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With the rival states to the northeast and northwest strongly oriented toward Buddhism, the best possibilities for expanding the Confucian world-view of the Song lay with newly emerging kingdoms to the east and south. Korea, Japan, and Vietnam, like Song China, depended on agriculture. The cultivation of rice, an increasingly widespread crop, fit well with Confucian social ideas. Tending the young rice plants, irrigating the rice paddies, and managing the harvest required coordination among many village and kin groups and rewarded hierarchy, obedience, and self-discipline. Confucianism also justified using agricultural profits to support the education, safety, and comfort of the literate elite. In each of these new kingdoms Song civilization melded with indigenous cultural and historical traditions to create a distinctive synthesis.
Since Han times Confucianism Chinese lnfluences had spread through East Asia with the adoption of the Chinese writing system. Political ideologies in Korea, Japan,
And Vietnam varied somewhat from those of Song China, however. These three East Asian neighbors had first centralized power under ruling houses in the early Tang period, and their state ideologies continued to resemble that of the early Tang, when Buddhism and Confucianism were still seen as compatible.
Government offices in Korea, Japan, and Vietnam went to noble families and did not depend on passing an elaborate set of examinations on Confucian texts. Landowning and agriculture remained the major sources of income, and landowners did not face challenges to their status from a large merchant class or an urban elite.
Nevertheless, men in Korea, Japan, and Vietnam prized literacy in classical Chinese and a good knowledge of Confucian texts. Members of the ruling and landholding elite sought to instill Confucian ideals of hierarchy and harmony among the general population through teaching by example and formal education, which was available to only a small number of people (see Diversity and Dominance: Law and Society in China and Japan). The elite in every country learned to read Chinese and the Confucian classics, and Chinese characters contributed to locally invented writing systems (see Environment and Technology: Writing in East Asia, 400-1200).
Korea Written language arrived too
Late for these societies to record their earliest histories. Our first knowledge of Korea, Japan, and Vietnam comes from early Chinese officials and travelers. When the Qin Empire established its first colony in the Korean peninsula in the third century B. C.E., Chinese bureaucrats began documenting Korean history and customs. Han writers noted the horse breeding, strong hereditary elites, and shamanism (belief in the ability of certain individuals to contact ancestors and the invisible spirit world) of Korea’s small kingdoms. But Korea quickly absorbed Confucianism and Buddhism.
A land of mountains, particularly in the east and north, Korea was largely covered by forest until modern times. Less than 20 percent of the land is suitable for agriculture, and this lies mostly in the south, where a warm climate and monsoon rains support two crops per year. Population movements from Manchuria, Mongolia, and Siberia to the north and to Japan in the south promoted the spread of languages that were very different from Chinese but distantly related to the Turkic tongues of Inner Asia.
In the early 500s the dominant landholding families made inherited status—the “bone ranks”—permanent
World History
