Crossing the River

In the closing years of the third century, nature's wrath—droughts, floods, famine, and epidemics—and man's rage—wars of succession, banditry, and tribal incursions—became insupportable. A sizable portion of an already decimated population fled the north of China to safety in the south.^[112] Perhaps as many as one million people sought refuge in a sparsely populated region of lush, largely uncultivated lands and networks of waterways.^[113] In time, the émigrés prospered as vast tracts were opened for development, trade and commerce flourished, and shipbuilding and seaports assumed a new importance.^[114]

It was undoubtedly the expanding economy that enabled the new dynasty to survive for a full century, amidst a host of contending forces: northern émigrés and southern aristocrats competing with each other and among themselves for lands, privileges, and power; nominal rulers vainly scheming to play off contenders and wrest control; peasants fired by ecstatic visions and crushing taxes to futile revolts. At the apex, successive Sima puppets occupied the throne (except for a brief interlude in 402–404 when Huan Xuan usurped it) until 420, when the general Liu Yu officially supplanted the emperor Gong to found the Song dynasty. That dynasty, in its turn, fell to another

general, Xiao Daocheng, who, in 479, established the Southern Qi dynasty.

Eastern Jin rule was for all practical purposes a rule by oligarchy, in which a few chief ministers, supported by their own and allied clans, fought each other to hold actual power while serving their respective puppet-emperors. In never-ending rivalry, the clans maneuvered to outwit their opponents and attain political power, perhaps even the throne itself.

The Nanjing tomb, with its mural of the Seven Worthies of the Bamboo Grove, was unquestionably constructed for one who himself, or whose family, belonged to one of the many factions that bubbled at the court in Jiankang. In the chapter that follows we shall see that memories of the Seven Worthies played a role in the political intrigues of this "world of emperors and princes, courtiers, officials, generals, genteel hermits, and urbane monks."^[115]

The Eastern Jin period is often referred to as the period of the Great Families. To understand who they were, how they achieved political power, and how they retained it, we must turn back to the third century.

The wars that ended the Han dynasty impoverished the country.^[116] An ever-increasing burden of taxation forced many small landholders to abandon ownership and seek refuge as tenant-serfs on the estates of those more fortunate than them. Others—such as those deprived of home and livelihood by war, scholars out of office—joined them to swell the populations of these manorial estates, which thus became important foci of economic and military power.^[117] Their owners were a potential support for and constant threat to any centralized government.^[118]

Efforts to contain the growing power of these landed families were futile. Any generalissimo (Cao Cao, for example, or Sun Quan, king of Wu) who won the day had to reward his supporters with ennoblement, enfeoffment, or official appointment, which is to say, with more lands (including the tenants thereon). Tax rolls were never accurate, of course; distortion, by time-honored and universal means, was always in favor of the estate. Above all, the landed families' access to the system of public administration sealed their power.^[119]

An individual did not need to hold public office to gain economic power; to retain it, however, was another matter. Wealth accruing from whatever source was most frequently invested in land, the productivity of which was best safeguarded by the holding of office. One who held office, for example, was, with his family and those to whom

he had given his patronage, exempt from certain taxes.^[120] Moreover, one's official rank determined the number of dependents he was entitled to lodge on his estates, as well as the size of his land allotment. In addition, commercial opportunities not possible for private individuals were available to those who served in a public capacity, as part of the state apparatus. Thus, it was not wealth per se, nor the mere possession of vast estates, that made a family politically and socially powerful.^[121] Private opportunism joined with the old Confucian tradition of public service to reinforce the importance, even the necessity of holding office. One owed it to one's family.

Whatever the selection system for appointment, those with landed power prevailed. At the state level they held the most powerful administrative posts; at the local level they knew the right people and how to impress them with their "talent." Indeed, they were the right people (the grand marshal Wang Yan, whom Ruan Ji's nephew so impressed, was a member of the powerful Langya Wang clan from modern Shandong). So effective were they that, under the Western Jin dynasty, the families with power bases at the local level succeeded in converting some posts to hereditary appointments.^[122]

Having abandoned their lands and their official posts, the northern families might be thought to have lost all, to have become pitiful refugees, like thousands of others who swarmed across the great river. Their arrival, moreover, was greeted with something less than compassion and hospitality by the old southern families, their counterparts who had migrated to northern Anhui and the coastal region during the Han dynasty. They had prospered, and when that great dynasty fell, to ensure peace in the region, retain their landholdings, and even extend them, they joined forces with the Sun warlords. Families like the Gu, the Lu, the Zhu, and the Zhang had done well in the kingdom of Wu, serving as chief ministers and marrying into the royal family.^[123] They saw the northern incursion as a threat to their status and power and resented it. Refusing to accept them as their equals, the southern swells considered the northern swells vulgar and called them worse.^[124]

