China's Fall & Korea's Rise

A History of Mankind (277)

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In China, gods had never been a prominent a part of the people's daily lives as in the Mediterranean, so the rise of a monotheism like Christianity, claiming to provide a single set of solutions for the evils of the time, was always a difficult prospect. When Confucianism went into almost terminal decline under the Eastern Han, many in China fell back on to the most spiritual and deity-dependent tradition they had – that of Taoism, which started a slow revival that took root especially amid the chaos of the 3^rd century.

Even as Buddhism started to make inroads in China, it was the Neo-Taoist Xuanxue (“school of dark learning”) that would remain the main strand of thought in Chinese philosophy through the 6^th century, combining elements of Confucianism and Taoism to reinterpret old, widely-known texts like the Yijing, Tao Te Ching, and Zhuangzi, while making every effort to connect followers with the earlier, mainstream Taoism that flourished in China hundreds of years before¹.

The era saw a spike in interest in Taoist themes and books such as the “Classic of the Mountains and the seas” (“Shanhai Jing,” possibly finalized on the basis of earlier texts under the Eastern Han), amounting to a guide to mythological China – informing travelers of the sort of strange creatures, hybrid, human and spiritual beings that they would be expected to find when visiting the country’s holy mountains, and of the powers that these beings could have; and what would happen if one were, perhaps, to eat their flesh or wear their fur.

These stories, often called “Zhiguai Xioashuo” (“Strange Tales”) are indeed the very first works of fiction popularized in China. In contrast with, for example, the realism and sobriety of Egypt’s Sinuhe, or the sophisticated social commentary of Rome’s Satyricon, early Chinese fiction was very much concerned with spooky accounts of bizarre phenomena, and thus targeted a lower social stratum, alike to that of the readers of swashbuckling Greek novels.

A later classic of Taoist painting, the 13th century "On a Mountain Path in Spring," by Ma Yuan.