Medieval Chinese Warfare, 300-900 (review)

Graff has written a wonderful book, though its richly deserved acclaim may be limited by its misleading title, and its appearance in the series "Warfare and History." Far from being of interest mostly to military historians, it is probably the best single-volume guide, in any Western language, to the history of medieval China. Pages 35 to 131, the bulk of chapters 2 through 6, are a priceless stand-in for the missing second volume of the Cambridge History of China.¹

Chronologically, the coverage is from the disintegration of the Western Jin dynasty to the fall of the Tang dynasty—a nearly complete survey of both the early medieval period of disunion and the late medieval reformulation of the Chinese empire. (Opinions differ as to whether the complications of the third century should be seen as the last act of Chinese antiquity or the dawn of a new era, and Graff does not argue the point.) Spatially and ethnically, the work covers "the Chinese world"; territories and peoples come under discussion to the extent that they became matters of concern to the dominant regimes in the Chinese cultural sphere at any given time. This coverage corresponds to that found in the underlying sources, but inevitably (and correctly) leads to flexible boundaries that do not correspond to any simple definition of "China" or "Chinese."

The contents are organized to provide a framework for understanding the intricate sequence of competing political actors and the military structures that brought them victory or defeat. Given the unique complexity of the early medieval period, and its poor documentation in Western scholarship, Graff has nobly undertaken the additional task of setting these events and institutions in a broader social and, to a lesser extent, economic context. He concludes by indicating ways in which the medieval period laid the groundwork for late imperial history, comparing medieval China briefly to Byzantium, and ultimately deciding that the distinguishing characteristic of Chinese civilization during this period was its continuity with the sacred and ritual-based kingship of antiquity.

Western students of premodern China are faced with two alternatives. They can devote themselves to becoming thoughtful tertiary participants in the great tradition of Chinese and Japanese scholarship, or they can become impudent gadflies, buzzing about the monumental corpus of East Asian historiography, insisting on different perspectives and new questions. The greatest virtue of Graff's work, particularly for the non-sub-specialist who comes to it for help with a period that even most historians of China find opaque and baffling, is the breadth and judiciousness of his command of the crucial Chinese (and, much more selectively, Japanese) guides into his vast topic. He has both the necessary mastery of a blizzard of intricate details, without which no comprehension of medieval China is possible, and the capacity to step back and describe the larger pattern within which they have occurred.

As someone who has slaved over the sources for substantial tracts of Graff's material, I am deeply impressed by the clarity and penetration of his treatment. As someone with a temperamental weakness for the gadfly approach, I think that Graff may minimize the epistemological problems posed by traditional historiography, and that he may have too easily accepted its definitions of what the issues are, and how we might approach them. But this book is a remarkable achievement. It should raise dramatically the next generation of Western dissertations on medieval Chinese history.