ASIATIC EAST, CIVILIZATION OF THE. — The peoples who formed the civilization of Asia and wove its historical fabric are China, orienting it to the east, India to the south, and Iran to the southwest; through this last country, the influence of the flourishing Arab-Semitic civilization of Mesopotamia later penetrated into Central Asia.
The Siberian north, inhabited by primitive Mongoloid peoples (Samoyeds, Ostyaks, Tunguses, Yakuts, Chukchi), was, from the mid-16th century, subjected by Ivan the Terrible to the firm and despotic rule of Russia and had no influence on the territories further south.
The Yellow River, penetrating from the northwest and finding the land already occupied by aboriginal peoples—Miao, Lolo, etc.—reduced them to confined areas in the south of the country. They brought with them some elements of the civilization of metals derived from the Near East through Turkestan, but once they arrived in the country, they were able to develop them autonomously and preserve them in a traditional form, given China’s separation from the rest of the world by the mountains and the Great Wall to the west and by the sea to the east; a separation that fixed it in a constant conservatism and sometimes drove it to a veritable horror of what was foreign.
Without regard to the traditional chronology of China based on the succession of imperial dynasties—a tradition that deifies the founding sovereigns of the first two dynasties (I and II), to whom are attributed the institution of agriculture, livestock breeding, navigation, writing, the calendar, metallurgy, and the norms of state administration—only with the last centuries of the third dynasty (Chou, 1122–256 BC) does one proceed onto solid historical ground. During this dynasty, despite the internal rebellions of the feudal kings that gave the period the name of the “Warring States,” Chinese thought developed, dominated, from the socio-economic point of view, by the idea that human order must be in harmony with that of nature, which in turn is regulated by the Lord of Heaven; and from the ethical point of view, by the teachings of a host of philosophers—Confucius, Mencius, Mo Ti, Chuang Tzu—who applied this idea to the political and social life of the country.
After the inglorious end of the third dynasty, following decades of intense struggles against the local princes, the fourth dynasty (Ch’in, 255–207 BC) emerged, which, under the Duke Cheng, who took the title of Shih Huang Ti (= First Emperor), after crushing feudalism, founded the centralized Chinese empire that, from 221 BC, lasted through 23 dynasties and countless reversals of fortune until 1912. The unification of the territory was followed by that of administration, the incorporation into the state of most of southern China, and the construction of the Great Wall against the incursions of the Hsiung-nu, ancestors of the Turkic and Mongol nomads. But to its discredit stands the destruction of the classical books, in hatred of the literati who, against the introduced reforms, extolled the ancient tradition of the country. This was followed by a civil war led by Liu Pang, which led to the sovereign’s suicide and the beginning, with Liu Pang himself, of the fifth dynasty (Former Han; 202 BC–8 AD). Of this dynasty, the greatest was Wu Ti, who fought against the Hsiung-nu in northern Mongolia, pushed into eastern Turkestan, the heart of Asia then inhabited by Indo-European peoples, crossed by the famous “Silk Road” that, since Roman times, had been traveled by caravans carrying silk west and exchanging it for products coming up from Syria and India to China; he annexed Kansu and extended his dominion into Korea and Tonkin. Within the country, there was a revival of letters as a reaction against the obscurantism of the Ch’in, a resumption of trade, and the introduction of Buddhism, which had penetrated from the west through Afghanistan and Turkestan. Initially received with suspicion as contrary to Chinese ideas on family and social order, it was later widely accepted and introduced into the country the models of Greco-Buddhist art.
