Download PDF | (Warfare and History) David Graff - Medieval Chinese Warfare 300-900- (2001).
299 Pages
China’s history has been shaped by war. Shortly after 300 AD, barbarian invaders from Inner Asia toppled China’s Western Jin dynasty, leaving the country divided and at war for several centuries. Despite this, a unified imperial order gradually took shape again. Medieval Chinese Warfare, 300–900 explores the military strategies, institutions, and wars that reconstructed the Chinese empire which survived into modern times. Drawing on classical Chinese sources and the best modern scholarship from China and Japan, David A. Graff connects military affairs with political and social developments to show how China’s history unfolded. Between 300 and 900 AD, both Chinese and barbarian regimes experimented with many different forms of military service, including the tribal warrior, the hereditary military retainer, the part-time farmer-soldier, and the full-time mercenary. Medieval Chinese Warfare, 300–900 is the first survey of medieval Chinese military history to be published in English. This pathbreaking text will be of interest to both students of military history and to anyone with an interest in China’s past.
David A. Graff is Assistant Professor of History at Kansas State University. He received his PhD in East Asian Studies from Princeton University in 1995.
Preface and acknowledgments
This book was several years in the making and stands on the shoulders of several earlier projects, including my doctoral dissertation. The list of people and institutions whose contributions should be acknowledged is therefore a rather long one. I will mention only a few of those names here. The list begins with the members of my doctoral committee at Princeton University, Professors Denis Twitchett, Ying-shih Yü, and Martin Collcutt. It also includes Professor Huang Ch’ing-lien of the Institute of History and Philology of Academia Sinica, who provided valuable assistance and advice during a year of research in Taiwan (1992–3) that was supported by a research grant from the Center for Chinese Studies of the National Central Library in Taipei.
Additional research for this volume was done during a year as a visiting scholar in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University, made possible by Professor Peter K. Bol. Jeremy Black and Peter Lorge read the manuscript and suggested numerous improvements, while timely intervention by Ken Chase saved me from an embarrassing faux pas. Mr. Yang Yu-wei not only helped to clarify some of the more obscure passages in the ancient military texts, but also guided me through a great deal of medieval parallel prose that would otherwise have been utterly impenetrable. Any errors that remain are, of course, entirely my own responsibility. Though it may not be immediately apparent to the non-specialist reader, I have tried to keep the sinological baggage in this book to a minimum. All official titles are translated, as are most other Chinese terms.
Specific dates have in all cases been converted to Western equivalents (for example, April 30, 637, rather than “the first day of the fourth month of the eleventh year of the Zhenguan era of Emperor Taizong of the Tang dynasty”). References to months are trickier, since the months of the Chinese lunar calendar rarely coincide with those of the Julian and Gregorian calendars. In order to avoid repeated use of awkward locutions such as “between the middle of April and the middle of May 758,” I have generally chosen to refer to months of the Chinese calender (e.g., “in the third lunar month of 758”). The Chinese lunar months usually begin between eighteen and forty-five days later than their Western equivalents.
Thus, the first day of the first lunar month of the sixth year of the Wude era corresponds to February 5, 623. The discrepancy between the Western and Chinese years does not present a serious problem for the purposes of this volume because there is little day-by-day narrative description of military campaigns. David A. Graff Manhattan, Kansas May 2001
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