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Military Histories of Early China: A Review Article

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 March 2015

Edward L. Shaughnessy
Edward L. Shaughnessy*
Affiliation:
Department of East Asian, Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL 60637
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Review Article
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Early China , Volume 21 , 1996 , pp. 159 - 182
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Study of Early China 1996

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References

1. Bojun, Yang 楊伯峻, Chunqiu Zuo zhuan zhu 春秋左傳注 (Beijing: Zhonghua, 1981)Google Scholar, Cheng 13, 860-61; Legge, James, The Chinese Classics, Volume 5: The Ch'un Ts'ew, with the Tso Chuen (1872; rpt. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1960), 379, 381–82Google Scholar. I am grateful to Donald Harper for his help in explaining the significance of this passage to me.

2. For cogent comments on the supremacy of the civilian over the military in Chinese history, and the concomitant “disesteem of physical coercion,” see Fairbank, John K., “Introduction: Varieties of the Chinese Military Experience,” in Chinese Ways in Warfare, ed. Kierman, Frank A. Jr., and Fairbank, John K. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974), 1–26Google Scholar. With respect to early Chinese history in particular, I wonder if this pacifistic sentiment is not evident in Benjamin Schwartz's comment that “the mix of reliance on the sacred ties of kinship among those ‘feudal lords’ who belonged to the royal lineage, on feudal strategies toward non-related lords, and on protobureaucratic organization (a mix which may have already existed in the late Shang dynasty) may have plausibly created conditions favorable to a fairly prolonged ‘pax Chou-ica’”; The World of Thought in Ancient China (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1985), 45Google Scholar. We will also see below (p. 166) that Joseph Needham characterized China as more pacifistic than the West.

3. The works to be discussed in the present review are; Kolb, Raimund Theodor, Die Infanterie im Alten China; Ein Beitrag zur Militärgeschichte der Vor-Zhan-Ghuo-Zeit (sic), Materialen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Archäologie, Band 43, Mainz: Verlag Philipp von Zabern, 1991Google Scholar; Needham, Joseph and Yates, Robin D.S., Science and Civilisation in China, Volume V:6, Military Technology: Missiles and Sieges, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994Google Scholar; Sawyer, Ralph D., The Seven Military Classics of Ancient China, Boulder: Westview Press, 1993Google Scholar; Sawyer, Ralph D., Sun Tzu: Art of War, Boulder: West View Press, 1994Google Scholar; Ames, Roger, Sun-tzu: The Art of Warfare: The First English Translation Incorporating the Recently Discovered Yin-ch'ūeh-shan Texts, New York: State University of New York Press, 1990Google Scholar. A recent search of local bookstores reveals other new translations of the Sunzi, and also two complete translations of the Yin-queshan manuscript of the Sun Bin bingfa 孫擅兵法 (0ne by Ralph Sawyer and the other by Roger Ames and D.C. Lau), which it has not been possible to consider in this review.

4. Kolb also notes (p. 115) that the xiao chen no longer appear after the time of King Mu, but he does not explore the implications of this change with respect to the organization of the Western Zhou military. I suspect that their disappearance was part and parcel of a general reorganization of the Zhou military (indeed, I believe there was a concommitant reorganization of many Zhou institutions) in which professional soldiers came to replace lineage leaders as commanders of troops. For some discussion of these changes, see Shaughnessy, Edward L., “Western Zhou History,” in The Cambridge History of Ancient China, ed. Loewe, Michael and Shaughnessy, Edward L. (New York: Cambridge University Press, in press)Google Scholar.

5. On pp. 57–58, Kolb properly dismisses the argument of Wang Guimin that the ma 馬 and duo ma 多馬 of the Shang oracle-bone inscriptions refer to chariotry (Guimin, Wang 王貴民, “Jiu Yinxu jiaguwen suo jian shi shuo sima zhiming de qiyuan” 就殷虛甲骨文所見試說司馬職名的起源, in Jiaguwen yu Yin Shang shi 甲骨文與殷商史, ed. Houxuan, Hu 胡厚宣 [Shanghai: Shanghai Guji, 1983], 173–90)Google Scholar, and also that of Yu Xingxu that cavalry was in use already during the Shang (Xingwu, Yu 于省吾, “Yindai de jiaotong gongju he yichuan zhidu” 殷代的交通工真和驛傳§[|度, Dongbei Renmin daxue renwen kexue xuebao 東北人民大學人文科學學報 1955. 2, 78–114)Google Scholar.

