Mark Edward Lewis, Construction of Space in Early China
Order from chaos through space: First the body, the household, the city, the regions, the empire, the world, then the cosmos..
Mark Edward Lewis wrote:
Introduction
UNITS OF SPATIAL ORDER
…. The early Chinese themselves had already developed discourses dealing with the historical construction of ordered human space. These began from the image of a primal state of undifferentiated chaos out of which all objects and ultimately human society emerged. Perhaps the most influential was a cosmogonic discourse preserved as a complete narrative in four texts, as well as in scattered references. These describe a formless, watery chaos at the beginning of time, and then depict the emergence of objects through a process of sequential division. This is sometimes described in mathematical terms as the division of an original unity into two parts, then three or four, ending in the formation of all things. While these divisions are not the work of men, the texts repeatedly insist that only the sage could understand the principles underlying this emergence of ordered space and use that understanding to regulate the world.
While the primal chaos had vanished, it survived as a permanent background condition to human existence. First, it formed a constant reservoir of infinite potentiality accessible to the sage who thereby obtained power to alter the spatially structured present. Second, it remained as a constant menace of universal dissolution and chaos should the principles that had forged order out of nondistinction ever be abandoned. This is the source of the specter of “chaos [luan]” that has haunted the Chinese imagination for millennia. This parallel vision of a primal state of nondistinction that acts as both an inexhaustible source of vitality and a threat of all-consuming chaos has remained a feature of Chinese thought down to the present day.
The creation of structured space out of chaos also figured in tales of a presocial age when men and animals had mixed freely. The tales described the technical, moral, and intellectual innovations that had separated a structured, human world from raw nature, attributing these changes to the work of the culture hero sages. These stories, more clearly than the cosmogonies, present a model of the construction of human society through the progressive shaping and spatial distribution of objects and groups. Several Warring States accounts linked the cosmogonies and the separation from animals as either two steps in a larger process of structuring space, or as parallel recurrences of a single category of event.
In addition to accounts of the construction of organized space, several texts insisted on the importance of continued action in their own day to protect this space from the threat of chaos. First, early discussions of ritual repeatedly asserted that it maintained order through imposing divisions. It was through separating men from women, senior from junior, ruler from subject, or civilized from barbarian that ritual constituted social roles and groups. Without ritual’s constant guidance to create and maintain these divisions, society would collapse back into undifferentiated chaos or animal savagery. Second, similar arguments were made for the role of the state and its legal codes. For its advocates, the new state order’s maintenance of appropriate divisions preserved society. Thus, virtually all major early Chinese theories of society and the physical world assumed an original undifferentiated chaos that remained in the background both as a source of potential power and as the threatening consequence of improper actions. The human world was a construct formed of delimited objects and their regulated distribution that was created and maintained only through constant effort.
To study this model, I have organized the exposition around the successive levels of constructed spatial objects and their relations. The first chapter deals with the human body, the second with the household, the third with the city, the fourth with the region, and the fifth with the world. …
… The preceding discussion indicates several features of early Chinese constructions of space, beyond such ideas as the domination of center over periphery, of higher over lower, and of the importance of establishing a center as a prelude to any process of ordering.
First, the units of spatial order were never naturally given. The bodies, households, villages, cities, states, and worlds in the lists were entities that had to be maintained by the conscious effort of some agent. This is indicated by the repeated use of verbs such as “controlled,” “arranged,” “governed”, “fashioned”, or “cultivated”. The units themselves were never unitary; they were multiplicities that had to be held together. This is a direct consequence of the aforementioned model of the origins of the world and human society out of chaos. The undifferentiated origin contained no discrete, indivisible units or elements, so all objects had emerged from it through processes of division and confluence. Each of these temporary precipitates constantly moved and changed until it dissolved back into the boundless fluid out of which it emerged. …
Chapter One
THE HUMAN BODY
[long fascinating chapter, only small parts of one section and conclusion here]
The smallest unit through which the early Chinese ordered their world was the body, including its physical and mental aspects. …
… Early Chinese writers treated all entities as elements formed out of an initial unity/chaos through the process of division. These objects thus appeared as both compounds of diverse substances and as parts of a larger whole. As compounds of diverse substances, all spatial units were temporary and unstable conflations of disparate elements that tended to dissociate. As parts of larger wholes, they were dependent fragments that achieved stability and meaning only through incorporation into an encompassing structure. This recurring pattern already appeared at the level of the human body. …
… Through the new vision of qi and the integrated cosmos articulated in the [texts] “Nei ye”, the Mencius, and the Zuo zhuan, the human body came to occupy the center of Warring States visions of ordered space.
