There is a problem for the reader of books about China and the Chinese, or of Chinese poems in translation, due to the variation in spelling of Chinese names and terms. This is caused by the many systems of transliteration used in the past when rendering Chinese names into English. It may make it difficult for the reader who knows no Chinese to recognise the same person place or term in different guises.

Modern China uses the Pinyin system (e.g. Beijing for Peking) for Romanization of names, which is still unfamiliar and awkward for most readers in the West who are used to the older systems.

I have therefore used traditional spellings in this book so that readers can recognise the names when referring to the many translations of Chinese poetry that already exist in English, and to older historical and biographical texts.

However readers wanting to refer to modern Atlases of China, for place names, or to other modern texts, will find a comprehensive list of equivalent names and terms towards the end of the book. This includes a Pinyin spelling for each name or term and for place-names the modern province name to assist when referring to an Atlas.

The T’ang Dynasty and the Tao

The Way - cannot be told.

TheName - cannot be named.

The nameless is the Way of Heaven and Earth.

The named is Matrix of the Myriad Creatures.

Eliminate desire to find the Way.

Embrace desire to know the Creature.

The Tao Te Ching I

Exhibit the unadorned.

Hold fast to the uncarved block.

Avoid the thought of Self.

Eliminate desire.

The Tao Te Ching XIX

The Way has no name.

The uncarved block is small

But no one dare claim it.

When it is carved there are names.

When there are names it is time to stop.

The Tao Te Ching XXXII

Introduction

The West is a sharpened blade. Western reason and Science have had as their goal the precise and the definitive, the form without shadow, the known and the named. The Classical aspiration was to describe and to understand, to define and to capture. The aspirations of the East were different.

Mathematics is the primary language by which the West has attempted to describe the approximate and imprecise. The formula encapsulates theory. What cannot be visualised can still be predicted with high degrees of accuracy. The predictability of outcomes and the consistency of experimental results are the core of science. The predictive capability of science is the platform for technology.

The East took an alternative path. Ancient India and China accepted the primacy of the unnameable, the imprecise, the evanescent, and the indistinct. The essences of Taoism and Buddhism are the Vortex and the Void, respectively, that which cannot be captured, and that which cannot be described, the nameless and the featureless.

Eastern religion has strongly influenced Western religion and art, but the direction that Western society has taken has been towards exact definition framed in secular language. Society has been defined by the search for a coherent legal system, and Science by the search for truth embodied in exact descriptions and universal laws. Of the ways of thought in China Taoism in particular has prized instead the evanescent and rarified, the vacant and turbid, the indistinct and shadowy, the tentative and hesitant.

It is true that the West has valued these aspects of thought in art. In painting there are the light and shadow effects of chiarascuro for examplein Leonardo Da Vinci’s and Rembrandt’s work. It has valued them in music in the tonal subtleties of Beethoven’s last quartets, or Brahms’s and Chopin’s solo piano pieces. It has valued them in the troubled existentialist thinking of a Kierkegaard, the mysticism of a St John of the Cross, the quietism of certain poets. It has valued moments of introspection and stillness. But insight in the West has more often meant instances of revelation than consistent durable attitude. Apollo and Dionysus have been the patrons of the arts. Apollo is the god of clear form, intense light and the bounding line. Dionysus is the god of intense energy, ecstasy and the reforming chaos. One has been the patron of Classical order and moderation, the other the patron of turbulence and Revolution. Both are fundamentally masculine, neither are quietist. Western art, religion and philosophy have tended to espouse the directed, the purposeful, the charged, and the dynamic. The quiet contemplatives are an exception rather than a rule. They have rarely generated schools of thought. They have been isolated examples.

Ancient China on the other hand valued the feminine, and attempted to keep the masculine in balance, to mute it and subdue it, to restrain it and absorb it. Quietism is a marked feature of Taoism the fundamental thought pattern of ancient China, and also of Chinese Buddhism and Confucianism the other two great ethical movements. Each of the three differs in its solutions. Simplistically Buddhism is a transcending of the world of transient phenomena: Confucianism is a continuing engagement with the world in its social aspects: while Taoism is an acceptance of and conformance with the world’s fundamental natural energies. Nevertheless there is a common underlying approach, a search for a self-illuminating harmony that is intrinsically personal, modest and moderate.

By the time of the T’ang Dynasty in the eighth century AD Taoist and Buddhist thought was well over a thousand years old. Buddhism imported from India was established in China by 65 AD and found in Taoism a natural forerunner. In their original forms neither way of thought is a religion in the Western sense. There are no gods, personal or otherwise. There is no sentience in the universe. There is no ostensible pre-determined purpose for existence. Human beings in Buddhist thinking are potentially caught up on an endless wheel of rebirth and the goal is an individual one, to find a way of casting off the pain and constraints of life, to achieve personal freedom and enlightenment. The Buddhist goal is the Void, nirvana, where the Self vanishes. The Taoist goal is to be part of the flow of universal energies, the Tao, that Vortex which is in its totality aimless and directionless.

Taoism, Buddhism and Confucianism were the intellectual matrix of the T’ang period. Fully developed approaches to the problems of existence, as they were, they informed and illuminated the lives of the T’ang poets and painters. It was in poetry, in the works of three major poets in particular, Li Po (pronounced in modern Chinese as if it were spelt Lee Baw, the first name in China being the surname), Wang Wei (Wang Way), and Tu Fu (Doo Foo) that the T’ang Dynasty achieved its greatest artistic flowering. Wang Wei was also a famous painter, and part of the line of development that led to the high achievements of later Chinese landscape painting imbued with the spirit of Taoism.

The lives of these three men began in the relative peace and stability of the T’ang Dynasty with its centralised Imperial government based on the Court of the Emperor and his ministers, wives and concubines. China’s Imperial history, before and since, was turbulent and often unstable though the thread of centralised Imperial rule ran through it, and the ethical systems and social rituals provided fundamental continuities.

The three poets were born within a few years of each other around the start of the eighth century AD. Wang Wei in 699AD, Li Po in 701 and Tu Fu, the youngest of the three, in 712. The T’ang Dynasty had achieved a period of calm and consolidation. The majority of their adult years were lived in the reign of Hsüan-tsung who ruled from 712 to 756AD. Known as Ming-huang the Glorious Monarch, Hsüan-tsung was a patron of poetry music and the arts. He was also a scholar of Taoism and Esoteric Buddhism. Under his reformed administration Chinese civilisation flowered. The borders of the immense Empire were garrisoned and defended, allowing almost fifty years of uninterrupted splendour. However his infatuation with a concubine Yang Kuei-fei led inexorably to the disaster of the An Lu-shan rebellion. In 756 the Emperor fled south-west to Szechwan and the period of greatness was over.

