Status Updates From Imperial China, 900–1800

i read some pages from this each night before bed and may take notes since it will be a long time before i finish this

right now Abaoji is developing a unique dual political system balancing nomadic Khitan people and Chinese bureaucracy after the collapse of the Tang dynasty

One of the great frustrations with this book is his tendency to be inconsistent in Romanization. Sometimes he writes of Jiangsi and Sinkiang, but most other names are given in Pinyin. 11 uses of Jiangsi and 30ish of Jiangxi. 3 of Sinkiang, dozens of Xinjiang. I understand names can become standardized in transliteration even when systems change, but this is just lazy.

“The lives of ordinary people in their localities were adversely affected by the steady loss of morale in the elite sector, and therefore in the conduct of local government. The spreading cynicism allowed malpractice to replace altruistic dedication, and to be realistically if not ideally accepted as the norm. The sense of social responsibility in officialdom, and among the elite who dominated local society, became

“[Modern] China has accepted this legacy of geographically extended Qing rule as if it inhered in the geopolitical facts of Chinese history. It does not. The Inner Asian empire was grafted onto the Chinese cultural zone in the process of meeting Manchu power needs and interests. Securing and retaining the Qing Empire is thus a Manchu achievement that added a vast realm to the historic China only because

“A careful reading of history makes it clear that the circumstances of the Ming collapse…were not brought about by any general disintegration of government and society. Far from it. Those fatal circumstances were brought about carelessly, by an administration that simply could no longer manage its resources, utilize its strengths, and maintain its focus.

“Through the exchanges of New World precious metals for Chinese products…Ming China was becoming part of an economically interactive if not yet economically unified world. [] In that commerce, China was essentially a seller of high-quality craft manufactures. Other countries could not compete either in quality or in price. The colonies of the New World and the entire Mediterranean sphere of trade, from Portugal

“The [Chinese] city had nothing like a city charter, and no independent administration, that is, no mayor or town council; no laws or privileges that applied especially to its inhabitants; and no indigenous social groups that would have thought of demanding city dwellers’ ‘rights’ from the central government. In short, Chinese cities had no separate legal or political status; they were not corporate entities

“The conduct of later Ming emperors reveals an impaired imperial institution. The reader of history might well wonder why the elite, and to some extent the general population of Ming China, remained dedicated to the dynasty even when may of its most able statesmen were driven away from service to it… The Chinese were not blind to these emperors’ flaws, but they had to remain hopeful that mundane faults could

Fascinated to learn that the Dalai Lama and its prestige owe mostly to the Mongol conversion to Tibetan Buddhism after their loss of China.
The term ‘Dalai’ is Mongolian in origin (meaning ‘all-encompassing’) — and the power and prestige held by that office were installed by Mongol forces amidst heated rivalry between various Buddhist sects. The 4th Dalai Lama (really the 2nd) was even a Mongol prince!

The story of Zhu Yuanzhang, recounted in detail here, is one of the most remarkable biographies in all of history. An orphaned peasant boy narrowly survives famine and plague, and becomes a Buddhist monk. His monastery is pillaged by troops from the collapsing Mongol Yuan Dynasty, so he joins a gang of Manichaean bandits, then rises through the ranks until eventually defeats all rivals and founds the Ming Dynasty.

On the chaotic collapse of the Yuan Dynasty:

“The government issued ever stricter laws and set ever fiercer punishments in an effort to prop up the forces of order…Social order normally was not maintained by direct coercion but by the much less intrusive reliance on society at large to uphold the norms of appropriate behavior. When that no longer worked and the government’s failures could be openly ridiculed,

On educated Chinese during Mongol rule:
“Many of the elite whose education and personal cultivation under more normal circumstances would have led them to serve in public life turned away from the usual careers to seek compensatory roles in public life.
Many withdrew into…turning their backs to the world to live out more obscure lives. Many who might have been ministers of state in normal times found meaning in

I do wish more was said about the dissolution of the Yuan and the Mongol retreat northwards. The founding of the Ming is almost entirely told as a story of rebel armies, especially the Red Turbans, competing amongst themselves for a power that the reader is left to mostly guess simply evaporated. Sure, we heard lots about Yuan weakness, but I feel like the actual fall was glossed over too quickly.

“That [Zhu Xi’s] system of learning should become primarily identified with the pursuit of success in the examination system is a great irony; his purpose was to teach people how to enlarge their minds and their humanity through study of the classics, and he was bitterly discouraged by trends becoming evident in his time toward the debasement of learning as a mere device for gaining status and wealth.”

“In the Song Dynasty, a new spirit in learning and thought, in which all of the elite were immersed, encouraged at its best strong individual self-esteem coupled with feelings of direct responsibility for the world in which they lived. They were free to make their own decisions on what constituted ‘correct learning,’ because those truths were available to all through their own powers of study and reasoning, not

“It long had been clearly seen by many Southern Song observers that extensive landholding by the richer sectors of society encouraged abuses of the tax exemption regulations and an increase of tax evasion among officials and wealthy households. These caused severe imbalances in the revenue system, bringing about widespread hardship in risk society.”

“The Chinese, however, have never felt that those who failed the highest examinations, under those odds, were necessarily of inferior cultivation and intelligence. Many noted literati throughout history failed, sometimes repeatedly; they were seen not as ‘failed men’ but as learned persons whom fate had not (yet) favored.
Those who did not receive degrees had to make their living apart from official service…

“‘Nativist reaction’ has been seen at many times and places in human history. [] Such movements seldom have led to the mass displacement of the ‘adopted’ culture and full return to the idealized ‘native’ culture by the reacting society. But that is not the whole measure of their meaning. They can provide culturally destabilized or socially dissatisfied persons with the means to reorient their lives