THE COMPOSITE BODY
These texts introduced many of the fundamental themes for discussions of the body in Warring States and early imperial China. Throughout this period, people wrote of the body as a measure of value, the smallest unit on which to base the social order, the potential center of the cosmos, the substance of ritual acts, the source and image of hierarchy, and an energetic compound exchanging substances with the surrounding environment.
One image that became central to Chinese discussions of the body was the idea that it was a composite entity formed from materials of different character and quality. Much Chinese religious and medical practice adopted this image, along with the consequent idea that the body could be transformed through the augmentation of certain substances and the elimination of others. This is most notable in later Daoist alchemy, which aimed to fashion a new crystalline body through the incorporation of incorruptible substances and sloughing off of corruptible ones. Such controlled metamorphosis also figured in ancestor worship, which aimed to convert dead bodies into usable ancestors. Even Buddhism, which in its orthodox teachings developed to the highest degree the idea of the body as a temporary composite, elaborated visions of bodily metamorphosis. This was clearest in the tradition that the accumulated virtues of eminent monks turned their bodies into imperishable mummies. …
… A common image of the composite body figures in discussions of the relation of the mind to the senses. As the senses were and still are called guan “officials”, this relation is often patterned on that of officials to their ruler. This turned the body into a reduced model of the polity. This image— anticipated in the fourth-century texts—was elaborated at the beginning of “Techniques of the Heart/Mind”, a third-century B.C. commentarial elaboration of the “Nei ye”:
The heart/mind in the body has the position of the ruler. The roles of the nine openings are shared out as those of the officials. If the heart/mind holds to the Way, then the nine openings will follow their natural pattern. But if tastes and desires give way to excess, then the eyes will no longer see and the ears no longer hear. So it is said, “If the superior diverges from the Way, then the subordinates will fail in their tasks”.
Here again the functioning of the mind is threatened by desires for external objects. If such desires are indulged, then the mind in its obsessions will block the senses in their role of perceiving, and the possibility of accurate perception will disappear.
The image of the body as a state plays several roles. As Unschuld has pointed out, elements of the body in the Huang Di nei jing, in contrast to the earlier medical texts found at Mawangdui, were patterned on features of the imperial realm. This indicates the increasing importance under the Han of the new form of polity as a model for structuring space through controlling the flows of substance. Some passages elaborate the model of the body as state in parallel to the bureaucratic division of labor, where each bodily part is assigned a distinctive task. Others, however, present the mind and other organs as rivals for supremacy. In such a rivalry, the victory of the mind, which is the natural ruler, creates order, but the victory of other organs leads to chaos, ill health, and death. These two contrasting uses of state-body imagery lead to two different lists in which the heart/mind appears. In one list the heart/mind is one of the internal “viscera” or “depots [zang]” along with the kidneys, liver, lungs, spleen, the heart-enclosing network, and sometimes the stomach and intestines. These lists emphasize the harmonious distribution of roles between the heart/mind and the other organs. The second type of list places the mind together with the sense organs. These usually emphasize the would-be independence of the senses, their challenge to the mind, and need to impose a proper hierarchy.
CONCLUSION
The body came to the fore in Chinese thought in the fourth century B.C. In that first emergence of Chinese philosophy, the body became a shared topic of discourse in which different traditions articulated their values. The theme was established as central by the Yangist tradition, which made the proper valuing of the self the premise of its arguments. Their central doctrines included protection of one’s life as a chief value, respecting one’s spontaneous inclinations, and avoiding the attractions of external objects that could damage life. Within these arguments the body and its various parts figured as markers of the supreme value placed on life and self. …
… A discourse on the body in the late Warring States emerged from these foundational texts. It featured at least two major characteristics that recur at all levels of spatial organization. First, it insisted that the body was a composite of diverse and sometimes antagonistic substances. Some programs for the perfection of the body argued for the accumulation of some of these substances and the expulsion of others. Alternative programs insisted on holding the disparate elements together for as long as possible. Second, diverse intellectual traditions argued that the body was not itself an autonomous entity but rather an element of a larger whole. While it was necessary to maintain boundaries defining the body, these boundaries remained both mobile and permeable. Diverse substances, energies, and signs moved outward from the body, or inward from the larger world. Through this flow back and forth, the interface between body and world became an extended zone of progressively radiating influences. In this model the interface between the body and the world consequently became particularly important, and much attention was devoted to such features as skin, face, shadow, hair, and costume.
