chinesegeography

The Longest Canal in the Ancient World-Sequel І



The throne of the Eastern Jin Dynasty ended up in the hands of the usurper Liu Yu, who proclaimed himself emperor of the Song Dynasty. In the following one and a half centuries or so, sovereignty passed frequently from one dynasty to another, both in the south, from the Song to the Qi, then to the Liang, and the Chen; in the north from the Northern Wei to the Eastern Wei, then the Western Wei, the Northern Qi, to the Northern Zhou. In 581 Yang Jian took the throne from the Northern Zhou Dynasty and crowned himself as Emperor Wen Di of the Sui Dynasty. The capital was set in Chang'an. In 589 the Sui Dynasty conquered the Chen, putting China under one single sovereign again after 270 years of division.



The war-torn economy began to recover and prosper now that the "walls" between the south and the north were knocked down. People of different nationalities were able to interact and intermingle in a more peaceful way.



Yang Jian died in 604, passing the throne to his son Yang Guang, who was to be known as Emperor Yang Di (560-618). His empire was now economically stable enough for large architectural projects, and he wasted no time in starting them.



Emperor Yang Di first had a 2,000-kilometer-long ditch dug out from Longmen to Shangluo, forming a curved defense line for Chang'an the capital and Luoyang the eastern capital.



In the spring of 605, work on a new Luoyang, 9 kilometers west of the old city, began, together with the building of new palaces and royal gardens.



The most ambitious undertaking Emperor Yang Di launched was a great canal that ran some 2,400 kilometers from Zhuojun in the north, through Luoyang the eastern capital, to Yuhang in the south. Millions of laborers worked day and night for six years until this audacious architectural feat, equaling the Great Wall in its impressiveness, was completed.



The practicality of the canal was great. Instead of freight by road, food produced from southern China could be transported swiftly and on a large scale by canal - the only watercourse running north and south navigable by large cargo boats - to the north, the political and cultural center of the empire, where there was an imperative demand for food.



But, as such a colossal and costly project, the canal also became a heavy political liability.

Tao Yuanming the Hermit



Tao Yuanming (365- 427) received a Confucian education that highlighted social responsibility of the intellectual. But, the political system of his time being as it was, with accessibility to a successful political career determined by birth, he could find no proper position with the government to put his ideas to use; and so he eventually ended up as a hermit, taking delight in wine and simple country living.



There was not much a man educated in Confucianism could do other than to work with the government. Tao Yuanming found himself left with few choices but to take what was offered, to make a living, if not to fulfill his ideals as a statesman. His first government service started when he was 29. The vain, pompous bureaucratic life was utterly against his lively disposition, and he soon resigned.



He lived without employment for 11 years, before he entered the much-loathed bureaucracy for a second time. His second service lasted for just over a year, and ended in AD 401 when his mother died, an occasion for which it was customary as well as compulsory that a filial government official should resign and stay home for a long period of mourning.



He received government position for a third time. But nothing was to his liking, and he was tom between the perceived necessity to work and his love for freedom and simplicity in the countryside. After serving in some insignificant positions for less than 80 days, he resigned again, this time for good. He could not even stay long enough to harvest the sticky rice he had grown for winemaking on the government estate. He turned into verse all the anxiety and distress he felt at being a magistrate, and the relief and happiness upon his ultimate decision to return to nature. Home, I'm on My Way became one of his masterpieces.



Living a secluded life, Tao Yuanming directed his mind to writing poems about country living, and how much he enjoyed it, despite (or maybe because of) its simplicity and hardship. With over 120 poems surviving to this day, Tao Yuanming is regarded as the initiator of a genre in Chinese poetry devoted to the praise of nature and country life, in authentic and simple language that became an attractive motif.



Shying away from the political realities of his time, Tao Yuanming envisaged what he believed was a perfect state of utopia in his epic poem, Out of Peach Village. It is a story about a fisherman stumbling upon a lost world, where he finds the inhabitants, who say they are descended from a community fleeing an ancient war, now living in a peaceful, righteous, paradisiacal society. There is no hunger, no poverty, no war, no crime, no laws, no government, and no tax collectors. Everybody lives happily according to their nature. Implying there might be nowhere to find or to found a society like this, Tao Yuanming had his fisherman leave the place, where a river flowed out into his world through a peach valley, and then lose his way back in his attempt to revisit it, despite all the markers he had left on his way out.

