Ancient warfare 3 controls5/7/2023 Northern steppe tribes were also constantly prodding and poking at China's borders and emperors were not averse to the odd foreign folly such as attacking ancient Korea. One cannot ignore the common presence of fortifications in the bronze age, such chaotic centuries as the Autumn and Spring Period (722-481 BCE) with its one hundred plus rival states, the Warring States Period (481-221 BCE) with its incredible 358 separate conflicts or the fall of the Han when war was once again incessant between rival Chinese states. With the emperors, the landed gentry, intellectuals and farmers all well-aware of what they could lose in war, it was, then, somewhat disappointing for them all that China, in any case, had just as many conflicts as anywhere else in the world in certain periods. Then, if war ultimately proved unavoidable, it was better to recruit foreign troops to get on with it. The Han Dynasty (206 BCE - 220 CE) was notable for its expansion, as were some Tang Dynasty emperors (618-907 CE) but, in the main, a strategy of paying off neighbours with vast tributes of silver and silk, along with a parallel exportation of “civilising” culture was seen as the best way to defend imperial China's borders. Generals and ambitious officers studied and memorised the literature on how to win at war but starting from the very top with the emperor, warfare was very often a policy of last resort. Even such famous works as Sun-Tzu's The Art of War (5th century BCE) warned that, "No country has ever profited from protracted warfare” (Sawyer, 2007, 159). Military treatises were written but, otherwise, stirring tales of derring-do in battle and martial themes, in general, are all rarer in Chinese mythology, literature and art than in contemporary western cultures, for example. The absence of a glorification of war in China was largely due to the Confucian philosophy and its accompanying literature which stressed the importance of other matters of civil life. "No country has ever profited from protracted warfare” - Sun-Tzu. Indeed, much of China's history thereafter involves wars between one state or another but it is also true that warfare was perhaps a little less glorified in ancient China than it was in other ancient societies. Those who did not fight had their possessions taken, their dwellings destroyed and were usually either enslaved or killed. The Chinese bronze age saw a great deal of military competition between city-rulers eager to grab the riches of their neighbours, and there is no doubt that success in this endeavour legitimised reigns and increased the welfare of the victors and their people. The Chinese intelligentsia may have frowned upon warfare and those who engaged in it and there were notable periods of relative peace but, as in most other ancient societies, for ordinary people it was difficult to escape the insatiable demands of war: either fight or die, be conscripted or enslaved, win somebody else's possessions or lose all of one's own. Chariots gave way to cavalry, bows to crossbows and, eventually, artillery stones to gunpowder bombs. With armies consisting of tens of thousands of soldiers in the first millennium BCE and then hundreds of thousands in the first millennium CE, warfare became more technologically advanced and ever more destructive. In ancient China warfare was a means for one region to gain ascendancy over another, for the state to expand and protect its frontiers, and for usurpers to replace an existing dynasty of rulers.
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