In the discourse on the divisions of the body, the most important models were the body as state and the body as cosmos. The former dealt primarily with relations between the heart/mind that played the role of ruler and the other organs. The most important of these were the sense organs, which were identified by a graph that also meant “officials”. Most texts from the late Warring States and early imperial periods inherited ideas about the senses that had been developed in the fourth century B.C. Senses naturally desired to seize external objects that gratified them, and consequently they were prone to be trapped by the external world. The mind alone could restrain this tendency and thus preserve the integrity of the body. Consequently, the mind and the senses engaged in a constant struggle for mastery that determined the health of the individual and the ability to command the loyalty of others.
In the second model of internal division the body was a fusion of the energies of Heaven and Earth. The former were more refined, the latter coarser and more substantial. Some traditions of self-cultivation argued that one had to draw in new and more refined energies while expelling old and crude ones. Others developed the idea that death and decay derived from the yin energies of the earth. One either had to eliminate such energies by not eating grain, or to supplement them to counteract their tendency to rot away and perish. Other traditions, represented in the medical literature and accounts of funerary practice, argued that the body had been formed by the progressive accumulation of a gamut of energetic substances. Dying consisted of gradually stripping these away until nothing remained but the physical form. Writers in this tradition emphasized holding together the opposed substances for as long as possible, first to preserve life and then to keep the dead at peace in the tomb. Within this discourse the skeleton, or the “bone and flesh”, was the coarsest and hence most enduring substance. As such, it came to define what endured in the tomb, and what was physically shared by kin. …
… Clothing similarly marked the transition between a state of savagery, when people had worn the skin of animals, and that of civilization, where they decked themselves in what several texts described as artificial versions of the coverings of birds and animals. More significantly, the body as depicted in Chinese art was almost invariably a clothed body. This, as several scholars have noted, reflects the fact that the body in early China, and indeed in all of Chinese history, was a social object. …
Chapter Three
CITIES AND CAPITALS
Separating people from their natural surroundings through its walls—both defensive walls ringing the town and those of buildings—the city forms a distinctively human space filled with all the products of craftsmanship that make up the constructed environment known as civilization. Cities are also a primary form of political power, providing both the setting in which rulers and administrators gather and the stage on which they display their power. Finally, they are focal points of circulation and exchange, drawing in a steady stream of people and objects, and in turn producing new goods that flow outward to other cities or to secondary centers of human habitation. …
… The role and nature of the city in China were transformed by the absorption of the city-states into macrostates based on extracting taxes and services from the peasantry. The city ceased to be an autonomous entity in its own right, with a clear legal distinction between the inhabitants of the town and those of the fields. It became instead the capital of a rural region from which it was no longer administratively or legally separate. …
… While the creation of the empire, like the prior formation of macrostates, reduced the city’s importance, at no time in Chinese history did cities exist for the sake of the countryside, nor was urban culture absorbed into an encompassing, rural world. The offices of the imperial government existed only in walled cities, so the cities alone were filled with the rich and mighty. Moreover, the early imperial cities were the center of a literary culture and refined fashion that spread to rural areas, and the most sophisticated pleasures and products were available only in cities. As throughout Chinese history, the cities contained everything that defined civilization …
Rather than inverting the relation between city and country, or absorbing cities into the rural world, making cities administrative centers had two consequences. First, all cities became subordinate elements of a larger whole. In the macrostates or empire, cities administered their own region but were absorbed in a hierarchy of administrative centers that culminated in the national or imperial capital. Second, the evolution of cities in the Warring States period created new social divisions that were expressed in the physical reconstruction of the urban landscape. Within the macrostates and empire the cities lost not only political autonomy but also the unity of shared membership in a largely self-sufficient enterprise.
The Greek city-state as described by Aristotle was the smallest possible unit that could function as an autarkic totality in which a full human existence was possible. Although this “totality” existed only by excluding merchants, foreigners, women, and slaves, the idea of a realm uniquely sufficient to make possible the realization of human potential—that is, to create “civilization”—was fundamental to the Greek poleis that serve as the archetypical model of Western urbanism, and this vision reappears in the city-states of renaissance Italy. By contrast, early Chinese writers denied the possibility of completeness or autarky for the city, which was part of a larger whole. Moreover, the city was divided against itself, and each of its elements drawn into distinct spatial networks.
