ChAPTER 18 The Spread of Chinese Civilization:

At the height of the power and prosperity of the Qing dynasty, the emperor, who ruled for more than 60 years, receives tribute from "the ten thousand countries" in one of his imposing palace complexes.

The Tang dynasty established the tribute ceremony as early as the 7th century c.e., making it essential for Japan, Korea, and Vietnam to trade with China.

Phuc was so angry that he ordered his companions not to enter but to prepare an improvised campsite in the middle of the street.

The emperor's officials had directed toward the Vietnamese, even though the emperor's knowledge of Chinese calligraphy was admirable.

Phuc reminded the Chinese emperor that the Vietnam had nurtured Chinese culture for thousands of years, just a few generations away from barbarian status in the Chinese view.

Phuc pointed out that, like the Chinese emperor himself, the Vietnamese royal family and officials were proficient in Chinese, Confucian principles of governance and social organization, and organized their educational system around the classic works of Chinese civilization.
The essay was presented to Chinese officials to be delivered to the emperor.
They admitted their gratitude that the mistaken use of "barbarian" had been challenged and corrected.

Despite steady expansion over much of east Asia from China for centuries and frequently rose in violent rebellions aimed at the end of the last millennium b.c.e.

Japanese elites were not able to absorb three large areas on their periphery because they were not sure how much Chinese influence would affect them.

Japanese peasants and merchants don't like to integrate Chinese imports into their daily lives.

The nature of highly civilized societies in Japan, Korea, and Vietnam were shaped by the tensions between the desire to emulate and borrow from China and the determination to preserve their distinctive languages, social customs, and other cultural forms.

As Phuc's confrontation with Chinese officialdom in the mid-19th century suggests, these tensions continued to shape social and political dynamics throughout east Asia well into the modern era.

Over was seen by Japan and China's other neighbors as the most advanced society in east Asia and the isolated court centers at in pursuits as varied as politics, intellectual production, and material culture.

The influence of Shinto views of the natural and supernatural world was lost when the Heian lost political influence.

Japanese borrowing from China peaked in the Taika, Nara, and Heian periods.

The level of the elites and the people of the court towns were touched by this borrowing.

Japanese court scholars struggled to master thousands of Chinese characters, which were not related to the language they spoke.

They created professional bureaucracy that was patterned after those created by the emperors of China, and followed an elaborate court protocol that included Chinese protocol and conscript army.

The Japanese aristocracy struggled to master Confucian ways, worshiped in Chinese-style temples, and admired Buddhist art that was Chinese in subject matter and technique.

The common people were affected by the influence from the mainland.

They looked at the great Buddhist temples in the towns and bowed their heads.
When they were sick or in need of a change of luck, the peasants turned to Buddhist monks.

The main rice granary of the islands was located in the Kanto plain, which was able to support a relatively dense population.

The Taika reforms would have been the culmination of centuries of Japanese borrowing from China if they had succeeded.

Adding "Son of Heaven" to the Japanese ruler's many titles was one of the central objectives of the proposed changes.
The reforms were intended to create a genuine pro fessional bureaucracy and peasant conscript army in Japan to match those of Han and Tang China.

The changes necessary for these goals to be achieved were frustrated by the resistance of the Buddhist monastic orders, who dominated both the emperor and the capital as a whole.

The Taika Reform Edicts to take the throne in the 760s was a threat to Japan.

His plans to marry her and become emperor were uncovered.

It was clear to the emperor's advisors that measures had to be taken to ensure that women could not rule Japan and to check the influence of the monastic orders at court.

Kammu established a new capital city at Heian, which was later called Kyoto.

Buddhists were not allowed to build monasteries in the new capital.
The monks were able to get around the restriction by establishing monasteries in the hills surrounding Heian.

The emperor abandoned his pretense of continuing the Taika reforms because he wanted to control the Buddhist monks.

The reforms were intended to curb the power of the great aristocratic families.

Unlike the Koreans, the Japanese did not follow Chinese precedent in determining rank by birth and allowed little mobility between the various orders.

Most of the positions in the central government were taken over by the aristocracy.
Their formal right to build up rural estates was restored.
The emperor gave up on his plan to build a peasant conscript army.
In its place, local leaders were ordered to organize militia forces, which would soon play a critical role in further eroding the control of the imperial household.

Within decades of the shift to Heian, the basis of imperial political power had been eroded, but court culture soared to new levels of refinement.

The Japanese emperors and their courtiers continued to live in a world of luxury and aesthetic delights for several centuries more.

Under the constant scrutiny of their peers and superiors, men and women of the aristocracy owed strict codes of polite behavior.

The hothouse atmosphere was dominated by social status, love affairs, and gossip.
Life in this artificial world was false and suffocating.
Lady's first novel in any language was gracious and well mannered and focused on the pursuit of beauty or social interaction.