Wang Wei, Li Po and Tu Fu lived through the time of civil war, destruction and tragedy. Wang died in 759, Hsüan-tsung himself in 761, Li in 762 and Tu in 770AD, so that despite the later re-instatement of the T’ang Dynasty, their lives broadly coincide with the flowering and fading of this period of cultural magnificence. The rebellion of General An Lu-shan was a further example of the many episodes of war and violence that punctuated Chinese Imperial history. It dismayed those with leanings to Confucianism, and confirmed for the Taoists and Buddhists the wisdom of retreat from a world of turmoil and confusion.

The lives and art of the three poets illustrate the tensions between involvement and non-involvement. Their poetry is full of humanity, delight in the natural world, and celebration of the everyday that enables it still to communicate with us across the centuries. But it is also filled with aspiration towards the greater life through Confucian integrity, Taoist retreat and Buddhist non-attachment. Through it run positive feelings of affection, friendship, and appreciation of beauty and tranquility. But there is also sadness at transience, regret for what is lost, pathos, and compassion.

Each is highly individual but all three reveal their empathy, sensitivity and sincerity. They struggled with the demands of their society and also the needs of their own psyches. They aspired to peace and inner calm but found themselves also engaged in a difficult world. Nothing is easy for those who wish to live the better life. It was not straightforward for these men in the ancient East any more than for us in the modern West. Certainly there was both a high moral and mental challenge, demanding intellectual, emotional and ethical responsiveness. Confucianism requires engagement. Taoism and Buddhism are not simple escapes from reality. They require a profound change in mental attitude.

Resistance to the concepts of both the void and the vortex is immense in the West. One seems merely emptiness, the other chaos. Our culture has led us into different channels. All our instincts are towards form and order, purpose and direction, achievement and activity. We introspect endlessly but we find contemplation difficult. We are fascinated by Leonardo’s drawings of water or Rembrandt’s figures lost in personal meditation. But they are exceptions within the mainstream of our culture. In literature for example there are few examples of the vortex or the contemplation of the void. Dante, Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Goethe are miracles of substantial, positive, directed energy. Dante’s contemplation of the afterlife resembles a set of scientific observations. Tolstoy’s and Shakespeare’s characters are carved out of the air with that precision we also admire in Jane Austen, and with the fecundity of creation we admire in Dickens. Homer, Sophocles, Ovid, Petrarch, Racine, Pushkin set the Western tone of clarity, brilliance, delineation, and externality. Inwardness and introspection are less evident in poetry than we might think. Quietism is rare in all the western arts. The best examples are in piano and chamber music and landscape painting, in the silence and stillness of the canvas, and the complex, muted tonalities and intimate harmonies of stringed instruments. Apollo and Dionysus are more often present in them. The void and the vortex rarely. We are able to enter Chinese art, particularly T’ang poetry and Sung painting, through an appreciation of natural beauty, but it can often seem understated, simplistic, muted and casual to the Western mind.

Buddhist, Confucian and Taoist ways of thought are each different. However Taoist spontaneity and sensitivity underlies the creation of almost all of Classical China’s poetry, painting and three-dimensional objects. The common artistic inheritance, the means of expression, and the Imperial culture blended together the three streams of thought, with the underlying Taoist concepts ever present. They are concepts that differ fundamentally from the traditional concepts of the West. Modern China as it follows Western capitalism and technology will find itself increasingly at odds with its own cultural history. The Western mind would itself need a radical change of its fundamental thought processes in order to approach the Tao. Taoism is spontaneous, non-intrusive, quiescent, empty, inactive and indifferent. It is the opposite of a scientific discipline, even though certain of its subordinate esoteric practises stimulated early technologies in China. Its essence is wu-wei the principle of non-action. Its goal is not achievable by the will. Its teachings cannot be communicated in words. It claims nothing and demands nothing.

The history of China, the lives of the poets and painters all demonstrate the difficulty of living in the world and aspiring to reach the Tao. The Chinese were as human and as fallible as we are. The true Taoist adept almost by definition is not a committed poet or painter, and cannot play a key role in the social order. The adept is not engaged with the world in that way. Taoism in the arts is almost a leakage from the pure Way into the impure human world. The Tao remains often only an aspiration and thereby an inspiration. The achievements of T’ang poetry are inevitably bound up with the external society, with the fate of the Dynasty and the lives of the poets. Wang Wei is an example of the modest official finding his solace in retreat to his country estate, in the practise of art, and in the study of Buddhist texts. Tu Fu is the humane Confucian, trying to be of service, demanding moral integrity of himself and others, accepting with sadness the vagaries of fate, exploiting the absorbing technical possibilities of poetry. Li Po is the Romantic, otherworldly, careless genius who scatters brilliance, dreams of a reality beyond the real, and exemplifies the spontaneity and grace of the Taoist Way. Their lives are illuminated by the transient splendour of the T’ang zenith, and then darkened by the shadow of its fall. Regret, nostalgia for the vanished glories, memory of past joys, the horrors of war, the pain of shifting allegiance, the hurt of separation from those loved, the effects of time and of distance, of ageing and of loss, are all present in their poetry.

But equally present are other factors, strength of character, deep sensibility, love of nature, pity and compassion, friendship and tenderness, which emphasise the ability of the poets to see all life and see it whole. Pity is not self-pity. The indifference of nature is not evidence of its active hostility. The lack of external purpose is not a reason for lack of internal knowledge of the right goals of living. Misfortune is not a justification for narrowness or lack of tenderness. Separation enhances friendship and love. Poetry and the arts, beauty and grace shed light on life.

There are trios of related elements. There are the three poets, Wang Wei, Li Po and Tu Fu. There are the three attitudes to existence, the three ways of life, of Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism. There are the three main protagonists of the Imperial tragedy, Hsüan-tsung the Emperor, Yang Kuei-fei the beloved concubine and consort, and An Lu-Shan the rebellious general. There are the three key aspects of life, the social, spiritual and artistic. It is through these triplicities we can attempt to see into the past.

The Tao

The Tao is the Vortex. The way to it lies in the recognition of the fluidity and instability of the Universe. Its deepest nature is like water or clouds. Nevertheless it encompasses the emergence of all forms. It underlies the Yang elements of existence, brightness, strength, and precise form, heat and light, jade and mountain, phoenix and dragon. Yet it is also the Yin matrix the female spirit of the valley, moon and shadow, winter and the north, mists and rivers, the containing cave and the opening flower.

