What Andrew Chittick calls “the Jiankang Empire” in this provocative and important new book is what is more commonly known as the Six Dynasties. That is, the succession of six southern states stretching from Three Kingdoms Wu (220–280) to the Chen dynasty (557–589) that had their capitals located at the site of the city that is today called Nanjing (but which for most of this period was named Jiankang 建康). Conventional designations such as the Six Dynasties, or the Southern Dynasties, seem to dismiss these states as relatively insignificant digressions from the grand continuum of unitary Chinese history, but Chittick rightly asserts to the contrary that, as of the mid-fifth century, the Jiankang Empire “was arguably the world's largest agrarian empire” (1), easily rivaling its contemporary Byzantine, Sassanid-Persian, and Gupta empires. Not only was the Jiankang Empire a major world empire in its own right, moreover, but Chittick also challenges our easy assumption that it should even be considered “Chinese.”

By this, I believe that Chittick primarily means “Chinese” in the narrowly ethno-national sense, rather than the broadly civilizational sense (which Chittick prefers to label “Sinitic” rather than “Chinese”). Chittick invokes (3) influential recent scholarship by Nicolas Tackett and others arguing that a sense of Chinese national identity first emerged only in the eleventh century Song dynasty (960–1279).Footnote ¹ Others might argue that the full maturation of Chinese ethno-national identity did not occur until much later even than that. In any case, despite popular assumptions that a Chinese ethno-national identity must have been primordial, such an identity is probably more accurately understood as an ongoing construct that had not yet fully coalesced as of the time of the Jiankang Empire. Chittick (x) then asks the “inevitable follow-up question: ‘If they weren't Chinese, then what were they?’”

Setting aside the English-language labels “China” and “Chinese” as obviously extraneous, among native Chinese-language terms the designation “Han people” 漢人 (which is today coterminous with meaning ethnic Chinese) had actually already come to be applied in at least a proto-ethnic sense by the fifth and sixth centuries. However, it was used then by the (non-Han) XianbeiFootnote ² 鮮卑 rulers of the northern Central Plains for their conquered subject population, and it was not applied to the people of the southern Jiankang Empire (32). Similarly, the term Zhongguo 中國, which is today probably the closest equivalent to the English word “China,” in this period often referred only to the northern Central Plains and did not include areas south of the Yangzi River. For example, in 301 the southerner Lu Ji 陸機 (261–303) was advised by friends to return south to Wu “because there are many difficulties in Zhongguo” 以中國多難, 勸機還吳.Footnote ³ Or again, sometime after 371, the vicinity of Nanjing was described as being “not like Zhongguo” 不如中國 (181).Footnote ⁴ Meanwhile, another ancient designation for “China,” Hua 華, arguably meant something more like “civilized” rather than narrowly ethnic “Chinese.” Civilization is an inclusive, acquired, characteristic, unlike ethnic identity, which is exclusive and presumed to be inherent. Therefore, no term that was in common usage at the time of the Jiankang Empire corresponded exactly to what we think of today as “Chinese” in the ethno-national sense (30–32).

To be sure, Hua “civilization” was defined according to the specific standards of Chinese (Sinitic) literate culture and was not some universal abstraction. But, as Chittick correctly observes, this Sinitic literate culture “is the common heritage of all of East Asia,” including Korea, Japan, and Vietnam, as well as the modern nation-state of China (19–20). This leads Chittick to conclude that while the educated elite of his Jiankang Empire may, indeed, have been culturally Sinitic, their local distinctiveness from contemporaries on the northern Central Plains may have been as pronounced as that of elites on the Korean peninsula or the Japanese islands (20–21).

Chittick discusses the case of the proto-Korean kingdom of Koguryŏ 高句麗 in considerable detail, not to reopen contentious recent nationalist debates over whether Koguryŏ should be considered part of Korean or part of Chinese history, but rather to suggest that, like Korea, what we normally think of today as “south China” could potentially also have become an independent non-Chinese nation-state (214–18). Koguryŏ embraced Sinitic literate culture, but it also drew heavily upon local “vernacular” culture, maintained long-term political independence, and eventually (merging with Silla and Paekche) successfully achieved ethnogenesis as a Korean nation. Hypothetically, the Jiankang Empire could have done much the same. The tantalizing question remains, though, whether the Korean peninsula and southern China's differing historical trajectories were merely the result of the contingency that Koguryŏ defeated Sui invasions and the Jiankang Empire did not, and was conquered, or if the Jiankang Empire might have for some reason been inherently more likely than Koguryŏ to become joined together into one empire with the Central Plains.