The buildings were made of wood.

The courtiers' living quarters had fish ponds, artificial lakes, and fine gardens.

The women are dressed in elaborate clothing.
The most valued art at the court was writing verse.
The poems were often written on painted fans or scented paper, and sometimes they were sent in small boats down the streams that ran through the palace grounds.

The verse was full of allusions to Chinese and Japanese classical writings.

The mist doesn't like the morning sun.

The simplified written script the Japanese had borrowed from the Chinese made it more compatible with spoken Japanese.

There was a lot of poetic and literary works that were more and more Japanese.
Lady Murasaki's classic, which was the first novel in any language, captured the charm of court life and its underlying tensions and sadness.
The life history of a prominent and amorous son of the emperor is told in the story.
Genji's life is almost entirely devoted to the pursuit of aesthetic enjoyment, whether in affairs with beautiful women or in musical entertainments in a garden scented with flowers.
Dirt, cheap pottery, and rough popular entertainments are to be avoided at all costs.
The illness that leads to the elaborate dress and studied pose of a Heian her premature death was caused by an encounter with a shriveled piece of fruit.

The intense world of the Heian court provided a tiny minority of Japanese women with pleasure, but it was unseemly for them to openly pursue lovers.

Lady Murasaki's outlets for expressing emotion and creativity that poignant novel makes clear, some women did court prospective lovers with great guile and have been denied to most women through much passion.
It was not uncommon for a high-born woman to humiliate a suitor.

The Japanese language was written in this era.

I went to the door and waited.

They played an unusual role in Japanese produc tions because they were less involved with Chinese cultural imports.

They wrote poems, played flutes or stringed instruments in informal concerts, and participated in elaborate schemes to snub or disgrace rivals.
They became involved in palace intrigues and power struggles like their counterparts in China and the Islamic world.

While the emperor and his courtiers were admiring the plum blossoms, some of the aristocratic families at court were busy running the rapidly shrinking imperial bureaucracy.

The inward-looking character of the court life century was captured in the middle of the 10th when a Fujiwara chief minister saw four of his daughters marry.

The growing isolation of the court provided opportunities for regional lords with large estates that provided a stable financial base for their growing power.

They had to compete with the Buddhist to seize effective monasteries because of their military orientation and links in the vicinity of the capital.
Both could work together in the campaign to get control of Japan back.

The monks and court nobility increased the number of peasants and artisans they ruled as the lands under their control expanded.

The rage among the Heian elite was due to the mystical influence over imperial diagrams and special hand positions of these teachings family.
They failed to reckon with the growing power of the capital as they built up their own power.

The pursuit of landed estates was taken up by elite families in the provinces.

Most of the families had risen to power, even though some had aristocratic origins.
The families came to control the resources of the court.
In various parts of the islands, they gradually carved out little kingdoms.
They ruled their mini-states from small fortresses surrounded by walls and ditches.
The local lord and his retainers were housed within the fortress, constantly on alert for an attack by a neighboring lord or the forces of one of the powerful families at court.
Blacksmith forges and stables, wells for water, and even armories made fortresses self-contained worlds.

Failure of the court's plans to build conscript armies allowed the bushi to build up their own supervised public works projects.

These were the most effective military forces.
They were loyal to the local lords.

To keep the peace in the capital.

The emperor's control over the country was weakened in the 11th and 12th centuries, allowing bandits to roam the countryside and the streets of loyal to local lords.

Buddhist monasteries used armed toughs to protect them.

The court and high officials hired provincial lords and their samurai retainers to serve as bodyguards in order to protect their palaces and mansions from robbery.

The emergence of a warrior class was dependent on these trends.

The bushi and samurai devoted their lives to hunting, riding, archery practice, and other activities in order to improve their martial skills.
Powerful longbows and spears were the main weapons of the mounted warriors until the 12th century.
The Japanese samurai used superbly forged, curved steel swords from the 12th century on.
The battles between the bushi and the samu rai warriors were increasingly fought on the basis of the great champi ons.
In the extreme, these combats represented heroic warfare.
Each side tried to demonstrate the justice of its cause and treachery of its enemies, and the time and location of battles were elaborately negotiated.
Japanese warriors bragged about their military exploits to their adversaries, who often missed the details because they were shouting back their own.

A warrior code stressed family honor and death.

Battles were a lot of shouting and clashing but few deaths, and were won or lost depending on the performance of the hara-kiri.

A means to restore family honor was not developed until centuries later.

Japan was moving in the same direction as western Europe in the same postclassical period.

The rise of the samurai discouraged the creation of a free peasantry.

