"Tang's Influence" - True or false, why it matters ( 1/3 )
Tang's Influence on the early Japanese civilization:
Was it real?
Yes. The ancient Japanese civilization was brilliant. Unlike its neighbors in the Northeast Asia, a
lot of ancient artifacts and edifices in Japan could survive to our time, thanks
to the geographical isolation of the Archipelago from the continent.
What amazes us today is how the flowering of
such exquisite art and architecture could take place in the physically separated
land all at the same time as it was getting exposed to the Buddhism and
international community. It seems so far
“the influence of Tang China” has been readily served to explain the wonder in
almost all literature. While the postulation of the “Tang's Influence”, to be so
comprehensive as said, should presume active exchange of people for the
transfer of knowledge, technology and social system, we don’t seem to get much in
that department beyond the reference to the ‘Missions to Tang’.
Chinese visit Nara city and feel proud thinking they are rediscovering the glory of Tang China that had disappeared in their land. The thought hasn't stayed inside the Chinese mind only. So-called ‘Tang's Influence" on the early Japanese civilization has been taken so granted widely that it has formed one of the pillars that uphold the belief in the superiority of the Chinese culture as the dominant source of the East Asian civilization. Yet the “Tang's Influence” postulation never seems to have been put to the scrutiny that the criticality of the idea should demand for the balanced understanding of the ancient East Asian civilizations.
The way the “Tang’s Influence” is presented
“Early in the seventh century the governing regent for the empress, Prince Shotoku,
encouraged a major Buddhist missionary effort
in Japan, and also introduced in
the
year 646 reforms known as the taika, or great change. The taika
reforms were
intended to strengthen the imperial
bureaucracy at the expense of the regional clans.
They
closely followed the similar changes in China, in which all land was vested in
the
emperor, reallocated among the peasants, and taxed. These modifications in
Japan were carried out and policed by a
public service modelled on the mandarinate.
The
custom of compulsory military part of the peasants’ tax burden was copied.
Since
the Japanese army had no external enemy to fight, the conscripts were used
on public works. Such a project was a capital
city, Nara, modelled on Chang’an. The
Empress Gemmyo began this work in 694, copying
Chang’an’s layout of straight
intersecting streets, its styles of architecture
and landscape gardening.”
- excerpt from an Asian history textbook on the Tang’s influence in the early Japan
If you have a book on the ancient Asian history, go to the pertinent part. The common way to present the ‘Tang influence’ on the ancient Japanese civilization is to put the images of the most exquisite art pieces from the time and say in the text the early Japanese culture was much influenced by Tang China.
One
of the most frequently deployed lines is that the Nara city was built in the grid
form after Chang'an, the capital of Tang, leaving the readers with the
impression that the whole set of the Japanese society was a replica of the
Chinese civilization. Some books feature
the arrival of the Chinese monk Ganjin in Japan as the event that propagated
the Chinese Buddhism and Buddhist art to Japan.
They also say of the Chinese system serving as benchmark for the early
law and governance system of Japan and attribute the general influence to the
missions to Tang China.
The common problem of the “Tang Influence” assertion is firstly the lack of evidence or detail episodes to back up the argument. There is a certain discrepancy in the timeline that seems to make it hard to attribute the majority of the early-Japan achievements and things, especially the most exquisite and original art pieces of the time, to the Tang influence. The bottom line here would be that the ancient Japanese had been exposed to the highest level of aesthetics and technics already before the birth of Tang (618-907).
Another
problem, perhaps more grave, is that the “Tang Influence” narratives are often found to cover the formative
process of the early Japanese civilization that had nothing to do with the "Chinese culture", not to say of Tang. The underlying message, that the “Tang Influence” postulation generates, intended or not, is that the Japanese society
had been uncivilized before the exposure to the Chinese civilization and, more
seriously, that the Chinese civilization was the only source of the advanced
culture in the Northeast Asia of the time, which is definitely contrary to the historical truth.
