Lesson 5b: Fun Things About The Zhou
Mar. 24th, 2002 12:45 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
camwynEvening, folks. Sorry I haven't posted anything lately. It's been a busy week. I don't have much of an excuse beyond that. Tonight we're gonna cover a number of things that crop up during the Zhou Dynasty - social customs mostly. That might take two or three nights, though, because the Zhou cover more ground than pretty much any other dynasty in Chinese history. Not to mention that their time spanned the era known over an awful lot of planet for the sheer number of philosophers and philosophies it spawned. Tonight, though, I'm keeping it simple. And providing the pulp survival tip: #171. It's probably a good idea to check up on your plane's pilot every so often, especially if the cockpit has a door that leads anywhere other than into the main cabin of the plane.
All right, back to the lesson. !historian. !linguist. !responsible for your grades.
Let's jump right to the messy stuff, shall we? Eunuchs. Those of you who've ever played the RPG called Feng Shui have doubtless plopped eunuchs into the same mental class as Grand Viziers - that is to say, there's no such thing as a good one. Barry Hughart didn't do 'em any favours in Eight Skilled Gentlemen, either. Li the Cat- ouch. Nasty man. There's been some bad ones in history, sure, but there's been some bad examples of pretty much every category of people. I'm not gonna try and detail their history or behavior one way or another. I'm just going into them here because, well, the Zhou Dynasty is traditionally credited with introducing 'em on a big scale to government work.
They'd existed before the Zhou Dynasty, as it happens. It was part of ancient Chinese law that certain crimes got certain punishments, most of which were on the severe side. (Branding on the forehead, cutting off the nose, cutting off the feet, mutilation, and death. C'mon, it's the ancient world, pop open your local Bible and take a look at what they recommend you do to the daughter of a priest if the daughter is caught making oo-oo before she's married.) The exact details of 'mutilation' don't seem to be laid out in any of the material I have on hand right now, but my best guess is that it got nasty. It certainly produced some very unhappy men along the way.
Given that there were criminals around who were missing body parts and therefore not particularly suited for certain jobs, it became important for something to be done with these men. Apparently it wasn't uncommon for the ones who lost feet to be hired as park maintainers. After all, they weren't gonna run away particularly fast, and they couldn't really engage in chasing the game animals or hunting them themselves. Better to have 'em doing something that'd keep them from becoming beggars and drains on society, right? Right.
Same deal with the eunuchs. Fully ambulatory, fully functional in terms of hands and feet and senses of smell, just... in dire need of sitting down when it came time to pass water. (To the best of my knowledge, castration in ancient China was the really serious kind. Out come the parts, out comes the sickle, whack thunk all good. Well, to everybody except the guy, anyway.) Gotta be something to do with the guys. Let's see, hrm, where can we use men who aren't particularly inclined towards aggression any more and who can't cuckold the local lord thereby screwing up his line of father-to-son succession by introducing doubt into the whole question of paternity... Aah! Yup, there you go. Put 'em to work looking after the noblewomen and the subsidiary wives, concubines, playmates, etc. The Zhou thought this was just the greatest thing since steamed rice, thanks (I suppose) to that inheritance plan of theirs, and rather enthusiastically started snapping up the unfortunates who'd been made that way by the law. Exactly when it started being done in large numbers for the express purpose of getting a guy a government job I don't know, although it definitely was in place by 197 BCE. That's when the law mandating castration as an acceptable punishment was abolished, but the eunuchs just kept on comin'. Or not coming, as the case may be.
As a side note, if you didn't think the bit with the sickle was disquieting enough, these guys were probably the first surgery patients anywhere to get to go home with their parts in a jar. Sure, they joke about it with tonsillectomy patients in the modern world, but these guys were serious about it. I'll go into the exact details in another post, but the general feeling was that you had to be buried with all your parts in the same place if you were gonna properly receive the rites offered the dead to get them into a decent reincarnation, and the Zhou were always big on rituals. Afterlife mojo gone wrong was just a bad thing all around. What it meant, basically, was that Sigmund Freud would have exploded with sheer excitement if anyone told him what those little jars were that the court eunuchs always seemed to have with 'em. No sense taking chances, after all.
But enough about that. I know I've got male readers, there's no sense getting into any more detail, and besides most of the really complicated stuff happens later. On to other topics.
