Wave 3 Test Review
“Wave Three,” also called the “Middle Imperial Period,” stretches for the 1,000 years from the fall of the Han in 220 ce to the fall of the Southern Song to the Mongols in 1276. We’ll include the Mongols’ 90-year Yuan Dynasty in this test as well. In other words: Period of Disunity – Sui – Tang and Song peak – Yuan crash
This test will consist of 75 multiple choice questions worth 1 point each. Questions will come from the dynasties and terms below. Terms with an * are vocabulary only. A dictionary is all you need for these.
Most of the rest of the terms can be reviewed either in the review screencasts, the “Wave 3 Summary” narrative I wrote that follows the terms list on this sheet, or by referring to either of the Ebrey textbooks. Indexes, skimming, and scanning skills will help you here. You should also know the dates of the dynasties.
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Terms, by dynasty:
End of Han
Yellow Turbans
millenarian*
Salvation Religion*
Warlords
Period of Disunity (220-589)
Three Kingdoms
Jin unification
Nine-Rank System
Feudalism
Neo-Taoist Escapism:
Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove
Tao Qian
Wang Xizhi’s “Orchid Pavilion”
Calligraphy
Buddhism
Mahayana v. Theravada
Noble Eightfold Path
Nirvana
Boddhisatva
Chan Buddhism
Shaolin Monastery/Gong Fu
Pagoda
Northern and Southern Dynasties
Xianbei Northern Wei
Sinicization (sinification)
Steppe
Southern Exiles
Military Aristocracy
Sui Dynasty (589-618)
Grand Canal
Korean Campaigns
Sui Wendi
Cakravartin King (Buddhism)
Confucian Exams
Compare/Contrast with Qin Shihuangdi
Tang Dynasty (618-907)
Tang Taizong
Chang’An: Model Imperial Capital
State-Regulated Market
State-Owned Land
Silk Road influence
Cosmopolitanism
Tea culture
Entertainment and Lifestyle:
Women, sports, music, street life
Influence on Korea, Japan, Vietnam
Empress Wu
Matreiya Buddha
Emperor Xuanzong
Imperial Court
Golden Age of Lyric Poetry
Landscape Painting
Sculpture
Concubine Yang Guifei
An Lushan Rebellion
Tang Decline
Semi-feudal rewards for An Lushan support
Loss of central control
Loss of revenues
Loss of Mandate
Anti-Buddhist Campaigns
Han Yu and the Relic Controversy
Song Dynasty (960-1276)
Liao threat to north
Foreign Policy
Political Reforms:
Examination Reforms
Civilizing of Military-Aristocratic elites
900: 3,000 candidates; 1200: 300,000 candidates
--Wealthy class now literati class
Loss of North #2: Jurchen Jins
Southern Song
Demographic shift south
Rice farming
Population growth
Land reclamation
Market cities
Commercial networks
Trade Revolution
Shipbuilding innovations
Indian Ocean trade network
Finance, currency, banking
(Certif’s of Deposit, Paper Money)
Culture: Foot-binding
Status symbol: merchant “trophy” wife
Fashion statement: women did it voluntarily
Sexual fetish of emperor?
A wealthy class phenomenon at first
Spread to all classes in future dynasties
Publishing Revolution
Printing Press
Gov’t publications
Farming manuals
Confucian Classics
Literacy explosion
Confucian Classics
Home libraries
Political Golden Age
Inner and Outer Courts honest
No scandals or Dynastic Cycle downturns
As close to Ideal Confucian Govt as China will get
Proto-Industrial Revolution
Steel Production
Mechanical pumps
Assembly line factory production (ceramics)
Steel Suspension Bridges
No dynastic circle down-turn
Yuan (Mongol) Dynasty (1278-1368)
Genghis Khan and the Mongol Empire
Kubilai Khan (Yuan Emperor)
Anti-Han discrimination
Culture (Third Lotus?):
Drama, Opera
Pax Mongolia
Marco Polo’s Travels
Whets Europe’s appetites for trade routes
Decline
Bubonic Plague
Succession crises
Yellow River changes course
Bandit gangs
Red Turbans: Folk-Daoist Millenarians
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Wave 3 / Dates / DynastiesRise to Peak / Crash
Middle Imperial Period / c. 600 – 1350 / Sui, Tang, Song/S. Song / Jurchen Jin conquers north;
Mongol Yuan conquers all
New growths:
A. Economic miracle
1. Grand Canal, moveable type, printing press, mass publishing, commercial revolutions (paper money and credit, modern banking), agricultural innovation, rise of tea as China’s national drink (and, when England develops a taste for it a few centuries later, China’s national curse), Tang Silk Road trade, Song shipbuilding and Indian Ocean trade, mechanical engineering, steel production, suspension bridges, on and on.