In the next centuries, Japanese peasants were reduced to serfs, who were bound to the land they worked and treated as the property of the local lord.
They were separated from the warrior elite by class barriers and prohibitions against peasants carrying swords or riding horses.
The peasants turned to Buddhism in the form of a salvationist pure land sect due to their growing poverty and powerlessness.
The promise of bliss in heaven for those who lived upright lives was offered by the teachings of the pure land.
Colorful figures, such as the dancing monk Kuya, were intended to make Buddhist teachings comprehensible and appealing to both the peasantry and the artisans, who were concentrated in the fortress towns.
Buddhist shrines and images became popular destinations for pilgrimages.

As the power of the provincial lords grew, so did the power of the imperial household and court aristocracy.

The Fujiwara, a powerful family at the court, depended on alliances in the early 1600s.
The Chinese have regional lords who support them in their disputes.
The influence of the provincial families began to decline in the 11th and 12th centuries.
The Taira gained control of the emperor in Japan.

Concentration of power-grabbing efforts in the capital led to the breakdown of critical links with competed with Minamoto family; rural notables who often sided with the Minamoto in the factional struggles.

The relevance of Chinese precedents and institutions in 12th-century Japan was affected by the weakened power of the imperial house.

The emergence of a scholar-gentry elite was stifled by the reassertion of power and prerogatives.

The designs for an imperial bureaucracy never came to fruition.
The transformation of Buddhism into a Japanese religion was done by both the aristocracy and peasants.
The decline of the Tang and a return to decades of political uncertainty and social turmoil in China made the Chinese model less relevant to the Japanese.
The Japanese court discontinued its embassies to the Tang court.
The emperor's advisors no longer considered official visits and groveling before the Son of Heaven to be worth all the bother, even though Japanese monks and traders still made the dangerous sea crossing to China.

They were forced to fight against each other for five years.

Many poorly trained peas between Taira and Minamoto ants were cut down by the better-armed, professional samurai warriors, who met these hapless rivals families, and resulted in destruction in the course of their seemingly endless ritual combats.
The Taira house group was based in Taira by 1185.

The Minamoto capital was established far to the east of the old court center at Heian on the Kanto plain.

Following the gempei Wars, the emperor and his court were preserved, but real power now rested with the Minamoto and their samurai retainers.
The feudal age in Japan at Kamakura began.

The Kamakura regime was weakened because of Yoritomo's fear of being overthrown by his own family.

The Minamoto triumph over the Taira had a lot to do with his brother's courage and military genius.
Although Yoritomo's rule went unquestioned, the military governments in throne left him without an heir.
The death and weakness of those who succeeded him led Japan.

Although they were content to leave the Minamoto as the formal rulers, the Warrior family closely nated the Kamakura regime.

The Kamakura regime manipulated the Minamoto shoguns, who in turn claimed to rule in the name of the emperor who lived at Kyoto.

The situation became murkier in the early 14th century when the head of one of the at Kyoto.

From 1336 to 15 73, the bushi vassals of the warring group were free to destroy local.

The court aristocracy, which was impoverished by its inability to defend its estates, was nearly wiped out as the power of the bushi warlords grew.

The existence of feudalism is easy to explain.

The weak central government of Russia was generated by many societies.

The Zhou dynasty ruled the West and Japan for a long time.

The Russian centuries of bitter internal warfare were based on feudal loyalties and rivalries.
Kings in the divine monarchy systems of sub were more restricted to the warrior-landlord class in Europe than in Saharan Africa, which flourished from about the 9th to the 19th Japan, in both instances feudalism summed up a host of elite mili century in various parts of the African government is centralized.
Historians have noted that kingdoms such as Ghana and personal or family al iances, loyalty, ritualized combat, and often Mali were ruled about as effectively as were Western monarchies contempt for non-warrior groups such as peasants and merchants.

The military aura of feudalism reminds me of the feudal era.

The armies of feudalism leaders were not simply military.

The idea of personal ties between leaders or among elite groups to make deals with such leaders, relying on personal negotiation as a foundation for political activity continued to affect political and pledges of mutual respect, marriage alliances, negotiation, life and institutions, both in the West and in Japan, long after.

The feudal systems in the West and Japan were not the same as those in Japan.

feudalism emphasized contractual resemble.
It is desirable not to call all such ideas strongly.
Although mutual ties were feudal, they were not as useful as members of the European warrior elite would have you believe.
In Russia, loyalties were sealed by negotiated contracts, in which the parties often saw its rulers, whatever their grandiose claims, make con involved, and obtained explicit assurances of the advantages each would cessions to regional nobles.
Japanese feudalism relied on loyalty and service from the lords.
Russia never ily on group and individual loyalties, which were not confirmed as feudal political hierarchy, which is one of the contractual agreements.
It was the clearest features that distinguished it from the West.
The legacy of feudalism in the West proved to be true for Zhou China and the Sudanic empire of Africa.