6. See von Dewall, Magdalena, Pherd und Wagen in frūhen China, Saarbrūcker Beitrage zur Altertumskunde (Bonn, 1964)Google Scholar; and Creel, Herrlee G., The Origins of Statecraft in China, Volume One: The Western Chou Empire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 153–54Google Scholar.

7. Kolb finds it “astounding” that, with the exception of a few broad remarks, the topic of logistics is almost unmentioned in pre-Han military treatises (p. 89); with the exception of Kolb's discussions, and some pertinent observations made by Michael Loewe with respect to campaigns at the time of Han Wu di (see Loewe, Michael, “The Campaigns of Han Wu Ti,” in Chinese Ways in Warfare, 67–122)Google Scholar, the topic is also almost unmentioned in studies of early Chinese warfare.

8. See Engels, Donald W., Alexander the Great and the Logistics of the Macedonian Army (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 153–56Google Scholar, Appendix 5. Engels's book, which does not appear in Kolb's bibliography, is an exceptionally clear presentation of the logistical constraints within which any army, and particularly those in antiquity, acted.

9. Volume One (Altertum; Berlin: Stilke, 1920)Google Scholar of this four-part work appears in Kolb's bibliography. His debt to Delbrūck is discussed in a review by Lewis, Mark Edward (T'oung Bio 79 [1993], 324–37, esp. 335–36)Google Scholar, which I will have occasion to discuss further below.

10. Kolb takes the figure of 16 square meters for a chariot from Hong, Yang 楊;弘, Zhongguo gu bingqi luncong 中國古兵器論叢 (Beijing: Wenwu, 1980), 88Google Scholar. I might note that an English translation of this work has now been published: Hong, Yang, Weapons in Ancient China, tr. Lijing, Zhang (New York: Science Press, 1992)Google Scholar.

11. Kolb credits this estimate to Pope, Saxton T., “A Study of Bows and Arrows,” American Archaeology and Ethnology 13.9 (1923), 329–414Google Scholar.

12. Kolbincludes a colorful quote from Turney-High, Harry H., Primitive War (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1971, 13Google Scholar: “The only good function a cutting edge has is to enable the assailant to withdraw his weapon from the spasmodically grasping tissue of his victim. A slashing blow is easily seen, dodged, and parried. It rarely hits a vital spot and therefore only wounds the enemy without killing him. He may be left not only alive but very angry and vengeful.”

13. Kierman, Frank A., “Phases and Modes of Combat in Early China,” in Chinese Ways in Warfare, 30Google Scholar.

14. This section was apparently written for the most part before 1969 (this date of composition is indicated at p. 184 n. a.), with the assistance of Krzysztof Gawlikowski, Edward McEwen, and Wang Ling, which is noted at appropriate places in the Table of Contents.

15. Yates, Robin D.S., “The City Under Siege: Technology and Organization as Seen in the Reconstructed Text of the Military Chapters of the Mozi” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1980)Google Scholar; “The Mohists on Warfare: Technology, Technique, and Justification,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 47 (1979), 549–603Google Scholar; “Siege Engines and Late Zhou Military Technology,” in Explorations in the History of Science and Technology in China: A Festschrift in Honour of Dr. Joseph Needham, ed. Guohao, Li, Mengweng, Zhang, and Tianqin, Cao (Shanghai: Shanghai Guji, 1982), 409–52Google Scholar.

16. He does begin with a very brief survey (pp. 241-47) of the evidence for walled cities before the Warring States period, and also notes (p. 241 n. b) that the poem “Huang yi” 皇矣 of the Shijing (Mao 241) describes siege warfare that is supposed to have taken place just prior to the Zhou conquest of Shang.

17. The passage, found at the beginning of the “Bei cheng men” 備城門 chapter (Mozi [Sibu beiyao ed.], 52, 14.1a–b), is translated by Yates on pp. 413-14.

18. A recent visit to a bookshop suggests, however, that in this case love and money may go hand in hand; in addition to the two books mentioned above, there were four other books by Sawyer, all but one of them (the new translation of the Sun Bin bingfa) yet further repackagings of the Sunzi translation.

19. Ames, Roger, The Art of Rulership: A Study in Ancient Chinese Political Thought (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1983)Google Scholar; Hall, David L. and Ames, Roger T., Thinking through Confucius (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1987)Google Scholar.

20. For an excellent discussion of the problems involved in dealing with manuscript materials for which there is a received text, see Boltz, William G., “Manuscripts with Transmitted Counterparts,” in New Sources of Early Chinese History; An Introduo Hon to Reading Inscriptions and Manuscripts, ed. Shaughnessy, Edward L. (Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies and the Society for the Study of Early China, in press)Google Scholar. For a statement of my own views on the matter, see Shaughnessy, Edward L., I Ching, The Classic of Changes: The First English Translation of the Newly Discovered Second-Century B.C. Mawangdui Texts (New York: Ballantine Books, 1996), 30–34Google Scholar.