In the Warring States period many new cities were founded and older ones expanded. This was made possible by economic development, such as improvements in crop yields due to better water control, the spread of iron tools, and the increased use of fertilizers. Commercial and craft activities also increased, as governments organized large workshops to produce clothing, weapons, vessels in bronze or lacquer, and other products for the court. Wealthy individuals pursued similar activities on a smaller scale. Consequently, whereas earlier cities had populations of a few thousand to a few tens of thousands, in the Warring States period cities of “ten thousand households” were common, and the largest cities apparently exceeded 200,000 in population. Rising population led to the extension of walls and increase of the areas they enclosed. …
More important than the increase in size was the structural transformation marked by the shift from the “concentric city” to the “double city”. The former was characterized by a single, outer wall that enclosed the entire urban space. The area within the walls had separate residential, craft, and temple/palace districts. The last (i.e., the district for nobles and political affairs) was built on rammed earth platforms and sometimes ringed by an inner wall. The “double city” … consisted of two distinct walled enclosures, either sharing a single wall or completely detached from each other. One “citadel” served as the “palace-city” for rulers and administrators, while the other contained merchants, artisans, and peasants. Within these cities there were usually also distinct areas where craft production was concentrated, either near the palaces or the markets.
These cities clearly separate a “political” realm from a residual town devoted to residence and economic activity. This creation of a newly autonomous political space emerged in a wave of building or rebuilding capitals that swept through China from the middle of the Warring States period in association with the rise of the macrostates and the eclipse of the old nobility. Whereas in the old, smaller cities of the Spring-and-Autumn period the entire male population participated at some level in politics, and in times of emergency were assembled to fight or swear loyalty, in the new cities those involved in politics and administration were physically separated from the rest of the population, which was treated purely as the object of registration and control.
This separation of the city marks the replacement of the nobility by agents of territorial lords, and the incorporation of cities into an administrative network. The transformation of political service from an inherited status into an occupational category shifted the meaning of the term shi from the lowest category of noble to “man in government service”. The shi formed an occupational category who justified their right to govern by appeal to the division of labor in which they participated. As analyzed in chapter two [on Household], officials formed a superior occupational category because their encompassing vision created the totality within which other forms of labor found their limited places. Officials also claimed superiority to other occupations through their concern for principle and morality rather than material “things”. They thus embodied the authority of whole over part, and encompassing morality over specialized talent.
Thus, the appearance of the double city marked a major shift in the structure of political power. In the world of the city-states those in authority had been the nobles who lived within the cities together with the “capital populace”. Both were clearly distinguished from the “field people” who lived and toiled beyond the walls. With the rise of the territorial state the old separation between city and agricultural hinterlands was replaced by a new division between the administrative (and religious) “palace city” and the residual city devoted to manufacture, commerce, and trade. The clearest legal expression of this was laws that placed merchants on special registers, and banned people on these registers and their descendants from holding office, wearing silk, riding horses, or owning land. Thus, the division between merchant and official, both of whom were necessarily inhabitants of the cities, replaced that between city dwellers and rural populace as the central legal divide. (In practice, only smaller traders were registered in the market, while truly wealthy merchants who engaged in the production of and long-distance trade in luxuries escaped the bans). This new legal and physical division corresponded to the new social model propounded by the philosophers of the period, in which the rulers were an occupational category, but distinct from all other forms of work through their cultivation of their minds (and thus their close link with philosophers), their embodiment of totality, and the integrity that freed them from slavery to objects. Even as the line between town and country dissolved in the administrative models of the territorial state, new and sharper lines were imposed within the city itself. It is this physical and social division of the city between local and imperial, rather than any inversion of the relation with the countryside, that contrasts the imperial Chinese city from earlier Chinese city-states, as well as those of ancient Greece or Renaissance Italy. …
[omitted interesting material here on: platforms, towers, and terrace pavilions]
… As the center of trade, the markets were … also the center of government power within the nongovernment city. Indeed, the market reduplicated within itself the contrary spatial characteristics of the palace city and the residential quarters, for it had both a multistory tower that served as symbol and locus of authority, and a horizontal grid to facilitate control. Nevertheless, despite these physical manifestations of authority and the presence of officials, the market remained a site of public assembly featuring a range of activities that challenged the authorities and their prescribed order.
The most visible manifestation of government control was a multistory tower in the center of the market that served as the base of operations for the officials in charge. The number of men assigned this task varied from place to place and across time. … These men assured that goods sold in the market were of sufficient quality and all prices in line with standards imposed after a monthly review of authorized agreements between buyers and sellers. They also collected a tax from all those on the market register, and sold government surplus commodities or the products of government workshops. The tower had a flag on top and a drum in the upper chamber that were used to signal the opening and closing of the market [and] were the highest structure in the market, both to manifest state power and to guarantee that signals were clearly visible to people in the most distant corners.
