The Cult of Ch’i T’ai-kung and T’ang Attitudes to the Military

Tang Studies 7 (1989) The Cult of Ch'i T'ai-kung and T'ang Attitudes to the Military D.L. McMULLEN ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY I. Introduction In one of his two studies of tbe role of the arnlies in T' ang history, Professor Pulleyblank wrote of the T'ang that it was "the dYilastyinwhich wu it.':, the military side of the [civil/military] coin, was most prominent and played the biggest role." In the same article, he also raised the fascinating issue of the relation of one of the distinctive features of pre-modern Chinese civilization, its "civilian ethic," to T'ang history.1The idea that Chinese political and social culture was distinguished by its preference for the civil over the military has received many formulations. Its roots lay in the early European experience of China and ran through the successive stages by which Europeans encountered the Chinese. First the Jesuits, concerned to idealize the Chinese, spoke of their predilection for "letters" and the absence in them of any "warlike genius.,,2Later, when the foreign powers became deeply involved in China, observers characterized the Chinese as "not a military The substance of this article was given as a paper to the Early China Seminar at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London on 20 May 1985. I am grateful to Professor Glen Dudbridge for later reading it in draft and making a number of suggestions. In re-writing it, my approach has been influenced by the stimulating book by Mark Edward Lewis, Sanctioned Violence in Early China (Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 1990). My debt to some of the ideas in this book willbe clear both from the text and from the annotation of this article. 1 Edwin G. Pulleyblank, "The An Lu-shan Rebellion and the Origins of Chronic Militarism in Late Tang China," inEssays on T'ang Society, cd. Perry and Smith (Leiden: Brill, 1976),35,59-60. Cf. Charles A Peterson, "Regional Defense against the Central Power: The Huai-hsi Campaign, 815-817," in Chinese Waysin Warfare, ed. Kierman and Fairbank (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 197), 123. 2 Du Halde, The Genera/History of China, Chinese Tartary Etc. (London, 1736), 75. 59 McMullen: 1M Cullofo,';rai-kung nation.,,3 The idea that the civil enjoyed ascendancy over the military in Chinese society went on to find an important place in the early characterizations of Chinese society by social scientists. Max Weber, the founding father of modern sociology, wrote at a time when the information available in Western languages on the Chinese past was a fraction of what it is today. But he used techniques of analysis that enabled him to relate different elenlents in the Chinese cultural tradition with a directness that expressed profound powers of intuition. He gave the idea of the "civilian ethic" one of its most evocative formulations when he wrote of "an increasingly pacified world empire" and linked this emphasis on internal peace to the agricultural nature of Chinese society. Warfare and farming were, he clainled, antithetical; successful farming was essential for stability, and to disrupt it by n1ilitary activity was to destroy the basis of this stability. "The Chinese enlperor became the patron saint of the ploughman; he was no longer a knightly prince. . . . The static pressures of economic life never allowed the war gods to ascend to Olympian heights.',4 In associating Chinese war gods with Mount Olympus, Weber was of course transposing from the Chinese context to the Greek element in the European cultural tradition. It seems unlikely that he knew much about Chinese military divinities, and even more unlikely that he knew which war gods were officially promoted in which periods of Chinese history. The interest of his observation lies partly in his assertion that the emperor's role expressed an aspect of Chinese society as a whole, and partly in his association of the pacific, agrarian nature of Chinese society 3 P.A Varg, Missionaries, Chinese, and Diplomats (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1958),36, recording the observation of Robert Hart (1835-1911), published in 1903. A brief but trenchant account from the first half of the nineteenth century...