But the pitiful refugees were to outnumber and outmaneuver the southern aristocrats. Skillful leadership, headed by another Langya Wang, Dao (276–339), succeeded in winning allegiance to a new emperor.^[125] To that end, he wooed southern families with honors and appointments at court while acceding to the demands of the northern families for the restoration of their old privileges, as well as for lands to replace those they had lost.^[126] With the need to establish quickly an

administrative apparatus for governing, almost any educated man could gain appointment as an official.^[127] High-level positions, however, at least at the beginning, were awarded to those whose families had held them in the north and who claimed their continued right to them as the price of allegiance.

It is not surprising that in these chaotic times the establishing of claims to hereditary privileges and status assumed such importance. If one's ancestry entitled one to official rank, to land allotments, to tax exemptions, then proof of that ancestry was necessary. Registers of geographical origins (tu duan ) and genealogies were compiled and became increasingly important over the centuries.^[128] The world was divided into those who, by virtue of education and ancestry, were entitled to govern (the shi ) and those whom they governed (the shu ).^[129] The members of the shi class, however, were by no means a homogeneous group. Linked by a tradition of education, they were divided by differential wealth, access to high office, and social status.^[130] A family that for several generations failed to produce high-ranking officials (regardless of the reasons for this) obviously lost benefits determined by rank, leaving their scions to rely on their talents or to sink further into oblivion. Political adroitness, such as Ruan Xiu had manifested in his interview with the grand marshal, could win a patron; military prowess, as the founder of the Liu-Song dynasty was to demonstrate, was another avenue to success.

It was, therefore, most certainly not a closed system, and talent could take one far. Still, in a social class where impeccable ancestry could be used to divide the ins (the Great Families: haozu, guizu, menfa ) from the outs (the Families of the Cold Gate: hanmen ). a solid genealogy was a comfort, and more. If it did not of itself always bring wealth or high appointment, it could give social standing and access to powerful people. In this new land to which the northerners had come, their records destroyed and their families scattered, it was not uncommon to forge a genealogy or to insist on a dubious ancestry. In the fourth century, for example, the Huans, who rose to prominence through military talent, claimed descent from a Han official. When, however, Huan Xuan briefly usurped the throne in 402, he was unable to fill the imperial ancestral temple with the seven required manes, because the names and ranks of ancestors prior to his great-grandfather were "not illustrious."^[131] In a poem to his sons, Tao Yuanming traced a distinguished ancestry as far back as the legendary emperors. In reality there is little of certainty about the Tao family prior to Yuanming's great-grandfather.^[132]

For the governing elite life in the south was more than a daily jostle for power and status. On their vast country estates the wealthy delighted in the idyllic existence afforded by a mild climate and gentle landscape. With their like-minded friends, they strolled and drank wine and composed poems. In this leisurely setting, the philosophical debates known as xuan xue became even livelier as a new philosophy and religion, Buddhism, was added to the yeast of arguments about Lao-Zhuang and the Yijing. A man's wit and learning were as prized in these discussions as was the substance of his argument, and indeed the way in which something was said was often far more admired than what was said. In the same manner, the way in which a poem was written down, the calligraphy, could be valued as highly as the poem. It might be remarked that the process—the way in which something was made, the style of the argument, the style of the calligraphy, the style of the poem—took on a new valuation.

Nor was painting neglected by the elite. The emperor Ming, albeit sketchy with regard to form and coloring, was nevertheless "rather successful in getting the spirit."^[133] Gu Kaizhi was greatly admired for his paintings, and private collectors sought them.^[134] It is in this period of Eastern Jin that we first hear of private art collections. One of the first recorded collectors of paintings and calligraphy, for example, was the nouvel arrivé and usurper of the throne Huan Xuan.^[135]

Thus the arts, in several media, flourished at this period. The new aesthetic begins to take a firmer shape and to impose itself, not merely on the production of art, but on the lives of men. From that realliance of Art and Politics forged by the upheavals of the third century and tempered by the realpolitik of the fourth will emerge a new ideal-type, an exemplar liberated but refined: the cultivated gentleman.