Latest / Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs / Season 3, Episode 3: Jessica Rawson, Life and Afterlife in Ancient China

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Season 3, Episode 3: Jessica Rawson, Life and Afterlife in Ancient China · Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Hello, I'm Jeffrey Sachs.
• 0:01
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Book Club, a monthly conversation with world-leading authors who have written scintillating, inspiring, and remarkably important books about history, social justices, and the challenges of building a decent world.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_00: I am absolutely thrilled and honored today to be speaking with Dame Jessica Dawson, who is one of the world's great art historians and sinologists.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: And I had the joy to meet Professor Rawson in person as we were co-recipients of the 2022 Tang Prize.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_00: She in Sinology and I in Sustainable Development, and we met in Taipei in the summer of 2023.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_00: Professor Rawson is a great art historian and expert in Chinese history in all aspects of Chinese ancient culture.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_00: She was keeper of the Department of Oriental Antiquities, which I think is now called the Asia Department of the British Museum.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: And after an illustrious career at the British Museum, she became a professor of Chinese art and archaeology at Oxford University, where she was also warden of Merton College and also pro-vice chancellor of Oxford University.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_00: So everything in university leadership.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: Today we're talking about her new book, which is called Life and Afterlife in Ancient China.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: And it's just an amazing, gorgeous work, which is a thrill to look at beautiful artifacts from twelve tombs around China, but it's also a way through those artifacts to understand the formation of China as a unified state, the role of geography in shaping cultures and economies, the distinctiveness of Chinese culture.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_00: It's everything.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: And it's gorgeous.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: It's just so beautifully produced and so wonderful, also, because I've never read a book like this where you aim to explain ancient China, I think roughly from around a thousand BCE to 200 BCE, to the formation of Unified State of China by examining 12 tombs in 12 distinct regions, ecosystems, and cultures of ancient China.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_00: So this is what we're going to talk about today, but let me welcome you, first of all.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_00: It's a great honor to be with you today.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you, Jeffrey.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_01: It's so great to see you again after that terrific trip to Taiwan and to talk about China there and now to have another great chance to talk to you again about China.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_01: It's such an important subject.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: It is indeed.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_00: We're all trying to understand this monumentally important and magnificent civilization and now certainly uh absolute center of influence and power and economy and culture in the world, and you help us to do it in this book.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: Could you lay out the idea of this book?
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: I think you say it's was in formation for a long time and explain the concept that leads you to this very, very special design and organization of this book.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I didn't realize until I actually started writing about two or three years ago, but I have been thinking about China all my life.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't realize that all the objects we see in our museums come from tombs, or almost all of them, because for Chinese, preparing a beautiful afterlife is central to everything they do.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_01: So actually the tomb idea came to me only slowly, and actually I think it proved very fruitful because it showed the lifestyle and the existence of particular individuals at particular places in particular time.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_01: And I chose the tombs so as to carry us through quite a long time, perhaps even longer than you mentioned, to go from the late Neolithic when we see the very first preparation of a banquet for the afterlife.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_01: Because unless we actually try to move into the Chinese mind and understand that they really did and do believe there is an important afterlife where the things they use in daily life will all be there.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_01: If we don't accept that, I think China becomes obscure.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_01: We don't understand their motivation because it's central to every family to ensure that their ancestors, their departed ancestors, are part of their life now, so that by providing for a beautiful afterlife in their tombs, these ancestors will look after their descendants down to the present.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_01: And that brings them into building these extraordinary structures.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_01: I don't think anybody has written about or appreciated that these tombs are between 10 metres and 30 meters deep, and in no other part of the world could you dig that deep without it falling in as you did.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_01: This is a special geological situation in northern China, and they found it by chance, probably by digging a well.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know how they found it, but nobody else in the world has this deep sandy lois in the Yellow River basin, and no one else decided to big these tombs.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_01: And though Egypt has very beautiful pyramids, they didn't go on to the 19th century.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_01: Whereas the Chinese have built tombs from the late Neolithic down to the 19th century, and they've all been provided with apparatus, with clothes, with food, with wonderful bronzes and porcelains, with furniture, to make sure that the person in the tomb has a happy afterlife.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_01: And we have much more than the tomb to support this.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_01: We also have stories and we have rules and regulations which show that this was central to the life of the elite, but also to quite ordinary people as well.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_01: This is not just confined to the highest lords and kings.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_00: Can I ask you, when did you first start to see such tombs yourself in your work?