The overall shape of the "Tang Influence" narrations looks like any circumstantial and plausible-looking twigs of incidents had been fetched selectively to set up the assertion of “Tang Influence”, pre-empting any other inputs or perspectives. The very notion of the “Tang influence” thus patched up has served to solidify the unvalidated belief that the early Chinese civilization was the predominantly superior, if not sole, source of cultural influence over its uncivilized neighbors. For the balanced and informed perspectives on the early Japanese civilization, we need to have some understanding on the people who occupied the Archipelago, who they were, where they had come from.
The condensed Macro-history up to the Asuka period in Japan
For the period of slightly over one millennium from around 4C BCE to 8C CE the Northeast Asia underwent the long process of migration of the people largely as result of the conflict between the two blocks of people that were quite immiscible in language and culture, and the diffusion effect for the newly discovered agricultural opportunities to the Archipelago. On one side was the culture of the Transeurasian language speakers, and on the other side that of the Chinese speakers from the middle inland China.
[Combined Map of the Linguistic Dispersal of the Languages in the Northeast Asia] The blue part shows the cradle for the Transeurasian cultures about 9000 BP, where the Korean and Japanese language speakers belong to and the orange part is for the Chinese language. Source: Transeurasian Languages (Blue part): Triangulation supports agricultural spread of the Transeurasian languages, Nature magazine, November 10, 2021 // Sino-Tibetan Languages(Brown part): “Dated language phylogenies shed light on the ancestry of Sino-Tibetan”, PNAS, May 6, 2019
The
dynamics of the conflict and move was triggered by the shift from bronze to
iron. While the increase of agricultural productivity generated the surplus
powers with the taxation on land and grain harvest, the shift to iron also
invited the drastic increase of the warring capabilities and mobility. Chariots
gave way to the warriors on the horseback as the stirrup freed the rider’s
hands for the bow and dagger.
The Transeurasian block in the Northeast Asia responded in two different ways depending on their respective geographic position to the pressure from the expanding Chinese block. The first is the camp of the ancient Korean polity, who resided along the coastlines of the Northeast Asia and in the Peninsula, thus had the marine culture on top of the nomadic and agricultural ones. So, their geographic scope was to the ocean and towards the east.
The second group was the northern tribal peoples, typically to the northwest, who we know now as Huns, Xianbei, Khitans and Mongols, whose culture was more of inland nomadic with none or lesser of marine. With the mainland China to the south, they were geographically connected to the West by land through the prairie route.
After the fall of the Han Dynasty the
Chinese plain underwent the long period of power contest and by around 5C, the
hegemony of the Chinese Plain fell to the hands of the Northern tribe Xianbei 鮮卑. Northern Wei (386-535CE) was the intermediary state that
would pave the way for the new infiltration dynasties Sui and Tang by the end
of the 6C.
[] It is known that the first rulers of Northern Wei could not speak Chinese before they took the course of Sinicization. Since then, China was to be mostly under the rule of the Northern tribal powers, with the exception of Song and Ming, until the arrival of the modern time.
On the side of the ancient Korean
polity, the eastward and southward move of the ancient Koreans in the lower
Manchuria and Shandong peninsula led to the chain reaction in the peninsular
and archipelago. The southern Peninsula had been populated by the rice-growers,
who used to live in the fenced community, and those communities were coalescing
into bigger confederations when the mass migration took place. Knowing the presence
of clustered islands to their east with rice-friendly climate, lots of rice
growers and communities in the southern Peninsula chose to move to the
archipelago. Many of them knew better and more than to fight the new arrivals from the
north, which made the intermingling of the people and the birth of the new
states in the southern Peninsula, such as Baekje, Silla and Kaya, in the 1C BCE,
much easier and peaceful. The new arrivals themselves, led by the warriors on
the horseback, were the people who had known better than to stay in the Manchuria
and fight the Sinicizing states of the Northern tribes forever.