The mass of peasants in Japan were effectively controlled by the legacy of feu.

A less institutionalized group consciousness was involved in the idea of mutual dalism.
This ties and obligations, and the rituals and institutions that expressed approach encouraged individuals to function as part of them, went beyond the more casual local deals and compromises decision-making teams that ultimately could be linked to the state.

There are some persistent threads that run through the experience of successful industrial development in both societies.

Both societies have proven to be good.
There is a common experience of feudalism at capitalist economies.
It is tempting to point out is a basis for later economic dynamism is a matter of specula to feudalism.
It is not necessary to exclude it from a list of provoca shared because the links are 19th- and 20th-century resemblances.
The feudal legacy may be challenging.

The Ashikaga Shogu war, which raged from 1467 to 1477.

Rival heirs to the Ashikaga Shogunate called on the warlord nate to support their claims.
The samurai went to rival headquarters in different parts of Kyoto.

The old imperial capital was reduced to rubble within a few years.

The chival rous qualities of the bushi era deteriorated in the 15th and 16th centuries, despite the fact that the rituals became more elaborate.

The Japanese landscape was dominated by these structures.
Spying, sneak attacks, ruses, and timely betrayals became the order of the day.
As large numbers of peasants armed with pikes became a critical component of daimyo armies, the pat tern of warfare was fundamentally transformed.
Himeji Castle was one of the most formidable of the many fortresses that became focal points of the Japanese landscape in the era dominated by samurai combat.
The samurai warriors were the key to victory.
Although the inner buildings were often made of wood, the size and organization of a warlord's forces and how more vulnerable structures were defended by walls and long, fortified passageways effectively his commanders used them in the field.

The poor training of the peasant forces and the lack of food made them vulnerable to long sieges by the forces.

They stole and pillaged as they fought the wars of their overlords.

The trend toward brutality and destruction was fed by the peasantry in different areas who rose up in hope less but often ferocious revolts.
It is no wonder that contemporary accounts of the era, as well as those written in later centuries, are dominated by a sense of pessimism and foreboding, a conviction that Japan was reverting from civilized life to barbarism.

There was a lot of economic and cultural growth despite the chaos.

If the daimyo were to survive in the long run, they needed to build up their states.
The daimyo tried to support the construction of irrigation systems and other public works and build strong rural communities by introducing regular tax collection.
There were incentives offered to encourage settle ment.
The well-being of the peasantry in the better-run domain was helped by new tools, draft animals, and crops.
Peasants were encouraged to make items such as silk, hemp, paper, dyes, and vegetable oils, which were high in demand and could be used as a source of household income.
Daimyos tried to get merchants to visit their castle towns.
A new and wealthy commercial class emerged as a supplier of goods for the military elite in Japan and overseas areas.
The guild organizations for artisans and merchants were strong.
In a time of political breakdown, they helped provide social solidarity and group protection.

Evidence shows that the growth of commerce and the handicraft industries gave some Japanese women opportunities to avoid the drop in status that most experienced in the age of the warring daimyos.

Women in merchant and artisan families were independent.

Their participation in guild organizations and business management was reflected by the fact that some of their positions were passed on to their daughters.

The status of women in the emerging commercial classes was different from that of women in the warrior elites.
The wives and daughters of the bushi households used to ride and shoot a bow and arrow.
By the 14th and 15th centuries, the trend among the daimyo families to limit inheritance to the eldest son dealt a blow to the women of the elite classes.
The wives and daughters of warrior households received little or no land or income.

The pattern of disinheritance saw women become defenseless appendages of their warrior fathers or husbands.

They were given in marriage to cement alliances between warrior households and reared to anticipate their warrior husband's every desire.

They were taught to slay themselves instead of being raped by enemy soldiers.
The role of the celebrant in village religious ceremonies was replaced by men who were trained to impersonate women.

Civil war and political division in Japan allowed artistic expression to survive, thanks to the patronage of landscape painting and other fine arts.

Song China, Fears that the constant wars between the swaggering which they regarded as the apex of the genre were imitated by Japanese artists.

The themes of landscapes with tiny human figures and brushstrokes that the Song masters used were the same as those of Japanese artists who focused on the samurai.

The Postclassical Period, 600-1450: New Faith and New Commerce the warrior elite, played a critical role in securing the place of the arts in an era of strife and destruction.

Zen monasteries provided key points of renewed diplomatic and trade contacts with China, which in turn led to a revival of Chinese influence in Japan.
The sketches of Japanese artists were both original and brilliant, despite the fact that much painting of the era imitated earlier Chinese work.
The screen and scroll paintings that capture the natural beauty of Japan, such as the one in Figure 18.5, give us a glimpse into Japanese life in this period.
The Golden and Silver Pavilions that Ashikaga shoguns had built in Kyoto are examples of Zen sensibilities.
Each pavilion was designed to blend into the natural setting in which it was placed to create a pleasing shelter that would foster contemplation and meditation.

