Asiatic Civilization, East

ASIATIC CIVILIZATION, East. - The peoples who constituted the civilization of Asia and wove its historical fabric are China in the east, India in the south, and Iran in the southwest, through which country the influence of the Arab-Semitic civilization flourishing in Mesopotamia later penetrated into Central Asia.

Siberian north, populated by primitive Mongoloid peoples (Samoyeds, Ostyaks, Tungus, Yakuts, Chukchi), was from the mid-16th century reduced, under Ivan the Terrible, to the firm and despotic dominion of Russia and had no influence on the territories further south.

Of the three formative peoples cited above, China (v.) is distinguished by its sense of spiritual equilibrium, made of concreteness, incapable of mystical flights and metaphysical constructions, more concerned with convincing by reasoning than with imposing its thought by dogmatizing; it is therefore tolerant toward all religions ("three religions, one religion," say the Chinese, with regard to their Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism), faithful only to its ethnic tradition represented by the teaching of the ancestors and fixed by the ritual that they once established.

India, with Buddhism, brought to Asia the sentiment of compassion for all beings, the sensibility before the sorrow of life, the apostolate of peace and gentleness that its art has so well expressed and diffused throughout all Asia, from Mongolia to Korea, to Japan, to Indochina and to the Indonesian archipelago.

Medieval Iran, with the theocratic centralization brought to the country by victorious Arab Islam, gave a unity of vision to the Mongol peoples and brought it about that, today, only two religions dominate more widely in the immense territory: Buddhism and Islam.

The movements of history in Asia and their reflections in Europe all begin from its central part, Mongolia (v.), populated by nomadic peoples devoted to pastoralism, whom the deficiency of pastures due to periodic drought drives in great waves toward the east, the west, and the south against the neighboring peoples, destroying them in order to return the country to the pastoral regime, useful for their immense herds.

I. THE CHINESE DYNASTIES

The Chinese descended to populate the rich alluvial soil of the lower basin of the Yellow River, penetrating it from the northwest and finding it already occupied by aboriginal peoples: Miao, Lolo, etc., whom they reduced within narrow confines in the south of the country. They brought with them certain elements of the metal civilization drawn from the nearby East through Turkestan, but once they had arrived in the country these were able to develop in an autonomous form and to preserve themselves according to a traditional form, given the separation of China from the rest of the world by reason of the mountains and the Great Wall that bound it on the West and by the sea that closes it on the East; a separation that fixed it in a constant conservatism and at times drove it almost to a horror of everything foreign.

Without taking into account the traditional chronology of China founded on the succession of the imperial dynasties, a tradition that heroizes the founding sovereigns of the first dynasties (1st and 2nd), to whom are attributed the institution of agriculture, the rearing of livestock, navigation, writing, the calendar, metallurgy, and the norms for the administration of the State, only with the last centuries of the 3rd dynasty (Ciou, 1122-256 B.C.) does one proceed on the solid ground of history. During this dynasty, notwithstanding the internal rebellions of the individual feudal kings which caused the period to be given the name of the "warring kingdoms," Chinese thought develops, dominated, from the economic-social point of view, by the idea that the human order must be in harmony with that of nature, which is in turn regulated by the Lord of Heaven; and from the ethical point of view, by the teaching of a host of philosophers: Confucius, Mongtu, Meit, Chuangtze, who applied this idea to the political-social life of the country.