The second spatial expression of government power in the markets was the imposition of a grid. … [Depictions show] the market as a perfect square, with a gate on each side and two major roads forming a cross between the gates. The two-story tower is placed in the center. It thus resembles a reduced version of the textually canonical ideal of a capital city … Each of the four quarters is in turn divided by rows of shops grouped according to the product being sold. Human figures are shown engaging in activities on the four main streets… emphasize the clear separation of goods and the regularity of the lines of shops as evidence of imperial greatness and social order. Several tomb images also depict the arrayed stalls in lines or as a grid, and legal documents from the Qin insist on the regularity of stalls.
As the chief spatial manifestations of authority in the markets, the grid and the tower displayed government power. Just as in city-states, the market was used for public punishments … and executions … the purpose of these displays was to instruct or persuade the masses. Thus, the market became a place where the ruler’s power was publicly displayed … The market also served for less violent displays of authority or for political performances seeking an audience … [and] given their crowds and the confluence of merchant wealth, some market activities escaped government control …
… Within the macrostates and the unitary empire, cities played a new role. First, the conventional city was the so-called double city in which there were separate walled compounds for the government/ritual center and for residential/business wards. This division of the city between an administrative center and residential or business districts became an enduring feature of Chinese urbanism, a feature that divided the city against itself. …
… Second, new modes of using space emerged. The vertical dimension became crucial in the form of platforms, towers, and elevated roads that raised political buildings and their activities above the populace. As demonstrations of power, places for observation, and means of moving in secret, elevated structures became essential to political power. …
Chapter Five
WORLD AND COSMOS
… Chinese of the late Warring States and early imperial period developed models of the world that extrapolated the principles they observed in their own society. These models sought mastery through claims of totality, and they were associated with the encompassing mode of knowing that defined the sage. Since all the units of spatial organization discussed earlier were fragments of larger wholes, it was at the level of the world that unity and thus ultimate power were to be found. These theories of the world, and the mode of knowing it, were thus ultimately theories of a world ruler.
First, writers employed the grid to organize the human world and all of space. The grid was not limited to cities but was basic to all spatial administration of the period, and it provided models of the greater world.
Another geometric model was that of concentric squares radiating in ever-weakening stages from the ruler, who thus became the center and defining point of the world. The dynamic form of this model was the centripetal flow of regionally distinctive goods that was discussed in chapter four [not included here]. Versions have likewise appeared previously in the bands of influence radiating from the perfected body, and in the concentric rings of the social networks of the great families. In addition, Warring States and early imperial accounts structured the world according to geographic features such as the correlate pair of mountains and waters. These models grew out of the cultic importance of these geographic features, and were closely linked to movement across the landscape in royal processions to offer sacrifice at major sites. … All these models could also incorporate accounts of alien peoples or nonhuman creatures from the distant reaches of the earth. These peoples marked out the structure of human space, defined Chinese civilization by negation, and through movement into the center once again gave a spatial definition of the ruler’s power. The divinatory charts and related objects from the period, which manipulated schematic models of the universe as a means of guiding action, also offered ordinary people success through assuming aspects of the totalizing vision of the world ruler.
However, while world models of the period sought to escape the problem of partiality in the figure of the ruler, they also preserved the principle of structuring through internal divisions. Thus, the grid fashioned space and society through carving it up into smaller units, while the model of concentric squares structured the world by dividing it into zones. The attainment of an orderly world through dividing it into smaller units also figured in ritual enactments of cosmic order, such as the ruler’s Bright Hall, or symbolic depictions of it in the patterns on diviner’s boards, liu bo game boards, and some bronze mirrors. This reappearance of division and partiality as necessary elements of the world empire, yet another version of the resurfacing of the repressed, will be discussed in the Conclusion.
GRIDS AND MAGIC SQUARES
… Defining the world through fixing the four directions around a center continued as a standard model throughout the imperial period, and significant debates in political cosmology were articulated in terms of evolving forms of the model.
Although the four quadrants remained conventional, early writers also developed new models of the world. An important example was the grid, which played several roles.
First, it provided an image of creating multiplicity from unity. One line divides a plane into two parts, another creates four, and each additional line increases the number of bounded spaces. Thus, the grid depicted the standard cosmogony, described in the introduction, of a structured multiplicity created out of an undifferentiated whole by repeated division.