2. Population doubles from 50 million in early Tang to 100 million by 1,000
B. Political tragedy, then perfection
1. Tang fatally weakened by the romantic story of Emperor Xuanzong, concubine Yang Guifei, and the An Lushan Rebellion.
2. Song establish Confucian Examinations as only route to official jobs. No corruption for 300 years.
3. Yuan Dynasty makes Beijing the capital for the first time. It remains so today, 700 years later.
C. Cultural and religious
1. Tang multiculturalism and splendor in Chang’an
2. Jurchen and Mongol conquests sour China’s “openness” to foreigners
D. Artistic Golden Age
1. Landscape Painting emerges
2. Golden Age of lyric poetry (Li Po and Du Fu).
Details
Sui Emperor Wendi – a rebel general of the now-sinified Xianbei – unifies China after 400 years of disunity, and restores the Confucian Examination System. Han China is back (though with new genes in its pool).
But Wendi, like Qin Shihuangdi 800 years earlier, over-reaches. He overworks the people with the 1,000-mile Grand Canal – a brilliant economic and military move that linked the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers to enable faster transport of goods and troops between the north and south, and built in an amazing five years, using a million workers – and a million-man military campaign in Korea (which, equally amazing, and to the credit of Korean toughness, failed). Wendi’s dynasty, like Qin’s, is overthrown within four decades. The Tang take the Mandate.
As the Han built on the Qin, so the Tang builds on the Sui – and the Song later builds on the Tang. The Tang and Song create a 600-year period of high culture, prosperity, and multi-cultural openness. Advances are made in every imaginable sector: art, politics, agriculture, trade and commerce, technology, philosophy, literature, industry, mechanics, engineering.
Tang China, with its capital at Chang’an – today’s Xi’an, at the eastern end of the Silk Road and only a few miles from Qin Shihuangdi’s mercury-filled resting place – was the most advanced civilization in the world in its time, and Chang’an the largest city.
Unlike to all the foreigners trading and living in the capital, and its tolerance of their religions. You should also remember the porcelain sculptures and art: landscape painting rises in this wave, bringing out the Daoist nature-lover inside the Confucian soul, with those exquisite mist-crowned mountains cradling humans and other small animals in their valleys. Tang women dance their elegant long-sleeved numbers, but also play polo with men on horseback. Amazing acrobats and Kung Fu martial artists add their sparkle to the brilliance. Tang lyric poetry reached a Golden Age with Do Fu and Li Po, still recited by the likes of our little Hong Kong YouTube cutie today. (If you like poetry, the moonlit water in these poems is fine. You shouldn’t die without drinking it.)
Life was prosperous, literature and art and entertainment thrived in the cities, fashion was high, music blended international with native sounds (the first “world music” scene?), and politically, administration was good – especially under the most cultured Tang Emperor, Xuanzong, who both tamed some rebellious barbarians in war, and opened an imperial art academy in his court. Like Florence 800 years later in the Italian Renaissance, it brimmed with the cultural geniuses of his realm. By his time, the Tang capital was the New York City of the medieval world.
But this same Xuanzong brought on the Tang decline. His story-book infatuation with the lily-faced concubine Yang Guifei led him to reward her favorite barbarian general with too many soldiers, which that general used to rebel and sack the capital. This was the An Lushan Rebellion, and the Tang barely survived it. Xuanzong’s bodyguards strangled the concubine as they fled the city, and the doting old emperor fell into a depression over his bad judgment and gave up the throne to his heir. The Tang never recovered from this, because it had to reward its allies against An Lushan with semi-fiefs, which weakened the administration of the empire. The dynasty declined until the Song claimed the Mandate around 900, and quickly regained the upward momentum of Tang civilization before An Lushan – and pushed it higher.
