Fire and Water: The Art of Incendiary and Aquatic Warfare in China (review)

This volume by the author and translator of The Seven Military Classics of Ancient China (Westview, 1993) assembles numerous examples of incendiary and aquatic attack, the latter usually involving creating flood conditions in sieges of cities. The examples range from the Zhou dynasty (ca. 1000-256 BC) to the Ming (1368-1644). The author cites an extremely wide range of classical Chinese sources, including the official dynastic histories, Sima Guang's Zizhi Tongjian, the standard military classics, the Mohist writings on siegecraft, and later military compendia such as the Wubei Zhi.

The chapter arrangement reflects the diverse nature of the sources. The first part (Chapters 1-7) on Incendiary Warfare includes a chapter each on developments in the Warring States (454-221 BC) and post-Warring States periods that rely largely on historical writings, two other chapters ("theoretical developments" and "methods, weapons, and techniques") drawn largely from the specifically military writings, and a final chapter on riverine warfare that is devoted to incendiary attacks on enemy fleets. The second part (Chapters 8-11) concludes with a chapter devoted to seven "illustrative sieges" in which river waters were important.

Despite the author's enviable command of the Chinese source material, the book is slow going for specialists and will be of limited use to military historians outside the China area. The author jumps backward and forward centuries at a time as he proceeds from example to example. The military activity is presented without any broader historical context, the book lacks maps, and the use of Wade-Giles rather than pinyin to transcribe Chinese words is becoming increasingly difficult to justify. There is a considerable disconnect between the sparse battle accounts in Chinese historical sources and the elaborate machineries and techniques described in the military manuals. Most of the numbers reported in the historical sources are not reliable. The general literary tradition favors the idea that battles should be won by clever stratagems, and many of the stratagems reported are quite fanciful. The author provides little guidance to the reader regarding these issues.

Better editing might have solved some of these problems. Two examples must suffice. On p. 303 we read that the Mongols "attacked the Jurchen at Nan-ching in A.D. 1232," and it needs to be explained that the city in question is Kaifeng in Henan province, rather than Nanjing (Nanking) in Jiangsu province. Two paragraphs later we read of "the Ming's earlier eastern thrusts under Wu Kuo-kung in 1358." The reader needs to be told that Wu Kuo-kung is not a man's name but the title, literally Duke of the State of Wu, assumed by Zhu Yuanzhang in 1356, twelve years before he proclaimed himself the first emperor of the Ming dynasty in 1368. Even with these drawbacks, however, readers familiar with Chinese history and able to read classical Chinese will find Fire and Water a useful aid in their own research.