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I first went to China in 1975, and I started to notice this extraordinary yellow earth region of the Yellow River, and the best tombs that I've seen have been in the last ten years.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_01: It takes quite a lot of contact building and trustworthiness with the Chinese archaeologists to be allowed to visit the tombs as they're excavated.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_01: So I've seen them being excavated, whereas most of these tombs will be filled in.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_01: After they've excavated them, they fill them in.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_01: So we don't see them again unless you actually are there at the moment where they're digging them.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_01: And then I have done that during the last ten years.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_00: Let's start with the Lois, which is uh this silt formations that allow for these uh deep tombs.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_00: An example of how physical geography shapes both the art and and the culture.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, maybe you could explain that to me and and everybody listening.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_01: Well, it is very extraordinary.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_01: Over northern China, so from at least 2,000 miles or kilometers from west to east, there is the wind over millennia, over perhaps even millions of years, have, if you like, shaved the rocks of Tibet and the Gobi Desert and blown this sharp sandy dust across the whole of North China all the way to Peking.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_01: And some of you may have seen Peking in a very bad dust storm.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_01: That's this stuff being blown, but it lands first in the west and it falls on the hills and covers them with a layer 200 meters deep.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_01: And as you go further east, it's only 10 meters deep.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_01: But that allows you to dig a deep tomb, and you can't reach the stone.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_01: So one reason when you go to China is you don't see stone buildings because they didn't notice them, didn't notice the stone at first.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_01: And what they first did was to build pounded earth platforms and put these beautiful wooden buildings with coloured tiles on top.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_01: So the Forbidden City is a strong example of that.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_01: But though it looks as if it might be covered in stone, it isn't really stone.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_01: The platform is earth, and they've done that since probably 8,000 years at least.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_01: And they did not go into stone buildings, which is in fact a very important social cultural difference with Europe and then with America and other parts of the world.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_01: So they don't think in the building of stone monuments in the same way that we do.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_00: You make uh many remarkable observations about the interaction of the physical earth, like you've just done, and the geography and how that has shaped the society.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_00: One that I want to ask you about, which I had never thought about and never heard before, was the difference in Western Eurasia, that is uh Europe today.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_00: Agriculture is uh mixed crops uh and large animal uh breeding, uh cattle breeding, for example.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_00: Whereas in China uh there wasn't cattle breeding, but rather, as you say, smaller animals, pigs and dogs, but not cattle.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_00: And this changed the population density and the nature of land use and absolutely fascinating.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_00: Could you say a word about that?
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, I mean I think that's a vital difference.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, Mesopotamia and the edge of Turkey, Anatolia, is where animals like sheep, goats, and cattle were domesticated, with horses perhaps domesticated a bit further north in the Pontic Steppe, but all west, a long way west.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_01: And though China might have done this, or could have done it if it had been working on the edge of Mongolia or Tibet, in fact they didn't.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_01: And I feel that one should be acutely aware that China doesn't have to develop in the same way as we did.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_01: And above all, the Mediterranean basin with Mesopotamia nearby.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_01: So these animals did move gradually across the steppe, but they took over 2,000 years to move.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_00: The steppes being the vast grasslands that extend across Eurasia.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_01: So China is a great land lump, if you like, to the east of Tibet, and it has very much less sea interaction than Western Asia and Mediterranean, and it has a huge agricultural plane.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_01: So it grew millet and rice, it added maize later.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_01: So that grain, particularly rice, could support a huge population, and they learned very early to organize the population.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_01: So when people say they lack certain resources, they didn't lack people, and they didn't lack the capacity to organize them.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_01: So very early they built dams and walls with these huge numbers.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_00: Your message very clear is that while China was not isolated, certainly, from Western Eurasia, it developed its own systems, cultures, resource use that are very distinctive because it was east of the Tibetan plateau, east of the Himalayan plateau.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_00: And so while there were connections and eventually the Silk Road that would connect east and west, animal uh husbandry, for example, developed in a completely different way.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_00: And as you've explained, and I again had never thought in Europe the land supported lots of mammals, but not just us, uh big big mammals, uh, the cattle, whereas in in China, the people were the main mammal that was supported by the land, and that meant a lot more people per hectare or per square kilometer.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_00: And so the population density was higher in no small part because of the difference of the agricultural system that had evolved because of which animal species were part of the farm system.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_00: Do I have that right?