Once the 3rd dynasty had died out without glory, after various decades of intense struggles against the local princes, the 4th dynasty (Ts'inn, 255-207 B.C.) established itself, which with Duke Ceng, who took the epithet of Scehuangti (= first emperor), after having vanquished feudalism, founded the centralized Chinese Empire, which from 221 B.C. lasted through 23 dynasties and countless reversals of fortune until 1912. To the unification of the territory there followed that of the administration, the aggregation to the State of the greater part of southern China, and the construction of the Great Wall against the incursions of the Huns (Hiong-nou), ancestors of the nomadic Turks and Mongols. But to its blame stands the destruction of the classical books, in hatred of the men of letters who extolled, against the introduced reforms, the ancient tradition of the country. There followed a civil war led by Liupang which brought about the suicide of the sovereign and the beginning, with Liupang himself, of the 5th dynasty (Earlier Han; 202 B.C. - A.D. 8). Of this dynasty the greatest was Wu-ti, who operated against the Huns in upper Mongolia, pushed into eastern Turkestan, the heart of Asia then inhabited by populations of Indo-European stock, crossed by the famous "silk road" which since the times of the Roman Empire was traveled by caravans that carried silk to the West and exchanged it for products that came up from Syria and India toward China; he annexed Kansu and extended his dominion into Korea and Tonkin. Internally there was the rebirth of letters as a reaction against the obscurantism of the Ts'inn, the revival of commerce, the introduction of Buddhism, which had penetrated from the west through Afghanistan and Turkestan, and which, received at first with diffidence as contrary to Chinese ideas on the family and the social state, was later widely welcomed and introduced into the country the models of Greco-Buddhist art.

The 6th dynasty (Later Han, 25-220) founded by Liusiu, a descendant of the Han who had placed himself at the head of the periodically resurgent brigandage, lived amid battles and bitter competitions (the three kingdoms: Lesser Han, lasting 45 years and considered as the 7th dynasty, Wei, Wu) until in 280 the whole country was again united by Semayen, founder of the 8th dynasty (Western Ts'inn, 265-316). It is a period of terrifying rebellions. In 311 the Huns occupy the capital Lo-yang, forcing the dynasty to take refuge in Peking, where the national Empire of southern China was constituted, while in the north ephemeral foreign sovereigns, Hunnic (= Turkish) or Mongol, succeeded one another. Precisely during these troubled times Buddhism, which had entered China from the West as early as the 2nd century B.C., continues its peaceful penetration of the country, where missionaries flock both by the land route of Turkestan and by the sea route, disembarking at Canton and Nanking.

The 9th-13th dynasties (419-589) are called respectively those of the south and of the north and follow one another without claiming any special merit toward the country. During the 6th century there appear for the first time on the scene of Asia, with their own historical name, the Turks (= strong), who found, at China's expense, an Empire that embraced Mongolia (552) and western Turkestan (565) and controlled the center of Asia from the Great Wall to the frontier of Sasanian Persia.

The greatest dynasty in Chinese history is the 14th (T'ang, 618-907), which with Tai-tsong the Great (627-49) again united all China under its scepter, taking back from the Turks their conquests in Mongolia and Turkestan; it had as its capital Singanfu, favored Taoism, and was benevolent toward the Nestorian missionaries, the memory of whose activity is fixed in the commemorative stele called precisely 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-lo-pen, and of the good reception it received from the emperor Tsitsong.

The third T'ang emperor Kao-tsong (650-83) occupied Korea, and Hinan-tsong (712-56) extended the authority of the Empire as far as Tashkent in western Turkestan, near the river Sirdaria. Under him there was the golden age in literature and art, which produced the Buddhist statues of Long-men and of T'ienlong-chen. Buddhism, ever more flourishing, felt the need to know more deeply the original texts of its faith and, with the pilgrim Huang-tsang (600-64), traveled as far as India to bring back the texts of the Mahayanic school.

But by now the Muslim Arabs, already masters of Syria and Egypt, invade Persia, still Mazdean, defeat it in the battles of Qādisijjah (637) and of Nihāwand (640), and bend it to Islam, which it accepts under the Sī'ite form, in opposition to the official Sunnism of the Umayyads; then at the beginning of the 8th century they cross central Asia, reaching the frontier of Chinese Turkestan and constituting a strong bloc that offered to the vanquished a unitary language and religion.

It is likewise to Persia, through Manichaean expansion, that the conversion to Manichaeism (v. MANI) of the Uighur Turks is due, who occupied Mongolia from 744 to 840 and left near Turfan, already rich in valuable Buddhist works of art, Manichaean paintings whose Iranian provenance is evident.

