To elaborate, the closest thing India has to democracy are its various assemblies, but ironically the people pushing for liberal property rights are also the ones pushing back against all those sorts of things, since assemblies are an outmoded "feudal" system that forces all the big financiers have to get buy-in from a larger swathe of society than they want to in order to get anything done. Plus all the serious political philosophers find the idea of "equal kingdoms" to be a little old-fashioned lately.
The New World of the White Huns
- Thread starter Practical Lobster
- Start date
To elaborate, the closest thing India has to democracy are its various assemblies, but ironically the people pushing for liberal property rights are also the ones pushing back against all those sorts of things, since assemblies are an outmoded "feudal" system that forces all the big financiers have to get buy-in from a larger swathe of society than they want to in order to get anything done. Plus all the serious political philosophers find the idea of "equal kingdoms" to be a little old-fashioned lately.
I don't know if this has any OTL parallel but it really reminds me of how Brazilian ex-slaves were an influential merchant community (dealing in slaves, but also other things) from Dahomey to Angola. Obviously it's different since the Kurama are sovereign free-men... but maybe that just makes it possible for them to take on more professions
This and calendars are two of the things at the back of my mind. I think sooner or later we do need an overview of theatrical and musical forms-- maybe it becomes part of strategies for legitimation in the Kapudesan conflict?
But given that not a lot of Sasanian melodies have actually been preserved the best I can say is that the dastgah scale system is probably the bedrock of composition in the Eftal style and those taking the Eftal as an inspiration: Xasars, Rusichi. The maqam system is difficult-- it's classically Arab but was probably produced through significant Persian influence as well. It's maybe safe to say something like it was promoted by the Bakhtiyar, which could make it a popular part of Jihangirid and Egyptian Khayamid court music (but the respective majority populations of each state might be more reserved in using it, composition in it may be seen as a way of sucking up to the royal court). Other implications of "no Islam" are that North Africa and Egypt compose according to the Roman-Greek tradition and that India... no ghazals, the differences only snowball from there, a lot of instruments will be different. It may be possible that European guitars are much more like lutes, lacking the influence of the oud; and I'm actually not sure if East Asia or Southeast Asia would see much difference, Southeast Asia's musical traditions survived conversion pretty well OTL and here they're still Hindu-Buddhist.
If anyone wants to write a canon post on any of this, PM Lobster? We do this to learn and I'd love to learn from people who know more about music than me.
We'll have posts on both of these soon (today or tomorrow for the Tereists), but-- the Horn currently has a Christian Ethiopia (last seen dunking on Indian/Arab imperialists). Southern Somalia is tangentially part of the Kapudesan affair, although its sympathies may be too Arab-Iranian/Buddhist for Haikarudra, Ndesamburo, and Kiringa to accept. Meanwhile Makuria exists, rules North Sudan, and is Coptic-- wonder what they'll get up to.
You asked about them and Japan earlier and-- the changes compared to OTL that China went through means a lot of knock-on effects on Korean and Japanese politics/religion. There's room for a fair bit of difference from OTL but we're not fully done working this out.
Last edited:
This should be (one of) the last "world coverage" posts-- trying to make sure every region of the world has at least one sentence about what it's doing in the 1300s. Glaring exceptions to this of course include Korea and Japan but shhhhhhh (also Central Africa but they're not even that relevant for East African events until later on). After this we're likely sticking with a handful of regions in Eurasia for an extended time.
The moving finger writes; and having writ, moves on
Is writing the only means of recording information? Of course not. Setting aside the fact that oral memory and retelling is enough for accounting the resources and obligations of a small community, a range of technologies— the tribute-bins of the Chimu, the knotted strings of the Andes, the memory-boards of Central Africa, and especially the “international style” of pictorial grammar seen in Tolteca— allow accounts of economic and political activity across larger formations. In religion the link between writing and memory is even weaker— the memories of teachers and disciples preserved texts from the Homeric epics to the Vedas for centuries. Giving sole credit to “efficiency” for the triumph of writing in a nonliterate culture ignores the utility of competing methods— but equally damning, it ignores the aesthetic power of writing itself. Before simplified and standard forms there were many scribal hands, and their glyphs readily revealed the natural imagery they took as their inspiration. Years of initiation and successive rituals produced a class set apart by erudite charisma, that worked with vermillion on clay, chisel-scratches on bronze and stone, plant juices on animal skin. The objects produced by writing— the ancient Chinese urns, the walls of Indian temples, the gold-painted Frankish manuscripts— have an appeal adjacent to, but separate from, the words themselves. Even an observer accustomed to the ubiquity and ease of writing in his era cannot shake the feeling that an old book doesn’t have to be some grimoire written in blood on human skin to be magical all the same.
For the Hausa of the 1000s AD, the dealers in this magic were the preachers of Holy Kanem, a state born from the revolutions of the preceding century. So long as the Kanem lionized conversion as equal to conquest (and so long as its clerics reported to the royal court of the Kay lineage, bypassing Alexandria’s impotent Archbishop in Njimi), its clerics abroad were enemy soldiers. They were also envoys, and their death would mean one of those wars for which Kanem was all too ready. For keeping this group out of harm’s way and away from the populations they wished to minister to, the Hausa royals had no better prison than their own palaces. The firm “invitations” of the pagan kings, delivered by the spies in the marketplaces, were odious to some clerics— but more odious was the thought of returning to Kanem empty-handed. So they remained, like Daniel in the house of Nebuchadnezzar. When not permitted to preach to the members of their hosts’ household, they simply read aloud to each other from their Makurian-papyrus Bibles. They spent their allowances on the import of more papyrus from the east, and wrote home on a variety of topics— the price of acacia gum (a valued export of the Great Laddeh [Sahel]), reports from the wars of the Mande in the west. Soon, they were no longer writing for themselves— their hosts dictated messages to them for personal correspondence with contacts in other cities.
And again, we miss the point if we leave things here, with the use of Coptic script for letters and records, and then contracts and laws and chronicles— first written in Kanembu and translated back to Hausa, then written in Hausa itself. All this was sufficient to make the 1000s a century of surprising Kanem-ization among the sworn enemies of Kanem— the import of Makurian papyrus or substitutes from the northern Berbers, the adoption of Kanembu fashions themselves adopted from further east, the extra income earned by porters who banded together to create postal networks. In the following century, the Kano Chronicle’s portrayal of a Kanem at war against all of civilization would itself be rendered in Kanem’s own script. But no less significant than these innovations were the spread of cultic practices that integrated the written word, both within the context of a tenuously stretched Christianity and outside it altogether. Ink washed from the wooden slates of wise men was bottled up and sold as elixirs. Warriors wore undershirts ringed with lines of painted prayers and incantations. The efficacy of these objects was evaluated independently of the religious context from which they were abstracted, free to exchange hands without the great corpus of Christian belief having to match their progress. The humble amulet, sometimes no more than a scrap of papyrus inscribed with a verse, took the written word where the law-code would not, to those people for whom the laws of the Hausa, never mind the Kanembu, did not apply. It was in this guise that the Fula encountered the written word among the Mossi and Songhay, western neighbors of the Hausa and easternmost constituents of the Fula empire after the mid-1200s [1].
***
Did Andilander reticence change the course of Toltecan history? Possibly. The Andilanders kept bills of lading for Nfansou’s expedition in their own runes, as they did for their own expeditions. Having landed the Fula in Tolteca, however, they were reluctant to bring their script ashore. The Andilanders in Tolteca were many things— sailors, bodyguards, advisors— but they were not administrators, if only because there were not enough of them to constitute an administrative class. And as for training others in the art of reading their runes… even if the threat of death was not held over them by their elders, they would not do it. The surest shield of their Darmahujr faith and its followers was secrecy; they would not part easily with documents bearing the runes.
But even if the Andilander script was available to the Toltecan Fula, it would have to vie with centuries of Toltecan tradition. This tradition was not invulnerable: a series of ecological and political disasters in the 900s AD led to a collapse in several Maya polities and associated scribal classes; the reconstituted polities which faced Nfansou’s onslaught copied the old books dutifully, but restricted the art of writing to particular lineages. The script of the Maya, the only system in the Solvias to closely follow the sounds and structure of a spoken language, was by the 1200s AD given new expression mostly in calendars (which mostly only involved numbers and finite sets of names associated with the calendrical cycles) and in the captions of texts where pictures supplied a great portion of the narrative content. The writing of the Zapotecs also did not survive the 800s AD. But in place of these retreating systems, the Toltecs promoted a remarkable semasiographic (language-agnostic symbols) system in which years of education in religion and history produced scribes capable of reading meaning out of, and painting meaning into, precise sequences of pictures, bounding-boxes, and shading. The conventions regulating this system did not accord with the sounds or grammar of any spoken language, but as a consequence transcended language itself. Two observers, even two observers speaking different languages, might look at the same sequence of pictures and produce different sentences— but each would contain the same essential points of subject, object, action, and description as the other. The Toltecs used semasiography to create codices of their histories and lists of tribute for Tollan, Cholollan, and other leading cities from their respective hinterlands [2]. The Fula correctly identified these tribute lists as the future of their imperial enterprise; unfortunately, the priests among whom they hoped to recruit their administrators and scribes were all too often leaders of rebellions, launched in defense of their peoples’ rights or religious practices which the Fula objected to. The Fula era was therefore a Toltec answer to the Maya disasters of three centuries before. As cities crumbled and their peoples melted away, the art of semasiography was reduced to its barest essentials: the tribute lists, the calendars, and those older texts deemed irreplaceable and indispensable.
The Chicomoztotecah cast themselves as the saviors of Toltec tradition, and on this basis their conquest is compared to the reconstitution of Iranshahr by the Parthava. This is valid, but the extent of Chicomoztotec ambition and achievement is better illustrated through comparison with the Franks and the Khitai, the other extraordinary peoples who dared to weigh tradition and innovation on their scales, to make old enemies stand in rank and file, and to produce from the whirling chaos of their continent a rock which could, for a time, represent the culmination of all history. “Revival” of the Toltec legacy was always conditional; in military matters, for example, it was not heeded at all. Solvian levies, clad in mail and quilted cotton, were a majority of the officers and the rank-and-file in the main and forward forces of the typical army, but they did not differ substantially in organization or ranks from the Fula armies which they superseded. One reason for this was that Toltecan armies had always been native-majority, ensuring mass exposure to the Fula system; but even after the conquest, armies faced similar needs. The infantry, for example, had to coordinate with the cavalry, whose tradition was wholly inspired by the Fula— and in some units this "inspiration" was an ongoing process. Officially, the "revivalism" of the Chicomoztotecah committed them to the erasure of the Fula as a group, of which some were singled out by resistance to the conquest or great infamy among their subjects, and met their end by being publicly shot with arrows to mark Tozcatl, the Spring Festival. In practice, the court of Huitzilihuitl did not wish to deprive itself of too many warm bodies with significant fighting experience, especially during an era in which the general neighborhood was still unsafe. The greatest threat was Novaquitaine— where exactly this empire was located was poorly understood, but from its naval base at Colima it oversaw a string of client-states to the west and south of Chicomoztoc. The largest of these, the Purepecha [Tarascan] state, wielded comparable strength to Chicomoztoc itself. The solution favored by Huitzilihuitl was to create a separate legal code (with harsher punishments) for those who could not prove their affiliation with a Solvian clan, as recorded by the scribes of a district's main village or by each of the calpolli (neighborhoods) of a city. The only escape from this code was marrying into a Solvian clan, in a legal system that would favor Solvian spouses and their in-laws, and seek appropriate redress for any grievances they might have. Those of mixed ancestry, who took to calling themselves Ocelomeh (Jaguars), would come into their own in later generations; but throughout the reign of Huitzilihuitl "pure" Fula, tracing their descent wholly to Nfansou's entourage and to the few waves of migration that followed before other areas of Fula expansion drew away potential colonists, were still relied on as horse breeders looking after the reserve animals in the rear of the armies, or to fill out troop rosters where required (and especially on the western borders with the Chimalhuacan and Tarascans). They would, however, never see the inside (or even the outside, except from a great distance) of a commander's tent for the foreseeable future; taking their place would be the new class of Chicomoztotec estate-owners created by the conquest. Efforts to integrate gunnery into this structure benefited from the collapse of the short-lived Ispaniard dominion on the Gulf Coast; although most men and materiel were successfully evacuated to defend Satanazes and the Lucaias from the Moors and other opportunists, sufficient renegade Ispaniards and their Totonac affiliates stayed behind to defend their properties and seek new patrons, readily found in the court of Huitzilihuitl. Besides those weapons purchased from the Moors and the Twin Crowns, a few small cannons could even be fished out of the more recent shipwrecks of the Gulf Coast shallows, the inheritance of a century of piracy and rivalry.
The attitude of Huitzilihuitl’s court toward writing was not a foregone conclusion. Among the dependencies of Novaquitaine, the Latin alphabet had even taken root among the non-Christian peoples like the Purepecha, although the Christian Mixtec elite of Yucu Dzaa/Tututepec were the most insistent on this point. If the Fula had introduced Latin themselves, it is even possible that the Chicomoztotecah might have retained the system. But on this vital question, the initiative was to be seized by the Momachtiqueh [students, followers] of the Itzcoayotl movement, which would come to represent the conscience of Chicomoztoc. A conscience is not always obeyed— in court debates, the defenders of the practice of sacrificing captives of war by shooting them with arrows claimed that this was done in homage to Mixcoatl, he who was given arrows by the Sun to shoot down his intoxicated, feather-adorned brothers (a role that the great clans of the Fula fit into quite well) and feed their hearts and blood to the earth. This heroic ancestor was furthermore the father of Ce Acatl, also called Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl, the figure whose legend provided the foundation for Itzcoatl’s [3]. The son ought not, therefore, to lecture the father— but equally so, the father could not outlive the son, and the portrayal of the defeat in the sacrifice debate as a temporary concession made by the right to the mighty set the tone for the later progress of the Momachtiqueh, whose thoroughgoing use of the written word to promote and achieve their aims rivaled that of the European movement of the Southern Popes.
The Third Yollotlahcuiloani, Tezozomoctzin, confirmed that the tradition which he led accepted the common Toltecan motif of the gods spilling their blood to create humanity, and the associated concept of a “blood debt” to the gods. The Chicomoztotecah interpreted this as a debt to the Sun through the means suggested to Mixcoatl; Chimalhuacan in Xalisco sought to imitate the Sun directly by burning sacrifice victims, and in a curiously Greek fashion letting the Sun partake of the smoke; the state of Yopitzinco took Xipe Totec as their patron, and flaying as their preferred means. But for the Momachtiqueh, all of these tales were superseded by the more recent history of the great king Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl, the finest king and priest to appear among the Toltecs since the fall of Teotihuacan. Although he was the son of Mixcoatl, neither the Sun nor any other divinity bound him to any particular duty; the king was allowed to express his own ideals. He permitted only the sacrifice of serpents and butterflies, claiming this was all that the divine aspect of Quetzalcoatl, also identified with Ehecatl of the wind, desired. At the same time, he was an ascetic and a penitent, who gave up to the gods his own share of food and water, and drew blood from his legs and tongue— whatever the gods would still demand of humanity, he would supply himself. Blessed were the generations that lived and flourished in his long reign, which ended only when at last he could no longer live up to his own standards. He voluntarily went into a long odyssey of exile, where at last he chose his place of death somewhere east of Yucatan.
The appeal of this legend dimmed in the subsequent era. Ironically the Toltec realms were already proceeding toward collapse in the decades before the arrival of the Fula; and when Tolteca’s leading cities turned on each other, each began to curse the feeble old men who considered themselves blessed to live under a king who forswore sacrifice and war, the noblest deaths anyone could ever have. The watchword of this philosophy was that “It is not true, no it is not true / That we came to live on the earth / We came here only to dream / We came here only to sleep.” [4] Life was only a chance to forget one’s true nature, and to commit sin; death, if done right, could be a chance for atonement, a chance to rejoin the unity of existence, even a chance to take on the nature of a god, to become that god’s embodiment (ixiptla). But then, goes the canonical account, the way of the dour Priest-King was revived and invigorated by the lively drama of the youthful Poet-King Itzcoatl— his unlikely rise to power as king of Cuauhnahuac, his twenty year reign of hope and good harvests, and the fateful events of his abolition of slavery. This last episode proved to be the most philosophically resonant— it, and the story of the suicide of Itzcoatl’s father, formed the core of the argument that the Fula era had destroyed the nobility of death. Mass death from disease, overwork, and wanton violence took away thousands for no reason and burdened the living with increased work— and the burden would only increase, if people continued to believe that the only remedy for the humiliations of oppression lay in trying to recreate a “dignified” death, based on garbled memories of what that was supposed to be. Death was, to the disillusioned, the sign of a broken society, the abandonment of the virtues that ought to define a life; and Tolteca no longer had so many warm bodies to give up. The will that animated Itzcoatl, that animated Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl, that seemed to be everywhere upon the wind, that seemed as ancient as ancient could be, enjoined the great mass of humanity to resist heaven's temptations, at least until one’s responsibilities had all been met. Lay practice among the Momachtiqueh would characterized by periods of simultaneous fasting and offerings of one's corn, that which would have become one’s blood, to the divinities of sky and earth (although the especially committed would offer up that blood directly, under the guidance of priest-doctors). This wasn't just a way to assuage any lingering concerns about the debt to the gods, but a gesture of gratitude for the gift of life, which proved the essential benevolence that lay beneath the flayed-skin suits of the divines.
Was the Toltec semasiography sufficient to express these ideas? Well, even if it wasn’t, it was hardly the only means at the disposal of the Momachtiqueh. Itzcoayotl had been closely connected with the conquering elite of Chicomoztoc since before the conquests even started. In disputes over real estate— old ruined temples, or even temples which were still active— the Momachtiqueh could call on contacts in the state. And soon after moving into Cuauhnahuac, the Third Yollotlahcuiloani Tezozomoctzin arranged for entire Otomi villages skilled in the manufacture of amatl-bark paper to be moved to new neighborhoods in the city, granting his movement an independent source of paper and additional income. The propagandistic activities of Itzcoayotl were undertaken from a position of material affluence; it was their enemies who were reduced, in extreme cases, to publications from the gutter. The Momachtiqueh could afford to think about promoting their philosophy beyond the circles of the Nahua, to those peoples who spoke other languages but considered themselves equal participants in civilization. For communication with the Mixtecs and Otomi, some form of the Toltec semasiography remained essential. But the hypothetical scenarios, extensive quotations, and rhetorical flourishes of the argumentative styles used not just by the Momachtiqueh but by all the schools of thought in Tolteca stretched semasiography, whose practitioners were already much reduced in skill by the end of the Fula era, to its limits.
The scholars of the Hueyi Calmecac [5], the great seminary-university of Cuauhnahuac with sister institutions across Chicomoztoc, experimented with pictorial grammars that moved away from language-agnostic semasiography, and accorded more with the structure of spoken Nahua, capturing particular choices of words and conjugations through syllabic or logographic elements. The decisive breakthrough on this front, however, was made by Malinalli (Maya name Ix Eb), the daughter of a family of calendar-keepers from Chich’en in the Yucatan. The Itza people of Chich’en had for some centuries been more open to the western cosmopolis than other easterners, integrating Toltec motifs into their art and to their repertoires of sorcery. Their city was one of the leading horses in the team that the Kandkessids yoked together to have a shot at governing the Yucatan, and may even have established its own dominion in that land if not for the landings of the Twin Crowns in Can Pech and Sisal. Now the Itza and other exiles resided in Chicomoztoc, hoping to gain sanction and supplies for an expedition against the remnant Kandkessids and their Novaquitanian protectors. Publicly, they made shows of approval for the philosophy of Itzcoayotl, but argued that it should remain a philosophy shared by autonomous providers of religious or magical services (comparable to Daoism) rather than a set of rules binding on those practitioners. In any case, the preference of bloodletting over sacrifice accorded well with Maya sensibilities, and Malinalli would soon demonstrate the value of Maya tradition. The scribal hand credited to her extends from the principles used to draw name-glyphs or calendrical symbols, lumping Toltec symbols which contextually represented different morphemes or phonemes of a single “word” into square or rectangular blocks, like those found in Maya codices. Within each block, the essential features of a symbol— the beak of a raven, the ridge of a man’s nose— were expanded in size, while less unique features were shrunken or disappeared entirely. Although Nahua and Mixtec readings for these symbols were codified from the 1370s, a larger phrase written with one language in mind would take some rearranging of the to be understood in the other, and the syllabic cues would be even less successful in crossing that barrier.
***
For all that the Hand of Malinalli was vital in the transformation of Toltec semasiography into a family of logosyllabic systems, the resulting system was still cumbersome enough to rank alongside Akkadian cuneiform or the Zhou dynasty’s bronze-ware script. Back in Africa, however, the Fula would learn that even simple alphabets can cause chronic headaches.
The headaches in question were not supposed to concern the government in Takrur at all. They were confident in the fruit of their religious reforms: Tereism, the cult of Maa the First Man. Where Maa came from was left vague, and there would never be a definitive list of his immediate descendants; but through him all spirituality would pass through a bottleneck, and all true subjects of the Fula would acknowledge that as ancestor and hero Maa was due equal or greater dignity to whoever they worshipped in practice. This was the system the Mauri referred to as the Cult of Adam, but it was not one with which they wished to share the continent for long. On the northern deserts and along the southern shores, and even in the very cities and castles of the Fula, Christianity of the North African tradition gained ground. The 1372 declaration of the Latin script as the only “true” Catholic script by Juba, Bishop of Micnassa (Meknes-Volubilis), was therefore guaranteed to cause consternation throughout West Africa.
Juba’s declaration, undertaken in close collaborations with the king of Amuricush and advisers with experience in West Africa, was least controversial in the Kuruma kingdom of Kaabu. These hatchet-men of Amuricush’s emerging commonwealth in Africa were no great Christians or readers, at least not yet— for them, the use of the Latin script where before they had none was expedient for their own communication and signaling their loyalties. At the opposite end of the spectrum was Kanem, which rebranded in the late 1200s as a Chalcedonian state, and since then maintained a healthy exchange of ideas with the Two Africas, along the trail which ran from Njimi to Carthage by way of Ghadames. Its attitude toward its insular and violent past was nuanced— the cultural achievement represented by the Kanembu Bible could never be disowned, but the dubiously Coptic-restorationist rebels who ran away to the south [6] to perpetuate the worst excesses of the Kay era were dismissed as “shilawa dintaburo” [Aging Bones], a past which refused to die. This was, of course, before the name Shilawa [Bones] became a fearful word in a hundred tongues, the name of pitiless hunters who replenished their ranks with kidnapped children and sold the parents to the Loango or the Ukwu. In any case, Juba’s declaration was to the Kanembu an insulting rejection of their heritage, no doubt founded on the calumnies once routinely recited against Holy Kanem— and the Bishop of Carthage declared that he would have no part in this scheme, making this the first argument among the two great Mauri states to transcend quotidian matters of land or water rights in the Atlas foothills.
