Empires Of The Word Part 9

Dealing with foreign devils.

From the sixteenth century until the present day, the Chinese government has increasingly come into contact with j.a.pan and a series of European powers, culminating in the first approaches of the USA; these resulted in wars, and the planting of foreign communities in trading colonies. For overseas Chinese communities, the effects were complex: they sometimes suffered from China's measures aimed at impoverishing and disarming foreigners; but they also profited from opportunities that were provided by the foreigners' enterprising new developments, especially those of Britain.

In the early sixteenth century, j.a.panese pirates were a persistent problem. China imposed an embargo on j.a.pan. For good measure, in 1522 it also banned all commercial voyages to the Nan-yang, converting all overseas Chinese into smugglers or pirates. Meanwhile, European explorers were increasingly nosing about China's seas, looking for trading concessions. In 1557 the Portuguese were granted an enclave on the coast at Macao; this turned out to be sufficient to fob off their intrusions in the long term. But it added a further burden to the overseas Chinese, who seemed now to be at a disadvantage even as against the dastardly European folangji;* the ban on Chinese voyages to the Nan-yang was finally lifted in 1566.

Although the advent of the Spanish and Dutch, following the Portuguese, provided capacious new markets for the now long-resident Chinese traders of the East Indies, lack of clear support from China meant that Chinese traders were always at a disadvantage. In Luzon, in their newly Spanish colony of the Philippines, the Chinese population was ma.s.sacred in 1602 and again in 1639, with utter impunity. Nevertheless, the trader community was beginning to be seen as a useful force: when the Ming dynasty was toppled by the Manchus in 1644, the last loyalist strongholds were found in the maritime communities of Zhejiang, Fujian and Guangdong, and later, until 1682, offsh.o.r.e in Vietnam and the Philippines. They suffered for their loyalty, of course, with the Manchus literally 'clearing the coasts' of all their inhabitants, moving them miles inland to prevent any support to mariners. Perhaps also-since the Manchu invaders through victory became the legitimate authority, the Qing dynasty-they laid the basis for a certain distrust felt ever since by China's central government towards its overseas community. This was the seed time for the Chinese Triads, and secret societies.

But there were new forces loose in the Nan-yang, and the Chinese were ready to profit from them. When Europeans were banned from Thailand in 1688, the Chinese became its princ.i.p.al traders and economic consultants through the eighteenth century. They were also well ensconced in the Malay kingdom of Joh.o.r.e. But in the same era, they found abundant opportunities for profit in collusion with the new Dutch VOC (East India Company); so much so that they suffered another major ma.s.sacre at Dutch hands, in Java in 1740. And when the British started their own East Indian enterprise, on the empty Malayan island of Penang in 1785, it was the Chinese who volunteered to populate it. Likewise, they were in the forefront in Raffles' development of Singapore after 1819. As British power spread across Malaya and northern Borneo, and the Dutch interest farther south, into Sumatra, southern Borneo and Celebes, the Chinese interests accompanied them. They liked very well the British inst.i.tution of free ports.

Pressure was now building up from trading interests in France and Britain on China itself. The French concern centred on Chinese possessions in Vietnam, but the British dealt more directly, and fiercely, with the Qing government, in defence of their opium trade out of Bengal: the result was the cession of Hong Kong (1842, enlarged in 1860 and 1898) and foreign access to five more treaty ports, including Shanghai (1842). Although the most prominent of these were not in Fujian, their cla.s.sic recruiting area, the overseas Chinese now had guaranteed access to the mainland. Links grew, and for the first time since the seventeenth century direct involvement with the mainland became an important part of overseas Chinese trade. Nan-yang was coming home.

Whys and wherefores.

Now that we have surveyed the full course of the histories of Egyptian and Chinese, we can consider what the major properties could be which might explain their unshakeable stability in the face of time and invasion.

Certain obvious possibilities can be eliminated at once, since in them Egyptian and Chinese are at opposite extremes.

In the most evident linguistic aspect, the structural type of their languages, Egyptian and Chinese were intrinsically always very different, and have developed in different directions over their recorded histories. And looking at them a little more abstractly, we can see too that they were also quite unlike in another aspect of their linguistic environments: their degree of similarity or difference to their neighbouring languages.

