Military history is an important emerging field in Chinese studies, and Nicola Di Cosmo is one of its leading lights. In 2001 he organized a conference on imperial Chinese military at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, and papers from this conference constitute the present volume.
Military historians will applaud Di Cosmo for inveighing against “…the influential perception that Chinese culture was inherently indifferent to the gritty matter of battles and wars and consequently paid little or no heed to military topics” (p. 1). More importantly, they will appreciate his four useful and insightful “meanings” or dimensions of military culture: first, a code of military conduct; second, civilian strategic culture; third, a society's degree of inclination for war and military organization; and fourth, the celebration (literary, civic, or otherwise) of military heroes and exploits. Most of the chapters conscientiously invoke one or more of Di Cosmo's dimensions.
The volume's chapters nicely span Chinese history chronologically, with the only noticeable gap being, as usual, the Yuan dynasty. Robin Yates pieces together from documentary and archaeological evidence the beginnings of Chinese military law during the Warring States period and makes the important speculation that “…it was through the army that cultural beliefs and practices of the educated elite filtered down to the mass of the population…specialists in Chinese popular culture have been revealing in recent years just how strong military values were and still are in Chinese popular culture” (pp. 40–41).
Other chapters are less cultural in their presentation. Ralph D. Sawyer offers a pastiche of prognosticative techniques and beliefs from military compendia and early historical records. Michael Loewe's chapter on the Western Han army has topical coverage of strategy, tactics, leadership, conscription, and logistics, but does not address military culture.
Edward L. Dreyer, a pioneering figure in Chinese military history who completed his chapter shortly before his sudden and premature passing, gives a detailed and circumstantial account of the War of the Eight Princes (300–307), largely unknown to Western Sinologists but widely familiar to the educated (and non-specialist) Chinese public.
The chapters by David A. Graff, Jonathan Karam Skaff, and Don J. Wyatt are superb. Graff's illuminating consideration of Tang battle narratives and his conclusions about the place of cunning, cleverness, and stratagems in Tang historical writing are applicable to other periods as well. Skaff's chapter, which focuses sharply on military culture during the first half of the Tang period, vindicates Alastair Iain Johnston's thesis about Chinese strategic culture in general, but more in terms of practical experience than textual tradition. Wyatt argues and demonstrates very effectively that “the divide between the Song civil and martial man was not unbridgeable but instead highly attenuated and permeable” (p. 196). The famous Song statesman Fan Zhongyan (989–1052) was also a respected and highly accomplished man of war!
Other chapters demonstrate permeability and balance between wen and wu cultural spheres. Kathleen Ryor discusses highly cultured Ming military men and Ming literati who dabbled in military matters and collected swords. S. R. Gilbert persuasively characterizes as fallacious and failed the Kangxi emperor's attempt to create Confucian generals by having military degree candidates write on Mencius, thereby endowing the second-greatest sage with military greatness. Joanna Waley-Cohen's chapter on the militarized political culture of the Qing observes that during high Qing, “at least for a time wu dislodged wen from its exclusive position at the pinnacle of political prestige and shared the limelight on a more nearly equal basis” (p. 281).
Peter C. Perdue's absorbing and insightful chapter, “Coercion and commerce on two Chinese frontiers,” turns the conventional telling of early- to mid nineteenth-century Chinese history on its head and shows how experience on one frontier was applied to the other: the Qing, “emboldened by its spectacular successes against the Mongols, backed Lin Zexu” (p. 337), and “A new sense of unlimited power generated complacency, the pride that went before the fall” (p. 338). But his discussion of Qing expansion into the northwest under General Nian Gengyao and others could have benefitted from a consideration of Wu Shu-hui's pioneering monograph (Die Eroberung von Qinghai untger Berucksichtigung von Tibet und Khams 1717-1727, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1995). Likewise, a look through Tonio Andrade's How Taiwan Became Chinese: Dutch, Spanish, and Han Colonization in the Seventeenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008) would have made his treatment of the southeast maritime frontier even better, but he probably did not have had time to see this before his manuscript went to press.
The volume deals primarily with culture in the premodern Chinese military, but it also contains useful material on military aspects of Chinese culture as well and will, one hopes, lead to future studies on how military experience and imperatives have long permeated popular and high Chinese culture. This reasonably priced and carefully edited volume will be essential reading in imperial Chinese culture and belongs in all serious academic libraries.