Given that the Zhou Dynasty started in the late 1100's BCE and continued without interruption until 770 BCE, changing their headquarters and a few other things shortly thereafter and continuing to be listed as an official dynasty until 221 BCE (that's a date we know for sure), it's no real surprise they managed to accrete a sizable body of poetry. Something close to 300 ritual hymns and ballads got compiled into one big whacker of a book entitled the Shi-jing, which translates into English as the Classic of Poetry. The oldest bits date back to the tenth century BCE and are hymns addressed to the dynasty's founders, who - like an awful lot of other Chinese rulers - got deified after their deaths. Other poetic sections in the Classic include the Great and Lesser Odes, including a lot of historical material relating to the dynasty's foundation and poems and songs related to the properly ideal running of the country. Finally, the last bit - which is more than half the 300 poems int he book - is composed almost entirely of local music, folk songs and court music from all over the country ruled by the Zhou monarchy. It's supposed to give something of a window into the lives of people at the time, but I've never read it. More's the pity. It does relay at least a little anthropological material, in the same way the Book of Proverbs does when it starts raving about the activities of the ideal wife. Lots of stuff about women in the silk industry, and how even the queen had to participate at certain times of year in the silk harvest, and how the poorer classes of people wore clothes made from hemp instead. (No cotton.) Fur clothing apparently gets mentioned as a reaction to winter - I can't help but wonder if our buddies from entry #1 did the same thing. Neat stuff.
Jade also became very, very big during the Zhou Dynasty. Before them and the Shang, jade was pretty much used for anything necessary. Tools, weapons, kitchen utensils, you name it. Wasn't particularly artistically handled, necessarily, but the craftsmanship was pretty good. The Zhou, now, they were busy centralizing government to some degree (not necessarily very successfully) and establishing rules, regulations, and monetary systems. They weren't as good as the Shang at bronzework, either. But wow were they big on jade. Here, the fine folks at Warrior Tours can say it so much better than me:
"In the Zhou dynasty, jade use was first regulated in Zhouli (Rites of the Zhou), which was the constitution of the Zhou dynasty concerning with politics, economy, military, diplomacy and law. With other two classics named Yili (Rites) and Liji (Book of Rites) later, it strictly stipulated national rites and etiquettes and directing philosophy. Only in Zhouli, Rites of the Zhou, there were dozens of articles concerning with jade use and function under different occasions such as politics, sacrifice, alliance, and military activities, etc. According to the three classics, special ministry should be set up to manage jade use. It was stipulated that six jade ritual items should be made to offer sacrifice to heaven, the earth, the east, the south, the west and the north. There were also strict regulations on six jade tablets used by emperors, dukes, marquises, earls, viscounts and barons respectively. Jade ware can be divided into following categories - ritual utensil, funeral utensil, accessory, currency, weapon, diplomatic gift, musical instrument and food according to the functions listed in the three classics. Simple carving, careful handling and not mixing private and public ritual vessel were basic rules to follow in jade use."
Popular rock.
We'll go over the religious, spiritual, and moral aspects of jade in Chinese culture another time - probably once we get to the Han dynasty. That's when you start seeing jade mummy suits. Next up will be the philosophers, I'm thinking; there's quite a bit of philosophizing going on over the next few hundred years, and there's no sense in making these guys share posts with anyone else.
All right, back to the lesson. !historian. !linguist. !responsible for your grades.
Let's jump right to the messy stuff, shall we? Eunuchs. Those of you who've ever played the RPG called Feng Shui have doubtless plopped eunuchs into the same mental class as Grand Viziers - that is to say, there's no such thing as a good one. Barry Hughart didn't do 'em any favours in Eight Skilled Gentlemen, either. Li the Cat- ouch. Nasty man. There's been some bad ones in history, sure, but there's been some bad examples of pretty much every category of people. I'm not gonna try and detail their history or behavior one way or another. I'm just going into them here because, well, the Zhou Dynasty is traditionally credited with introducing 'em on a big scale to government work.
They'd existed before the Zhou Dynasty, as it happens. It was part of ancient Chinese law that certain crimes got certain punishments, most of which were on the severe side. (Branding on the forehead, cutting off the nose, cutting off the feet, mutilation, and death. C'mon, it's the ancient world, pop open your local Bible and take a look at what they recommend you do to the daughter of a priest if the daughter is caught making oo-oo before she's married.) The exact details of 'mutilation' don't seem to be laid out in any of the material I have on hand right now, but my best guess is that it got nasty. It certainly produced some very unhappy men along the way.