Egyptian remained throughout its history a highly inflected language with complex verbal morphology, and flexible word order, though it did develop somewhat over the millennia into a more a.n.a.lytic structure, with separable articles and personal p.r.o.nouns becoming const.i.tuents of noun and verb phrases, and more rigid word order. Furthermore, the languages that might have been expected to influence or replace it, especially Libyan and Aramaic, were typologically similar to it-just as was its ultimate nemesis, Arabic. There seems no reason in linguistic structure, absolute or relative, to explain its stability.

Old Chinese, by contrast, was an extreme example of an isolating language, its roots, monosyllabic and marked with significant tone patterns, largely functioning as independent words, and using word order as the most significant aspect of syntax. Again, there was some change visible over the millennia: but Chinese moved to become less a.n.a.lytic, with longer words developing on the basis of the previously detachable roots, and some of the roots changing into grammatical morphemes, marking such things as plurality, copular links between subject and predicate, or markers of relative and subordinate clauses. Unlike Egyptian, which was challenged by languages of its own type, the threat to Chinese came from the Altaic languages, which were, as we have seen, fundamentally different in type. In fact, where it was in contact with languages of similar type (in the south), Chinese was the incoming language, and tended to replace them.

Religious outlook is another important aspect of cultures, where we might look for a clue to their stability, which might then be reflected in language. We have seen (Chapter 3, 'Second interlude: The shield of faith', p. 86) that especially in the Middle East attachment to a religion could preserve a language against the odds. But here again, Egypt and China diverged.

Faith in an afterlife was important to Egyptians: they deliberately made their tombs the most permanent part of their built environment, and we find them in their literature very much concerned with what they could know about life after death, judgement and individual survival. Certainly they preserved their religion for most of the lifespan of their language, and they no more actively preached it abroad than they attempted to spread their language when they enlarged the boundaries of their power. But aspects of their faith did spread without the language none the less: their mother-G.o.ddess Isis became one of the most widely revered deities in the Roman empire, and has been seen as a root of the Christian cult of Mary as Mother of G.o.d. And paradoxically, when the Christians suppressed the Egyptian cult, Egyptian as a language took on a new life as the local language of Christianity. Egyptian religion was certainly favourable to the survival of the Egyptian language, but the two became detached long before the end.

The Chinese att.i.tude to religion was very different, mostly characterised by down-to-earth practicality. There were two major traditions. One followed Confucius (Kung Fu-zi, 'Master Kung'), taking a highly socialised and worldly definition of virtue; the other followed the Dao (, 'way') of Lao-zi and Zhuang-zi, seeking to merge with the patterns discerned in nature. Aside from popular animist beliefs, no fulfilment of any Chinese yearnings for another world was available until Buddhism began to penetrate from India in the first millennium AD. (This, for the Chinese, was a Western religion.) It prospered in the troublous times of the third, fourth and fifth centuries, and then became the established faith of the Tang dynasty that returned strong universal government to China; the Pali and Sanskrit cla.s.sics were translated in Chinese, and Buddhism became a naturalised Chinese faith.

Buddhism, with its emphasis on suffering, resignation and the ultimate unimportance of the daily round of life, was never a positive influence on kings who must preserve their realms against external aggression. No Buddhist king in its homeland of India, not even Asoka, managed to found a dynasty that would endure more than a couple of generations; and the strange attraction of Buddhism to invading Altaic peoples, especially the Tabgach and Genghis Khan's Mongols, brought their soldierly virtues to an early end once they had settled in China. As Grousset remarks: 'These ferocious warriors, once touched by the grace of the bodhisattva, became so susceptible to the humanitarian precepts of the sramanas [i.e. Buddhist monks] as to forget not only their native belligerence but even neglect their self-defence.'23 But there was one aspect of Egyptian and Chinese religion which was similar, and is probably connected with the gross survivability of their languages in situ over many millennia. This is the att.i.tude that each of them took to their emperor, and his relation to his land, his people and their G.o.ds.