The Vortex is the movement of energies and the energies themselves. It is that seething world of sub-atomic entities that the quantum universe displays and it is the structures of the macrocosm. It is both form and chaos. At its core are randomness and uncertainty. It is chaotic like the atmosphere, like the waterfall, but it reveals continuously altering form like the cloud and the river. From its inwardness come the myriad entities. Its surface ripples and undulates. Its depths twist and coil. It is eternal and continuous. It contains infinitely nested repetitive patterns, but never repeats itself in entirety. It changes and flows through time. Its changes are Time. Each reconfiguration of the Universe is the Moment. Bodies alter imperceptibly. Mountains erode. Rivers alter their course. Clouds rise and vanish.

The Tao is process, as our minds are. It is the movement of water in the mountain stream. It is the windblown cloud pouring across the dome of the sky. It is the cycle of individual birth, unique maturity and unknowable death within the pattern of the species and the type. It is the irregularity, the randomness that guarantees identity, and the form and process that reveals similarity. Thinking about the Tao breaks down our view of fixed boundaries, containing shapes, and permanent entities. It introduces the random fluctuation, the imageless particle and invisible wave. The static vibrates. The isolated merges. The world is an instant, an instance of the World.

The endlessly pouring, continuously flowing, imperceptibly altering, randomly changing, richly patterned universe of the myriad creatures emerges from the seething continuum that is the uncarved block. The uncarved block is both vast and minute, macrocosm and microcosm. It cannot be grasped in its smallness and cannot be grasped in its enormity. It is the unnamed and unnameable matrix in which all names are dissolved, but out of which all nameable things come. It is the great calmly moving ocean of forms, of earths, seas, skies and stars, that also reveals itself in the unstable, shifting, elusive and transient. It is the smoke patterns in the air, the currents of the river, the flickering of light, the fluctuations of lives. Energy flows through all forms, at many levels, in veins or threads. It makes the ‘dragon veins’ of landscapes employed in geomancy (Feng shui, ‘wind and water’). It creates the texture of silk, the structure of a leaf or a flower, the elements of a thought. These veins and threads are part of the nature of a thing and the essence of a process. They are like the Tao indefinite and elusive, vague and slippery, subtle and hidden. But they may also like the Tao be simple and undemanding, various and gleaming, satisfying and clear.

The aim of Taoism is to reach a harmony with this matrix, with the Tao. Its goal is to be a tranquil part of the Vortex, to live among the currents and inner vortices. The Way is to hold to the uncarved block, the universal mystery, without the urge to name and analyse, classify and dissect. It is to embrace time and change, to recognise the continuum, to cease grasping, to suppress the will, to harmonise the energies, to let go of worldly objectives. That is why the Way is straightforward but intensely difficult. That is why it cannot be reached by an act of reason but is in itself wholly reasonable. Lao Tzu the author to whom the Tao Te Ching, the great classic of Taoism, is attributed says ‘My words are simple and easy to use, but no one understands them or uses them.’ ‘The Way is straightforward but people prefer side tracks.’ And of the nature of the Tao and therefore of the Universe itself he says, ‘Without possession, without demands, without authority it is mysterious virtue.’

Early Chinese History

Taoism, Buddhism and Confucianism were ancient ways of thought long before the T’ang Dynasty. The Chinese civilisation itself was already more than two thousand years old when the T’ang Dynasty came to power. By 5000BC Neolithic peoples were cultivating the yellow loess soils of northern China, fine fertile, wind-driven and river-borne, soils workable with primitive tools. The soil is huang tu, yellow earth, ground to fine powder by the Arctic winds, and blown down from the Siberian Steppes. Loess has little structural stability and is carved into cliffs and gullies by rain, wind and rivers. The Chinese became skilled at hydraulic engineering on this immensely cultivable soil.

By 1500BC a sophisticated bronze-age civilisation, the Shang Dynasty, ruled in areas of the Yellow River valley and as far south as the Yangtze River. Around 1050BC the Shang was defeated in battle by King Wu and the Chou Dynasty was founded. From this period to 221BC a complex civilisation developed, consolidating fifty states through warfare, to bring the whole of the Yellow River plain under Chou control. The Chou period was decentralised, with frequent periods of political fragmentation, but contains the intellectual origins of Chinese thought. From this period come the earliest Chinese poetry, the Book of Songs, and the compilation of the Classic historical and ritual texts.

Confucianism dates from around 500BC. Confucius promoted the concept of an ordered social structure governed by morally based conventions and rituals. The highest virtue is ren, the life of benevolence, humanity, and conscience. Taoism also probably dates from this period, its oldest text, the Tao Te Ching of the possibly mythical teacher Lao Tzu, establishing its concept of the Way, the matrix of energy underlying the vortex of the natural world, and the life that is lived in harmony with the flows of existence.

The Ch’in Dynasty, which in turn in 206BC gave way to the great Han, was established about 250BC and by 221BC the Ch’in had consolidated the Empire to rule all of China. With Capitals at Ch’ang-an (modern Xian) and Loyang, in Central China, the Empire stretched from Korea and Vietnam in the southeast to Central Asia in the northwest. From this period dates the terracotta army at Xian, found in the vicinity of the tomb of the First Ch’in Emperor. Ch’in built the first Great Wall that the Han used as an effective military barrier against border incursions.

Through military strength, taxation, legal decree, and cultural unity the Han Emperors established the strong central government that characterised later China. They extended trade routes across Asia to Persia, India, Arabia and Rome. The unified regime based on an educated elite, Confucian in spirit with a Taoist admixture, encouraged art and the civilised life. Bronze and lacquer work produced was of rare beauty. Calligraphy flourished furthering the copying and study of the Five Classics, and ceramic production was advanced. This basically agrarian society, with its emphasis on family, filial piety, the subservience of women, Confucian-educated officials, strong central Imperial control, defended borders, and a common moral and legal cultural framework set the pattern for later Dynasties.

The luxury of the Imperial Court, the presence of Imperial concubines and eunuchs, and the principle of exogamy, that is the requirement of the Emperors to marry a subject outside the line of patrilineal descent, were fatal weaknesses in successive Dynasties. Centralised dependence, coupled with the use of foreign generals to defend the borders allowing them to create distinct decentralised power bases, and the influence of Imperial consorts on the Emperor, led to the demise of the Han. The rise of consorts’ families and the influence of the Court eunuchs created powerful inner threats to the throne. It guaranteed court intrigue and strife based on fear, greed and ambition. It was an inherent weakness of the system that the later T’ang also experienced.

