralize at once and everyone thought that they, specifically, ought to be the center.

We'll pause for a moment while I dig through my history books and figure out if we're talking about ancient China or medieval Europe. Seriously, does this or does this not sound like the beginnings of European feudalism, only with the Pope being slightly less spiritually scary? The Zhou kings couldn't excommunicate you personally... anyway.

The rulers of Qin and Hann and Zhao and everybody else left standing were jockeying for position - preferably the central position, in the fertile plains at the heart of the empire - and that meant a lot of alliances and wars and betrayals and fascinating soap-opera-like stories of deception and bloodshed. It also meant some fairly impressive military minds got to running around, to whom even modern businessmen pay a great deal of respect.

That's right, folks: instead of Spring and Autumn Period, today we're covering Sun Tzu and the Classical Kickers of Ass.

Sun Tzu, also known as Sun Zi or Sunzi (rassum frassum Wade-Giles vs. Pinyin mumble mutter growl), was born in 535 BCE under the name Sun Wu in the state of Chi. He's credited with being the author of the prime candidate for oldest surviving military thesis in the world, The Art of War. You can find the entire online text as translated by Lionel Giles here. For a good chunk of their history, at least according to the surviving accounts, pre-Warring States Chinese warlords had adhered to something vaguely like a code of chivalric combat. Not in terms of guys on horseback in shining armor, mind you. Chinese horses weren't up to the task, and nobody had that kind of armor anyway. No, this was Confucian gentlemanly behavior these men practised. I'm talking about guys like the Song Xiang Gong, the Duke of Song. In 638 BCE, His Nibs was at war with Chu - a pretty powerful state for all that the others considered it semi-barbarian at best. The Chu armies started crossing a river at one point, and an advisor suggested to the Duke that this'd be a great time to get down there and quite literally get medieval on their asses. Unfortunately, Duke Xiang had that code of gentlemanly honor drilled into him and said nope, wouldn't be honorable. The Chu armies got across and started trying to form up again, the advisor suggested that Song try now, and the Duke once more refused. The Duke is now mostly remembered to people outside China because Mao Zedong announced that 'We are not Duke Hsiang of Sung' in one of his speeches. That's what happens when you get half your army slaughtered and your own person wounded over a matter of failing to take advantage of a strategic situation. I know he was thinking mostly of his own country, but I can't help but wonder whether this wasn't perhaps part of what Terry Pratchett had in mind when he came up with some of the attitudes in Jingo...

Sun Tzu, needless to say, did not feel this way. He felt very strongly that the way to win a war was - surprise, surprise - through superior tactics and strategy rather than superior manners. His book reflects that, being an in-depth study of important factors and stratagems to keep in mind and take to heart when going to war. He understood the importance of maintaining morale, of handling desperate men, of different terrain types and their impact not only on direct combat, but on the supply lines that feed every army. He had a fondness for spies, as knowing your enemy's strengths, weaknesses, and layout made it possible to bring him low more quickly. 'Spies are the most important asset, because on them depends an army's ability to march.' (From the etext cited above.) He emphasized flexibility and adaptability, feeling that the most important thing was to win, rather than to look good or come off as a hero. True, you might have to retreat from a battlefield here or there in order to achieve your final goal, but in the end what counted was that your side was truly victorious.

Now, not everyone felt the same way, and given the history of China up to that point I can't really blame them. A king who's got a new strategist at the foot of his throne offering to show him how to truly sock it to his enemies is entitled to a little proof, right? Right. The quest for proof of what Sun Tzu could do gave rise to one of the most famous stories to come out of the Warring States period. Here's how it went down:

HO LU, KING OF WU: Oooh. Nice military treatise. Sun Tzu, I see you've got some material here on managing soldiers, which has been a problem in the past. Mind if I give it a test?

SUN TZU: Sure.

KING HO: I don't wanna interrupt the soldiers right now. Can we use women? I've got a harem.

SUN TZU: I don't see why not. It's all valid regardless of who you apply it to.

KING HO: Oh, cool! (calls out the concubines)

SUN TZU: Okay, ladies. Ninety of you over there, ninety of you over here. You two - you're the royal favourites - each of you gets to be commander of one division. Y'all know the difference between right and left, forward and back, right?

CONCUBINES: *giggle* Yes, sir.