On
the side of the Archipelago, waves and waves of the immigrants from the Peninsula
arrived in the Archipelago to build new communities and countries with the
advanced agricultural knowledge and related technologies in, starting from the
first rice paddies and fenced communities called Uji that mushroomed in
Southern Japan from around 4th century BC, opening the Yayoi period in the
process some scholars call "agricultural colonization" by the rice
growers from the ancient Korean polity. []
[] Yayoi is the name of the area near Tokyo
where the artifacts of the new people, distinct from Jomon, were first found in
early 20C. Prof. Mike J. Hudson described the dispersal of the rice cultivation
in Japan by the ancient Koreans as typical “agricultural colonization” in his
book Ruins of Identity: Ethnogenesis in the Japanese Islands.
As the peninsula and northeast Asia
China became war-ridden and saturated with the states of the horse-riding
warriors, the conquerors on the horseback began to show up in the Archipelago
leaving huge tomb mounds (Kofun) filled with relics of equestrian armor in iron
cast and the potteries identical to those of ancient Korean kingdoms from
around 3C CE, about the same time Huns were moving slowly towards Europe.
Japan Key events of the time
-4C BCE Jomon period
4C BCE-3C AD Yayoi Period Arrival of the rice growers/ Uji communities
3C -6C CE Kofun
Period Arrival of Horseback
riders / Mound Tombs
538 -710 CE Asuka Period Arrival of Buddhism with Art and
Architecture
710 -794 CE Nara Period Country Name Nihon, Nihon Shoki, Todai-ji
794-1185 CE Heian Period
Perhaps the biggest cultural event in
the early Northeast Asia of the first Millennium would be the introduction of
the Buddhism. In Japan the Asuka period opened with the arrival of the new
religion Buddhism from Korea in the first half of 6C CE, putting the end to the
Kofun period.
What made the propagation of Buddhism to Japan special was that it was made by way of the human migration accompanied with the transfer of the whole package of culture that comprised art and architecture, even language and governing system from the Korean Peninsula, enabling the emergence of Japan as one of the leading civilizations in the East Asia in the matter of one hundred and some years.
The
formation of the city Nara
Now let’s look into one of the most frequently mentioned examples of the “Tang Influence” that the city of Nara was built in the grid form under the influence of Chang’an, the capital of Tang, today’s Xian.
Around the time the Tang started the
dynasty in Chang’an, the capital cities of Korean states such as Silla, Baekje
and Koguryo retrospectively, had long been built in grid shape with the sense
of direction.[] So, to be able to argue
that the Nara city was built in the grid form particularly after Chang’an, one
should have a direct evidence or episodes that back up the assertion, since a
city in the grid form on a flat land is not a patentable idea like four wheels
in a car would not.
[]
According to 三國史記 新羅本紀 History
of the Three Countries, Silla Part, the capital city Kyungju had been built in
grid form well before early 5C CE when they named the hundreds of blocks. At one time
there were 1,360 such blocks in Kyungju, each block sized 120 meters to 160
meters one side according to 三國遺事 Records
of the Three Countries.
Nara was not a city built overnight on a vacant land to be used as a new capital. The Nara City began to be formed by the new settlers from the Peninsula, especially from the states of Baekje and Koguryo, long before it became the capital city. From the Kofun period, Nara was one of the centers of the Japan in its embryonic stage.
The earliest records on the contacts between
Baekje and the Japanese (to be) dates back to the 3C CE, but it was with the
propagation of the Buddhism from Baekje in the early 6C that the city Nara
emerged as one of the cultural centers of the Asuka period. The royal palace
named Baekje Grand Palace 百濟大井宮 was built as early as in 572 by the
Bidatsu Tenno ( 敏達天皇, reign 571–585) in the
Nara area.[] At the time of Bidatsu Tenno in Japan, China was in the state of division with Tang yet to come. .
[] The name of the palace大井宮 suggests it was in the grid form.
Chang’an was the capital of one of the struggling states, Northern Zhou, sitting deep in land blocked by the other coastal countries with no possible and pursued way of access from the country which was to be called Japan later. When Nara was emerging as one of the cultural and political centers in japan, the Chinese city Chang'an simply did not exist to the Japanese of the time.