Han China that existed for over four hundred years dissolved in rebellion, and was followed by a complex period of warring kingdoms and dynasties that lasted from 220 to 589AD. Taoism as a philosophy of retreat and self-cultivation flourished in this Age of Division. As did Buddhism born in India but introduced to China by 65AD. It offered a philosophy of enlightenment, based on an analysis of suffering and the renunciation of attachment to the world. It had affinities of attitude with Taoism in its quietism, disengagement, and disciplined spirituality. It involved compassion, release from caste and gender distinctions, and the superiority of the private mind to the public persona.

Taoism and Buddhism with an accretion of icons, divinities, magical practices, temples, and scriptures, became popular religions. Through the latter part of this period of instability, the north and south were politically separate. Northern China laid strong emphasis on Confucian ideals and ethics, on mastery of the histories and classics, and on public service. The Southern aristocracies encouraged a literary and artistic world where the life of convivial conversation, and the practise of calligraphy, poetry and painting, led to intellectual artistic sensibility being valued highly. Throughout the period China retained a common language and culture that was enriched and developed in a more personal way, and this continuity offset the effects of continual disorder and dislocation, and preserved the desire for strong, centralised government as a means to ensure peace and stability.

T’ao Chien (also called Tao Yüan-ming, 365-427AD) is the great southern poet of this period. He is the fully formed individual, quitting political life to live in the quietist Taoist manner on his small tract of land. His poetry is the poetry of friendship and family, enjoyment of music, wine, and literature, withdrawal from public affairs, and immersion in the rational cultivation of art, nature and the self. He provided an archetype for later men of letters. He is the self-contained single one who finds a way to live undisturbed by external events and in harmony with nature.

The Nature of the Tao

The Tao is the impersonal anonymous neutral matrix underpinning every manifestation. It is the nature of reality and the means by which the universe operates. In terms of Western science we could call it Energy. The manifestations of it would be the entities of the microcosmic world of particle physics, the objects and processes of the macrocosm, and the configurations of forces and forms in which those energies can appear through time. What is its reality? Well what is energy or force? What is gravity or inertia? What is a sub-atomic particle? We can only reply with how things work and move and configure and change. We can only answer with observation and theory. The ‘what’ is forever mysterious, untouchable, numinous. It is the given. We employ names to try and describe it, like substance, matter, and force. We can manipulate their symbols within a mathematical framework and thereby describe the transformations of energy, but the world itself is forever as it appears to us, and no more. Reality is appearance.

Who is satisfied with that? We know, irrationally, that appearances are illusion and deception while realities are fundamental and independent of our existence. We know the world is real. But we cannot truly name or touch that which makes it so. Modern physics attempts through mathematics to model and thereby describe the intangible and ambiguous nature of the subatomic quantum world whose particle nature exists alongside its probabilistic wave nature with complementary validity.

We fail in any attempt to visualise what the ‘real’ entity is that can be described by alternative and radically different mathematics, described that is as probability wave and particle. It is in one sense a bounded form observed to be at a fairly precise location in space with a fairly precise velocity. In another sense it only exists as a continuum of energy, giving a statistical likelihood of an entity being observed as a tightly bounded form, at any particular fairly precise location with a fairly precise velocity. Measurement of both velocity and position simultaneously is thwarted in the act of observation and this uncertainty principle emphasises the strangeness of the quantum universe. We cannot even say that the unobserved particle is in any place at all. Observation gives it reality for us.

As we examine dynamic systems like water or clouds we discover bounded but non-repeating patterns, and random fluctuation. When we examine natural shapes there are infinite levels, endless scaling, of precise fractal detail, and there are sudden transitions. Weather patterns may progress in a stately fashion then non-linear changes allow tiny disturbances to initiate vast effects. Our lives rely on bounded and unambiguous entities and processes, yet at the core of the quantum universe, and of unstable systems, is chance, an intrinsic randomness that is of the very nature of reality. At the microcosmic level we rely on the statistical probabilities of ambiguous event expressed in mathematical terms. In fluid systems like water or clouds we do find self-referencing structure. But we still exist in a universe of turbulent flow, of whorls and spirals, entanglement and elusiveness. There is infinite detail in finite spaces. There are infinite lines in bounded areas. The river remains, but the currents shift, and the water patterns vary endlessly. The cloudbank passes over, but its clouds separate and recombine, and their configurations alter continuously.

If we can free ourselves from the idea that there are only fixed forms, clear boundaries, nameable entities, and ultimate certainties then we enter the world of the Tao. The Tao encompasses the fixed and the nameable as manifestations of energy, but the totality is fluid, unnameable and ultimately random. This is what it means to say that the Tao is indifferent: that it is directionless: that it is formless: that it is uncarved: that it is a matrix: that it is the spirit of the feminine: that it gives rise to the myriad creatures. The Tao is not reducible to its components and its manifestations: it encompasses them. ‘Silent and empty, alone and unchanging, it has no name’ says Lao Tzu ‘so I call it the Way.’ ‘The Way is empty but nothing can fill it.’ ‘Without possession, without demands, without authority it is mysterious virtue.’

The Tao is behind that ceaseless flow of process and pattern that we see in nature, where nature is the universe untouched by the human. Within the water and the clouds are vortices of energy. Within the bounded object are random flickering patterns of underlying sub-atomic structure. The boundaries are continually eroding and altering. We also are a part of nature, where nature is the totality that includes us. Every human being is a continuously changing network of energies and forms. The mind is a set of parallel hierarchical processes. The instant, the object, the thought, the movement, the world itself are impermanent. Every moment is a unique configuration of what is. The past configuration neither exists nor returns. The future configuration does not yet exist and is in its entirety unknowable. The moment is itself imprecise. The configuration is itself ungraspable. Name it and it shifts. Grasp it and it changes. Like clouds in the wind, like water in the river, the reality is evanescent, a vast movement, a loosely connected web. Things that last long enough to be named make up our useful world of reliable objects, discernible process, and stable patterns. They are the myriad creatures. The Tao is uncarved: a feminine matrix. ‘The spirit of the valley never dies’ says the Tao Te Ching ‘its name is the mysterious feminine. The mysterious feminine is called the root of heaven and earth.’