Given that there were criminals around who were missing body parts and therefore not particularly suited for certain jobs, it became important for something to be done with these men. Apparently it wasn't uncommon for the ones who lost feet to be hired as park maintainers. After all, they weren't gonna run away particularly fast, and they couldn't really engage in chasing the game animals or hunting them themselves. Better to have 'em doing something that'd keep them from becoming beggars and drains on society, right? Right.
Same deal with the eunuchs. Fully ambulatory, fully functional in terms of hands and feet and senses of smell, just... in dire need of sitting down when it came time to pass water. (To the best of my knowledge, castration in ancient China was the really serious kind. Out come the parts, out comes the sickle, whack thunk all good. Well, to everybody except the guy, anyway.) Gotta be something to do with the guys. Let's see, hrm, where can we use men who aren't particularly inclined towards aggression any more and who can't cuckold the local lord thereby screwing up his line of father-to-son succession by introducing doubt into the whole question of paternity... Aah! Yup, there you go. Put 'em to work looking after the noblewomen and the subsidiary wives, concubines, playmates, etc. The Zhou thought this was just the greatest thing since steamed rice, thanks (I suppose) to that inheritance plan of theirs, and rather enthusiastically started snapping up the unfortunates who'd been made that way by the law. Exactly when it started being done in large numbers for the express purpose of getting a guy a government job I don't know, although it definitely was in place by 197 BCE. That's when the law mandating castration as an acceptable punishment was abolished, but the eunuchs just kept on comin'. Or not coming, as the case may be.
As a side note, if you didn't think the bit with the sickle was disquieting enough, these guys were probably the first surgery patients anywhere to get to go home with their parts in a jar. Sure, they joke about it with tonsillectomy patients in the modern world, but these guys were serious about it. I'll go into the exact details in another post, but the general feeling was that you had to be buried with all your parts in the same place if you were gonna properly receive the rites offered the dead to get them into a decent reincarnation, and the Zhou were always big on rituals. Afterlife mojo gone wrong was just a bad thing all around. What it meant, basically, was that Sigmund Freud would have exploded with sheer excitement if anyone told him what those little jars were that the court eunuchs always seemed to have with 'em. No sense taking chances, after all.
But enough about that. I know I've got male readers, there's no sense getting into any more detail, and besides most of the really complicated stuff happens later. On to other topics.
Given that the Zhou Dynasty started in the late 1100's BCE and continued without interruption until 770 BCE, changing their headquarters and a few other things shortly thereafter and continuing to be listed as an official dynasty until 221 BCE (that's a date we know for sure), it's no real surprise they managed to accrete a sizable body of poetry. Something close to 300 ritual hymns and ballads got compiled into one big whacker of a book entitled the Shi-jing, which translates into English as the Classic of Poetry. The oldest bits date back to the tenth century BCE and are hymns addressed to the dynasty's founders, who - like an awful lot of other Chinese rulers - got deified after their deaths. Other poetic sections in the Classic include the Great and Lesser Odes, including a lot of historical material relating to the dynasty's foundation and poems and songs related to the properly ideal running of the country. Finally, the last bit - which is more than half the 300 poems int he book - is composed almost entirely of local music, folk songs and court music from all over the country ruled by the Zhou monarchy. It's supposed to give something of a window into the lives of people at the time, but I've never read it. More's the pity. It does relay at least a little anthropological material, in the same way the Book of Proverbs does when it starts raving about the activities of the ideal wife. Lots of stuff about women in the silk industry, and how even the queen had to participate at certain times of year in the silk harvest, and how the poorer classes of people wore clothes made from hemp instead. (No cotton.) Fur clothing apparently gets mentioned as a reaction to winter - I can't help but wonder if our buddies from entry #1 did the same thing. Neat stuff.
Jade also became very, very big during the Zhou Dynasty. Before them and the Shang, jade was pretty much used for anything necessary. Tools, weapons, kitchen utensils, you name it. Wasn't particularly artistically handled, necessarily, but the craftsmanship was pretty good. The Zhou, now, they were busy centralizing government to some degree (not necessarily very successfully) and establishing rules, regulations, and monetary systems. They weren't as good as the Shang at bronzework, either. But wow were they big on jade. Here, the fine folks at Warrior Tours can say it so much better than me:
"In the Zhou dynasty, jade use was first regulated in Zhouli (Rites of the Zhou), which was the constitution of the Zhou dynasty concerning with politics, economy, military, diplomacy and law. With other two classics named Yili (Rites) and Liji (Book of Rites) later, it strictly stipulated national rites and etiquettes and directing philosophy. Only in Zhouli, Rites of the Zhou, there were dozens of articles concerning with jade use and function under different occasions such as politics, sacrifice, alliance, and military activities, etc. According to the three classics, special ministry should be set up to manage jade use. It was stipulated that six jade ritual items should be made to offer sacrifice to heaven, the earth, the east, the south, the west and the north. There were also strict regulations on six jade tablets used by emperors, dukes, marquises, earls, viscounts and barons respectively. Jade ware can be divided into following categories - ritual utensil, funeral utensil, accessory, currency, weapon, diplomatic gift, musical instrument and food according to the functions listed in the three classics. Simple carving, careful handling and not mixing private and public ritual vessel were basic rules to follow in jade use."
