Peter P. Wan - Asia Past and Present

1 Timothy Brook, The Troubled Empire: China in the Yuan and Ming Dynasties (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013).

2 Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2001), dir. by Ang Lee.

3 John W. Dardess, Ming China, 1368–1644: A Concise History of a Resilient Empire (Boulder, CO: Rowman and Littlefield, 2011).

4 Mark C. Elliott, The Manchu Way: The Eight Banners and Ethnic Identity in Late Imperial China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001).

5 Mark C. Elliott, Emperor Qianlong: Son of Heaven, Man of the World (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Longman, 2009).

6 Louise Levanthes, When China Ruled the Seas: The Treasure Fleet of the Dragon Throne, 1405–1433 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).

7 Peter C. Perdue, China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).

8 Richard J. Smith, The Qing Dynasty and Traditional Chinese Culture (Boulder, CO: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015).

9 Jonathan D. Spence, Emperor of China: Self‐Portrait of Kang Hsi (New York: Knopf, 1974).

The Imperial Court is the forbidden precinct. Happily, the line descended from Amaterasu has possessed hereditary authority for the countless generations. Accordingly, even though a military general [the Tokugawa Shogun] has grasped the power and directs government and letters within the four seas, this is nevertheless for the reason that he has been commanded to oversee all state affairs on behalf of the Imperial Court, and his serving of the Imperial Court diligently, without the slightest negligence, is in accordance with the great propriety obtaining between lord and subject. 1

—Yamago Sogo, explaining why the Shogun rules

Japan is an island country consisting of four main islands and many smaller islands. Its four home islands stretch from Hokkaido in the far north to Kyushu near the equator, placing most of the country in the temperate zone. Its main island Honshu has a mountain range stretching down its middle and reaching out to the coasts. On its eastern coast are two major plains: the Yamato Plain where Kyoto is located, and the Kanto Plain where Tokyo (Edo) is located. Most of its farmland is scattered along the coast on tiny plains. The soil is generally poor, and only 17% of its land area is under cultivation, but the warm and moist maritime climate allows crops to thrive. The scattered and isolated distribution of its arable land delayed the unification of the country for a long time.

Japan is often thought of as “small,” but its territory is actually larger than Great Britain, although smaller than either France or California. It is also often thought of as “isolated,” but it actually is separated from the Asian continent by no more than 120 miles at its closest point to Korea. This was a considerable distance by the standards of ancient times, and posed a formidable barrier to the ambitions of its stronger neighbors. But it was not an insurmountable obstacle to the Japanese, who were determined to borrow from the more advanced cultures of their neighbors. Stone Age cultures were widely scattered across the islands of Japan by 40,000 BCE, and the Jomon culture was one of them. These typically constituted hunting, gathering, and fishing people who lived in sunken pit shelters. They were likely the Ainu people, whose physical appearance was more like Caucasians than modern Japanese.

By 300 BCE, the Yayoi people had migrated from the Korean Peninsula to the Japanese islands and conquered the Jomon people. They would become the ancestors of the modern Japanese people. They were like the Koreans in that they had originated in Siberia and Manchuria and migrated to Korea; but unlike the Koreans, they had kept going until they landed in Japan. They spoke an Altaic language related to Korean, but not to Chinese. The Yayoi culture emerged on the Japanese islands with amazing suddenness. They brought with them an advanced New Stone Age agriculture, and employed bronze and iron. These technologies had originated in China, spread to Korea, and now settled in Japan. They built huge earthen mounds over the tombs of their prominent men, which was a typical Korean practice. They were still essentially the same as the Koreans, but had absorbed some of the indigenous Ainu population through intermarriage, and driven the rest northward. In modern times, the Ainu people have lived a relatively primitive way of life on reservations on the northernmost island of Hokkaido, and are suffering from a shrinking population.