Song Dynasty: Song foreign relations are especially interesting: they decide the best policy with the northern barbarians is to pay them tribute in exchange for peace. They still have a massive, well-equipped army just in case, but when the Jurchen nomads invade China – using Chinese weapons against the Chinese – those bad-a$$ horse-masters (don’t quote that in your essays) were more powerful still.
Midway through the Song, for the second time – this time it’s the Jurchens instead of the Xianbei – barbarians take the Yellow River. Also for the second time, the Han become refugees, fleeing south to the Yangtze in a mass exodus. Thus begins the Southern Song.
In true Daoist fashion, the Southern Song adapts to the commercially disastrous loss of the Silk Road by taking a “path of least resistance” in a new direction – the sea – and turns bad luck into good. The government prioritizes commercial shipbuilding, and soon China not only joins the Indian Ocean international trade network, but out-competes its Indian and Muslim rivals to dominate that trade. Southern Song government revenues from the sea trade will grow larger than their revenues from domestic trade and taxes. These ships will fund the bulk of government expenses, they’re so successful so quickly.
A tragic end: Many historians agree that the Southern Song Dynasty of 1100 c.e. bore many of the hallmarks of England 700 years later, when it underwent the Industrial Revolution that enabled it to conquer the world: a publishing explosion due to the printing press led to the spread of technological knowledge and the inventions of machines, pumps, steel. The coal and river-power England used in its first factories were also in abundant use in Song China. Advanced banking practices necessitated by the sea trade made capital and finance available for more enterprises. Mass production of books, china, silk, and other items took place in Song factories. As a sharp student said in class, “Give them 50 more years, and they may have industrialized 600 years before Europe.”
But they didn’t have 50 more years, despite the fact that no Dynastic Cycle nosedive brought their empire down. Song politics are the most boring in Chinese history, because the most honest and professional. No eunuch or concubine or empress problems, no significant corruption to speak of, no worthless daddy’s boy emperors. Historians consider this governing class among the most intelligent, ethical, and tasteful in world history.
The Southern Song ended because it was simply butchered, as was the rest of the known world, by the Mongol hordes of Kublai Khan, grandson of world-conquering Genghis.
And a staggering “What if?”: If the Mongols hadn’t cut off the Song in its prime, we might today have not the theoretical “Tianxia” we read about in class, but a real one instead of the (dis-) United Nations. The imagination reels, too, at the possible uses to which Song Confucians, instead of today’s capitalists, would have put modern industrial power. Would they have harnessed it for public good instead of private gain? Would they have limited it, out of their disdain for the “unnecessary,” to the production of goods that are necessary for the public good, thereby leaving more of earth’s surface unscarred by those rapacious machines disemboweling the earth to make what is so often merely next month’s junk?
There’s no way we can know, of course – but there’s good reason to suspect today’s world would be a very different place, one perhaps less consumed with hyper-competition, hyper-stress, hyper-waste, and hyper-dependence on things for human happiness. (In view of the Confucian respect for education, one can easily imagine classrooms with one teacher for every five or so students, studying vastly more interesting subjects, and developing vastly different skills that make humans independently happy, instead of miserably dependent on money for that happiness.)
Anyway, things didn’t turn out that way.
Instead, Yuan Emperor Kubilai Khan employed Italian foreigner Marco Polo – able to safely travel across Eurasia due to the Pax Mongolica – in his court in Beijing, and Polo later co-authored a book about China and India that will launch Europe’s Age of Exploration. It inflamed the minds of Late Medieval Europe with a fever to find India and China for “God, Gold, and Glory” – though not necessarily in that order, as we see when the European explorers, traders, and missionaries finally find China in the next dynasty, the Ming.
But 100 years before Europe first appeared in the high seas, the Ming launched its own Age of Exploration – one as fatefully ill-timed, one might argue, as the Song Dynasty’s proto-industrial climb.
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