Second, the grid divided space into bounded units for the regulation of human activities. This was sketched in chapter three’s account of the grid structure of major streets in the city and stalls in the markets. Third, in the divinatory charts unearthed in early Han tombs and in later magic squares, the grid provided an image of the manner in which mathematical structures underlay a spatial order. In this way the grid became one of the most powerful tools for applying to space the numerological mode of thought that became so important by the end of the Warring States. In the “nine fields” theory it also constituted the most important mechanism for correlating earthly events to astral phenomena. Finally, the grid provided an image of cyclical movement through a controlled space, thus forming a frame for linking cosmological models and ritual actions. …
… The most common form of grid was nine squares formed by the intersection at right angles of two horizontal lines and two vertical ones. Its earliest literary occurrence was in the Mencius’s model of the “well-field” system. This system, a pattern of land use attributed to the Zhou, consisted of a nine-square grid in the shape of the Chinese graph “well (jing)”. The idea of such a system was probably inspired by references to an ancient pattern of land use that was no longer understood. Having only the name jing, the authors of the Mencius imagined a nine-square grid. The eight outer squares were owned by individual households who worked them for their own subsistence, while the last belonged to the lord and was worked collectively. Since income from the central field provided for the public purse, the people paid tax only in the form of their labor. …
… The “well-field” system derives from the idea that division is the basis of social order and good government. The character [for] jing is used in early texts to indicate the division of the city by a grid of streets and the market by stalls. It had the broader meaning of “to put in order” or “rule”, and came to be applied to the canonical texts that provided order in the world. Thus, the imposition of a grid first appears as the spatial form of the making of distinctions that was the basis of all order.
Second, the grid assured equity by creating standard units. Demarcating equal plots of land in a grid, and using these plots as units for taxation and reward, already figured in administration by the middle of the fourth century B.C., when the Mencius was being composed. The practice is associated with the Qin reformer Shang Yang, who divided fields into a grid of equal plots by constructing a network of paths called qian and mo. This grid in theory produced equal units of land so that each household had identical holdings to provide their taxes and service, and they also fixed a standard unit for the allocation of rewards to those who earned merit in military service. The Mencian model simply projected contemporary practices into antiquity.
While the Mencius insists on the rural character of the “well-field” and posits a separate mode of taxation for cities, other grids defined urban space, as discussed in chapter three. Authors regularly linked grids in the countryside and those in the city. A striking demonstration of this is the phrase “market-well (shi jing)”. This identifies the market’s structure with that of the Zhou field system in the Mencius. The phrase appears in the Mencius itself, and continues down through the Han.
Thus, grids were a feature of life, both in cities and the countryside.
Since the square of the four directions had long been basic to world structure, the application of grid-squares to world models was an easy step. There are references in late songs from the Shi jing to a division of the Shang world into nine sections, and the Mencius divides the area within the seas into “nine areas of ten thousand li square”. …
… Here [alas, passages omitted] the world is a full-blown grid. The nine provinces of Yu make up one zhou. Nine of these zhou in turn make up a single unit of a grid, which forms a single unit in a larger grid. This larger grid is ringed by the ocean, which is the true edge of the world, the point at which Heaven and Earth meet.
This also shows reasons for adopting the grid as a model of the world. The earlier reference to backward temporal extrapolation posits sequential divisions from a primal unity as fundamental to the emergence of the world. As noted earlier, the grid is a spatial image for such a process. What is novel here is the explicit appeal to the grid as the visual image of a potentially limitless extension based on a fundamental unit that retained a fixed and simple structure.
Alexis de Toqueville observed that the grid was a clear and simple structure that could be reproduced endlessly to generate a city at whatever scale was desired without losing its internal order. This is the role assigned to the grid in Zou Yan’s world. Yu’s nine provinces are a first grid that forms one unit of a second grid of nine, which in turn forms a unit of a third. He stops the process at that point, but there is no inherent reason he could not have repeated it a fourth or fifth time. For a process of finding small units and then extrapolating them to infinity, the grid offered an ideal spatial mechanism.
The grid was not only useful for Zou Yan’s purposes, but also a genuine result of extrapolating empirical observations. Both the fields and the cities of Zou Yan’s world were structured in grids, and even the houses discussed in chapter two were based on the multiplication of recurring square units. With the idea that China consisted of nine units, and the tendency to visualize such an arrangement as a grid, the process of arguing from lesser to greater was already developed. Fields and cities formed grids at the local level, and each of these formed a unit in the larger grid of China. To create a model of the entire world it was only necessary to repeat the process.