In the middle, geographically and otherwise, were the Fula empire and the Hausa city-states. Both had adopted Kanem’s Coptic for their own reasons, although they now wrote on Mauri paper-- the second oldest paper industry in the Christian world, patterned on the mills established by the Eftal tradesmen who accompanied the boy-king Heshanos into Egypt [7]. Theoretically they should have no great attachment to the Coptic script, but it had become part of their history, part of their shows of power, beloved even by some of the same deviant scholars with the greatest knowledge of, and (secret) devotion to, Christianity. The Kano Chronicle recorded the Hausa struggle for justice and independence in the script of their enemy. The pillars of Mansa Sulanjai, planted in cities from Kayor to Gao, proclaimed the glory of the Mansa in a script that few knew— but under the tutelage of the Mansa, they would learn. Could the sons of Sulanjai permit this system, which even recorded their royal histories and still older legends, to be replaced so easily— replaced, no less, by a priest in the employ of a domineering foreign king, whose boorishness surpassed the tyrants of Old Ghana? The late 1300s confounded the Fula to no end. Was the dueling among the Christian congregations in their realm truly to their benefit? Would it engulf and immolate the empire if left unchecked? Could it be allowed to occur anyways, if only to let these insufferable dissidents thin out their own ranks? But if this was done, would the veneer of Tereism that overlaid the public space survive such brazen disruption of its hegemony? The contradictions of the situation were nowhere better expressed than in the case of the Kanembu scribes of the Fula empire. They too were former partisans of the Kay dynasty— but they were gentlemen, not the sort who would join the rampage of the Shilawa. Instead, they not only became scribes in the lands of the Fula, but also became arch-Tereists. Within the terminology of a larger religion, the western Kanembu found refuge for their peculiarities as the Darmahujr had. Their calls for official persecutions of any and all Chalcedonians who dared to disturb the public peace were inspired not only by bad memories in the old homeland, but also by fears of change and competition in that profession which made them affluent and respected members of their new communities.
***
Ukwu and Ijebu largely sat out the Latin-Coptic row. Each was a confederation coterminous with a cultural complex, the Igbo and Yoruba respectively, wherein a great cultic center and associated ruler embodied the sovereignty and distinctiveness of the people, but did not claim any particular power over the decisions made in outlying regions. The relatively sparse connections within these realms, a consequence of heavy forestation which likewise made cavalry maneuvers difficult for them and for their enemies, was itself a form of protection against the designs of the Ispaniard and the Lankan, the Moor and the Fula, the Akan and the Kuruma and the Shilawa. This cacophony of cultures added up to no overall influence in one direction or another; these polities would for now be content to carry on in their own way.
A rough equivalent to them in the Indosphere was the kingdom of Musengezi, keepers of the faith of Mwari-Dzivagaru, and the Nguni to their south and east. Here too, at the crossroads of Central Africa, Kapudesa, and Watya in its Randryan and Lankan incarnations, the influences of the world added up to no particular direction. But here the faith of Mwari added a chauvinistic steel to the non-literacy of the Musengezi, who denigrated the scratchings-on-paper as the means by which once-proud peoples became domesticated Shaivist thralls of the eastern cities.
This, however, left the question of how exactly the Musengezi planned to deal with the Nguni. Their path of several centuries would have taken them to the shores of Watya, but the Lankan Peratugami enforcers extended a line of forts across their path. In the meantime, the Musengezi suffered a punishing defeat at the hands of the Tamil, with their king forced to take refuge among the Tswana to the southwest. If the Tswana did not take their pound of flesh then, it is only because their incursions were turned back by those Nguni who invited themselves to the southwestern border [Matabeleland] of Musengezi territory. The implications of this were obvious.
The palace-corrals of Musengezi were home to artisans who worked in copper from the northern savanna [Katanga, Zambia]. Among more practical implements, they fashioned small helical spheres and ovoids, which Nguni warriors attached to rings on their ears or noses as they took up arms against Siddhapura on the Zambezi or the hated Lankans. The helical sphere represented the life-giving raindrop, and its twisting frame was the circuitous unity of matter and spirit under the duality Mwari-Dzivagaru. On balance, Nguni victories boosted faith in the power of these amulets more than defeats dimmed their luster. The symbols and gifts of one culture were, as happened throughout the world and in all eras, adopted by the neighbors for their own purposes— but the Musengezi had even less control than the Kanembu over how their gifts would be interpreted or used. The Musengezi, swimmers against the tide of history, staked the future of their project on these silent artifacts.
[1] This is based on the spread of Arabic and its… practitioners, without any major accompanying military movements or religious revolution, in the Ashanti empire. Personal correspondence, chronicles, and charms/decorations were some ways in which the script of Sahelian literacy spread to this and other southern polities.
[2] This is a vague description of Aztec practice, but this system was in vogue in Central Mexico before them, originating in the closely adjacent Nahua and Mixtec populations around Cholula and northern Oaxaca.
[3] All of this is from the version of the story given in the Leyenda de los Soles in the Codex Chimalpopoca, more on that here. This is of course not the only version, OTL or TTL, but let's say it becomes the "definitive" version here.
[4] From the Cantares Mexicanos.
[5] Other activities include antiquarian scholarship attempting to reconstruct pre-Fula local and regional culture, and organize the larger events of that past into a coherent history that recommends particular policies or methods of governance in the current era. This is of course undertaken by rivals of Itzcoayotl as well; the interests of all parties mostly come from the support this scholarship lends to taking over or redefining institutions like the school, the village or urban neighborhood, the temple, the kingdom, and so on. This post is already a little unfocused so I didn't dwell on it as much as I would like-- but if you want to think of this period as like the Hundred Schools of the middle and late Zhou dynasty, driven by the jealousies of kings and warlords and an emerging scholarly caste stuck in between, that's more or less the vibe I'm going for. By extension this could mean that Itzcoayotl is not out of the woods yet-- there may yet be "burning books and burying scholars" in Tolteca...
[6] The Shilawa domain is centered in Cameroon’s Adamawa region, and stretches east into parts of the Central African Republic.
[7] The Heshanid dynasty of Coptic Eftal seems like as good a way to introduce Central Asian (and before that, Chinese) papermaking to the Mediterranean as any. European paper is now used as far away as Aloysiana, although colonial metropoles try to make sure it is not produced independently in the colonies. This initially created problems for independent colonies like Aloysiana and Novaquitaine. The former imported paper from Tolteca until the emergence of Amuricush as an Antillean mercantile power; the latter largely reverted to animal-skin parchment until sufficient Aquitanian papermakers had circumvented the Ispanian travel ban to allow a mill to be established in Morlans.
The moving finger writes; and having writ, moves on
ⲇⲟⲩⲛⲁⲙⲁⲕⲁⲏ’ⲙⲁⲏ̀ϫⲓⲙ̀ⲃⲉⲛ
Dunama Kay, Mai Njimben (Mai in Njimi). Kanembu. First king of the Kay dynasty, 930s.
ⲇⲁⲩⲓⲇⲕⲁⲏ’ⲥⲁⲣⲕⲏⲛⲕⲁⲛⲉⲙ
Dawiti Kay, Sarkin Kanem (King of Kanem). Hausa. Aggressor against the Hausa, 1150s.
Dunama Kay, Mai Njimben (Mai in Njimi). Kanembu. First king of the Kay dynasty, 930s.
ⲇⲁⲩⲓⲇⲕⲁⲏ’ⲥⲁⲣⲕⲏⲛⲕⲁⲛⲉⲙ
Dawiti Kay, Sarkin Kanem (King of Kanem). Hausa. Aggressor against the Hausa, 1150s.
Is writing the only means of recording information? Of course not. Setting aside the fact that oral memory and retelling is enough for accounting the resources and obligations of a small community, a range of technologies— the tribute-bins of the Chimu, the knotted strings of the Andes, the memory-boards of Central Africa, and especially the “international style” of pictorial grammar seen in Tolteca— allow accounts of economic and political activity across larger formations. In religion the link between writing and memory is even weaker— the memories of teachers and disciples preserved texts from the Homeric epics to the Vedas for centuries. Giving sole credit to “efficiency” for the triumph of writing in a nonliterate culture ignores the utility of competing methods— but equally damning, it ignores the aesthetic power of writing itself. Before simplified and standard forms there were many scribal hands, and their glyphs readily revealed the natural imagery they took as their inspiration. Years of initiation and successive rituals produced a class set apart by erudite charisma, that worked with vermillion on clay, chisel-scratches on bronze and stone, plant juices on animal skin. The objects produced by writing— the ancient Chinese urns, the walls of Indian temples, the gold-painted Frankish manuscripts— have an appeal adjacent to, but separate from, the words themselves. Even an observer accustomed to the ubiquity and ease of writing in his era cannot shake the feeling that an old book doesn’t have to be some grimoire written in blood on human skin to be magical all the same.
For the Hausa of the 1000s AD, the dealers in this magic were the preachers of Holy Kanem, a state born from the revolutions of the preceding century. So long as the Kanem lionized conversion as equal to conquest (and so long as its clerics reported to the royal court of the Kay lineage, bypassing Alexandria’s impotent Archbishop in Njimi), its clerics abroad were enemy soldiers. They were also envoys, and their death would mean one of those wars for which Kanem was all too ready. For keeping this group out of harm’s way and away from the populations they wished to minister to, the Hausa royals had no better prison than their own palaces. The firm “invitations” of the pagan kings, delivered by the spies in the marketplaces, were odious to some clerics— but more odious was the thought of returning to Kanem empty-handed. So they remained, like Daniel in the house of Nebuchadnezzar. When not permitted to preach to the members of their hosts’ household, they simply read aloud to each other from their Makurian-papyrus Bibles. They spent their allowances on the import of more papyrus from the east, and wrote home on a variety of topics— the price of acacia gum (a valued export of the Great Laddeh [Sahel]), reports from the wars of the Mande in the west. Soon, they were no longer writing for themselves— their hosts dictated messages to them for personal correspondence with contacts in other cities.
And again, we miss the point if we leave things here, with the use of Coptic script for letters and records, and then contracts and laws and chronicles— first written in Kanembu and translated back to Hausa, then written in Hausa itself. All this was sufficient to make the 1000s a century of surprising Kanem-ization among the sworn enemies of Kanem— the import of Makurian papyrus or substitutes from the northern Berbers, the adoption of Kanembu fashions themselves adopted from further east, the extra income earned by porters who banded together to create postal networks. In the following century, the Kano Chronicle’s portrayal of a Kanem at war against all of civilization would itself be rendered in Kanem’s own script. But no less significant than these innovations were the spread of cultic practices that integrated the written word, both within the context of a tenuously stretched Christianity and outside it altogether. Ink washed from the wooden slates of wise men was bottled up and sold as elixirs. Warriors wore undershirts ringed with lines of painted prayers and incantations. The efficacy of these objects was evaluated independently of the religious context from which they were abstracted, free to exchange hands without the great corpus of Christian belief having to match their progress. The humble amulet, sometimes no more than a scrap of papyrus inscribed with a verse, took the written word where the law-code would not, to those people for whom the laws of the Hausa, never mind the Kanembu, did not apply. It was in this guise that the Fula encountered the written word among the Mossi and Songhay, western neighbors of the Hausa and easternmost constituents of the Fula empire after the mid-1200s [1].
***
Did Andilander reticence change the course of Toltecan history? Possibly. The Andilanders kept bills of lading for Nfansou’s expedition in their own runes, as they did for their own expeditions. Having landed the Fula in Tolteca, however, they were reluctant to bring their script ashore. The Andilanders in Tolteca were many things— sailors, bodyguards, advisors— but they were not administrators, if only because there were not enough of them to constitute an administrative class. And as for training others in the art of reading their runes… even if the threat of death was not held over them by their elders, they would not do it. The surest shield of their Darmahujr faith and its followers was secrecy; they would not part easily with documents bearing the runes.
But even if the Andilander script was available to the Toltecan Fula, it would have to vie with centuries of Toltecan tradition. This tradition was not invulnerable: a series of ecological and political disasters in the 900s AD led to a collapse in several Maya polities and associated scribal classes; the reconstituted polities which faced Nfansou’s onslaught copied the old books dutifully, but restricted the art of writing to particular lineages. The script of the Maya, the only system in the Solvias to closely follow the sounds and structure of a spoken language, was by the 1200s AD given new expression mostly in calendars (which mostly only involved numbers and finite sets of names associated with the calendrical cycles) and in the captions of texts where pictures supplied a great portion of the narrative content. The writing of the Zapotecs also did not survive the 800s AD. But in place of these retreating systems, the Toltecs promoted a remarkable semasiographic (language-agnostic symbols) system in which years of education in religion and history produced scribes capable of reading meaning out of, and painting meaning into, precise sequences of pictures, bounding-boxes, and shading. The conventions regulating this system did not accord with the sounds or grammar of any spoken language, but as a consequence transcended language itself. Two observers, even two observers speaking different languages, might look at the same sequence of pictures and produce different sentences— but each would contain the same essential points of subject, object, action, and description as the other. The Toltecs used semasiography to create codices of their histories and lists of tribute for Tollan, Cholollan, and other leading cities from their respective hinterlands [2]. The Fula correctly identified these tribute lists as the future of their imperial enterprise; unfortunately, the priests among whom they hoped to recruit their administrators and scribes were all too often leaders of rebellions, launched in defense of their peoples’ rights or religious practices which the Fula objected to. The Fula era was therefore a Toltec answer to the Maya disasters of three centuries before. As cities crumbled and their peoples melted away, the art of semasiography was reduced to its barest essentials: the tribute lists, the calendars, and those older texts deemed irreplaceable and indispensable.
The Chicomoztotecah cast themselves as the saviors of Toltec tradition, and on this basis their conquest is compared to the reconstitution of Iranshahr by the Parthava. This is valid, but the extent of Chicomoztotec ambition and achievement is better illustrated through comparison with the Franks and the Khitai, the other extraordinary peoples who dared to weigh tradition and innovation on their scales, to make old enemies stand in rank and file, and to produce from the whirling chaos of their continent a rock which could, for a time, represent the culmination of all history. “Revival” of the Toltec legacy was always conditional; in military matters, for example, it was not heeded at all. Solvian levies, clad in mail and quilted cotton, were a majority of the officers and the rank-and-file in the main and forward forces of the typical army, but they did not differ substantially in organization or ranks from the Fula armies which they superseded. One reason for this was that Toltecan armies had always been native-majority, ensuring mass exposure to the Fula system; but even after the conquest, armies faced similar needs. The infantry, for example, had to coordinate with the cavalry, whose tradition was wholly inspired by the Fula— and in some units this "inspiration" was an ongoing process. Officially, the "revivalism" of the Chicomoztotecah committed them to the erasure of the Fula as a group, of which some were singled out by resistance to the conquest or great infamy among their subjects, and met their end by being publicly shot with arrows to mark Tozcatl, the Spring Festival. In practice, the court of Huitzilihuitl did not wish to deprive itself of too many warm bodies with significant fighting experience, especially during an era in which the general neighborhood was still unsafe. The greatest threat was Novaquitaine— where exactly this empire was located was poorly understood, but from its naval base at Colima it oversaw a string of client-states to the west and south of Chicomoztoc. The largest of these, the Purepecha [Tarascan] state, wielded comparable strength to Chicomoztoc itself. The solution favored by Huitzilihuitl was to create a separate legal code (with harsher punishments) for those who could not prove their affiliation with a Solvian clan, as recorded by the scribes of a district's main village or by each of the calpolli (neighborhoods) of a city. The only escape from this code was marrying into a Solvian clan, in a legal system that would favor Solvian spouses and their in-laws, and seek appropriate redress for any grievances they might have. Those of mixed ancestry, who took to calling themselves Ocelomeh (Jaguars), would come into their own in later generations; but throughout the reign of Huitzilihuitl "pure" Fula, tracing their descent wholly to Nfansou's entourage and to the few waves of migration that followed before other areas of Fula expansion drew away potential colonists, were still relied on as horse breeders looking after the reserve animals in the rear of the armies, or to fill out troop rosters where required (and especially on the western borders with the Chimalhuacan and Tarascans). They would, however, never see the inside (or even the outside, except from a great distance) of a commander's tent for the foreseeable future; taking their place would be the new class of Chicomoztotec estate-owners created by the conquest. Efforts to integrate gunnery into this structure benefited from the collapse of the short-lived Ispaniard dominion on the Gulf Coast; although most men and materiel were successfully evacuated to defend Satanazes and the Lucaias from the Moors and other opportunists, sufficient renegade Ispaniards and their Totonac affiliates stayed behind to defend their properties and seek new patrons, readily found in the court of Huitzilihuitl. Besides those weapons purchased from the Moors and the Twin Crowns, a few small cannons could even be fished out of the more recent shipwrecks of the Gulf Coast shallows, the inheritance of a century of piracy and rivalry.
The attitude of Huitzilihuitl’s court toward writing was not a foregone conclusion. Among the dependencies of Novaquitaine, the Latin alphabet had even taken root among the non-Christian peoples like the Purepecha, although the Christian Mixtec elite of Yucu Dzaa/Tututepec were the most insistent on this point. If the Fula had introduced Latin themselves, it is even possible that the Chicomoztotecah might have retained the system. But on this vital question, the initiative was to be seized by the Momachtiqueh [students, followers] of the Itzcoayotl movement, which would come to represent the conscience of Chicomoztoc. A conscience is not always obeyed— in court debates, the defenders of the practice of sacrificing captives of war by shooting them with arrows claimed that this was done in homage to Mixcoatl, he who was given arrows by the Sun to shoot down his intoxicated, feather-adorned brothers (a role that the great clans of the Fula fit into quite well) and feed their hearts and blood to the earth. This heroic ancestor was furthermore the father of Ce Acatl, also called Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl, the figure whose legend provided the foundation for Itzcoatl’s [3]. The son ought not, therefore, to lecture the father— but equally so, the father could not outlive the son, and the portrayal of the defeat in the sacrifice debate as a temporary concession made by the right to the mighty set the tone for the later progress of the Momachtiqueh, whose thoroughgoing use of the written word to promote and achieve their aims rivaled that of the European movement of the Southern Popes.
The Third Yollotlahcuiloani, Tezozomoctzin, confirmed that the tradition which he led accepted the common Toltecan motif of the gods spilling their blood to create humanity, and the associated concept of a “blood debt” to the gods. The Chicomoztotecah interpreted this as a debt to the Sun through the means suggested to Mixcoatl; Chimalhuacan in Xalisco sought to imitate the Sun directly by burning sacrifice victims, and in a curiously Greek fashion letting the Sun partake of the smoke; the state of Yopitzinco took Xipe Totec as their patron, and flaying as their preferred means. But for the Momachtiqueh, all of these tales were superseded by the more recent history of the great king Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl, the finest king and priest to appear among the Toltecs since the fall of Teotihuacan. Although he was the son of Mixcoatl, neither the Sun nor any other divinity bound him to any particular duty; the king was allowed to express his own ideals. He permitted only the sacrifice of serpents and butterflies, claiming this was all that the divine aspect of Quetzalcoatl, also identified with Ehecatl of the wind, desired. At the same time, he was an ascetic and a penitent, who gave up to the gods his own share of food and water, and drew blood from his legs and tongue— whatever the gods would still demand of humanity, he would supply himself. Blessed were the generations that lived and flourished in his long reign, which ended only when at last he could no longer live up to his own standards. He voluntarily went into a long odyssey of exile, where at last he chose his place of death somewhere east of Yucatan.
The appeal of this legend dimmed in the subsequent era. Ironically the Toltec realms were already proceeding toward collapse in the decades before the arrival of the Fula; and when Tolteca’s leading cities turned on each other, each began to curse the feeble old men who considered themselves blessed to live under a king who forswore sacrifice and war, the noblest deaths anyone could ever have. The watchword of this philosophy was that “It is not true, no it is not true / That we came to live on the earth / We came here only to dream / We came here only to sleep.” [4] Life was only a chance to forget one’s true nature, and to commit sin; death, if done right, could be a chance for atonement, a chance to rejoin the unity of existence, even a chance to take on the nature of a god, to become that god’s embodiment (ixiptla). But then, goes the canonical account, the way of the dour Priest-King was revived and invigorated by the lively drama of the youthful Poet-King Itzcoatl— his unlikely rise to power as king of Cuauhnahuac, his twenty year reign of hope and good harvests, and the fateful events of his abolition of slavery. This last episode proved to be the most philosophically resonant— it, and the story of the suicide of Itzcoatl’s father, formed the core of the argument that the Fula era had destroyed the nobility of death. Mass death from disease, overwork, and wanton violence took away thousands for no reason and burdened the living with increased work— and the burden would only increase, if people continued to believe that the only remedy for the humiliations of oppression lay in trying to recreate a “dignified” death, based on garbled memories of what that was supposed to be. Death was, to the disillusioned, the sign of a broken society, the abandonment of the virtues that ought to define a life; and Tolteca no longer had so many warm bodies to give up. The will that animated Itzcoatl, that animated Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl, that seemed to be everywhere upon the wind, that seemed as ancient as ancient could be, enjoined the great mass of humanity to resist heaven's temptations, at least until one’s responsibilities had all been met. Lay practice among the Momachtiqueh would characterized by periods of simultaneous fasting and offerings of one's corn, that which would have become one’s blood, to the divinities of sky and earth (although the especially committed would offer up that blood directly, under the guidance of priest-doctors). This wasn't just a way to assuage any lingering concerns about the debt to the gods, but a gesture of gratitude for the gift of life, which proved the essential benevolence that lay beneath the flayed-skin suits of the divines.
Was the Toltec semasiography sufficient to express these ideas? Well, even if it wasn’t, it was hardly the only means at the disposal of the Momachtiqueh. Itzcoayotl had been closely connected with the conquering elite of Chicomoztoc since before the conquests even started. In disputes over real estate— old ruined temples, or even temples which were still active— the Momachtiqueh could call on contacts in the state. And soon after moving into Cuauhnahuac, the Third Yollotlahcuiloani Tezozomoctzin arranged for entire Otomi villages skilled in the manufacture of amatl-bark paper to be moved to new neighborhoods in the city, granting his movement an independent source of paper and additional income. The propagandistic activities of Itzcoayotl were undertaken from a position of material affluence; it was their enemies who were reduced, in extreme cases, to publications from the gutter. The Momachtiqueh could afford to think about promoting their philosophy beyond the circles of the Nahua, to those peoples who spoke other languages but considered themselves equal participants in civilization. For communication with the Mixtecs and Otomi, some form of the Toltec semasiography remained essential. But the hypothetical scenarios, extensive quotations, and rhetorical flourishes of the argumentative styles used not just by the Momachtiqueh but by all the schools of thought in Tolteca stretched semasiography, whose practitioners were already much reduced in skill by the end of the Fula era, to its limits.