Another scene at the Nihon Shoki lets us peep into how the city Nara was formed in a better definition. In 629 Jomei Tenno (舒明天皇, reign 629-641), granddaughter of Bidatsu, ordered the construction of the Baekje Palace 百濟宮, Kudara-Miya, on the west side of the Baekje river 百濟川, Kudara-gawa, and the Baekje Temple on the east side. One thing we can say from the record is firstly that the city was built with the sense of the cardinal directions, and secondly that the Japanese court carried the tradition of the theocracy whereby the ruler presided over the worship and the secular affairs at the same time, which would set apart the Nara city from the Chinese ones. Jomei was the Tenno who first sent the missionary to Tang, but it was only after her order for the construction of the above-mentioned edifices. []
[] The first missions to China were sent at
the time of the short-lived Sui Dynasty, but the first two missions were of
diplomatic nature and the third and last one that was joined by scholar-monks
and students did not return to Japan until after the start of Tang.
Talking about the move of the
capital, we need to understand the situation Japan was in before the final move
to Nara as capital in 710, opening the new phase of Japan as a state that we
call Nara Period today. They had fought their last war with the Tang force in
663 to resuscitate the fallen Baekje to no avail. Baekje now gone, the politics
within the power circle went unstable while the relationship with Tang China turned
quite uncomfortable. After Asuka, Japan would move the capital three times before
they finally nestled in Nara as capital. [] The decision for Nara to be the
next capital was made only two years before the official move in 710, which
would make the argument groundless that Nara was built after the model of Chang’an
since no major structural change could have taken place in two years. Now, let’s
take a look at the layout of the capital cities.
Nara vs. Chang’an
We can observe three common features of the city design: the grid shape, the positioning of the city in line with the cardinal directions and lasty, the location of the palace at the center of the northern end.
The grid form was quite common for the capital cities around the world of east and west by the time. The idea of building a structure facing the south was a norm in the cultural sphere of ancient Korea and Japan, which still is alive today. You can see the direction of the keyhole-shaped tombs clustered to the north of the city, in the above Nara map, that had been built centuries earlier during the Kofun Period, were all aligned towards the south with the chamber in the northern end. In the Transeurasian culture the north-to-south axis had the special importance because of their view on the world order, wherein the universe revolves around the Polar Star. Most of founders of ancient Korean states had the legend of being born out of an egg, suggestive of their association with the Heaven.
[ Gangseo Tomb 江西大墓 of Koguryo circa 6C
located near Pyongyang, Korea]
The chamber of the tomb sits in the northern end, facing
the south. The Red Phoenix is drawn on the southern side wall that leads to the
passage corridor. The Koguryo tombs, the earliest found circa 4C, are one of
the few structures remaining where the sense of direction of the universe was
manifested with the animal symbols drawn on the wall. The main streets of the
two cities, Nara and Chang’an, were named after the imaginary bird.
The capital city right before Nara was Fujiwara-Kyo, the first planned capital of Japan. It was in the grid form and positioned in line with the cardinal directions. It had the palace in the middle of the city, not in the northern end, one of its corners bordering the river. The area was not so flat, with hills and river inside and bordering mountains. One of the capital cities with the similar topographical feature was Gyeongju that had been the capital of Silla, for more than a half millennium by then, where one side of the palace was using the river for a natural moat of the defensive castle it had started as, in the south of the city, looking towards the north where the city stretched out in grid form as it grew.
Here it needs to be noted that the decision
for the location of the Fujiwara-Kyo was made by Tenmu Tenno himself and that
it took more than 15 years, not counting the years of intervening hiatus, to
build the Fujiwara-Kyo, which was smaller than Nara in scale. The fact that the
first discussion for the capital move to Nara was made in the year 704 and the
ground-breaking made only two years before the move in the year 710 means that
the city Nara had been almost in ready shape for the capital. []
[] The Yakushi-ji temple 藥師寺, seen in the lower left side in the above Nara map as a big block, can be the evidence of the city Nara having been built in the grid form with the north-south orientation before its candidacy as capital. The Temple opened in the year 680.
