A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD BY H. G. WELLS
30.CONFUCIUS AND LAO TSE
We have still to tell of two other great men, Confucius and Lao Tse, who lived in that wonderful century which began the adolescence of mankind, the sixth century B.C. In this history thus far we have told very little of the early story of China. At present that early history is still very obscure, and we look to Chinese explorers and archæolologists in the new China that is now arising to work out their past as thoroughly as the European past has been worked out during the last century. Very long ago the first primitive Chinese civilizations arose in the great river valleys out of the primordial heliolithic culture. They had, like Egypt and Sumeria, the general characteristics of that culture, and they centred upon temples in which priests and priest kings offered the seasonal blood sacrifices. The life in those cities must have been very like the Egyptian and Sumerian life of six or seven thousand years ago and very like the Maya life of Central America a thousand years ago.
If there were human sacrifices they had long given way to animal
sacrifices before the dawn of history. And a form of picture writing
was growing up long before a thousand years B.C.
And just as the primitive civilizations of Europe and western Asia were
in conflict with the nomads of the desert and the nomads of the north,
so the primitive Chinese civilizations had a great cloud of nomadic
peoples on their northern borders. There was a number of tribes akin
in language and ways of living, who are spoken of in history in
succession as the Huns, the Mongols, the Turks and Tartars. They
changed and divided and combined and re-combined, just as the Nordic
peoples in north Europe and central Asia changed and varied in name
rather than in nature. These Mongolian nomads had horses earlier than
the Nordic peoples, and it may be that in the region of the Altai
Mountains they made an independent discovery of iron somewhen after
1000 B.C. And just as in the western case so ever and again these
eastern nomads would achieve a sort of political unity, and become the
conquerors and masters and revivers of this or that settled and
civilized region.
It is quite possible that the earliest civilization of China was not
Mongolian at all any more than the earliest civilization of Europe and
western Asia was Nordic or Semitic. It is quite possible that the
earliest civilization of China was a brunette civilization and of a
piece with the earliest Egyptian, Sumerian and Dravidian civilizations,
and that when the first recorded history of China began there had
already been conquests and intermixture. At any rate we find that by
1750 B.C. China was already a vast system of little kingdoms and city
states, all acknowledging a loose allegiance and paying more or less
regularly, more or less definite feudal dues to one great priest
emperor, the “Son of Heaven.” The “Shang” dynasty came to an end in
1125 B.C. A “Chow” dynasty succeeded “Shang,” and maintained China in
a relaxing unity until the days of Asoka in India and of the Ptolemies
in Egypt. Gradually China went to pieces during that long “Chow”
period. Hunnish peoples came down and set up principalities; local
rulers discontinued their tribute and became independent. There was in
the sixth century B.C., says one Chinese authority, five or six
thousand practically independent states in China. It was what the
Chinese call in their records an “Age of Confusion.”
But this Age of Confusion was compatible with much intellectual
activity and with the existence of many local centres of art and
civilized living. When we know more of Chinese history we shall find
that China also had her Miletus and her Athens, her Pergamum and her
Macedonia. At present we must be vague and brief about this period of
Chinese division simply because our knowledge is not sufficient for us
to frame a coherent and consecutive story.
CONFUCIUS
CONFUCIUS
Copy of stone carving in the Temple of Confucius at K’iu Fu
_(From the records of the Archæological Mission to North China
(Chavannes))_
And just as in divided Greece there were philosophers and in shattered
and captive Jewry prophets, so in disordered China there were
philosophers and teachers at this time. In all these cases insecurity
and uncertainty seemed to have quickened the better sort of mind.
Confucius was a man of aristocratic origin and some official importance
in a small state called Lu. Here in a very parallel mood to the Greek
impulse he set up a sort of Academy for discovering and teaching
Wisdom. The lawlessness and disorder of China distressed him
profoundly. He conceived an ideal of a better government and a better
life, and travelled from state to state seeking a prince who would
carry out his legislative and educational ideas. He never found his
prince; he found a prince, but court intrigues undermined the influence
of the teacher and finally defeated his reforming proposals. It is
interesting to note that a century and a half later the Greek
philosopher Plato also sought a prince, and was for a time adviser to
the tyrant Dionysius who ruled Syracuse in Sicily.
