Eurasian influences

The majority of papers in this volume deal with Western Asian influences on China, and thus on the introduction of Islamic science and civilization into China. One paper focuses on the contributions to Korean civilization of members of a fourteenth century Uighur family at the Yuan court that emigrated to Korea in 1358; European influences on China are mentioned only in the context of the transmission of Greek geography, medicine and astronomy to China through Western Asian intermediaries.

In his paper “Whose secret intent?” George Lane describes some Persian responses to Mongol rule in which the Mongols are welcomed as the bringers of justice. In Mustawfi’s Zafarnamah the Chief Justice of Qazvin, having appealed to Möngke to destroy the Ismaili menace, declares “He who comes over the river Amu Darya finds the Qa’an’s justice” (p. 24) and it is that justice that he wishes the Mongols to establish in Qazvin. Mongol camps in Iran and Azerbaijan were places where conquered and conquerors, “the Muslims of Eastern Turkestan and their Mongol saviors” developed peaceful contacts and “social intercourse at various levels, including trade, the provision of skills, and the exchange of expertise and information” (p. 16-17). These camps “provided shelter to learned men” and artisans. The incorporation of Iran into the Mongol empire was followed by a stream of “those who sought to ally themselves with the new power” (p. 21) as well as “others who looked east with thoughts of fame and fortune” (p. 22).  These emigrants, merchants, scholars, artisans and servants of the government who made their way to China brought their culture, arts and sciences with them. Yet the influence of the Yuan Muslim communities was limited and not long-lasting Chaffee claims in the next paper in the volume, because of  their “alien, semi-colonial character” (p. 54).

Whether Chaffee is correct in his assessment of the Muslim influences on Yuan China, it is in his paper “Cultural transmission by sea: maritime trade routes in Yuan China” that one of the volume’s chief defects appears most clearly: an almost total absence of theoretical discussion. The absence is most noticeable in Chaffee’s remarks on the Mongol encouragement of trade:

 

Lest we imagine the Mongols to be precursors to Adam Smith, we should remember that they were warriors and empire-builders first and foremost. They were adept at adapting to local circumstances, at utilising peoples, technologioes, and trade to their own ends. But those ends led to a hybridisation of practices, in which commerce involved politics and patronage in addition to considerations of purely economic exchange. (p. 43)

 

Perhaps I am missing something, but I cannot imagine such a thing as “a purely economic exchange,” and certainly not in the long history of China up until and including today. Far from leading to a hybridisation of practices, it would appear that in China (and throughout Asia) there was a long evolution of tribute-trade relations in which local politics and international relations were involved in all aspects of commerce (see e.g. Hamashita Takeshi, “The tribute trade system and modern Asia” in Memoirs of the Research Department of the Toyo Bunko, no. 46 (1988), p.7-25).

Another instance of the absence of theoretical questions appears in Rossabi’s paper “Notes on Mongol influences on the Ming Dynasty”. Rossabi notes the presence of Mongol dress in Ming ceramic funerary figures portraying Imperial Guards but asks

 

The clothing worn by the Imperial Guards may have symbolic significance, but could wearing of such garb be superficial and not particularly important? Although various military honour guards in other civilisations have worn decorative costumes, which employed foreign motifs, did this truly reflect substantial influence or was it a concerted effort to co-opt or even to link them to the other’s glorious heritage? (p. 208)

 

No less than Chaffee’s remark on “purely economic exchange” Rossabi’s remarks on the semiology of clothing and dress--especially when that involves imperial military uniforms!--suggest that he has never thought about the matter at all.

Interreligious relations are not dismissed as superficial nor as “not particularly important in Ma Juan’s paper “The conflicts between Islam and Confucianism and their influence in the Yuan Dynasty” but when the author remarks that

 

Islam, as a minority religion, readily adjusted to Confucianism in order to survive... “The Muslim minority was, in part, strengthened by its relations with Confucianism ... Conflict created solidarity ... enhanced its cohesion, and contributed to its identity. ... The community persisted into the Ming and later dynasties through a combination of conflict and cooperation. (p. 68)

 

The major theoretical issues that I had hoped this volume would address are actually brought out into the open only in Hyunhee Park’s paper “Cross-cultural exchange and geographic knowledge of the world in Yuan China.” In this paper the main topic is on the introduction of Islamic geographic knowledge into China as that is evident in the only extant Yuan era map of the world, but the discussion of the use of grids in maps complicates the history.

 

Although tables of longitudinal and latitudinal coordinates had existed in Islamic geography before this time, the production of grid maps constituted a new development. Jonathan Bloom argues that the grid concept was probably transmitted from China to the Islamic world for use in architectural planning. ... Needham called the style of the grid map a “Mongol style.” ... It seems highly likely, then, that these Muslim scholars in the Yuan court adapted their new concept of longitude and latitude coordinates to the construction of world maps. Whichever is more accurate, the possibility of such complicated mutual influences is intriguing. (p. 141-142)

 

The production of the map was (according to Hyunhee Park) probably originally undertaken by order of the Mongol emperor Khubilai Khan (died 1294) and completed in 14th century Yuan China. It reveals that its makers had both Chinese and Islamic geographic knowledge, but how to tease out what is Chinese, what is Islamic and what is Mongol?

Economics and clothing are not the main issues discussed in the volume, but these as well as religion, language, art, astronomy, architecture, cartography, geography and medicine are all presented as pre-existing objects (whether knowledge, practices, or material objects) that are transmitted or transferred from one civilization to another. We have cross-cultural exchange and influences, but the peoples, the knowledge and the civilizations are presented as though they are side-by-side rather than mixed up at the core. Lane remarks that “It was these rudimentary contacts [in the military camps of Iran and Azerbaijan] which also underpinned the emergence of a Mongol empire built on cultural and commercial exchange” (p. 17) but Iran remains Iran and the Mongols remain invaders--even though the latter are invited to rule Iran and establish justice there. If it was the contacts that “underpinned the emergence” of the empire, how does this affect the way we think of influence? exchange? cross-cultural? foreign?

Perhaps the very focus of the conference upon which the volume was based--foreign influences on China--led the contributors to focus on the foreign, but all of the papers (and not just Park’s) should lead readers to question what we mean by foreign and by influence in discussions of ethnic groups, cultures, nations and civilizations. A very simple example: by whom, when, how and why might this book--a record of a workshop at Binghamton University in 2009, attended by scholars at institutions in London, Binghamton, Nanjing, Würzburg, Harvard, Yale, Munich, New York, Beijing and Philadelphia, published in Singapore, with bibliographical references to and discussions of works in Chinese, English, French, German, Japanese and Persian--be described as a foreign influence? If the objection is raised that this is an example of modern globalisation, then what is Eurasia, and what were the Mongol empire and Yuan China? I do not have an answer to that question, but I had hoped that the matters discussed at the conference and reflected in this volume would have asked some deeper questions about what it is we are studying when we claim to be studying “influences” whether “Eurasian” or “foreign.” At least in my own case it seems that everything that comes to me from the past (whether 1354, 2009 or yesterday) and from anywhere outside my skin is both foreign and an influence, but that to speak of the time and “skin” of a continent, a people, a nation, a culture, a civilization, a religion or a language calls for a deeper understanding of any and all of these than is evident anywhere in the volume.