China's Early Empires

David's Bookshelf: The remarkable thing about China's history is how little of its past has been physically preserved.

"The Early Chinese Empires" is the name of the opening volume of Belknap's lively six-volume history of Imperial China, but this opening volume is nothing like the beginning of the story.

The first of the "early empires" studied here is the Qin dynasty of 221-207 BC. At the time Hannibal was crossing the Alps into Italy to pulverize the armies of the Roman Republic, the ruler of the western-most of the Chinese principalities was conquering and absorbing his neighbors slung the banks of the Yellow River. This principality, spelled Qin, pronounced Chin, was the poorest of them all, but the most thoroughly organized and mobilized for war. The King of Qin was a megalomaniac paranoiac, who believed that total conquest could gain him immortal life. The covered arched walkways you see in traditional Chinese paintings of idealized parks were an invention of his: to ensure his invisibility when he must move outside his own palace.

It was the King of Qin who ordered up that famous army of terracotta soldiers buried near the modern city of Xian, close to his own ancient capital. He buried with him all of his concubines who had not yet borne him sons. Within a decade, his empire had fallen apart. But the idea behind the empire endured. In the post-imperial chaos, former mid-level imperial clerk assembled an army, reconquered the territory once ruled from Qin - and established the famous Han dynasty that would last, with interruptions, more than 300 years, a bookend to Rome on the far side of the world.

But the years from 221 BC to the final dissolution of the Han in 220 of the Common Era surmount hundreds of years of recognizably "Chinese" prior history. China was already unfathomably old when the King of Qin became the first man to take the title that we translate into English as "Emperor."

Now you might say: So what? European history extends a long way back: Cro-Magnons were painting caves 25,000 years ago, Celts were making good-looking swords and pots a thousand years before Christ, and the Parthenon is near as old as Confucius.

But here's the difference between Europe and China, and it takes considerable adjustment to absorb all the implications of this difference.

The history of Europe is driven by sharp discontinuities of period and self-conscious distinctions between peoples.

A classical Roman would have felt that "his" history extended back to the beginning of the Republic in the 700s BC or in a cultural sense perhaps to the Trojan war sometime before that. Further back then that, it didn't concern him. A medieval Christian likewise had a sense of "before" and "after": a Hungarian Catholic of 1400 might know about Rome, but he would not think of himself as Roman. The Protestant Reformation, the Enlightenment, the rise of nation states, likewise slice our history into periods far more meaningful than the unspooling whole.

A title like "A History of France, 987-1989" makes sense to us. But on those rare occasions when an ambitious synthesizing historian tries to write a history of all of Europe from Neolithic era to the present -- or all the "West" -- the result usually seems forced, argumentative, even polemical - and their arguments quickly fall out of style.

But with China, there really is no choice: You have to study the whole damn thing to understand any of it.

That is not to say that "China" is an unchanging unity. It's startling to think that through most of the period covered by this volume, tea was regarded as a medicine, rice as an unusual addition to the diet. Over the centuries, the Chinese would worship different gods in different ways. Buddhism would come and then (largely) go. Spoken languages would arise and vanish, the written characters would change their shapes and meaning. Nor was this change always gradual. Chinese history would be punctuated with catastrophes as terrible as the fall of Rome and the Black Plague: millions of people could die in the tumult that accompanied the end of a dynasty.

And yet notwithstanding all that: a literate Chinese of the year, say 1850 lived in a mental universe much more similar to that of a Chinese of 2000 years before than did a literate Englishman of the year 1850 a literate Englishman of the year 1750. More than that: While a literate Englishman of 1850 would have been eager to believe himself different from his great-grandfather of a hundred years previous, his Chinese counterpart would have been even more eager to believe himself continuing the vanished traditions of the past. Even if, on more than a few occasions, the traditions to be continued had to be invented first.

This appetite for continuity brings up the second shocking oddity of China's antiquity, shocking at least to me.

Despite the amazing and even terrifying continuity of Chinese culture, it is really astonishing how little of ancient China there remains for anybody to look at. Lewis off-handedly mentions at one point that there remains not a single surviving house or palace from Han China. There are not even ruins.

There's no equivalent of the Parthenon or the Roman Forum, no Pantheon or Colosseum. You can come closer to the present: There's no real Chinese equivalent for Notre Dame or the Palazzo Vecchio. For all its overpowering continuity, China does not preserve physical remains of the past.

Even those things advertised in China as "old" usually turn out otherwise: the Temple of Heaven and the Forbidden City in Beijing originate in Ming times, but the forms we see post-date 1644 - and really they look like as if they had been remodeled and repainted as recently as last week. You'll be shown a supposedly ancient pagoda, only to have it explained that it burned down in 1150, was rebuilt in 1300, then demolished, then built again, and has now been fully restored thanks to generous funding from the local government. The sections of the Great Wall open to visitors are "Ming dynasty" in exactly the same way that the Governor's Palace in Williamsburg, Virginia, is 17th century: some stones are, some stones aren't.

You can blame the fragility of the Chinese built environment on the cultural preference for wood over stone, or possibly the seismic volatility of the Chinese landscape.

But as you read through these Belknap volumes and imagine the immensity of time they represent, you wonder whether the burden of history must not become intolerable for the Chinese themselves. When a new dynasty arises, it systematically plunders the capital of the old dynasty, recycling valuable building materials, burning the rest: that was the fate of the Qin capital, of the first Han capital, of the great Tang capital of Chang'an, of Song dynasty's Kaifeng. The Mongols and the Ming both used what is now Beijing as a capital -- but before the Ming built their city, they first pulled down what the Mongols had left behind. The last dynasty, the Manchu Ching, ostentatiously conserved the Ming locations -- but then "improved" them in light of that latter dynasty's aggressive bad taste.

I paid my own first visit to Beijing this spring. In a huge city almost 800 years old, there seemed as far as I could see fewer 18th century building remaining than in the tiny town Annapolis, Maryland; fewer 19th century buildings than in Baltimore. China suffered a destructive 20th century, it's true. Yet now that China is regaining its wealth and power, its first thought seems to be to demolish as much as possible of the little that survived the destruction. The visitor may ask: Why are they so determined to obliterate their past? Are they ashamed? It takes a long stretch of reading and thinking to appreciate that the demolition is itself a tradition from the past -- and even more sadly to appreciate that the legacies of the Chinese past most in need of change are not built by hand but carried in the mind.