26. Gernet, Op. cit., page 311.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid., page 312.
29. David Battie (editor), Sotheby’s Concise Encyclopaedia of Porcelain, London: Conran Octopus, 1990, pages 15ff.
30. Gernet, Op. cit., page 320. See also: Hucker, Op. cit., page 204.
31. Gavin Menzies, The Year That Changed the World: 1421, London: Bantam Press, 2002. Its thesis, that the Chinese circumnavigated the world and discovered America, has been heavily challenged.
32. Gernet, Op. cit., pages 326–327.
33. This was probably born in the great estuary of the Yangtze, 10 to 20 kilometres wide at its mouth, and which stretched inland for 150 kilometres. Here the transition from river to ocean is imperceptible. Gernet, Op. cit., page 327.
34. Taoist experiments initiated the compass (see Chapter 20). The idea of the experiment was also introduced ahead of Europe though it was not sustained. See Hucker, Op. cit., page 204. Chinese maps were also better than European maps at this time, using an early idea of both latitude and longitude. European maps were held back by religious concepts. Gernet, Op. cit., page 328.
As Joseph Needham has pointed out, the Song were a pivotal people in Chinese history, and not least in naval affairs. The greater foreign trade promoted by the Song encouraged the rise of its navy, and the associated inventions and innovations. However, despite her prominence as a sea power, China always remained primarily a land empire. Politically and militarily, she faced her greatest threats from inner Asia and she always raised more financial support from agricultural taxes than she did from taxes on international commerce. This basic truth never altered, says Lo Jung-Pang, and helps to explain why, although the Chinese were so ingenious, it was ultimately others who took greatest advantage of her many inventions. Lo Jung-Pang, ‘The rise of China as a sea power’, in Liu and Golas (editors), Op. cit., pages 20–27.
35. Yong Yap et al., Op. cit., page 43.
36. F. W. Mote, Imperial China, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1999, page 127.
37. Ibid.
38. Ibid., page 128.
39. This meant that very poor families might have to save for two to three generations until they could afford to send a favoured son to a private academy.
40. For this and other aspects of the examination system in Song China, see: John W. Chaffee, The Thorny Gates of Learning in Sung China: A Social History of Examinations, Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1985, pages 104–105, and passim.
41. See Frye, Op. cit., page 164 for details about Changʾan.
42. Chaffee, Op. cit., page 104.
43. Fairbanks, Op. cit., page 95.
44. Chaffee, Op. cit., page 134. See Hucker, Op. cit., pages 315–321, where he says later dynasties fell back on the sponsorship system.
45. C. K. Young, Religion in Chinese Society, Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1961, page 216.
46. Gernet, Op. cit., page 215. See Frye, Op. cit., pages 195–196, for the organisation of Sogdian society, especially the absence of a priestly hierarchy.
47. Gernet, Op. cit., page 216.
48. Hucker, Op. cit., page 210, says Kumarajiva’s translation of The Lotus Sutra is the single most influential book in east Asian Buddhism. See also Gernet, Op. cit., page 218, and Frye, Op. cit., pages 145–147, for Buddhist complexes between India and China.
49. Gernet, Op. cit., page 221.
50. Young, Op. cit., pages 119–120.
51. Gernet, Op. cit., page 226.
52. See Frye, Op. cit., for archaeological discoveries at Dunhuang.
53. In 1900, a Daoist known as Wang took up residence at the site of the Cave of a Thousand Buddhas, at Dunhuang in Gansu, an important monastic centre along the Silk Road. In the course of Wang’s exploration he noticed a gap in the plaster of one of the caves and, when he tapped it, he found it was hollow behind. This was how he discovered the so-called Library Cave, which contained 13,500 paper scrolls, from which daily life in eighth-century Dunhuang has since been recreated. These scrolls show that, in a town of 15,000, there were thirteen monasteries and that one in ten of the population was directly linked to these establishments, either as monks or nuns or as workpeople. Hansen, Op. cit., pages 245–251.
54. Gernet, Op. cit., page 295.
55. Hansen, Op. cit., page 198.
56. Mote, Op. cit., page 339.
57. See Hucker, Op. cit., page 370, for a portrait of Zhu Xi.
58. Lixue: alternatively, li-hsueh, see Ibid., page 365. Yong Yap et al., Op. cit., page 198.
59. Mote, Op. cit., page 342.
60. Yong Yap, et al., Op. cit. page 198.
61. Ibid., page 208.
62. Ibid., page 170. Wilkinson, Op. cit., page 686.
63. Yong Yap et al., Op. cit., page 171.
64. Ibid. Wilkinson, Op. cit., page 679.
65. Yong Yap et al., page 171. In the eleventh century, the emperor Song Huizong sent officials all over the country in search of rocks, strangeness of shape and texture being most sought-after, in particular limestone that had been turned into fantastic shapes by water, which were witness to the awe-inspiring forces of nature. These forces of life had to be lived with and the perfect garden was a reminder of that. See Hucker, Op. cit., page 260 for the role of grottoes and cliffs.
66. Yong Yap et al., Op. cit., page 172.
67. Gernet, Op. cit., page 341.
68. Mote, Op. cit., page 151.
69. Ibid.
70. Mark Elvin, The Pattern of the Chinese Past, London: Eyre Methuen, 1973, pages 164ff and 179ff.
71. Mote, Op. cit., page 152. And see Hucker, Op. cit., page 263 for the difference between ‘clerical script’ and ‘cursive script’.
72. Mote, Op. cit., page 326.
73. Ibid., but see also: Robert P. Hymes, ‘The elite of Fy-Chou, Chiang-hsi’, in his Northern and Southern Sung, Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1986. See also: Nathan Sivin, Science and Technology in East Asia, New York: Science History Publications, 1987, xv–xxi.
74. Abu-Lughod, Op. cit., page 4.
CHAPTER 15: THE IDEA OF EUROPE
1. Alfred W. Crosby, The Measure of Reality: Quantification and Western Society, 1250–1600, Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1997, page 3.
2. Bernard Lewis, The Muslim Discovery of Europe, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1982, page 82.