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_01: And also it is in a different climate.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_01: We are in the west, in Europe and the Mediterranean particularly, we're in the winter rain.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_01: We're suffering from it now.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_01: Whereas China has summer rain from the Pacific, and that is what they need to grow rice.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_01: And it's the constant, very heavy rain and the very waterlogged area around the Changjiang, the Yangtze River, and even further north that makes it possible to domesticate the grass that becomes rice, and also to produce sometimes several crops a year, so that it is an astonishingly different physical environment.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, if you travel to China as I know you have, in summer it feels hot, humid, and you wish it wouldn't.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_01: And here we would like it to be a little more sunny and less rain in the winter.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_01: You know, so the two areas have very distinctive climates, and I think that affects the food style and so on, because rice and millet are much better boiled, they can't be easily ground into bread.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_01: Whereas we grow wheat and barley, which can be ground into bread.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_01: So that you start off going in a different direction, and then since we roast the bread, if you like, we put it on hot stones or in ovens, we then also roast meat.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_01: Whereas the Chinese do not primarily roast meat, they make these wonderful dishes with cut-up meat fried with vegetables and often with bean card, tofu, and so on.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_01: So that the whole cuisine develops very differently, and that too has a strong social impact.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_00: Amazing.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_00: And another difference that you point out is uh the different role of metals.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_00: Metallurgy arrives uh a bit later, I understand, in China than in, say, the Fertile Crescent or Mesopotamia and in Europe.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_00: But what China does develop is this remarkable jade culture, and the book has a beautiful cover of uh Jade Dragon, the kind of incredible artwork that you describe throughout this uh wonderful book.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_00: What is uh the role of uh jade in this story and the role of the metals?
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_01: Well, the jade is early, and it starts, I mean, Rabbi 6000 BC, right in the far north of China, and is taken by hand, if you write, one person to another down the sea coast.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_01: And jade has an advantage in not being intelligible even to the Chinese.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_01: So this distant history is unknown to everybody before the 1980s or even the 2000s, but it's very durable.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_01: It's a beautiful stone that is kind of soft to the touch, but actually is very, very hard and needs to be polished, and then it's semi-translucent, but it's not sparkling like a gem.
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_01: So this very early history, these pieces travelled around, and then the area disappeared.
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_01: The jade users were flooded out, and the jade moved hand by hand along the rivers westwards.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_01: And so when it turned up dug out of the ground by chance, people didn't completely know what it was, but it was supernaturally magical, so that jade became a sign of good omens, a sign of fortune, so that it's always had that association since people could write.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_01: The very early period, nobody knew what it was, and nobody wrote.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_01: They had their own belief system, they chanted and sang no doubt, but they didn't write it down.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_01: And so one advantage of jade is that it is a bit mysterious.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_01: And so people can't say immediately why it's important, but it's important because it turns out mysteriously, and they think in terms of good omens, and it remains like that to today.
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_01: We know much more about it, but even I find it a bit mysterious.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I don't quite understand white has this allure, this attraction, but it undoubtedly does.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_01: And it's way ahead of gold in China.
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, gold is relatively lesser, it's a sign of nouveau riche styles.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_01: And the problem is with all this Lois, that you didn't find the metal initially, that metal wasn't obviously on the surface, whereas in Mesopotamia or Anatolia or the Mediterranean, the rocks are visible, it's a very rocky world.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_01: And people found bits of copper ore and they turned them into ornaments.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_01: So while they were making copper ornaments, if you like, people in East Asia were making jade ornaments.