Both these empires achieved early unity under a single ruler, Egypt under the legendary Menes, China under the historical Shi Huang Di. Although afterwards there were often divisions, and compet.i.tion among the different kingdoms, the two civilisations never found such disunity tolerable: their histories, as we have seen, distinguished firmly between prosperous periods, when a single royal house controlled the whole country, and interregna, which may have been perfectly peaceable, but suffered from the cardinal flaw that the country was divided. These were very much centred countries, and the centre was not a place (each of them had many different imperial capitals-Thebes, Memphis, Tanis, Leontopolis, Sais in Egypt, Chang-an, Luoyang, Nanjing, Hangzhou, Beijing in China) but a royal court. In each case, the king's position* was sanctified by the national faith. The Egyptian pharaoh was seen as the incarnation (am) of kingship, maintaining a direct relation with the G.o.ds on behalf of all his people of the Two Lands. Likewise the Chinese emperor was Son of Heaven (tian zi), guaranteeing order in the Central Kingdom.

Both rulers were absolute, deriving their sovereignty not from the people but the G.o.ds. Nevertheless each was subject to an explicit moral constraint. In Egypt, this was called maR 'at, 'order', the moral and natural law. The pharaoh had a duty to put maR 'at in place of jazfat, 'wrong', in his kingdom. The Chinese emperor had a duty to rule justly, and abstain from oppression; only so long as he did this, according to the influential doctrine of Mencius (Meng-zi), could he retain the Mandate of Heaven (tian ming), i.e. legitimacy: the oppressive ruler had forfeited his right to rule, and could be justly deposed by the people.

Both Egypt and China, therefore, had the same simple but sustaining political doctrine, which based the country's ident.i.ty on the rule of a single emperor, and based the emperor's sovereignty on righteousness. The national philosophy therefore contained a built-in theodicy: the proof of a ruler's righteousness was his success in maintaining a ruling dynasty. The G.o.ds were ensuring that only righteous monarchs would be successful, and so, whether the king was failing or prospering, all was right with the world, and the Egyptian or Chinese citizen, whether recent interloper or long-standing resident, could give the system his loyalty.

This doctrine was extemely fitting for a stable long-term culture, with the linguistic consequences that we have seen. But it could be maintained that it was the result, rather than the cause, of the culture's stability. At least as revealing, from a more outward, objective point of view, is the gross fact of population density.

In absolute size, Egypt and China are very different. Although they are comparable in terms of their duration, their populations and areas are of quite different orders. Egypt's population in ancient times has been estimated at 2 million in the Old Kingdom, rising to 8 million over the three thousand years to the Roman conquest. The area inhabited, the Nile valley and the Fayyum, encompa.s.ses about 30,000 square kilometres. By contrast, Chinese census figures (first available in AD 2) show 57 million, rising to over 80 million in 1000, and over 1200 million at the recent turn of the millennium. The area of 'China inside the Wall' (excluding Inner Mongolia and Manchuria, and western areas such as Gansu and Qinghai, always very spa.r.s.ely inhabited) amounts to some 4.5 million square kilometres.24 The Chinese language, and Chinese history, has had fifty times more adherents than Egyptian, and 150 times the s.p.a.ce in which to act.

This immediately leads, however, to another aspect that they do have in common-high density of population. From the figures quoted for Egypt, the population density would be 65 rising to 250 per square kilometre over the period. China is much more varied in its environments; however, the census figures make it possible to abstract a little from the situation in the country as a whole: in the Han period they show a density of 58 per square kilometre in the valley of the Huang-he, and 12 per square kilometre in the lower valley of the Yangtze. A millennium later, in 1250, ca.n.a.ls linked the two river systems, and more importantly the north had sustained invasions from Xiongnu, Tabgach, Khitan, Jurchen and Mongol: in this period, the lower Huang-he population had declined by 45 per cent, whereas on the northern bank of the Yangtze it had increased by 176 per cent and twice that (337 per cent) on the southern bank. This puts the two regions of China much on a par, with 30-40 per square kilometre; each, however, less than half the density found on the Nile.25 Compare this with the densities in the age of Constantine (fourth century AD)26 estimated for Italy-20 per square kilometre-and for eastern Anatolia-19.*

By ancient standards, then, the density of population in Egypt and China was something truly exceptional. This too must have supported the long-term stability of their languages. The sheer numbers of speakers in their populated regions gave them immunity against swamping by incomers speaking foreign languages, even when they could not deny them entry. Strength in numbers reinforced languages already b.u.t.tressed by their cultural prestige, and the robust inst.i.tution of a monarchy endorsed by heaven.

