Chapter 7: India and China Establish Empires, 400 B.C.- A.D. 550

Chapter 7.1: India’s First Empires

• Chandragupta Maura may have been born in the powerful kingdom of Magadha. 

  • He gathered an army, killed the unpopular Nanda king, and in about 321 B.C. claimed the throne. 

    • This began the Mauryan Empire. 

  • Chandragupta moved northwest, seizing all the land from Magadha to the Indus. 

  • Around 305 B.C. Chandragupta began to battle Seleucus I, one of Alexander the Great’s generals. 

    • Seleucus inherited part of Alexander’s empire. 

      • He wanted to establish Meacedonian control over the Indus valley. 

    • After several years of fighting Chandragupta defeated Seleucus. 

      • By 303 B.C. the Mauryan Empire stretched more than 2000 miles uniting north India politically for the first time. 

      • He relied on an adviser named Kautilya, a member of the priestly caste. 

        • Kautilya wrote a ruler’s handbook called the Arthasastra. 

          • This book proposed tough minded policies to hold an empire together, including spying on people and employing political assassination. 

    • Chandragupta created a highly bureaucratic government. 

      • He divided the empire into four provinces, each headed by a royal prince. 

        • Each province was then divided into local districts, whose officials assessed taxes and enforced the law. 

• In 301 B.C. Chandragupta’s son assumed the throne. 

  • He ruled for 32 years. 

    • Chandragupta’s grandson, Asoka, brought the Mauryan empire to its height. 

      • He became the king in 269 B.C. 

      • He at first followed in this grandfather’s footsteps, waging war to expand his empire. 

        • During a bloody war against the neighboring states of Kalinga, 100,000 soldiers were slain, and even more civilians perished. 

          • Asoka felt sorrow over the slaughter at Kalinga. 

          • He studied Buddhism and decided to rule by the Buddha’s teaching of “peace to all beings”

  • Religious toleration: acceptance of people who held different religious beliefs. 

    • Asoka had extensive roads built so he could reach all parts of India. 

    • This improved travel and communication. 

• Asoka’s death left a power vacuum. 

  • In northern and central India, regional kings challenged the imperial government. 

    • The kingdoms of central India which had only been loosely held in the Mauryan Empire, soon regained their independence. ]

    • The Andhra Dynasty arose and dominated the region for hundreds of years. 

      • The Andhra profited from the extensive trade between north and south India and also with Rome, Sri Lanka, and Southeast Asia.

  • Southern India also experienced turmoil. 

    • It was home to three kingdoms that had never been conquered by the Mauryan. 

      • The people who worked in these regions spoke the Tamil language and are called the Tamil people. 

      • These three kingdoms were often at war with each other and other states. 

    • After 500 years of invasions and turmoil, a strong leader again arose in the northern state of Magadha. 

      • His name was Chandra Gupta. 

      • This was part of India’s second empire, the Gupta Empire. 

        • It oversaw a great flowering of Indian civilization, especially Hindu culture. 

• The Gupta era is the first period for which historians have much information about daily life in India. 

  • Most Indians lived in small villages. 

    • The majority were farmers, who walked daily from their homes to outlying fields. 

    • Craftspeople had shops on the street level and lived in the rooms above. 

  • Most Indian families were patriarchal. 

    • Patriarchal: headed by the eldest male. 

    • parents , grandparents, uncles, aunts, and children all worked together to raise their crops. 

      • Farmers often had to irrigate their crops. 

      • There was a tax on water, and every month, people had to give a day’s worth of labor to maintain wells, irrigation ditches, reservoirs, and dams. 

• Southern India followed a different cultural pattern. 

  • Some groups were matriarchal, headed by the mother rather than the father. 

  • Property, and sometimes the throne, was passed through the female line.

• The empire ended about 535 due to them being overrun by the Huns or other Central Asian nomads. 

Chapter 7.2: Trade spreads Indian Religions and Culture

• By 250 B.C. Hinduism and Buddhism were India’s two main faiths. 