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_01: So these two different schools didn't completely meet.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_01: Jade never really made it to the west.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_01: And what happened with the animals travelling, as the animals travelled over several millennia from Mesopotamia and across this huge grassland steppe, they had people with them, of course, and those people had things made of bronze.
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_01: They took their local bronze, small daggers, small ornaments, they took them to what is the north of China, and the people there were astonished both at the animals and the metal, and started to build them into their societies.
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_01: But because their societies were already very developed, they had to accommodate them within the structure they already had.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_01: I mean they do make weapons, but for China the weapons don't have the same status as the beautiful bronze vessels that they use for rituals for offering to their ancestors.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_01: So that there's a switch in purpose.
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_01: And though they certainly make weapons and they certainly fight, they don't have the same elite fighting that the steppe people did and we do.
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_01: If you're an elite in the Chinese bureaucracy, you write, and you better write well.
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_01: I mean calligraphy is highly important.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_01: So it's actually the middle managers, the people who looked after the horses, or the people who fought in the army, they could ride the horses and they could fight.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_01: But the elite didn't do it themselves.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_01: They had armies to do it, again, because they had a large population.
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_01: So from the time we know they had armies, they already had armies of three to five thousand men.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_00: And the brands uh clearly came later and came from the West, actually.
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, and this is not the most popular statement for the Chinese, but what I'd say is undoubtedly it moves with these animal herders and it moves on a very small scale.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_01: So what we see in China is a completely different enterprise.
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_01: The Chinese did not adopt the kind of metal casting used by their neighbors.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_01: They reinvented it completely and used a much, much, much more difficult system to make these incredibly beautiful bronzes with very complicated patterns and which came in vast sets because everything in China is on scale.
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_01: You know, the Chinese don't do things on small scale.
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of people to serve exactly.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_01: They go for big scale.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_01: So this is a completely different technology for a completely different purpose.
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_01: So if you like, the Chinese have reinvented bronze for a completely different function in their ritual life.
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_00: Your book describes, I think, in essence, if I understand correctly, uh, the process of cultural as well as political unification of China to the point of the first unified state, uh, the Qin dynasty, short-lived, but uniting something that is like the modern geography of China as of 221 BCE.
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_00: That process, if I understand correctly, starts in the north of China and moves southward.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_00: So it starts uh in the Yellow River valleys or more to the north, and it's uh later on that it comes to the Yangtze.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_00: But by the time there is that unification, there is a unity of written characters, I think, uh and a set of beliefs uh around ancestor worship uh that the tombs show, art and belief systems.
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_00: It's of course a stunning process that you're describing.
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_00: And could you help us uh to conceptualize that a little bit?
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_00: Because China starts as a vast region of very diverse cultures and civilizations and ecologies, and over the course of a millennium at least becomes a unified entity that remains more or less a unified entity until today, which is absolutely extraordinary.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_01: Well, it is complicated, but actually, I think we overestimate the need for warfare and underestimate the way in which the early Chinese dynasties, starting from at least 1200 BC, developed rituals and also this character written language that people wanted to copy.
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_01: So they managed managed to hold on or gain allies across what I'd call the North China Plain, where starting in the Yellow River Basin, they gain allies who seem to want to.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: move together n with the main dynasty by adopting their writing system, that is the Chinese characters, which are still used today, and the ritual vessels, the offering to the ancestors, which is still used today in a different form.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_01: And then what happens is another dynasty moves in from the north, slightly edgy group of people, and they're even more able to manage this almost like a trick.
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_01: They encourage people, often through written statements, often I imagine, small amounts of warfare, but not huge conquests.
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_01: They've they managed to entice them to join this system of writing, even though the number of people able to write would have been absolutely tiny.
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_01: It it can't have been a large scale operation.
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_01: But if you see the inscriptions that start from 1200 BC and go on to the unification, they're all written in the same script.
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_01: It might be in a slightly different styles, but the same writing system happens.
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_01: And what I think happens is China at this stage tolerates a great degree of diversity.
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_01: It's the people in these different southern regions who want to join in.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_01: They want to gain the status of belonging to this high ranking whoever they are people, the Zhou they're called, but they they can't have had a clear vision that we have today.
• 23:24
  SPEAKER_01: It must have been evolving all the time.