The self-sufficient, resilient character of Egyptian and Chinese is revealed in many situations where they, or their speakers, had to interact with foreigners and their linguistic traditions. These dense, centralised societies were not always impervious to foreign influence, even in the representation and use of their own languages. But for millennia they had sufficient equipoise, or sufficient inertia, to keep the outsiders under their own cultural control.

In the remainder of this chapter, we shall consider three aspects of their cultures where foreigners were bound to have an impact: the history of writing, their knowledge of and att.i.tudes to foreign powers, and their responses to invasion. In every case, the languages' steady continuity depended on a resolute refusal to see themselves, or conduct themselves, on others' terms.

Holding fast to a system of writing.

Copy thy father and thy ancestors ... Behold their words remain in writing. Open, that thou mayest read and copy wisdom. The skilled man becomes learned.

Instruction for King Merikare, line 35 (Egyptian, mid-twentieth century BC)27 Shu bujin yan yan bujin yi Writing cannot express all words, words cannot encompa.s.s all ideas.

Yi Jing (Cla.s.sic of Changes), Xi Ci Appendix

(attrib. Confucius), i.12 (Chinese, pre-fifth century BC).

Egypt's writing system is strange in that it has no known precursors. The first hieroglyphic inscriptions, on seals, cosmetics palettes, epitaphs and monuments, though they may be short, are well formed in the system that was to persist for the next 3500 years. They use pictures phonetically, making an ill.u.s.trated word's characteristic consonants do multiple duty, as if a picture of a knife were to stand in English not just for 'knife', but also for 'niffy', 'nephew' and 'enough'. Nevertheless, the characteristic style is prefigured in ill.u.s.trations made by artists before the advent of writing, suggesting that the system was set up on an indigenous basis.28 The usual a.s.sumption is that the inspiration came from Mesopotamia, where writing had developed out of accounting tallies, using similar principles of phonetics, a few hundred years before. There were ancient trade routes along the Wadi Araba which connected the Nile valley with the Red Sea, and for all we know the origin may have been due to a genius like that of Sequoya, the illiterate Cherokee who in the nineteenth century AD took the fact of English literacy as a proof of concept, and proceeded then to develop a syllabary for his own language from first principles.

However it was, the system was immediately standardised in an Egyptian style of ill.u.s.tration. Although cursive forms of the hieroglyphs were developed for daily uses, a rigid pictorial exact.i.tude was kept up for monumental inscriptions. This was maintained despite the fact that the materials used by the Egyptians, paint on walls or ink on papyrus laid on with a brush, would have permitted total freedom of style. The practice of fluid, stylish calligraphy never began in Egypt. In their steadfast approach, Egyptian scribes were very different from the masters of such systems as Chinese characters or Mayan glyphs.

Furthermore, although new hieroglyphs were added from time to time, the basic principle of the script, the punning use of the consonants in words pictured, clarified by the use of more pictures to determine the range of meaning and sound, did not change. We find experimental uses of the hieroglyphs to found an alphabet at quarry sites in the Sinai peninsula; and ultimately radically new uses were made of a small set of the symbols by their trading partners, the Phoenicians, to found their alphabet, the apparent progenitor of all the alphabets in the world today. But while some of these foreigners were taking perverse inspiration from them, the Egyptians themselves never modified the hieroglyphic system to write their own language.

This resistance to script reform, a trait shared by the Chinese, really shows no more than that these cultures had already-both very early by regional and global standards-achieved a stable incorporation of writing into their way of life. Asking for a replacement of the writing system in such a literate administration was no more practicable than the various attempts to introduce spelling reform into modern English. It could only become feasible if the systems of education and administration were so severely disrupted that the succession was broken, and a new start could be made. This never happened in Egypt until the country was taken over by cultures with rival administrative traditions, Persian, Greek and Roman. Then the use of Egyptian in administration was undermined, and replaced by Aramaic and Greek. But even so, it was only when Christianity provided a whole new use for literacy that Egyptian could make the leap to writing in a ready-made, alphabetic script. In China, the change to alphabetic writing has never happened at all, despite the 1905 abolition of the imperial examination system, which had indeed been the central educational and administrative inst.i.tution, and despite all the radical speculation about the future of the character system in the first half of the twentieth century, which had even included the People's Republic's authorisation of a new system for romanisation, Pinyin (used throughout this book).