Taoism and T’ao Ch’ien

What did Taoism mean in ancient China as a way of life? Taoism is a mental attitude. It is not a system of thought because it denies the validity of systemisation. It is not a religion because in its pure form it has no use for divinities. It is not a rigorous discipline because it seeks to evade inappropriate goal-driven behaviour. Analysis and definition, naming and theorising are anathema to it. Taoism denies the validity of the scientific project. It denies the validity of the work ethic. It denies the usefulness of ambitions and desires, grasping and craving. To those who say ‘My life feels empty’ Taoism would respond by saying ‘That is because you are trying to fill it.’ To those who say ‘My life is without purpose’ Taoism would reply ‘That is because you are trying to give it a purpose.’ The only aim of Taoism is to be in harmony with the Tao, with inner and outer nature. The result of that harmony is tranquility. It can only be achieved, if at all, through relinquishing hold, through comprehending the flow of the universe, through discarding the superfluous, through eliminating inappropriate desires. It involves respect for wu-wei that is inaction and non-intervention. It can be approached through tzu-jan, spontaneity. Its movements are like a flag in the wind, or a ball on a mountain stream. Taoism despite this is in no way world-rejecting. The Taoist is independent, self-sufficient. The Taoist works as necessary to sustain his life, and stops when he has achieved the essential. The Taoist takes pleasure in things that are harmless, which connect to the flow of nature and the Tao. The Taoist acts only when it is valuable to do so, and desists when the effect has been achieved.

In the arts the Way is simplicity within subtlety. In everyday life the Way is balance within moderation. It encourages retreat and withdrawal, silence and stillness but is neither hostile nor humourless. The Taoist is moral because the Taoist life is both non-intrusive and non-grasping. Equally the Taoist does not proselytise or seek to convince, offers compassion but does not set out on a mission to relieve suffering. Non-involvement leaves others free. The Way is open to anyone who finds it. The Taoist tends the field and garden, tries to follow nature, and attempts to achieve and create harmony.

There are some similarities with the aspirations and practices of the Vedantic Yoga schools. There is a like emphasis on discriminating between the transient creatures and the permanent Tao. On renouncing futile activity and adopting a stance of wu wei, non-action, the passivity of the Yin. But where Yogic thought yearns for disengagement the Taoist merely disengages. Where Yogic practise strives for control of the self, through restraint, discontinuance of desired but inappropriate activity, indifference to the polar opposites, concentration and faith, the Taoist forgets the self altogether and is absorbed into the natural. Taoism is a simple acceptance and acquiescence, a lyrical and harmonious attitude of mind, that rejects the absurdities of the creature striving always to create something alien, the human opposed to nature. It avoids and eludes whatever damages or destroys tranquility of mind and spiritual peace. It sees the human best exemplified in the sincerity and simplicity of the tiny infant. The true spirit keeps a child’s heart.

‘There are four things that do not leave people in peace’ says the Lieh Tzu ‘trying to live for ever, needing to be known, wanting high status, desiring wealth.....their lives are controlled by the external. But those who accept their destiny do not desire to endlessly prolong life, those who love honour do not need fame, those who reject power do not want status, and those who are without strong desires have no use for wealth... these people live according to internal things.’

There is a story of the Zen Master who passed on to his only disciple the famous and valuable text that had been annotated and handed down for seven generations from master to master. ‘You had better keep it if it is so valuable, said the disciple ‘I am satisfied as I am.’ ‘I know that, but even so’ said the Master ‘you must keep it. Here.’ Feeling its sudden weight in his hands the disciple instantly flung it into the fire. ‘What are you doing, what are you doing!’ shouted the Master. ‘What are you saying, what are you saying?’ replied the disciple.

‘Find your true face’ said Hui-neng the sixth patriarch of Zen ‘the one you had before you were born’. It is the self that is uncarved, in front of that universe that is unnameable. Then there is no need for religions or moral codes. Released, the crystal child of the self defeats the great dragon. As in Buddhist thought, the Wheel turns in the sky without being turned. Everything becomes in itself spontaneous reality. It is as it is, without mind or nature. Taoism is the way to live a life on earth, respecting the body and the mind, existing simply, naturally, and harmoniously, in peace, as a free spirit. And there is consequently lightness, calm, and tolerance, a balance and a depth, reflected in Taoist art and literature.

T’ao Ch’ien (365-427AD) was one of the poets whose life exemplified the practise of the Taoist Way. He was a minor official but later withdrew from public involvement. He celebrated the relinquishment of that life where he viewed himself as having been ‘too long a prisoner, captive in a cage’. He writes about a quiet way of existence, among friends and family, about the practise of simple pleasures, creating poems, cultivating his land, and enjoying natural beauty. His poetry is like a Sung Dynasty landscape painting with himself a tiny figure in the scene. Drinking wine is a means of escaping excessive introspection. Enjoying nature without intervening in it is a means of escaping analysis and definition. The private rather than the public life satisfies and the personal is enough, while the Tao is intrinsically unknowable and wordless.

The Taoist life is centred on nature. No separation is conceived between the sacred and profane, there are only the harmonious and the inharmonious. A human being is one of the myriad creatures, modest in scale. Conformity with the Tao, with the order of the universe, is all that is necessary to the true life. Therefore the Taoist does not seek to change the natural except in accord with absolute necessity. Nature is not to be despoiled for inappropriate material gain. The Taoist needs neither ambitions nor moral code. The Taoist may be a recluse living in the hills, a wanderer among mountains and rivers, a gardener or a poet, in a humble occupation, or free of all except essential occupation. The Taoist cultivates detachment from the world’s affairs and concern for the unchanging and eternal. The Taoist embraces the mysterious and feminine, the dark and evanescent, the indistinct and rarified, the empty and minute, the tentative and hesitant, the turbid and vacant, the childishly simple and the foolishly obvious, the muddled and indifferent, the shapeless and dim.

T’ao Ch’ien reveals that absence of analysis, in his poems, that is the essence of Tao. It is not an absence of profundity. The deep is simple. The profound is obvious. He is without complex logic and artificial rhetoric. He is without conformity but without pride. He rejects power in order to be weak, and discipline in order to be natural, but he is neither undisciplined nor subservient, neither immoral nor crude. His foolishness is full of intelligence. His simplicity is not uncultivated. His weakness cannot be manipulated. His naturalness is imbued with ethical understanding.

In the first of his two poems titled ‘Returning to Live in the Country’ he evokes that life which evades public confusion to live in accord with nature and the true self. Elements of nature, mountains and hills, trees and streams, are mentioned but not described. They are there to point towards the Tao not to analyse it. The names of natural features are designed to evoke the natural framework not to provide complex metaphors. The Vortex is subtly present, as air, water, smoke, mist, and winding lanes. The life described is simple. The human need is in the end the same as that of other creatures, birds or fish. It is the freedom the caged bird wants or the fish in its pool. It allows the mind to achieve ‘space and silence’.

In the second poem it is human transience which is the theme and by implication the continuum of nature. That which has vanished is set against the continuity of that which endures. The myriad creatures are contrasted with the eternal Vortex of the natural world.

