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UC San Diego UC San Diego Previously Published Works Title An Outline History of East Asia to 1200, second edition Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9d699767 Author Schneewind, Sarah Publication Date 2021-06-01 Supplemental Material https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9d699767#supplemental eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Second Edition An O utline H istory of Ea st A sia to 1200 b y S a r a h S c h n e e w i n d Second Edition An Outline History of East Asia to 1200 by S ar ah S chneewi nd Introduction This is the second edition of a textbook that arose out of a course at the University of California, San Diego, called HILD 10: East Asia: The Great Tradition. The course covers what have become two Chinas, Japan, and two Koreas from roughly 1200 BC to about AD 1200. As we say every Fall in HILD 10: “2400 years, three countries, ten weeks, no problem.” The book does not stand alone: the teacher should assign primary and secondary sources, study questions, dates to be memorized, etc. The maps mostly use the same template to enable students to compare them one to the next. About the Images and Production Labor The Cover This image represents a demon. It comes from a manuscript on silk that explains particular demons, and gives astronomical and astrological information. The manuscript was found in a tomb from the southern mainland state of Chu that dates to about 300 BC. I chose it to represent how the three countries of East Asia differ, but share a great deal and grew up together. From the full color facsimile chart in Noel Barnard, The Chʼu Silk Manuscript: Translation and Commentary (Canberra: Department of Far Eastern History, Australian National University, 1973). Images The cover and other images were either used under Fair Use, permission from the creator, or Creative Commons licensed. Production The author, Sarah Schneewind, wrote content and figure statements, located images, and devised the layout. Haneen Mohamed, UC San Diego Library Scholarly Communications Assistant, worked on the final publication format for the first edition and Sam Muñoz, UC San Diego Library Senior Digital Library Development Assistant, worked on formatting the second edition. Copyright © 2021 Sarah Schneewind. For certain images and other contributions, the copyright holders are named in the captions. This Open Access Textbook is published under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial 4.0 International license (CC BY NC 4.0) First published on eScholarship by the author with support from the UC San Diego Library, Scholarly Communications. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9d699767 For inquiries, please contact the author. Table of Contents Chapter One East Asia to 1045 BC 1 Chapter Two The Zhou Period (1045 – 256 BC) 20 Chapter Three From Warring States To Empire (480 BC -207 BC) 42 Chapter Four The Han Empire and Its Neighbors 58 Chapter Five Religion and Society in Han (206 BC – AD 220) 80 Chapter Six A World of Many Powers (AD 200 – AD 580) 99 Chapter Seven Consolidating Unified Regimes (c. 500-780) 129 Chapter Eight Aristocratic Societies 1: Tang and Silla 151 Chapter Nine Aristocratic Societies 2: Hei’an Japan 177 Chapter Ten The Commercial Revolution 195 Epilogue Postface: Acknowledgements 223 Bibliography 227 Note: To return to this page from a chapter, click on chapter heading 1 Chapter One: East Asia to 1045 BC Myths and Nations Pan Gu was the first born. When he died, he was transformed. His breath became the wind and the clouds. His voice became the thunder; his left eye became the sun and his right eye became the moon; his arms and legs became the four poles or directions and the five parts of his torso became the five sacred mountains; his blood and semen became the water and rivers. His muscles and veins became the earth’s arteries; his flesh became fields and land. The hair on his head and his beard became the stars. The hairs on his body became plants and trees. His teeth and bones became metal and rock. His marrow became pearls and jade. His sweat became the streaming rain. And the small lice that ran about his body were touched by the wind and turned into people. It is easy to see that a myth like this is just a story. But there are other myths that seem to us rational. Every nation today relies on an ideological foundation of myth for its cohesion. As historian Kim Byung-Joon writes, “All countries are prone to harbor a few illusions about their ancient history. They like to assert that their history began at the earliest date possible, and tend to characterize it as a grand and splendid history, uniquely distinct from all others.”1 The United States of America, for instance, presents itself as the land of opportunity and