The Egyptian scribe, zaRaw, represented from the earliest doc.u.mented times the acme of ambition. This is amply confirmed by the kinds of texts that were copied in the scribal schools: Behold there is no profession which is not governed;

It is only the learned man who rules himself.

Set to work and become a scribe, for then thou shalt be a leader of men.

The profession of scribe is a princely profession; his writing materials and his rolls of books bring pleasantness and riches.30

In the Satire on Trades, the scribe boasts: I have never seen a sculptor sent on an emba.s.sy,

nor a bronze-founder leading a mission.

This complacency generated an extreme conservatism that may ultimately have been Egypt's undoing. Literacy in Egyptian remained the preserve of a small and highly educated caste long after the demise of the last independent Egyptian state, in fact until the Christians adapted the Greek alphabet for the language: this step was taken fully a thousand years after the rest of the Mediterranean, including the a.s.syrians and Babylonians, had adopted alphabetic writing.

But as if to show that there is no natural term to the life of a pictographic system in an alphabetic age, the Chinese system has survived even the turmoil of the twentieth century. It has persisted, essentially unchanged despite some simplification in penmanship, since Shi Huang Di's imposed standardisation in the third century BC of a system that was already over a millennium old. This system established a particular stylised picture, or a combination of phonetic pun plus determiner, in a notional square box, for each word or root in the language. Once established, it was less phonetically based than the Egyptian system, and so its practical use was even less affected by the phonetic changes in the language that have come about over the following two and a half millennia. Scholarly Chinese will have watched with amused unconcern the modifications, truncations and additions conceived by foreigners to produce the j.a.panese kana-two sets of forty-eight simplified outlines chosen to represent the full set of j.a.panese syllables-and the Korean han-gul-a true phonetic alphabet, but designed to harmonise on the page with Chinese characters. Each was an original solution to the poor match between Chinese characters and their own polysyllabic, agglutinative and non-tonal languages-but this must have seemed no problem for Chinese itself.

In fact, in the last two and a half millennia the Chinese have become aware of a number of alphabetic scripts, conceived quite independently of their characters. The Buddhists brought the Siddha version of the Brahmi alphabet from India, and the Muslims who converted many of the Western peoples brought variants of the Aramaic scripts and Arabic. The Mongol emperor Kublai Khan even commissioned an alphabetic script for his empire, to be used officially for all its literate languages, Mongolian, Chinese, Turkic and Persian. Called 'Phagspa, it was based on the Tibetan version of Brahmi, and promulgated in 1269. It was a version of the Tibetan script converted to be written vertically (though unlike Chinese characters in columns from left to right), and in deference to Chinese taste in rather a squared-off form. However, it never caught on, and was discontinued, along with the Mongolian dynasty, just a century later.

The great advantage of the Chinese system is its masterly representation of the highest common factor of structure and meaning shared by all the Chinese dialects, many of which are not mutually comprehensible. All the modern dialects, and wenyan as well, are built on a common set of meaningful syllables, which may be p.r.o.nounced and strung together in different orders in the various dialects, but are still recognisable in graphic form. By and large, every one of these syllables is represented in writing by a single character, and so the meaning of a written Chinese text will be relatively clear to any literate speaker of any dialect. No alphabetic script, based perforce on the sounds of a language, could now be so conveniently neutral in terms of all the different Chinese dialects, unless perhaps it were designed on historical principles with a knowledge of all varieties of Chinese. Such a tour de force would have to be a miracle of subtlety and ambiguity. And so the traditional characters survive.

Despite the difficulty of learning the system, in China mere literacy did not remain the elite accomplishment it always was in Egypt. Different levels would have been attained according to the wealth and opportunities of the family, but poor families continued to throw out the occasional intellectual star. Literacy skills were still prized in China, but at a higher functional level. So the status of the scribe in Egypt corresponds in Chinese society more with that of graduates of the higher levels of the imperial compet.i.tive examinations. These were held by and large every third year from AD 622 to 1905.

