Lesson #2: The Yellow Emperor, and writing.

[camwyn]

Hey hey. Everyone ready for the next lesson? Cool. Let's just put y'all through the disclaimer first. . .

I am not a history teacher. I am not a historian of any kind. Nothing historical that I have written has ever been published. I have never even done a term paper on Chinese history. The closest I've ever been to China was that once I stood on the western coast of Vancouver Island and looked over the Pacific in China's direction. The closest I get to being any kind of pedagogical authority is that my grandmother was an American history teacher. Use of this information will probably not help you in school and may cause you to erupt in hives or something. I take no responsibility for that, although I'd like to suggest Aveeno if the hives happen to be itchy and you're not allergic to oats.



Last time around we'd gotten as far as Shen Nong. Lovely guy, really, but today we're going to leave him behind and move forward to the time of the Yellow Emperor. We're just about out of the dawn-of-civilization stuff by now; basically, if it wasn't nailed down by Fu Xi or Shen Nong or the other guys from the last history lesson, the Yellow Emperor or his wife probably did it.

This guy's name was Huang Di, and the list of his inventions and creations reads like something you'd see in a biography of a neolithic Leonardo da Vinci. No big surprise, really; we're talking about a culture that seriously values wisdom in their kings. Besides, this is really early on. Crack open a Bible to one of the early bits of Genesis and start flipping through the stuff that comes immediately after the incident with the snake and the fruit. You'll get a similar list of 'this one guy, he did x and y and z, and this other guy, he invented musical instruments and he made 'em out of bronze and EVERY SINGLE PERSON IN THE WHOLE WORLD who makes musical instruments, they're descended from him or something'. Having a name to hang early inventions on is a popular theme in most ancient cultures, I think. And let's face it - if you were living five thousand years ago in the Chinese civilization growing up in the Yellow River Valley, and someone came along and said 'hey, I know how to predict what the heavens are going to do, and I can make a real boat, not just this hollowed-out log thing, plus I know how to use those weird black stones that stick to other stones to tell what direction I'm going even when the stars aren't out', you'd be impressed too. I know I would.

He didn't invent the wheel, but he got the idea to the point where a useful cart could be made from it. He's said to have figured out the basic laws of astronomy and used 'em to put together the first calendar used by the Chinese people. He got marked down as the guy who invented the boat, although I don't know the details on that - I'm assuming the stories mean actual bits-of-wood-fastened-together boat, not dugout canoe or lashed-together raft. He's even got his name all over China's first medical textbook, the Neijing - the Yellow Emperor's Classic of Medicine. It's composed of lengthy conversations between him and his physician and a couple of other advisors at the court. Great stuff.

His wife was a woman named Lei Zu, and she's got silk and sericulture to her credit. There's legends about deities and stuff being responsible for silk, particularly one by the name of Horsehead (that's a fun story, falling into the category of 'think before spouting off about who you'd be willing to marry if only thus-and-such happened'), but Lei Zu was the one who really nailed it down. Most likely silk got first noticed by accident. All it really takes is one good famine and people start boiling anything in sight to use as food; probably at some point during a very bad year, some ancient inhabitant of the Yellow River valley got so desperate as to start throwing caterpillar cocoons into the pot. Imagine their surprise when the cocoons they were boiling started unraveling and yielding these amazingly long and supple strands of… something. That's got to have been freaky - I mean, that was supposed to be dinner, right? What the hell happened in the pot?

Exactly where it went from there no one knows, but if the legends are right the queen gave this stuff a good long look and decided that she liked the idea. Next thing you know she's figured out how to weave it and she's got other folks working on the idea, too - plus she's determined where the stuff comes from (specific caterpillar cocoons) and what the critters that produce it need (mulberry leaves). Bam, we have sericulture. Sheep? Who needs sheep?

One of the things you really have to hand Huang Di is that he didn't hog all the inventions for himself. He liked talented people, the old accounts say, and he encouraged 'em big-time at his court. That whole thing with the black rocks - natural magnets? Once he realized that they always aligned themselves in a particular direction, he decided that this had to be significant. South - the direction the Chinese always felt they pointed in - had to be a pretty important direction if it could affect the stones that way. He wanted a cart or chariot that'd allow the passenger to face the sacred direction all the time. Huang Di came up with the idea and the plans, but it was one of the craftsmen at his court, a guy named Fang Bo, who actually built the south-pointing chariot. Other folks came up with stuff like the twelve-tone musical scale, measuring instruments, and so on. If you had a good brain and bright ideas that'd be good for a growing civilization, the Yellow Emperor wanted to hear from you.

I should point out here that one of the others at his court is credited with the invention of pictographs, but this is almost certainly as much of a formal credit tacked onto one person as 'Lei Zu invented sericulture and silk'. Pictographs are a concept of supreme importance to Chinese writing, and it's only natural to want to credit somebody specific with coming up with such an amazing idea. The fact is that they're incredibly ancient. If anything, the Yellow Emperor's ideas man probably codified existing ones or at least tried to catalog them. We're talking serious Stone Age antecedents here. . .