The Feishui Campaign-Sequel І



The last few years of Emperor Hui Di (r. 290-307) witnessed the mounting internal discontent and resentment, leading to riots and insurrections that ultimately contributed to the fall of his dynasty. Meanwhile, nationalities beyond China's northwestern frontiers began to pour in, taking advantage of the social and political instability of the Han. In the 136 years from AD 304-439, states founded by these nationalities rose and fell in northern China and Sichuan. It was a period of much confusion, when different peoples intermingled and interacted, considerably altering the ethnological map of China. Historians refer to this period as the period of the "Sixteen States," after the sixteen most significant states of these ethnic groups.



The Qian Qin (351-394) was one of those states. In 382 King Fu Jian of Qian Qin subdued all other states in northern China and established his dominance. In 383 King Fu Jian, despite his officials' counsel against it, rallied his million-strong army for a campaign against the Eastern Jin, which had retreated south of the Yangtze River. His army and fleet advanced triumphantly. Within a month, the pioneering troops arrived at the Huaihe River, standing by for an attack on Shouyang (today's Shouxian County, Anhui Province).



The good news from the front inflated Fu Jian's ego. Leaving his main force in Xiangcheng, he personally led a cavalry of 8,000 to Shouyang, anxious to destroy the Eastern Jin in a single battle.



Convinced the Eastern Jin was too weak to stand up against him, King Fu Jian dispatched an envoy through the front lines, with the view to calling on the enemy to surrender. But his envoy, named Zhu Xu, turned out to be an Eastern Jin commander who had been captured after surrender.

Wang Xizhi the Great Calligrapher-Ending



Wang Xizhi had a garden called "Lan Ting," near Kuaiji Mountain (Shaoxing, Zhejiang Province). It was a garden of comfort, elegance and simple beauty. In 353 Wang Xizhi and his friends had a get-together in Lan Ting. It was a nice day, full of easy talk and refined intellectual pleasures. Each of them composed verses to celebrate this occasion, which they put together into the Lan Ting Collection. Everybody agreed that Wang Xizhi should be the one to write a prologue for their collection. As if the Muses had planted the ideas into his mind, Wang Xizhi penned the prologue, which proved to be a masterpiece of literature and calligraphy, treasured and admired to this day.



As literature and as calligraphy, the "Prologue" to the Lan Ting Collection speaks perfectly of the spirit of the time in which it was created. The artistry of the brush strokes shows not only the well trained touches of the author but also a sense of the emotional state of his being, which he invested in every stroke of his brush, and in the pattern in which all the strokes came together. It is a work of both scope and balance, so that the whole piece conveys felicity as well as a dynamic and beautiful rhythm. Ever since its creation, the "Prologue" has been valued as one of the greatest masterpieces of calligraphy. From it, Wang Xizhi acquired a timeless name.



* The Own Calligraphy



Wang Xizhi liked to travel around the famous mountains and rivers. Whenever he saw the scripts of famous calligraphers, he would carefully imitate such scripts. It is said that when he was 53 years old, he still kept the habit of imitating the styles of ancient calligraphers. Once he went to bed, he still drew characters in the air with his fingers. Unconsciously, he moved the fingers on his wife's body. His wife was sulky and said, "Why do you always draw characters on other's body? Where is your own?" When Wang heard "your own," he suddenly realized that he should create a calligraphy style of his own. Later, he finally formed his unique style by concentrating others' merits.

War of the Eight Princes



Emperor Wu Di of Jin died, passing the throne onto his mentally disabled son, who was to be knownas Emperor Hui Di (r. 290-307). But the real sovereign was Hui Di's wife Jia, who ruled the empire ruthlessly for eight years. Not wanting to abdicate to Prince Sima Yu, a son whom the emperor had with another woman, Empress Jia worked out a plan to have him eliminated.



Empress Jia had a letter dictated in the manner of the prince, urging the emperor to abdicate. Then she invited the prince to dinner and got him very inebriated. Semi-conscious, Prince Sima Yu yielded to the empress' manipulations and copied out her letter.