The only possible Chinese adoption from foreigners in respect of writing concerns not writing itself, but the a.n.a.lysis of p.r.o.nunciation. The traditional fsnqie system cla.s.sifies a character's p.r.o.nunciation in respect of its initial consonant and its rhyme plus tone, but the dengyun-xue "study of graded rhymes" sub-cla.s.sifies these const.i.tuent parts phonetically. This invention of Chinese scholars of the seventh and eighth centuries AD came about very much under the influence of the subtle phonetic a.n.a.lysis of the Sanskrit p.r.o.nunciation, derived from the Buddhist tradition.31 Even so, the a.n.a.lysis of the rhyme part of a character-syllable into its const.i.tuent semi-vowels, vowels and consonants had to await the more thoroughgoing approach of alphabetisation, and specifically romanisation, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.32 There was, then, a clear reluctance to continue the development of Egyptian and Chinese pictographic systems in the direction of reducing their complexity, despite awareness of simpler systems that foreigners were using. The civilisations were built around respect for tradition, and in particular the traditional difficulties in joining the literate cla.s.s, who held the reins of government.

Foreign relations.

Both Egypt and China mostly lacked an active posture towards their neighbours, and towards parts of the world farther away.

Egypt early relied on foreign trade for some of its staple goods, particularly timber. But it secured this through intermediaries, mainly Phoenicians in the third and second millennia, later Greeks. It had control of Palestine and Syria around the end of the second millennium and the beginning of the first, but as we have seen did not actively spread its language (or its culture) to build permanent links there. It never spread out along the Mediterranean coast to the west: population movement was all in the reverse direction, and the city of Cyrene, when it was established c.630 BC, was a Greek, not an Egyptian venture. It may have been more active southward, attempting to incorporate much of Kush (and its gold mines) permanently, and sending some of its own expeditions down the Red Sea to trade with the fabulous Land of Punt, perhaps in Somalia. Although there was seen to be cultural value in unifying the Black Lands, flooded by the Nile, and surrounded by desert wastes on either side, the net effect of these efforts was small. The populations in these harsh regions were just too scant. Politically, the most striking result was the reverse invasion of Egypt in the late eighth century-by Kus.h.i.te enthusiasts for Egyptian culture.

China was in a very different position from Egypt, by an irony of fate having to defend an intrinsically open border in the north and west, but actively developing and colonising across a naturally occluded frontier in the south. The coasts to the east were seen more as another border, which left China open to pirate attack, rather than offering an opportunity for maritime expansion.

But beyond the encircling zones of barbarians, there was a sense that farther to the west, in India and the Persian and Roman empires, there were foreigners worthy of considerably more respect. In fact the Chinese court sent one or two emissaries to discover and report on these exotic civilisations; and Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Nestorian Christianity and Islam all penetrated China under Tang rule, to the extent that the first three suffered official persecution in 845. (Only Buddhism and Islam survived it.) The Chinese emperor Yi Zong famously impressed the Muslim visitor Ibn Wahab in 872 with his knowledge of the princ.i.p.al facts of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. But the only material links with the countries that had produced them came through foreign traders visiting Chinese ports. Until the sixteenth century these were all from the Indian Ocean economies, Arabia, Persia and India.

The case of India was different. Once Buddhism had reached China (in the first century AD, through Indian initiative) and begun to establish itself, Chinese monks starting with Fa-Xian in the late fourth century were drawn to make the journey from China themselves, sometimes in stealthy disregard of the law. The most famous of them, Xuan-Zang, had to depart illegally and furtively in 627, but was able to return to an official welcome from the emperor Tai Zong in 644.* It became fashionable to fund large-scale centres for translation of Buddhist literature. There was also a series of expeditions by Chinese monks to study and gather literature in India-fifty-six are known before the tenth century, of whom thirty-four travelled by sea from Guangzhou (Canton) and twenty-two overland past the Taklamakan desert and the Hindu Kush.33 All this must represent the greatest sustained initiative that China undertook before the modern period to make contact with outside civilisations.

There was a lasting effect on Chinese from the many thousands of new terms which the translations produced, usually building on existing simple Chinese words but combining them in new ways. Three characteristic examples are gu-qu, 'past', xian-zai, 'present', and wei-lai, 'future', each built of two elements: pa.s.sing/go, appear/be-there, not-yet/come. Each precisely reflects the metaphor of a corresponding Pali word: at.i.ta, paccuppanna, anagata. Such words became central to active Chinese vocabulary.

