over its heartland in western Europe, changing but not supplanting its language as they attempted to adopt it, and the successors of the old Roman power retrenching into what had historically been non-Roman lands in the eastern territories, the Balkans, Greece and Anatolia. Yet the Chinese language faced no competition from a potential equal, as Latin faced Greek in the eastern Mediterranean. The land, in all its parts, was dominated by Chinese, even if increasingly spoken by people with some very strange accents.
Down in the south a unified Chinese dynasty continued; there large numbers of well-to-do Chinese immigrants were gradually spreading the range of Chinese. They had moved partly to escape the invaders, but also to occupy the more fertile land drained by the Yangtze. The languages of the native population there, whether of the Tai, Sino-Tibetan or Hmong-Mien families, were all of a type quite similar, though often unrelated, to Chinese. The result was a relatively smooth take-up of Chinese by learners in the south: some of the new Chinese dialects that arose, especially the southernmost (called Yue, or Cantonese), sound very much like the original.
Middle Chinese of the seventh century AD had syllables that could end in m, n, ng, p, t, k or a vowel, and so does Modern Cantonese, just like the (unrelated but neighbouring) southern language Zhuang; in Mandarin final m has become n, and final p, t and k have all been dropped. Again Middle Chinese is inferred to have had three tone contours, and a separate, so-called ‘entering’, pattern for words ending in p, t or k. These later split to eight tones, with a high and a low onset, depending on whether they started with a voiced or voiceless consonant (b-d-g-z-j versus p-t-k-s-c). This is the basis of the system in modern Cantonese, and also in Zhuang; Mandarin has taken a different route, splitting only one of the original tones, but when it dropped final p, t and k it assigned all the words affected to one of the other tones. It has ended up with four tones, while Cantonese (and Zhuang) have eight.16
In 589 it proved possible to reunite the country. A new Chinese golden age, of prosperity if not always peace, began under the Sui and then the Tang dynasties. Throughout this period, Chinese continued to spread southward.
The Tang dynasty lasted until the end of the ninth century, when it degenerated into a power struggle among regional warlords. Many foreign missions reached China in this period, including Buddhists from India, Nestorian Christians, Zoroastrians and Manichaeans, and Muslims. This would have spread the sounds of the Sanskrit, Aramaic, Persian and Arabic languages to the major centres, where they would have been used in worship; but the numbers actually speaking them must have remained tiny. In any case, by the end of the Tang all except the Buddhists and Muslims had been purged out of existence. During the eighth and ninth centuries there was an increasing threat of incursions from Tibet in the west, and stout resistance from the Nanzhao natives in Yúnnán (‘South of the Clouds’, in the south-west) but no long-term loss of territory. This period (from 847) also saw another Turkic-speaking group, the Uighurs,
settle in the northerly province of Gansu, and set up an independent kingdom, friendly to the Chinese, in the far west (modern Xinjiang).
The breakdown of central government was repaired after half a century (960) by the Song dynasty, but not before the extreme north, Manchuria and the lands north of the Great Wall, had been taken by the Khitan, a Mongolian tribe; Gansu too, in the north-west, was lost, invaded by the Tangut, who spoke a language related to Tibetan. The Tangut held on to this area; but the Khitan were in 1115 overwhelmed by another group from farther north—the Jurchen, a Tungus-speaking people, whom the Chinese, ill-advisedly, assisted. Although the Jurchen adopted the Chinese name and style of Jīn (
As so often, it proved much easier for the invaders to overrun the north than the south. For two generations the Song dynasty maintained a defence of the southern empire, based on Hangzhou, until in 1279 the Mongols were able to take them in the rear, having first conquered Yunnan (and indeed the north of Vietnam) in the south-west.
For the first time, a non-Chinese speaking dynasty (Mongols, now known as the Yuán,
Mongol control of China did not last much longer. Although Kublai was famous for his civility, his successors were less distinguished. It is worth mentioning the last of the dynasty, Togan Timur (1333–1369), since among much anti-Chinese legislation he passed laws forbidding Chinese to read or write Mongolian. It is evident that a strict racial policy was being followed. One would have expected, by comparison with the Manchu who were to follow much later—or the contemporary, but of course quite unknown, example of the English in Ireland*—that the elite would be passing laws to prevent their own members from taking up the language of the conquered people.
In 1369 Togan Timur and his Mongols ended up chased out by a popular Chinese warlord turned national hero, who established himself as the first Ming emperor. There was then for three centuries no interference by outsiders in the government of China.
Northern influences
Then the Tungus-speaking Jurchen people, now to be known as the Manchus, gained a second chance to dominate China. This invasion was the last permanent penetration of China by speakers of a foreign language.
In the early seventeenth century, the Manchus had been reorganised, under two able leaders, and advanced into the northern marches of Chinese territory to establish a capital at Mukden. Then, in 1644, they had the luck to be invited
into Beijing as a tactical move in a struggle between two generals contending to replace the Ming. The Manchus took the opportunity to install themselves, styling their new dynasty with the name Qīng (
It was into the north that the invaders came, and the Chinese spoken in the north went on to become the standard language for the country. But although the northern