His poem ‘Drinking the Wine’ evokes the inner silence of the Taoist. It endorses the simplicity of life, the satisfaction to be had in appreciation of natural beauty, the tranquility gained by release from action, the elusiveness and indefinability of the Tao. Wine is a way to release spontaneity, to forget the world, to become part of the Way. It is a formal irresponsibility! The poem points to the unknowable essence of the natural world and therefore of life itself, where knowing what things do never takes us to what they inescapably are, never enables us to get at their whatness, their ‘quiddity’. That they are - is mysterious. Though we push and poke at matter, though we study and analyse process, their reality in the vortex always gleams beyond us. Existence is not an attribute of things. The poem expresses the indifferent placidity of the Vortex. Filled with energy, a raging torrent, it is nevertheless detached, neutral. It is the calm surface without hostility even while it is the ceaseless movement without benevolence. Language and intellectual analysis do not get us closer to the essence. It is beyond mind and words. The landscape of the poem is one of remoteness, minuteness, and rarefaction. The hills are distant, the flights of birds dwindle, the air is thinned. Light is about to fade. ‘Blunt the sharp’ says the Tao Te Ching ‘untie the knots, dim the glare.’

‘Reading the Classic of Hills and Seas’ is again a poem of the simple life. ‘One glance finds all of heaven and earth’. T’ao Ch’ien points back to a passage from the Tao Te Ching on the virtues of non-action. The way of life recommended is neither spiritually lazy nor parasitic. The Taoist cultivates the land and garden, has an artistic sensibility and appreciation, develops the self but has compassion for others. If tranquility is denied because one is caught in the world’s net, it can still be an aspiration and a focus of personal values. ‘Without going out, one can know the world. Without looking out, one can see the way. The further we go the less we know. Therefore the wise see without stirring, know without looking, achieve without doing’.

The Taoists frequently tease the Confucians. They see them as compelled to wander about in order to find employment and office, ‘perching here and perching there’. Trapped in meaningless ritual and formal law. Forced to bow to those who are their inferiors in mind and morality. ‘Even for a sack of rice a month it is not worth bending to this man’ said T’ao Chien. ‘Foolish to follow convention and propriety slavishly.’ Confucian benevolence was, to the Taoist, a recipe for intrusive intervention in a world that was beyond human direction. ‘As for you’ said a Taoist to Confucius’s follower Tzû Lu, ‘instead of chasing after a leader who runs from one place to another you should rather follow those who escape the world entirely.’

Confucianism’s articulation of rites and duties is a constriction of the natural self. The intelligent should pursue their own harmony, do not require to be instructed, embrace an intuitive ethics of moderation, and avoid evils by eliminating unnecessary desires. Ssû-ma Ch’ien the great Han historian tells a story of Confucius visiting Lao Tzu at Loyang and praising the ancient sages. ‘Those you talk about are all dead’ replied Lao Tzu ‘and their bodies are turned to dust, only words are left. Get rid of your pride and your desires, your insinuating ways and your ambition. They are of no use to you. This is all I have to say.’

The Taoist stories are of those who reject office rather than disturb their equilibrium. ‘Better to be a live tortoise dragging your tail in the mud’, said Chuang-tzu on being pressed to return to Imperial service, ‘than a dead tortoise sacred, and covered with jewels, in a box in the Emperor’s palace.’ Or of fishermen and recluses who laugh at the useless seriousness of the committed Confucian. The legendary fisherman knows that he has to paddle in the world’s waters but should still wash eyes and ears in the clear stream of the Tao. He laughs and vanishes.

The sense of another world untouched by corruption is at the heart of T’ao Ch’ien’s story of the Peach Blossom Spring, that stream which leads the fisherman to a world of happy immortals living in harmony and having no desire to return to a world they have eluded. It is a story that is akin to the Western tales of worlds of faery, where the marvellous is commonplace and where tragedy is to lose the vision. Here the remote land is lost but remains an aspiration.

There is another story of Confucius and his pupils walking by the river that pours with immense power over the falls, and winds through the rocks. They see an old man, upstream, dive into the foam and vanish and they rush to save him. But there he is standing by the bank, unharmed, streaming with water. Confucius asks him how he could survive the force of the torrent. He replies, smiling, ‘That’s easy. I go down with the descending currents, and I come up with the ascending ones.’ The Taoist aspiration is to achieve that spontaneity and careless calm, to accept, and not to struggle needlessly, to do the minimum in order to achieve the maximum.

The poet Hsi K’ang (223-262AD), writing a letter, explains his indifference to office and the attitude of the Taoist individual. ‘He acts in harmony with his own nature and stops wherever he is at peace. Some people enter the Court and never set foot out of it. Others go into the mountains and never look back.... Wandering among rivers and hills, watching the birds in the leaves and looking at the fish in the water, is my greatest pleasure.... Ignoring status and fame, eliminating desire, making my mind still, my greatest goal is non-action... To keep to the simple ways, help my children and grandchildren, sit and talk with friends, drink wine, play music, this is the height of my needs and ambitions.’

The T’ang Dynasty

At the end of the sixth century north and south were reunited by northern military power and the Sui Dynasty was founded. Within forty years it was destroyed by rebellion and replaced by the T’ang (618-907AD). The T’ang Dynasty was one of the great ages of development and consolidation in China. It looked back to other periods of transformation and cultural flowering, the ancient Dynasties of Shang and Chou, and the historical achievements of Ch’in and Han.

The Empire re-established strong central government based on the Imperial Court and on officials, trained in the Confucian Classics for public service. These officials formed an intellectual elite loyal to the throne. The borders expanded and China’s cultural influence extended to Japan in the east and to Korea, and Vietnam in the southeast. Sogdiana and Transoxiana, across the mountains of the Tian Shan and the Pamirs in Central Asia, became areas of military contention. Trade routes ran through them to the west and south. Southern sea-routes also stimulated foreign trade and cultural imports, as well as an influx of immigrant traders, artisans and students. Persians, Indians, Syrians, Africans, and Greeks all found their way to the capitals at Ch’ang-an and Lo-yang, introducing a vital cosmopolitan influence. There was substantial contact with Europe and Arabia as well as Persia and India.

It was an empire of around 50 million people and centralisation on the twin capitals gave Ch’ang-an a population of a million people, the largest city concentration in the world, and Lo-yang a population of three quarters of a million. This concentration further unified Chinese culture, and allowed it to rapidly absorb foreign artistic influences, music and dance from Asia, and new verse forms.

