Ancestral Leaves: A Family Journey through Chinese History
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Ancestral Leaves: A Family Journey through Chinese History
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780520947627 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 02/09/2011 |
| Series: | The World's Finest Wines |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 392 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
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Read an Excerpt
Ancestral Leaves
A Family Journey through Chinese History
By Joseph W. Esherick
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Copyright © 2011 The Regents of the University of CaliforniaAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-94762-7
CHAPTER 1
Fleeing the Long Hairs
In 1852, Ye Kunhou went home to bury his mother. The filial son, then fifty years old, was at the prime of his career as a local official in the north China province of Henan, along the Yellow river. He had distinguished himself by fighting floods and then pursuing bandits and rebels. At a recent awe-inspiring audience in the capital, the emperor had commended him for diligent service. But the Confucian precepts of the imperial code required that an official resign his post for three years of mourning on the death of a parent. Together with his brother, he fulfilled his filial obligations by retiring to his home in the walled city of Anqing, to give his mother a proper burial.
Anqing, on the north bank of the Yangzi River, lies about six hundred kilometers upstream from Shanghai at the river's mouth. In the mid-nineteenth century, it was the provincial capital of Anhui. A fairly new province, Anhui had been split off from the large lower Yangzi province of Jiangnan only in 1662 and given a name that derived from its two largest prefectures, Anqing and Huizhou—the latter lying south of the Yangzi and renowned as a homeland of Chinese merchants. Like other Chinese capital cities, Anqing was surrounded by a sturdy brick-faced wall, but the area within the wall measured only one square mile (2.5 square kilometers). With a population of perhaps seventy thousand, it was one of China's smallest provincial capitals. Commerce along this stretch of the Yangzi centered downstream at the port of Wuhu, and Anqing was primarily a political center—which was one reason scholar-officials like Ye Kunhou and his brothers moved there from the nearby village of their ancestors. Here they were close to official power and could enjoy the amenities of urban life: bookstores, teahouses, antique shops, picturesque temples and pavilions, and the company of their peers. A missionary in the early twentieth century reported that roughly one-fourth of the area within the walls was occupied by public buildings: the officials' yamen (as their combined office and living quarters were called), schools, jails, and temples. Anqing, in his words, was "a rather sleepy, conservative, comfortable place."
In normal times, Anqing might have been sleepy and comfortable, but the mid-nineteenth century was not normal times. Indeed, no sooner had Ye Kunhou moved back to Anqing than the city found itself threatened by a massive rebel armada sailing down the Yangzi river. The rebels, known as the Taiping, were inspired by a quasi-Christian religious fervor (their leader conceived himself to be Jesus's younger brother) and an intense hatred of the China's Manchu ruling elite. The rebellion would wrack central China for over a decade, killing tens of millions and bringing unprecedented devastation. It was a watershed in China's modern history, but a cataclysm long in the making.
The Manchu dynasty, called the Qing (pronounced "ching"), had been ruling China since 1644. During the first two centuries, the country had enjoyed unprecedented prosperity. Long years of domestic peace, the spread of new subsistence crops from the New World (especially corn and sweet potatoes), commercial crops (cotton, peanuts, rapeseed, sesame), the handicraft production of silk and cotton textiles, an efficient market in grain, and a state-supported safety net of granaries provided the foundations for this prosperity. Famine relief in bad years meant that most people had enough to eat, clothing was relatively cheap and widely available, and young men could afford to marry and raise families. As a result, China's population tripled, approaching 450 million: growth that was initially a sign of prosperity but ultimately a demographic burden. The Qing state did not keep up with this economic and population growth, its revenues limited by a 1712 edict freezing the all-important land tax. Corruption spread, and officials covered up problems they were ill equipped to solve. When dikes and waterworks were not well maintained, floods became more serious. By the nineteenth century, the granary system was plagued by leaky warehouses, rotting rice, and false reporting: an efficient state response to famine was no longer possible. Not long before he returned home, Ye Kunhou wrote a sad poem describing repeated floods in Anhui that le nine in ten people destitute: beggars filled the roads, people ate bark and weeds, and parents sold their children.
The Qing state faced another problem—one scarcely mentioned in official documents. The Manchus were an ethnically alien conquest dynasty. From their homeland in the northeast, they had conquered China in the seventeenth century. In some places, the conquest was extremely brutal, especially when Chinese men resisted the imposition of the Manchu hairstyle, which required them to shave their foreheads and keep a long braided queue. The conquering armies, organized in banners and including Mongols and ethnic Chinese (Han) from the northeast, garrisoned key points throughout the empire, living in separate walled compounds. in the central government, every board (ministry) had two presidents: one Manchu and one Chinese. In provincial posts, Manchus and Han bannermen, descendants of the original allies, predominated.