There is an irony here, or rather a significant correspondence between grammar and government. Other countries and languages may simply have borrowed some mangled version of the Sanskrit or Pali words, and supplemented the language that way. This is what was happening all over South-East Asia, even though its languages were just as different from the Indian languages as was Chinese. (See Chapter 5, p. 183.) But the fact that new words were reconstructions in Chinese of the concepts derived from Sanskrit or Pali words is of a piece with China's general strategy in conducting its foreign relations: to attempt always to keep them under domestic control.

This attempt to maintain control was also a feature of China's management of its front and back doors, the 'Silk Roads' round the Taklamakan desert to Dunhuang and the ports along the eastern seaboard. Although China was prepared to defend the security of the Silk Roads against the neighbouring barbarians from Roman times onward, the importance of the route was gradually eclipsed by the growth of the maritime trade. The maritime route was actually closed to private trade during the three centuries of the Ming period from around 1368, but when allowed this trade was concentrated mostly at Guangzhou (Canton), with some compet.i.tion allowed from the more northerly port of Quanzhou in Fujian. From 1757 to 1842 and 1949 to 1979, Guangzhou enjoyed a monopoly, continuing the Chinese government preference for monitoring and easy taxation. This was forcibly broken open by European and American interests in the intervening century.

A strange exception to the general policy of the Chinese-which was to admit foreign trade on terms, but not to initiate it or to seek diplomatic contact with foreign powers-comes in the apparently unique case of Admiral Zheng-He, who undertook seven great voyages round the Indian Ocean between 1405 and 1433, reaching the Red Sea and Mogadishu.

In the Indian subcontinent Zheng-He's attention was mostly concentrated on ri Lanka, where on his second voyage in 1411 he is known to have left a trilingual inscription on a stone tablet (prepared in advance in China) in Chinese, Tamil and Persian.

It conveys greetings from the Chinese Ming emperor, and in its three languages expresses respect to the Buddha, the G.o.d Tenavarai-Nenavar and Allah respectively, listing ma.s.sive offerings in gold, silver, silk, etc. These expeditions were evidently not mere courtesy visits, and have a certain dramatic similarity to the notorious behaviour of Europeans abroad: faced with resistance, the Chinese abducted the ri Lankan king and took him forcibly to the emperor in Nanjing, but then returned him, along with the most holy relic in the island, the Sacred Tooth of Buddha. This resulted in a Chinese claim of sovereignty over ri Lanka, which was actually respected through payment of tribute by the ri Lankans until 1459.

Despite their apparent success, such imperialist initiatives ceased abruptly after Zheng-He's final voyage, and were never renewed. No one really knows why. China's foreign policy returned to its characteristic inward-looking and defensive stance.

Nevertheless, as seen above ('Beyond the southern sea', p. 146), Chinese expatriates have given China, and the Chinese, a bridgehead into South-East Asia which its government never looked for-and indeed discouraged over many centuries. Now, in all the major countries of South-East Asia, Chinese-language communities are the princ.i.p.al source of investment capital.

In the Philippines, the overseas Chinese make up 1% of the country's population, but control over half of the stock market. In Indonesia the proportions are 4% and 75% respectively, in Malaysia 32% and 60%. In Thailand the overseas Chinese account for at least half of the wealth ... According to one estimate, the 51 million overseas Chinese control an economy worth $700 billion-roughly the same size as the 1.2 billion mainlanders.34 Growing Chinese-dominated businesses will have the opportunity of communicating with one another in Chinese, whether Mandarin or Southern Min; and so for the first time the Chinese language has potential for expansion outside the mainland. China itself is no longer keeping its distance from its fellow-Chinese who have chosen to make their living abroad, and it is possible that this new, more diplomatic face of China will become openly influential, perhaps even hegemonic.

China's disciples.

Although China was always reserved in accepting any influence from foreigners, its smaller neighbours who achieved some level of settled civilisation and independent statehood were nothing like so circ.u.mspect in their acceptance of influence from China. The states and peoples of Korea, j.a.pan and Vietnam adopted this position. Each of them spoke a language unrelated to Chinese. Each of them had to resist sporadic Chinese attempts at conquest (though j.a.pan suffered this only in the first flush of Mongol imperialism). But each first learnt to read and write not in their own languages but in cla.s.sical Chinese. And each developed writing systems for their own languages by transforming or supplementing the use of Chinese characters.