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_01: And even when this dynasty is said to be collapsing, in fact the South is still edging to join.
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_01: It doesn't go a long way south that's going to take another half a millennium but it's a very clever system.
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_01: You know people talk about the Zhou dynasty collapsing and hey presto their characters and their ritual system and their furnishing spreads a thousand miles.
• 23:52
  SPEAKER_01: It's amazing.
• 23:53
  SPEAKER_00: So it's really a process unity you're saying is a kind of cultural accretion or a kind of a gravitational process that not by conquest and bitter strife, but rather by attraction.
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_01: That's exactly what I think is happening.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_01: I think there is strife people fight of course but in a way they're fighting over small patches.
• 24:15
  SPEAKER_01: They're not fighting because the Joe King has made a declaration and they don't like it.
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_01: I like your word accretion.
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_01: What you see are different forms of accretion.
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_01: It it takes a long time and that's where I've spent a lot of time trying to understand these little steps but it is a remarkable development and China is huge.
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_01: And the thing is that unlike Europe it doesn't divide up into different languages.
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_01: People speak differently in Sichuan or Fujian but they write in the same way.
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_00: Could you explain that because it is so fascinating and so different from what we're used to totally different languages using the same writing system.
• 24:56
  SPEAKER_01: And not just as letters I mean quite different from letters in fact yes the important thing is that particularly in classical this earlier Chinese a single character represents a word.
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_01: But this is a language which does not have inflection.
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_01: So it has no cases and no tenses.
• 25:13
  SPEAKER_01: So it's much more like looking at an algorithm or algebraic expression with numbers.
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_01: So if you s looked at the numbers four would be pronounced differently in different languages across the world but it would have the same meaning across the world and the character is a bit the same.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_01: If you accept the character as a way of writing it has the same meaning to you in southern China as it has to the king in northern China.
• 25:42
  SPEAKER_01: But meanwhile you go on speaking the way you always do and for instance if you know about Scotland we don't try to render Scottish speech in alphabetic English actually we allow them to write in our English words but they speak in a different accent with many more syllables so that we're a long way from the Chinese system and people used to criticize the Chinese system because it does take a long time to master for a child.
• 26:10
  SPEAKER_01: But once you've mastered it it's amazingly useful across the whole territory.
• 26:16
  SPEAKER_01: When I was young and first went to China the dialects were very hard to understand.
• 26:20
  SPEAKER_01: Now everybody is educated in northern Chinese what we call Mandarin but even now if you ask the Shang'anese to talk to each other I won't understand a word.
• 26:31
  SPEAKER_01: It is as different as German and English and Danish.
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_01: You know that the pronunciation is very different.
• 26:37
  SPEAKER_00: So the same character is read everywhere in China but the pronunciation of the character can be completely different.
• 26:45
  SPEAKER_01: Yes certainly the pronunciation of the word represented by the character can be completely different.
• 26:51
  SPEAKER_00: Yes that's what I should say if you were reading a text in southern China and reading the same text in northern China.
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_01: It could be very different.
• 26:59
  SPEAKER_01: Well the big obvious example is Cantonese in the Cantonese reading a newspaper will sound completely different but it'll look the same as the newspaper in Beijing.
• 27:09
  SPEAKER_00: So it was this linguistic twist that was key to enabling a kind of unification without having to unify the spoken language.
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_01: I think it was very important to the first emperor the first emperor came from actually a much less developed part of China he came from the Northwest.
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_01: This is Emperor Emperor the first emperor because he came from the Northwest in fact he made a lot of use of people from other states and therefore that also had an accretion effect.
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_01: He drew in these other states and the thing that did have to happen was he had to send more of the educated elite south so that the south became an area with immigrants and they were governed by all sorts of rules.
• 27:56
  SPEAKER_01: I mean he was a big rule man.
• 27:59
  SPEAKER_01: And whether that's a good thing or not, but there we begin to see the kinds of rules that are quite typical in China of all periods and because of the single written language easy to spread.