21. Sawyer's notes to both his introductory material and to his translations and in both Sun Tzu: Art of War and in The Seven Military Classics of Ancient China are extremely thorough, providing a ready survey of the traditional commentaries to the text(s) as well as a broad range of modern scholarship on them in Western and Asian languages. The notes provided by Ames, on the other hand, only rarely provide more than a bare citation, and, as I will point out below, in some of the cases where he does draw on modern scholarship his choices seem to be ill advised.

22. It is perhaps again ironic that in a recent article Ames has emphasized the need for translations to be faithful to the literal reading of a text; see Tongqi, Lin, Rosemont, Henry Jr., and Ames, Roger T., “Chinese Philosophy: A Philosophical Essay on the ‘State-of-the-Art,” Journal of Asian Studies 54.3 (1995), 727–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar, especially p. 752: “The Problem of Translation.”

23. Again in the case of this gloss, 天者陰陽寒暑時讳也, the translations by Ames and Sawyer reveal their different concerns:

Ames: Climate is light and shadow, heat and cold, and the rotation of the seasons.

Sawyer: Heaven encompasses yin and yang, cold and heat, and the constraints of the seasons.

Can it really be that yin yang 陰陽 here is intended only to refer to “light and shadow”?

24. Sawyer gives the following note explaining his translation (pp. 314-15 n. 80): “The meaning of the circular formation has stimulated voluminous commentaries. Essentially the army seems to be involuntarily compressed into a circular formation and is therefore vulnerable. However, such a formation presents no exposed points or positions yet offers the possibility of numerous fixed deployments and the employment of both orthodox and unorthodox tactics through unfolding. Consequently, in some views it is chosen deliberately rather than forced on the army to allow flexibility while creating the similitude of difficulty and apparent defeat (cf. SWTCC WCCS. vol. 1, p. 38A; ST SCC, pp. 72-75).”

25. Ames cites Yates, Robin, “New Light on Ancient Chinese Military Texts: Notes on their Nature and Evolution, and the Development of Military Specialization in Warring States China,” T'oung Pao 64 (1988), 220–21Google Scholar. Yates makes his comment in a round-about way, first translating the term in this passage in the Sunzi as “forms and names” though suggesting “that both ‘form and name’ refer to flags and pennants” (p. 220). It is curious that unlike Yates (and also unlike Sawyer), Ames does not cite the gloss of Cao Cao 曹操, the first commentator on the Sunzi, which identifies xing as pennants and ming as the sound of gongs and drums.

26. The passage in the Mozi that serves as Yates's evidence presents a long list of flags, named according to their color and/or design, to be used in the defense of a citadel. The list concludes with the sentence: fan suo qiu suo qi ming bu zai shu zhejie yi qi xing ming wei qi 凡所求索旗名不在書者皆以其形名爲旗. Yates translates, “In general, when the name of the flag that you are looking for is not in the book, in all cases use its form and name to make (the design on) the flag״ (Yates, , “New Light on Ancient Military Texts” 221)Google Scholar. Although there is nothing wrong with Yates's translation, neither is there anything in it to suggest that xing ming means “flags and pennants” rather than the “forms and names” of the flags and pennants, which are quite explicitly referred to as qi 旗.Thus, this entire interpretation would seem to be unfounded.

27. For Kuan's, Yang view, Lewis cites his Zhanguo shi 戰國史 (2nd ed. rev. Shanghai: Renmin, 1980)Google Scholar; for Hsu's, , his Ancient China in Transition: An Analysis of Social Mobility, 722-222 B.C. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1965)Google Scholar.

28. This figure is cited in a review of Lewis's book by Kolb, Raimund Th.: “Anmerkungen zu Sanctioned Violence in Early China von Mark Edward Lewis,” Monumenta Serica 39 (1990–1991), 356CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Hsu Cho-yun says that “no fewer than 110 states” were extinguished during the Chunqiu period, leaving 22 (Ancient China in Transition, 59).

29. See above, nn. 9 and 28.

30. Bojun, Yang, Chunqiu Zuo zhuan zhu, Zhuang 11, 186Google Scholar; Legge, , The Ch'un Ts'ew with the Tso Chuen, 88Google Scholar.

31. For this letter, see Yunmeng Shuihudi Qin mu 雲夢睡虎地秦墓 (Beijing: Wenwu, 1981), 25–26, Pl. 167Google Scholar.