Sui and Tang Dynasties
The Sui reunited China in an effective but short-lived dynasty (589–618). They were able to expand their power into south China, where colonization had brought economic and cultural prosperity. They built the first Grand Canal that enabled them to bring rice from the fertile southern plains to the north to supply the armies and the government. These connections between north and south aided the unification of the country.
The Sui were overtaken by the Li, a family of aristocrats from the northwest who had connections with the barbarians. The early Tang dynasty was marked by military conquests in Central Asia. This was the age of men of action in the cavalry, lovers of horses, and polo playing, as evidenced by the depictions of horses in sculpture and painting. They appreciated other cultures, and other cultures were being influenced by the Chinese also. The Japanese sent monks and scholars to China from 607 to 838 to discover and adopt what they liked in Chinese calligraphy, painting, art, religious thought, and government practices. The Koreans owed even more to the Chinese, with influences starting in the 3rd century BCE through the Han and Tang dynasties. This is how the Japanese adopted Chan/Zen Buddhism, Chinese calligraphy, Chinese pottery, and Chinese brush painting, which is known as Sumi-e in Japan.
The Imperial Examination System
The Tang dynasty improved the Imperial Examination System introduced in the Sui dynasty. Although examinations had been used in the Han dynasty, employment as an official also required recommendation and patronage, which were only available to the sons of high dignitaries and the wealthy landed gentry. Under the Sui dynasty, the lower classes had a greater chance to obtain employment. The Sui set up government schools to train the candidates. The Tang continued and expanded the system and added schools in the prefectures. This was part of a strategy to reduce the power of the military aristocracy of the northwest. The system awarded positions according to provincial and prefectural quotas so that officials were recruited from the whole country. This helped to ensure the integration of the Chinese state and reduce the tendencies towards regional autonomy.
The examination system also provided a cultural unity and common set of values based on Confucian teachings. The elites and those attempting the examination all studied the same content. Only about five percent of those taking the examinations received positions. Those who failed to pass became teachers, patrons of the arts, managers of local projects, and social leaders in local villages or cities. The system ensured that the best and brightest had the chance at a position and encouraged and enabled the pursuit of education regardless of wealth or class.
The literati taking the public examinations formed a new gentry class based on their education. The breadth of the examinations contributed to the building of their moral character as well as knowledge. Before the Sui dynasty, the examinations covered archery and horsemanship, music, arithmetic, writing, and knowledge of the Confucian rituals and ceremonies in public and private life. In the Sui dynasty, the curriculum was expanded to include military strategy, civil law, revenue and taxation, agriculture and geography, and the Confucian classics. As well-rounded individuals, the scholar-gentry participated in cultural pursuits outside of their official duties.
Advances in Painting
Emperor Xuanzong’s Kaiyuan era (713–741) was a period of political stability, prosperity, and peace in society, which allowed advances in education, literature, music, painting, sculpture, and religion. The emperor himself was a poet, musician, and actor, and a talented painter and calligrapher. The creation of poetry and painting reached new heights. New styles and types of brushwork sprang up. Two main schools of landscape painting emerged, the Northern School and the Southern School. These terms were coined at a later date by the scholar-artist Dong Qichang (1555–1636), who borrowed the concept from Chan Buddhism, which has Northern and Southern Schools. The schools differed in their use of brush and ink, not by their geographical positions.
Li Si Xuan (Li Ssu-hsün), known as General Li, founded the Northern School. He and his followers preferred strong, severe forms and definite designs that left little to the imagination. They used clear-cut, articulated, and rugged strokes. General Li and his son Li Chaodao (Li Chao-tao) were also noted for using blue, green, and gold in their landscapes. They outlined on silk and filled in with colors. Their precise technique produced beautiful and detailed decorative pieces.
The Southern School of landscape used mainly ink and water with only touches of light coloring. Their strokes were softer, more graceful, and suggestive. The school was founded by Wang Wei, who was a famous poet as well as a renowned landscape painter. He was credited with introducing monochrome ink washes that produced softer and subtler effects. The paintings of the Southern School are less literal and more poetic and imaginative, allowing a greater freedom for the qi energy to express itself. It was said of Wang Wei that his pictures were poems and his poems were pictures. The Southern School was also known as the Literary School as the natural scenes aimed to convey the mood of the dreaming poet.
Before the Tang dynasty, painters did not sign their works. In the early Tang period, artists became individualists as painting came into its own. The artists added modest signatures in very small characters in an inconspicuous place so as to not mar the design. Later, the Song dynasty artists became bolder and signed their name and the date on the base of the painting at the extreme edge.
Into the Song Dynasty
The Tang dynasty gave way to the short Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms era (907–970), which was succeeded by the long reign of the Song dynasty (960– 1279). From the late Tang and into the Song dynasty, people turned away from the military tradition, hiring mercenaries instead. Rather than military men, the policy leaders were scholar officials interested in polite learning, poetry, and the fine arts. The Imperial Examination System was regularized and extended to draw in more candidates for civil service and thus became less aristocratic and more bureaucratic.
In the later Tang dynasty, painters had started to specialize in singular subjects, such as bamboo, chrysanthemum, or horses. During the Five Dynasties, flower and bird painting became popular, and new painting styles emerged. Xu Chongsi (Hsü Ch’ung-Ssu) created the Mo-ku or “boneless” style (without outlines), which has continued up until the present day. The boneless style developed out of calligraphic strokes, which are not of uniform thickness and are shaped more like forms than single lines. This led to a new mastery of the line contour and new graded effects when a brush was loaded with two or three values of ink for a single stroke.
The Northern Song Dynasty
The Song dynasty is known as the golden age of landscape painting. Many emperors were artists themselves and gave considerable patronage to painters. In the Northern Sung dynasty (960–1127), Emperor Huizong (Hui Tsung) was a great painter, poet, and calligrapher. He painted mainly birds and flowers on silk in a realistic, detailed, outlined style filled in with colors. He was famous for the “slender gold” style of calligraphy he developed that looked like twisted wire.
Emperor Huizong wanted court officials to be artists, so the imperial examination required the candidate to illustrate a line from the classics or a well-known poem. Poetry was the “host” and painting was the “guest.” A painting could only win praise if it expressed the poetic idea well. The Chinese painter had to be a student of literature, and he was likely to be a poet also, as was Wang Wei.
With the rise of landscape painting and the waning of figure painting, poets started expressing their thoughts more in nature imagery that captured a mood, such as the sadness of departing. The mingling