  • Hinduism: a complex polytheistic religion that blended Aryan belief with the many gods and cults of the diverse peoples who preceded them. 

  • Buddhism: teaches that desire causes suffering and that humans should overcome desire by following the Eightfold Path. 

    • Over the centuries, both religions had become increasingly removed from the people

    • Hinduism became dominated by priests, while the Buddhist ideal of self-denial proved difficult for many to follow. 

  • The Buddha had stressed that each person could reach a state of nirvana.     

    • Nirvana was achieved by rejecting the sensory world and embracing spiritual discipline. 

    • The Buddha had forbidden people to worship him. 

  • By the first century A.D. Buddhists had divided over new doctrines. 

    • Those who accepted them belonged to the Mahayana sect.

    • Those who held to the Buddha’s stricter, original teachings belonged to the Theravada sect. 

      • The new trends in Buddhism inspired Indian art. 

        • Artists carved huge statues of the Buddha for people to worship.

        • Wealthy Buddhist merchants who were eager to do good deeds paid for the construction of stupas. 

          • Stupas: mounded stone structures built over holy relics. 

        • Merchants also commissioned the carving of cave temples out of solid rock. 

          • Artists then adorned these temples with beautiful sculptures and paintings. 

• By the time of the Mauryan Empire, Hinduism had developed a complex set of sacrifices that could be performed only by the priests. 

  • People who weren’t priests had less and less direct connection with the religion. 

• The three most important Hindu gods were Brahma, the creator of the world, Vishnu, the preserver of the world, and Shiva, the destroyer of the world. 

  • Vishnu and Shiva were the favorites. 

  • Many Indians devoted themselves to these gods. 

• India entered a highly productive period in literature, art, science, and mathematics that continued until roughly A.D. 500. 

  • One of India’s greatest writers was Kalidasa. 

    • He may have been the court poet for chandra Gupta II. 

    • His most famous play is Shakuntala. 

      • It tells the story of a girl who falls in love and marries a middle age king. 

  • In the second century A.D. the city of Madurai in southern India became a site of writing academies. 

    • More than 2000 Tamil poems from this period still exist. 

  • Drama was also very popular. 

    • In Southern India traveling troupes of actress put on performances in cities across the region. 

      • Women as well as men took part in these shows, which combined drama and dance. 

  • The expansion of trade spurred the advance of science. 

    • They began to use a calendar based on the cycles of the sun rather than the moon. 

  • Indian mathematics was among the most advanced in the world. 

    • Modern numerals, the zero and the decimal system were invented in India. 

    • Around A.D. 500 an indian named Aryabhata calculated the value of Pi to four decimal places. 

      • He also calculated the length of the solar year as 365.358 days. 

        • This was very close to modern calculations made with an atomic clock. 

• India has always been rich in precious resources. 

  • Spices, diamonds, sapphires, gold ,pearls, and beautiful woods have been valuable items of exchange. 

  • Trade between India and regions as distant as Africa began more than 4000 years ago. 

  • Groups who invaded India after Mauryan rule ended helped to expand India’s trade to new regions. 

    • Central Asian nomads told Indians about a vast network of caravan routes known as Silk Roads. 

    • Sea trade also increased. 

      • Traders used coastal routes around the rim of the Arabian Sea and up the Persain Gulf to bring goods from India to Rome.

• Increase in trade led to the rise of banking in India. 

  • Commerce was quite profitable. 

  • Bankers were willing to lend money to merchants and charge them interest on the loans. 

    • Interest rates varied, depending on how risky business was. 

Chapter 7.3: Han Emperors in China 

•  Rumblings of discontent during the Qin Dynasty grew to roars in the years after Shi Huangdi’s death. 

  • Peasants were bitter over years of high taxes, harsh labor quotas, and a severe penal system. 

    • They rebelled. 

  • Two powerful leaders emerged. 

    • Xiang Yu was an aristocratic general who was willing to allow the warlords to keep their territories if they would acknowledge him as their feudal lord. 

