SANDBOX4[edit]

Hello, this is one of my sandboxes. For others, see:

Here are my article drafts:

Women and the Family[edit]

Hinsch's Book[edit]

Hinsch, Bret. (2002). Women in Imperial China. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. ISBN 0742518728.

Context of the Age[edit]

Western Han[edit]

Page 20: Following the collapse of Qin in 206 BC, the peasant Liu Bang fought in a civil war before consolidating a new empire and becoming Emperor Gaozu. His administration lessened the severity and harshness of rule embodied in the Qin state. Since he relied on various warlords and generals to gain his success, he was obliged to reward them with kingdoms and marquisates. The latter were fairly semi-autonomous in regards to central control. Emperor Gaozu really only had control over the western half of the empire, while the eastern half was ruled by kings and nobles who did not share his blood. These kingdoms posed a constant threat to Han authority, and so over time the Han emperors found excuses to depose all kings not related by blood to the ruling family, while central authority became supreme.
Page 21: Empress Lu Zhi, the wife of Emperor Gaozu, did not officially rule in her own right, yet during the reign of her son Emperor Hui of Han and his two successors, she was the de facto ruler of state. Her kinsmen also permeated the highest ranks of state. This setup of having the empress dowager amass ultimate power would cause problems for the rest of the dynasty, as factions of the empress dowager would compete with other prominent factions for power during the reigns of weak emperors.
Page 21: After the death of Empress Dowager Lu in 180 BC, Emperor Wen of Han provided China with a steadfast leader who cemented a regularized and rationalistic bureaucracy in place of simple charismatic rule of founders and experimenters.
Page 21: Under Emperor Wu of Han, the state began to rely more on Confucianism as its main ideology, the rudimentary roots of China's Imperial examination system were implemented under Wu, while his military campaigns into Central Asia opened up the Silk Road to the west.
Page 21-22: Wu's reforms and policies came at a heavy price. He had to create new taxes and raise the standard of existing ones to implement all of his reforms. The government take over of mines as well as salt and iron industries was also a necessary step to bring in more revenue. After Wu's reign, the government had to cut back on expansionism and grandiose schemes, instead seeking more modest means to govern the empire.
Page 22: During the reign of Emperor Wu, consort families became quite powerful. This was extended into the reigns of subsequent emperors. For example, after Wu's death, there was a powerful triumvirate formed which led the state, the most powerful of its members being Huo Guang. He linked himself to the imperial household by marrying his granddaughter to the new ruler, Emperor Zhao of Han. He filled the highest official posts with members of his family and dominated the government during the reign of Zhao.
Page 22: QUOTE: "Eventually the Huo family overreached. Just as Zhao reached maturity, he died under ambiguous circumstances. The next emperor was Xuan, who mounted the throne as a teenager. The Huos poisoned Xuan's pregnant wife to make way for a Huo relative to become empress. When details of this assassination leaked out, opinion at court turned against the Huos. Following the death of family patriarch Huo Guang, his desperate family plotted to overthrow the emperor and place one of their own kin on the throne. Their plot backfired, and in 66 B.C.E. rival factions exterminated the Huo family and deposed Empress Huo."
Page 22: This episode is indicative of a much wider problem plaguing the Han Dynasty, according to Bret Hinsch. Any emperor who was too immature or passive would find himself dominated by the relatives of his wife or mother, a conflict between "male and female authority."
Page 22-23: Government authority and administrative efficiency began to erode and decline during the final decades of Western Han. Leading up to that point there were many reforms to reduce state expenditures, to be cautious in dealing with foreign affairs, and to evoke a memory of the Zhou Dynasty rather than the Qin Dynasty. Some officials advocated land redistribution due to perceived inequalities, but reforms of such were blocked due to the interests of the wealthy. Consort families began to amass greater power again, the emperors became recluse and followed the advice of close favorites. Emperor Ai of Han even humored the idea of stepping down from the throne and giving it to his male lover. With omens of impending doom seen in natural phenomena, people began to turn to the Queen Mother of the West for solace and rumored that the Mandate of Heaven was no longer in the Liu family's hands.