Earlier, under the Han dynasty (202 BCE–220 CE), “the imperial elite was open to anyone who could master the Sinitic paideia” (that is, the educational curriculum), and internal local differences within the Han empire had been muted (176). After the Han dynasty, however, Chittick perceives a “hardening of cultural prejudice” (51) among Central Plains elites against southerners—people who ate exotic foods like rice and seafood and spoke unfamiliar languages—over subsequent centuries. During the period of the Jiankang Empire, Chittick distinguishes, in particular, between what he calls Wuren 吳人 (inhabitants of the lower Yangzi area—sometimes extending to include all southerners), Churen 楚人 (people from the Huai River north/south border zone, who became militarily and politically dominant in the Jiankang Empire after the early fifth century), and what Chittick somewhat idiosyncratically calls “Zhongren” 中人, meaning inhabitants of the northern Central Plains, and the migrants who travelled south from there.

It is conventionally believed that mass refugee flight from the collapsing Western Jin dynasty (265–317) in the north in the early 300s resulted in prolonged domination of the Jiankang Empire by Zhongren émigré elites, and that the Jiankang Empire contained a very large northern émigré population. Chittick, however, estimates that actual Zhongren migrants (excluding those from the Chu border region) in the fourth century constituted only about 2–3 percent of the total southern population (77, 367–370), and argues that effective émigré domination of the southern states did not outlast the Eastern Jin dynasty (318–420). All population estimates for this period must inevitably be somewhat speculative, but Chittick's do seem plausible.

It could be pointed out that the region under consideration here is still largely confined to the geographic “All under Heaven” that had originally been staked out by the Han dynasty, and that the different languages referred to are mostly what are popularly considered “dialects of Chinese.” But, there certainly was a pre-Sinitic substrate in the south, which did include non-Sinitic languages. Intriguingly, Chittick invokes Victor Lieberman's division of Eurasia between an exposed inner core that was vulnerable to steppe nomadic conquest and a less exposed periphery.Footnote ⁵ Chittick argues that the “most sensible” line of division between the exposed core and the protected rim lay not along the modern border between China and Vietnam, but instead along the Huai River (in central “China”). Chittick suggests that everything from south of the Huai River through modern northern Vietnam might be considered a “Sino-Southeast Asian Zone” (10–12) that formed a hybrid mix of Sinitic and Southeast Asian elements.

This would place Chittick's Jiankang Empire into a somewhat different world from the Central Plains of the north, and Chittick does observe some tantalizing similarities between the Jiankang Empire in the fifth and sixth centuries and contemporary Southeast Asia, including more personalized politics than what are normally associated with Central Plains empires, a kind of “theater state,” and extensive non-tributary commercial maritime exchange (36, 205, 207, 298–99). Chittick is unable to say much about any distinctive local “vernacular” culture in the Jiankang Empire, apart from noting the important local tutelary deity Jiang Ziwen 蔣子文 (214, 224–31). This is presumably because the local culture was mostly oral and went unrecorded. But, in competition with the Sinitic paideia, there was another available non-Sinitic textual tradition: Buddhism.

Of course, the Jiankang Empire shared Buddhism with the Central Plains and much of all Eurasia at this time. But, the Buddhist court of the Liang dynasty (“Jiankang Empire”) Emperor Wu (r. 502–549)—who staged lavish public Buddhist events with as many as ten-thousand persons in attendance, and repeatedly donated his person to the Buddhist Triratna (Three Jewels) to be redeemed by generous state donations—has always been seen as somewhat exceptional. Chittick notes (291–94) that stories began to appear in the late fifth century claiming that ancient Buddhist relics had been rediscovered in the Jiankang Empire that had supposedly originally been placed there by the great South Asian universal monarch Asoka. At that time it was erroneously believed that Asoka's reign had coincided with the period when the independent pre-Qin southern kingdoms of Wu and Yue 越 had been at their heights, and it could therefore be imagined that ancient Wu and Yue had fallen under the dominion of Asoka rather than being part of the Sinitic Zhou king's realm (c. 1045 BCE–256 BCE). Such stories created a potential foundation for imagining the Jiankang Empire as part of a South and Southeast Asian Buddhist world that was independent of the traditional authority of the Sinitic Central Plains.

