The Grass and the Crops

Perspectives on the Chinese Civilization

Taking the thousands of years of integration of the Chinese civilization into perspective, we will see that the major driving force behind this long process has been the interaction between the Grassland civilization and the Huaxia civilization¹.

As the rhyme goes, “Xia, Shang, Zhou, Qin, and Han; Tang, Song, Yuan, Ming, and Qing,”² the rise and fall of Huaxia dynasties have long been the main storyline of our textbooks and historical canon in their account of the Chinese civilization. However, this is a one-sided perspective. To fully learn and understand the development of the Chinese civilization, it is inadequate to examine only how Huaxia civilization evolved and view the Chinese civilization only from the vantage point of Huaxia.

This tradition is easy to explain: most history books were written by Huaxia literati who naturally saw Huaxia and the Grassland from the Huaxia perspective. Besides, writing systems didn’t appear in the Grassland as early as in Huaxia, and even after the grassland people invented their own writing systems, their production of textual documents was only meagre compared to that of Huaxia. The history of the entire Grassland and its people has long been shrouded in a mist.

The images of civilizations in different regions described in those historical accounts could be seen as results of introspection for Huaxia. However, for the Grassland, they were all written from foreign perspectives. We should not be surprised to see that Huaxia has been frequently described as a superior civilization. Even in the context of foreign conquests, Huaxia historical writers managed to reinterpret the concept of legitimacy which absorbs successful foreign rulers into the perpetual system of civilization system they built.

From this outsider’s viewpoint, the Grassland has often been described as a barbaric world, and nomadic people as savages and plunderers. As a result of this perspective, the self-image of these people, the strategies they adopted when confronting Huaxia and their views about their southern neighbor have long been ignored, misread, and distorted in historical writings.

“The shape of Mount Lu eludes the gaze, / If you view her from within her maze.”³ In order to see the full picture of the Chinese civilization, we need to take the leap out of the maze and examine it from the outside.

This book is an attempt to offer a multi-perspective account of the long history of integration of the Chinese civilization, an objective description of how it grew from the small dots scattered on the prehistoric cultural map to its cosmic scale in the Yuan, Ming, and Qing Dynasties in a constant process of merging and fusion, and a record of how different peoples from the north of the Great Wall to the south of the Yangtze River made contact, interacted, and communicated with each other throughout the history to make this integration possible.

“The World of Grass” (or the Grassland civilization) in this book is a broad concept encompassing the whole of the Mongolian Steppe and the lands to its east and west, which could be roughly described as the region beyond the Great Wall. Similarly, “the World of Crops” (or the Huaxia civilization) does not only refer to the agrarian plains, but a vast expanse of a variety of terrains to the south of the Great Wall, a web of mountains, rivers, lakes woven with the plains as its warp and woof.

During the peak of the Qing Dynasty, the northern grasslands, combined with its eastern and western flanks, already outsized the World of Crops to its south. The gap would widen if we included the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau into the former. Although the agrarian World of Crops always maintained its obvious advantage in population and productive power, the Grassland generally excelled in its military force primarily composed of cavalry troops. This was enough to even the odds and make the Grassland a great regional civilization and an equal rival to Huaxia. A clear insight of the development of the Chinese civilization could not be achieved if we overlook the influence and contribution from either side.

Therefore, the key theme of this book is how a nation of ultimate unity rose as such with efforts of ancient peoples who lived geographically so far apart from each other, overcame huge differences in natural environments, and yet still managed to bridge the enormous political, economic, and cultural gaps between the World of Grass and the World of Crops.

To explore this theme thoroughly, neither a Huaxia perspective nor a Grassland perspective would be enough alone. We would have to turn to a multi-perspective investigation.

Doing this does not mean nullifying the Huaxia perspective. The glory and magnificence that Huaxia has achieved throughout its thousands of years of history goes without saying. Its vast agrarian plains have been feeding anenormous population of people whose achievements have long been recognized as representing one of the world’s major ancient civilizations. Nor is this book rewriting the Chinese history entirely from a Grassland point of view as an interpretation of ancient China from the perspective of any single regional civilization would be to mistake a part for the whole. Instead, this book tries to explore the evoluation Huaxia and the Grassland from a broader and multi-angle perspective. It probes the historic details of different regional civilizations to reveal the processes of their dynamic fusion, especially the thousands of years of collision, interaction and merging between Huaxia and the Grassland, which have been a major driving force in Chinese history.

Our main storyline is roughly the evolution of over 4,000 years of Chinese civilization, starting from the “starry night” prehistoric time through the dynasties from Shang (C. 1600–1046 BCE) to Qing (1644–1911 AD), and the formidable nomadic powers from Xiongnu to Mongols. Our last stop is the tumultuous beginning of the Republic of China (1912–1949), which was established after Qing, China’s last unitary imperial dynasty, collapsed under the tsunamic impacts of globalization. Throughout the story, the selection of contents casts, to some extent, the Grassland in a more favorable light, which is intended as an effort to emphasize how different civilizations managed to adjust themselves, respond to each other and accordingly choose their paths.

While I’m fully aware of my limited repertoire of knowledge, I have nevertheless endeavored to offer a concise overview of the integration of Chinese civilization both through the lens of contributions of the different regional civilizations but also based on a multidisciplinary approach. As such, mistakes are inevitable. I hope that readers will be forgiving of my shortfalls and gaps of knowledge, and understand my sincere intention of interpreting the integration of civilizations from a multi-lens point of view.

This book is intended to be easy and fun to read, by explaining the lengthy and complicated Chinese history and Chinese civilization in a simple style, and without distorting historical facts. It should read like a story, but also should be thought provoking. My genuine hope is to help my readers probe into the origin and development of the Chinese civilization.

I would like to thank everyone who contributed and helped make this book possible, especially CITIC Press, my family, and all our ancestors who created this magnificent civilization.

Yin Bo

In Khanbalik/Beijing