• 28:10
  SPEAKER_00: Again thank you I never realized this fact I've always been a believer that the biblical parable about the Tower of Babel where God punishes humanity by giving separate languages so that they can't cooperate on audacious ventures like building a tower to the heavens had a deep element of truth to it, which is that the linguistic divisions are so fundamental as creating not only cultural barriers but also provocations of war and endless conquest and the mystery of China being a more unified peaceful peaceful semi-peaceful.
• 28:51
  SPEAKER_00: Semi-peaceful but relative to Europe I think certainly more peaceful at least internally always vulnerable to outside invasion probably this linguistic difference and the common written language despite different spoken languages you're saying played an important role in that it allowed a governance in a way that could not really happen the same way say in the European or Mesopotamian context.
• 29:18
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 29:19
  SPEAKER_01: I mean China is open to the north and it has had many people move in and you could say invade.
• 29:27
  SPEAKER_01: But that has also been subject to this language question.
• 29:31
  SPEAKER_01: People who came in like the Manchus of the 18th and 19th century who came from the northeast they couldn't govern China unless they adopted the local written language and that made them part of the accretion you know they couldn't resist it in order to run China which was already incredibly developed in terms of bureaucratic organization from the first emperor everybody who moved in as a ruler in northern China had to use in one way or another this written language and therefore they had to adopt and adapt the bureaucracy of the state that was already there and so people call this sinusization.
• 30:09
  SPEAKER_01: I wouldn't say that I think it's even more clever.
• 30:12
  SPEAKER_01: I think that China offers and perhaps it's offering to us now the challenge if you want to get along with us you're going to have to try to understand our language and to go with what that tells you.
• 30:26
  SPEAKER_00: It's like saying we have many many different peoples and languages but we have one operating system basically so if you want to be here you have to operate on our operating system.
• 30:35
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly they often fret and say they don't like all these invasions and they're worried about it.
• 30:40
  SPEAKER_01: But actually I think they should look back at it positively the number of incursions people like the Mongols or the Manchus actually resulted in the enrichment of China because they gained more land, they gained people who were adapted into their bureaucratic government system with their language and with their classical beliefs you know the whole of this belief in the afterlife of what we often call Confucianism all that came with it and was easily laid on these new people.
• 31:09
  SPEAKER_00: I wanted to ask you about this critical interaction which resonated with me of the steplands which are the grasslands where the horses grow and are prevalent and are strong and are superior and the settled agricultural regions, the millet and the rice growing regions that's a very deep part of China's history including these incursions and the cultural accretion.
• 31:35
  SPEAKER_00: You also make an observation which I had never heard before which is so important that horses could not really breed in a superior way on the central plains.
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_00: So they had to come from the north you mentioned selenium as a critical nutrient I guess that is in the grasslands or the steplands but not in the central plains so that if you wanted good horses which the emperors did and they needed for their armies and so on, you had to have relations with the people of the steppes and so there was a constant cultural human political economic interchange between the steplands and the plains.
• 32:16
  SPEAKER_00: Can you uh elaborate on that?
• 32:18
  SPEAKER_01: Yes I mean it's a very complicated part of China.
• 32:21
  SPEAKER_01: I would say we have to remember the lowest area and that is a kind of buffer state buffer area between the settled central plain and the real steppe which is much for the north and very windy and cold.
• 32:34
  SPEAKER_01: So the horses actually need a certain degree of cold and one problem with the central plain is it's humid and hot particularly in the summer so not only the nutrients but also the overall climate and the very wet land is not good for horses.
• 32:51
  SPEAKER_01: So horses were always kept further north.
• 32:53
  SPEAKER_01: They came from the north and then they were kept in northwestern China and then brought in when needed.
• 32:59
  SPEAKER_01: What I think again is often you know people the Chinese don't like the idea that they have to be involved with the steppe but I think if you turn it round again and say they well they managed this relationship pretty well the steppe kept on moving towards them.
• 33:14
  SPEAKER_01: The people from the north with the horses moved towards this richer land and what you see in the archaeology is after a generation or two they've been integrated into mainland China.
• 33:25
  SPEAKER_01: They've become part of the farming community or they've become the herders the managing people for the horses on the higher land so that this isn't always an invasion.
