Lesson #3: Sage Kings
Mar. 14th, 2002 11:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
camwynEvening, folks. Sorry it took me so long to get around to today's lesson. I'm skipping the disclaimer this time, you all know the drill already: I ain't a teacher, I ain't an authority, don't try using this at school, do not taunt Happy Fun Anthropology Person. I'm also getting today's pulp survival tip out of the way first:
3. Determine the prevailing mythos of your movie, and make sure at least two people in your party - preferably three - can both speak and read that mythos' language with a high degree of fluency.
Okay, then.
Since we're still in the realm of legend more than pure-factual history, I'm going to skip over several people who get mentioned as rulers in various accounts. The people we're concerned with tonight are three men who were forever after looked up to as models of how an emperor ought to be. Being idealized to that extent tends to indicate that the person talked about probably has more than his fair share of legend to him, but that's okay. This is more or less the point at which history begins, and that's a little fuzzy for any culture. The period is considered something of a Golden Age, and all I"m going to say about that is that the Greeks couldn't even be bothered to come up with stories about specific places or people during their legendary Golden Age, as far as I recall. They just said 'ooh, it happened, and then people got bad, and then it was the Silver Age, and then people got worse, and then, and then...' Bah.
Here, however, we have names, and the first of them is Yao. Yao is considered to be the dawn of authentic history, and his reign is believed to have fallen sometime around 2400 or so BCE. He's considered one of the 'Wu Di', or Five Kings. You may recall the Romans had a group of Five Good Emperors; this is like that. Only simultaneously less impressive, because the Middle Kingdom wasn't a proper empire yet so Yao was more of a High King than an Emperor, and more impressive, because Confucian scholars considered him one of the greatest models of how to behave and how to run things that any leader could have. (As opposed to the Roman Five Good Emperors, who were considered very good rulers who weren't slightly further around the bend than Giggling Lord Smince.) His first official act was to issue an improved calendar, simultaneously endearing him to farmers and priestly types alike. You've got to keep good track of the seasons to know when to plant, after all, and a ritual conducted at the wrong time of year is a sure recipe for disaster. He was said to be a humble and wise man, very compassionate towards his people. Several of the major Chinese legends take place during his reign, my favourite being the one about the ten suns and Yi the Archer. There's too many versions of that to go into here. Suffice it to say that every story I've ever seen or heard about Yao has indicated that his greatest concern was for the welfare of the people under his rule, and that he lived very simply, a sharp contrast to later rulers. Apparently it worked pretty well, because he reigned for a long time, and it was generally prosperous, right up until about the sixty-first year of his rule.
Yeah, sixty-one years. I did tell you there was some legendary contamination involved here.
The sixty-first year was the point at which the flood began. Nearly every culture has a flood legend somewhere in its histories, and China is no exception. This one was bad, lasting thirteen years or more, if the stories are to be believed. Now, in most cultures I know of, the flood myth ends with some lucky bunch of people hiding out somewhere until the water goes away, usually on a boat. Yao wasn't having any of that, thanks. He looked around his court and tapped one of his ministers on the shoulder and said 'you - fix this'. The guy tried, to be sure, but the stories say the job got away from him and extended clear into the reign of the next emperor. It took his son to end the whole sorry mess. Not by putting people into boats, mind you - but by engineering. Strip out the stuff about magic soil and being the son of a man who could change into the shape of a bear, and what you basically have is someone who looked at the Great Flood and started building dams and digging ditches. Running away? Please. Not gonna happen. He plugged enough holes and drained enough flood plains that the land won out over the waters. Took eight years, but eventually his engineering saved the country, and this service was well remembered - but we'll hear more about him later.
Sorry. I went to an engineering college. You have to love someone who became a heroic forefather to his country by massive acts of civil engineering.
Anyway, life went on as usual, even though Yao hadn't been able to bring the Yellow River and the floods in line without a whole lot of help. Eventually he looked around and did something that later scholars considered one more hallmark of the Truly Cool Ruler: decided that there was no way he was gonna hand the job off to his son. Nope. The kid was bright, but he had problems, and his only real passion was Weiqi (you probably know it as Go). Yao therefore figured it was time to pick the best man for the job, instead. The advisors suggested pulling someone from among the people, so Yao gave it some thought. The fellow who seemed best came from a family chock full of Very Bad People - Dad was a criminal, Mom was dishonest, his younger brother was a horribly insolent brat. But the guy himself was honest, loyal, humble, hard-working, and so on, even though he'd been forced to work as a swineherd. Given the circumstances you can't really blame Yao for putting the guy through a test first, but after Yu Shun married two of his daughters and handled the governance of several parts of the country very well, Yao was happy. He abdicated the throne in favour of someone he figured was obviously acceptable to Heaven, and Shun became Emperor.