The sixth dynasty (Later Han, 25–220), founded by Liu Hsiu, a descendant of the Hans who had placed himself at the head of periodically resurgent brigandage, lived amid fierce battles and competitions (the Three Kingdoms: the Minor Hans, lasting 45 years and considered the seventh dynasty, Wei, Wu) until in 280 the whole country was reunited by Ssu-ma Yen, founder of the eighth dynasty (Western Chin, 265–316). It was a period of terrible rebellions. In 311, the Huns occupied the capital Lo-yang, forcing the dynasty to take refuge in Peking, where the national empire of southern China was established, while to the north, ephemeral foreign sovereigns—Huns (= Turks) or Mongols—succeeded one another. Precisely during these turbulent times, Buddhism, which had entered China from the west as early as the 2nd century BC, continued its
**ASIATIC EAST, CIVILIZATION OF THE — A stretch of the Great Wall — Jehol.**
**India, with Buddhism, brought to Asia the sentiment of compassion for all beings, the sensitivity to the suffering of life, the apostolate of peace and gentleness that its art so well expressed and spread throughout Asia, from Mongolia to Korea, Japan, Indochina, and the Insulindia.**
Medieval Iran, with the theocratic centralization brought to the country by the victorious Arab Islam, gave a unity of vision to the Mongol peoples and ensured that, today, only two religions dominate more widely over the immense territory: Buddhism and Islam.
The movements of history in Asia and their reflections in Europe all begin from its central part, Mongolia (q.v.), inhabited by nomadic peoples devoted to pastoralism; the scarcity of pastures due to periodic droughts pushed them in great waves toward the east, west, and south against neighboring peoples, destroying them to restore the country to the pastoral regime, useful for their immense herds.
I. THE CHINESE DYNASTIES
The Chinese descended to populate the fertile alluvial soil of the lower basin of the
peaceful penetration into the country, where missionaries flocked both by the land route of Turkestan and by the sea route, disembarking at Canton and Nanking.
The ninth to twelfth dynasties (419–589) are respectively called the Southern and Northern Dynasties and followed one another without claiming any special merit for the country. During the 6th century, the Turks (= the strong) first appear on the scene of Asia under their historical name, founding, at China’s expense, an empire that embraced Mongolia (552) and western Turkestan (565) and controlled Central Asia from Greater Mongolia to the border of Sassanian Persia.
The greatest dynasty in Chinese history is the fourteenth (Tang, 618–907), which, under Tai Tsung the Great (627–49), reunited the whole of China under his scepter, wresting from the Turks their conquests in Mongolia and Turkestan; it had its capital at Sianfu, favored Taoism, and was benevolent toward Nestorian missionaries, the memory of whose work is fixed in the commemorative stele
known as that of Singanfu, erected in 781, containing the exposition of the fundamental points of the Christian religion, the record of the introduction of Christianity into the city (635), due to the work of the Nestorian monk A
le and Eastern Europe as far as Crimea and the Danube, but was unable to overcome Japan’s resistance (1274–81; V. JAPAN). This incursion, besides bringing into contact peoples who until then had been unaware of each other, was of particular advantage to Islam in that with Timur (Tamerlane) it succeeded in exalting the unifying force of Islam, animated by the ardent Semitic faith against the secular indifferentism of the Mongols, to whom it gave a religious law, to which even the sovereign was subject, as well as Muslim culture and art with schools and mosques, from which the religion of Muhammad radiated toward both East and West, albeit accommodated to indigenous traditions and superstitions.
To Tamerlane is owed the invasion of India (1398–99), already brought under Islam since 711; to his descendant Bābur the foundation of the Mughal Empire, which lasted from 1526 until the English conquest in 1858 (v. INDIA).
The Mongol army of Genghis Khan swept down like an avalanche over China and overthrew the Sung dynasty, which had reigned for 320 years and had fostered historical studies and the fine arts, particularly painting and ceramics, which then reached heights never again attained.
The twenty-first dynasty was Mongol (Yüan, 1280–1368), founded by Kublai Khan, son of Ögedei, in turn son of Genghis Khan. He quickly assimilated Chinese culture, of which he appreciated the splendor, was benevolent toward the people, received Marco Polo with honor, who remained for many years at the Mongol court as imperial ambassador, and as a tolerant Mongol respected the followers of the four “prophets”: Jesus, Moses, Muhammad, and Buddha. He welcomed Catholic missionaries with Giovanni da Montecorvino (1333), who became the first archbishop of Beijing. On the contacts between the Church and the Mongols, V. CHINA.
But the foreign origin of the dynasty and the unsuccessful war against Japan (v.) provoked a national reaction, led by the former monk Zhu Yuanzhang, who under the name of Hongwu founded the twenty-second dynasty (Ming, 1368–1644).