The appeal of the grid … also derived from the development of the magic square. Two cosmograms, the Luo Writing and the River Chart, lay out the two major orders of the Five Phases as a 3 x 3 grid. While the earliest reproductions of these date only from the Song, references to them and charts with similar organizations date back to the late Warring States or early Han. More important, grid structures are a recurring feature of Han divinatory charts that were used to assign proper positions in time and space. Such charts included the Xing-de divinatory charts, the “Nine Palace” chart, the chart attributed to Yu for the disposal of the placenta, and the Tai Yi diviner’s board discovered at Fuyang. Thus, it is likely that at the end of the Warring States grids in the form of magic squares or related structures were used in the visual demonstration of the Five Phases cycles …
CONCLUSION
[entire chapter, unmarked]
The preceding chapters have shown how the early Chinese articulated every level of spatial order in terms of the relation of part to whole. Whether discussing cosmology, society, or politics, they presupposed an original, undivided totality that in the human world appeared as chaos. All objects or groups emerged from this original state of nondifferentiation through sequential division and recombination. The classic form of this model was the division of the whole into Heaven and Earth, which then rejoined to produce all life. Apart from the primal chaos itself, there was no absolute, eternal foundation or element that existed outside the realm of flux and change.
Everything that existed was a temporary confluence of the diverse energies and substances that had emerged from nondifferentiation; without constant effort, they would return to that state. The specifically human forms of space—bodies, families, cities, regions, states, and world—were the products of conscious and continuous human endeavor. They likewise tended to lapse back into chaos or nondifferentiation.
In addition to being unstable confluences of diverse energies, all things human were fragments of a primal unity. As ever larger macrostates were created through absorbing city-states, the authority of whole over part became a standard theme of intellectual and social analysis. In intellectual polemics it took the form of rival traditions, each claiming an all-encompassing wisdom of which their rivals possessed only a limited part. In political analysis it took the form of seeking an end to the constant warfare of the period through the construction of a single, unitary state. In social thought it took the form of a vision of the state as an encompassing order within which the division of labor and the segmentation into households could be transcended in networks of exchange. Warring States Chinese found a world divided against itself in intellectual polemics, wars, and economic specializations. All hope for truth, peace, and order hinged on achieving unity, and all intellectual and political authority were assigned to those who could fashion such a unity and bring all others within its bounds.
The categories of spatial analysis discussed in this book emerged within this overarching vision. To avoid disintegration, each level of space needed a defining center around which the rest could be organized. Within the body, the authority of the mind over the senses maintained an autonomous self, while the unity of the spirit energies and the skeleton/skull perpetuated the self beyond death. In the household, the authority of the father provided the orthodox center, and behind him lay a patriline defined in ancestral cult. However, the authority of the mother provided a countercenter in which the household was defined by the husband-wife tie and the authority of both parents over children, rather than the purely masculine line of descent. The tension between these two models of organization resulted in two visions of the household that in turn produced such phenomena as the perpetual scandal of female authority at court and the pairing of the ancestral temple and joint husband-wife tomb as parallel loci of the death cult. In the city, the political district became the center through its unique vertical dimension, and then extended order outward through the grids of the market and the streets. At the same time, the imperial capital developed as a new ritual center and model of a text-based city under which all other urban centers were subsumed as partial replicas. Finally, all the former states were reduced to the status of regions, which found order only through participation in the political realm embodied by the capital and the urban political districts. The high culture of the epoch was defined in the language and art of the court, and the regional centers were drawn in through the centripetal flow of men and tribute goods to the capital.
However, in a world in which truth and order were identified with unification, these units remained fragments that could never in themselves achieve harmony. The perfected body in the “Nei ye” and related traditions found fulfillment only when its influence radiated to the ends of the earth. A household achieved full order only when, as in Han readings of the “lesser prosperity” in the “Li yun” chapter of the Li ji, “the whole world was a household”. This itself was a decline from true unity when the “whole world was public”. Each city functioned only as part of a network that converged in the capital, which itself played its role only to the extent that it drew together both Heaven and Earth in its ritual program. Regions, as noted, were fragments which contributed to order only through sending men and objects to the imperial center where they provisioned the unifying empire.
Thus, every level of spatial order pointed to a world empire in which lost unity was finally regained. The body, family, city, and region all found completion and meaning only within the new empire that ideally absorbed the entire world. However, although world empire was the logical culmination of the vision of unification, it remained distinct from the primal unity. First, the Chinese knew of peoples beyond their reach: earlier, the mythic states where strange creatures lived at the ends of the earth and, later, in lands such as Central Asia and Korea. More important, however, was the fact that even a universal state remained distinct from the absolute unity of nondifferentiation.