Confucius died a disappointed man. “No intelligent ruler arises to
take me as his master,” he said, “and my time has come to die.” But
his teaching had more vitality than he imagined in his declining and
hopeless years, and it became a great formative influence with the
Chinese people. It became one of what the Chinese call the Three
Teachings, the other two being those of Buddha and of Lao Tse.
The gist of the teaching of Confucius was the way of the noble or
aristocratic man. He was concerned with personal conduct as much as
Gautama was concerned with the peace of self-forgetfulness and the
Greek with external knowledge and the Jew with righteousness. He was
the most public-minded of all great teachers. He was supremely
concerned by the confusion and miseries of the world, and he wanted to
make men noble in order to bring about a noble world. He sought to
regulate conduct to an extraordinary extent; to provide sound rules for
every occasion in life. A polite, public- spirited gentleman, rather
sternly self-disciplined, was the ideal he found already developing in
the northern Chinese world and one to which he gave a permanent form.
THE GREAT WALL OF CHINA
THE GREAT WALL OF CHINA
As it crosses the mountains in Manchuria
_Photo: Underwood & Underwood_
The teaching of Lao Tse, who was for a long time in charge of the
imperial library of the Chow dynasty, was much more mystical and vague
and elusive than that of Confucius. He seems to have preached a
stoical indifference to the pleasures and powers of the world and a
return to an imaginary simple life of the past. He left writings very
contracted in style and very obscure. He wrote in riddles. After his
death his teachings, like the teachings of Gautama Buddha, were
corrupted and overlaid by legends and had the most complex and
extraordinary observances and superstitious ideas grafted upon them.
In China just as in India primordial ideas of magic and monstrous
legends out of the childish past of our race struggled against the new
thinking in the world and succeeded in plastering it over with
grotesque, irrational and antiquated observances. Both Buddhism and
Taoism (which ascribes itself largely to Lao Tse) as one finds them in
China now, are religions of monk, temple, priest and offering of a type
as ancient in form, if not in thought, as the sacrificial religions of
ancient Sumeria and Egypt. But the teaching of Confucius was not so
overlaid because it was limited and plain and straightforward and lent
itself to no such distortions.
EARLY CHINESE BRONZE BELL
EARLY CHINESE BRONZE BELL
Inscribed in archaic characters: “made for use by the elder of Hing
village in Ting district;” latter half of the Chou Dynasty, Sixth
Century B.C.
_(In the Victoria and Albert Museum)_
North China, the China of the Hwang-ho River, became Confucian in
thought and spirit; south China, Yang-tse-Kiang China, became Taoist.
Since those days a conflict has always been traceable in Chinese
affairs between these two spirits, the spirit of the north and the
spirit of the south, between (in latter times) Pekin and Nankin,
between the official- minded, upright and conservative north, and the
sceptical, artistic, lax and experimental south.
The divisions of China of the Age of Confusion reached their worst
stage in the sixth century B.C. The Chow dynasty was so enfeebled and
so discredited that Lao Tse left the unhappy court and retired into
private life.
Three nominally subordinate powers dominated the situation in those
days, Ts’i and Ts’in, both northern powers, and Ch’u, which was an
aggressive military power in the Yangtse valley. At last Ts’i and
Ts’in formed an alliance, subdued Ch’u and imposed a general treaty of
disarmament and peace in China. The power of Ts’in became predominant.
Finally about the time of Asoka in India the Ts’in monarch seized upon
the sacrificial vessels of the Chow emperor and took over his
sacrificial duties. His son, Shi-Hwang-ti (king in 246 B.C., emperor in
220 B.C.), is called in the Chinese Chronicles “the First Universal
Emperor.”
More fortunate than Alexander, Shi-Hwang-ti reigned for thirty-six
years as king and emperor. His energetic reign marks the beginning of
a new era of unity and prosperity for the Chinese people. He fought
vigorously against the Hunnish invaders from the northern deserts, and
he began that immense work, the Great Wall of China, to set a limit to their incursions.