Eastern Han[edit]

Page 23-24: Empress Wang Zhengjun became empress dowager during the final years of Western Han. Her kinsmen were either nobles or belonged to many of the highest ranks of state. Her nephew Wang Mang was among these. He steadily gained power and dominated the government under Emperor Ping of Han. Following Ping's death he announced that a series of strange omens signaled the end of the Han Dynasty and the house of Liu, which had lost the Mandate of Heaven. Therefore he assumed the title of Emperor of China and initiated the Xin Dynasty.
Page 24: Wang Mang achieved mixed success with his reforms to create a simpler society modeled on old. He faced little opposition to his rule, until the disastrous shifting of the course of the Yellow River. This catastrophe killed thousands and displaced thousands more, ruining crops, laying waste to whole villages and towns, and causing many starving peasants to turn to banditry or a group of rebels known as the Red Eyebrows (Chimei), who distinguished themselves by painting red marks on their foreheads. A group of rebels decided that Wang Mang should be overthrown and the Han Dynasty restored. Using a puppet descended from the Liu family, they rebelled and defeated the forces of Wang Mang, who was decapitated. However, their puppet ruler did not last long, while a stronger member of the Liu family took the throne as Emperor Guangwu of Han.
Page 24-25: With Chang'an in tatters, the government moved its capital further east to Luoyang, hence the next phase of the dynasty was termed Eastern Han. Emperor Guangwu defeated the remaining rebels, consolidated control over the empire, and balanced state power effectively by adhering to all the political factions.
Page 25: During the reign of Emperor Ming of Han (r. 57–75), the Ma family kinsmen of his wife Empress Ma (Ming) became powerful. However, when his successor Emperor Zhang of Han (r. 75–88) made two sisters of the Dou family clan as prominent consorts, the Ma and Dou families butted heads. However, when Dowager Empress Ma died, the Ma family's power declined. Zhang's successor Emperor He of Han (r. 88–106) was only a child when he took the throne, allowing the Dou family to establish a regency over him. However, when Emperor He came of age, he had the Dou family punished and exterminated.
Page 25: A similar episode occurred involving the Deng family of Empress Deng Sui (d. 121), wife of Emperor He. When she became empress dowager, her relatives dominated the high offices of state. They made many enemies, and following her death her family was destroyed. Empress Yan Ji, wife of Emperor An of Han (r. 106–125), dominated the court under her weak husband. He died without an heir, so she put a puppet ruler (Marquess of Beixiang) on the throne, yet even this puppet ruler died soon after, so another needed to be chosen. Rival eunuchs at court promoted the ascension of Emperor Shun of Han, and with this the Yan family suffered execution, while the luckier ones were exiled. For the first time in the history of the Han Dynasty, a eunuch faction rivaled a consort clan for power over the succession of the emperor.
Page 25: Emperor Shun married Empress Liang Na, and like the consort families before her, her Liang family kinsmen gained power at court and in officialdom. The Liang families dominated the courts of Emperor Chong of Han, Emperor Zhi of Han, and Emperor Huan of Han (or, at least the beginning of his reign). After Grand Dowager Empress Liang died in 159, Emperor Huan had the Liang family executed.
Page 25-26: Many officials criticized the existing system, elite corruption, and state of affairs during the reign of Emperor Huan, who welcomed such criticism. By the time of his reign, four elite forces dominated the court; these were the emperor, the empress or empress dowager and their family members, the elite landlords who were drafted into the bureaucracy, and the eunuchs of the palace. The eunuchs eventually gained the upper hand against the bureaucratic officials and consort families, especially by the reign of Emperor Ling of Han (168–189). They persecuted the leading families, filled the bureaucracy with eunuchs, and sold other offices off at the highest bidder.
Page 26: Rumors of the dynasty's impending doom fed into the minds of the peasants who joined the widespread Yellow Turban Rebellion in 184 AD. Although the rebellion was eventually crushed, it allowed eunuchs to amass control over top military positions. The extravagance and corruption of the eunuchs afterwards provoked a massacre of them (including the Ten Attendants) in 189 AD, following the death of Emperor Ling and assassination of He Jin. This chaos led to civil war amongst warlords who battled for supremacy over the Han court, but eventually Cao Pi, son of Cao Cao, saw no use to prop up a dead dynasty, and so dethroned the last Han emperor in 220.