T’ai Tsung (reigned 626-649AD), the second T’ang Emperor, initiated a period of construction both at home and in foreign policy. Border strategy based on strong fortifications encouraged trade along the Silk Routes in Central Asia. The T’ang Code of 653AD standardised the laws. The centre controlled and rotated provincial officers limiting the power of the provincial elites. The civil-service examinations were extended to encourage Confucian values and create a loyal cadre dedicated to public responsibility and ethical values. This system encouraged a search for talent though it remained dominated by the famous aristocratic families. Low but comprehensive taxation encouraged economic growth and brought nine million families into the tax system. Unification of north and south was aided by the continuous engineering of the Grand Canal system, built with conscripted labour, linking the Eastern capital Lo-yang to the Yangtze valley and then pushing northeast as well as further south. The canal extended twelve hundred miles with a parallel Imperial road and bridges and with relay post stations enabling long-distance supply of the army.

By the middle of the seventh century China was a dynamic, cosmopolitan Empire, trading internationally, with an ordered agrarian population benefiting from land-share, two massive capitals, an educated, artistic and creative elite, and strong borders. Towards the later part of the century the Court was under the dominance of the Empress Wu, who began her career as a concubine of the Emperor. She is an example of those women in Chinese Imperial history who from the role of concubine exerted tremendous influence over the reigning monarch, and who gained power for themselves and through the promotion of their families. The monarchy was always vulnerable to the power group from within.

She controlled the monarchy and the succeeding reigns of her two sons, whom she deposed, proclaiming herself Emperor of a new dynasty in 690AD and claiming to be a reincarnation of the Buddha Maitreya as a female ruler. Tough and uncompromising she maintained a robust foreign policy and quelled internal dissent until she was finally deposed in 705 when over eighty and in ill health. The T’ang was immediately restored and in 712 her grandson Hsüang Tsung, Ming Huang the Glorious Monarch, came to the throne.

For fifty years, in a history that spans four thousand years, Chinese civilisation achieved a peak of cultural sophistication. T’ang China is the land of peonies and plum-blossom, moonlight and green jade, where dragons live in the lakes and turn into pine trees, where gauze-sleeved dancing girls glance from beneath green painted willow eyebrows, where peach-trees and mulberries talk to cedar and bamboo. It is the land of silk and cinnabar, cassia and pearl, a country, perfect in the mind, which the West could not have invented if it had not already existed. Tea, fine rain, lake views, gardens with curious rocks, girls with gauze veils and gowns, boxes of tortoise-shell and gold, and also, behind the Imperial splendour, a vast country of villages and farms, mountains and rivers littered with the remnants of earlier dynasties. A land where Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism blended in the civilised mind in complementary subtlety. A land of technology without science, of the seismograph and the armillary sphere, magnetism and the compass, the continuous bellows and steel-making, paper and printed books, the movable stern-post rudder and vast sailing ships. A land of literati and connoisseurs, of painters and poets, of courtesans and concubines, of lute and zither, pipe and drum.

The core T’ang territories were in Central China. They lay between the Wei and Yellow (Hwang Ho) Rivers in the north and the Yangtse River in the south. These are the two great water systems that cross China from the high mountains of the west to the eastern seas. On the western side of this central box, the Kialing River runs southwards from hills below the Wei to meet the Yangtze at Chungking. In the centre the tributaries and lower reaches of the Han River also run southeast reaching the Yangtze near Hankow. The Han River therefore marks out the highlands of the west from the flood plains of the east. On the eastern side of the box are the provinces of Shantung and Kiangsu and the Yellow Sea.

While the centres of administrative power lay to the north and west in the two capitals of Ch'ang-an and Loyang, and the great rivers had many obstacles to navigation, it was still possible to travel extensively across eastern and southern China. Imperial roads and canals could be used wherever they existed, as well as the open stretches of the rivers. Li Po in his wanderings visited many of the towns of the north-eastern, eastern and southern provinces, Peking and Kai-feng in the north, Yangchow, Nanking, Kuikiang and Hankow in the south. Routes led to the West also. From Ch'ang-an in Shensi, the western capital on the Wei River, ran the route to Central Asia to the northwest. Across the mountains and rivers to the southwest lay Szechwan and the headwaters of the Yangtze, often a place of exile. The capital of Szechwan, Chêng-tu, Brocade City, though it was difficult of access from Ch’ang-an, lies in the Red Basin, immensely fertile land surrounded by hills and mountains. The ‘bread-basket’ of China, the Red Basin, was an ancient inland-sea. The Yangtze tributaries were canalised and cleared by Ch’in engineers and labour in 250BC. Canals, dykes and dams regulated the mountain waters to build the silt layers that fertilise the Basin. Chêng-tu was later the capital of the Kingdom of Shu (221-263AD). Li Po, who as a child was brought up northeast of Chêng-tu, wrote a poem about climbing the high passes to reach it from the north-east. ‘Shu Way is hard! Shu Way is high! Like climbing to Heaven, climbing the Szechwan Road.’

Ch’ang-an the western capital had been the capital of the Han from 202BC, sited a few miles from the previous Ch’in capital burnt to the ground during the rebellion that brought the Han to power. To look back from Sui and T’ang to Ch’in and Han was to look back to a time of greatness, to the time of the building of the Great Wall and the expansion of the borders. In Han times Ch’ang-an provided a concentration of rich and influential families, with a common Chinese language and culture, living within a stable centralised system, and the T’ang Renaissance recreated this.

Ch’ang-an, (modern Xian or Sian), was sited on the banks of the sluggish Wei River, fifty miles from the junction of the Wei and the Yellow River, north of the Ch’in-ling Mountains and with the T’ai-hang mountains to the east. Its periods of stability and continuity were punctuated by the tremors of war and rebellion. Sacked in 26AD by the Red-Eyebrow guerrillas it was re-established in 191AD to be sacked again in 311 and was rebuilt by the Sui Dynasty in 583.

In T’ang times the rectangular walled city, its sides oriented to the points of the compass, was laid out like a giant chessboard, a grid of a hundred and eight walled wards closed at night, with markets, Buddhist and Taoist monasteries, and Manichean, Mazdean and Nestorian temples. The outer walls, entered and exited through great gates with flanking towers, were made of pounded earth sixteen metres thick at the base and eight metres high. The rectangle of the city extended over eight kilometres north to south and over nine kilometres east to west, to cover over eighty square kilometres containing a population of a million people. The Imperial City with lakes and pools extended south from the northern wall. Its position placed the apartments of the consorts and concubines in the Yin north. It faced the Yang south and the administrative city that in turn looked out to the city wards. To the northeast of the city was the Ta Ming palace and the Imperial Park. To the northwest of the city was the Emperor’s summer palace. In the southeast corner of the city were the Hibiscus Garden and the ‘Serpentine’ Lake. Outside the Western Wall was the Shang-lin complex designed in Han times with gardens, halls and palaces. In one of the ornamental lakes Emperor Wu of Han had built a model of the mythical P’eng-lai Palace on the Islands of the Blessed in the Eastern Seas. The southern gate opened out on to a broad avenue that, like others of the city’s great avenues, was edged by ditches planted with trees. The Great and Little Swallow Pagodas towered into the sky. In the K’un-ming Pool near the city, constructed for Naval exercises was a famous statue of a whale, and near it statues of the Weaver Girl and the Herdboy, whose annual meeting in the starry sky guaranteed the cyclic movement of the cosmos.

