The Six Dynasties Period in Chinese History

The period from the fall of the Latter Han dynasty through imperial reunification under the Sui and T'ang, a period of nearly four centuries, has until recently attracted little in the way of historical research in the West. While the literature and religion of this long interregnum have received scholarly attention, historical studies lag behind.^[8]

This era, known as Wei-Chin-Nan-Pei-ch'ao^k (Wei, Chin, and Northern and Southern dynasties) or more handily as the Six Dynasties, was for a long time seen as a kind of black hole in Chinese history for several reasons. First, the difficulties posed by studying China at a time when no state held control over the entire empire seemed overwhelming. Sources abound but they are often corrupted; constant warfare, attacks from the North and conquests by people of non-Chinese origin, institutions established, but with questionable authority, all militated against the development of a clear picture of the Chinese state and society in these years. Second, traditional Chinese historiography was essentially political history, and the lack of central imperial authority constituted a giant lacuna (and, consequently, a possible source of embarrassment) in a history that otherwise boasted great dynasties usually punctuated by only short intervals. As a result, the Six Dynasties era came to be regarded as a Chinese analogue of the Dark Ages in Europe

after the fall of the Roman Empire, a time when no significant intellectual advances could be cited, certainly none worthy of serious study—and, like the Dark Ages in Europe, the Six Dynasties were not studied in depth.

That such a view of China is bankrupt no longer requires a great deal of contemplation or extensive explanation. Though China suffered four centuries of political disorder, Chinese history and culture made significant advances. This was the period when the mass migrations from North China, due to the "barbarian" invasions from farther North, caused the spread of Han Chinese society and culture into South China. This development would have repercussions through all of subsequent Chinese history. South China has for the past millennium been seen as the center of Chinese culture, society, population, and the economy. In the Han dynasty, though, the South was only sparsely populated by ethnic Chinese and was still largely jungle land.

The move south by so many men and women from the North brought along the importation of Northern sedentary agricultural ways. Unlike the North, however, South China could boast extraordinary potential riches in agricultural production. The coming of metallic agricultural implements to the South and the phenomenal socioeconomic development of Kiangnan by the time the Sui and T'ang dynasties reunified China, would have enabled the South, in the words of Kawakatsu Yoshio, to jump right into the tenth century had it not had to contend with military pressures from the North.^[9] Who knows what advances Kiangsu, Chekiang, or the whole of South China might have made if they had not been compelled to feed the rest of China?

The invasions of Hsiung-nu,^l Hsien-pi,^m and others into North China provided the opportunity for the first Sino-barbarian cooperation in the building of regimes, one of which, the Sui, eventually reunited China. We can see the remarkable attraction of many Chinese ways to these previously nomadic peoples once they conquered and occupied some part of China. Almost always they realized the necessity of relinquishing nomadic ways for sedentary agriculture, and often even the need to afford the military a secondary role in a society stressing the civil arts. These two met with considerable consternation, resistance, and occasionally civil war, but ultimately won out.

So thoroughly "civilized" did the previously martial and nomadic Northern Wei become that they made lasting contributions to Chinese society and agriculture of a distinctly civil bent—the fu-pingⁿ or militia system for compulsory military service, as opposed to a professional army, and the chün-t'ien^o or equitable field system for the fair parceling of arable land by the state.

The forerunner of the examination system, the primary route to official power throughout the last one thousand or more years of Chinese history, got its start in the early third century under the state of Wei created by Ts'ao Ts'ao.^p This system, the chiu-p'in chung-cheng^q (Nine Ranks and Arbiter), has been studied in great depth elsewhere and needs no further discussion here.^[10]

We also see the growth and efflorescence of Chinese culture in the Six Dynasties period. Calligraphy and painting emerge as artistic forms, while new poetic styles and the compilation of the Wen-hsüan^r poetry collection appear. And, because Confucianism was not predominant, we see an age in which a freer atmosphere existed for other religions and schools of thought, such as Buddhism and Taoism.

One remarkable difference between the Six Dynasties and the so-called Dark Ages in Europe is that, while both witness the preponderance of military types because of ceaseless warfare, the military in China proved unable to form a dominant social class, even in the warrior states of the North, through which to rule over China. It might be possible militarily to create a state, even to make oneself emperor. But to rule China, or any part of it, almost always required educated bureaucrats, and in the process the "military" rulers became "civilized." This process was particularly troubling in the North where racial antagonisms often flared.

The first scholar to delve into the morass of materials for the Six Dynasties and to emerge with a conceptual understanding of this era was Naito^[*] Konan,^s one of the giants of prewar Japanese sinology and a founder of the Kyoto school.^[11] In a celebrated article entitled "Gaikatsuteki To^[*] -So^[*] jidai kan" (A comprehensive look at the T'ang-Sung period),^[12] Naito offered his periodization of "medieval China," which corresponded roughly to the third through the ninth centuries. He also de-

scribed the characteristics of medieval culture and society, which set it off from the subsequent "modern" or "early modern" era (Sung and thereafter). Although the latter part of this periodization, that the Sung dynasty commences the "modern" (kinsei )^t era in Chinese history, is the more famous, Naito^[*] invested considerable time into research on the middle period.

In Naito's overall scheme, China's antiquity was a period of the emergence and flowering of Chinese culture, as well as its flow to the neighboring states on China's periphery. As this period came to a close in the late Latter Han, the outward flow of Chinese influence came to a halt. The alien peoples along China's borders, particularly in the North, having become racially aware of their own non-Chineseness by virtue of the confrontation with China, now reacted against a much weaker Chinese state. They built kingdoms in the North and were in continual strife with influences and forces from the South where so many Han Chinese had emigrated. Naito characterized this middle era as "aristocratic" because, he argued, the society and culture were dominated by a peculiarly Chinese aristocracy, not based in land or military might or wealth, but in letters.^[13]

Several Japanese scholars who continued to work in this area were Okazaki Fumio, Utsunomiya Kiyoyoshi, and Miyakawa Hisayuki, all graduates of Kyoto University and intellectual disciples of Naito Konan. Miyakawa also contributed the first essay in English on Naito and his theories.^[14] Okazaki worked on a wide variety of topics, particularly social and economic institutions, but cultural history as well. Miyakawa has also studied issues in social, political, economic, and especially religious history. The importance of Utsunomiya's work on society and culture in the Six Dynasties period is discussed by Tanigawa in the body of the volume here translated.

No serious debate over Naito's periodization occurred until after World War II, especially after the victory of the Chinese revolution in 1949, when a freer atmosphere existed in Japan and new issues appeared on the scholarly agenda. Naito Konan became the object of scholarly invective as he too was associated with a concept of stagnation—that is, if the "modern" period began way back in the Sung and continued through till the present, then the events of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries held no special significance, for the institutions of Sung had already set the stage for what was to come.^[15]