freedom, although its prosperity began with land stolen from Native Americans and labor stolen from African slaves. These myths, like the nations themselves, have been constructed and elaborated by people over time. They are neither purely imaginary nor purely factual. Often they contradict historical knowledge for which there is firm evidence. Figure 1.1 A woodblock-printed image of Pan Gu as imagined in the seventeenth century. Source: Wang Qi, Sancai tuhui 三才圖會 [Collected Illustrations of the Three Realms], 1609. Public Domain. "An Outline History of East Asia to 1200, second edition" by Sarah Schneewind is licensed under Chapter 1, p. 1 CC BY-NC 4.0. Retrieved from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9d699767 2 The two Chinas, the two Koreas, and Japan all have such myths. Chiang Kaishek, the first leader of the Republic of China on Taiwan, and Xi Jinping, the current President of the People’s Republic of China, agree that Chinese culture has been uninterrupted for more than 5,000 years and has been absorbed into the Chinese “bloodline.” But the figure of four or five thousand years is pure invention: made up by a foreign missionary in the late nineteenth century.2 Against the myth of an unbroken, pure Chinese heritage, historian Wang Hui writes, “Under the surface of the idea of China’s unified imperial system, there have always been changes wrought by differences within and between state organizations, social groups, regions, ethnic groups, and religious faiths… The so-called pure Han nationality and the image of its imperial culture has always been a fantasy.”3 Because of China’s long written and archaeological records, this variety and change are well-attested. The chapters to come give some examples. Tangun, the father of the Korean people, supposedly lived around what we call 2333 BC. That was about 2,200 years before the merest scraps of writing extant from the peninsula. Historian Hyung Il Pai judges that “Korean studies that address topics such as the emergence of ancient Korean civilization, statehood, religion, and identity are inexplicable without reference to a complex jumble of contradictory narratives filled with Tangun fiction, competing dynastic myths, and hypothetical invasions of tribes, as well as unaccountable archaeological data. This state of confusion has rendered it virtually impossible to distinguish fact from fiction in studies on ancient Korea.”4 With no way to know whether Tangun existed, we must consider the idea that the Korean people descended from him a myth. As for Japan, myth holds that the imperial family descends in an unbroken bloodline from Emperor Jimmu. A descendent of the sun-goddess Amaterasu, Jimmu conquered all the islands of the archipelago in about 660 BC. But no-one there had such power at the time: the first sign of advanced weaponry in the archaeological records of the archipelago is one bronze arrowhead made after 440 BC. Further, the earliest written records in Japan date from about 1200 years after Jimmu’s supposed expedition. Historian Kitagawa writes that “Most scholars dismiss the historicity of the official Japanese accounts before the fifteenth emperor, Ōjin.” Ōjin lived about AD 400.5 There is no real way to know about individuals much further back than that. Myths deserve study. They show how people thought about themselves and the past. But a scientific study of history depends on primary sources of information: texts written close to the events. Those primary texts may be preserved – that is, they may have come down to us on the original medium, be it bone, stone, silk, bamboo, or paper. Or they may have been transmitted – copied from one generation to the next onto different media – in which case they must be used with caution, for transmissions often include errors or changes. A scientific study of history also depends on secondary sources, the work of scholars writing later than the events recorded. Secondary sources are most valuable when they cite their primary sources, and demonstrate a commitment to the pursuit of truth by reporting the complexities that characterize lived reality. The “historical” period, and the work of the historian – “history proper” – begin when written texts survive. But often, matters people took for granted were not written down, and few people wrote. So to understand the past, historians draw on other sources of information too, such as “material culture” – objects, buildings. And since historical societies grow from those without writing, historians need to take prehistoric times into account, often relying on archaeologists. Chapter 1, p. 2 3 Food and Progress East Asia shares its most ancient past experiences with the rest of humanity. By about 200,000 years ago, homo sapiens sapiens (the species of primate to which all humans now belong) had evolved in Africa.