Shun wasn't exactly born to the position of emperor and he knew it, so he made extra sure to pick wise and helpful advisors. This combination of modesty and diligence made him extremely popular. He's credited with codifying morality, which is another thing you don't see in Roman emperors. The fact that he got hold of the flood manager's son and put him to work didn't hurt either. When the nine rivers were led out to sea and the land returned, Shun knew he had a winner on his hands. Good thing, too- Shun had a lot of accomplishments including the establishment of an educational system, and a number of sons, but none of the sons were righteous.
The tamer of floods, on the other hand, had it all going for him. His name was Yu, and his dedication to duty was legendary. The story is that he only stayed with his wife a few days after their wedding before heading out into the field to battle the flooding Yellow River, and that he passed his house three times during the struggle with the waters but didn't so much as pay his family a visit on the grounds that 'I don't have a family until the flood is under control". Given a field test as the ruler of a portion of the kingdom by Shun, Yu was eventually acclaimed as beyond a doubt the best man for the job. It's said he tried several times to refuse his position on the grounds of insufficient virtue. Nobody believed him. Eventually, he became Emperor, and Shun died on a tour of the south some 18 years after he ascended the throne.
Yu was known for maintaining an open-door policy thousands of years before any books on managerial secrets ever advocated such a thing. You wanted to talk to the ruler about proper virtue, or misconduct, or impotant news, or personal grievances, or even an appeal from the decisions of one of the judges, you could get in to see him and talk about it. Becoming an Emperor by essentially wresting your country back from the hands of a raging angry river is the kind of thing that gives a man a good clear impression of what day to day life is like, I imagine. His dedication to the welfare of his kingdom and his people earned him a place in the hearts of his country... well, pretty much forever. The site said to be his mausoleum is one of China's current major cultural sites. His only real flaw, so far as I can tell, is that he was a little more tetchy about punctuality than is strictly healthy. Something about executing people who were late to his committee meetings. All things considered, that's a pretty darn minor failing in an emperor. In his old age he chose a fellow named Bo Yi to succeed him. Didn't work. At least one of his few times in his own household, he'd managed to father a son, and that son apparently wanted to follow in his father's footsteps. Bo Yi either died or was murdered or was set aside, depending on which story you read, and Qi took over. This was the beginning of the first real dynasty in China, called the Xia - or Hsia, if you're reading Larry Gonick. There's only a handful of archaeological traces of them, but those traces are just about enough to show that they existed beyond myth after all...
That'll be it for now, I think. I'm sorry it's all so fuzzy this time. Next time around . . . well, we'll see what gets covered next time, but I'm starting to get frustrated with rendering the language in English. The history lesson will be accompanied by a brief overview of romanization of Chinese words, including an explanation of why my Akashic has a different spelling to his family name than all the other characters in his family. See you then.
3. Determine the prevailing mythos of your movie, and make sure at least two people in your party - preferably three - can both speak and read that mythos' language with a high degree of fluency.
Okay, then.
Since we're still in the realm of legend more than pure-factual history, I'm going to skip over several people who get mentioned as rulers in various accounts. The people we're concerned with tonight are three men who were forever after looked up to as models of how an emperor ought to be. Being idealized to that extent tends to indicate that the person talked about probably has more than his fair share of legend to him, but that's okay. This is more or less the point at which history begins, and that's a little fuzzy for any culture. The period is considered something of a Golden Age, and all I"m going to say about that is that the Greeks couldn't even be bothered to come up with stories about specific places or people during their legendary Golden Age, as far as I recall. They just said 'ooh, it happened, and then people got bad, and then it was the Silver Age, and then people got worse, and then, and then...' Bah.
