China between Empires

Welcome back / quick check in on presentations

What’s in a name?

• Historians—traditional, popular, and professional—tend to focus on times of unity and strength, particularly in early Chinese history
• The period we are exploring through the Romance of the Three Kingdoms tends to be downplayed, that is the four centuries between the crumbling final years of the Han dynasty (206 BCE-220 CE) and the rise of the Sui (隋 581-618) and Tang (唐 618-907). (Here’s a more detailed timeline of what happened in the middle).
• What do we call this period?
  • “Wei, Jin, and Northern and Southern Dynasties” (Wei Jin Nan Bei chao shiqi 魏晉南北朝時期)?
  • “Age of Disunion”?
  • “Dawn of a Golden Age”?
  • “Early Medieval Period”?
• This seemingly simple question will be our overriding question today. Why does it matter? Keith Knapp, who we will explore in a little more depth today, argues:
  • “Periodization cannot be overlooked because it helps us make sense of historical phenomena. If historical time is not divided into discrete periods, how can we discern change over time?” (Knapp, 12).

Context

• Important trends in this period. Beginning of:
  • Geographic redefinition of China
    • In north, armies of non-Chinese horsemen who had emerged as the power behind the Han army in the latter half of the dynasty seized control over northern China
    • “Aliens” were to rule the Yellow River valley for 9 of the 18 centuries after the fall of the Han.
  • Large percentage of the Han population southward
    • End of early Han, less than one quarter of population lived along Changjiang (Yangzi River), and people were considered somewhat alien
    • Movement south hard to quantify with erosion of centralized statistics, but can be seen in cleared hillsides, drained marshes, and transformation of cultural practices in area
    • By reunification by the Sui in 589, region had emerged as “breadbasket” of China
  • New international links
    • City today known as Guangzhou emerged as maritime trade center connecting China to southeast Asia
    • Buddhism (link to map) in particular drove contact with India, Japan
• Religious and cultural transformation 
  • Han and earlier, much of religious life was sponsored directly by the imperial state
    • ​Buddhism benefited from sponsorship of several smaller kingdoms
    • In absence of strong state, Daoism and Buddhism created new forms of social connections independent of the state and new ways of thinking about life and the afterlife
  • Intellectuals became detached from formal power structures
    • Among most famous examples was the eclectic band of writers, musicians, and metaphysical Daoists known as the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove (Zhulin qixian 竹林七賢) from the third century

Today’s task

• Imagine you are no longer a high school class, but the editors of a new multi-volume book series on Chinese history.
• You have received a proposal from Keith Knapp arguing that the volume covering the period between the Han and Sui dynasties be called “China’s Middle Ages” or “China’s Medieval Age.” It has been submitted as a brief article, below: Keith N. Knapp, “Did the Middle Kingdom have a Middle Period? The Problem of ‘Medieval’ in China’s History,” in Education about Asia, volume 12, number 3 (Winter 2007), 12-17. (PDF) (Focus mainly on the first 3 pages).
• You will have a very short time to read his proposal individually (after all you are a busy titan of the book industry!), and then we will discuss:
  • What is compelling about using “middle” or “medieval” age to label this period of history?
  • Why is this label better than some of the alternatives we introduced at the beginning?
  • Why might we want to be cautious about using this label?
  • Should we accept his proposal? Why or why not?