The Wei River valley past Ch’ang-an was the main trade corridor from China to Central Asia, a continuation of the Yellow River route from Honan province. Trade goods flowed to and from India and the West along the line of towns and oases forming the Silk Road. Caravans heading west from Ch’ang-an travelled the Kansu ‘long corridor’, the great ‘valley’ where the Han race originated, skirting the Gobi Desert to the north and the Nan Shan mountains to the southwest. The Jade Gate, at the old town of Yumen, piercing the Great Wall, allowed them exit to Tun-huang on the edge of the Tarim Basin.

Back through the gate passed high quality raw jade, from the mountains further west, down into China. From Tun-huang they entered the hostile and arid Basin where a number of alternative routes ran west along the northern and southern edges of the Basin's barren Taklamakan Desert. There they skirted the eight-hundred-mile sea of sand dunes, lying between the Tien Shan (Celestial Mountains) range to the north and the Kunlun range to the south. One route passed by Lop Nor’s lake to reach Loulan, where the caravans could provision before heading west along the Tarim River system. Reaching Kashgar at the other end of the Tarim Basin, travellers could then cross the northern edge of the Pamirs via the Terek and other passes to Fergana. Then along the chain of oases, Samarkand, Bokhara, Merv, and on to Baghdad, the Middle East and Europe. This was the trade corridor between Rome and the Han Empire.

Itinerant Buddhist monks joined the caravans along the Silk Road bringing their literature and way of life, creating the Buddhist cave complexes at Tun-huang and K'u-ch'e. They could reach Khotan in the Tarim Basin from the Indus valley to the south by crossing the Hindu Kush, over the frozen eighteen thousand-foot heights of the Karakoram Pass. This route along the south of the Tarim Basin between Khotan and Loulan was the path taken by Hsüan-tsang the Chinese Buddhist pilgrim in 629AD, who spent sixteen years travelling from China through India and returned bringing copies of key Buddhist texts. His experiences are the theme of one of China’s few long novels, ‘The Journey to the West’ (Xijouyi). Travelling to the south of the Taklamakan, he no doubt experienced the karaburan or black hurricane, a dark storm of pebbles and sand lasting for hours. ‘At times you hear melancholy wails and pitiful cries, and, between the sight and sounds of the desert, men are confused and lost. So many people die on the way, the work of evil spirits and demons.’

Manicheanism, Nestorian Christianity, Judaism, Mohammedanism, and Zoroastrianism entered China along the Silk Road. Envoys from Sassanid Persia, Byzantium, and Arabia had reached Ch’ang-an by the seventh century. And as well as the traffic to the west, there was extensive sea-trade with Japan, and coastal traffic with Korea and South-East Asia. China absorbed immigrants and refugees, Arabs and North Africans, pilgrims from India, Turkoman nomads, Jewish and Muslim merchants. Ch’ang-an’s cosmopolitan population imported foreign jewels and silver, horses and textiles, raw materials and ceramics. It copied foreign fashions in clothing and hairstyles, furniture and art-objects, song and dance. New instruments and musical forms changed the Chinese native models. The Uighurs, the Turkomans of Urumqui and Turfan, produced famous wine, sending the ice-packed golden grapes called ‘mares teats’ and the best musicians and dancers of Asia to Ch’ang-an. Wealth and leisure demanded performing artists in dance, mime, music and song, and Asian songs and ballad forms stimulated new poetic patterns in the works of the intellectual elite.

The rich officials and aristocrats of the city also had second homes in the country. To the south east of the capital was the Lant’ien (Indigo Fields) prefecture where the wealthy had their extensive retreats in the Chungnan (South Mountain) foothills and along the Wang River. Wang Wei the poet painter had a famous estate here. It was a pleasant place for weary officials to escape to, where they could satisfy the desire to be close to Nature’s force and beauty amongst relaxing scenery.

Lo-yang the eastern capital, two hundred miles from Ch’ang-an, also had its lakes and palaces, gardens and temples. With a population of three-quarters of a million it stood at the gateway to the great flood plains of the Yellow River. Less well-defended and smaller than Ch’ang-an, but with better water supplies, it was sited on the north bank of the Lo River and south of the Yellow River in Honan province. Built by the Chou it was the Eastern Han capital from 25AD and was sacked along with Ch’ang-an in 311AD though rebuilt in the 490’s. It too was re-established by the Sui Dynasty. When Empress Wu came to the T’ang throne she had a Hall of Light, a Ming-t’ang built there, to symbolise the power of the dynasty. Three tiered, its lowest tier symbolised the four seasons, the second tier the twelve double hours with a dish-shaped roof supported by nine dragons, and the highest tier symbolised the twenty-four fortnights of the year.

T’ang China

The Chinese poets give glimpses of the life of Ch’ang-an’s Imperial Palace. The beauty of Hibiscus Park, with its memories of the Han consorts. The crystal blinds, embroidered curtains, silk and mica screens of the Imperial apartments and terraces. The lakes and pools with their stone ornaments, fish and dragons. Lutes and pipes sounding through the gardens. The flowered skirts, the jade pendants, the gauze and crimson silks, the slender waists and green-painted willow eyebrows, of girls dancing. Wine drinking in the moonlight. Candles and silk fans, kingfisher covers and carved mirrors. Midnight visits and the exchange of poems. Scented robes and letters on coloured paper. Water clocks and chiming bells. Lacquered trays and cups. Gardens of bamboos and cassia, willows and chrysanthemums, orchids and pear trees. Mandarin ducks and lotus flowers are on the waters, orioles are in the trees, butterflies over the grasses. The cry of the phoenix sounds, and eyes are filled with tears. There is a coolness of jade and pearl. There is a rustle of silk over dew-white steps.

Chang Hêng describes the dancers of Huai-nan. ‘Delicate snapping waists, a glow of the lotus flower, shedding crimson flame. Languid hesitant eyes, suddenly blaze with light, skirts fluttering, birds in flight. Gauze sleeves whirl falling snow, weaving the dancing hours, till white powder and willow brows are gone, flushed faces, tangled hair, gathered and held with combs. Gowns of gossamer trail. P