The scholars of the Hueyi Calmecac [5], the great seminary-university of Cuauhnahuac with sister institutions across Chicomoztoc, experimented with pictorial grammars that moved away from language-agnostic semasiography, and accorded more with the structure of spoken Nahua, capturing particular choices of words and conjugations through syllabic or logographic elements. The decisive breakthrough on this front, however, was made by Malinalli (Maya name Ix Eb), the daughter of a family of calendar-keepers from Chich’en in the Yucatan. The Itza people of Chich’en had for some centuries been more open to the western cosmopolis than other easterners, integrating Toltec motifs into their art and to their repertoires of sorcery. Their city was one of the leading horses in the team that the Kandkessids yoked together to have a shot at governing the Yucatan, and may even have established its own dominion in that land if not for the landings of the Twin Crowns in Can Pech and Sisal. Now the Itza and other exiles resided in Chicomoztoc, hoping to gain sanction and supplies for an expedition against the remnant Kandkessids and their Novaquitanian protectors. Publicly, they made shows of approval for the philosophy of Itzcoayotl, but argued that it should remain a philosophy shared by autonomous providers of religious or magical services (comparable to Daoism) rather than a set of rules binding on those practitioners. In any case, the preference of bloodletting over sacrifice accorded well with Maya sensibilities, and Malinalli would soon demonstrate the value of Maya tradition. The scribal hand credited to her extends from the principles used to draw name-glyphs or calendrical symbols, lumping Toltec symbols which contextually represented different morphemes or phonemes of a single “word” into square or rectangular blocks, like those found in Maya codices. Within each block, the essential features of a symbol— the beak of a raven, the ridge of a man’s nose— were expanded in size, while less unique features were shrunken or disappeared entirely. Although Nahua and Mixtec readings for these symbols were codified from the 1370s, a larger phrase written with one language in mind would take some rearranging of the to be understood in the other, and the syllabic cues would be even less successful in crossing that barrier.
***
For all that the Hand of Malinalli was vital in the transformation of Toltec semasiography into a family of logosyllabic systems, the resulting system was still cumbersome enough to rank alongside Akkadian cuneiform or the Zhou dynasty’s bronze-ware script. Back in Africa, however, the Fula would learn that even simple alphabets can cause chronic headaches.
The headaches in question were not supposed to concern the government in Takrur at all. They were confident in the fruit of their religious reforms: Tereism, the cult of Maa the First Man. Where Maa came from was left vague, and there would never be a definitive list of his immediate descendants; but through him all spirituality would pass through a bottleneck, and all true subjects of the Fula would acknowledge that as ancestor and hero Maa was due equal or greater dignity to whoever they worshipped in practice. This was the system the Mauri referred to as the Cult of Adam, but it was not one with which they wished to share the continent for long. On the northern deserts and along the southern shores, and even in the very cities and castles of the Fula, Christianity of the North African tradition gained ground. The 1372 declaration of the Latin script as the only “true” Catholic script by Juba, Bishop of Micnassa (Meknes-Volubilis), was therefore guaranteed to cause consternation throughout West Africa.
Juba’s declaration, undertaken in close collaborations with the king of Amuricush and advisers with experience in West Africa, was least controversial in the Kuruma kingdom of Kaabu. These hatchet-men of Amuricush’s emerging commonwealth in Africa were no great Christians or readers, at least not yet— for them, the use of the Latin script where before they had none was expedient for their own communication and signaling their loyalties. At the opposite end of the spectrum was Kanem, which rebranded in the late 1200s as a Chalcedonian state, and since then maintained a healthy exchange of ideas with the Two Africas, along the trail which ran from Njimi to Carthage by way of Ghadames. Its attitude toward its insular and violent past was nuanced— the cultural achievement represented by the Kanembu Bible could never be disowned, but the dubiously Coptic-restorationist rebels who ran away to the south [6] to perpetuate the worst excesses of the Kay era were dismissed as “shilawa dintaburo” [Aging Bones], a past which refused to die. This was, of course, before the name Shilawa [Bones] became a fearful word in a hundred tongues, the name of pitiless hunters who replenished their ranks with kidnapped children and sold the parents to the Loango or the Ukwu. In any case, Juba’s declaration was to the Kanembu an insulting rejection of their heritage, no doubt founded on the calumnies once routinely recited against Holy Kanem— and the Bishop of Carthage declared that he would have no part in this scheme, making this the first argument among the two great Mauri states to transcend quotidian matters of land or water rights in the Atlas foothills.
In the middle, geographically and otherwise, were the Fula empire and the Hausa city-states. Both had adopted Kanem’s Coptic for their own reasons, although they now wrote on Mauri paper-- the second oldest paper industry in the Christian world, patterned on the mills established by the Eftal tradesmen who accompanied the boy-king Heshanos into Egypt [7]. Theoretically they should have no great attachment to the Coptic script, but it had become part of their history, part of their shows of power, beloved even by some of the same deviant scholars with the greatest knowledge of, and (secret) devotion to, Christianity. The Kano Chronicle recorded the Hausa struggle for justice and independence in the script of their enemy. The pillars of Mansa Sulanjai, planted in cities from Kayor to Gao, proclaimed the glory of the Mansa in a script that few knew— but under the tutelage of the Mansa, they would learn. Could the sons of Sulanjai permit this system, which even recorded their royal histories and still older legends, to be replaced so easily— replaced, no less, by a priest in the employ of a domineering foreign king, whose boorishness surpassed the tyrants of Old Ghana? The late 1300s confounded the Fula to no end. Was the dueling among the Christian congregations in their realm truly to their benefit? Would it engulf and immolate the empire if left unchecked? Could it be allowed to occur anyways, if only to let these insufferable dissidents thin out their own ranks? But if this was done, would the veneer of Tereism that overlaid the public space survive such brazen disruption of its hegemony? The contradictions of the situation were nowhere better expressed than in the case of the Kanembu scribes of the Fula empire. They too were former partisans of the Kay dynasty— but they were gentlemen, not the sort who would join the rampage of the Shilawa. Instead, they not only became scribes in the lands of the Fula, but also became arch-Tereists. Within the terminology of a larger religion, the western Kanembu found refuge for their peculiarities as the Darmahujr had. Their calls for official persecutions of any and all Chalcedonians who dared to disturb the public peace were inspired not only by bad memories in the old homeland, but also by fears of change and competition in that profession which made them affluent and respected members of their new communities.
***
Ukwu and Ijebu largely sat out the Latin-Coptic row. Each was a confederation coterminous with a cultural complex, the Igbo and Yoruba respectively, wherein a great cultic center and associated ruler embodied the sovereignty and distinctiveness of the people, but did not claim any particular power over the decisions made in outlying regions. The relatively sparse connections within these realms, a consequence of heavy forestation which likewise made cavalry maneuvers difficult for them and for their enemies, was itself a form of protection against the designs of the Ispaniard and the Lankan, the Moor and the Fula, the Akan and the Kuruma and the Shilawa. This cacophony of cultures added up to no overall influence in one direction or another; these polities would for now be content to carry on in their own way.
A rough equivalent to them in the Indosphere was the kingdom of Musengezi, keepers of the faith of Mwari-Dzivagaru, and the Nguni to their south and east. Here too, at the crossroads of Central Africa, Kapudesa, and Watya in its Randryan and Lankan incarnations, the influences of the world added up to no particular direction. But here the faith of Mwari added a chauvinistic steel to the non-literacy of the Musengezi, who denigrated the scratchings-on-paper as the means by which once-proud peoples became domesticated Shaivist thralls of the eastern cities.
This, however, left the question of how exactly the Musengezi planned to deal with the Nguni. Their path of several centuries would have taken them to the shores of Watya, but the Lankan Peratugami enforcers extended a line of forts across their path. In the meantime, the Musengezi suffered a punishing defeat at the hands of the Tamil, with their king forced to take refuge among the Tswana to the southwest. If the Tswana did not take their pound of flesh then, it is only because their incursions were turned back by those Nguni who invited themselves to the southwestern border [Matabeleland] of Musengezi territory. The implications of this were obvious.
The palace-corrals of Musengezi were home to artisans who worked in copper from the northern savanna [Katanga, Zambia]. Among more practical implements, they fashioned small helical spheres and ovoids, which Nguni warriors attached to rings on their ears or noses as they took up arms against Siddhapura on the Zambezi or the hated Lankans. The helical sphere represented the life-giving raindrop, and its twisting frame was the circuitous unity of matter and spirit under the duality Mwari-Dzivagaru. On balance, Nguni victories boosted faith in the power of these amulets more than defeats dimmed their luster. The symbols and gifts of one culture were, as happened throughout the world and in all eras, adopted by the neighbors for their own purposes— but the Musengezi had even less control than the Kanembu over how their gifts would be interpreted or used. The Musengezi, swimmers against the tide of history, staked the future of their project on these silent artifacts.
[1] This is based on the spread of Arabic and its… practitioners, without any major accompanying military movements or religious revolution, in the Ashanti empire. Personal correspondence, chronicles, and charms/decorations were some ways in which the script of Sahelian literacy spread to this and other southern polities.
[2] This is a vague description of Aztec practice, but this system was in vogue in Central Mexico before them, originating in the closely adjacent Nahua and Mixtec populations around Cholula and northern Oaxaca.
[3] All of this is from the version of the story given in the Leyenda de los Soles in the Codex Chimalpopoca, more on that here. This is of course not the only version, OTL or TTL, but let's say it becomes the "definitive" version here.
[4] From the Cantares Mexicanos.
[5] Other activities include antiquarian scholarship attempting to reconstruct pre-Fula local and regional culture, and organize the larger events of that past into a coherent history that recommends particular policies or methods of governance in the current era. This is of course undertaken by rivals of Itzcoayotl as well; the interests of all parties mostly come from the support this scholarship lends to taking over or redefining institutions like the school, the village or urban neighborhood, the temple, the kingdom, and so on. This post is already a little unfocused so I didn't dwell on it as much as I would like-- but if you want to think of this period as like the Hundred Schools of the middle and late Zhou dynasty, driven by the jealousies of kings and warlords and an emerging scholarly caste stuck in between, that's more or less the vibe I'm going for. By extension this could mean that Itzcoayotl is not out of the woods yet-- there may yet be "burning books and burying scholars" in Tolteca...
[6] The Shilawa domain is centered in Cameroon’s Adamawa region, and stretches east into parts of the Central African Republic.
[7] The Heshanid dynasty of Coptic Eftal seems like as good a way to introduce Central Asian (and before that, Chinese) papermaking to the Mediterranean as any. European paper is now used as far away as Aloysiana, although colonial metropoles try to make sure it is not produced independently in the colonies. This initially created problems for independent colonies like Aloysiana and Novaquitaine. The former imported paper from Tolteca until the emergence of Amuricush as an Antillean mercantile power; the latter largely reverted to animal-skin parchment until sufficient Aquitanian papermakers had circumvented the Ispanian travel ban to allow a mill to be established in Morlans.
Last edited:
While the tanio lost there homeland, I can definitely see Haiti being more connected with its tanio roots then OTL and many of there culture characteristics could come back in the future through nostalgia. I can also see the term Kasikenena come back as a leader position on the island, as well.
What's happening in Greenland and upper north America?
I wouldn’t even say the Taino as a whole have lost their homeland, keep in mind the Autotheists are to a large extent forming a society alongside the Taino on Antilla and they make up a large portion of their population and play a large role. This is also something unlikely to change in the future unless they get conquered by another power (in which case the European Autotheists would almost certainly also face major discrimination due to being heretics), because the Europeans and Taino Natives in Antilla have overwhelmingly positive relations, since the Autotheists did whatever they could to help said natives when the disease outbreaks first came. Those Taino, although their culture certainly will change due to the Autotheists influences, are still very much there and very much not loosing their homeland.
Comments? I feel like a fair amount of discussion has wound up happening between PL, LiND and myself in our PM thread and cut out a lot of discussion in the thread. Particularly interested in any thoughts on the developing commercial rivalries in the Indian ocean. If you have thoughts on a region we haven't mentioned in a while, let us know.
Vignettes From the History of Wood pt 2
The Near East and the Indian Ocean Rim had their own reckonings with the need for wood.
In the Near East, while the Eftal invasions had been devastating, the lack of a subsequent Arab or Mongol invasion meant that irrigation works were much more intact than in OTL, and pastures were not quite as subject to overgrazing. Thus, the Near East tended to have better forest cover and was less dry and dusty than OTL.
This could not be said of India. Centuries of uninterrupted prosperity had led to depletion of forests, and issues in many ways similar to those that afflicted the Roman Empire - the silting of the harbor of Bharuch being a notable example. The rains of the monsoon season hit a peak around the year 1000 and had declined somewhat since then. As a result, many areas that would have been semi-arid OTL became fully arid; this especially affected Singh, Gujarat, and Mahratta. The depletion of forests made those that remained more valuable, and it was the politics of wood that would make the disunited kingdoms of the Gondwana forests a battlefield between Andhra, Mahratta, Kannauj, and Bihar in the Majachaiya Wars... The loss of fertile land contributed to declining tax revenues, especially for the Chandratreya, and contributed to the pressures that would wind up sending more and more Indians overseas...
Andhra, though, would profit quite handsomely off of wood. In 1321, an Andhran banigrama, the Kridachala Association, established a settlement in the lands of the northwest corner of Pula [Australia] they called Gandhampattanam [Darwin]. While the Majachaiya explorers had been disappointed in the low prospects for immediate profit in the vast lands of Pula, Kridachala had a longer-term outlook. The Kridachala held close to what they saw as the original religious visions of the ayat, now leavened with Kitai exoteric influences. The Kridachala sought not just to make a profit, but to set up a refuge where men could optimally pursue nirvana. Accordingly, they planned for the long term, planting great stands of sandalwood that would take at least 15 years to mature. In the meantime, most of Kridachala's shareholders and associates would migrate to the settlement, along with their families, and set up their own semi-autonomous government that, while nominally under the control of the Andhran monarchy, restored many of the ayat privileges that the Gajapati dynasty had crushed. Their members were dismissed by many back in Andhra as deluded utopians, but they would have the last laugh. On making their first sandalwood harvest, their workers would make a quite the discovery: when they dug up the trees for harvest (the aromatic oil of the tree being most concentrated in the roots) they also found large deposits of easily-accessible copper in the soil... This was taken as a sign of the favor of the dharma, and the profits from these were widely distributed and invested in infrastructure by the elected leaders of the banigram. The white stone city of Gandhampattanam became a haven for likeminded Hindu idealists from across the Indian Ocean rim. Their ideology would even win converts among the Makassan, the seasonal traders that sailed from the spice islands to gather the sea cucumbers... The prosperity and harmony of the colony would be an inspiration for settlers elsewhere in Pula and ultimately inspire the founding of Kadaka across the ocean... Marege, as the Makassan called it, the "Wild Country", was becoming increasingly tamed. Their golden age, like that of many places, would come to an end after the collapse of the Majachaiya, which dragged them into Andhra's wars, flooded them with refugees, and disrupted their carefully ordered society - but Gandhampattanam would remain for some time to come the premier settlement of Pula.
In Africa, the heavy-handed exploitation of the Ethiopian highlands at the hands of the Hawiya had rendered much of Ethiopia a wasteland, far more than OTL. The Hawiya Shahs encouraged the expansion of Zawmali [Somali] pastoralists into the highland plateau, which further degraded the land. With the collapse of that state around the turn of the millennium, the land did, however begin to recover. The highland Christians and Jews remained hostile to the Buddhists, and so preferred to trade with the majority Christian city-state of Adulis, which itself had strong ties to the Malayalam Christian Nine Lions banigram of Pandya and Hoysala, rather than trade with the rump Buddhist city of Gidaya. Over the next 150 years, the Amhara highlanders would gradually replant their injera fields and zanj farms, and Malayalam traders would be the middleman for popularizing the Zanj drink in southern India, particularly the Pandya kingdom.
The traders of Hadhramaut, Aden, and Awal [Bahrain] were competitors with Pandya in the zanj trade for a time; the fall of the hydraulic Hawiya kingdom was paralleled by the rise of the Ijara Shahdom of the Horn. The Ijara Shahdom's own name is illustrative - coming from the Arabic term for "rent", or "tax", its own power came from its ability to extract maximum use of its hydraulic control of irrigation works in the Jubba and Shabelle basins and to exploit their stranglehold on the region's wells. With the irrigation works they could grow spices and cotton, which were traded through the ports of Shangani [Mogadishu] and Kismani along with the old trade goods like ivory, gold and beeswax. With control of the wells, came control of the Zawmali pastoralists who moved their herds around the Horn, and by monopolizing water supplies the Shahs of Ijara were able to reward allied clans and punish clans who foolishly decided to raid them. The language of the Shahdom was peculiar - at base a creole of Somali dialects and the older, non-Arabic South Semitic languages of Najran that first traded with the region, it also had influence from the Hejazi Arabs of the Banu Hawiya, the Syriac-speaking Asorig, and Parsi traders who had also frequented the coast. It would be the Bharukacchi who ultimately catapulted them to prominence, however... The Ijara kingdom expanded into the eastern highlands, which they would soon plant with zanj. They butted up against the realms of Adulis in the north and Musilo [Bosaso] in the northeast. Shah Saadh II came to found a new capital near the old, smaller port of Shangani, calling it the "Place of the Shah" or Maqad-i-shah, which rapidly came to rival premier cities of East Africa like Adulis and Mzishima, and in time became host to the largest Zoroastrian community in East Africa, many (but by no means all) Parsi. While not part of the White-Elephant Concordat, its cozy relationship with the Parsi and Asorig, who generally were, allowed it to take part in some of its prosperity, despite remaining free of Mzishima's hegemony.
Their rise to power would soon face some headwinds, however. With support of Adulis, a Cushitic camp-king named Yikunno brought together a coalition of Amhara who would win a decisive victory in 1141 against the highland Zawmali herdsmen, driving many of their clans out of the central plateau and into the lands of Ijara, whose highland zanj and grain plantations were heavily damaged by their raids. This raised the price of Chandratreyan zanj, which, along with the final defeat of the Hawiya by the camp-king Yakub-Dawit, helped spur the disastrous Mahatitta-backed Yemeni invasion of Ethiopia in 1176. The defeat of this invasion led to the crowning of the first Negus Negesti (or King-of-Kings) of Ethiopia, Amdesiyo. Amdesiyo, whose cavalry had been decimated by tufenjeras at the battle of Gidaya, learned from the experience and procured tufenj himself from Adulis, which would be used to devastating effect against the kingdom's troublesome Zawmali and Oromo neighbors, many of whom were sold into slavery. The King-of-Kings ruled with the approval of the Chewa - self-trained warriors supported by, and protecting their own communities, Jewish and Christian alike. The Chewa, were famed for their poetry, athleticism, and great curved swords, and were also famed for their suspicion of outsiders, especially Dharmists and Zawmalis, who had rendered their ancestors peripatetic much as they were. The only exception was Adulis, which had aided them against the Hawiya and came to effectively control the kingdom's overseas trade.
The Arabs and Asorig, who had long traded on the East African coast and founded many of its cities and island settlements, came to rely on the region for wood for their fleets. Further south, Kintradoni [Mombassa, Kenya] would become a major supplier for Yemen and Awal, giving them naval timber along with more exotic lumber like the African blackwood, which made excellent furniture and woodwind instruments, and for which Kintradoni would be famed. Kintradoni also became famous for its university, patronizeds by the Shahs but founded by Jains, who made many converts in the region, especially among the elites. After Kintradoni fell under Mzishiman dominance, the highlands of Pazudesada were increasingly planted with zanj and tea as well, giving Chandretreya merchants an alternative to the faltering plantations of Ijara and the tea-traders of Vanga.
Lanka, meanwhile, cozied up to Dodakote [Kilwa, Tanzania], an island kingdom near the coast that, with their patronage, would eclipse the nearby old Savahila settlement of Ambahita. Dodakote dhows, themselves made of the ubiquitous coconut palm, would ply the coast and rivers, acting as middlemen to supply the Lankan ivory, timber and slave trade. The Coral Fortress where its ruler dwelled was famed for its causeways, courtyards, and beautifully carved wooden doors marked with Shaivist scripture, as well as for being something of a combination palace and emporium where the Raja of Dodakote himself wheeled and dealed with important foreign traders. Elsewhere the people of Dodakote built their thatched dwellings from the fronds of the also ubiquitous raffia palm, which was widely harvested to make rope and cloth, and whose sap was fermented to make a strong vintage of palm wine. The Lankans and Tamils, recently shut out of Hanthawaddy [lower Burma] and its forests by Vanga, would also come to Izarioka and plant large plantations of Asian teak, which, due to its water resistance, durability, and the reasonably short growth period, was the tree of choice for production of their ships. This ultimately meant the great island would turn into one of the first proxy wars that heralded the collapse of the Chandratreya: for eastern Arabia hungered for wood.
The Najd and Persian Gulf coast had become a refuge for many fleeing Khardi persecution, and Nestorian Christians, Zoroastrians, and others, took refuge in the marshy coasts and desert harbors. The island [Bahrain] various referred to as Tilmun (by the Asorig), Muharraq (by the Arabs), and Awal (by the Persians) exerted control over the scattered Christian settlements of the coast, which Arab Christians called the Banu Qatarye. The Banu Qatarye was a land of coastal marshes and deserts, and possessed some of the largest oases in Arabia, where some of the world's most productive date plantations were worked by East African slaves. The sprawling city of Bet Gawsa, near the mouth of the Tigris and Euphrates, was not only the last Asorig- majority city in Mesopotamia, it was also the center of the secretive Mandean community, who claimed to follow the teachings of John the Baptist. The city of Qtapa [Qatif] would export vast amounts of food grown on the Pitardashir oasis [Al-Hasa] to feed the port of Tilmun. The great port of Tilmun was itself famed for its glistening marble churches, and for its tolerance; though its line of Malkas, or kings, was of Syriac Christian descent, the Malkas stood by an ancient motto of their house, that "There is no compulsion in religion", and the island had sizeable Jewish, Zoroastrian, and Buddhist minorities. While the Khardi had strongly persecuted non-Buddhists in their empire, their successors the Bakhtiyar had a much more tolerant approach, and invited the Asorig, Parsis and Jews back to the cities of Mesopotamia, where their neutrality allowed them to mediate between squabbling Bakhtiyar houses; and given the Bakhtiyar kingdoms' focus on land matters, the island of Awal came to dominate trade in the Persian Gulf. While the days that the Asorig were an actual majority in most of Asoristan were long past, Asorig traders established networks throughout the Near East, stretching to the shores of the Mediterranean and Black Seas, and so were able to control the flow of Indian and Kapudesan goods heading west, while selling luxuries sourced from as far away as Narbo and Smolensk. The Asorig had a growing presence in India as well, especially in Hoysala and western Pandya, where they cultivated ties to the Malayalam Christian community.
Further east, the closely allied city of Zohar, jewel of Mazun [Oman], was famed as one of the last places in the world Zoroastrian Magi were pre-eminent, and Zoroastrian traders, commonly known as Parsi, were just as well-known as the Asorig in Kapudesa, Chandratreya and Persia. Under the White-Elephant Concordat, both the Asorig and Parsi had come to occupy a privileged position as middlemen for the Indians trading with the Near East, and the Awali fortress at Hazora [Musandam, Oman] commanded the approach to the Straits of Hormuz. This was, however, increasingly challenged; especially as the Lankans and Tamils exerted increasingly forceful attempts to break into their markets, with the former having famous success in Egypt and the Red Sea, and the latter increasingly breaking into Persia. An agreement with Jihangir Shah in 1369 granted the Tamils the island of Qeshm in the strait of Hormuz, just opposite Hazora, a development which the Asorig loathed and feared. Yet, they were still a weak military power, dependent on Chandratreya support. If they were to challenge the Tamils, even in their home waters, they would need to build their fleets.