We do not know whether, and how much if
ever, the location of the palace was affected by the Tang mission, who returned
in the year 703 and reported about the layout of Chang’an. The example of the
palace being placed at the center of the northern end may have made Nara emerge
as the candidate for the capital since the construction of the palace on the
vacant land to its north could easily make the capital out of the already-dense
city with no space for the palace in the middle. The move to Nara, the city
that had begun as settlement for the people from Baekje and Koguryo, could have
been the victory for the Baekje camp over the Silla clans that used to have
bigger voice under Tenmu and took the initiatives for the move to Fujiwara-Kyo.
[]
[] The head of the Tang
mission in 703, 粟田真人 Awata
Masato, was son of a Baekje prince. There was also a hygiene
issue with Fujiwara-kyo. 続日本紀� 慶雲3年 (706) “如聞, 京城內 外多有穢臭”
We do not know whether the location of the palace in Nara was changed to the northern end at the final moment or it had been so planned beforehand, but whatever it may have been, to have the palace in the northern end was no deviation from their cultural legacy. Chang’an may have served as an idea that made the move to Nara easier, but to say that the Nara city was designed after Chang’an, even interpretated as a propagation of the Chinese culture, would be far from the balanced understanding, when we remember that the city Nara had been formed since the Kofun period and it was already in grid shape and north-south orientation before it was decided as the new capital. If you can be allowed freedom of speech, just as much as those Tang-influencers have been over this matter, you might say that both Chang'an of Tang and Nara of Japan were the products of the cultural diffusion of the Traneurasian people, one southward by the Xianbei into geographic China, the other eastward to the Archipelago by the ancient Koreans.
[] It was not the common practice in China either to have the palace in the center of the northern end. Chang’an was the first such capital city. The placement of the palace at the northern end may have come more as a practical choice to change an existing saturated city to a capital, than out of philosophy. Luyang 洛陽 did have the palace in the middle of the city under Northern Wei and to the northwest corner under Sui.
[Luoyang as capital of
Northern Wei 北魏 洛陽] [Luoyang
as capital of Sui 隋 洛陽]
Now, let’s take a look at the points of difference from each other of
the two cities.
- All the blocks have a
uniformed size in Nara (and in Geongju, Silla) while Chang’an has two
distinctively different sizes of blocks, each block being much larger than the
ones in Nara.
[] The total area of Chang’an is claimed to have been 82 square kilometers, about 9 kilometers one side of the square while the Nara City had about 5 kilometers one side.
- The size of one block
of Nara city is almost identical to that of the Silla capital Gyeongju, between
120 meters to 150 meters, suggestive of the same cultural soil between the two
cities. []
[] In the 三國史記 新羅本紀History of
the Three States, Silla Part, there is the record that the blocks were named in
the capital city Gyeongju 慶州 as early as in 469. “定京都坊里名”
- Nara included in its design the huge-sized
state-built Buddhist temples, and Yakushi-Ji 藥師寺and
Daian-Ji 大安寺 in the south, and later Todai-Ji and Nishidai-ji in the north,
reflecting the theocratic nature of the Japanese court after the Transeurasian
cultural legacy. The similarity in the temple design and size could be found
between Korea and Japan. Chang’an had about one hundred Buddhist temples, each
much smaller in size than the state temples of Nara. Zoroastrian, Nestorian and
Manichean chapels coexisted in Chang’an though in smaller numbers.
- The repeated shape in the Nara City,
the square with the smaller rectangle attached on its east side, of the palace
and of the whole capital contour, should be by conscious design, that manifests
the consciousness of the Japanese leadership of the time on the position of
their new state vis-a-vis the world, just like a big geoglyph placed just right
in the world shaped the same.