• 33:35
  SPEAKER_01: It's an integration a sort of infiltration of people with horses which the Chinese rulers then use to their advantage both to show off their status but possibly also to use in war.
• 33:47
  SPEAKER_01: So several of my chapters in my book explain this group of people, this lord or that lord had horses which means that he had gained relationship with people who could bring the horses so instead of seeing this as an invasion or somehow an insult to China's holistic development what I'd say is we see China integrating into its mainstream people from the north in particular but actually in due course also from the south and it's the language the written language and the ritual that I think is overwhelmingly dominant.
• 34:24
  SPEAKER_01: And I think what we don't realize is what is Confucianism, but the idea that the family is all important.
• 34:32
  SPEAKER_01: And I think this is a very big contrast with the extreme west where we are in Europe where deities are very important.
• 34:40
  SPEAKER_01: And round the deities you gather communities of non-kin but in China you have communities of kin and they may all be very large numbers in a clan in the in the 19th or 18th century.
• 34:53
  SPEAKER_01: But what I think is happening is these northerners with their horses are being seduced in and join these kin groups in some way and they disappear from being foreigners they become part of the whole system and I just think it's a magical clever way of doing things.
• 35:11
  SPEAKER_00: That kin phenomenon actually struck me uh we were in Shufu or Shifu, um Shandong province where Confucius's birthplace for uh a conference in the fall and it was also on Confucius's birthday so we went to the Confucian temple and watched the celebration of his birthday 2,500 and some years and then came thousands of people that were Confucian descendants.
• 35:40
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly exactly unbelievable unbelievable yes exactly and so I have become more familiar with this whole family pattern from talking to my graduates as I have grown older and they have got their own lives they're more willing to tell me about their lives background in China and almost without exception they have this strong family structure.
• 36:05
  SPEAKER_01: The degree to belief in the afterlife may vary region to region and certainly has regional differences.
• 36:12
  SPEAKER_01: But the strength of the family is overwhelming and it leads to all sorts of management questions in daily life today.
• 36:20
  SPEAKER_01: They're much more tolerant in you know offices are much more caring about how people need to go home to look after their daughter or something than we would be and they're much less adjusted.
• 36:33
  SPEAKER_01: They do have communities we both have families and communities they have families and communities but the family is absolutely dominant and how to better yourself within the family is overwhelmingly important as I'm sure you've noticed.
• 36:48
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely extraordinary and it also gives me the thought that Confucius of course in a way he and the disciples created notions and ideas but he channeled really a lot of the deep culture around him and put it into his stories and analyses but didn't invent it in a way because he was saying that family responsibility ancestor worship ritual is the defining element of the good society that we have around us.
• 37:20
  SPEAKER_00: So he was mainly trying to distill it sounds to me distill what was the organizing principle of the society not inventing it per se but distilling it.
• 37:32
  SPEAKER_01: I think that's a very good way to express it.
• 37:34
  SPEAKER_01: I haven't used it myself but I would definitely say he's distilling the antique, the aging ancient texts and bringing them into his present and putting them in very neat words.
• 37:47
  SPEAKER_01: I mean the statements of Confucius and his disciples are very clear.
• 37:51
  SPEAKER_01: Whereas if you were to spend the time of learning all these ancient scripts and looking at the Zhou texts you would find it a bit confusing.
• 37:59
  SPEAKER_01: But he's got it very clearly distilled.
• 38:02
  SPEAKER_01: So the Chinese speak less about Confucianism than they do about um classical learning.
• 38:09
  SPEAKER_01: They call the whole his writing and his predecessors and successors the classical learning very much.
• 38:16
  SPEAKER_01: And I think your word distill is absolutely correct.
• 38:19
  SPEAKER_00: It leads me as we reach uh the end of our precious uh time uh together to reflect on China today and how it really is a reflection of a culture and society with a kind of temporal integrity over a period of at least 3,000 years.
• 38:39
  SPEAKER_01: Well they would say five and I think that's right.
• 38:42
  SPEAKER_01: I mean I think their claim is correct.
• 38:44
  SPEAKER_01: Your politicians and our politicians don't seem sufficiently patient to think about how to understand China nor do I think there's people on the other side on the Chinese side thinking too much about European history.
