Читать книгу Chinese Art - Stephen W. Bushell - Страница 7

In the Sui Dynasty the empire was re-united, and under the Great Tang Dynasty (618–906), which followed, it attained its widest limits. The Tang ranks with the Han as one of the great “world-powers“ of Chinese history, and many of the countries of Central Asia appealed to the Son of Heaven for protection against the rising prowess of the Arabs.

A Chinese general with an army of Tibetan and Nepalese auxiliaries took the Capital of Central India (Magadha) in 648, and fleets of Chinese junks sailed to the Persian Gulf, while the last of the Sassanides fled to China for refuge. The Arabs soon afterwards came by ship to Canton, settled in some of the coastal cities, as well as in the province of Yunnan, and enlisted in the imperial armies of the north-west for service against rebels. Nestorian missionaries, Manicheans, and Jews came overland during the same period, but the Crescent prevailed in these parts and has lasted ever since, the number of Chinese Muslims today being estimated to exceed 20,000,000.

Buddhist propagandism was most active early in the Tang after the headquarters of the faith had been shifted from India to China. Hindu monks, expelled from their native country, brought their sacred images and pictures with them, and introduced their traditional canons of art, which have been handed down to the present day with little change. Chinese ascetics, on the other hand, wandered in successive parties to India to investigate the holy land of the Buddha and burn incense before the principal shrines, studying Sanskrit and collecting relics and manuscripts for translation, and it is to the records of their travels that we owe much of our knowledge of the ancient geography of India.

Stimulated by such varied influences, Chinese art flourished apace, the Tang Dynasty being generally considered to be its golden period, as it certainly was that of literature, belles-lettres, and poetry. However, the Tang power during its decline was shorn, one by one, of its vast dominions, and finally collapsed in 906. The Kitans, who gave their name to Marco Polo’s Cathay, as well as to Kitai, the modern Russian word for China, were encroaching on the north, a Tangut power was rising in the north-west, a Shan kingdom was established in Yunnan, and Annam declared its independence.

Of the five dynasties which rapidly succeeded one another after the Tang, three were of Turkish extraction, and they may be dismissed as being of little account from an artistic point of view.