II. THE MONGOL CONQUEST

With the fall of the T'ang dynasty in 907, China relapsed into anarchy; there follow the so-called "Five Little Dynasties" XVᵃ-XIXᵃ (907-60) in the north, while in the south small provincial kingdoms succeed one another, until the XXᵃ Sung dynasty (960-1280) reconstitutes Chinese unity under T'aitsu. This, however, had to give way under the blows of the great Mongol invasion of Temujin, called Genghis Khan, who, after unifying Mongolia, occupied northern China with Peking (1213), eastern Turkestan (1218), and the Ḥwārīzm, and sent (1220) his two lieutenants Gehe and Sabutai to make with 25 thousand horsemen a raid across western Asia and eastern Europe as far as the Crimea and the Danube, but he could not overcome the resistance of Japan (1274-81; v. GIAPPONE). This raid, besides bringing into contact peoples who until then had been unaware of one another, was of particular advantage to Islam in that with Timūr (Tamerlane) it succeeded in exalting the unifying force of Islām, animated by the ardent Semitic faith against the lay indifferentism of the Mongols, to whom it gave a religious law, to which even the sovereign was subject, and a Muslim culture and art with schools and mosques, whence the religion of Muhammad radiated toward the East and toward the West, albeit accommodated to native traditions and superstitions.

To Tamerlane is owed the invasion of India (1398-99), already won over to Islam since 711; to his descendant Bābar, the founding of the Mogul Empire, which lasted from 1526 until the English conquest in 1858 (v. INDIA).

The Mongol army of Genghis Khan fell like an avalanche upon China and overwhelmed the Sung dynasty, which had reigned for 320 years and had favored historical studies and the fine arts, particularly painting and ceramics, which then reached heights never again attained.

The XXIᵃ dynasty was Mongol (Yūan, 1280-1368), founded by Qubilai Khan, son of Ogōdāi, who was in turn the son of Genghis Khan. He soon assimilated the culture of the Chinese, whose splendor he appreciated, was benevolent toward the people, received with honor Marco Polo, who stayed several years at the Mongol court in the capacity of imperial ambassador, respected, as a tolerant Mongol, the followers of the four "prophets": Jesus, Moses, Muhammad and Buddha, and welcomed the Catholic missionaries with John of Montecorvino (1333), who was the first archbishop of Peking. On the Church's contacts with the Mongols, v. CINA.

But the foreign origin of the dynasty and the unsuccessful war against Japan (v.) aroused a national reaction, at whose head placed himself the former bonze Ciuyuang, who under the name of T'aitsu was the founder of the XXIIᵃ dynasty (Ming, 1368-1644).

T'aitsu favored Confucianism, the traditional religion of China, against Buddhism, and reformed the code and the court ritual. To his successor is owed the transfer of the capital from Nanking to Peking and the construction of the great canal between Peking and southern China; to Hsientsung (1463), the repair of the Great Wall, the historic bulwark, though not always effective, against the Mongols.

III. THE EUROPEAN PENETRATION

In the 16th century the penetration of Europeans into China begins. In 1557 the Portuguese establish themselves at Macao; in 1582 Fr. Ricci lands in that city, and in 1601 he betakes himself to Peking, where he dies in 1610. Ten years later the Tartars (Mongols) cross the northern frontier, advance into Liaotung and Shansi, and give Peking over to flames and plunder: the last emperor of the Ming dynasty committed suicide (1643).

The Ming are succeeded by the last dynasty, the 23rd, which is of Manchu origin (Ts'ing, 1644-1912). Of this dynasty the best sovereign was Kang-hsi (1662-1722), who has been called the Louis XIV of China. Intelligent, quick in his decisions, well disposed toward Catholics, from whom he was alienated by the "question of the rites" that was being debated among the Catholic missionaries of the various religious Orders (v. RITI CINESI E MALABARICI), the author of a dictionary, he nevertheless failed to revive the national spirit of China, which ended by shutting itself up within itself, accentuating its contempt for the "barbarians of the West," precisely when the commercial and industrial movement of Europe was knocking at the doors of the Far East, provoking there 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 came a war that ended in 1842 (only to resume in 1848), with the occupation of Hong Kong by England and the dismantling of the forts of Canton.