SUN TZU: Oy. All right, when I say right face, you turn right.When I say left face, you turn left. When I say about face, you turn around. Got that?

CONCUBINES: *giggle* Yes, sir.

SUN TZU: *sigh* Here. Swords. Halberds. Hold 'em for me, would you? Great. *cues signal drummers* Okay, everybody... riiiiight face!

CONCUBINES: *burst out laughing*

SUN TZU: Your Majesty, if words of command are not clear and distinct, if orders are not thoroughly understood, then the general is to blame. Lemme explain this to the women again. . . Okay, ladies, we've gone over it again. Let's try this one more time. LEFT FACE!

CONCUBINES: *burst out laughing again*

SUN TZU: If words of command are not clear and distinct, if orders are not thoroughly understood, the general is to blame. But if his orders ARE clear, and the soldiers nevertheless disobey, then it is the fault of their officers. *points to favourites* Off with their heads.

CONCUBINES / KING HO: Eeeeeeeek!

SUN TZU: I told you what you were supposed to be doing, ladies.

KING HO: But but but -

SUN TZU: A general in the field is not always bound by his sovereign's orders. Sorry, your Majesty, but that's the way it is. Okay, let's see... you two, you're the new leaders. *ahem* Right face!

The concubines, it is said, 'went through all the evolutions, turning to the right or to the left, marching ahead or wheeling back, kneeling or standing, with perfect accuracy and precision, not venturing to utter a sound.' Sun Tzu then offered to let the king inspect the troops, but the king was kinda squicked by losing his two favourite girls and declined. Sun Tzu asked if he was more interested in words than deeds; stung, the king acknowledged that Sun Tzu was better at managing recalcitrant people than he was, and made him a general. Sun Tzu went on to stomp the living daylights out of Wu's neighbour state Chu - you know, the river-crossers - and stormed right up to the capital. His book's still in print. Pity about the concubines, but there it is.

Sun Tzu wasn't the only strategist rattling around, mind you. He had a grandson named Sun Pin, who was apparently almost as cunning as his granddad; there are scholars who think they may have been one and the same person. Honestly, if I ever get my hands on the people responsible for destroying so many of China's historical documents, they're joining the concubines. My personal favourite stratagem from this period in history is a Sun Pin one, involving a rather neat nighttime attack that must surely have provoked the invention of the Chinese word for 'd'oh!!'. See, Sun Pin's armies were in an area where they knew the enemy would be coming through shortly, but for various reasons were in no position to make a proper frontal assault. Knowing that the enemy armies were pretty well useless without their chief strategist, Sun Pin picked out a nice big tree and gave a guy a pot of paint. When the enemy armies arrived that night, the advance men reported seeing what looked like writing on a tree. The strategist was apparently something of an idiot, so he called for torches.

Am I the only one who sees this coming? Am I? Torches. At night. When you're at war. For looking at writing on a tree in the middle of nowhere.

Do I even need to mention that the writing said 'Pan Chuan dies under this tree' - and that Sun Pin had archers stationed not far away? Like I said, 'd'oh!'.

Other stratagems abounded, of course. One of the most effective - and most disturbing - involved an army of the state of Wei about two hundred years after Sun Tzu's time that fielded a forward line armed with very sharp swords. They had to have been very sharp, because according to the histories of the battle, the first thing they did after charging into the field was, er, decapitate themselves. Yes, you read that right - WHACK, thump thump thump. The enemy army was so freaked at the sight that they pretty much stood there going 'bwah?', and failed to recover in time to successfully defend against the rest of the army. It sounds counterintuitive to do something like this, but in point of fact this was one of the most eerily effective stratagems of the time. See, that front line wasn't composed of soldiers, per se. The men in the front were convicts who had been dragged out of prison by the government of their home state and given a choice: become suicide troops for us right now, or we start killing your family members. Given the importance of the family in China, the convicts miserably assented and marched off to die. I'm afraid it wasn't exactly a strategy you could repeat very often - sooner or later you'd run out of convicts, but more importantly to the planners, once word got out you'd run out of shock value.

Doubtless there are other practitioners of the ways of war from this time period who are worth hearing about, but I fear I haven't got access to material about them. I also seem to be without a reference to Barry Hughart today. That's all right, though. Our next lesson (at long long last!) is going to be about the Qin Dynasty, and trust me. There will be plenty to be said about the Tiger of Ch'in there. Plenty.