- In Nara City
the north-to-south street out of the palace named 朱雀大路 is many times wider than the other streets of the city as its
name deserved, while in Chang’an the east-to-west street crossing the front of
the court is clearly wider than the other streets in reflection of their
consciousness of their state as center of the secular world.
You may say that Chang’an, with its immensity,
could have been a stimulation for the Japanese, as much as ancient Korean
capital cities of the time, especially Gyeongju of Silla, should have been the
target to emulate, but to say more than that would have to be accompanied with the
evidence.[]
[] Proud Japanese people of the time may have
been amused by likening Nara to Chang’an, calling some corners of the city
after certain districts of Chang’an. People in Seoul like to call their
financial district “Manhattan” jokingly because it is located in an island
shaped like Manhattan in Han River. But no one would say Seoul was modelled
after New York.
To finalize the discussion on the
city Nara, it
needs be noted that the city had been called Nara since long before it became
the capital. The river that ran through the city and the palaces in the area had
been named Kudara, which is the way the Japanese called Baekje 百濟 then, and yet. Nara in the Korean language means capital or state.
Nara-t-nim means King or head of state, Nara-t-nil means state
affair. The word is till used every day in Korea meaning the nation or country,
like in Uri-Nara meaning “our country“.
The Kudara-gawa 百濟川
is now called Hirano-gawa平野川.
The
nature of the Missionaries to Tang
We
see the incidence of the Japanese missionaries to China referred to as a
channel for the “Tang Influence” more than often. Many are predisposed to think that the main
purpose of the missionaries must have been to learn from the advanced systems
and technologies of China, which is supposed to have been the “only civilized
society in the East Asia”.
But it would be far astray from the
truth to say that the Tang culture, tangible and intangible, came overwhelming to
the Japanese, to enlighten and influence Japanese just as
much. When Baekje was still in the pipeline, the things from Baekje were
regarded the most precious and exquisite by the Japanese. When they started
their country as Nihon after the fall of Baekje, the commodities from Silla
were the most coveted as the status-defining items by the Japanese court and
aristocrats from 8C to 10C CE.
Being argued here is not that the
culture of the ancient Korean states was superior to the Chinese nor the
opposite. The point is that the Japanese had been long exposed to the culture
of the ancient Korean states. When the
Tang culture came to them it came as a varied addition, not as the eye-opener that
the cultures of the three Korean states and those of predecessor states in the
peninsula in the early Kofun Period, had been some hundred years prior.
The nature of the Japanese missions to
Sui and Tang were diplomatic in the first place and then for the literature
study. It was different in nature from the Iwakura Missionary of 1870 to Europe
and the United States, where the diplomatic tasks served as an excuse for the
large-scale quest of learning about the Western society, its social systems and
technology, so that the delegation was led by the powerful political leaders,
not by the diplomatic officials.
The critical difference in nature between the
two Japanese missions, thirteen hundred years apart, derived from the way the
Japanese came to encounter the other party. The Iwakura Mission in the late 19th century was
made after Japan succumbed to the unquestionably overwhelming power of the West
that they came to realize in the course of resisting the opening of the
country. So, the West was the sole destination for the Japanese missions with
no competition.
In contrast, the Japanese at the beginning of the seventh century had a good measure of their Chinese counterpart through the Koreans or Korean-Japanese, if you will, who knew so well about them through the long history of trade and wars. China was big, but not necessarily the strongest, pound for pound. Koreans had fought innumerable wars with the Chinese. The defeat in the war with Koguryo, whose population is estimated to have been less than one tenth of the Chinese, was one of the major causes for the fall of the Sui Dynasty. Taizong of Tang gave up after two huge defeats from Koguryo. Another defeat would be recorded for the Chinese in the seven-year war with Silla when Tang attempted to annex the lands of Baekje and Koguryo. They also had a lot of understanding on the Chinese culture in terms of art and technology, and social customs. The Xianbei people that founded Sui and Tang were not stranger to Koreans and the new Japanese leadership of the 7C CE. []
[] Xianbei 鮮卑 had the literal meaning of the slave people of Joseon, 朝鮮, read Chao-Xian in Chinese. They were perceived as a peripheral tribe under Go-Joseon. In the beginning years of the Sui and Tang Dynasties, they had to go out of their way to get over the ridicule from the northeastern tribes. The obsession of Sui and Tang to win over Koguryo, who was regarded as the legitimate inheritor of Go-Joseon, could be partly explained by the subtle, yet unrelenting sentiments of stature within the Transeurasian peoples of the time.
