government organization: Asia and the Pacific 503 extensive system of highways uniting conquered territories, or producing food or textiles for the state’s storehouses In return, the Incan state provided food to those engaged in construction projects and redistributed surplus food from its storehouses in time of famine, though the latter task was left mostly to local rulers Incan administrators kept up a census of people and llamas using khipus Outlying provinces were administered from centers built in Incan style and connected by state roads Local subjects— able-bodied young men—periodically gathered at these provincial outposts to perform mita labor and participate in ritual feasting and alcohol consumption under the direction of the resident Incan officials To keep order in their conquered provinces, the Inca sometimes forcibly removed rebellious ethnic groups en masse and resettled them in distant regions, while subject peoples of proven loyalty were sent in to colonize newly acquired and potentially unstable territories Local rulers often were left in power, their loyalty to the Incan state assured by rewards (luxury goods) and preventive measures (their families, and even their local gods, being taken back to Cuzco as hostages) Newly conquered local leaders might be bought off with gifts of fancy textiles, while Incan garrisons were installed in some provinces to keep order The Incan language, Quechua, served as the official language of the empire Asia and the Pacific by Kenneth Hall Indian religion and Chinese Confucianism were critical to the founding and development of most Asian states, which emerged out of earlier tribal societies The Indian governmental ideal was the mandala state, a conceptual “heaven on earth” in which regional political authority centered on a sacred royal court, a court’s sacred temple complex, or a network of strategic temples sponsored by a monarch and his court elite As the focal center of the realm or as the chief patron of the realm’s temples, the monarch held power through his divine association as the gods’ delegated authority on earth, if not a divine being himself who had temporarily taken human form, to return to divinity after death The debate in Indian kingship was whether the ruler should lead by moral example, with his subjects modeling their lives after his as a means of achieving their own salvation, or by direct intervention The alternative was to rule by threat or to use force when necessary to maintain societal order The greatest threat in the Indian system of statecraft was the potential autonomy of the state’s temples and temple networks and the popular empowerment of priests as the moral alternative to a ruler’s secular authority Chinese Confucian tradition resolved this dilemma by clearly distinguishing the state as a secular institution The Confucian state was centered in its urban capital, which was primarily an administrative rather than a ritual center Professional bureaucrats who had passed civil service examinations filled the state’s administrative posts, and priests could not hold bureaucratic appointments The Chinese emperor was the highest administrator of his secular realm but was subject to the conceptual Mandate of Heaven In theory, an emperor received the mandate of the divinity, an assurance of their favor, as acknowledgement of his capacity to lead humanity successfully If, however, the emperor became corrupt or ineffective, the mandate could be withdrawn and granted to another The civil ruler was thus empowered by the divine but was a human ruling over a civil society in which the actions and decisions of humans determined the course of their existence on earth A failed ruler who no longer held the mandate could be overthrown by public rebellion, in contrast to the Indian notion of kingship in which the monarch could be replaced only by direct divine intervention As in Indian kingship, Confucians disagreed as to whether the emperor should lead by moral example or by aggressively involved civil leadership Indian Political Culture In India’s Dharmasastra (“dutiful law”) ideal there was no hierarchy among the caste tribunals and village and marketplace councils that had overlapping governmental jurisdictions Every social group was allowed to formulate and apply its own customs and conventions Governmental law and political institutions were not rigid but could be changed to meet fluctuating local needs and to achieve the best interests of the local community Ultimately, Indian institutions were expected to make decisions consistent with the interests of the most powerful among the community’s members, whose prominence was a combination of their political, economic, religious, or hereditary stature Most local legal decisions resulted in expulsions and boycotts rather than the fines or the severe physical penalties that were typical of the Chinese political system In theory, only a royal court could impose a death sentence A royal court of justice consisted of a king or an emperor or his designated agent assisted by learned Hindu and Buddhist clerics Local justice could be appealed to royal courts, where kings made practical legal decisions based on their sense of common usage rather than on a written code of law Few cases went all the way to the royal court, and such cases put the community at risk since the king’s justice would not necessarily benefit the community’s interests While kings were supposed to pass judgments after weighing both the