They would have to enlist Indian help; luckily, they would find it. The Radiant Silk Group of Suryapur, a Jain concern with heavy investment in textiles, approached the Malka of Awal with an offer; they would help sponsor and end to the anarchy on Izarioka, where the Asorig could obtain timber to grow their navy, and the Radiant Silks could invest in indigo and other dye plantations. After the Ispanian raids on the island, the monarchy lost much of its credibility, and the island had devolved into a state of constant civil war between usurpers and claimants, while foreign companies had free reign to abuse and expropriate from commoners as much as they could get away with. The Radiant Silk banigrama, and others, like the Thanan banking houses, had approached the Chandratreya state itself multiple times to enlist the imperial navy in the effort to enforce some stability on the island, only to be delayed and rebuffed; in any case, their navy was increasingly decrepit due to the state's focus on land wars, and was becoming infamous for nepotism and graft. Malka Ephrem III was intrigued, but viewed the venture as a gamble, remembering the failed Yemeni invasion of Ethiopia of two centuries prior. When an emissary of the Thanan banking house of Naphaparisada approached him with a similar offer two years later, this time accompanied by a cousin of the beleaguered Izaoriakan royal family, he found it harder to resist. Tamil pirates from the Maldives and Yemeni corsairs based in Hadhramaut had been making their presence felt recently, and the Malka was increasingly aware that with Chandratreya's authority fading, it would be up to him and his fleets to secure his merchants' shipping on the Indian Ocean. An emissary from Mazun, confirming Parsi interest in the venture as well, sealed the deal.
In 1373 the plan was deployed: an expeditionary force left Tilmun, stopping first at Zohar and the Asorig trading port of Musilo [Bosaso] to take on extra Arab and Zawmali mercenaries, then sailed to Toamasina, where their catspaw took the regnal name of Mipanafakamalala I. Mipanafakamalala empowered the local Maroserania clan, which itself was Christian and claimed distant Arab origin, to pacify the nearby province, and moved south along the coast, granting privileges to various clans with strong ties to the Parsi, Asorig, and the sponsoring Chandratreyan banigrama. The absolutist Varma kings who had preceded him had increasingly relied on foreign trading houses to handle the administrative functions of state like taxation and infrastructure... with Mipanafakamalala's "counter-revolution", this function was returned to local clans, allowing him to argue he was restoring local control, while in practice entrenching foreign influence on the island. Much as in Majachaiya, these select clans, which increasingly acted as branches of the foreign merchant houses, set up an order favorable to their own profit, confiscating lands from rival Hindu clans in the interior and coastal clans with Lankan and Tamil connections.
The new king's forces, made up of a motley collection of Arab, Tayzig, and Zawmali mercenaries, were, at the time, the most hardened force to ever step foot on the island. The Tamil and Lankan response, years down the line, would ensure they would not keep that record forever. In the meantime, the invasion suited the Chandratreyan state just fine, happy to see their Tamil and Lankan rivals weakened; but it marked the start of a cycle of escalation. The Tamils began to ship even more weapons to their proxies on the southern third of the island, and formalized an alliance with Adulis and the Ethiopian kingdom; with the power vacuum following the sack of Mzishima, Adulis made Musilo its vassal, while Ethiopia seized the Ijara kingdom's highlands and conquered the Jubba river down to Kismani, and in so doing, consolidated a commanding position in the zanj trade. Awal was, at least, able to maintain the island of Socotra against assaults from Tamil pirates. The rump Ijara Shahdom, meanwhile, sought shelter under the Lankan umbrella, and accepted a Lankan garrison in Maqad-i-shah.
The Lankans also continued to invest in their possession of Watya, which took on even more economic importance as Lankan began cultivating the endemic Ratupandura [Rooibos] tea on large plantations. The tea tree, native to China, had been carried to India by Pala traders, who planted it in the highlands of Assam; Chandratreya and Tamil traders had carried it further, to Kapudesa. The Vanga maintained a stranglehold on the Indian Ocean tea trade, and the Lankan's plantations of the little red bush allowed them an easy substitute. The ravenous appetite for labor Cape Watya was developing was starting to outrun Lanka's slave supply; the Cape would draw indentured laborers from as far away as Brittany and Majachaiya. The need for slaves drove them to negotiate a discount on the Watya toll for Moors who also supplied the Cape with slaves; since this was the quite a number of them, this meant the tax was eased on many Mauri clans, though the Lankans still collected other dues. By the end of the 14th century Moorish merchants could be found as far away as Majachaiya. The mass rapine of the Majachaiya collapse would finally supply Cape Watya with enough slaves, but by then the economic forces that had demanded their presence were undergoing quite literally violent upheaval...
Neither the Tamils or the Lankans would be the last Indian power to intervene in East Africa, either. After the vandalism of the Buddhist shrine of Sonuttara, religious tensions ran high in Kintradoni. This culminated in a revolt of Shaivist tea and zanj plantation workers, many of mixed Indian-African heritage. Seeking to consolidate their grip on the zanj trade by destroying a rival source, the Pandyan kingdom covertly supported this revolt with shipments of weapons, putting them on more even ground with the Shah's collection of Arab mercenaries and Maa auxillaries. The desperate Shah Farough II and many of the old guard Arab-Iranian nobility of the city debated what to do - they considered inviting Lanka to protect the region's shrines (and, by extension, themselves), but, having seen how disastrous Kumaraya Ratta's "help" had been to Mzishima, they decided to accept another patron - Sindh, which was beginning to exert its independence as the Chandratreya state increasingly broke down. Sindhi connections allowed them to recruit a large number of Pajcanada mercenaries to put down the revolt, but a number of the rebels would seek refuge in the highlands and vex the Shahdom for quite some time. Sindhi merchants would seize the Gazarta islands [Seychelles] from their Parsi and Asorig inhabitants to support their voyages to Pazudesada, and their exports of food, timber, and other raw materials would be a boon to the manufacturing centers developing on the Indus.
Vignettes From the History of Wood pt 2
The Near East and the Indian Ocean Rim had their own reckonings with the need for wood.
In the Near East, while the Eftal invasions had been devastating, the lack of a subsequent Arab or Mongol invasion meant that irrigation works were much more intact than in OTL, and pastures were not quite as subject to overgrazing. Thus, the Near East tended to have better forest cover and was less dry and dusty than OTL.
This could not be said of India. Centuries of uninterrupted prosperity had led to depletion of forests, and issues in many ways similar to those that afflicted the Roman Empire - the silting of the harbor of Bharuch being a notable example. The rains of the monsoon season hit a peak around the year 1000 and had declined somewhat since then. As a result, many areas that would have been semi-arid OTL became fully arid; this especially affected Singh, Gujarat, and Mahratta. The depletion of forests made those that remained more valuable, and it was the politics of wood that would make the disunited kingdoms of the Gondwana forests a battlefield between Andhra, Mahratta, Kannauj, and Bihar in the Majachaiya Wars... The loss of fertile land contributed to declining tax revenues, especially for the Chandratreya, and contributed to the pressures that would wind up sending more and more Indians overseas...
Andhra, though, would profit quite handsomely off of wood. In 1321, an Andhran banigrama, the Kridachala Association, established a settlement in the lands of the northwest corner of Pula [Australia] they called Gandhampattanam [Darwin]. While the Majachaiya explorers had been disappointed in the low prospects for immediate profit in the vast lands of Pula, Kridachala had a longer-term outlook. The Kridachala held close to what they saw as the original religious visions of the ayat, now leavened with Kitai exoteric influences. The Kridachala sought not just to make a profit, but to set up a refuge where men could optimally pursue nirvana. Accordingly, they planned for the long term, planting great stands of sandalwood that would take at least 15 years to mature. In the meantime, most of Kridachala's shareholders and associates would migrate to the settlement, along with their families, and set up their own semi-autonomous government that, while nominally under the control of the Andhran monarchy, restored many of the ayat privileges that the Gajapati dynasty had crushed. Their members were dismissed by many back in Andhra as deluded utopians, but they would have the last laugh. On making their first sandalwood harvest, their workers would make a quite the discovery: when they dug up the trees for harvest (the aromatic oil of the tree being most concentrated in the roots) they also found large deposits of easily-accessible copper in the soil... This was taken as a sign of the favor of the dharma, and the profits from these were widely distributed and invested in infrastructure by the elected leaders of the banigram. The white stone city of Gandhampattanam became a haven for likeminded Hindu idealists from across the Indian Ocean rim. Their ideology would even win converts among the Makassan, the seasonal traders that sailed from the spice islands to gather the sea cucumbers... The prosperity and harmony of the colony would be an inspiration for settlers elsewhere in Pula and ultimately inspire the founding of Kadaka across the ocean... Marege, as the Makassan called it, the "Wild Country", was becoming increasingly tamed. Their golden age, like that of many places, would come to an end after the collapse of the Majachaiya, which dragged them into Andhra's wars, flooded them with refugees, and disrupted their carefully ordered society - but Gandhampattanam would remain for some time to come the premier settlement of Pula.
In Africa, the heavy-handed exploitation of the Ethiopian highlands at the hands of the Hawiya had rendered much of Ethiopia a wasteland, far more than OTL. The Hawiya Shahs encouraged the expansion of Zawmali [Somali] pastoralists into the highland plateau, which further degraded the land. With the collapse of that state around the turn of the millennium, the land did, however begin to recover. The highland Christians and Jews remained hostile to the Buddhists, and so preferred to trade with the majority Christian city-state of Adulis, which itself had strong ties to the Malayalam Christian Nine Lions banigram of Pandya and Hoysala, rather than trade with the rump Buddhist city of Gidaya. Over the next 150 years, the Amhara highlanders would gradually replant their injera fields and zanj farms, and Malayalam traders would be the middleman for popularizing the Zanj drink in southern India, particularly the Pandya kingdom.
The traders of Hadhramaut, Aden, and Awal [Bahrain] were competitors with Pandya in the zanj trade for a time; the fall of the hydraulic Hawiya kingdom was paralleled by the rise of the Ijara Shahdom of the Horn. The Ijara Shahdom's own name is illustrative - coming from the Arabic term for "rent", or "tax", its own power came from its ability to extract maximum use of its hydraulic control of irrigation works in the Jubba and Shabelle basins and to exploit their stranglehold on the region's wells. With the irrigation works they could grow spices and cotton, which were traded through the ports of Shangani [Mogadishu] and Kismani along with the old trade goods like ivory, gold and beeswax. With control of the wells, came control of the Zawmali pastoralists who moved their herds around the Horn, and by monopolizing water supplies the Shahs of Ijara were able to reward allied clans and punish clans who foolishly decided to raid them. The language of the Shahdom was peculiar - at base a creole of Somali dialects and the older, non-Arabic South Semitic languages of Najran that first traded with the region, it also had influence from the Hejazi Arabs of the Banu Hawiya, the Syriac-speaking Asorig, and Parsi traders who had also frequented the coast. It would be the Bharukacchi who ultimately catapulted them to prominence, however... The Ijara kingdom expanded into the eastern highlands, which they would soon plant with zanj. They butted up against the realms of Adulis in the north and Musilo [Bosaso] in the northeast. Shah Saadh II came to found a new capital near the old, smaller port of Shangani, calling it the "Place of the Shah" or Maqad-i-shah, which rapidly came to rival premier cities of East Africa like Adulis and Mzishima, and in time became host to the largest Zoroastrian community in East Africa, many (but by no means all) Parsi. While not part of the White-Elephant Concordat, its cozy relationship with the Parsi and Asorig, who generally were, allowed it to take part in some of its prosperity, despite remaining free of Mzishima's hegemony.
Their rise to power would soon face some headwinds, however. With support of Adulis, a Cushitic camp-king named Yikunno brought together a coalition of Amhara who would win a decisive victory in 1141 against the highland Zawmali herdsmen, driving many of their clans out of the central plateau and into the lands of Ijara, whose highland zanj and grain plantations were heavily damaged by their raids. This raised the price of Chandratreyan zanj, which, along with the final defeat of the Hawiya by the camp-king Yakub-Dawit, helped spur the disastrous Mahatitta-backed Yemeni invasion of Ethiopia in 1176. The defeat of this invasion led to the crowning of the first Negus Negesti (or King-of-Kings) of Ethiopia, Amdesiyo. Amdesiyo, whose cavalry had been decimated by tufenjeras at the battle of Gidaya, learned from the experience and procured tufenj himself from Adulis, which would be used to devastating effect against the kingdom's troublesome Zawmali and Oromo neighbors, many of whom were sold into slavery. The King-of-Kings ruled with the approval of the Chewa - self-trained warriors supported by, and protecting their own communities, Jewish and Christian alike. The Chewa, were famed for their poetry, athleticism, and great curved swords, and were also famed for their suspicion of outsiders, especially Dharmists and Zawmalis, who had rendered their ancestors peripatetic much as they were. The only exception was Adulis, which had aided them against the Hawiya and came to effectively control the kingdom's overseas trade.
The Arabs and Asorig, who had long traded on the East African coast and founded many of its cities and island settlements, came to rely on the region for wood for their fleets. Further south, Kintradoni [Mombassa, Kenya] would become a major supplier for Yemen and Awal, giving them naval timber along with more exotic lumber like the African blackwood, which made excellent furniture and woodwind instruments, and for which Kintradoni would be famed. Kintradoni also became famous for its university, patronizeds by the Shahs but founded by Jains, who made many converts in the region, especially among the elites. After Kintradoni fell under Mzishiman dominance, the highlands of Pazudesada were increasingly planted with zanj and tea as well, giving Chandretreya merchants an alternative to the faltering plantations of Ijara and the tea-traders of Vanga.
Lanka, meanwhile, cozied up to Dodakote [Kilwa, Tanzania], an island kingdom near the coast that, with their patronage, would eclipse the nearby old Savahila settlement of Ambahita. Dodakote dhows, themselves made of the ubiquitous coconut palm, would ply the coast and rivers, acting as middlemen to supply the Lankan ivory, timber and slave trade. The Coral Fortress where its ruler dwelled was famed for its causeways, courtyards, and beautifully carved wooden doors marked with Shaivist scripture, as well as for being something of a combination palace and emporium where the Raja of Dodakote himself wheeled and dealed with important foreign traders. Elsewhere the people of Dodakote built their thatched dwellings from the fronds of the also ubiquitous raffia palm, which was widely harvested to make rope and cloth, and whose sap was fermented to make a strong vintage of palm wine. The Lankans and Tamils, recently shut out of Hanthawaddy [lower Burma] and its forests by Vanga, would also come to Izarioka and plant large plantations of Asian teak, which, due to its water resistance, durability, and the reasonably short growth period, was the tree of choice for production of their ships. This ultimately meant the great island would turn into one of the first proxy wars that heralded the collapse of the Chandratreya: for eastern Arabia hungered for wood.
The Najd and Persian Gulf coast had become a refuge for many fleeing Khardi persecution, and Nestorian Christians, Zoroastrians, and others, took refuge in the marshy coasts and desert harbors. The island [Bahrain] various referred to as Tilmun (by the Asorig), Muharraq (by the Arabs), and Awal (by the Persians) exerted control over the scattered Christian settlements of the coast, which Arab Christians called the Banu Qatarye. The Banu Qatarye was a land of coastal marshes and deserts, and possessed some of the largest oases in Arabia, where some of the world's most productive date plantations were worked by East African slaves. The sprawling city of Bet Gawsa, near the mouth of the Tigris and Euphrates, was not only the last Asorig- majority city in Mesopotamia, it was also the center of the secretive Mandean community, who claimed to follow the teachings of John the Baptist. The city of Qtapa [Qatif] would export vast amounts of food grown on the Pitardashir oasis [Al-Hasa] to feed the port of Tilmun. The great port of Tilmun was itself famed for its glistening marble churches, and for its tolerance; though its line of Malkas, or kings, was of Syriac Christian descent, the Malkas stood by an ancient motto of their house, that "There is no compulsion in religion", and the island had sizeable Jewish, Zoroastrian, and Buddhist minorities. While the Khardi had strongly persecuted non-Buddhists in their empire, their successors the Bakhtiyar had a much more tolerant approach, and invited the Asorig, Parsis and Jews back to the cities of Mesopotamia, where their neutrality allowed them to mediate between squabbling Bakhtiyar houses; and given the Bakhtiyar kingdoms' focus on land matters, the island of Awal came to dominate trade in the Persian Gulf. While the days that the Asorig were an actual majority in most of Asoristan were long past, Asorig traders established networks throughout the Near East, stretching to the shores of the Mediterranean and Black Seas, and so were able to control the flow of Indian and Kapudesan goods heading west, while selling luxuries sourced from as far away as Narbo and Smolensk. The Asorig had a growing presence in India as well, especially in Hoysala and western Pandya, where they cultivated ties to the Malayalam Christian community.
Further east, the closely allied city of Zohar, jewel of Mazun [Oman], was famed as one of the last places in the world Zoroastrian Magi were pre-eminent, and Zoroastrian traders, commonly known as Parsi, were just as well-known as the Asorig in Kapudesa, Chandratreya and Persia. Under the White-Elephant Concordat, both the Asorig and Parsi had come to occupy a privileged position as middlemen for the Indians trading with the Near East, and the Awali fortress at Hazora [Musandam, Oman] commanded the approach to the Straits of Hormuz. This was, however, increasingly challenged; especially as the Lankans and Tamils exerted increasingly forceful attempts to break into their markets, with the former having famous success in Egypt and the Red Sea, and the latter increasingly breaking into Persia. An agreement with Jihangir Shah in 1369 granted the Tamils the island of Qeshm in the strait of Hormuz, just opposite Hazora, a development which the Asorig loathed and feared. Yet, they were still a weak military power, dependent on Chandratreya support. If they were to challenge the Tamils, even in their home waters, they would need to build their fleets.
They would have to enlist Indian help; luckily, they would find it. The Radiant Silk Group of Suryapur, a Jain concern with heavy investment in textiles, approached the Malka of Awal with an offer; they would help sponsor and end to the anarchy on Izarioka, where the Asorig could obtain timber to grow their navy, and the Radiant Silks could invest in indigo and other dye plantations. After the Ispanian raids on the island, the monarchy lost much of its credibility, and the island had devolved into a state of constant civil war between usurpers and claimants, while foreign companies had free reign to abuse and expropriate from commoners as much as they could get away with. The Radiant Silk banigrama, and others, like the Thanan banking houses, had approached the Chandratreya state itself multiple times to enlist the imperial navy in the effort to enforce some stability on the island, only to be delayed and rebuffed; in any case, their navy was increasingly decrepit due to the state's focus on land wars, and was becoming infamous for nepotism and graft. Malka Ephrem III was intrigued, but viewed the venture as a gamble, remembering the failed Yemeni invasion of Ethiopia of two centuries prior. When an emissary of the Thanan banking house of Naphaparisada approached him with a similar offer two years later, this time accompanied by a cousin of the beleaguered Izaoriakan royal family, he found it harder to resist. Tamil pirates from the Maldives and Yemeni corsairs based in Hadhramaut had been making their presence felt recently, and the Malka was increasingly aware that with Chandratreya's authority fading, it would be up to him and his fleets to secure his merchants' shipping on the Indian Ocean. An emissary from Mazun, confirming Parsi interest in the venture as well, sealed the deal.
In 1373 the plan was deployed: an expeditionary force left Tilmun, stopping first at Zohar and the Asorig trading port of Musilo [Bosaso] to take on extra Arab and Zawmali mercenaries, then sailed to Toamasina, where their catspaw took the regnal name of Mipanafakamalala I. Mipanafakamalala empowered the local Maroserania clan, which itself was Christian and claimed distant Arab origin, to pacify the nearby province, and moved south along the coast, granting privileges to various clans with strong ties to the Parsi, Asorig, and the sponsoring Chandratreyan banigrama. The absolutist Varma kings who had preceded him had increasingly relied on foreign trading houses to handle the administrative functions of state like taxation and infrastructure... with Mipanafakamalala's "counter-revolution", this function was returned to local clans, allowing him to argue he was restoring local control, while in practice entrenching foreign influence on the island. Much as in Majachaiya, these select clans, which increasingly acted as branches of the foreign merchant houses, set up an order favorable to their own profit, confiscating lands from rival Hindu clans in the interior and coastal clans with Lankan and Tamil connections.
The new king's forces, made up of a motley collection of Arab, Tayzig, and Zawmali mercenaries, were, at the time, the most hardened force to ever step foot on the island. The Tamil and Lankan response, years down the line, would ensure they would not keep that record forever. In the meantime, the invasion suited the Chandratreyan state just fine, happy to see their Tamil and Lankan rivals weakened; but it marked the start of a cycle of escalation. The Tamils began to ship even more weapons to their proxies on the southern third of the island, and formalized an alliance with Adulis and the Ethiopian kingdom; with the power vacuum following the sack of Mzishima, Adulis made Musilo its vassal, while Ethiopia seized the Ijara kingdom's highlands and conquered the Jubba river down to Kismani, and in so doing, consolidated a commanding position in the zanj trade. Awal was, at least, able to maintain the island of Socotra against assaults from Tamil pirates. The rump Ijara Shahdom, meanwhile, sought shelter under the Lankan umbrella, and accepted a Lankan garrison in Maqad-i-shah.
The Lankans also continued to invest in their possession of Watya, which took on even more economic importance as Lankan began cultivating the endemic Ratupandura [Rooibos] tea on large plantations. The tea tree, native to China, had been carried to India by Pala traders, who planted it in the highlands of Assam; Chandratreya and Tamil traders had carried it further, to Kapudesa. The Vanga maintained a stranglehold on the Indian Ocean tea trade, and the Lankan's plantations of the little red bush allowed them an easy substitute. The ravenous appetite for labor Cape Watya was developing was starting to outrun Lanka's slave supply; the Cape would draw indentured laborers from as far away as Brittany and Majachaiya. The need for slaves drove them to negotiate a discount on the Watya toll for Moors who also supplied the Cape with slaves; since this was the quite a number of them, this meant the tax was eased on many Mauri clans, though the Lankans still collected other dues. By the end of the 14th century Moorish merchants could be found as far away as Majachaiya. The mass rapine of the Majachaiya collapse would finally supply Cape Watya with enough slaves, but by then the economic forces that had demanded their presence were undergoing quite literally violent upheaval...
Neither the Tamils or the Lankans would be the last Indian power to intervene in East Africa, either. After the vandalism of the Buddhist shrine of Sonuttara, religious tensions ran high in Kintradoni. This culminated in a revolt of Shaivist tea and zanj plantation workers, many of mixed Indian-African heritage. Seeking to consolidate their grip on the zanj trade by destroying a rival source, the Pandyan kingdom covertly supported this revolt with shipments of weapons, putting them on more even ground with the Shah's collection of Arab mercenaries and Maa auxillaries. The desperate Shah Farough II and many of the old guard Arab-Iranian nobility of the city debated what to do - they considered inviting Lanka to protect the region's shrines (and, by extension, themselves), but, having seen how disastrous Kumaraya Ratta's "help" had been to Mzishima, they decided to accept another patron - Sindh, which was beginning to exert its independence as the Chandratreya state increasingly broke down. Sindhi connections allowed them to recruit a large number of Pajcanada mercenaries to put down the revolt, but a number of the rebels would seek refuge in the highlands and vex the Shahdom for quite some time. Sindhi merchants would seize the Gazarta islands [Seychelles] from their Parsi and Asorig inhabitants to support their voyages to Pazudesada, and their exports of food, timber, and other raw materials would be a boon to the manufacturing centers developing on the Indus.