The design of some of the more famous gardens of this era shows this contemplative mood.

At the Ryoanji Temple, there were islands of volcanic rock set amid white pebbles, which were raked into different patterns.
The tea ceremony that developed in the era of warrior dominance was influenced by Shintoism and Zen Buddhism, as well as the Japanese ability to find great beauty in the rough and simple.
The graceful gestures, elaborate rituals, and subtly shaped and glazed pots and cups associated with the service of tea on special occasions all lent themselves to composure.
Through centuries of warfare, these arts and aesthetic sensibilities were cultivated.
The last phase of the feudal period that lasted until the great architectural treasures of the age of the warring houses was marked by the golden Pavilion.

The wooden, tile-roofed structure was built on a small lake near Kyoto in the 15th century and is typical of Japanese artistic production in the centuries of warring states.

Korean kingdoms weredwarfed by their giant neighbor to the west, and most observers have treated them for the longest period of time.

Despite being ruled by indigenous dynasties through most of its history, the Korean people still have a separate identity despite being lumped together with China.

The people who occupied the Korean peninsula represented a different ethnic blend than forms of dress, cuisine, and those who had come to identify themselves as Chinese.
The Koreans have a unique social class system.

By the 4th century b.c.e., the peoples who moved into the Korean peninsula had begun to acquire sedentary farming and metalworking techniques from the Chinese.

The Koreans played a role in the struggles of the peoples of the north China plain.

The Han armies conquered parts of Korea for nearly four centuries.
The Chinese in109 b.c.e.
began to use these colonies as a channel.

There was a small Japanese enclave in the southeast of the peninsula that provided contact with the islands.

The fall of the Han and Koguryo kingdoms resulted in contact between the splinter kingdoms in the northern half of the ruled north China.

The adoption of Chinese culture in Korea is extensive.
The case of Sinification was the same in Japan.

The building of monasteries and pago in the southeastern part of the peninsula was financed by the Korean rulers.

Korean scholars traveled to China and a few went to India to look for the defeated Koguryo.

Even though the Japanese agreed to pay tribute to the Tang emperor, the Chinese Tang allies introduced Chinese writing even though it was not suited for adaptation to the Chinese characters.

Han China had a unified law code.

The Koguryo ruler tried to put together a Chinese-style bureaucracy in order to expand his power and make inroads into the Korean kingdom.

The noble families who supported him had little use for the project that posed Tang allies in the 7th century.

The full implementation of these policies had to wait for a more powerful Chinese culture in other regions to emerge.

The Tang Alliances and the Conquest of Korea were the result of centuries of warfare between the three Korean kingdoms.

Korea was vulnerable to further attacks from the outside.
The Tang dynasty included Korea in the territories they staked out for their empire despite the unsuccessful campaigns of the Sui.
It was many decades before one of them could mount a successful invasion.
The Koguryo kingdom's warriors bore the brunt of the Tang assaults, just as they had done to the Sui rulers.
Tang strategists came up with the idea of taking advantage of Korean divisions to bring the region into line.

The Chinese ended the dynasty that had been a key part of Korea's early development.

The Chinese conquerors began to argue with their Silla allies over how to divide the spoils.

In 668, the Chinese withdrew their armies.

The Chinese were able to play against the other kingdoms.

They sent embassies to the Tang court, which dominated Korea's early history against each other, and Korean scholars collected Chinese texts and noted the latest fashions in exert great influence on the political and social development of court dress and decorum.

Many of the kingdoms of southeast Asia, as well as the emperors of Japan, were included in the system.

The Koreans were the most committed to the arrangements.
Chinese emperors were content to receive their embassies rather than try to conquer the Koreans.
The Son of Heaven was acknowledged by these emissaries in the form of splendid gifts and a series of ritual bows in which the supplicant prostrated himself before the throne.

To most of the people involved, this was a small price to pay for the benefits they received from the Middle Kingdom.

Not only did submission and tribute guarantee peace with the Chinese, but they brought richer gifts than the tribute bearers offered to the Chinese ruler.
Privileged access to Chinese learning, art, and manufactured goods was provided by the tributary system.
Merchants who were able to buy up Chinese manufacturers and sell their own goods in the lucrative Chinese market depended on their country's participation in the Chinese system.
There were contingents of scholars in missions from Japan, Korea, and Vietnam.
They purchased Chinese scrolls and works of art to fill the libraries and embellish the palaces back home after studying at Chinese academies or Buddhist monasteries.
The tribute system became the main channel of trade between China and its neighbors.