The next day Empress Jia had her husband summon all the officials and showed them the letter that the prince had copied out, accusing him of treason. The officials did not believe Prince Sima Yu to be capable of this, but when the empress compared the handwriting, they could hardly speak up for the prince. The case established, Empress Jia deprived Sima Yu of the title of crown prince.



Public opinion among court officials, always against Empress Jia and her tyranny, was outraged at the deprivation of Sima Yu's title. Prince Sima Lun saw this as a good opportunity to gain power. Worried about Sima Yu beating him to the sovereignty, he started a rumor that court officials were plotting his restoration. The rumor worked; fearful of retribution, Empress Jia had Sima Yu poisoned. Then, using the crime of poisoning as the pretext, Sima Lun sent Sima Jiong to arrest Empress Jia.



Dismayed, the empress demanded why he was here with all these armed officers.



"In the name of His Majesty, you are under arrest," was the answer.



"But my own words are in the name of His Majesty," cried out the empress, "I cannot consider any other decree as valid or effective! "



However, her words could not save her this time. She was arrested and beheaded.



Once he became the virtual dictator of the empire, Prince Sima Lun's ambitions grew.



He went as far as placing the emperor under house arrest, and then ascended the throne himself. He rewarded each of his followers with a position in his government. When, given all the newly created positions, there was a shortage of marten tails, worn as a standard head ornament by the officials, the government improvised by using dog tails.



Princes outside the capital learnt of the usurpation and soon joined in a fight for the throne. Because eight princes were involved, the war is referred to as the "War of Eight Princes."

The Reunification



The period of the Three Kingdoms (Wei, Shu and Wu) was approaching its end. In 263 Shu fell to the Wei, which in turn was replaced by the Jin, the dynasty of Sima Yan. Sima Yan was the son of Sima Zhao. As Emperor Wu Di of the Jin, or Western Jin (265-317), Sima Yan eventually ended the incessant state of civil discord that had torn China into warring states.



In AD 280 Emperor Wu Di of Jin appointed General Du Yu in command of an army over 200,000 strong for a campaign against Wu. To stop Du Yu's advance along the Yangtze River, the King of Wu, Sun Hao, laid barriers across the river with thick iron chains. He also had pointed devices submerged into the river to hit Du Yu's fleet.



When fleet commander Wang Rui learnt of Sun Hao's defenses across the Yangtze, he came up with a clever plan. He had his soldiers build dozens of wide rafts on which he placed straw men, dressed to resemble real soldiers, and sent some soldiers who were good swimmers to send these rafts downstream for the pointed obstacles to catch hold on them. Those good swimmers disposed of the rafts together with the obstacles, clearing the waterway. To overcome the dangerous chains, Wang Rui harnessed the power of fire. His soldiers built huge torches soaked in fuel, which they ignited when they came to each of the chains. The unrelenting flames melted down the iron so that the chains all sank to the bottom of the river. Wang Rui's fleet then captured many towns along the Yangtze.



Commander-in-chief Du Yu ensured that his army launched coordinated attacks from all fronts. While Wang Rui's fleet were advancing along the Yangtze River, his officer Zhou Zhi brought 800 soldiers across the river and approached Lexiang, a major military base of the Wu. Zhou Zhi had his soldiers wave many flags and torches on Bashan Mountain, giving the impression of a large army approaching. In the meantime, Wang Rui and Du Yu captured Wu's major cities Wuchang and Jiangling.



Du Yu decided to take advantage of his overwhelming success and march straight onto Jianye (today's Nanjing), the capital of Wu. His troops were unstoppable, crushing enemy defenses along their way.



Du Yu soon captured Moling (today's Jiangning, Jiangsu Province), the gateway to Jianye. The Wu commanders either died in the war or surrendered, leaving Sun Hao desperate for a plan. His courtier Hu Chong told him: "It is over, Your Majesty. When you cannot defeat them, I am afraid you can only j oin them."



When there did not appear to be any other way out, surrender seemed a good idea to Sun Hao, since he was still able to live on with all the luxuries he had become used to. His surrender marked the end of the old period of the Three Kingdoms, and the new reunification of China.