Over time, the cultural differences between Manchus and Han gradually faded. Despite vigorous imperial efforts to define and maintain a distinct Manchu identity, the bannermen acculturated to the Chinese environment. By the nineteenth century, Manchus wrote and spoke in Chinese, educated their children in the Confucian classics, composed poetry, and absorbed the cultural norms of the Chinese literati. Their skills as horsemen and archers, which the Qing emperors promoted to preserve Manchu identity, declined markedly. Still, they were a separate and privileged elite, and resentment of their political dominance was natural.
In the mid-nineteenth century, these domestic problems were exacerbated by European imperialism. Westerners had traded directly with China since the sixteenth century, buying silk, tea, and porcelain (known in Europe as "china"). In the late eighteenth century, the pace of trade picked up, especially as the English developed a taste for tea. Tea became Britain's prime Asian import. Heavily taxed (causing well-known problems in the American colonies), tea also provided invaluable revenues for the crown. But the British were unable to identify an export product to balance their imports of tea, silk, and china—until they began cultivating opium in India. The trade was illegal, but the Qing state, whose navy was inadequate to patrol its long coastline, proved powerless to stop it. In the nineteenth century, and especially in the 1830s, opium sales increased dramatically until silver—which had long flowed into China to pay for Europe's purchases—began to flow out. This brought a shortage of silver, a fall in prices, and a significant economic downturn. In addition, as is always the case with illegal drugs, the profits from opium sales were sufficient to corrupt the Chinese armed forces and officials in the coastal regions.
In 1839, the crisis came to a head. Determined to stop the opium flow, the emperor sent an imperial commissioner to Canton (or Guangzhou), the exclusive southern port for trade with the West. The commissioner closed opium dens, confiscated opium pipes, and punished addicts, and then sought to sanction the Western opium merchants. The British merchants persuaded their government to use the dispute as an opportunity to forcibly "open" China to trade. Soon the Opium War broke out. China's armies, neglected during long years of peace, were utterly unfit to confront this new challenge. In Ye Kunhou's words, "Half the soldiers on the registers are phony names [a padding of the rolls to enrich the officers]./The old and the weak inherit their positions./Men are drafted from the riff-raff of the towns and worthless rascals join the ranks." The superior discipline, training, tactics, and military technology of the British navy and its marines won a quick victory, sealed in the 1842 treaty of Nanjing. Hong Kong was ceded to the British; several ports, including Shanghai, were opened to trade and Christian proselytizing; and the Qing suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of the Western barbarians.
In one of the world-shaping tragedies of modern history, China and the West confronted each other politically and militarily just at the point when the Qing empire was growing corrupt and entering a period of decline while the West, bursting with confidence from the advances of the scientific and industrial revolutions, was more convinced than ever of the superiority of its civilization. The Opium War that resulted from this fateful confrontation exacerbated the decline of Manchu rule. Unrest had been spreading for some time, in the form of banditry, secret societies, and small-scale rebellions by religious sectarians, ethnic minorities in mountain enclaves, and underemployed, unmarried, and rootless young men drawn to gambling and criminal activity. Opium smuggling provided new opportunities for secret societies, and British efforts to suppress piracy along the southern coast drove many brigands into inland waterways.
Amid this growing unrest, a frustrated scholar from the Canton region, who had repeatedly failed the civil service examinations, came to believe—aer reading a Christian pamphlet—that he was the son of God and the younger brother of Jesus Christ. In the 1840s, Hong Xiuquan and a small band of devoted followers formed the God Worshippers Society in the ill-governed hill country of Guangxi province in southwestern China. Leaders of the God Worshippers, claiming to be possessed by the spirit of Jesus Christ or the Heavenly Father, offered prophecies, denounced immoral practices, cured sickness, succored the needy, and promised salvation for the faithful. The gentry elite in nearby towns became suspicious of this heterodox faith, reporting the group to the local authorities and harassing it with militia forces raised from their tenants and neighbors. But the God Worshippers attracted more and more followers, especially among the Hakka minority to which Hong belonged, poor charcoal burners and unemployed miners, other vulnerable groups seeking protection and support, and secret-society members willing to offer their fighting skills. By 1850, the government had grown sufficiently suspicious to move against this new religion, which reorganized itself as the Taiping ("Great Peace") Heavenly Kingdom and rose in open rebellion. The Taiping added a clear anti-Manchu message to its religious millenarianism. The Manchus were decried as alien "imps," and the Taiping displayed their anti-Manchu mission by abandoning the Qing-mandated hairstyle and marching forth with unshaved foreheads and loose tresses, which earned them the name "Long Hairs."
For two years, the rebels fought and gathered strength in their southwestern hill-country base. Then in 1852 they broke out of government encirclement and headed north into central China, where the size of their army increased exponentially. By the end of the Chinese lunar Year, the Taiping had captured the strategic cities of central China, and their vast fleet lay poised to move down the Yangzi toward Anqing and China's economic heartland in the lower Yangzi valley—down toward the ancestral home of the Ye family.