Chittick claims that the “pejorative ethnicizing discourse” directed at Wuren by Central Plains elites was greater than “for any other marginalized group” in this era (102–3), although it is worth noting that in the sixth century the Xianbei rulers of the Central Plains could be quite scathing in their expressions of contempt for their subject Han people—one even supposedly exclaiming, “one penny Han, let them die” 頭錢價漢, 隨之死.Footnote ⁶ More pertinently, however, northern and southern dismissals of each other as “barbarian” were decidedly mutual. “Southern histories speak of northerners as ‘Rope Caitiffs’ [a reference to the Tuoba 拓跋 Xianbei queue hairstyle], and northern histories refer to southerners as ‘Island Yi [barbarians]’” 南書謂北爲“索虜,”北書指南爲“島夷,” it was observed.Footnote ⁷ Chittick himself argues that the Jiankang Empire conceptualized its relationship with its contemporary Northern Dynasties using the historical parallel of the earlier Han dynasty relationship to the Xiongnu 匈奴 steppe nomads (129–33): that is, recasting the Jiankang Empire as the new center of the Sinitic world, and the Central Plains as uncivilized and foreign. The Buddhist Seng You 僧祐 (445–518) even marveled that north and south had seemingly exchanged places, with the traditional northern heartland of Sinitic civilization now under alien conquest, and the southern land of Wu and Chu, which had once been Yi (“barbarian”), now “turned into a civilized place” 吳楚本夷而翻成華邑 (137).Footnote ⁸

Somewhat surprisingly, the Wuren of the Jiankang Empire did not very often invoke the legacy of the ancient pre-Qin Wu kingdom (232). By the fifth century, Jiankang elites, regardless of their ancestry, “bound themselves together culturally by their commitment to Sinitic universalism, and portrayed their political and literary lineage as a continuation of the Han, Wei, and Jin courts” (258). The southerner Gu Huan 顧歡 even produced what Chittick considers possibly the clearest “statement of a pan-Sinitic ethnic identity in any medieval text” (261–62) in his Yi Xia lun 夷夏論 of 467, which contrasted the Sinitic civilization of Hua and Xia 夏 with the Buddhism of the Yi and Rong 戎 (“barbarians”).

Jiankang Empire attempts to depict itself as the new Sinitic center undoubtedly sprang from the brushes of elites who were literate in the Sinitic textual paideia, and they may not be representative of local vernacular culture. With the weakening of any plausible southern claim to direct inheritance of the supposedly sole line of legitimate dynastic succession after the overthrow of the Eastern Jin dynasty in 420, and with Northern Wei dynasty (386–534) consolidation of control over the whole of the Central Plains by the late fifth century, non-literati southern military and commercial elites became more assertive, and the Jiankang Empire may have begun to evolve in a new direction towards a more Buddhist universalist ideological foundation (325–26).

Perhaps the Jiankang Empire was beginning to develop an independent new identity. Chittick may be correct that by the sixth century there was little evidence that people in the Jiankang Empire viewed their state as the southern half of a “Chinese” whole that must someday inevitably be reunified (17, 331). But, on the other hand, I am also unaware of any evidence that anyone at the time actually considered the string of dynasties from Three Kingdom's Wu to Chen as having a single common “Jiankang Empire” identity either. Within the Sinitic world, beneath the overarching level of Hua civilization and the geographic Zhongguo (and various local native places), individual dynasties were the specific states that people normally identified with. And, the particularistic patron–client relationships that were characteristic of the Jiankang Empire (so excellently described by Chittick) may have contributed to economic polarization, popular disaffection, and a weak sense of popular identification with the later Jiankang Empire dynasties—while northern and southern literate elites, meanwhile, often seemed to be remarkably interchangeable.Footnote ⁹ “Reunification” was surely not inevitable, but any incipient independent ethno-national Jiankang Empire identity that might have been emerging was permanently cut short by the Sui conquest in 589.

There are many sub-topics addressed in this richly researched monograph that cannot even be mentioned here due to lack of space. As Chittick correctly indicates, the Age of Division that followed the Han dynasty remains sorely under-studied in English, and most of the work that has been done lies in the fields of religion, philosophy, and literature (ix). This book would therefore make a major scholarly contribution merely by describing and analyzing so much of the history of this period in detail. But, by also casting the Six Dynasties in a radically new interpretative light, Andrew Chittick has given everyone interested in China very much to think about.