Popular rock.
We'll go over the religious, spiritual, and moral aspects of jade in Chinese culture another time - probably once we get to the Han dynasty. That's when you start seeing jade mummy suits. Next up will be the philosophers, I'm thinking; there's quite a bit of philosophizing going on over the next few hundred years, and there's no sense in making these guys share posts with anyone else.
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no subject
Date: 2002-03-23 11:27 pm (UTC)The Warring States period more or less corresponds to the rise of the philosophers as well, all described in Confucius' "Spring and Attumn Annals" - one of the reasons this is also known as the Spring and Autumn period. For those of us unconcerned about philosophy and namby pamby stuff like that, this is where strategists like Sun Wu (or Sun Tzu), his grandson Sun Bin and Sun Bin's rival Pang Juan, Zhang Yi, Wu Ji and Sun Qi began serious thinking about warfare as an sneaky and precise art. Given several centuries of nearly uninterrupted warfare, the Chinese had a long time to think about how to win wars and influence people, making the art of war and the art of statesmanship become almost inseperable.
Speaking of eunuchs, without a eunuch, we might never be able to know so much about this period of history. It was the Grand Historian, Sima Qian, whose Shiji, or "Records of the Grand Historian" picked up where Confucius' "Spring and Autumn Annals" took off. The Annals chronicled 500 years of history prior to Confucius' own time. Sima Qian's father, the Grand Historian of the Han Dynasty, considered himself a failure because it was now 500 years after the Annals had been written and he had not compiled an equal volume to cover the gap. Dying, he made Sima Qian promise to carry on his work as Grand Historian, which he vowed to do so, starting in 107 BCE.
5 years later, at the age of 47, Sima Qian unwisely became involved in the affair of Li Ling. Emperor Wu was engaged in several campaigns against the Northern Barbarians - the tartars, at this point in time. Li Guangli, a relative of the Emperors, was placed in charge of the campaigns, after which successes began to wane. Li Ling, who was the grandson of the famous general Li Guang, was ordered by Li Guangli to take a force of 5,000 men to distract the main force of the Tartars. However, he met up with about 80,000 enemy troops. 8 days of fighting followed, the Han army killing about 10,000 tartars and losing half its men. Out of ammo, out of weapons, Li Ling surrendered.
The Emperor was furious - Li Ling should have committed suicide rather than surrender. He ordered Li Ling's family to be executed. However, Sima Qian spoke up in Li Ling's defence, pointing out that despite 16 to 1 odds, Li Ling managed to lose only half his men before succumbing - and maybe it wasn't really his fault. Sima went even further, suggesting that the campaigns against the Tartars were the mistake. That did it - the Emperor snapped, and ordered Sima Qian executed.
There were only 2 ways to avoid death. One was for Sima's friends or family to bail him out - but no one had the cash. The other way was castration. Sima, remembering the vow he had made to his father, chose the latter course. It was humilating - worse than death - but it was the only way he could keep his promise to his father. Turning his humilation and anger into energy like so many others had done before, he continued his work on the Shiji, finally completing it, in 130 volumes and five categories, in 97 BCE.
no subject
Date: 2002-03-24 08:55 am (UTC)And you really gotta admire Sima Qian. Now that's one stubborn academic. (I have to admit I thought Larry Gonick's handling of the whole affair was hysterical. "Um, your Majesty? He wasn't really a bad guy. . . and he wanted to stay alive to win more battles for your Majesty. . . so he didn't. . . you know..." "OFF WITH HIS- hmm. Off with his what?" "Gleep!")
Now I gotta go dig up my copy of Gonick. My first volume of the Shiji arrived this week and I'll never get it all read in time, so I need a light study guide.
no subject
Date: 2002-03-24 09:01 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2002-03-24 09:20 am (UTC)