      • Liu Bang was one of Xiang Yu’s generals. 

        • He eventually turned against Xiang Yu. 

          • They fought each other and Liu Bang won and declared himself the first emperor of the Han Dynasty. 

            • The Han Dynasty ruled China for more than 400 years, and is divided into two periods. 

              • The former Han ruled for about two centuries, until the Later Han ruled for almost another two centuries. 

• Liu Bang's first goal was to destroy the rival kings’ power. 

  • His first goal was to destroy the rival kings’ power. 

  • He established a centralized government. 

    • Centralized government: in which a central authority controls the running of a state. 

  • To win popular support, Liu Bang departed from Shi Huangdi’s strict legalism. 

    • He lowered taxes and softened harsh punishments. 

• When Liu Bang died in 195 B.C., his son became emperor, but in name only. 

  • The real ruler was his mother, Empress Lu. 

  • The empress outlived her son and retained control of the throne ebay naming first one infant and then another as emperor. 

    • Because the infants were too young to rule, she remained in control. 

  • When  empress Lu died in 180 B.C. people who remained loyal to Liu Bang’s family, rather than to Lu’s family, came back into power. 

    • They rid the palace of the old empress’s relatives by executing them. 

• Traditionally, the emperor chose the favorite among his wives as the empress and appointed one of her sons as successor. 

  • The palace women and their families competed fiercely for the emperor’s notice 

  • The families would make alliances with influential people in the court.

• When Liu Bang’s great-grandson took the throne, he continued Liu Bang’s centralizing policies. 

  • Wudi who reigned from 141 to 87 B.C. held the throne longer than any other Han emperor. 

    • He is called the “Martial Emperor” because he adopted the policy of expanding the Chinese empire through war. 

    • His first set of enemies were the Xiongnu, fierce nomads known for their deadly archery skills from horseback. 

      • They roamed the steppes to the north and west of China. They made raids into china's settled farmland.

      • They took hostages and stole grain, livestock, and other valuable items. 

  • The early Han emperors tried to buy off the Xiongnu by sending them thousands of pounds of silk, rice, alcohol, and money. 

    • Normally they accepted these gifts and continued their raids. 

  •  Wudi realized that the bribes were making the Xiongnu stronger, so he sent more than 100,000 soldiers to fight them. 

  • After his army forced the nomads to retreat into Central Asia, Wudi attempted to make his northwest border safe by settling his troops on Xiongnu's former pastures. 

    • He also colonized areas to the northeast, now known as Manchuria and Korea. 

      • He sent his armies south, where they conquered mountain tribes and set up Chinese colonies all the way into what is now Vietnam

        • By the end of his reign, the empire had expanded nearly to the bounds of present-day China. 

• Chinese society under the Han dynasty was highly structured. 

  • The Chinese believed their emperor to have divine authority, they accepted his exercise of power. 

  • He was the link between heaven and earth. 

    • If the emperor did his job well, China would have had peace and prosperity. 

    • If he failed, the heavens showed their displeasure with earthquakes, flood, and famines.

• The Chinese emperor relied on a complex bureaucracy to help him rule. 

  • Running the bureaucracy and maintaining the imperial army were expensive. 

  • To raise money, the government levied taxes. 

  • Chinese peasants owed part of their yearly crops to the government . 

  • Merchants also paid taxes. 

  • Besides taxes, the peasants owed the government a month’s worth of labo or military service every year. 

    • With this labor the Han emperors built roads and dug canals and irrigation ditches. 

• Wudi’s government employed more than 130,000 people. 

  • The bureaucracy included 18 different ranks of civil service jobs, which were government jobs that civilians obtained by taking examinations. 

    • Chinese emperors rewarded loyal followers with government posts. 

• The early Han emperors had employed some Confucian scholars as court advisers, but it was Wudi who began actively to favor them. 