Japanese would not regard China as their
superior as well manifested in their first diplomatic letter to the Sui in 600
CE. It should be only when you can align your perspective with the Japanese of
the time, you can understand what the things meant to them, why they went the
way they did, and what they came down to after all that.
[] The diplomatic letter sent in 607, allegedly from Prince Shotoku, is known to have made Wendi of Sui indignant by addressing him as an equal, by starting (word for word) “the Son of Heaven (天子) from where the Sun rises addresses the Son of Heaven where the Sun sets. [處天子致書日沒處天子 無恙云云] The term 天子 Son of Heaven, alluding to the ruler, was the expression originated from the Transeurasian culture, according to the Late Han scholar 蔡邕 Cai Yong in his work 獨斷 Du Duan. [天子, 夷狄之所稱, 父天母地, 故稱天子] The adoption of the word may have been taken as insult to the new ruler of China, who would have liked to be taken as 皇帝 Huangdi, for being reminded of his Xianbei background.
Tang Missions vs. Silla Missions
The
bigger problem in ‘Tang Missions’ postulation as a major channel of the Tang
influence is that the presentation is done without mentioning the missions sent to other countries, leaving the
most, if not all, history students to think Tang was the only cultural source
and benchmark the Japanese looked for in their conscious efforts to build their
new state and society. If it was not intented to be selective for a certain purpose of concealment, it wasn't fair.
While
the Japanese sent the missions to many countries, the missions to Silla in
particular could be estimated no lesser in any measure of the Tang’s in its
importance and actual political and cultural impact, if not outstripping, when
we compare the two as in the followings:
- The missions to Silla
were more frequent during the whole period. The total 25 missions sent to Silla
during the period 668-836CE in less than two centuries, while 13 missions were
sent to Tang China between 630 to 894CE in the time span of more than two and
half centuries.
- The level and size of the delegation in the missions was different. The sea travel to China was very dangerous an undertaking, so the delegates in the missions to Tang were recruited from the low officials or local aristocrats in the scale of tens while the missions to Silla were led by high scholar-monks or high bureaucrats in the scale of hundreds. We see some romantic anecdotal stories about a couple of long-term students from Japan often highly featured to promote the “Tang influence” but personal stories of such kind abound with other countries too.
- For the Japanese missionaries the language barrier was none the less a huddle with the Chinese while the communication between the Silla people would have been much easier. Some students from the missions to Tang could not get into the school in Chang’an because of the language inability. Some students were denied the pledged scholarship from the Chinese court, apparently for the waning zeal on the Chinese side. The Tang court also showed the concern over the leakage of sensitive knowledge and information. Out of the whole period of the Tang missions, skimpy was the time where the mission worked in stable and cordial atmosphere, free from the mutual doubt and animosity, and later, from the domestic distractions in China. []
[] Rebellion of An Lushan
755-763, Rebellion of Huang Chao 874-884, Demise of Tang 907
-
Yet, perhaps most importantly, Tang missions lacked the reciprocity the missions to Silla had. During
the period 25 missions were made to
Silla, 38 delegations were made from Silla to Japan. Tang sent their delegates
to Japan only three times, and that merely by way of joining the return trip of
the Japanese mission. While the significantly bigger number of trips from Silla
might explain the relative easiness of the sea trip for the Silla people, Silla
had its own commercial motive for the trips. They were eager for the trade with
the Japanese, not unlike the Europeans and Americans were in the 19th
century. The commodities from Silla
included not just the items made in Silla, but also those from the exotic
sources, such as glassware and pigment from the Middle-East and beyond, and
spices from the Southeast Asia. Silla had its own route of trade with the West and Southeast Asia, through the prarie route to the west and the ocean route to the south. For Japan of the time, the international trade
hub was Silla, not Tang, who depended mostly on the Silk Road for the international trade with the West or on the tenuous land route with the Southeast Asia. The household items made by Silla, such as paper, ink
stick, carpet and utensils, were regarded not just as of the best quality and but as symbol of social status, so highly-coveted
by the court and aristocrats that there was a system of distribution imposed
and directly handled by the court. []
[] Todai-ji installed the office and warehouse by the entrance of the Yodo-gawa 淀川 in Osaka to handle the commodities from Silla in Todai-ji Siragi-e Estate 東大寺領 新羅江庄. The lower part of the Yodo-gawa was called Siragi-e, or River of Silla, in the olden time, attesting to the importance of the trade with Silla at the times of early Japan.