Last edited:
Tufenjeras, I like that. Looking forward to thinking up zany [language]-to-[language] loanwords for various concepts.
Are there sufficient alloy ingredients (copper, tin, etc) in/near Ethiopia to make casting cannons viable there? Could this be an industry for a neighbor to get involved in?
Could be - thought maybe not at this particular settlement. I think many of the wattles Jared mentions in LoRaG, for example, are confined to SE Australia. For Gandhampattanam specifically, I don't know - their major cash crop is sandalwood, which I feel like would compete for space with other trees. I might go back and skim that TL to see what if anything might fit though.
I could potentially see Tasmanian pepper being a exploited TTL. That requires someone to be interested enough in the area to look at it deeply, though.
One difference from OTL is that colonization of Australia happened close to the start of the industrial revolution, whereas here it's starting in the "High Medieval"/Early Modern period. So, there's a longer time to build up higher population densities and there's not the same incentive to adopt crops that are industrially processed or harvested mechanically. This gives them both more desire and flexibility to explore native crops like the wattles...
Yeah, this is only going to get more and more alien as the Indians develop more and more "early modern" concepts.
I wonder if Sanskrit will become the language of science the way Latin is OTL?
As best I can tell, copper deposits in Ethiopia are... not great? Axum imported a lot of bronze and copper. Seems like there's some local iron that was in use by medieval times. Doesn't seem especially promising though.
On another note, apparently in Ethiopia there was a common belief that blacksmiths (whose trade was hereditary) could use magic to change their shapes just as they reshape metals, and turn into hyenas at night. I love finding wild random stuff like this...
In all likelihood, yes. Pali could serve as a bridge to Sanskrit-- and while Sanskrit is used in Hindu and Buddhist scholarship, Pali is only kept by Buddhists. There could be loanwords going into "scientific register" Sanskrit itself though, with associated controversies-- not to mention that scientific Sanskrit may be associated with a more prosaic literary style.
Last edited:
I'm excited for this, although it will likely make someone put the timeline in the ASB catagory, shapeshifting hyena blacksmiths is too good to pass up.
(kidding of course)
I finally caught up with this great timeline
The roundup posts were very interesting and India seems to have a lot of the early modern development. The management of forest was of the uttermost importance for trade and in France at least saw the plantation of new forests in place of marshes (see the Landes for the most visible exemple)
Is there the same development of canals than in otl western Europe?
When you think about it most of the world would be almost unrecognisable : I mean in Europe alone, half of it would be Buddhist with another alphabet and the other one would be very different : no free cities to develop new lands, slave soldiers, architecture would be very different without gothic architecture and even the Latin alphabet would be different with a lot of our alphabet was codified quite late (no fraktur, no w, u&v and I&j are the same letters, there would surely be long s and a lot of innovation that didn't occur in otl)
South America seems really different and very interesting : I'm happy to see the fula thrive ! And I'm wondering who will settle in otl Chile because it would be a door to the riches of new Aquitaine
The European war that is shaping up is looking a bit like a 30years war to me : who will get the most out of it ? It may well be the ones that don't participate...
So thanks to all of you that flesh out this world, this is massively interesting !
The roundup posts were very interesting and India seems to have a lot of the early modern development. The management of forest was of the uttermost importance for trade and in France at least saw the plantation of new forests in place of marshes (see the Landes for the most visible exemple)
Is there the same development of canals than in otl western Europe?
When you think about it most of the world would be almost unrecognisable : I mean in Europe alone, half of it would be Buddhist with another alphabet and the other one would be very different : no free cities to develop new lands, slave soldiers, architecture would be very different without gothic architecture and even the Latin alphabet would be different with a lot of our alphabet was codified quite late (no fraktur, no w, u&v and I&j are the same letters, there would surely be long s and a lot of innovation that didn't occur in otl)
South America seems really different and very interesting : I'm happy to see the fula thrive ! And I'm wondering who will settle in otl Chile because it would be a door to the riches of new Aquitaine
The European war that is shaping up is looking a bit like a 30years war to me : who will get the most out of it ? It may well be the ones that don't participate...
So thanks to all of you that flesh out this world, this is massively interesting !
@Gwenc'hlan I think one of the more recognizable places would be China, as they would still have a civilization similar to the song dynasty as otl. India, Europe and Africa are quite unrecognizable tho.
The Heart of China
The Reconstruction of China: The Heart
In other religions, the divines speak and act like men. The Old Testament is a continuous dialogue with God, and the New takes the life of God-as-man as its central topic. The incarnations of Vishnu come time and again to play vital roles in the Hindu histories. But the difficulty in definitively labeling the Chinese intellectual traditions as “religions” or “philosophies”, to say nothing of “ideologies”, comes from the fact that in these traditions, the essence of the universe, its all-ruling impulse, defies personification. It does not come down to visit people; people must look for it themselves, and define what they are looking for. That different modes of striving do not wholly cancel each other out accounts for the extraordinary spirit of coexistence 三教合一 in Chinese society; but in the deep and enduring disagreements over the premises on which these systems are built, and their divergent goals for individual and social development, the limitless potential of the human mind (心, “heart”), which all the Chinese traditions affirm as the sole instrument of salvation but for different reasons, almost becomes a burden.
China’s indigenous traditions saw a person’s work as something to be accomplished in the bounds of one life. One’s striving stopped at the moment of death; after this point, one’s spiritual welfare lay primarily in the hands of one’s descendants. Leaders of sufficient renown could look forward to having their memorial tablets placed in a public shrine and included in its ceremonies, or even having an entire temple dedicated to their memory.
But if the Buddhist cycle of rebirth or transmigration entailed suffering, it also granted a lot of leeway. It allowed a division of labor, a taking of turns. Only a miniscule proportion of the population, the sangha, could make meaningful strides toward nirvana at any given time; but by providing for the material needs of the sangha, and undertaking great works to glorify and propagate the faith, anyone could accumulate meritorious karma, which would raise one’s station in the next life. This in turn freed the majority of lay Buddhists from having to follow the rules of monastic conduct or hold themselves to the same educational standards, while necessitating the creation of monasteries as worlds-unto-themselves in which the same rules were viable. There is of course much more to say about the curious relationship between the lay and clerical spheres than this, but for now it is sufficient to say that a monk and a king could acknowledge the gulf that lay between their respective occupations. Each accepted the other party as the primary authority within their respective sphere, and only then worked toward a consensus on mutual oversight.
“Exoteric Chan,” the purported ideology of the Khitai Yaol (1012-1344), therefore maintained a healthy separation between the “Exoteric” and the “Chan”. The curriculum of the civil service exams was broadly the same as under the late Qi (620-867), with a subset of exams offered in the Khitai language. Rather than replacing the Confucian model of scholarship, Buddhist thinkers since the Liang (502-620) had augmented it through practices like panjiao 判教, or building periodizations and genealogies of texts and authors to give structure to vast corpuses of knowledge. The respect and support Buddhism afforded to the traditionally respectable may have paved the way for its massive growth under the Liang; in any case, the Yaol saw no need to fix what wasn’t broken. Their state was not a theocracy, much less a Chan one— the rise of the Chan school of Sudden Enlightenment over older predecessors was a product of wider trends in Chinese society, such as increasing familiarity with the doctrinal basics established by the Huayan and Tiantai schools and a demand for more authoritative statements to inform daily practice. This was not something the Yaol were at liberty to stage-manage, although the Yaol maintained a measure of control over the sangha by reserving, as did the Liang and Qi, the sole right to grant new monks certificates of ordination (a measure which helped maintain an imperial registry of monks, control their numbers through quotas, and charge miscellaneous fees).
“Exoteric” concerns about making the world “safe” for the Buddha-dharma involved the power of the state more directly, through grand and small construction, uneasy coexistence of private enterprise and state monopolies (generally favoring the latter), and encouraging interaction with the outside world while busily policing (and expanding) the borders. This was not the only option available to them. The Confucian discourse of a state that recognized where the genius of the people might allow them to preserve their own livelihood, without the state needing to exhaust the strength of the people and strain their resources in half-baked plans to “save” its subjects, would not have been unknown to the Khitai. Although Buddhism was judged to be the foreign tradition that coexisted most easily with their native shamanism and their Turkic-Iranic affectations, many Khitai were renowned for their depth of classical Chinese learning, and eulogized by close friends and political allies among the Chinese [2]. However, the senior Khitai aristocracy did not indulge this pattern, seeing it as the unlucky fate of those lower Khitai forced to interact with the Chinese on a daily basis by their professions. They also did not wish to see future emperors identify themselves with the Chinese as so many “reformist” Khitai or half-Khitai did or seemed to; the tutors of the emperors were chosen from venerable Chan abbots, who delayed education in the Confucian classics until later in adolescence. A third option for legitimacy, however unsophisticated, could have come from a personalist cult that unconditionally praised the emperor— this was the Uighur (867-1012) road, but it had not led the Uighurs to much success. The “Incarnate Holy King” Eltemish’s attempts at a sacred state failed to override the preceding religious diversity of the Khaganate, did not make Northern China any easier to govern, and ended shamefully with the “holy” title reduced to a plaything of brutish intrigues.
Yaol emperors and ministers promoted a utilitarian image of an ever-ready, ever-helpful state, uniquely suited to governing the largest, most populous, and most prosperous empire in the entire world. It was the product of the combined talents of all its people— although some contributed more than others. To a large extent, Yaol Exotericism and the conditions that made it possible arose from the interaction of the Khitai state with a very specific group of conquered Chinese. The absorption of the rich and urbanized kingdom of Wu (867-1123) on the lower Yangtze, one of the world’s great centers of craft manufacturing and trade, supplied the state with over half its subsequent revenues; meanwhile the North China Plain’s Khitai and Uighur monasteries and aristocratic estates colluded closely to claim and preserve tax exemptions. The curriculum for the Yaol realm’s civil service exams was designed with input from the former leading lights of Wu, for only here did the “universal” civil service exams introduced in the late Qi survive in any meaningful capacity. Precedent for the Qi policy was of course said to come from the Han dynasty, but in Han times examination was not open to all; and the sons of great aristocrats, generals, and relatives of the imperial family received easier examinations if they even had to bother with them at all. They treated higher offices as yet another part of their families’ extensive properties, and this attitude endured into the Liang and Qi despite the attempts of the later dynasty’s Confucian revival to assert the primacy of learning and merit. But when the Qi collapsed, the Uighurs and Khitai moved in to expropriate the grandees of the north and take their place. The detritus of the old order fled to Wu with belongings in tow, including great collections of books; but they could not bring their lands with them. Their only asset was their learning, and thus the primacy of learning was established in Wu.
Well into the 1100s, the lower Yangtze was still fertile ground for private and state-run academies: institutions to form up young men into… calling them “citizens” is to get ahead of ourselves, but there was certainly an ideal of productive, socially active life which these academies catered to. But the abolition of Wu's central government was not counterbalanced enough by the expansion of the Yaol government; the Yaol in fact instituted regional maximums, so that it would be impossible for many to pass the exams even if they invested years into studying. Instead, the many thousands of gentry who despaired of getting past the exams used their education to stand out within their communities, as great owners of property and investors in businesses, a literate class which existed not for the state but for itself. Those who did seek the calling of public office would find that not only did the ethnic hierarchy of the Yaol empire stall their upward climb, but it even bedeviled them in their efforts to happily govern in the lower levels. In theory, local governance since the Qin and Han was a matter of prefectures and counties 郡縣. The counties are sometimes treated as the essential atoms of this system, since throughout the centuries after the Qin they generally expanded in size, fusing together in core regions even as new colonies were established along ethnic and political frontiers. In practice, the counties relied heavily on the corporate structures of the clusters of villages (or in urban settings, precincts or neighborhoods), garrisons, and other settlements within them for information on population, property transfers, and daily matters of security. The prefectures, or commanderies, brought five to ten counties together into a unit that could coordinate comprehensive bandit suppression, local construction or recruitment of laborers for construction elsewhere, and the collection, use, and transfer of the large quantities of cash coins, silver pieces, cloth, and grain in which taxes were assessed. On top of this, prefects had the right to send memorials and notices to the court in Kaifeng, meaning that they could even go over the heads of the circuits, regional supervisory bodies which drew together information and resources from multiple prefectures. In theory a prefecture was the imperial state in miniature, but the prefectures of the Yaol state were riddled with enclaves such as the ordo military estates. If a prefect complained about the parlous conduct of an Uighur garrison commander encamped in his jurisdiction, he was as likely to find himself out of a job as his enemy. Nor could the circuits meaningfully intervene on behalf of prefectures— these were not truly “provincial” administrations. The circuits came in several varieties (civil, military, financial) with different portfolios and affiliations with different central ministries, and circuits corresponding to the same rough region might include prefectures not included in another. Perennial reconstitution of circuits and prefectures, upgrading and downgrading units or putting new ones together out of the pieces of the old, meant that between the township and the capital there were no coherent political “regions” to serve as a platform for any sort of advocacy or sustained policy that the court did not call for. The Yaol state was only as Exoteric as it wanted to be, and it was very slow to own up to its failures.
All of this determined the dominant tendencies in lower Yangtze Confucianism, best represented by the establishment in Shifu, or Hangzhou. There was much they still wished for, but they were generally considered successful at making the leap from Wu to Yaol. They even drew students from the former state of Chu, traveling in search of teachers more renowned (and contacts more valuable for future advancement in the bureaucracy) than those of their home provinces. The outlook was broadly utilitarian, although this was not a point of principle— the radical Ouyang Zhen’s sympathetic commentary on the Han Feizi, placing front and center the Legalist philosopher’s notion that a wise man “does not assign truth to high antiquity, nor take any as law any constant… [but] assesses the affairs of the age and prepares himself,” was roundly criticized by most contemporaries in the late 1100s (although decades later Yaol Pusuwan, last great emperor of his line, would speak favorably of the copy he owned). The more popular opinion was to respect the classics of the Confucian canon, but opt for a less socially-focused reading of them. Remaining focused on one’s own learning and spiritual development in good and bad times was sound advice. But if one was then supposed to advise and transform one’s colleagues and ruler, and through morality above create peace below… the Yaol emperor was unfortunately insulated from such transformative advice by layers of Khitai and Uighur aristocrats and self-interested Chinese (both laity and Chan abbots), who would either delight in setting conscientious Confucians against each other, or declare some arbitrary grouping of them a “conspiratorial faction” and notify the emperor of the threat. The classics were still considered to hold great personal significance, but they were also practical means of acquiring the skills of fine writing and broad thinking. Perhaps it was best to keep one’s head down and focus on getting by, getting ahead.
This was the way of the inferior man.
Confucianism was born in the unhappy age of the Warring States. In their day jobs, China’s first distinct class of scholars 士 extracted their lord’s share from even the smallest villages, and ended lives with their pens. But they were raised on tales of a better age. Their histories started from the legendary origins of civilization, the Golden Age of humanity: the rule of the Three Sovereigns and Five Emperors, sage-kings who arose to distinction or were appointed by their predecessors, and the Three Dynasties of the Xia, Shang, and early Zhou. Collectively the sages were associated with writing and editing the genre of classic 經 texts, laying out foundational concepts in fields as diverse as music, numerology, history, mythology, religious ritual— and beneath the already profound outer meanings, it was said, lurked oceanic wells visible through the allegories and metaphors on the surface. The rule of the sages was perfect, and achieved without compulsion; their arts were the fount of civilization in its myriad forms. The Confucian contribution was to say that all of this was connected— all of it, from the histories of great kings doing great things to the meditative poetry of the Book of Odes, and the divinatory glyphs and formulas of the Book of Changes— and together it embodied the truth that a beautiful society was not just the gift of the immortals and gods, but something that people could create, lose, and recreate. Engagement in society did not come at the expense of individual self-actualization, but was an essential component of it.
Wherever people knew their proper roles and relationships with each other, wherever they were educated into a fuller awareness, and wherever force did not compel them to act against this understanding— there, the truth of the sages would be manifest. There was no lay/clerical distinction, as there was in Buddhism, whereby some people declared themselves central to the struggle for perfection and other people (even the ruler!) were content to be peripheral. The struggle would involve every person, even if they had different occupations and roles to play. But the necessary precondition of this was openness; the reaffirmation of hierarchy and the bonds of respect were to be the foundation of dialogue. This was why the head of the most insignificant prefecture deserved the right to have their appeals heard, why a king needed his ministers to be as strict as their station allowed. If the ruler was convinced he already knew everything there was to know and that everything would turn out exactly as he planned, and his greatest subjects refused to correct him— for fear of punishment, or out of despair that no one would ever listen to them, or simply because they were really quite ignorant and had nothing to say— then the misery of the Warring States, the Hegemonic Way 霸道 that cannibalized society for its hollow victories, was the only result.
The Analects, the recorded conversations of an official often disappointed but always resolute, speak simply of superior 君子 and inferior 小人 men. Words abstracted from the vocabulary of social hierarchy were used to describe closeness and distance from the sagely ideal, and to create a progression toward that ideal, toward the apex of moral and spiritual development. This begs many questions, including the questions of where the capacity for perfection dwells and why it is so rarely manifested. The debates over human nature 性 should be seen in this light— Xunzi’s argument was that an innate conception of order and orderliness did not dwell within people, and so they would have to be socialized into it. Although this perspective would seem desirable, as it minimizes the need for metaphysical conjectures into what cannot be observed, it could not dispel the fear that the essential teachings on which socialization relied could be revised by society or even lost entirely in the event of some great disaster. The mainstream of Confucianism would therefore trace its lineage through Confucius’s pupil Zengzi and his grandson Zisi to Mencius, wherein each link of the chain gave a fuller and more thorough statement of the principle that goodwill 仁 and principles 義 are imparted by Heaven but exist within people 仁義内在. Even if the textual record of this concept is lost and the teaching forgotten, it is immortal and can be rediscovered.
The Han dynasty enshrined Confucianism as state orthodoxy but pitted its scholars against its eunuchs, allowing the latter to persecute and kill their betters in order to preserve their own privileged access to the emperor. The Confucians of later eras, burdened by the enormity of the task ahead of them, sought a false peace first in Daoist circles and then in the monasteries, eating food provided by slaves at the table of vagrants who left their families behind. Clearly, Confucianism needed to be a system of ardent passion, of tireless drive to investigate the myriad things and cultivate oneself. If the imperial exams were used to domesticate it, then the spirit in which these exams were prepared for and taken had to change. Where before there had simply been “superior men”, now there would be open talk of cultivating inner sageliness; and Heaven as previously conceived was now placed at the root of a great system of existence, reaching outward to embrace a pantheon of principles led by the Dao. Where this kingdom of axioms met with the everyday was in Mencius’s concept of the original mind 本心, a proper nature imparted by Heaven but buried in the course of life by clutter. The pursuit of the profitable and easy, the ethic of mere utility and prudence, all this came at the cost of one’s integrity— if that was lost, one would never reclaim one’s original nature, and there was no guarantee of a second chance after death. All this could never have been thought of or propagated by a single mind; this was the work of an entire fellowship of scholars, who went by the simple name of Great Learning or Daxue 大學, after a chapter in the Book of Rites. Leading figures followed their proclivities and exercised their individual strengths to the fullest, their careers leading them to new audiences in the provinces or into the halls of power in Kaifeng. Members recognized each other by displaying particular turns of phrase in examination essays, following codes of conduct unique to their private academies, or delivering eulogies at the funerals of teachers and students. They were recognized from the outside by their imitation of ancient dress and manners, their increasing coherence in the lower officialdom and courting of influential figures in the capital, and their willingness to march on against blacklists and prohibitory edicts. By the early 1300s the combined membership of the Great Learning’s constituent schools was a little over three thousand, a small fraction of the literati as a whole but the largest organized faction within it.
For the moralists of the Great Learning Fellowship, the rise of the New Policies military clique 新政閥 was an inevitable result of Yaol intolerance for dissent and laxity in self-assessment. For the relatively apolitical gentry of Shifu, the descent into military rule was really quite of a surprise, but those on the frontiers had seen it coming for decades. The militarized frontiers between hostile states tend to be marginal areas, by nature or by design— the military would inevitably be the largest institution there, and its demand for provisions would absorb much of the local economic activity as well. In the wake of the Flowering Flesh in the early 1200s, the ordo of the frontiers, tribes of northerners resettled as far south as Cao Bang, took over administrations of prefectures hit hard by the plague almost by default. From the mid-1200s the term “army” 軍 was used synonymously with “prefecture,” and these hybrid administrations sent memorials to central military and civil authorities depending on their needs.
Cities like Shifu and Kaifeng were not immediately germane to the New Policies, whose designers were primarily focused on transforming the rural majority of China. They hoped to achieve this through unchecked expansion of the army itself, and the creation of a militia that would in theory encompass the entire working male population. The “guard and tithe” 保甲 system would provide the men and the means of provisioning them: every ten to thirty households, their locations determined by census, would serve as the basic unit of tax collection or resource provision, and every ten households would also form a small militia, to be integrated into larger formations as needed. This of course cut right across the existing county and prefecture system, especially with regard to tax collection— a few mishaps of attempted double collection in Huguang were enough to set off the first major campaigns of tax evasion and open revolt against the New Policies in the otherwise optimistic (at least compared to what came after) decade of the 1290s; but as crimes by one member of a guard or tithe unit were to be met with punishment on all members, the seeds were sown for an escalating cycle of extralegal punishment and vicious revenge attacks. Shifu’s initial role in all of this was to bankroll it— taxes on the city’s commerce, and profits from the city’s voracious consumption of state monopoly products like salt, together provided over a fifth of the empire’s revenues, and this proportion would only increase as overall revenues decreased.
By the 1310s refugees from the provinces sought shelter behind Shifu’s walls, and behind them followed government agents who looked for coded messages of the New Policies Clique’s downfall in speeches and writings down to the smallest brochure. Increasingly contrived synonyms for “new” 新 were devised to avoid beatings or worse over an unintended reading. The next move was not immediately clear, and public or private meetings to discuss the matter were bedeviled by nosy neighbors. But all the alleyways of this gargantuan city could not be policed all the time— nor, it turned out, could all of its poetry circles. A popular topic were the works, poetic and prosaic, of An Juyi and Lu Qiji, two past administrators of Shifu; elaborations on these works would spread from cell to conspiratorial cell and finally escape Shifu entirely over the 1320s.