Here, however, we have names, and the first of them is Yao. Yao is considered to be the dawn of authentic history, and his reign is believed to have fallen sometime around 2400 or so BCE. He's considered one of the 'Wu Di', or Five Kings. You may recall the Romans had a group of Five Good Emperors; this is like that. Only simultaneously less impressive, because the Middle Kingdom wasn't a proper empire yet so Yao was more of a High King than an Emperor, and more impressive, because Confucian scholars considered him one of the greatest models of how to behave and how to run things that any leader could have. (As opposed to the Roman Five Good Emperors, who were considered very good rulers who weren't slightly further around the bend than Giggling Lord Smince.) His first official act was to issue an improved calendar, simultaneously endearing him to farmers and priestly types alike. You've got to keep good track of the seasons to know when to plant, after all, and a ritual conducted at the wrong time of year is a sure recipe for disaster. He was said to be a humble and wise man, very compassionate towards his people. Several of the major Chinese legends take place during his reign, my favourite being the one about the ten suns and Yi the Archer. There's too many versions of that to go into here. Suffice it to say that every story I've ever seen or heard about Yao has indicated that his greatest concern was for the welfare of the people under his rule, and that he lived very simply, a sharp contrast to later rulers. Apparently it worked pretty well, because he reigned for a long time, and it was generally prosperous, right up until about the sixty-first year of his rule.
Yeah, sixty-one years. I did tell you there was some legendary contamination involved here.
The sixty-first year was the point at which the flood began. Nearly every culture has a flood legend somewhere in its histories, and China is no exception. This one was bad, lasting thirteen years or more, if the stories are to be believed. Now, in most cultures I know of, the flood myth ends with some lucky bunch of people hiding out somewhere until the water goes away, usually on a boat. Yao wasn't having any of that, thanks. He looked around his court and tapped one of his ministers on the shoulder and said 'you - fix this'. The guy tried, to be sure, but the stories say the job got away from him and extended clear into the reign of the next emperor. It took his son to end the whole sorry mess. Not by putting people into boats, mind you - but by engineering. Strip out the stuff about magic soil and being the son of a man who could change into the shape of a bear, and what you basically have is someone who looked at the Great Flood and started building dams and digging ditches. Running away? Please. Not gonna happen. He plugged enough holes and drained enough flood plains that the land won out over the waters. Took eight years, but eventually his engineering saved the country, and this service was well remembered - but we'll hear more about him later.
Sorry. I went to an engineering college. You have to love someone who became a heroic forefather to his country by massive acts of civil engineering.
Anyway, life went on as usual, even though Yao hadn't been able to bring the Yellow River and the floods in line without a whole lot of help. Eventually he looked around and did something that later scholars considered one more hallmark of the Truly Cool Ruler: decided that there was no way he was gonna hand the job off to his son. Nope. The kid was bright, but he had problems, and his only real passion was Weiqi (you probably know it as Go). Yao therefore figured it was time to pick the best man for the job, instead. The advisors suggested pulling someone from among the people, so Yao gave it some thought. The fellow who seemed best came from a family chock full of Very Bad People - Dad was a criminal, Mom was dishonest, his younger brother was a horribly insolent brat. But the guy himself was honest, loyal, humble, hard-working, and so on, even though he'd been forced to work as a swineherd. Given the circumstances you can't really blame Yao for putting the guy through a test first, but after Yu Shun married two of his daughters and handled the governance of several parts of the country very well, Yao was happy. He abdicated the throne in favour of someone he figured was obviously acceptable to Heaven, and Shun became Emperor.
Shun wasn't exactly born to the position of emperor and he knew it, so he made extra sure to pick wise and helpful advisors. This combination of modesty and diligence made him extremely popular. He's credited with codifying morality, which is another thing you don't see in Roman emperors. The fact that he got hold of the flood manager's son and put him to work didn't hurt either. When the nine rivers were led out to sea and the land returned, Shun knew he had a winner on his hands. Good thing, too- Shun had a lot of accomplishments including the establishment of an educational system, and a number of sons, but none of the sons were righteous.
The tamer of floods, on the other hand, had it all going for him. His name was Yu, and his dedication to duty was legendary. The story is that he only stayed with his wife a few days after their wedding before heading out into the field to battle the flooding Yellow River, and that he passed his house three times during the struggle with the waters but didn't so much as pay his family a visit on the grounds that 'I don't have a family until the flood is under control". Given a field test as the ruler of a portion of the kingdom by Shun, Yu was eventually acclaimed as beyond a doubt the best man for the job. It's said he tried several times to refuse his position on the grounds of insufficient virtue. Nobody believed him. Eventually, he became Emperor, and Shun died on a tour of the south some 18 years after he ascended the throne.