Back in Anqing, Ye Kunhou and his family mourned his departed mother. neighbors came to console him, but after a while, the number of visitors declined, and he regretted his loss of official status: "When one's time comes, guests are plentiful;/ When one's influence wanes, even relatives are distant." He attended to family affairs—notably plans to build a proper lineage hall and compile a new edition of the genealogy. As the family's first official in many years, he was eager to establish the written record and ritual institutions that would preserve his family's place in local society. Heal so relished the opportunity to relax, away from the cares of office. He had returned from Henan with an enormous collection of some 460 antiques; old friends still came to chat over wine and poetry, an important form of socializing among the literati; and he had a substantial library where he spent a good deal of time reading history, turning often to accounts of earlier dynasties in crisis. The rebel advance was never far from his mind, and the city's lack of preparation distressed him. "From the walls, the sound of war drums;/Within the city, they are singing and dancing." When disaster struck, it seemed appropriate and inevitable retribution: "The prosperity of Jiangnan [the lower Yangzi region] has reached the level of arrogant extravagance./Out of such peace and happiness comes sudden change./The flames of war foretell a disastrous punishment."
The advance of the Taiping armada along the river toward Anqing sent the city into an uproar. Strange omens foretold trouble: clouds without rain on a particular day, pear trees bearing melons, bamboo flowering across the city, rats fleeing, a falling meteorite. Such portents suggested that the dynasty had failed to maintain cosmic harmony and was losing the Mandate of Heaven. The populace was growing uneasy. After the fall tax collection, the city's granaries were filled with rice, which the governor feared would be an attractive target for the rebels. Additional troops were requested to defend the city, but when two thousand soldiers arrived from neighboring Zhejiang province, Ye Kunhou's son Boying was not impressed: they were "short, small, timid and weak—most unreliable." The governor sought help from the gentry—the local elite of former officials like Ye Kunhou, scholars who had passed the civil service examinations but never taken office, and other gentlemen whose wealth and status made them leaders of their communities. Ye Kunhou was asked to apply his experience fighting rebels in Henan to organize a local militia to defend the city. He responded by forming a gentry-led militia bureau, which first sought to identify Taiping spies who had infiltrated the city. He had little confidence in the governor, whom he found hopelessly weak: real power lay in the hands of the lieutenant governor, who in turn relied on an aide whose arrogance was unconstrained by moral principles. Ye Kunhou had good relations with another local official, the son of a colleague he had known in Henan, but this lower-ranking official could offer little help. With the official establishment in disarray, no one thought the city could be defended, and residents prepared to flee. One commander, fearing that Taiping soldiers might use the dwellings along the outside of Anqing's walls to scale the walls or to protect sappers digging tunnels to blow up the city's defenses, ordered the houses destroyed—a desperate (though prudent) move that both angered and frightened the residents. Officials and gentry retreated to the relative safety of the countryside. The young Ye Boying took his large extended family by boat some fifty kilometers north to the hills of neighboring Tongcheng county, where a former official and colleague of his father offered refuge. Back in the city, Chinese new Year came without celebration. Snow covered the ground. The markets were still. Most of the people had fled.
Some four hundred kilometers upriver, on the first day of the Chinese new Year (February 8, 1853), the Taiping set forth from the central China city of Wuchang. A large ground force on both sides of the river protected a flotilla of some twenty thousand commandeered junks. In the middle of the fleet, the Taiping Heavenly King Hong Xiuquan rode in a majestic dragon boat, testifying to the imperial ambitions now added to his religious mission. The rebel army was virtually a nation on the move—perhaps five hundred thousand people in all, males and females in carefully segregated camps. Many were conscripts from the towns and cities the Taiping had already conquered, and not all would prove loyal to the cause. The immediate effect, however, was to produce such a massive force moving relentlessly down the Yangzi that resistance crumbled in city after city.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Ancestral Leaves by Joseph W. Esherick. Copyright © 2011 The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
PrefacePart I: The Imperial Era
1. Fleeing the Long Hairs
2. Family Roots
3. Father, Son, and Family
4. Rebellion
5. Official Life in the Late Qing
6. A Time of Transitions
Part II: Republican China
7. Doing Business in Tianjin
8. Growing Up in Tianjin
9. Student Life in the 1930s
10.War
Part III: The People’s Republic
11. Family Life in New China
12. Hundred Flowers and Poisonous Weeds
13. The Cultural Revolution
Epilogue: After the Deluge
Notes
Glossary of Chinese Terms
Selected Ye Family Bibliography
Index
What People are Saying About This
"This is an extraordinary book; for me it was something of a page-turner as I followed the story of the twists and turns."—Twentieth Century China
"Ancestral Leaves offers for . . . the general reader a most unique survey of modern Chinese history."—Frontiers of History
In China
"Ancestral Leaves is a great read and it will appeal to specialists and non-specialists alike."—Journal of Chinese Studies
"Very well researched and documented. . . . Something special and rare."
—Chinese Cross Currents
"Meticulously researched and written in an absorbing style. [Esherick's] book enriches our understanding of Chinese social history."—The China Journal