An let his deeds speak for him: his commitment to learning about the rules and habits of Indian guilds to figure out how Shifu society could benefit from them was an excellent demonstration of what a man of strong character and broad learning could achieve. Lu was more inclined to wax philosophical; formerly a student of Ouyang Zhen’s school of utilitarians, his most famous work would in fact be a response to Ouyang. The old radical once wrote on the subject of rural reform that the basic unit of governance ought to be a community of 110 households, where every year one of the ten wealthiest household heads would be the village chief 里長 who represented the community before the magistrate and tax collector and organized other activities like carrying the mail, fighting crime, and publishing state proclamations. The remaining 100 would be divided into ten sets of ten, each taking care of their tax responsibilities collectively under a similar annual rotation of leadership. Everyone in a group would of course be responsible for the welfare and good conduct of the other members [1]. Lu’s response was to say that this system actively worked against what was good about it. Although it meant to make individuals responsible for the good order of their locality, for nine years a household head would have to accept that his opinion officially did not matter, and a given year’s “chief” might not be the best negotiator or the most astute organizer. And while this structure of tens-in-tens was very good for extracting resources and making sure everyone paid their share, without any control over what would be done with those resources the whole exercise would seem hollow to its participants, and without their interest proper practice would not be maintained for long. It would be better for everyone if the “higher ten” remained invested in all years through collegial decision-making as practiced by the Indian guilds of Shifu, which would give the best man for the job the support and confidence of his fellows. It would be even better for this rigmarole to actually involve something pertinent to the well-being of the whole community. Even if 110 was too small a number to achieve that, who could say that there should not be additional layers of tens-in-tens— that ten village heads should not form a township association, and ten townships should not form a county? Lu would revisit these themes in later writings. Against a reader’s remark that collegialism would only encourage families to split their households 分家 in order to produce more “household heads”, working against the ideal of a harmonious extended family under one roof, Lu suggested that perhaps the basic unit of collegialism should not be the household but the working man 成丁, which would give large households an incentive to avoid splitting up. This concession to Confucian sensibilities was actually sincere— Lu himself belonged to a harmonious extended family, kept solvent by the government salaries of his uncles and the cabbage wholesaling operation run by his father. But there were enough hooks in Lu’s ideas that Shifu’s poetry circles could embellish them with further notions, including the irreverent Buddhism of the “White Turban” incarnation.
But in the end, the most influential product of the White Turban movement was not a merchant or an official, a poet or philosopher, but a soldier. In 1331, Jiankang [Nanjing] fell to a peasant army after a Turbanist-led conspiracy of gentry and guard captains opened the gates from within. At this stage “Foreman Kang” 康工頭, real name Kang Yi, was a former cannonner in the Yaol army who defected, like most of his peers, for a parcel of land. His participation was of little consequence until the rebellion marched to the sea, to Shifu and Jinshanwei. Here he became renowned as a tireless evangelist for the Panyuepao (盤越炮, “Pandyan gun”) [3], a breech-loading cannon with a length equal to a little over forty times its bore diameter on average, and the accompanying corned powder. Yaol gun designs had proceeded slowly from vase to tube for some time, but the independent branch of gunpowder experimentation established in India since the late 700s had since worked its way through similar problems (and there were centuries’ worth of problems, as gunpowder first arrived in India when it was still considered a failed immortality elixir) at a slightly faster pace amid the constant war of the subcontinent. To this, however, Kang contributed the genius in fortification that earned him his nickname, placing Panyuepao at intervals atop works of earth and stone, with acute-angled barbicans jutting out of the corners to minimize blind spots. The defense of Jinshanwei for thirteen months against eight thousand besiegers became an enduring legend— and imagine the surprise of the nascent rebel movement along the Yellow River when the architect of this legend appeared in their midst, having escaped the bloody Yaol sack of Jinshanwei by hiding in a barrel on the deck of a Japanese merchantman. The war of the new “White Banner” movement against the Yaol was mostly a war of offense, in which the unquestioned leader Xu Zhenyi leaped from strength to strength; but Foreman Kang’s defensive works were present to ensure that any White Banner reversals did not involve the handover of cities. He was not the only former Turbanist to take up the Banner— but of the hundreds who did the same, Kang was the highest-placed, and enjoyed the greatest proximity to Xu Zhenyi, the Jianwen Emperor of the Qing Dynasty.
But Xu Zhenyi was not his friend, nor anyone’s. The opening salvo came in 1348; the targets were the Uighurs of Quanzhou, a lapsed ordo whose constituent occupational groups (smiths, guards) had translated well to civilian trades from horse breeding and bronzeworking to retail of imports from old contacts on the docks. Like most other Uighurs of the 1300s, the few tens of thousands that still identified as such after three and a half centuries of residence in Khitai-ruled China, they were aloof from the religious mainstream— they were descended from the Nestorians of Central Asia, and were recontacted by the Asorig in the 1160s. Choosing spiritual preceptors, especially ones from outside the Yaol realm, and paying for the propagation of their teachings was an exercise in autonomy among peoples that the Yaol treated as mere army units. Not for nothing did the Vajrayana Uighur communities refer to their Tibetan preceptors as ataliq, a title which would have described the tutor of a khan if there were any Uighur khans. This interfered to some degree with the Qing policy of assimilation but need not have posed an immediate problem. The predicament of the Quanzhou Uighurs was that as intermediaries between the native population, the merchants from across the sea, and the military cliques of the interior, they had become de-facto rulers of the city since the 1320s. That they had the temerity to negotiate with the appointed Qing intendant over keeping some of this influence, even unofficially, was enough for Xu to declare a root-and-stem policy of deportation. The imperial bodyguard corps worked with the previous government’s turncoats to confiscate rolls of membership held by the churches and identify nearly all the core members of the community; half their number, four thousand in total, were sent to frigid Yongmingcheng and the rest were scattered through Huguang and Lingnan. The message to any other ambitious “sects” in other cities, Shifu for example, was clear.
Next on the hit list were the monasteries and the armies. The Buddhist monastery had for eight hundred years been the backbone of social support in China. They increased their wealth through donations, and invested in business ventures like inns for travelers, grain mills, and oil presses. They even charged interest on loans made to farmers and entrepreneurs, and confiscated the debtors’ belongings if they did not pay in time. This put monasteries in the strange position of ruthlessly demanding fifty-percent interest or more on loans of seed grain to farmers, but offering charity to the homeless and the hungry; of doing more for the destitute of the empire than state agencies, but never failing to claim and preserve their tax exemptions. All in all, the monasteries were very easy to criticize and impossible to replace. The ten monasteries which had received the greatest amount of donations from the Yaol were shut down entirely; the sangha as a whole was informed that the Ministry of Rites would take greater charge of their conduct, including enforcement of rules against allowing children aside from orphans to be recruited as novices; but after this Xu made it clear that there would be peace. Guarantees like this of course relied on Xu’s mastery of military force, and no Emperor before or since would be as passionate as he was about keeping the military under his personal control. Xu had built his armies from scratch, starting with only twenty good men from his home village of which only five still lived; his sense of personal responsibility over his creation was as strong as his distrust of the “criminals and deviants” in the ranks. Xu would gut the Ministry of War, splitting its former responsibilities into five regional commands over which the sole coordinating office would be the emperor himself and a staff of secretaries to help manage the paperwork.
War hero status aside, there was little Foreman Kang could do to lead some sort of White Turban revival. He could expect no help from the bureaucracy, which had little priorities at the time aside from reintroducing itself to public affairs after six decades in the shadow of military authorities. At any rate the leading officials, such as Chancellor Duan Hong, were affiliated with the Great Learning fellowship and suspicious of “heterodoxy”. The popular base of the White Turbans was nothing spectacular. Many loyalists were killed in the Yaol suppression of the 1330s revolt, and in the generation since what was mostly remembered about their rule in Jiankang, Shifu, and Jinshanwei was botched land redistributions, fanciful attempts at community granaries and model urban precincts, and a revolving door of leaders who never quite seemed to be in charge. In fact, Kang himself would publicly state that his true pride was participating in the prelude for the establishment of the august Qing; but whatever criticisms he made of the Turbanist revolt did not directly concern Lu Qiji or his ideas, only the fact that the revolt itself was somewhat underwhelming. As the hero of two movements, he genuinely did not wish for them to come to blows. If they did, if he or another Turbanist unwisely provoked the emperor or the emperor openly came after them… the best outcome would be for the emperor to win, and quickly. If the row between former comrades lasted longer than that…
In 1350 Kang suggested that, even if the armies were divided, the knowledge and experience gained through shared struggle ought to be preserved by a single body— a civilian body, namely the Ministry of Public Works. There was, after all, much resemblance in the use of mathematics, geography, and feng shui geomancy in large-scale architecture and in modern war: an officer needed to be able to accurately assess his resources and those of his enemy, and to assess the terrain itself both with regard to its physical characteristics and the flows of spiritual energy. Upcoming projects like the renovation of the Great Wall would require the expertise of artisans, bureaucrats, and officers; although Kang’s use of the phrase “a common Dao” seemed presumptuous to some, it easily evoked the idea of something that ought to be cultivated and preserved. The Ministry of Works was long regarded as one of the weakest agencies in the central government, its role often taken over by circuit heads or the private enterprises of court favorites; it responded enthusiastically to this chance to expand its portfolio. Neither Chancellor Duan nor the emperor objected; Duan was content to see that the balance of power among the ministries would not change too much from this, and the emperor was glad to see Turbanists retire from active military duty to seek refuge in the weakest civilian ministry.
In general the effect of Kang’s maneuver was something like the transformation of the Pure Criticism 清議 movement of the Han Dynasty into the later Pure Conversation 清談, its political ambitions blunted by deadly confrontations with the palace eunuchs and its spirit of inquiry diverted into metaphysical concerns. Kang would be a flawed hero, and perhaps not a hero at all, to the civilians across China who tried to print or hand-copy Lu Qiji’s works and discuss their implications for the new era. But the opening of several “works academies” 工院 by the Ministry of Public Works, intended to offer “postgraduate” courses to interested bureaucrats and officers who already possessed the foundational scholarly 文 and martial 武 learning, was a revolutionary event in its own right. Collectively the works academies were the highest centers of experimentation and congress for those interested in such subjects as mathematics and chemistry for their own sake and for practical ends. Teachers and students would work together to recover mathematical texts and Daoist pharmacopoeias from previous dynasties, and translate more recent Indian and Middle Eastern works on experiments in ballistics and architecture. Their labors were financed by direct infusions from the Ministry of Public Works’ share of the imperial budget. Even the officers who did not excel in these studies benefited, because from this point they could argue, ever more convincingly, that their field possessed true erudition, a sophistication beyond skill in archery, horsemanship, and the study of history. This was not to say that the Chinese martial tradition had never possessed heroes or sophisticated people— Zhuge Liang was of course both, and Guo Yaoshi was a more recent example. However, the Great Learning would generally view Zhuge Liang with some suspicion, considering his advocacy of the Legalists Shen Buhai and Han Fei a sign of the Han dynasty's overall failure to attain the sagely ideal; and Guo Yaoshi would be recast as a more earthy figure, a simple man with the righteous fury to fight and die for civilization [4]. These characterizations obviously wouldn't go unchallenged— but even besides that it became possible to accept that military service could offer something more than the wrong opinions or no opinions about the world, that it imparted a unique insight into the world’s spiritual and physical qualities which could be used to serve the empire with dignity. And the world would one day see what officers convinced of their insight and dignity could accomplish…
All other parties dealt with, there remained only the Jianwen Emperor and the Great Learning. On paper neither party needed the other: the ideas of the fellowship were quite agnostic as to who the emperor actually was, and there were plenty of other literati to whom the emperor might assign the task of rebuilding civilian government. In practice they were perfect for each other: the fellowship had in Xu Zhenyi a fiery Vajrapani to be their patron and protector; and the emperor had in the fellowship tireless and articulate partisans for a conservative vision of social stability, the sort of people who could make everyone believe that returning to their homes and carrying on was for the good of all-under-Heaven. But the basic relationship of the fellowship was that between teacher and student: their platform was an extended meditation on how education should be accomplished and why, and their public initiatives reflected this. Meanwhile, the emperor presented an image of untutored excellence, the penniless farmer with the world in his hand— and if the fellowship dreamed of overwriting his personality to create the sort of paragon of decorum they truly wished to see on the throne, they would be sorely disappointed. Neither could fully submit to the guidance of the other without giving up a cherished part of the image they presented to themselves and others; but for the time being they worked together well enough.
Education was not the only public sphere the Great Learning fellowship sought to revolutionize. As prefects and intendants in China’s south they sought to establish institutions like community granaries to lend seed grain to farmers or supply emergency aid, run by local literati and intended to compete head-on with the Buddhist monasteries. But the beating heart of their movement, the subject on which they spilled the most ink and to which they committed the most efforts, was right there in the name.
In eulogies to commemorate departed comrades, members of the fellowship would bemoan the loss to their faction 黨, to their Dao. This stemmed from the response given by one of the founding members of the school to Yaol Abaoji’s declaration that “gentlemen do not form parties,” that in fact parties were efforts by individuals to seek the common Dao and not merely platforms for scheming. This exchange was of course mostly symbolic, factions have existed in every human government— but the idea of a common way would remain important to Great Learning discourse. Their Dao was none other than the Dao of Confucius and Mencius, which they believed they understood as no one else did. In a curiously Chan turn of phrase, they asserted that this Dao was transmitted directly from the old Masters to the founding members of their own school, skipping over all the retrograde and unimaginative thinkers of the Han, Liang, and Qi dynasties (and their own contemporaries), by way of unique insights in the classic texts that lay buried until recently. Chief among these were the metaphysical unities of the mind, the Dao, Heaven, and sageliness— but these were essentially rhetorical strategies. It was a rhetorical strategy to claim that “true” learning, true self-cultivation, was not the absorption of ideas external to oneself, but the process of reaching into one’s own mind, rediscovering what one had always known. The great flaw of the civil service exams as they had existed so far was that they encouraged learning as a means of attaining status and wealth, things external to oneself, which degraded the content of the learning itself. No one, least of all the Chinese literate public that was larger than in any previous era, saw this as a reason to abolish the exams. But the vision of learning promoted by the Great Learning suggested a way to redeem them— to prepare students for the exams, while also ensuring they understood that high office was not an end in itself but a means to an even higher calling. But what self-cultivation really was, the process of it, was something that varied with teaching style— and in the private academies of the late Yaol, set up as an alternative to state academies that only cared about the exams and nothing else, different lecturers used the teaching styles that they believed in.
The dominant approach to self-cultivation was a gradual, guided progression through the classics and commentaries on them, uncovering the greater truth by turns. Residual questions mostly involved whose commentaries to use, and just how rigid the progression needed to be. The former question was resolved to the satisfaction of most of the fellowship by adopting the anthologies of introductory essays penned by Mu Cejian, the leading light of the fellowship in the 1280s by virtue of his Erudite Literatus degree (a higher honor than even the jinshi degree awarded in the palace exams) and post of senior compiler in the Historiography Academy. Mu’s commentaries would become the basis of state-run academy curricula in the Qing era, and the “essential canon” as he saw it would heavily influence the civil service exams. The latter question would finally split the fellowship in two. Shu Ji, who claimed overall leadership of the fellowship by virtue of being Mu’s favorite student (also reminiscent of the Chan dharma-transmission), was a stickler for an emerging sense of orthodoxy. He was insistent, more insistent than Mu himself, that basic texts such as the Analects and the Mencius ought to precede studies of the other classics such as the histories, the Odes, and the Changes— and that the basic texts themselves needed to be preceded by introductory commentaries, enduring a correct general attitude was established early and endured through all subsequent learning. This was a rhetoric of forging the mind anew, for even though Shu accepted that all people had an ethical nature imparted by Heaven he held that this was distinct from the human mind. The ethical nature was a sort of endlessly duplicated schematic; the mind had to be reshaped in accordance with it, in order to consistently conform to it.
His influence was unquestioned amid the stresses of the 1320s, which drew in many new members but also brought persecution from above. But as the state’s capacity for persecution (and enacting its will in general) fell apart in the 1330s, so too did the aging Shu’s hold over the fellowship. A teacher in Nanchang, Xiong Shen, expected his students to uphold rigid rules of decorum but made a point of rejecting rigidity in the structure of learning itself. The point was not to complete a list but to read what one wished, thoughtfully and enthusiastically; to discern cause and effect, principles of right and wrong, and the implicit meaning beyond the literal. Furthermore, just as the minds of ordinary people could be clouded by desires, the minds of the intelligent could be clouded by strange theories; fixed opinions were the jailers of the open mind. Did the need for an “open mind” mean that all doctrines were the same? Definitely not, Xiong had nothing good to say about the “selfishness” he perceived in the Buddhist goal of liberation— but he also pointed out how Buddhism as he observed it also encouraged benevolent conduct and respect for family. What Xiong meant is that rather than needing to hammer the mind into shape, one could set it on the right path and allow it to proceed naturally toward the good, just as children naturally learn to show goodwill and adhere to principle, and Buddhists naturally tend toward central ideas of Confucianism while the Confucians absorbed only peripheral ideas from other teachings. All that self-cultivation really had to be was proceeding at one’s own pace, remaining sensitive to the stirrings of one’s mind; there was no need to maintain tight-fisted control of its progress.
This of course meant his image of the mind was very different from Shu Ji’s, and Xiong would confirm this by promoting a vision of human consciousness enjoying fundamental unity with the ethical nature and through it the mind of Heaven. This of course applied to every single human— Confucians, and also Buddhists, generally considered their statements on human nature valid for all people, but maybe illiteracy or a lack of leisure time to study held most people back from the real prizes. Xiong’s flexibility on book-reading theoretically lowered this bar, and he was willing to play with the idea further— he would say, not entirely as a joke, that the first sages couldn’t have learned their arts from books since they were the ones to invent writing, and that ironically there seemed to be less sages in the ages when more books were published (and by the time “commentaries on the classics” emerged as a genre of literature, there were no sages at all). The only indispensable readings for Xiong were the Five Classics traditionally held to be edited by Confucius, and the Four Books credited to his disciples; the point of reading them was to internalize them through experience and consistent practice, and not to spend one’s life wandering through a hall-of-mirrors by reading endless commentaries by people who only wanted to ride the coattails of their betters. Mu’s commentaries were exempt from this condemnation, but only out of respect for the fellowship; even then, Xiong would claim direct “transmission” from Mencius that skipped over even the founding members of the Great Learning. The inevitable debates with Shu— carried out through meetings and exchanges-of-letters— were inconclusive, but not acrimonious. Aside from some moments where each seemed interested in little more than scoring points, the two scholars considered each other as great men and as equals even if they were separated by twenty years. Their correspondence was generally friendly and continued until Shu’s death in 1345; Xiong would deliver a touching and conciliatory eulogy. The next generation, however, would be far less polite to each other. Shu’s “loyalists” were fond of comparing their opponents to Chan Buddhists, implying by this a glorification of unearned “sudden enlightenment”; coarser insults such as “wild men” 狂人 would have their debut in the coming decades.
Few were unhappier about this widening rift than Chancellor Duan Hong. He was not some high-flying Erudite Literatus— he was Chancellor because he was effective, and because he made the emperor, formerly the illiterate farmer Xu Zhenyi, feel less insecure than someone like Shu Ji might have. But he was only effective because he had a faction behind him. Sure, he had a lengthy resume as intendant for the financial circuits of Huguang North and Jingdong East [Shandong], and he penned the occasional essay for the fellowship’s anthologies and various county gazetteers in his places of work. But no one can govern a state alone, and so where more idealistic scholars might see a big beautiful tent of different ideas, or an engine for the moral regeneration of civilization, Duan saw in the Great Learning a bureaucratic faction with the same fundamental strengths and weaknesses as any other. When a faction could be the face of support or opposition for a particular set of policies, it had strength to throw around; if it could no longer be identified with a particular attitude it would lose its coherence, and if it lost its social dimension (the ability to promote the like-minded, worthwhile marriage ties) then it was another dead label. It might spawn a successor, but that faction would do what it liked with the legacy of predecessors. Already the Great Learning maintained consensus on little else besides basing state-run academy curricula and the civil service exams on Mu’s commentaries and definition of the classic canon. When the exams were resumed in 1350 they would effectively have no further ideas to contribute— unless they could become the face of something else. And so, the Chancellor would begin drafting a memorial to the emperor that drew from the other aspect of the Great Learning— the side suspicious of a ruler’s unchecked power, the ill effects of which had been so clearly demonstrated by the previous six decades of Qin-dynasty policies under barbarian enforcers. If the current generation wished to surpass even the Han, it could at least do its part to prevent yet another Qin. Where Kang Yi leaned away from confrontation, Duan leaned into it.
Duan invited the reader to consider the fate of the Censorate, which once had three branches. The first reviewed the conduct, correspondence, and announcements of the emperor and Chancellery, and made suggestions and criticisms on the ground of moral propriety; the Uighurs and Khitai abolished this branch completely. The other two branches sent inspectors on missions to audit the finances of central and regional government agencies, and investigate for corruption and impropriety; these were turned by the Khitai into attack-dogs, bearing the name of the prior office but forfeiting the dignity earned by brave investigators and crusaders for justice since the Han. Why did the Khitai decide they could use part of the Censorate but not the rest of it? Duan proposed that because the “remonstrance” function of the Censorate only required officials to be familiar with a limited number of people (who were likewise familiar with the censurers), criticism could be squarely on-target and would not be taken as an insult or threat. In discussing people with the duty to admonish one who was falling into error, Confucius named ministers, officers, friends, and sons— all figures of great familiarity. The “inspection” function was of course a necessary complement, but historically it relied on sending officials to provinces strange to them, where they did not know local affairs and feared for their safety; the officials they investigated likewise feared that a censurer’s hasty judgement of them could cost them their career or their life, for even if a censor was found to be wrong he would not be punished. For Duan, this demonstrated that when it came to offices of advising and correcting the powerful, as opposed to offices of actually exercising power, the wisdom that had endured since the Qin— that officials be kept far from positions of power in their home locality— was in fact upside-down. If the Censorate as an institution was to recover from its mistakes, its powers would have to be strictly defined and widely distributed. “Remonstrance” 諫 and “inspection” 察, rather than radiating out from the central government, would have to be distributed to the provinces through independent bureaus at the circuit level, staffed by figures of local renown…
[1] This is a basic summary of the Ming dynasty lijia system, introduced by the Hongwu emperor.
[2] For an OTL example there's Shimo Yisun. I didn't want to get to into the weeds here but in future posts I do expect to bring up TTL examples of Khitan distinction (in the sense of "difference" or that of "honor") within a Chinese context, both during and well after the Yaol.
[3] The name Panyue is from the Weilue.
[4] Guo Yaoshi is a TTL figure, a general who led the last stand of the Qi against the Uighurs. I imagine he's seen the way Yue Fei is OTL, but without the added gut-punch of being betrayed and executed by his own lord; this may mean he's a less compelling folk hero as well.
***
There is a lot I wasn't really able to get to: Daoism, women, the Lingnan/Daiya Tai, the economy. Those will get more focused, hopefully shorter posts.
There's also a lot of expies of Southern Song/"founding generation of Neo-Confucianism" people; really the main exercise here is to see how certain parts of Neo-Confucianism might become exaggerated or minimized to audiences of its time when the "historical background" is provided by the events of TTL instead of the events of OTL. And since Confucianism since the Song has largely been extensions of or responses to the Song, setting the context for later developments in a way that preserves the big ideas of the Song allows me to bring in Ming and Qing ideas in more original combinations down the line, all while making it clear where those come from. Oh yeah, and the White Turbans-- I've tossed out a lot about them but I do want a little of the confusion over what their exact genealogy and future alignments are to be "in universe" as well. Maybe they go in a more "practical statecraft"/"utilitarian" direction, maybe they go for some weird ruralist idealism, maybe they keep the kind of libertarian vibe and remain practical enough to produce some interesting critiques of government. But the thing is that for literally any direction I go with them, I can find a significant enough Chinese philosopher to help me make that case in a way that makes at least a modicum of sense (maybe sometimes it'll really be a stretch) within the cultural context.