Society and Economy[edit]

Page 27: QUOTE: "One unusual characteristic of Qin and Han society was the system of ranks that functioned as an official social hierarchy. This custom began in the state of Qin and was imposed across China following unification. During the Han, the system consisted of twenty grades. Every free adult male was assigned a rank. On special occasions, such as the commencement of a new reign, the emperor would raise the ranks of every male subject by one or two grades. Because these ranks were cumulative, a man's official grade tended to increase along with age, allowing the system of official ranks to match traditional respect for seniority. These ranks constructed a carefully defined official order all the way down to the very bottom rungs of society."
Page 27: QUOTE: "In addition to government bureaucracy and official rankings, society also had a more traditional structure based on kinship. Han dynasty officials exploited the existing social fabric by employing some village elders as minor local officials. However, Qin officials considered powerful kinship groups such as extended families a threat to state authority and used taxation and the law to discourage large kinship groupings. Sometimes powerful families did indeed pose problems. Most famously, time and again the relatives of Han empresses gained control over the government. To do so, they appealed to kinship loyalties to thwart the normal processes of bureaucratic administration. Nor was this problem limited to the central government. Emperor Gaozu enthroned some powerful men as kings in quasi-independent kingdoms located within the borders of the Han state. It took decades for central authorities to reduce their autonomy. And on the local level, wealthy landlord families often dominated their locale. Members of these families used wealth, bureaucratic office, and connections to exploit the surrounding populace."
Page 27: QUOTE: "During the Eastern Han, large kinship groups began to reemerge. Extended families anmd clans with large landholdings transformed rural society. Large kinship groups also influenced the balance of power at the local level. For example, clans and lineage groups started several rebellions, showign them to have impressive power at the local level. However, the roles played by extended kinship groups in local society were not entirely negative. During the late second century, when the central government lost the ability to uphold public order, large clans and powerful landlord families often stepped into the vacuum. In this way, even during the chaotic years leading up to the fall of the Eastern Han, a semblance of order was maintained in many areas. In other places, strong men attracted followers unrelated by blood, creating many small power centers to rival late Eastern Han authority in the countryside."
Page 28: QUOTE: "Land could be freely bought and sold during the Han. Most peasants owned only a very small piece of land and spent their lives teetering on the edge of survival. In times of chaos, high taxation, or natural disaster, peasants often had no choice but to go into debt. The wealthy benefited from these troubles by cheaply buying up the lands of impoverished peasants. Although there was some slavery and agricultural wage labor during the Han, most large landlords preferred to rent out their fields to the landless. Of course peasants declined in social status when they became tenants. When this process was repeated innumerable times on a national scale, society became increasingly unequal. Land reform was repeatedly attempted in the late Western Han and under Wang Mang, but these efforts never succeeded. By the Eastern Han, resistance to large estates seems to have declined. The elite had probably come to accept blatant social inequality as a normal state of affairs. The rise of large landholdings certainly influenced the conduct of government during the Eastern Han. The scope of authority exercised by the emperor declined; landlord families assumed increasing power. Wealthy landlord families were often able to dominate the court as imperial consort kin. During the late Eastern Han, central authority gradually disintegrated, leading to the decentralization of authority and the reemergence of feudal-style institutions as the dynasty decayed."
Page 28: QUOTE: "Early imperial China was also noteworthy for its urbanization. The earliest Chinese cities were primarily centers of ritual and administration. But during the Qin and Han, many cities across north China had become sizeable commercial centers. The standardization of currency during the Qin no doubt stimulated long-distance trade. Each major city had officially designated markets. Local officials regulated prices, enforced contracts, and levied commercial taxes. The Western Han government actively regulated the economy, though government regulation of commerce and industry seems to have lessened during the Eastern Han."
Page 28: QUOTE: "Merchants traded in a wide variety of goods, as befitted such a large and diverse empire. Prepared foods and agricultural produce, manufactured goods, such as cloth and bronze, and raw materials such as dyes and iron were all actively bought and sold. Chinese merchants conducted trade with places beyond the borders of the Han state, importing foreign exotica such as sesame seeds, rhinoceros horn, pomegranates, and glass for sale to Chinese consumers. Some merchants gained enormous wealth and invested it in land, decreasing the number of fields available to free peasants. In this way the thriving commercial economy brought inequality and poverty to the countryside. The mercantile economy seems to have thrived right up until the time of chaos preceeding the collapse of the Eastern Han."
Page 29: QUOTE: "Although some merchants were wealthy, they held an ambiguous position in early imperial society. The government feared the disruptive effects of commercial wealth, and so the official social status of merchants was low. Government officials periodically harassed them. For example, merchants were sometimes singled out for military conscription or forced to colonize new lands in the malarial south. Sumptuary laws prohibited merchants from flaunting their wealth. Thy were subject to special taxes. And the descendants of merchants were excluded from service in the bureaucracy."
Page 29: QUOTE: "Manufacturing was conducted on a significant scale as well. The state routinely produced certain goods, such as court luxuries. In some eras the government also oversaw the production of necessities such as salt, metallic ore, and even agricultural tools. Although several Western Han administrations actively pursued manufacturing, state industry declined in importance during the Eastern Han. Aside from a few specific goods emphasized by the officialdom, most manufacturing seems to have been undertaken privately. Some products, such as brewed beverages, seem to have been extremely profitable. And textile production, a traditional female pursuit, was one of the major handicraft industries of the Han. Occasionally the scale of textile production became quite large, with hundreds of women engaged in production under the auspices of a single enterprise. This put women on the forefront of early industrial production."
Page 29: In regards to members of society, QUOTE: "Landlords, merchants, artisans, free peasants, refugees, tenants, landless laborers, and slaves made up a diverse society."