The Sil rulers rebuilt their capital at Kumsong to look like their Tang counterpart.

There were parks, lakes, and a separate district to house the imperial family, which were laid out on a regular grid.

They made up a large portion of the capital's population with their large extended fami.
The Confucian examination system was introduced by the Silla rulers, and some of them studied in Chinese schools.
Most of the aristocracy chose to live in the capital.

They were able to do that because most positions in the government were occupied by members of the aristocracy and they had no knowledge of the Confucian classics.

The Korean elite preferred Buddhism over Con fucianism because it was more associated with Chinese culture.

The Korean royal family and monasteries endowed works of religious art, which became major forms of Korean cultural creativity.
The capital at Kumsong became crowded with Buddhist temples, which were usually made of wood.
Buddhist monks were always present at the ruler and members of the royal family.
The schools of Buddhism that caught on were Chinese.
Chinese prototypes of Korean artwork and monastic design.
The location of monasteries and pagodas in high places followed Chinese ideas about the need to balance supernatural forces.

The Koreans would borrow from the Chinese and do better than their teachers.

The Sil a and Koryo eras produced pottery.

The techniques of porcelain manufacture were learned from the Chinese.
Even Chinese connoisseurs admired and collected all of the major civilized.
They pioneered in making centers of east Asia produced refined ceramics, oxide glazes that were used to make the black and rust-colored stoneware.
The pitcher in Figure 18.7 was a characteristic of this era.

That has been printed.

The Chinese were the first to develop wood block and later, from earlier periods of Korean history, has become metal-type printing.
After the metal type was introduced into Korea, local artisans came up with an ingenious way to keep it in the long register in the museums.

The Chinese found that the metal type wore down very fast and was difficult to stable in the register.

The pure land that had a strong appeal for the ordinary people was the exception to the rule.

The aristo cratic families were divided into several different groups that did not socialize with the rest of the population.
They dominated the social and economic life of the entire kingdom by filling most of the posts in the Korean bureaucracy.
The Chinese and Japanese were given a lot of fancy clothing, tea, scrolls, and artwork by Korea in exchange for trade.
Korea exported mainly raw materials, such as forest products and metals, which were mined by slaves who lived in horrible conditions.

Members of the royal family financed artisan production for export or to supply the court.

Money lending was even done extensively by some of the backed expeditions.
The activities of artisans and traders were limited.
The former were low in status and were not paid enough for their labor.
The latter were so weak that they were not a distinct class.

The only people who counted for anything in Korean society were the aristocrats.

The classes were focused on their work.
Government functionaries were categorized as a separate social category.
The commoners, who were mostly peasants, were known as the "low born" and ranged from miners and artisans to servants and entertainers.
Buddhist festivals gave the common people hope for a better life in the afterlife.

The common people and the low born found their lot too much to bear and rose up against a ruling class that was more devoted to pursuing its own pleasures than to their well-being.

The Korean dynasty succeeded the ruling class.
They contributed to the downfall of the Silla and Koryo regimes and the reunification of the Koryo dynasty in the 13th century.
In the absence of real alternatives, the aristocratic families were able to survive and one of them was elevated to the throne.

It ruled Korea until 1910.

The Yi restored the dominance and links to China that had been lost under their predeces sors.
The Koreans were the only ones who were content to live in the shadow of the Middle Kingdom.

The preconquest culture of the Vietnamese gave them a sense of themselves that they didn't want to be overshadowed by China.

The basis for a Viets was provided by superior technology, modes of political rebellion, and ideas they received from China.
But their fear of losing their identity and becoming a part of China's massive civilization made them feel less grateful.

There was little Chinese presence after the initial raids.

Their language was not related to Chinese.

Chinese women have less freedom within the family and in society at large than their Vietnamese counterparts.

The map shows that the customs and cultural forms of Vietnam were very different from the original core of Vietnam.

The Vietnamese were dressed differently.
The southern province of the Chinese empire was ruled by women.

In the centuries when they were dominated by the rivals of the Vietnamese, they were able to preserve most of the features of their society.

At the grassroots level of Buddhism, the Mekong river delta region became much more attached to Buddhism, and they developed a drive to the south.

The Han rulers who succeeded the Qin tried to incorporate south China into their empire.

The Han emperor wanted the Viet ruler to acknowledge his status as a vassal.
The Han thought it was best to conquer the Viets and use Chinese officials to govern them.
The Red River area was garrisoned by Chinese troops and Chinese administrators were going to encourage the local lords to adopt Chinese culture.
The agents of the new regime cooperated with the elite because they realized that they had a lot to learn from their neighbors to the north.
The Chinese introduced essential elements of their own culture into the southern lands in order to get another barbarian people to join them.