Unlike Chinese with Sanskrit and Pali, they each adopted vocabulary from Chinese as it was, regardless of the fact that it did not fit well within the sound systems of their own languages. For them, after all, China represented the fountainhead of advanced civilisation.* As a result their languages became full of Chinese loan vocabulary, modified for their own p.r.o.nunciation, and have remained so ever since. They soon had as clear an appreciation of the meanings of the syllables they borrowed, and the characters a.s.sociated with them, as the Chinese had themselves-indeed, perhaps clearer, since they also used the same characters to represent words in their own languages, related only by meaning.

This faithful adoption and incorporation of Chinese language has provided a useful time capsule of a kind for modern comparative research on the history of Chinese. These three 'Sinoxenic' dialects, Sino-Korean, Sino-j.a.panese, Sino-Vietnamese, are made up of syllables and words borrowed from Chinese. They are so complete that it is possible to use them to read out whole texts in wenyan. As such, they have preserved an echo of Chinese as it was p.r.o.nounced when the words were borrowed. In fact, in the case of j.a.panese-complex as ever-there are three distinct echoes: go-on, kan-on and to-on, depending on whether the word was borrowed in the sixth century, the eighth century or early in the second millennium. So the Mandarin word nei, 'within', written , is now noi, p.r.o.nounced in the sixth tone in Vietnamese, nae in Korean and dai or nai in j.a.panese. These antiquated styles proved vital when in 1954 the Swedish scholar Bernhard Karlgren came up with a reconstruction of the sounds of seventh-century Chinese.35 This avid cultural discipleship of its neighbours could be considered a major secondary spread of the Chinese language. It is often compared to the role of Latin within English and other modern European languages, or Arabic within Persian and Turkish, but it is really more comparable with the fundamental role of Sumerian within Akkadian. Chinese was a language quite unrelated to its disciple languages, and totally unlike them structurally. Nevertheless, its writing system became the root of their literacy, its words became inescapable for any sort of educated discourse, and its literature was adopted as the foundation for their own education system.

With their neighbours so in awe of them, it must have been hard for the Chinese to see their superiority as anything but a universal, objective fact.

Coping with invasions: Egyptian undercut.

Foreigners from the desert have become people every where ... Indeed, the desert is spread throughout the land. The cultivated districts are destroyed. Barbarians from outside have come to Egypt ... There are really no people anywhere ...

Admonitions of Ipuwer, lines i.5,iii.lff. (Egyptian, late third millennium BC)36 This is from a pessimistic a.n.a.lysis of Egyptian society, which became a literary cla.s.sic. (The one surviving ma.n.u.script was copied out some thousand years after the text was written.) It shows that even early in its recorded history conservatives were bewailing barbarian influxes into Egypt, which as they saw it disrupted the social order: 'Serfs have become owners ... She who looked at her face in the water is now the owner of a mirror ...' The word for barbarian is pidjeti, 'bowman', bringing his desert home (hrswt) with him, and pointedly contrasted with real people, proper Egyptians.

This text pre-dates any foreign incursions into Egypt that we know about, but evidently the immigrant, particularly unwelcome if he was a social success, was already a stock figure. Yet this ancient Egyptian insularity is telling us more about perennial att.i.tudes than any actual crisis for patriots: the persistence of the Egyptian language shows that the country was able to absorb all the foreign immigration of the following two millennia without losing its central character and traditions.

It is an interesting feature of Egyptian history that, until the advent of the Muslims, they suffered no overwhelming nomadic invasions comparable to the coming of the Amorites and Aramaeans to Mesopotamia. Yet we know that Libyan immigration was significant over many centuries, and among Egyptian dynasties at least the Hyksos kings and the Kus.h.i.tes were foreigners who installed themselves by force. Why, then, so little effect on Egypt's language and culture? Part of the reason must have been the high density of the Egyptians on the ground (pace Ipuwer): there were so many of them, benefiting from the bounty of the Nile, that interlopers were doomed to merge.