Atrocitology - Matthew White

Скачать книгу

An Lushan Rebellion stands high in the cultural history of China because two of their greatest poets lived and wrote during this time. This gives us an interesting glimpse into the Chinese attitude toward war. It is much more pacifistic than, for example, Beowulf, which was written about the same time in England.

      Li Po was an enthusiastic drinker and drifter, an alchemist and Taoist mystic, who lived a lucky life full of ups and downs. In his mid-fifties when the war began, he was considered the greatest poet of his era. He attached himself to Prince Lin, sixteenth son of the emperor, but in 756, the prince was accused of plotting to establish an independent kingdom and was executed. Li Po was tossed into prison, but an old soldier he had helped thirty years before had now risen to high command in the loyalist army. This commander released Li and employed him as his secretary. Soon, however, the charges were restored, and Li Po was exiled to the southern barbarian province of Yelang. He dawdled and visited with friends along the way, so even after three years, he had still not arrived at his destination. Then a general amnesty arrived, so Li turned around and went back home to east China. While staying at a relative’s house, he died. Legend has it that while drinking wine in a boat on the river, he tried to grab the moon’s reflection on the surface and tumbled in, which is probably the poet’s equivalent of dying bravely in battle.11

       In the battlefield men grapple each other and die;

       The horses of the vanquished utter lamentable cries to heaven,

       While ravens and kites peck at human entrails,

       Carry them up in their flight, and hang them on the branches of dead trees.

       So, men are scattered and smeared over the desert grass,

       And the generals have accomplished nothing.

       Oh, nefarious war! I see why arms

       Were so seldom used by the benign sovereigns.

       —Li Po, “Nefarious War” 12

      Younger than Li Po by eleven years, Tu Fu had a cloud of bad luck following him around. After failing the exams necessary for a career in the civil service, he wandered and eventually befriended Li, acquiring a reputation as a promising poet. Returning to the court, he married and tried for five years to get a job with the government. Just as he landed a minor position, An Lushan attacked, and Tu Fu fled the capital only to be captured by bandits. After escaping them, he wandered ragged and hungry, eventually connecting again with the exiled court. He secured a minor job as a censor, but his hardships caused the deaths of some of his children by hunger and illness. After losing this job, he resumed wandering aimlessly. He too is said to have died drinking on a boat, by overindulgence after a ten-day fast.13

       The war-chariots rattle,

       The war-horses whinny;

       To each man a bow and a quiver at his belt.

       Father, mother, son, wife, stare at them going,

       Till dust shall have buried the bridge at Hsien-yang.

       We trot with them and cry and catch at their long sleeves,

       But the sound of our crying goes up to the clouds;

       For every time a bystander asks the men a question,

       The men can only answer us that they have to go.

       —Tu Fu, “A Song of War-Chariots” 14

      Bai Juyi belonged to the next generation of poets, born a few years after the war had ended, but his epic Song of Everlasting Sorrow told of the tragic love between Emperor Xuanzong and Yang Guifei. After her death, the emperor is said to have moped around, and then hired a medium to summon her spirit. They reminisce over old times, and Xuanzong is really, really sorry about tossing her to angry soldiers. Finally they agree that they are destined to reunite on the other side.

      Bai Juyi says it better than I do, however. He did not consider this his best work, but it became very popular among romantic young girls.15

       The king has sought the darkness of his hands,

       Veiling the eyes that looked for help in vain,

       And as he turns to gaze upon the slain,

       His tears, her blood, are mingled on the sands

       —Bai Juyi, “The Song of Everlasting Sorrow” 16

       Numbers

      The census taken in China in the year 754 recorded a population of 52,880,488. After ten years of civil war, the census of 764 found only 16,900,000 people in China.

      What happened to 36 million people? Is a loss of two-thirds in one decade even possible? Perhaps. Peasants often lived at the very edge of starvation, so the slightest disruption could cause a massive die-off, particularly if they depended on large irrigation systems. As we saw with the Xin dynasty and the Three Kingdoms, this was not the only population collapse in Chinese history, and many authorities quote these numbers with a minimum of doubt. On the other hand, these numbers could also represent a decline in the central government’s ability to find every taxpayer rather than an actual population collapse.17

      More convincing, though less dramatically precise, is the count of households. In the seven counts before An Lushan’s Rebellion, the census repeatedly found between 8 and 9 million households, and then, in the seven counts following the rebellion, the census consistently found no more than 4 million. Even a century after the revolt, in 845, the Chinese civil service could find only 4,955,151 taxpaying households, a long drop from the 9,069,154 households recorded in 755.18 This indicates that the actual population collapse may have been closer to one-half, or 26 million. For the sake of ranking, however, I’m being conservative and cutting this in half, counting only 13 million dead in the An Lushan Rebellion. Even so, it still ranks among the twenty deadliest multicides in human history.

MAYAN COLLAPSE

      Death toll: over 2 million missing

      Rank: 46

      Type: failed state

      Broad dividing line: some awful unknown force, like the weather or Cthulu, against the Mayans

      Time frame: 790–909

      Location: Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico, and Guatemala

      Who usually gets the most blame: Most people suspect that the Mayans somehow brought it on themselves

      The unanswerable question everyone asks: Where did everyone go?

      THE MAYANS BUILT A FASCINATING AND COMPLEX CIVILIZATION FROM scratch, prospered for several centuries, and then abandoned it, without even saying good-bye. From being builders and mathematicians on a grand scale, they went back to being quiet subsistence gardeners, leaving behind huge jungle-encrusted ruins to mystify later generations. For over a century and a half, we’ve been trying to figure out why. The three most popular explanations among archaeologists are:

1. Drought. In this scenario, the Mayan disappearance was driven by climate,

Скачать книгу