After the Chinese conquest, the Han emperors and the shi developed a bureaucratic machine that they used to hold together the empire.

They attended Chinese-style schools, where they wrote in the Chinese script and read the classical Chinese texts.
The responsibilities and privileges of administrative posts were defined by Chinese precedents.
The introduction of Chinese techniques and irrigation technology made Vietnamese agriculture the most productive in southeast Asia.
Vietnam's society could support larger numbers of people like that of China.
The Red River valley and the lowland coastal areas to the south have high population densities.

The extended family model was adopted by the Vietnamese elite and they venerating their ancestors in the Confucian manner.

The Chinese had every reason to think that the barbarians were on their way to becoming civilized.

The revolts led by members of the Vietnamese aristocracy and the failure of Chinese cultural imports to make much of an impression on the Vietnamese peasantry frustrated Chinese hopes for assimilating the Viets.

The Chinese found it difficult to conceal their disdain for local customs in what they considered a backward and unhealthy outpost of the empire, which is why the Vietnamese lords chafed under their rule.

The less than reverent attitudes felt by Vietnamese aborators toward Chinese learning and culture can be found in Vietnamese literature.

I've been dropped like a root after failing my exams.

In Vietnamese writings, self-doubt and mockery turn to rage and a fierce determina tion to resist Chinese dominance.

This passage gives a sense of why the Chinese failed to integrate the Vietnamese.

They failed because the peasantry rallied again and again to the call of their own lords to drive off the aliens.
In contrast to Vietnam against Chinese rule, the stronger position of women in Vietnamese society is demonstrated by the frequent peasant rebellions in role as rebel leaders.

We don't know if this resentment played a part in the Trung sisters' decision to revolt.

Female authors wrote poetry in the 1700s and 1800s that gave no doubt about the reactions of Vietnamese women to male dominance.

Let your sister teach you to write poems.

Young bees are rubbed in flowers.

Young goats who have nothing to do with their horns butt each other.

One wife is covered by a blanket while the other is left in the cold.

This is the fate of sharing a husband.

The steamed rice is cold and tasteless, because you toil and endure to earn it.

It's like renting your services for a fee and then not being paid.

I would rather live alone than remain unmarried.

The Vietnamese struggle for independence was aided by the links that bound them to China, as well as a strong sense of identity and motives for resistance that crossed class and gender barriers.

The Chinese administrators responsible for supplying military expeditions to the far south had nightmare conditions due to great distances and mountain barriers.
Few of the Chinese who lived in the Red River area did so permanently.
Chinese control over the distant Vietnamese depended on the strength of the ruling dynasties in China.
The Vietnamese were able to take advantage of the turmoil in China to assert their independence.
After failing to completely free themselves on several occasions, they mounted a massive rebellion during the period of chaos in China after the fall of the Tang dynasty.

The Vietnam had won political independence from their northern neighbors.

The rulers of China tried to regain control, but both efforts ended in retreats.
The French conquered the land of the Vietnamese in the 19th century.

Chinese cultural exports played a central role in Vietnamese society despite the Chinese political hold being broken.

They ruled through a bureaucracy that was much smaller than the Chinese administrative system, with secretariats, six main ministries, and a bureau of censors.
An administrative elite schooled in the Confucian classics sought the emperor's favor and commanded deference from the common people when civil service exams were reintroduced.

The Chinese scholar-gentry enjoyed more power than the Vietnamese one.

Their control at the local level was not as secure as that of their Chinese counterparts.
Local Vietnam ese officials were more likely to identify with the peasantry than with the court and higher administrators.
They looked out for the interests of the peasants and served as leaders in village uprisings against the ruling dynasty when their demands became too oppressive.

Competition from well educated Buddhist monks limited the power of the scholar-bureaucrats in Vietnam.

Chinese taste and architectural styles influenced the construction and decoration of China, which meant that the Buddhists had of the Vietnamese court.
The patterned after the ones that Vietnam's envoys had seen in China.
Despite this imitation, high esteem in which women were held in Vietnamese rulers were more accessible to their subjects, and their palaces and capital city made little Buddhist teachings and institutions also impression on Chinese visitors.

The samurai of Japan and the Aztec warriors of Tenochtitlan embodied these ideals in their public persona and military enterprises, which at times were immortalized in songs, legends, and epics.

The illustrations show portraits of people from four different civilizations.

We can assume that the portraits capture the values, symbols of legitimacy, and demeanor that these people intended to project to the viewer because each of these portraits was produced by artists from the same society.
Carefully examine each of the portraits, paying special attention to clothing, poses adopted, objects included in the portraits, background selected, and activities depicted.

The relevant sections of Chapters 15, 16, 17, and 18 can be found here.

It was not possible for most Vietnamese dynasties to enjoy the authority of their Chinese counterparts.