Credit where it's due: the two books that helped me the most were Confucian Discourse and Chu Hsi's Ascendancy by Hoyt Cleveland Tillman and Late Works of Mou Zongsan: Selected Essays on Chinese Philosophy, translated by Jason Clower. I'm not really sure which order I'd suggest reading them in-- I started with Tillman who is very much writing about the Southern Song alone, and gives exhaustive details and quotes... unfortunately a lot of it went over my head. Mou Zongsan is... well he was a New Confucian, a refugee from the Chinese Civil War who spent the rest of his life in Taiwan and Hong Kong. His essays are very much inspired by a sense of contemporary mission (and rage against pinko intellectuals) but he was able to express what X believed or what he disagreed with Y on in a way that made more sense in some cases... but in other cases this also went over my head. I would like to reread both works sometime after I've read more widely and see if I understand them better. On Buddhism and "Exoteric Chan" I found Critical Readings on Tang China, Volume 4, ed. Paul W. Kroll helpful, but I only read the first two chapters of that.
“Would that there were no need for me to speak!... What does Heaven ever say? Yet the four seasons are put in motion by it, and the myriad creatures receive their life from it. What does Heaven ever say?”
— Confucius, Analects 17.19
In other religions, the divines speak and act like men. The Old Testament is a continuous dialogue with God, and the New takes the life of God-as-man as its central topic. The incarnations of Vishnu come time and again to play vital roles in the Hindu histories. But the difficulty in definitively labeling the Chinese intellectual traditions as “religions” or “philosophies”, to say nothing of “ideologies”, comes from the fact that in these traditions, the essence of the universe, its all-ruling impulse, defies personification. It does not come down to visit people; people must look for it themselves, and define what they are looking for. That different modes of striving do not wholly cancel each other out accounts for the extraordinary spirit of coexistence 三教合一 in Chinese society; but in the deep and enduring disagreements over the premises on which these systems are built, and their divergent goals for individual and social development, the limitless potential of the human mind (心, “heart”), which all the Chinese traditions affirm as the sole instrument of salvation but for different reasons, almost becomes a burden.
“The August Yuan received Heaven’s command, reached the end of earth and sky, where all accepted it as the ruler. The people grew numerous and the civilization prospered, and all war was ended. The officials under the Yuan upheld the principles of civilized rule, while the people rejoiced. The emperor bestowed benevolence onto the people and brought good government.”
China’s indigenous traditions saw a person’s work as something to be accomplished in the bounds of one life. One’s striving stopped at the moment of death; after this point, one’s spiritual welfare lay primarily in the hands of one’s descendants. Leaders of sufficient renown could look forward to having their memorial tablets placed in a public shrine and included in its ceremonies, or even having an entire temple dedicated to their memory.
But if the Buddhist cycle of rebirth or transmigration entailed suffering, it also granted a lot of leeway. It allowed a division of labor, a taking of turns. Only a miniscule proportion of the population, the sangha, could make meaningful strides toward nirvana at any given time; but by providing for the material needs of the sangha, and undertaking great works to glorify and propagate the faith, anyone could accumulate meritorious karma, which would raise one’s station in the next life. This in turn freed the majority of lay Buddhists from having to follow the rules of monastic conduct or hold themselves to the same educational standards, while necessitating the creation of monasteries as worlds-unto-themselves in which the same rules were viable. There is of course much more to say about the curious relationship between the lay and clerical spheres than this, but for now it is sufficient to say that a monk and a king could acknowledge the gulf that lay between their respective occupations. Each accepted the other party as the primary authority within their respective sphere, and only then worked toward a consensus on mutual oversight.
“Exoteric Chan,” the purported ideology of the Khitai Yaol (1012-1344), therefore maintained a healthy separation between the “Exoteric” and the “Chan”. The curriculum of the civil service exams was broadly the same as under the late Qi (620-867), with a subset of exams offered in the Khitai language. Rather than replacing the Confucian model of scholarship, Buddhist thinkers since the Liang (502-620) had augmented it through practices like panjiao 判教, or building periodizations and genealogies of texts and authors to give structure to vast corpuses of knowledge. The respect and support Buddhism afforded to the traditionally respectable may have paved the way for its massive growth under the Liang; in any case, the Yaol saw no need to fix what wasn’t broken. Their state was not a theocracy, much less a Chan one— the rise of the Chan school of Sudden Enlightenment over older predecessors was a product of wider trends in Chinese society, such as increasing familiarity with the doctrinal basics established by the Huayan and Tiantai schools and a demand for more authoritative statements to inform daily practice. This was not something the Yaol were at liberty to stage-manage, although the Yaol maintained a measure of control over the sangha by reserving, as did the Liang and Qi, the sole right to grant new monks certificates of ordination (a measure which helped maintain an imperial registry of monks, control their numbers through quotas, and charge miscellaneous fees).
“Exoteric” concerns about making the world “safe” for the Buddha-dharma involved the power of the state more directly, through grand and small construction, uneasy coexistence of private enterprise and state monopolies (generally favoring the latter), and encouraging interaction with the outside world while busily policing (and expanding) the borders. This was not the only option available to them. The Confucian discourse of a state that recognized where the genius of the people might allow them to preserve their own livelihood, without the state needing to exhaust the strength of the people and strain their resources in half-baked plans to “save” its subjects, would not have been unknown to the Khitai. Although Buddhism was judged to be the foreign tradition that coexisted most easily with their native shamanism and their Turkic-Iranic affectations, many Khitai were renowned for their depth of classical Chinese learning, and eulogized by close friends and political allies among the Chinese [2]. However, the senior Khitai aristocracy did not indulge this pattern, seeing it as the unlucky fate of those lower Khitai forced to interact with the Chinese on a daily basis by their professions. They also did not wish to see future emperors identify themselves with the Chinese as so many “reformist” Khitai or half-Khitai did or seemed to; the tutors of the emperors were chosen from venerable Chan abbots, who delayed education in the Confucian classics until later in adolescence. A third option for legitimacy, however unsophisticated, could have come from a personalist cult that unconditionally praised the emperor— this was the Uighur (867-1012) road, but it had not led the Uighurs to much success. The “Incarnate Holy King” Eltemish’s attempts at a sacred state failed to override the preceding religious diversity of the Khaganate, did not make Northern China any easier to govern, and ended shamefully with the “holy” title reduced to a plaything of brutish intrigues.
Yaol emperors and ministers promoted a utilitarian image of an ever-ready, ever-helpful state, uniquely suited to governing the largest, most populous, and most prosperous empire in the entire world. It was the product of the combined talents of all its people— although some contributed more than others. To a large extent, Yaol Exotericism and the conditions that made it possible arose from the interaction of the Khitai state with a very specific group of conquered Chinese. The absorption of the rich and urbanized kingdom of Wu (867-1123) on the lower Yangtze, one of the world’s great centers of craft manufacturing and trade, supplied the state with over half its subsequent revenues; meanwhile the North China Plain’s Khitai and Uighur monasteries and aristocratic estates colluded closely to claim and preserve tax exemptions. The curriculum for the Yaol realm’s civil service exams was designed with input from the former leading lights of Wu, for only here did the “universal” civil service exams introduced in the late Qi survive in any meaningful capacity. Precedent for the Qi policy was of course said to come from the Han dynasty, but in Han times examination was not open to all; and the sons of great aristocrats, generals, and relatives of the imperial family received easier examinations if they even had to bother with them at all. They treated higher offices as yet another part of their families’ extensive properties, and this attitude endured into the Liang and Qi despite the attempts of the later dynasty’s Confucian revival to assert the primacy of learning and merit. But when the Qi collapsed, the Uighurs and Khitai moved in to expropriate the grandees of the north and take their place. The detritus of the old order fled to Wu with belongings in tow, including great collections of books; but they could not bring their lands with them. Their only asset was their learning, and thus the primacy of learning was established in Wu.
Well into the 1100s, the lower Yangtze was still fertile ground for private and state-run academies: institutions to form up young men into… calling them “citizens” is to get ahead of ourselves, but there was certainly an ideal of productive, socially active life which these academies catered to. But the abolition of Wu's central government was not counterbalanced enough by the expansion of the Yaol government; the Yaol in fact instituted regional maximums, so that it would be impossible for many to pass the exams even if they invested years into studying. Instead, the many thousands of gentry who despaired of getting past the exams used their education to stand out within their communities, as great owners of property and investors in businesses, a literate class which existed not for the state but for itself. Those who did seek the calling of public office would find that not only did the ethnic hierarchy of the Yaol empire stall their upward climb, but it even bedeviled them in their efforts to happily govern in the lower levels. In theory, local governance since the Qin and Han was a matter of prefectures and counties 郡縣. The counties are sometimes treated as the essential atoms of this system, since throughout the centuries after the Qin they generally expanded in size, fusing together in core regions even as new colonies were established along ethnic and political frontiers. In practice, the counties relied heavily on the corporate structures of the clusters of villages (or in urban settings, precincts or neighborhoods), garrisons, and other settlements within them for information on population, property transfers, and daily matters of security. The prefectures, or commanderies, brought five to ten counties together into a unit that could coordinate comprehensive bandit suppression, local construction or recruitment of laborers for construction elsewhere, and the collection, use, and transfer of the large quantities of cash coins, silver pieces, cloth, and grain in which taxes were assessed. On top of this, prefects had the right to send memorials and notices to the court in Kaifeng, meaning that they could even go over the heads of the circuits, regional supervisory bodies which drew together information and resources from multiple prefectures. In theory a prefecture was the imperial state in miniature, but the prefectures of the Yaol state were riddled with enclaves such as the ordo military estates. If a prefect complained about the parlous conduct of an Uighur garrison commander encamped in his jurisdiction, he was as likely to find himself out of a job as his enemy. Nor could the circuits meaningfully intervene on behalf of prefectures— these were not truly “provincial” administrations. The circuits came in several varieties (civil, military, financial) with different portfolios and affiliations with different central ministries, and circuits corresponding to the same rough region might include prefectures not included in another. Perennial reconstitution of circuits and prefectures, upgrading and downgrading units or putting new ones together out of the pieces of the old, meant that between the township and the capital there were no coherent political “regions” to serve as a platform for any sort of advocacy or sustained policy that the court did not call for. The Yaol state was only as Exoteric as it wanted to be, and it was very slow to own up to its failures.
“What Heaven confers is called [human] nature. Accordance with this nature is called the Way. Cultivating the Way is called education.”
— Zisi [grandson of Confucius], Doctrine of the Mean
All of this determined the dominant tendencies in lower Yangtze Confucianism, best represented by the establishment in Shifu, or Hangzhou. There was much they still wished for, but they were generally considered successful at making the leap from Wu to Yaol. They even drew students from the former state of Chu, traveling in search of teachers more renowned (and contacts more valuable for future advancement in the bureaucracy) than those of their home provinces. The outlook was broadly utilitarian, although this was not a point of principle— the radical Ouyang Zhen’s sympathetic commentary on the Han Feizi, placing front and center the Legalist philosopher’s notion that a wise man “does not assign truth to high antiquity, nor take any as law any constant… [but] assesses the affairs of the age and prepares himself,” was roundly criticized by most contemporaries in the late 1100s (although decades later Yaol Pusuwan, last great emperor of his line, would speak favorably of the copy he owned). The more popular opinion was to respect the classics of the Confucian canon, but opt for a less socially-focused reading of them. Remaining focused on one’s own learning and spiritual development in good and bad times was sound advice. But if one was then supposed to advise and transform one’s colleagues and ruler, and through morality above create peace below… the Yaol emperor was unfortunately insulated from such transformative advice by layers of Khitai and Uighur aristocrats and self-interested Chinese (both laity and Chan abbots), who would either delight in setting conscientious Confucians against each other, or declare some arbitrary grouping of them a “conspiratorial faction” and notify the emperor of the threat. The classics were still considered to hold great personal significance, but they were also practical means of acquiring the skills of fine writing and broad thinking. Perhaps it was best to keep one’s head down and focus on getting by, getting ahead.
This was the way of the inferior man.
Confucianism was born in the unhappy age of the Warring States. In their day jobs, China’s first distinct class of scholars 士 extracted their lord’s share from even the smallest villages, and ended lives with their pens. But they were raised on tales of a better age. Their histories started from the legendary origins of civilization, the Golden Age of humanity: the rule of the Three Sovereigns and Five Emperors, sage-kings who arose to distinction or were appointed by their predecessors, and the Three Dynasties of the Xia, Shang, and early Zhou. Collectively the sages were associated with writing and editing the genre of classic 經 texts, laying out foundational concepts in fields as diverse as music, numerology, history, mythology, religious ritual— and beneath the already profound outer meanings, it was said, lurked oceanic wells visible through the allegories and metaphors on the surface. The rule of the sages was perfect, and achieved without compulsion; their arts were the fount of civilization in its myriad forms. The Confucian contribution was to say that all of this was connected— all of it, from the histories of great kings doing great things to the meditative poetry of the Book of Odes, and the divinatory glyphs and formulas of the Book of Changes— and together it embodied the truth that a beautiful society was not just the gift of the immortals and gods, but something that people could create, lose, and recreate. Engagement in society did not come at the expense of individual self-actualization, but was an essential component of it.
Wherever people knew their proper roles and relationships with each other, wherever they were educated into a fuller awareness, and wherever force did not compel them to act against this understanding— there, the truth of the sages would be manifest. There was no lay/clerical distinction, as there was in Buddhism, whereby some people declared themselves central to the struggle for perfection and other people (even the ruler!) were content to be peripheral. The struggle would involve every person, even if they had different occupations and roles to play. But the necessary precondition of this was openness; the reaffirmation of hierarchy and the bonds of respect were to be the foundation of dialogue. This was why the head of the most insignificant prefecture deserved the right to have their appeals heard, why a king needed his ministers to be as strict as their station allowed. If the ruler was convinced he already knew everything there was to know and that everything would turn out exactly as he planned, and his greatest subjects refused to correct him— for fear of punishment, or out of despair that no one would ever listen to them, or simply because they were really quite ignorant and had nothing to say— then the misery of the Warring States, the Hegemonic Way 霸道 that cannibalized society for its hollow victories, was the only result.
The Analects, the recorded conversations of an official often disappointed but always resolute, speak simply of superior 君子 and inferior 小人 men. Words abstracted from the vocabulary of social hierarchy were used to describe closeness and distance from the sagely ideal, and to create a progression toward that ideal, toward the apex of moral and spiritual development. This begs many questions, including the questions of where the capacity for perfection dwells and why it is so rarely manifested. The debates over human nature 性 should be seen in this light— Xunzi’s argument was that an innate conception of order and orderliness did not dwell within people, and so they would have to be socialized into it. Although this perspective would seem desirable, as it minimizes the need for metaphysical conjectures into what cannot be observed, it could not dispel the fear that the essential teachings on which socialization relied could be revised by society or even lost entirely in the event of some great disaster. The mainstream of Confucianism would therefore trace its lineage through Confucius’s pupil Zengzi and his grandson Zisi to Mencius, wherein each link of the chain gave a fuller and more thorough statement of the principle that goodwill 仁 and principles 義 are imparted by Heaven but exist within people 仁義内在. Even if the textual record of this concept is lost and the teaching forgotten, it is immortal and can be rediscovered.
The Han dynasty enshrined Confucianism as state orthodoxy but pitted its scholars against its eunuchs, allowing the latter to persecute and kill their betters in order to preserve their own privileged access to the emperor. The Confucians of later eras, burdened by the enormity of the task ahead of them, sought a false peace first in Daoist circles and then in the monasteries, eating food provided by slaves at the table of vagrants who left their families behind. Clearly, Confucianism needed to be a system of ardent passion, of tireless drive to investigate the myriad things and cultivate oneself. If the imperial exams were used to domesticate it, then the spirit in which these exams were prepared for and taken had to change. Where before there had simply been “superior men”, now there would be open talk of cultivating inner sageliness; and Heaven as previously conceived was now placed at the root of a great system of existence, reaching outward to embrace a pantheon of principles led by the Dao. Where this kingdom of axioms met with the everyday was in Mencius’s concept of the original mind 本心, a proper nature imparted by Heaven but buried in the course of life by clutter. The pursuit of the profitable and easy, the ethic of mere utility and prudence, all this came at the cost of one’s integrity— if that was lost, one would never reclaim one’s original nature, and there was no guarantee of a second chance after death. All this could never have been thought of or propagated by a single mind; this was the work of an entire fellowship of scholars, who went by the simple name of Great Learning or Daxue 大學, after a chapter in the Book of Rites. Leading figures followed their proclivities and exercised their individual strengths to the fullest, their careers leading them to new audiences in the provinces or into the halls of power in Kaifeng. Members recognized each other by displaying particular turns of phrase in examination essays, following codes of conduct unique to their private academies, or delivering eulogies at the funerals of teachers and students. They were recognized from the outside by their imitation of ancient dress and manners, their increasing coherence in the lower officialdom and courting of influential figures in the capital, and their willingness to march on against blacklists and prohibitory edicts. By the early 1300s the combined membership of the Great Learning’s constituent schools was a little over three thousand, a small fraction of the literati as a whole but the largest organized faction within it.
“Article 2: The Ten Abominations.
The first is plotting rebellion.
The second is plotting great sedition.
The third is plotting treason.”
The first is plotting rebellion.
The second is plotting great sedition.
The third is plotting treason.”
— Law Code of the Great Ming
For the moralists of the Great Learning Fellowship, the rise of the New Policies military clique 新政閥 was an inevitable result of Yaol intolerance for dissent and laxity in self-assessment. For the relatively apolitical gentry of Shifu, the descent into military rule was really quite of a surprise, but those on the frontiers had seen it coming for decades. The militarized frontiers between hostile states tend to be marginal areas, by nature or by design— the military would inevitably be the largest institution there, and its demand for provisions would absorb much of the local economic activity as well. In the wake of the Flowering Flesh in the early 1200s, the ordo of the frontiers, tribes of northerners resettled as far south as Cao Bang, took over administrations of prefectures hit hard by the plague almost by default. From the mid-1200s the term “army” 軍 was used synonymously with “prefecture,” and these hybrid administrations sent memorials to central military and civil authorities depending on their needs.
Cities like Shifu and Kaifeng were not immediately germane to the New Policies, whose designers were primarily focused on transforming the rural majority of China. They hoped to achieve this through unchecked expansion of the army itself, and the creation of a militia that would in theory encompass the entire working male population. The “guard and tithe” 保甲 system would provide the men and the means of provisioning them: every ten to thirty households, their locations determined by census, would serve as the basic unit of tax collection or resource provision, and every ten households would also form a small militia, to be integrated into larger formations as needed. This of course cut right across the existing county and prefecture system, especially with regard to tax collection— a few mishaps of attempted double collection in Huguang were enough to set off the first major campaigns of tax evasion and open revolt against the New Policies in the otherwise optimistic (at least compared to what came after) decade of the 1290s; but as crimes by one member of a guard or tithe unit were to be met with punishment on all members, the seeds were sown for an escalating cycle of extralegal punishment and vicious revenge attacks. Shifu’s initial role in all of this was to bankroll it— taxes on the city’s commerce, and profits from the city’s voracious consumption of state monopoly products like salt, together provided over a fifth of the empire’s revenues, and this proportion would only increase as overall revenues decreased.
By the 1310s refugees from the provinces sought shelter behind Shifu’s walls, and behind them followed government agents who looked for coded messages of the New Policies Clique’s downfall in speeches and writings down to the smallest brochure. Increasingly contrived synonyms for “new” 新 were devised to avoid beatings or worse over an unintended reading. The next move was not immediately clear, and public or private meetings to discuss the matter were bedeviled by nosy neighbors. But all the alleyways of this gargantuan city could not be policed all the time— nor, it turned out, could all of its poetry circles. A popular topic were the works, poetic and prosaic, of An Juyi and Lu Qiji, two past administrators of Shifu; elaborations on these works would spread from cell to conspiratorial cell and finally escape Shifu entirely over the 1320s.
An let his deeds speak for him: his commitment to learning about the rules and habits of Indian guilds to figure out how Shifu society could benefit from them was an excellent demonstration of what a man of strong character and broad learning could achieve. Lu was more inclined to wax philosophical; formerly a student of Ouyang Zhen’s school of utilitarians, his most famous work would in fact be a response to Ouyang. The old radical once wrote on the subject of rural reform that the basic unit of governance ought to be a community of 110 households, where every year one of the ten wealthiest household heads would be the village chief 里長 who represented the community before the magistrate and tax collector and organized other activities like carrying the mail, fighting crime, and publishing state proclamations. The remaining 100 would be divided into ten sets of ten, each taking care of their tax responsibilities collectively under a similar annual rotation of leadership. Everyone in a group would of course be responsible for the welfare and good conduct of the other members [1]. Lu’s response was to say that this system actively worked against what was good about it. Although it meant to make individuals responsible for the good order of their locality, for nine years a household head would have to accept that his opinion officially did not matter, and a given year’s “chief” might not be the best negotiator or the most astute organizer. And while this structure of tens-in-tens was very good for extracting resources and making sure everyone paid their share, without any control over what would be done with those resources the whole exercise would seem hollow to its participants, and without their interest proper practice would not be maintained for long. It would be better for everyone if the “higher ten” remained invested in all years through collegial decision-making as practiced by the Indian guilds of Shifu, which would give the best man for the job the support and confidence of his fellows. It would be even better for this rigmarole to actually involve something pertinent to the well-being of the whole community. Even if 110 was too small a number to achieve that, who could say that there should not be additional layers of tens-in-tens— that ten village heads should not form a township association, and ten townships should not form a county? Lu would revisit these themes in later writings. Against a reader’s remark that collegialism would only encourage families to split their households 分家 in order to produce more “household heads”, working against the ideal of a harmonious extended family under one roof, Lu suggested that perhaps the basic unit of collegialism should not be the household but the working man 成丁, which would give large households an incentive to avoid splitting up. This concession to Confucian sensibilities was actually sincere— Lu himself belonged to a harmonious extended family, kept solvent by the government salaries of his uncles and the cabbage wholesaling operation run by his father. But there were enough hooks in Lu’s ideas that Shifu’s poetry circles could embellish them with further notions, including the irreverent Buddhism of the “White Turban” incarnation.