• 38:59
  SPEAKER_01: They're focused on America but they don't think about the European background and I think actually it's the two backgrounds that are essential to our getting along together.
• 39:10
  SPEAKER_01: I mean I actually have great time and patience for China and very interested in it.
• 39:16
  SPEAKER_01: But I am very concerned that China is misunderstood and probably we are all misunderstood.
• 39:23
  SPEAKER_00: One thing I find in an area that I'm very much involved in in international affairs and international relations theory how states interact with each other.
• 39:34
  SPEAKER_00: My feeling I just wonder about your reflection on this in a lot of the uh American and British and I would say more generally Western thinking about statecraft, it's taken for granted that there will be conflict and war and that there is a kind of state of anarchy that prevails and therefore the world's extremely dangerous you better arm peace through strength or expect war.
• 40:00
  SPEAKER_00: And in China it's I think not a cliche to say that their view of statecraft is different that it's not just an anarchic situation but the belief that there can be harmony and that there should be harmony maybe hierarchical harmony but a kind of harmony that doesn't necessarily devolve to open conflict.
• 40:23
  SPEAKER_00: Am I being naive or do you think that this is a difference of viewpoint?
• 40:27
  SPEAKER_01: I think it is a difference of viewpoint but the thing I do think is important in China and you've just said it is hierarchy.
• 40:34
  SPEAKER_01: And China believes that it should be at the top of the pillar and we in Britain certainly should know our place.
• 40:41
  SPEAKER_01: America perhaps not so bad but um what I do think is that if the statesman on our side paid a little more attention to this hierarchy question, offered a few more compliments to China's power base, its achievements for instance in you know though they might criticize the coal firing they also should praise the huge renewables that China goes in for and also the huge effort that China has made to bring its own population out of deep poverty.
• 41:15
  SPEAKER_01: So that I think there is deliberate misunderstanding also on both sides.
• 41:19
  SPEAKER_01: But what matters to China is that it is respected for its top position.
• 41:25
  SPEAKER_01: The question is can America agree to that and I do think the elite individually were not trained to fight.
• 41:34
  SPEAKER_01: They were trained to write so you start from a good position there but I think we've made many mistakes over the last 30 years.
• 41:43
  SPEAKER_01: I think we've been too aggressive China's copied our aggression.
• 41:48
  SPEAKER_01: I hope more people will do what I've done and spend their lives trying to understand China.
• 41:53
  SPEAKER_01: I have only met a few of my own Sinological colleagues who've done that.
• 41:57
  SPEAKER_01: Most people don't try as hard to go there and to walk around China.
• 42:02
  SPEAKER_01: I think going there and walking around meeting people on the ground is what makes all the difference.
• 42:09
  SPEAKER_00: I'll tell you just uh anecdotally I was in an online conference of Chinese and Americans and there was the typical somewhat tough interchange and one of our students from Harvard University PhD who became one of China's leading economists and is extremely distinguished and a very senior advisor and teachers at Qinghua University got exasperated and finally said to both sides listen, all China wants is to be respected.
• 42:42
  SPEAKER_00: All Americans want is to be told how smart they are if the two sides would just do this we'd get along perfectly fine.
• 42:50
  SPEAKER_01: I think that's very good.
• 42:51
  SPEAKER_01: You see to me the word for China is you must show respect and it is very hierarchical and yes and we do think America's smart I don't know if the Chinese do but I think they do actually well let me say Professor Jessica Rawson you're very smart.
• 43:09
  SPEAKER_00: You have so brilliantly illuminated China and Chinese history and culture this magnificent book really everyone should read treasure enjoy you will learn absolutely on every page and as I am sure listeners will agree your insights are absolutely scintillating unique very powerful wonderful and a great way to enable us to understand each other and to understand China better from the West so I could not be more grateful and more admiring and more thankful to you for joining book club with Jeffrey Sachs thank you Professor Jessica Rawson the book is Life and Afterlife in Ancient China and I'm so grateful that you could be with us today.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you very much it's been a beautiful hour thank you.
• 44:07
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for joining in the conversation please subscribe rate and rate a review on whatever platform you listen for your podcast