Hongwu favored Confucianism, the traditional religion of China, against Buddhism, and reformed the code and the court ritual. His successor moved the capital from Nanjing to Beijing and oversaw the construction of the great canal between Beijing and southern China; under the Xianzong emperor (1463), repairs were made to the Great Wall, a historic bulwark, though not always effective, against the Mongols.
III. EUROPEAN PENETRATION
In the 16th century the penetration of Europeans into China began. In 1557 the Portuguese established themselves in Macao; in 1582 the Jesuit Father Matteo Ricci arrived in that city, and in 1601 he went to Beijing, where he died in 1610. Ten years later the Manchus (Mongols) crossed the northern frontier, advanced into Liaodong and Shanxi, set Beijing ablaze and to sack, and the last Ming emperor committed suicide (1643).The Ming were succeeded by the last dynasty, the twenty-third, which was of Manchu origin (Qing, 1644–1912). The best ruler of this dynasty was the Kangxi Emperor (1662–1722), who has been called the “Louis XIV of China.” Intelligent, decisive, well-disposed toward Catholics—though alienated by the Rites Controversy that divided the Catholic missionaries of different religious orders (v. CHINESE AND MALABAR RITES)—and author of a dictionary, he nevertheless failed to revive the national spirit of China, which ended up shutting itself off from the world, intensifying its contempt for Western barbarians just as Europe’s commercial and industrial movement was knocking at the doors of the Far East, provoking a series of reactions followed by painful humiliations.
Thus, over the importation of opium, rightly prohibited by the Chinese government in the name of social hygiene against the commercial greed of the English, there arose a war that ended in 1842 (to resume in 1848), with England’s occupation of Hong Kong and the dismantling of the forts at Canton.
This humiliation, exacerbating the anti-European spirit of the Chinese, led to the so-called Taiping Rebellion (= Great Peace), led by the fanatical visionary Hong Xiuquan, who established his capital at Nanjing and over the course of fifteen years devastated sixteen provinces and cost twenty million lives; a rebellion that turned anti-European when foreigners, seeing themselves threatened, lent support to the Manchu dynasty, and in 1864, by suppressing the rebellion, ended up opening China’s doors to Europe, imposing upon it the exchange of diplomatic missions between Beijing and European capitals.
Twenty years later the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–95) broke out, ending for China in the loss of Korea, Formosa, and the Liaodong Peninsula. In 1900 the xenophobic Boxer Movement began (fueled by the Empress Dowager Cixi, though originally anti-dynastic), which led to the massacre of thousands of Christians and provoked the armed intervention of the European powers, with grave economic and political consequences for China. Eight years later, the old empress died, and with her the last imperial dynasty came to an end.
IV. THE CHINESE REPUBLIC
Indeed, three years later the socialist Sun Yat-sen, who had studied in England and America, taking advantage of a popular revolt against the Manchu troops, returned to China, where on 14 February 1912 the Republic of China was proclaimed in the name of the Nationalist Party (Kuomintang). After a brief regency by Sun Yat-sen, Yuan Shikai was proclaimed president; he, having attempted to restore the monarchy for his own benefit, disappeared from the political scene in 1916. Japan, taking advantage of China’s internal strife between northerners and southerners, declared war on China in 1937, occupying Beijing, Nanjing, and the coastal cities; then, profiting from the Second World War, it seized American and European possessions in Southeast Asia: the Philippines, Hong Kong, Singapore, the Dutch East Indies (1941–45), along with other prewar colonial holdings.The Chinese Communists, who during the Second World War had kept themselves in the background, not without their usual double-dealing, after Japan’s defeat, with the support of the Russians and under the leadership of Mao Zedong, invaded all of mainland China, forced the Nationalist government to take refuge in Taiwan, and in 1950 proclaimed the Communist People’s Republic. This, however, by drastically applying the criterion and method of the class struggle and the annihilation of the individual before state power—a criterion utterly contrary to the habits of a people boasting an ancient civilization and noble culture—ended up turning into hatred that sympathy with which it had initially been greeted.
The Second World War marked the revolt of Asian civilization against Europe in the Far East; in India, which through Gandhi’s tenacious action had won its independence from British rule; in Annam, which rose against the French; and in Indonesia (1949), which rebelled against the Dutch. A new page has begun for the history and civilization of Asia.