This humiliation, exasperating the anti-European spirit of the Chinese, led to the rebellion known as that of the T'ai p'ing (= great peace), headed by the fanatical visionary Hang-Sieu-Ts'iuang, who fixed his capital at Nanking and in the course of 15 years devastated 16 provinces and cost the lives of 20,000,000 men; a rebellion that also became anti-European when the foreigners, seeing themselves threatened from close at hand, lent strong support to the Manchu dynasty and in 1864 put an end to the rebellion, which ended by opening the doors of China to Europe, also imposing on it the exchange of diplomatic missions between Peking and the European capitals.

Twenty years later the Sino-Japanese war breaks out (1894-95), which ends for China with the loss of Korea, of Formosa and of the Liaotung peninsula. In 1900 begins the xenophobic movement of the Boxers (fed by the dowager empress Tsehai, although it was 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 was extinguished.

IV. THE CHINESE REPUBLIC

Indeed, three years later the socialist Sun Yat-sen, who had completed his studies in England and America, taking occasion from a popular revolt against the Manchu troops, returned to China, where on 14 February 1912 the Chinese People's Republic was proclaimed in the name of the National Party (Kuo-min-tang), of which, after a brief regency of Sun Yat-sen, Yuan Shih-k'ai was proclaimed president; the latter, for having attempted to restore the monarchy to his own advantage, had to disappear from the political scene (1916). Japan, taking occasion from China's internal turmoil, contested between northerners and southerners, in 1937 declared war on China, occupying Beijing, Nanjing and the coastal cities: then, profiting from the Second World War, it overturned to its own advantage the American and European possessions in Southeast Asia: the Philippines, Hong Kong, Singapore, the Indies (1941-45), together with their other pre-war possessions.

The Chinese communists, who during the Second World War had held themselves apart, not without the usual double game, after the defeat of Japan, with the support of the Russians and under the leadership of Mao Tse-tung, invaded the whole of continental China, forced the national government to take refuge in Formosa and in 1950 proclaimed the communist democratic Republic. The latter, however, by drastically applying the Bolshevik criterion and method of the annihilation of the individual before the power of the state — a criterion utterly contrary to the habits of a people that boasts an ancient civilization and a noble culture — ended up turning into hatred that feeling of sympathy with which it had been greeted at the outset.

The Second World War meant the revolt of the civilization of Asia against Europe, in the Far East; in India, which following the tenacious action of Gandhi obtained its independence from English domination; in Annam, which rose up against the French, and in Indonesia (1949), which rebelled against the Dutch. A new page has begun for the history and civilization of Asia.

Variétés Sinologiques: the oldest Chinese historical book, Shuking, was translated into English by J. Legge, The Shoo hing, the Ch'un t'in and the Tso chuan, Hongkong 1865-72, and into French by L. Couvreur, Chou hing, Tchouen-tsiou et Tsontchouan, Ho-hien-fu 1913-16. - Recent literature: L. Cahun, Introduction à l'histoire de l'Asie: Turcs et Mongols des origines à 1405, Paris 1896; G. Gabrieli, La diffusione dell'islamismo nell'Asia centrale, in Revista di scienza delle religioni, 1 (1906), pp. 116-29; L. Wieger, Textes historiques, 3 vols., Hien-hien 1922; id., La Chine à travers les âges, ibid. 1922; R. Grousset, Le reveil de l'Asie, Paris 1924; H. Maspero, La Chine antique, ibid. 1927; M. Granet, La civilisation chinoise, ibid. 1929; R. Grousset, Histoire de l'Extrême Orient, 3 vols., ibid. 1929; id., Sur les traces du Bouddha, ibid. 1929; H. H. Gowen, Histoire de l'Asie, ibid. 1929 (translated from the English by G. Lepage); F. Pelliot, La haute Asie, ibid. 1931; R. Grousset, L'empire des steppes: Attila, Gengis-hhan, Tamerlan, ibid. 1939; id., L'Asie orientale jusqu'au XVe siècle, ibid. 1941; id., L'empire mongol, ibid. 1941; id., Histoire de la Chine, ibid. 1946; G. Messina, Cristianesimo, buddhismo, manicheismo nell'Asia antico, Rome 1947; B. Fedele, Le stato e la società nell'antica Cina, in Annali Lateranensi, 15 (1951), pp. 145-350. Giovanni Bonardi-Nicola Turchi