When we take account of all the factors of the cultural exchange among the three countries during the duration of the Japanese missions from 7C to 9C, it would not be unfair to say that Silla overwhelmed Tang in terms of the gamut and mass of the cultural influence on the early Japanese society. If not a lie by omission, the sole reference to the Tang Missions as for the cultural interactions of the early Japanese society would be a gross misleader.
Missionaries to Silla 遣新羅史 and the new
country Japan
Yet,
the gap in magnitude of the influence can be wider when we weight the
cruciality of the period of the three decades and something between the fall of
Baekje and the start of the Nara Period for the formation of the new country
Nihon. Let’s lay down the major events in the 7C on the timeline:
630 Jomei sends the first Mission to Tang
645/646 Fall of Soga clan and Taika Reform
660 Fall of Baekje by Silla-Tang
alliance
663 Keum-River Battle in Peninsula
with Tang to revive Baekje
667 Court move to Otsu 近江大津宮 by
Biwa Lake
668 Fall of Koguryo / Omi-Ryo 近江令
Last Tang Mission to
be followed by 35 years of hiatus until 702
The first Mission
to Silla (10 Missions sent to Silla until 710)
670 The first use of the state name
Nihon to Silla
672 Jinshin War (壬申の乱). Tenmu, the first use of Tenno
title
682 Groundbreaking for the new and
first Capital Fujiwara-kyo 藤原京
689 The first Code Asuka
Kiyomihara-ryo 飛鳥浄御原令promulgated
694 Capital move to Fujiwara-Kyo
701 Taiho Code promulgation under Monmu
703 Mission to Tang sent after hiatus of more than three decades
Mission to Silla
708 Groundbreaking for move to new capital
Nara under Kenmei Tenno
710 Capital move to Nara
The events of the late 7C in Japan gives us a good insight how the framework of the new state Japan was being set up during the short period of less than a half century after the era-changing events in the Peninsula.
-The state name Nihon 日本was first used to Silla right
after the fall of Baekje and Koguryo. []
-There took place three pairs of the capital move and code promulgation during the three decades after the fall of Baekje before they finally settled in Nara as capital in 710.
-During the period of thirty some years
where the Tang mission was put on hold, Japanese Court sent ten missions led by
high scholar-monks to Silla in a frequency unseen in the whole pre-modern
Japanese history.
[] “倭國更號日本, 自言近日所出以爲名.” 三國史記 新羅本紀 670CE
While the uneasiness between the two countries after the military clash
in the Keum River battle of 663 could be one of the reasons for the hiatus of
the Tang Mission, it also could be that the Japanese leadership chose to focus
on learning from the Silla society and system in their endeavor to set up the framework
for their new country.
The end of the part 1/2 of the article
The Part 2/3 of the article will be uploaded by March 25, 2025
Understanding the early Buddhism in East Asia
The Buddhist art of the Asuka period
The cross-section of the Japanese Society seen through the construction of Todai-Ji
Part 3/3 by March 10, 2025
the word Kara 唐 in the Japanese and the practice of Korea erasing
Conclusion
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