PDF《INTRODUCTION》

INTRODUCTION A.

1 PERIODIZATION A.1.1 The Three Ages of Antiquity For the people of ancient (pre-Qin) China, what we call antiquity was the present and what they called antiquity was of course an age much closer to them than it is to us. To put it in another way, 1.6 billion minutes separate us from the Zhou conquest of the Shang [§56.5]), but for the First Emperor (in

221 BCE), the gap was only 0.4 billion minutes. Much as we do today, time was broadly divided using the rela- tive terms ancient and modern ( gu 古and jin 近), and ancient itself was further subdivided into the three ages of antiquity (sangu 三古): shanggu 上古 [taigu 太古, yuangu 远古] (meaning high or remote antiquity);

taigu was often used for the archaic period before the age of the sages. zhonggu 中古 (mid antiquity). xiagu 下古, jingu 近古, or jindai 近代 (recent past, recent times). De?nitions of the three antiquities di?ered. For some Han dyn- asty writers shanggu applied to the age of Fuxi 伏羲, zhonggu to that of Shennong 神农, and xiagu to the ?ve emperors (Wudi 五帝);

on these legendary ?gures, see §56.4. Others called the entire period of their rule shanggu, from then to King Wen of Zhou, zhonggu, and the time of Confucius, xiagu. As time went by the tendency was to update the de?nitions of zhonggu and jingu in order to bridge the gap between the present and the remote past. For example, for the Tang historiographer, Liu Zhiji 刘知几 (661C721), shanggu 上古 extended to the early Zhou;

zhonggu or zhongshi 中世, to the Qin and Han;

and jingu, the peri- od between the Han and the Sui. Likewise, in the Yuan dynasty, one writer de?ned shanggu 上古 as the legendary age, zhonggu 中古 as the Three dynasties (Sandai 三代, i.e., Xia, Shang, and Zhou), and xiagu 下古 as covering from the Warring States to the Yuan. Neo-Confucians, too, believed that there were three periods: (1) the time when the Way was practiced by the sage kings (down to and including the Three Dynasties);

(2) the long period during which the Way was lost (late Zhou, Han to Tang) and (3) the new age when the Way began to be practiced again beginning in the eleventh century (§A.2.6). No matter how the boundaries of the three ages of antiquity were de?ned, all would have agreed that the models and inspiration for right conduct that Confucius had drawn upon lay in remote an- tiquity (shanggu). It was to him and to this age that people turned for their most revered paragons until the twentieth century. In ?nding value in a remote past (suitably adapted by later thinkers), the Chinese people were not unique. Buddhists and Christians to this day revere the truths revealed in the lives of the founders of their beliefs, who lived 2,500 and

2000 years ago, respectively. Shorter periods were traditionally referred to in terms of royal or imperial dynasties (wangchao duandai 王朝断代), each of which experienced cycles of rise and decline (§A.2.5). The use of a group of dynasties to refer to past time dates from the Spring and Autumn period expression, Sandai 三代 (§A.2.3). Elapsed time between the present and the past was reckoned in various ways, including counting the total years of the successive reigns of all the intervening dynasties or by counting the number of sexagenary cycles (§A.4). The break with traditional concepts of the past came toward the end of the nineteenth century when some thinkers concluded that China was entering an entirely new phase of history. Both Xue Fu- cheng 薛福成 (1838C94) and Wang Tao 王韬 (1828C97), for ex- ample, realized that the period in which they lived marked a new age, one in which China was facing an unprecedented series of dis- asters, including the loss of control of foreign trade (later referred to as the Opium War) and defeats in the Sino-French War, the Sino- Japanese Wars, and at the time of the Boxers. A.1.2 Ancient, Medieval, Modern In the twentieth century two new methods were grafted onto the three ages of antiquity, at ?rst by applying the system of three divisions (sanfen fa 三分法), that is the European concept of an- cient, medieval, and modern and secondly by using the system of ?ve divisions (wufen fa 五分法), the Morgan-Engels or Marxist- Leninist ?ve-stage mode of production theory (§A.1.3). One of the earliest and most long-lasting of the new history textbooks was written by Xia Zengyou 夏曾佑 (1863C1924), who rearranged Chinese history along progressive lines into shanggu zhi shi 上古之世 (from the legendary age to the end of the Zhou), zhonggu zhi shi 中古之世 (from Qin to Tang), and jingu zhi shi 近古 之世 (from Wudai to Qing). But he did not get beyond the end of the Tang (Xia Zengyou 1902C6). Xia'