The Chinese legacy gave the Vietnamese great advantages in the struggles within the region that became a major preoccupation of the independent Vietnamese rulers.

The Viet namese refused to move into the malarial highlands that surround the Red River area and rose abruptly from the coastal plains farther south.

The driver drove into the Map 18.4.

The successful peoples in the hills retaliated for raids on their villages by launching periodic expeditions.
They traded with the hill dwellers for forest products.

South along the narrow plain between the mountains and the sea was where the Vietnamese made good use of the larger population and superior bureaucratic and military organization that the Chinese connection had fostered.

From the 11th to the 18th century, they fought a long series of successful wars against the Chams, an Indian ized people living in the lowland areas along the coast.
Most of the Chams were driven into the highlands, where their descendants live to this day.

After defeating the Chams, the Vietnamese then clashed with the Khmers, who had begun to move into the Mekong Delta region during the centuries of the Vietnamese drive south.

The Chinese-modeled military forces and weapons of the Vietnam proved too much for Indianized armies.
By the time the French arrived in the area in the late 18th century, the Vietnamese had taken control of much of the upper delta and were pushing into territory that is now Cambodia.

Here was south and east Asia.

Chinese influences include lonely for her lord, and sick for home.

There is evidence in one of the passages of marvelous letters written in a very far-fetched epistolary style and significant exchanges between the satel ite of China.

A girl stood by.

You're still to bear the fortune of a rose, seem to me to get along well without much learning.

You have to bow to circumstance when evil strikes.

It was the work of a brush and had no scent.

The poet tells us that Kuei-fei's grace was that of She [Kieu] put aside all vows of love and troth.

She said to "Hands off-- a simpering Chinesified air."

The northerners ese dynasty that arose in southern came to see the Vietnamese who settled in Vietnam to challenge traditional frontier south as less energetic and slower in speech and movement.

Regional military commanders grew less and less kingdom centered on Red and slower in sending taxes to the court as the hold of the dynasty of Trinh in north at Hanoi weakened.
The capital of Hue was turned to the Mekong rivers.

The territories of the Nguyen were centered on the narrow plains that connected the rivals of the family in the south.

The capital of their country was located far north of the Mekong delta region.

The houses fought for the right to rule Vietnam for two centuries.

Neither accepted the division of Vietnam as permanent; they wanted to unite all of the people under a single monarch.

The long struggle absorbed a lot of the Vietnamese energy, but it also prevented them from seeing the growing threat to their homeland.
For the first time in history, the danger came not from the Chinese giant to the north but from a distant land and religion that the Vietnam knew nothing about.

The spread of ideas, organizational models, and the various combinations of Chinese-derived and indigenous material culture from a common Chinese center spawned the rise ments produced distinctive variations on a common pattern of civilized development in Japan, Korea, and lized life.

The period of direct Chinese rule in Korea was brief.
China's military power and presence in the lands of the nomadic peoples were all too apparent.

The Vietnam, where Chinese control lasted more than a spread of the Chinese pattern of civilized development, was essential to sedentary cultivation.

The struggle for political independence provided an ideal environment for the cultivation of wet rice, which gave way to a growing attachment to Chinese culture as a counter to the Indian influences that had brought civilization.

In Japan, where attempts by Chinese dynasties to assert direct ing and bureaucratic organization to religious teachings and art had failed, Chinese culture was emulated by the courtly elite.

That brought civilization to the islands in all three cases.
The rise of a rival Chinese imports, with the exception of popular Bud aristocratic class, which was based in the provinces and championed dhism, was all but monopolized by court and provincial elite military values that were opposed to Chinese Confu groups.
Chinese thought patterns and modes and the reassertion of Japanese traditional ways were in all three cases.
The Japanese political of social organization were cultivated by patterns, which made them different from the local elites in China, who knew that they were the key to a higher level of rule.

The transmission of Chinese civilization and the development of peoples in this far-flung region were judged by the standard of Buddhism, which was one of the great world religions.

The power of the Chinese model in India is one of the important results for Korea, Japan and to a large extent.

Contacts with other parts of the world were limited because there was no sense that any other place had culture before being passed on to Japan, Korea, and Vietnam.
Bud examples are worth emulating.
The intensity of interactions within the dhism gave a link between the east Asian region tendencies to be isolated from the rest of the world.

There are a lot of good works on early Japanese and Korean social history.

The section on the arts, religion, and literature of the era was written by E.Wagner.

The best works on the earliest period in the Document feature of this chapter are translations of the writings of a French scholar to get inside Japanese and Vietnamese culture.

The ways in which Japan, Korea, and 4 are compared.

Key elements of art and literature in East Vietnam interacted with China.

How much control did each civilization have?

What were the underlying differences that made these 6 unique?