The latter appeared in an ordered society only as chaos: the vanishing of frontiers, the overturning of hierarchy, the end of the distinction between men and women, and the disappearance of the separation of humans and beasts. The closest approximations to this in Chinese history were the cataclysmic civil wars that marked the collapse of major dynasties. Thus, the world empire needed within itself all the fragments that underlay its establishment: regulated bodies, ordered households, policed cities, and structured regions. This was the truth indicated in the lists of ordered spatial units with which this book began. Like all the other forms of ordered space, the empire was a whole that remained divided against itself.
This is demonstrated in the relation between the family and the state in the empire, as elaborated in a monograph by Ogata Isamu. Despite classicist models that saw the state as an extension of the household, in practice the imperial state and the family were built on different principles, and the political order incorporated those differences. The state was constructed on the basis of relations between the ruler and his ministers/servants. The latter term originally indicated a slave or a dependent servant, and as in early modern Europe the early bureaucracy was formed by “the king’s servants”. Early Chinese officials, and people in general, could never refer to themselves by their family name in communications with the emperor. Instead they used the formula “your servant + personal name”. The right to name one’s family in the presence of the emperor was given only occasionally as a political privilege to the chief of the Xiongnu. This is important because slaves likewise had no surname and no legal family. In becoming the emperor’s servants, people left their own family, lost their surname, and became the emperor’s slaves.
The idea that one ceased to be a member of a family when in imperial service was marked not only in self-reference, but also in formulae pertaining to career patterns. To begin an official career was to “remove [from the household] one’s body/self [chu shen]” or to “rise up out of the household [qi jia]”. A request to retire was indicated by the formula “to beg for one’s skeleton”, where the skeleton was the part of the body that belonged to one’s “bone and flesh” kin. Furthermore, biographical sketches of officials often specified whether they died “in office” or “in the household”. All these usages indicate the assumption that the state and the family constituted two distinct and even antithetical realms, and that participation in one meant withdrawal from the other.
Ogata also examines the terms in which these two realms were understood. He shows that the state was identified as the realm of gong “the lord, public, universal”, while the household or family was the realm of si “the private, partial, limited”. Thus, he explains the tension between the two in terms of the dichotomy of part and whole around which this book has been structured. Families were by nature partial and limited in their interests, as demonstrated in the disputes between the Mohists and the ru classicists over whether the notion of a “concern for each and every individual” was reconcilable with the differential affections owed to kin. Arguments in the Lun yu, the Mencius, and the Han Feizi on whether fathers and sons should testify in court against one another indicate the same tension. The state was intended to be an encompassing structure in which all were equally subject to laws, rewards, and punishments. The household, in contrast, was a limited or partial realm which privileged members over outsiders, and rated even outsiders in terms of kin ties.
While the state and household were thus diametrically opposed, the state could not do without the household realm. Although certain utopian classicists imagined a high antiquity in which “the whole world was public”, and radical statist philosophers like Han Fei advocated a world in which political loyalties superseded devotion to kin, in practice households remained indispensable elements of the state order.
First, the Warring States polity depended on the service and taxes provided by peasant households, and the imperial state was built on the same foundation. Second, the Chinese empire remained a dynastic state, so the family unit remained embedded at the pinnacle of the imperial order. Third, and most important, given the limited number of personnel that the early Chinese state could recruit and pay, the government relied on powerful families to impose order at the local level. The state order was thus not limited to those in state service, but necessarily included within itself large numbers of kin groups with particularist, local interests. These groups were drawn into the state order through the wealth and prestige gained in service, but they also assisted in preserving order through their pursuit of local power in forms condemned by statist visionaries such as Han Fei.
Thus, while the empire was itself the culmination of the drive toward total unity, it was a unity that harbored within itself, and depended on, many limited groups pursuing their own partial interests. The official public realm consisted of the imperial house and the few tens of thousands in state service, and secondarily those engaged in the study of the artificial, text-based language propagated by the court and its servants. Only these would, in the categories of the day, have been involved in “public service [ gong shi]”. The vast majority of the population spent their entire lives within the partial realm of private interests defined by the household and economic enterprises. The link between the two, and the key to the ability of the Chinese empire to establish some degree of local order, lay in the fact that members of the great families moved back and forth between the two realms, thus establishing a single realm consisting of both state and families (guo jia). In the combination of these two, the addition of the single “universal” to the huge number of “partials”, the Chinese empire came as close as it possibly could to the vision of total unity. Since this approximation of unity was achieved only in the shifting of members of the great families between public service and private interest, the dream of constructing a universal space was achieved only within the dimension of time. But that is another book. [END]
The Source:
Mark Edward Lewis*, The Construction of Space in Early China, State University of New York Press 2006
*Social Science Files subscriber
Evolutions of social order from the earliest humans to the present day and future machine age.