Yu was known for maintaining an open-door policy thousands of years before any books on managerial secrets ever advocated such a thing. You wanted to talk to the ruler about proper virtue, or misconduct, or impotant news, or personal grievances, or even an appeal from the decisions of one of the judges, you could get in to see him and talk about it. Becoming an Emperor by essentially wresting your country back from the hands of a raging angry river is the kind of thing that gives a man a good clear impression of what day to day life is like, I imagine. His dedication to the welfare of his kingdom and his people earned him a place in the hearts of his country... well, pretty much forever. The site said to be his mausoleum is one of China's current major cultural sites. His only real flaw, so far as I can tell, is that he was a little more tetchy about punctuality than is strictly healthy. Something about executing people who were late to his committee meetings. All things considered, that's a pretty darn minor failing in an emperor. In his old age he chose a fellow named Bo Yi to succeed him. Didn't work. At least one of his few times in his own household, he'd managed to father a son, and that son apparently wanted to follow in his father's footsteps. Bo Yi either died or was murdered or was set aside, depending on which story you read, and Qi took over. This was the beginning of the first real dynasty in China, called the Xia - or Hsia, if you're reading Larry Gonick. There's only a handful of archaeological traces of them, but those traces are just about enough to show that they existed beyond myth after all...
That'll be it for now, I think. I'm sorry it's all so fuzzy this time. Next time around . . . well, we'll see what gets covered next time, but I'm starting to get frustrated with rendering the language in English. The history lesson will be accompanied by a brief overview of romanization of Chinese words, including an explanation of why my Akashic has a different spelling to his family name than all the other characters in his family. See you then.
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no subject
Date: 2002-03-14 11:24 pm (UTC)Speaking of flood legends, there's one in which humanity is saved through one man (Nu Hua) who built a boat, stowed his wife and kids on it and survived the flood, repaired the heavens with a rainbow, and became the ancestor (or created) the next generation of men. Now, this story could be dismissed as a corruption of the Noah story, since Nu Hua (meaning "Woman-Flower") isn't your typically masculine name, except for a couple of things.
One, the British Sinologist ETC Werner traced this story to Lieh Zi, a Taoist who lived around the 5th Century BC, long before the West is supposed to have encountered the Chinese. Now, Werner may have gotten his fact wrong or made the whole thing up, except...
Two, the Chinese word for "boat", "chuan" in Mandarin, is a pictogram made out of three components.
The left component is the original pictogram for a boat viewed on its side ("zhou"), and the right side is made out of two words - the top is "eight" ("ba") (or possibly depending on how nitpicky you want to be with the writing, "several" - ji) and the bottom "mouth" ("kou"). Therefore, a boat with several or eight mouths, or more properly, several or eight people. Creationists have seized on this, because if you count Noah, his wife, his three sons and three daughters-in-law, there were exactly eight humans on the Ark. Remember the old Sunday School song, "And only eight were saved..."
I'm no Creationist - far from it, but you got to admit this is an intriguing little mystery here. How did the ancient pictogram of boat, which was known to the Japanese as far back as 400 AD, so it wasn't a modern creation, reflect the Judaic story of the Flood? Either the Cosmic Joker is laughing at us again, or Judaism reached much further into Asia than was previously known, or the Creationists may be right - at least in this aspect, and there was a Universal Flood and Noah did indeed exist.
Personally, I think it's time travellers. But that's just me.
no subject
Date: 2002-03-15 06:14 am (UTC)(Although it's worth mentioning that The Story of the Stone makes mention of a story that supposedly came from 'a tablet from the Cave of Yu'. This is that Yu. The tablets supposedly contained many secrets, instructions, and bits of wisdom, and the one mentioned in the book concerned the stone that was at the center of the novel's plot. Hughart knows his stuff, man. If you haven't read him already, go do it now. Then come back and scream along with me as we reveal, piece by piece, exactly how much Chinese history he purposely rearranged for the books. Honestly, I wish I'd had enough of a clue the first time I read them to understand his definition of 'Prolepsis' under Caveat Oriens in the very first book was a warning...)
no subject
Date: 2002-03-15 06:10 pm (UTC)