But in the end, the most influential product of the White Turban movement was not a merchant or an official, a poet or philosopher, but a soldier. In 1331, Jiankang [Nanjing] fell to a peasant army after a Turbanist-led conspiracy of gentry and guard captains opened the gates from within. At this stage “Foreman Kang” 康工頭, real name Kang Yi, was a former cannonner in the Yaol army who defected, like most of his peers, for a parcel of land. His participation was of little consequence until the rebellion marched to the sea, to Shifu and Jinshanwei. Here he became renowned as a tireless evangelist for the Panyuepao (盤越炮, “Pandyan gun”) [3], a breech-loading cannon with a length equal to a little over forty times its bore diameter on average, and the accompanying corned powder. Yaol gun designs had proceeded slowly from vase to tube for some time, but the independent branch of gunpowder experimentation established in India since the late 700s had since worked its way through similar problems (and there were centuries’ worth of problems, as gunpowder first arrived in India when it was still considered a failed immortality elixir) at a slightly faster pace amid the constant war of the subcontinent. To this, however, Kang contributed the genius in fortification that earned him his nickname, placing Panyuepao at intervals atop works of earth and stone, with acute-angled barbicans jutting out of the corners to minimize blind spots. The defense of Jinshanwei for thirteen months against eight thousand besiegers became an enduring legend— and imagine the surprise of the nascent rebel movement along the Yellow River when the architect of this legend appeared in their midst, having escaped the bloody Yaol sack of Jinshanwei by hiding in a barrel on the deck of a Japanese merchantman. The war of the new “White Banner” movement against the Yaol was mostly a war of offense, in which the unquestioned leader Xu Zhenyi leaped from strength to strength; but Foreman Kang’s defensive works were present to ensure that any White Banner reversals did not involve the handover of cities. He was not the only former Turbanist to take up the Banner— but of the hundreds who did the same, Kang was the highest-placed, and enjoyed the greatest proximity to Xu Zhenyi, the Jianwen Emperor of the Qing Dynasty.
But Xu Zhenyi was not his friend, nor anyone’s. The opening salvo came in 1348; the targets were the Uighurs of Quanzhou, a lapsed ordo whose constituent occupational groups (smiths, guards) had translated well to civilian trades from horse breeding and bronzeworking to retail of imports from old contacts on the docks. Like most other Uighurs of the 1300s, the few tens of thousands that still identified as such after three and a half centuries of residence in Khitai-ruled China, they were aloof from the religious mainstream— they were descended from the Nestorians of Central Asia, and were recontacted by the Asorig in the 1160s. Choosing spiritual preceptors, especially ones from outside the Yaol realm, and paying for the propagation of their teachings was an exercise in autonomy among peoples that the Yaol treated as mere army units. Not for nothing did the Vajrayana Uighur communities refer to their Tibetan preceptors as ataliq, a title which would have described the tutor of a khan if there were any Uighur khans. This interfered to some degree with the Qing policy of assimilation but need not have posed an immediate problem. The predicament of the Quanzhou Uighurs was that as intermediaries between the native population, the merchants from across the sea, and the military cliques of the interior, they had become de-facto rulers of the city since the 1320s. That they had the temerity to negotiate with the appointed Qing intendant over keeping some of this influence, even unofficially, was enough for Xu to declare a root-and-stem policy of deportation. The imperial bodyguard corps worked with the previous government’s turncoats to confiscate rolls of membership held by the churches and identify nearly all the core members of the community; half their number, four thousand in total, were sent to frigid Yongmingcheng and the rest were scattered through Huguang and Lingnan. The message to any other ambitious “sects” in other cities, Shifu for example, was clear.
Next on the hit list were the monasteries and the armies. The Buddhist monastery had for eight hundred years been the backbone of social support in China. They increased their wealth through donations, and invested in business ventures like inns for travelers, grain mills, and oil presses. They even charged interest on loans made to farmers and entrepreneurs, and confiscated the debtors’ belongings if they did not pay in time. This put monasteries in the strange position of ruthlessly demanding fifty-percent interest or more on loans of seed grain to farmers, but offering charity to the homeless and the hungry; of doing more for the destitute of the empire than state agencies, but never failing to claim and preserve their tax exemptions. All in all, the monasteries were very easy to criticize and impossible to replace. The ten monasteries which had received the greatest amount of donations from the Yaol were shut down entirely; the sangha as a whole was informed that the Ministry of Rites would take greater charge of their conduct, including enforcement of rules against allowing children aside from orphans to be recruited as novices; but after this Xu made it clear that there would be peace. Guarantees like this of course relied on Xu’s mastery of military force, and no Emperor before or since would be as passionate as he was about keeping the military under his personal control. Xu had built his armies from scratch, starting with only twenty good men from his home village of which only five still lived; his sense of personal responsibility over his creation was as strong as his distrust of the “criminals and deviants” in the ranks. Xu would gut the Ministry of War, splitting its former responsibilities into five regional commands over which the sole coordinating office would be the emperor himself and a staff of secretaries to help manage the paperwork.
War hero status aside, there was little Foreman Kang could do to lead some sort of White Turban revival. He could expect no help from the bureaucracy, which had little priorities at the time aside from reintroducing itself to public affairs after six decades in the shadow of military authorities. At any rate the leading officials, such as Chancellor Duan Hong, were affiliated with the Great Learning fellowship and suspicious of “heterodoxy”. The popular base of the White Turbans was nothing spectacular. Many loyalists were killed in the Yaol suppression of the 1330s revolt, and in the generation since what was mostly remembered about their rule in Jiankang, Shifu, and Jinshanwei was botched land redistributions, fanciful attempts at community granaries and model urban precincts, and a revolving door of leaders who never quite seemed to be in charge. In fact, Kang himself would publicly state that his true pride was participating in the prelude for the establishment of the august Qing; but whatever criticisms he made of the Turbanist revolt did not directly concern Lu Qiji or his ideas, only the fact that the revolt itself was somewhat underwhelming. As the hero of two movements, he genuinely did not wish for them to come to blows. If they did, if he or another Turbanist unwisely provoked the emperor or the emperor openly came after them… the best outcome would be for the emperor to win, and quickly. If the row between former comrades lasted longer than that…
In 1350 Kang suggested that, even if the armies were divided, the knowledge and experience gained through shared struggle ought to be preserved by a single body— a civilian body, namely the Ministry of Public Works. There was, after all, much resemblance in the use of mathematics, geography, and feng shui geomancy in large-scale architecture and in modern war: an officer needed to be able to accurately assess his resources and those of his enemy, and to assess the terrain itself both with regard to its physical characteristics and the flows of spiritual energy. Upcoming projects like the renovation of the Great Wall would require the expertise of artisans, bureaucrats, and officers; although Kang’s use of the phrase “a common Dao” seemed presumptuous to some, it easily evoked the idea of something that ought to be cultivated and preserved. The Ministry of Works was long regarded as one of the weakest agencies in the central government, its role often taken over by circuit heads or the private enterprises of court favorites; it responded enthusiastically to this chance to expand its portfolio. Neither Chancellor Duan nor the emperor objected; Duan was content to see that the balance of power among the ministries would not change too much from this, and the emperor was glad to see Turbanists retire from active military duty to seek refuge in the weakest civilian ministry.
In general the effect of Kang’s maneuver was something like the transformation of the Pure Criticism 清議 movement of the Han Dynasty into the later Pure Conversation 清談, its political ambitions blunted by deadly confrontations with the palace eunuchs and its spirit of inquiry diverted into metaphysical concerns. Kang would be a flawed hero, and perhaps not a hero at all, to the civilians across China who tried to print or hand-copy Lu Qiji’s works and discuss their implications for the new era. But the opening of several “works academies” 工院 by the Ministry of Public Works, intended to offer “postgraduate” courses to interested bureaucrats and officers who already possessed the foundational scholarly 文 and martial 武 learning, was a revolutionary event in its own right. Collectively the works academies were the highest centers of experimentation and congress for those interested in such subjects as mathematics and chemistry for their own sake and for practical ends. Teachers and students would work together to recover mathematical texts and Daoist pharmacopoeias from previous dynasties, and translate more recent Indian and Middle Eastern works on experiments in ballistics and architecture. Their labors were financed by direct infusions from the Ministry of Public Works’ share of the imperial budget. Even the officers who did not excel in these studies benefited, because from this point they could argue, ever more convincingly, that their field possessed true erudition, a sophistication beyond skill in archery, horsemanship, and the study of history. This was not to say that the Chinese martial tradition had never possessed heroes or sophisticated people— Zhuge Liang was of course both, and Guo Yaoshi was a more recent example. However, the Great Learning would generally view Zhuge Liang with some suspicion, considering his advocacy of the Legalists Shen Buhai and Han Fei a sign of the Han dynasty's overall failure to attain the sagely ideal; and Guo Yaoshi would be recast as a more earthy figure, a simple man with the righteous fury to fight and die for civilization [4]. These characterizations obviously wouldn't go unchallenged— but even besides that it became possible to accept that military service could offer something more than the wrong opinions or no opinions about the world, that it imparted a unique insight into the world’s spiritual and physical qualities which could be used to serve the empire with dignity. And the world would one day see what officers convinced of their insight and dignity could accomplish…
“It is wrong to say that the human mind is identical with human artifice, whereas the Dao mind 道心 is identical with Heaven’s principle. By the human mind is meant people’s minds in general… It is wrong to say that one is human desires and the other is Heaven’s principle. There are good and evil in man, and also good and evil in Heaven such as eclipses and evil stars. How can it be correct to ascribe all good to Heaven and all evil to man?”
— Lu Xiangshan
All other parties dealt with, there remained only the Jianwen Emperor and the Great Learning. On paper neither party needed the other: the ideas of the fellowship were quite agnostic as to who the emperor actually was, and there were plenty of other literati to whom the emperor might assign the task of rebuilding civilian government. In practice they were perfect for each other: the fellowship had in Xu Zhenyi a fiery Vajrapani to be their patron and protector; and the emperor had in the fellowship tireless and articulate partisans for a conservative vision of social stability, the sort of people who could make everyone believe that returning to their homes and carrying on was for the good of all-under-Heaven. But the basic relationship of the fellowship was that between teacher and student: their platform was an extended meditation on how education should be accomplished and why, and their public initiatives reflected this. Meanwhile, the emperor presented an image of untutored excellence, the penniless farmer with the world in his hand— and if the fellowship dreamed of overwriting his personality to create the sort of paragon of decorum they truly wished to see on the throne, they would be sorely disappointed. Neither could fully submit to the guidance of the other without giving up a cherished part of the image they presented to themselves and others; but for the time being they worked together well enough.
Education was not the only public sphere the Great Learning fellowship sought to revolutionize. As prefects and intendants in China’s south they sought to establish institutions like community granaries to lend seed grain to farmers or supply emergency aid, run by local literati and intended to compete head-on with the Buddhist monasteries. But the beating heart of their movement, the subject on which they spilled the most ink and to which they committed the most efforts, was right there in the name.
In eulogies to commemorate departed comrades, members of the fellowship would bemoan the loss to their faction 黨, to their Dao. This stemmed from the response given by one of the founding members of the school to Yaol Abaoji’s declaration that “gentlemen do not form parties,” that in fact parties were efforts by individuals to seek the common Dao and not merely platforms for scheming. This exchange was of course mostly symbolic, factions have existed in every human government— but the idea of a common way would remain important to Great Learning discourse. Their Dao was none other than the Dao of Confucius and Mencius, which they believed they understood as no one else did. In a curiously Chan turn of phrase, they asserted that this Dao was transmitted directly from the old Masters to the founding members of their own school, skipping over all the retrograde and unimaginative thinkers of the Han, Liang, and Qi dynasties (and their own contemporaries), by way of unique insights in the classic texts that lay buried until recently. Chief among these were the metaphysical unities of the mind, the Dao, Heaven, and sageliness— but these were essentially rhetorical strategies. It was a rhetorical strategy to claim that “true” learning, true self-cultivation, was not the absorption of ideas external to oneself, but the process of reaching into one’s own mind, rediscovering what one had always known. The great flaw of the civil service exams as they had existed so far was that they encouraged learning as a means of attaining status and wealth, things external to oneself, which degraded the content of the learning itself. No one, least of all the Chinese literate public that was larger than in any previous era, saw this as a reason to abolish the exams. But the vision of learning promoted by the Great Learning suggested a way to redeem them— to prepare students for the exams, while also ensuring they understood that high office was not an end in itself but a means to an even higher calling. But what self-cultivation really was, the process of it, was something that varied with teaching style— and in the private academies of the late Yaol, set up as an alternative to state academies that only cared about the exams and nothing else, different lecturers used the teaching styles that they believed in.
The dominant approach to self-cultivation was a gradual, guided progression through the classics and commentaries on them, uncovering the greater truth by turns. Residual questions mostly involved whose commentaries to use, and just how rigid the progression needed to be. The former question was resolved to the satisfaction of most of the fellowship by adopting the anthologies of introductory essays penned by Mu Cejian, the leading light of the fellowship in the 1280s by virtue of his Erudite Literatus degree (a higher honor than even the jinshi degree awarded in the palace exams) and post of senior compiler in the Historiography Academy. Mu’s commentaries would become the basis of state-run academy curricula in the Qing era, and the “essential canon” as he saw it would heavily influence the civil service exams. The latter question would finally split the fellowship in two. Shu Ji, who claimed overall leadership of the fellowship by virtue of being Mu’s favorite student (also reminiscent of the Chan dharma-transmission), was a stickler for an emerging sense of orthodoxy. He was insistent, more insistent than Mu himself, that basic texts such as the Analects and the Mencius ought to precede studies of the other classics such as the histories, the Odes, and the Changes— and that the basic texts themselves needed to be preceded by introductory commentaries, enduring a correct general attitude was established early and endured through all subsequent learning. This was a rhetoric of forging the mind anew, for even though Shu accepted that all people had an ethical nature imparted by Heaven he held that this was distinct from the human mind. The ethical nature was a sort of endlessly duplicated schematic; the mind had to be reshaped in accordance with it, in order to consistently conform to it.
His influence was unquestioned amid the stresses of the 1320s, which drew in many new members but also brought persecution from above. But as the state’s capacity for persecution (and enacting its will in general) fell apart in the 1330s, so too did the aging Shu’s hold over the fellowship. A teacher in Nanchang, Xiong Shen, expected his students to uphold rigid rules of decorum but made a point of rejecting rigidity in the structure of learning itself. The point was not to complete a list but to read what one wished, thoughtfully and enthusiastically; to discern cause and effect, principles of right and wrong, and the implicit meaning beyond the literal. Furthermore, just as the minds of ordinary people could be clouded by desires, the minds of the intelligent could be clouded by strange theories; fixed opinions were the jailers of the open mind. Did the need for an “open mind” mean that all doctrines were the same? Definitely not, Xiong had nothing good to say about the “selfishness” he perceived in the Buddhist goal of liberation— but he also pointed out how Buddhism as he observed it also encouraged benevolent conduct and respect for family. What Xiong meant is that rather than needing to hammer the mind into shape, one could set it on the right path and allow it to proceed naturally toward the good, just as children naturally learn to show goodwill and adhere to principle, and Buddhists naturally tend toward central ideas of Confucianism while the Confucians absorbed only peripheral ideas from other teachings. All that self-cultivation really had to be was proceeding at one’s own pace, remaining sensitive to the stirrings of one’s mind; there was no need to maintain tight-fisted control of its progress.
This of course meant his image of the mind was very different from Shu Ji’s, and Xiong would confirm this by promoting a vision of human consciousness enjoying fundamental unity with the ethical nature and through it the mind of Heaven. This of course applied to every single human— Confucians, and also Buddhists, generally considered their statements on human nature valid for all people, but maybe illiteracy or a lack of leisure time to study held most people back from the real prizes. Xiong’s flexibility on book-reading theoretically lowered this bar, and he was willing to play with the idea further— he would say, not entirely as a joke, that the first sages couldn’t have learned their arts from books since they were the ones to invent writing, and that ironically there seemed to be less sages in the ages when more books were published (and by the time “commentaries on the classics” emerged as a genre of literature, there were no sages at all). The only indispensable readings for Xiong were the Five Classics traditionally held to be edited by Confucius, and the Four Books credited to his disciples; the point of reading them was to internalize them through experience and consistent practice, and not to spend one’s life wandering through a hall-of-mirrors by reading endless commentaries by people who only wanted to ride the coattails of their betters. Mu’s commentaries were exempt from this condemnation, but only out of respect for the fellowship; even then, Xiong would claim direct “transmission” from Mencius that skipped over even the founding members of the Great Learning. The inevitable debates with Shu— carried out through meetings and exchanges-of-letters— were inconclusive, but not acrimonious. Aside from some moments where each seemed interested in little more than scoring points, the two scholars considered each other as great men and as equals even if they were separated by twenty years. Their correspondence was generally friendly and continued until Shu’s death in 1345; Xiong would deliver a touching and conciliatory eulogy. The next generation, however, would be far less polite to each other. Shu’s “loyalists” were fond of comparing their opponents to Chan Buddhists, implying by this a glorification of unearned “sudden enlightenment”; coarser insults such as “wild men” 狂人 would have their debut in the coming decades.
Few were unhappier about this widening rift than Chancellor Duan Hong. He was not some high-flying Erudite Literatus— he was Chancellor because he was effective, and because he made the emperor, formerly the illiterate farmer Xu Zhenyi, feel less insecure than someone like Shu Ji might have. But he was only effective because he had a faction behind him. Sure, he had a lengthy resume as intendant for the financial circuits of Huguang North and Jingdong East [Shandong], and he penned the occasional essay for the fellowship’s anthologies and various county gazetteers in his places of work. But no one can govern a state alone, and so where more idealistic scholars might see a big beautiful tent of different ideas, or an engine for the moral regeneration of civilization, Duan saw in the Great Learning a bureaucratic faction with the same fundamental strengths and weaknesses as any other. When a faction could be the face of support or opposition for a particular set of policies, it had strength to throw around; if it could no longer be identified with a particular attitude it would lose its coherence, and if it lost its social dimension (the ability to promote the like-minded, worthwhile marriage ties) then it was another dead label. It might spawn a successor, but that faction would do what it liked with the legacy of predecessors. Already the Great Learning maintained consensus on little else besides basing state-run academy curricula and the civil service exams on Mu’s commentaries and definition of the classic canon. When the exams were resumed in 1350 they would effectively have no further ideas to contribute— unless they could become the face of something else. And so, the Chancellor would begin drafting a memorial to the emperor that drew from the other aspect of the Great Learning— the side suspicious of a ruler’s unchecked power, the ill effects of which had been so clearly demonstrated by the previous six decades of Qin-dynasty policies under barbarian enforcers. If the current generation wished to surpass even the Han, it could at least do its part to prevent yet another Qin. Where Kang Yi leaned away from confrontation, Duan leaned into it.
Duan invited the reader to consider the fate of the Censorate, which once had three branches. The first reviewed the conduct, correspondence, and announcements of the emperor and Chancellery, and made suggestions and criticisms on the ground of moral propriety; the Uighurs and Khitai abolished this branch completely. The other two branches sent inspectors on missions to audit the finances of central and regional government agencies, and investigate for corruption and impropriety; these were turned by the Khitai into attack-dogs, bearing the name of the prior office but forfeiting the dignity earned by brave investigators and crusaders for justice since the Han. Why did the Khitai decide they could use part of the Censorate but not the rest of it? Duan proposed that because the “remonstrance” function of the Censorate only required officials to be familiar with a limited number of people (who were likewise familiar with the censurers), criticism could be squarely on-target and would not be taken as an insult or threat. In discussing people with the duty to admonish one who was falling into error, Confucius named ministers, officers, friends, and sons— all figures of great familiarity. The “inspection” function was of course a necessary complement, but historically it relied on sending officials to provinces strange to them, where they did not know local affairs and feared for their safety; the officials they investigated likewise feared that a censurer’s hasty judgement of them could cost them their career or their life, for even if a censor was found to be wrong he would not be punished. For Duan, this demonstrated that when it came to offices of advising and correcting the powerful, as opposed to offices of actually exercising power, the wisdom that had endured since the Qin— that officials be kept far from positions of power in their home locality— was in fact upside-down. If the Censorate as an institution was to recover from its mistakes, its powers would have to be strictly defined and widely distributed. “Remonstrance” 諫 and “inspection” 察, rather than radiating out from the central government, would have to be distributed to the provinces through independent bureaus at the circuit level, staffed by figures of local renown…
[1] This is a basic summary of the Ming dynasty lijia system, introduced by the Hongwu emperor.
[2] For an OTL example there's Shimo Yisun. I didn't want to get to into the weeds here but in future posts I do expect to bring up TTL examples of Khitan distinction (in the sense of "difference" or that of "honor") within a Chinese context, both during and well after the Yaol.
[3] The name Panyue is from the Weilue.
[4] Guo Yaoshi is a TTL figure, a general who led the last stand of the Qi against the Uighurs. I imagine he's seen the way Yue Fei is OTL, but without the added gut-punch of being betrayed and executed by his own lord; this may mean he's a less compelling folk hero as well.
***
There is a lot I wasn't really able to get to: Daoism, women, the Lingnan/Daiya Tai, the economy. Those will get more focused, hopefully shorter posts.
There's also a lot of expies of Southern Song/"founding generation of Neo-Confucianism" people; really the main exercise here is to see how certain parts of Neo-Confucianism might become exaggerated or minimized to audiences of its time when the "historical background" is provided by the events of TTL instead of the events of OTL. And since Confucianism since the Song has largely been extensions of or responses to the Song, setting the context for later developments in a way that preserves the big ideas of the Song allows me to bring in Ming and Qing ideas in more original combinations down the line, all while making it clear where those come from. Oh yeah, and the White Turbans-- I've tossed out a lot about them but I do want a little of the confusion over what their exact genealogy and future alignments are to be "in universe" as well. Maybe they go in a more "practical statecraft"/"utilitarian" direction, maybe they go for some weird ruralist idealism, maybe they keep the kind of libertarian vibe and remain practical enough to produce some interesting critiques of government. But the thing is that for literally any direction I go with them, I can find a significant enough Chinese philosopher to help me make that case in a way that makes at least a modicum of sense (maybe sometimes it'll really be a stretch) within the cultural context.
Credit where it's due: the two books that helped me the most were Confucian Discourse and Chu Hsi's Ascendancy by Hoyt Cleveland Tillman and Late Works of Mou Zongsan: Selected Essays on Chinese Philosophy, translated by Jason Clower. I'm not really sure which order I'd suggest reading them in-- I started with Tillman who is very much writing about the Southern Song alone, and gives exhaustive details and quotes... unfortunately a lot of it went over my head. Mou Zongsan is... well he was a New Confucian, a refugee from the Chinese Civil War who spent the rest of his life in Taiwan and Hong Kong. His essays are very much inspired by a sense of contemporary mission (and rage against pinko intellectuals) but he was able to express what X believed or what he disagreed with Y on in a way that made more sense in some cases... but in other cases this also went over my head. I would like to reread both works sometime after I've read more widely and see if I understand them better. On Buddhism and "Exoteric Chan" I found Critical Readings on Tang China, Volume 4, ed. Paul W. Kroll helpful, but I only read the first two chapters of that.
Last edited:
Going by geography+more trade with the rest of asia, I imagine that if capitalist industrializaiton kicks off in india in ttl, China will probably be rather less behind than OTL western world in industrialization. My guess is somewhere on a spectrum between Russia(least lucky/most backwards) to Italy in terms of timing of industrialization compared to India.
So this could be a world where you have east, south and southeast asia along with the more indianized bits around the indian ocean as the first world/industrialized world and the third world-equivelant being most of africa, europe, the middle east and the americas.
So this could be a world where you have east, south and southeast asia along with the more indianized bits around the indian ocean as the first world/industrialized world and the third world-equivelant being most of africa, europe, the middle east and the americas.