Don't Know Much About Mythology - Kenneth C. Davis [173]
I
n 1793, King George III sent an emissary to the court of Chinese emperor Qian Long. Arriving in what was then called Peking, the British ambassador displayed a lavish array of gifts for the Chinese ruler, including six hundred cases of scientific instruments. The emperor, a member of the Qing Dynasty, who had been on the throne for nearly sixty years, was polite but unimpressed. “There is nothing we lack,” he told Lord McCartney, the British envoy. “We have never set much store on strange or indigenous objects, nor do we need any more of your country’s manufactures.” It was seemingly true. For much of its nearly 4,000-year-long history, China had thrived in splendid isolation, a mysterious and unwelcoming empire that neither needed nor desired contact with outsiders. Cut off from most of its neighbors by natural boundaries—the Himalayan mountains to the west, the Gobi desert and forbidding Mongolian territory to the north, and the Pacific Ocean to the east—China had expended vast sums and countless lives building walls.* Behind these formidable barriers of earth and stone, sheltered from the gaze of potential invaders and eager Christian missionaries, China’s successive dynasties had developed a civilization that was in many ways far more advanced than any of its contemporaries. Not only did the Chinese create a vast network of rural villages held together by a remarkable bureaucracy and a single written language, they invented paper, printing, gunpowder, fireworks, the seismograph, noodles, the compass, and ships capable of sailing the world long before Westerners did. China was, as historian Daniel Boorstin once called it, “an empire without wants.”
Yet, in spite of its early history of writing, China did not leave the world’s richest written mythic legacy. Unlike the Egyptians, who stored thousands of funeral texts in their grand tombs, the Chinese were seemingly far less concerned with elaborate burial rites, and left no detailed road maps to the afterlife, although they built expansive tombs. Though nearly every great ancient civilization composed epic poems of love and war, there is no ancient Chinese Gilgamesh, Iliad, or Ramayana. China certainly had its cornucopia of Creation and Flood accounts—as many as six separate Creation stories and four Flood narratives, each featuring different characters. But, intriguingly, these tales don’t emphasize heavenly retribution for sinful behavior. And while the Chinese acknowledged a wide range of nature gods, mythical semidivine rulers, and prophetic priest-kings in their fourth-century treatise Questions of Heaven and their third-century encyclopedia of gods, The Classic of Mountains and Seas, it was human ingenuity—not divine intervention—that was seen as the solution to most problems.
No surprise, then, that myth never formed in China the deep cultural identity that is typically associated with Greece or India. Or became the monolithic state religion, or powerful priesthood associated with Egypt. Quite to the contrary, China’s vast size and regional differences checked the development of a single “national” mythology that could unite the country. Even as generations of Chinese students immersed themselves in the myth-tinged works of Chinese literature called the Five Classics, their goal was not to become priests. They were preparing for the ancient Chinese SATs, or “civil service exams,” required to climb the imperial bureaucratic ladder or advance in the army. (The Chinese even had an “examination god” named Kui Xing, who was called upon by scholars for divine assistance at test time.)
But where myth failed to unify China, philosophy succeeded. Far more important than China’s poets and storytellers were its sages and wise men. Think China, and you think Confucius, not a poet like Homer.
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