In 209 B.C., Manse Everard:
approaches and enters Bactra;
dines at the house of Hipponicus;
visits Chandrakumar at the vihara where he is nearly arrested but escapes;
eavesdrops on the Exaltationists and escapes from the city;
brilliantly defeats the Exaltationists at a temple outside the city.
We commend economy of story-telling. Every chapter advances the plot even the dinner party when Everard's enquiries alert an unwitting agent of the Exaltationists.
14 comments:
Most of the premodern world has village characteristics. Everybody knows everybody and everything about everybody, and strangers stand out -- anonymity is difficult.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Meaning big cities are better places to hide in. With vast masses of people coming and going. Including large numbers of transients.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: yes, but even a fairly major city like Bactra would be quite small, and most of the people in it would be divided into small communities.
Rome at its peak, or Constantinople, or Edo or Baghdad or Chang'an, would be different -- populations pushing a million, and a lot of transients.
Though Edo didn't have any non-Japanese permanently resident, come to that, and it had a surprisingly modern population-registration system.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I was thinking of really large cities, Rome and Constantinople at their peaks, Baghdad, Chang'an, etc. But, let's skip Edo, because of that population registration system.
Ad astra! Sean
The Japanese anticipated a lot of modern developments.
Eg., when the Tokugawas established internal peace, initially there was rapid population growth.
That led to a number of severe problems -- deforestation, for example.
The Japanese readjusted smoothly, cutting fertility rates by modifying household behavior, developing sustainable forestry practices and so forth.
They were also the only people in the world to get disease rates in a large city down to sustainable levels, with births and deaths in Edo in a rough balance, by developing a really effective supply of clean water and recycling every scrap of garbage and human waste.
(And by things like systematically harvesting seaweed as a fertilizer.)
They're really quite good at organization, and always were. Thinking outside the box, not so much.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I've commented before, however, that Tokugawa style efficiency came with a high price. E.g., the gov't was much more autocratic than Western Europeans would have found tolerable. It also meant a highly regimented and rigidly stratified population with precious little social mobility. And Tokugawa style regimentation would discourage innovation, as you said.
So, in many ways, I would say "No, thanks" to that kind of system.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: essentially they had a closed system, which operated to about 100% of its capacity, said capacity not involving fundamental technological innovations. And there was change -- in 1600 the samurai and their daiymo overlords really were a warrior caste. By 1850, they still were in theory but had become bureaucrats and policemen in practice, and the once-despised merchants were pulling strings behind the scenes. It's illuminating to trace how "bushido" became increasingly formalized, unrealistic, and divorced from results over that period.
(From SM Stirling.)
There are eerie parallels between Japan's historical arc and Europe's, allowing for the smaller size of the Japanese archipelago. Middle Ages, Early Modern, fossilized relics of feudalism...
I think this may be why Japan, alone of the East Asian countries, started to successfully modernize in the 19th century.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
And the closed system of Tokugawa Japan could work only as long as Japan was deliberately isolated from the rest of the world. Because regular contact would have inevitably mean social, political, economic, technological, etc., change. AND competition with other nations, as would have been necessary to avoid falling under foreign domination.
Ans I assume those Japanese merchants were increasingly impatient with the restrictions imposed on them by those daimyo and samurai by 1850? And if they were not even able to BE a true warrior caste by 1850, the daimyo and samurai were increasingly irrelevant by then.
It is interesting: why did Japan succeed in modernizing but not China or Korea?
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: I think that Japan modernized more swiftly simply because it was much more -like- Europe.
Eg., in China, the ruling class were the scholar-gentry, who were obsessively focused on the study of the Confucian classics. And Confucianism is anti-modern; it exalts the agricultural, and denigrates both merchants and warriors as respectively parasitic and morally inferior.
In Japan, like Europe (and despite Confucian influence from China) the overlords were warriors with a set of values that put courage and loyalty to superiors over things like kin-relationships. This had very strong resemblances to European aristocratic systems.
And beneath the shell of warrior-aristocrat rule, Japan developed a very European-like urban-mercantile culture dominated by the bourgeoise. By the 1700's Edo (Tokyo) was the biggest city on earth, and its mercantile families had developed an extraordinarily sophisticated system of exchange, credit and so forth.
It was the urban upper classes which dominated Japanese culture -- that's where things like Kabuki theater came from, for instance.
Also, Japan had a strong sense of national consciousness that resembled European identities. China was an empire and a world; the Chinese were xenophobic, but not (until later) nationalistic. Japan was a -nation-.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
What you said about Japan makes sense, and fits in what I've read about Japanese history. In some ways much like Feudal European times.
Yes, I recall the disparaging view taken of military aristocrats and merchants by the Confucian scholar-gentry caste from Han Dynasty times onward in China.
Yes, Japan was a NATION, China was an empire, a WORLD. Theoretically, All Under Heaven, in Chinese parlance, was rightfully ruled by the Emperor, the Son of Heaven.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: yes, theoretically China ruled the world, via the Son of Heaven, and all non-Chinese were tributary. It was a 'universal state' from an early period in theory, and from Chin/Han times in fact, with intervals of disunion. But unity was always an -aspiration- in Chinese politics.
The Japanese had a very vivid sense of the -difference- between themselves and all outsiders.
Their Emperor was the descendant of Amaterasu-Omikami, the Sun Goddess, and Japan was the Land of the Gods, unlike all other places.
In the 1930's, Neo-Shintoists translated this into an aspiration to rule the world, or at least Asia, but they were handicapped by the difficulty (nearly impossibility) of outsiders "becoming Japanese". Japanese are -extremely- conscious of ancestry.
The Chinese, by contrast, were fully aware (especially at the educated-elite level) that they had incorporated and assimilated many non-Han groups in the process of their expansion from the original heartland in the Yellow River plain since Shang times.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Agree, what you said about the universal extent of Chinese ambitions and aspirations since Ch'in/Han times. But, unlike Japan, no single ruling house was permanently believed to have the right to reign. The Chinese worked out the Mandate of Heaven theory of legitimacy to allow for those periods of disunity you mentioned.
I read a biography of Emperor Showa many years ago in which the author discussed how the Emperor himself did not believe he was descended from the Japanese gods. What Japan was fortunate to have was a strongly rooted sense of dynasty legitimacy/stability.
Ah! The Greater East Co-Prosperity Sphere! We know how well that worked out for Japan!
The Tibetans, and the Uighurs are currently the most recent victims of that Han assimilation process. And, unlike in the past with other peoples, at a far more ruthlessly accelerated pace.
And I thought just now of David Wingrove's CHUN KUO series, set in an era where all Earth was conquered by China.
Ad astra! Sean
Post a Comment