Food and Environment in Early and Medieval China. E. N. Anderson
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than Thutmose’s magnificent and grim war, but infinitely more important and meaningful in historic terms.
Shortly before this, around 3500 BCE, horse domestication permitted highly mobile steppe nomadism. The horse reached China by 1500, and west and east were well and truly united. The steppe became a vast freeway rather than a cold, hostile barrier. Today, in this world of air and ship transport, we have no concept of how important clear and unbarriered land routes were in earlier times. There was nothing to stop a rider from taking off at top speed in Beijing and galloping all the way to the Black Sea, changing horses as necessary. In fact, under the Mongols, the courier service did exactly that. Similarly, there was nothing in the American Great Plains to prevent the same institution arising: the Pony Express was copied directly from the Mongol post (Weatherford 2004) and had a brief but glorious “run” in 1860–61.
By the beginning of our Common Era, silk from China was already crossing Asia, to be exchanged for silver and other valuables. Not until the nineteenth century was the main route labeled the Silk Road (Hansen 2012), a term coined by geographer Ferdinand von Richtofen in 1877. The term is a good one, though there was no single road but rather a shifting set of caravan tracks through the desert. Also, all manner of goods flowed in both directions; silk was only the most famous and probably the most long-lasting as a trade staple. In any event, this great route was the most important long-range transnational pathway on earth for over a thousand years. Empires flowed along it, but more important were the foods and other ordinary goods—textiles included. The empires fell or faded, and even the names of many of them have been forgotten, but the domesticated crops and food-processing techniques are still with us, giving us life. Wheat and barley had already been crossing Asia on the ancestral routes that became the Silk Road, but later, horses and chariots, metallurgy, and countless other technological innovations came along the road or along the more northerly steppe routes. As David Christian pointed out (2000), it was a major belt of interface for pastoralists and settled people from the beginning, as well as a route linking West and East. The pastoralists often entered settled life by conquering Silk Road cities and settling down; at other times they worked, voluntarily or as slaves, for the cities and farms.
The other useful concept I take from world-systems theory is the idea that a world-system has a core (a core nation or small group of nations), some semiperipheral polities, and some peripheral ones. The core tends to dominate terms of trade and conquest, such that it keeps the other polities down. The peripheral polities are particularly disadvantaged by being politically and militarily weak and often are exploited for raw materials. Semiperipheral polities are potential rivals and often diligently develop themselves militarily so that they can loot or even conquer and take over the core.
These dynamics have played out time and again in East Asia. Whatever state or states ruled central north China has or have generally been the core. Siberia and parts of upland Southeast Asia were peripheral. In between were the fascinating semiperipheral states that rose and fell, especially in Central Asia: the Xiongnu, Turks, Tibetans, Mongols, and others. Many of these were cut down by Chinese rhetoric into “nomad” and “barbarian” states. As we shall see, they were far from merely that. Korea and Vietnam have also been semiperipheral throughout a good deal of China’s history.
China was a core—usually the core—of East Asia until the nineteenth-century wars, in which China was brutally “semiperipheralized” in the unified world-system whose core became the Western European nations and, increasingly, the United States. Today we have seen the reemergence of Japan as a core nation and are watching China rapidly move into core status again. The world of the twenty-first century has multiple core areas.
The world-systems view takes advantage of the known facts of diffusion (Mair 2006). Humans are amazingly good at adopting each other’s ideas. Some measure of this phenomenon occurred when Lewis and Clark contacted Native American tribes who had never been within hundreds of miles of a white person before and found them telling French folktales, reworked in local languages. The tales had spread from Quebec by word of mouth, through thousands of miles of trackless and unexplored country where no whites had ever been and where writing and literacy did not exist.
Similar spreads are numerous worldwide. If folktales can spread that fast, it is clearly no surprise to find, for example, that the bow and arrow spread from its invention in Africa about 50,000 years ago to the entire world (though some isolated areas still lacked it at the time of European expansion). Nor are we surprised to find early Indo-European loanwords in Chinese and ancient Thai loans in Korean.
A world-system theorist’s teeth are set on edge by words like “hybridity” when they are applied to cultures. Cultures are not remotely like different species. There never was a time when cultures were pure, homogeneous, isolated, or essentialized. People have always been wildly creative and dynamic and, above all, open to any influences from any direction. People appropriate anything good they can get their hands and minds on. Cultures reflect this.
The Chinese had something like a world-system theory during the Warring States period, and to some extent afterward. Westerners are apt to think of the Chinese self-label Middle Kingdom (or Central Country) as mere vanity, but originally it seems to have meant “central states”—plural. The Warring States writers, or even earlier ones, saw that there were core states and peripheral ones. The latter were labeled with terms we now translate as “barbarians,” but perhaps “peripheral peoples” would be a better translation. The Chinese even distinguished semiperipheral states—“cooked barbarians,” those that had picked up Chinese culture or a good deal of it—from “raw barbarians,” those without much Chinese culture. Snobbish, ethnocentric, and patronizing as this was, it displays awareness of the ideas underlying world-systems theory.
Today, however, core nations are defined by military and economic might, not by culture. The Chinese, by contrast, looked at culture as basic. This idea evolved into the Confucian theory that morality was key to politics, and politics to military and economic power. The counter-theories, based on a more sober awareness of military and economic influence, then became even more like world-system theory.
Recent studies are radically different from the old studies that portrayed China as a remote, unique, isolated, changeless civilization. Modern historical studies like those of Lewis (2006, 2009a, b), Mallory and Mair (2000), Tan (2009), and Wade and Sun (2010) and foodways studies like those brought together by Cheung and Tan (2007) emphasize the fact that from early times, China was involved in a huge, active network of trade and contact. The Chinese created a great civilization that has its own wonderful and fascinating features but is broadly parallel to other civilizations and went through the same stages as other civilizations: invention of agriculture, development of settled life, construction of great cities, development of law codes, and the rest.
Diffusion, Cultural Choice, and Chinese Distinctiveness
Those points are rather obvious, but they are worth stating because they stand in contrast to the old Orientalist view, still not uncommon in China studies. It holds that China is unique, homogeneous, and isolated and that its civilization cannot be compared with any other. Often it adds the idea that the Chinese live in a world of mystical correspondences, ancient texts, and changeless 2,500-year-old thoughts that are “not true philosophy” (whatever that may mean), rather than in a world where people concern themselves with food, clothing, and shelter and are quite willing to update or selectively reapply ancient guides.
Students of agriculture, metallurgy, and other “manual arts” have long recognized that China influenced, and was influenced by, other cultures; but students of medicine, political theory, philosophy, poetry, and other arts of the mind, including perceptions of the environment, still sometimes insist that China can be interpreted only on its own terms. They appear to believe the Chinese had not only different theories but different physical realities from the rest of humanity.
This belief in the uniqueness and changelessness of Chinese culture seems based, ultimately, on a Platonic view of the world. Plato held that we know only what is in our heads, and we can meditate to full knowledge of the Ideal. In contrast, his student Aristotle held that we must try to find out what we can about real, tangible things out there in the world. Western civilization has ever since been trying to deal with the difference