See, like any other early humans, the proto-Chinese wanted answers about the future. In some parts of the world people went about getting their answers by ecstatic techniques like shamanism and interesting inhalants. (Don't blame me for the fact that the ancient Greeks figured the best way to get a handle on the future was to have an attractive woman sit over a crack in the ground and get high on burning plant matter. I didn't make the Oracle at Delphi up.) Probably this happened in proto-Chinese civilization too, but the most popular means of augury, far and away, involved hot stuff and animal parts. Remember Fu Xi and his trigrams? Remember how he got them from staring at a tortoise shell? It apparently got a lot easier to discern the patterns if you had a turtle dinner first. Boil the shell in conjunction with the proper rituals, then go looking for your markings. Later generations would call this 'consulting the tortoise'. It was a different method of augury that gave rise to writing, though.

Exactly how the custom got started I don't know, but someone noticed that if you pressed very hot material against bone or shell, it would crack. The ancient priests and wisdom figures decided this sounded like a great way to ask the supernatural what was going on, and who could blame them? It's got to have been an unusual phenomenon. . . anyway, what happened was that they'd take a likely looking bone (scapulas were popular) and make marks on 'em to indicate possible answers to a question. Then they'd stick the bone in the fire, or they'd stick a poker in the fire and put the poker to the bone and wait for the cracks to start. Whichever way the cracks ran lay the answer.

The great thing about a custom like this is that it involves durable materials. Once an oracle bone was used, it was pretty much put aside and not used again. Archaeology revolves around bones and sherds, especially when it comes to writing. (We know a great deal of early Greek writing from the practice of scribbling notes or names on ostraka - fragments of pottery.) The most ancient samples of Chinese writing in the world are on recovered oracle bones. It's fascinating how the development of the ideograms of today can be traced back to the first vaguely representational pictographic squiggles and scribbles on the shoulder bones of domestic animals. Oh, the story is that they're dragon bones - apparently there was a belief that dragons shed their bones each year the way snakes do, although I can't find confirmation of this belief - but unless dragons are the size of oxen, pigs, and so on, the bones are pretty much those of domestic animals.

Those of you who've read Barry Hughart's Bridge of Birds may remember a segment in the book where Ox gets so freaked out by the prospect of going up against the Duke of Ch'in that he runs off to his childhood cave and starts fooling with the bones there - that's this ritual. Ox says that Master Li says the oracle bones from the city of An-yang are the only solid evidence that the Shang dynasty actually existed, but this is a little bit of an exaggeration. There's other artifacts - not many, but they exist - and there's some older artifacts as well. The point is that Ox was turning to a tradition stretching back into the dawn of recorded time. The pictures used in that tradition were stylized over time to make them simpler to draw, and new pictures were added. As the years went by the markings became less and less like pictures, and more and more formalized. Some concepts - 'mountain', for example - were pretty easy to represent. Some were more abstract, like 'home', so they started combining the drawings for things they felt went together to describe the concept pretty well. ('Home', the books tell me, is represented by the mark that means 'pig' under a mark that looks like a roof. Agricultural folks know their priorities.) They also sometimes combined signs to indicate that one word was pronounced very much like another word, whether they had any kind of similar meaning or not.

Eventually it got to the point where we are today - thousands upon thousands of characters, each representing a meaning rather than a sound, although possibly with sound cues imbedded. Words that don't have existing characters still get 'em put together the way they always did; 'computer', for example, is written with the character for 'electric' next to the character for 'brain'. Before you make any comments about this, please allow me to remind you that the thing that you use to call your friends and family and talk to them from your home was given its name from the Greek words for 'distance' (tele) and 'talk' (phonos). It's the same no matter where you go. It's just a little more visually apparent in the Chinese written language, that's all.

But we've drifted a long way from the histories today. I felt the diversion was warranted, just because the writing system can be kind of a scary prospect to people unfamiliar with it. And, well, because it's kind of exciting to realize that it goes back in an essentially unbroken line back to a time when so much of the rest of the world was still relying on oral expression. Egyptian hieroglyphics can make a similar age claim, but it's not as if they developed into the primary system of writing used by over a billion people - at least not as far as I know. (I think demotic script might be a different story.) The pictograms credited to the time of the Yellow Emperor became the language we know today, and that's a hell of a thing for any linguistic invention to pull off.

I promised you the three sage-kings last time, and I'm really sorry I didn't get to put them in this entry. The writing thing kinda distracted me. You'll meet Yao, Shun, and Yu in the next lesson. (For the record, Yu is the one Stargate SG1 said was a Gou'ald - to his credit, one of the more benevolent Gou'ald on record.)

Today's pulp survival tip is #167:The only way paper walls can protect you against anything is if an accredited practitioner of the supernatural arts has painted charms or sigils on them. Make every effort possible to sleep in an area with walls a little less vulnerable to being sliced open with a butter knife.