Thought and Religion[edit]

Page 29-30: QUOTE: "Compared to the tremendous ferment of the preceding Warring States Period, intellectually the early empire was an age of consolidation." SO TRUE! "Some editors brought together diverse articles under a single title, making a wide array of ideas available to their readers. Others strove to unify the ideas of various thinkers into a comprehensive system." This included blending elements of Legalism, Confucianism, legend, and cosmological theory in order to QUOTE: "address the concerns of their day. And at the onset of the imperial era, achieving an intellectual unity to match China's new political unity was the most pressing problem of the time."
Page 30: At the beginning of the dynasty no school of thought had real prominence over another, that was until the reign of Emperor Wu of Han. He turned to the scholar Dong Zhongshu for guidance on ideology, therefore cementing Confucianism (blended with cosmological theory) into the state's accepted ideological structure which would last until the end of the Imperial era. There were many debates about how to interpret ancient texts and how to best transmit them, the results of which brought about the orthodoxy of Confucian canons (Five Classics). The debates were seen as incredibly important, because they would decide how government policy would be shaped.
Page 30-31: Scholars speculated about cosmology and the nature of the universe, such as whether it was domed or spherical, or whether or not it extended into infinity. They emphasized the interaction of yin and yang as well as the five phases, or wu xing.
Page 31: Although apocryphal texts existed beforehand, they became increasingly popular during the Eastern Han. Thinkers of this era used apocryphal texts to interpret omens, to expound upon mysticism, and make predictions about the future. However, their energies were perhaps directed into the wrong path in a time when further debate and discussion on morality, ethics, and government were needed in light of extravagance and decadence of the Eastern Han.
Page 31: However, books were a rarity in an age before printing, as philosophical, apocryphal, and other erudite texts was largely reserved for the elite. Scholars studied tirelessly to memorize sections or even entire books which they specialized in, and families who owned precious books transmitted them carefully to the next generation. Therefore, the wider Chinese culture was more influenced by oral and visual mediums.
Page 31-32: Unlike the written text, religion was far more widespread and pressing upon ordinary people's daily lives. Before unification, each region of China had its own unique mythological traditions. During the Han Dynasty, old and regionally diverse sets of religious myths were siphoned into texts such as the Shanhaijing and Huainanzi in order to systematize and amalgamate them into a unified corpus of beliefs. The historian Sima Qian reconciled traditional myth and history when he incorporated into the records of China's earliest history the Three Sovereigns and Five Emperors.
Page 32: Yet beneath the official doctrines about mythology propounded in elite texts, the common people still retained numerous and diversified beliefs in a number of deities associated with mythical or real places, appearing in animal form or represented by nature, such as a flowing river. Erudite scholars sometimes wrote of how they looked down on these popular beliefs as nothing more than superstitious and misguided forms of piety.
Page 32: The state sponsored five major deities and built altars to them. In the late Western Han, this was reformed in order to perform worship only to Heaven, or Tian (synonymous with the Lord on High, or Shangdi), a chief deity which the state ceremonies provided worship for throughout the rest of the Han Dynasty.

Kinship[edit]

Page 33-34: In the Han Dynasty, as in earlier periods, everyone's interactions with immediate or extended family members—in their actions, behavior, and roles which they played—were regulated by kinship associations. For example, a mother could be bossy to her son, but usually became meek and submissive in the presence of a father-in-law. When a younger sister died, that person would even mourn differently for her than if his or her mother had died. QUOTE: "The relationship between gender and behavior was both subtle and complicated."

