ABSTRACT
There has long existed a rough-and-ready, generally accepted periodization of the military history of the Western world. Though exact chronological boundaries remain subject to debate, changes in technology, tactics, and military institutions have enabled historians to distinguish between an ancient period dominated by the infantry-based armies of Greece and Rome and a medieval period characterized by political fragmentation, the primacy of cavalry on the battlefield, and the great advantage enjoyed by the defenders of castles and fortresses. This medieval pattern in turn gave way to an early modern warfare marked by the resurgence of effective infantry forces, the use of gunpowder weapons, and the centralization of military authority.1 In contrast to this familiar picture of historical change, the periodization of Chinese military history remains extremely murky. At the ancient and modern extremes, to be sure, certain changes are fairly obvious. The aristocratic chariot warfare of the seventh century BC was profoundly different from the conflicts waged by disciplined mass armies of infantry and cavalry four centuries later, and, at the other extreme, the struggle to assimilate Western military technology, organization, and ideas in the late nineteenth century marks another obvious watershed. In the more than two thousand years separating these points, however, significant developments are not easy to identify. It is not at all clear that medieval Chinese warfare – however we choose to define the term “medieval” in the Chinese context – differed very much from what came before or followed after. The starting point for this survey, AD 300, coincides very loosely with the appearance of the stirrup in China, while the endpoint of AD 900 falls just prior to the introduction of gunpowder into Chinese warfare. Yet, for a variety of reasons both institutional and technological, neither of these innovations seems to have had the same sweeping impact on the conduct of warfare in China as in the West.2 Nor can this period be sharply distinguished on the basis of military institutions or organization, since there was little that did not have an analogue in earlier or later times. The choice of 300 and 900 as the chronological boundaries of this work has less to do with developments in the art of war than with changes in the broader background of Chinese society and the imperial polity.