Comments

[khaosworks.livejournal.com]

To jump ahead of ourselves a little - while pictograms date back to the Shang period, they continued to evolve over the centuries. However, each individual province, or tribe, or area had its own spoken language as well. It was only with the advent of the Chin dynasty, and the first true Emperor of China - Chin Shi Huangdi, that the Chinese written language became standardized. This meant that no matter where you were from in China, and no matter what dialect of Chinese you spoke, you could still communicate with each other because even if you pronounced the words differently, your written language was still the same.

Now, how amazing this is cannot be emphasized more. Consider, even though, say French and English and Italian share the same Roman characters, the languages are completely different and you still have to translate. With Chinese, no matter if you pronounce "water" as 'shui'(Mandarin), or 'shoei' (Cantonese), or 'jwee (Hokkien)', the word is the same and can be understood.

It means that today, we can read ancient Chinese literature a lot easier than we can, say, read Chaucer, because the written language has remained essentially unchanged except for a few cosmetic alterations. Even what we don't know can more or less be deduced from the context and from deconstructing the pictograms.

When the West began to penetrate into China, it was suggested to the Chinese that they switch to Roman characters to facilitiate communication. The counter-proposal by the Chinese was that the West switch to pictographs so everyone could understand each other.

The proposal was never raised again.

[camwyn]

You mean that was actually true? Cool. The suggested switch to pictographs, I mean. I had read about that in Gonick's Cartoon History of the Universe, but it was mentioned briefly in a footnote, and I didn't know his source. It's a lovely thought, though. I've pondered it more than a few times as I've had to deal with crap like reading Dante Alighieri in the original proto-Italian. (Wasn't proper Italian until he came along and made it an Officially Okay language, instead of everyone clinging to Latin's last legs.) Would've been nice, too, when we were dealing with Beowulf in school... oh, well.

Thanks for the assistance with these, btw. I really do appreciate it.

[khaosworks.livejournal.com]

I'd heard it mentioned before I read it in Gonick's Cartoon History - so while I can't verify the source, it's a story that's been told before (true or not, well...).

[khaosworks.livejournal.com]

Irrespective of whether the story is true or not, let me just go on a bit about the impact of Shi Huangdi's language reform. Not only did this mean greater unity throughout the empire, because people could communicate with ease, but it also had far reaching consequences. When the Mongols came into China, they had no written language of their own. So to communicate effectively with their conquered peoples, they had to adopt the Chinese written language - and hence, they had to learn how to speak it in any number of dialects. In the end, the Chinese language became their own language. The conquered had assimilated the conquerers!

Even the Manchus had to deal with using Chinese because the gigantic bureaucracy they inherited ran most efficiently because of the nature of the language. In a sense, the Chinese people have never been truly conquered, and the inassailability of the culture can be said to be in part due to the common language. Negative effects of course include the generally insular and xenophobic attitudes of the Chinese people as well...

Anyway, I like history, so this gives me a chance to spout off a bit. I've forgotten most of what I know about Chinese history, although I used to get top marks in it in high school. Right now you're talking about stuff that is legendary, and wasn't covered in great detail anyway, but it's stimulating some memories.

History, despite appearances, isn't just about dates and times, and it's not necessarily always linear. There are branches, tributaries, parallel lines, events whose impact can only be discerned when you look at it from a perspective of millennia - I'm one of those who believe that history, and time, has an architecture that can be followed. Also, at its core, it's a damn good story.

[camwyn]

Coming at this from the point of view of someone whose ancestors spent most of their history offing each other - Italians on one side, Northern Irish, English, and Scots on the other (plus some Bavarians thrown in just for fun) - a country with a history as massive as China's, and a written tradition as long as theirs, is just damned impressive. I mean, my mother's family comes of part-Etruscan blood. Their language? Dead. Gone. Kaput. Nobody understands it any more, because the biggest available sample of the damned stuff is written on the wrappings of a mummy found in Zagreb years ago. They got assimilated into the Roman Empire and vanished, leaving behind clusters of pale people with reddish hair and light eyes in regions the Celts never got to. My father's family? Like I said, Ulstermen, Englishmen, Scots, and Catholic Germans. I have to admit I look at Chinese history and find myself thinking of what Disraeli allegedly said to someone in Parliament who made a disparaging comment about his Judaism - "when the ancestors of the right honourable gentleman were brutal savages in an unknown island, mine were priests in the temple of Solomon."

The legends will start giving way to proper history soon enough. I figure it helps to lay down a foundation, and I've always been fond of foundational myths anyway. Then again, my majors were anthropology and religion; that just naturally flings legends into the student's face until they stick. (I should mention at this point that I got my professor to use several large sectors of the Gonick book in our Asian Religions course, as well as the Buddhism course I took the next semester.) In the meantime, though, I have to get hold of Sima Qian and start reading like crazy.