  • Confucius had taught that gentlemen should practice “reverence, generosity, truthfulness, diligence, and kindness

    • These were the qualities he wanted his government officials to have. Wudi set up a school where hopeful job applicants from all over China could come to study Confucius’s works. 

      • After their studies, job applicants took formal examinations in history, law, literature, and Confucianism. 

      • Only sons of wealthy landowners had a chance at a government career. 

      • The civil service system begun by Wudi worked so efficiently that it continued in China until 1912.’

• Advances in technology influenced all aspects of Chinese life. 

  • Paper was invented in A.D. 105. 

  • Before that. Books were usually written on silk. 

  • Paper was cheaper, so books became more readily available. 

    • This helped spread education in China. 

    • Paper was much more useful for record keeping. 

  • Another technological advancement was the collar harness for horses. 

    • This allowed horses to pull much heavier loads than did the harness being used in Europe at the time. 

  • The chinese perfected a plow that was more efficient because it had two blades. 

  • They also improved iron tools, invented the wheelbarrow, and began to use water mills to grind grain. 

• During the Han dynasty, the population of China swelled to 60 million. 

  • With all of the mouths to feed, Chinese people considered agriculture the most important and honored occupation.

  • The same decree dismissed commerce as the least important occupation, manufacturing and commerce was very important to the Han Empire. 

    • The government established monopolies on the mining of salt, the forging of iron, the minting of coins, and the brewing of alcohol. 

      • Monopoly: occurs when a group has exclusive control over the production and distribution of certain goods. 

  • The techniques of silk production became a closely guarded state secret. 

• The Chinese began to learn about the foods and fashions common in foreign lands.

  • To unify the empire, the chinese government encouraged assimilation. 

    • Assimilation: the process of making conquered peoples part of Chinese culture.

    • To promote it, the government sent Chinese farmers to settle newly colonized areas. 

    • It encouraged them to intermarry with local peoples. 

    • Government officials set up schools to train local people in the Confucian philosophy and then appointed local scholars to government posts.  

  • Several writers also helped unify Chinese culture by recording China’s history. 

    • Sima Qian is called the Grand Historian for his work in compiling a history of China from the ancient dynasties to Wudi. 

    • He visited historical sites, interviewed eyewitnesses, researched official records, and examined artifacts./

    • His book is called Records of the Grand Historian.   

    • Another famous book was the history of the Former Han Dynasty.

    • Ban Zhao gained fame as a historian, however, most women made important contributions to their family’s economic life through duties in the home and work in the fields of the family’s farm. 

      • Some upper class women lived much different lives. 

      • Daoist and later Buddhist nunes were able to gain an education and lead lives apart from their families. 

• The Han emperors faced grave problems. 

  • One of the main problems was an economic imbalance caused by customs that allowed the rich to gain more wealth at the expense of the poor. 

  • A family’s land was divided equally among all of the father’s male heirs. 

    • With such small plots of land, farmers had a hard time raising enough crops to sell or even feed their family. 

    • They often went into debt and the landowner took possession of the farmer’s land. 

  • Large landowners were not required to pay taxes, so when their land holdings increased, the amount of land that was left for the government to tax decreased. 

    • The government then pressed harder to collect money from small farmers. 

      • The gap between rich and poor increased. 

• With economic change came political instability. 

  • Court advisers, palace servants, and rival influential families wove complex plots to influence the emperor’s choice of who would succeed him as ruler. 

  • Chaos reigned in the palace, and with peasant revolts, unrest spread across the land as well. 

  • Wang Mang decided that a strong ruler was needed to restore order. 

    • For 6 years he had been acting as regent for the infant who had been crowned emperor. 

    • In A.D. 9 Wang took the imperial title for himself and overthrew the Han, thus ending the Former Han, the first half of the Han Dynasty. 

    • He tried to bring the country under control ,and relieve the money shortage. 

    • He took away large landholdings from the rich and planned to redistribute the land to farmers who lost their land. 

      • This plan angered large landowners. 

• Peace was restored to China in the first decades of the Later Han  Dynasty and was quite prosperous.