Marriage[edit]

Page 34: When a woman married, she had to leave the household of her parents and enter that of her husband's, meaning that she had to adopt all new social roles of wife, daughter-in-law, and eventually mother. She was expected to be completely subservient to her new parents-in-law, as dictated by custom, ritual, and morality.
Page 35: Romantic love was not discouraged during Han, as seen in such examples as the tale of the cowherd meeting the weaving maid once a year or artistic depictions of couples in moments of intimacy. However, marriage in this era was decided by the family and mostly for reasons of property, not by any drive of tender emotions. Land property was the prime source of wealth in Han society, which sons did not inherit until a father's death. If a son was still economically dependent on his parents in the household, then there was no guarantee that his wife would be safe from ill-treatment by her new in-law family members.
Page 35: Since married couples were more often than not dependents on the male's parents and under their household, society was characteristically conservative and hierarchical. Since a newly-wed wife had to take her place amongst strangers in a new household, women's authority and position in society was very limited. It was even more so by the fact that society was patrilineal.
Page 35: Unlike the Judeo-Christian belief that marriage existed since the beginning of time, Chinese thinkers believed that mankind lived in a state of savagery for ages until the sages of old introduced institutions into Chinese culture such as marriage, which civilized the people of the earth.
Page 35-37: In advocating a patrilineal society, Confucian thinkers stressed the need for the primacy of kinship over individuals, the separation of the sexes, the domination of men over women (who were on the same hierarchic level, such as sibling, cousin, or wife-and-husband), ritualized relations between the sexes, monogamy, and the discouragement of widows remarrying. However, before the era of the Tang Dynasty, these ideals were much more ignored in actual practice, as aspects such as economic concerns easily undermined the patrilineal ideal.
Page 37-38: Just like in modern China, women of the Han Dynasty retained their natal surname after they were married, meaning they did not share the same surname with their new husband. This ensured a continual bond of kinship with a wive's original and natal family.
Page 38: In fact, when a married woman died, the inscription on her coffin included her natal surname and her order of birth in regards to her natal sisters, not her sisters-in-law from her husband's family. QUOTE: "After a lifetime of marriage, in the end a woman was still considered to belong to the family of her birth." By maintaining contact and relations with her old natal family, a wife increased her prospects of kinship support, whether that be financial, legal, or physical support. Even the husband benefited from a relationship with his wife's family. Hinsch says this bond between women and their natal families was so strong that it QUOTE: "distorted the patrilineal institutions underlying early imperial government," in regards to Western and Eastern Han emperors providing their in-laws (i.e. consort families) with enormous wealth and privilege.
Page 38: The husband's relationship to his in-laws was especially valuable, because Chinese marriage was traditionally monogamous, limiting the amount of in-laws he could rely on to just one family. It should be noted, though, that the emperor had nine wives in rank order of importance (which scholars equated with the nine regions of China in a cosmological rationale), and could have hundreds of consorts, but he had only on true wife, the Empress.
Page 39: Yet Han society's monogamy was only theoretical; in practice, wealthy men could buy and sell concubines who served as additional lovers. Still, none of these concubines were treated as wives, since there was officially one wife for each man. The wife's position was superior to that of a concubine. A concubine's family did not have to engage in the gift-giving ceremonies with the man's family, something that official weddings necessitated. What made a concubine different from a slave is the fact that a concubine, once bought, could not be resold. The social and legal status of a slave also differed entirely from that of a concubine. A concubine's sons did not inherit the lineage's property, only the wife's sons did (the less amount of progeny, the less you have to divy up the property, ensuring that family fortunes would not decline into downward social mobility). Sometimes men flouted rules of tradition by unofficially elevating the status of a concubine above that of a true wife.
Page 39: QUOTE: "Most important, monogamy strengthened patrilinealism. Multiple wives would have fractured patrilineal kin organizations based on simple and direct bloodlines."

Divorce[edit]

Page 40-41: Both men and women were granted the privilege of divorce from spouses by traditional custom and then by law. Divorce was initially a ritualistic and popular custom, until the Qing Dynasty law code contained clauses related to cases where men could be allowed to divorce their wives. These were known as the "seven conditions", those being QUOTE: "barenness, licentiousness, failure to serve parents-in-law, locquacity, theft, jealousy, and dread disease." A wife then had the "three prohibitions" on her side, which allowed her to contest an impending divorce if the following applied to her, QUOTE "having mourned for parents-in-law, having been married prior to a household's rise from poverty to wealth, and lacking anywhere to return." Theoretically these were the conditions for males to divorce their wives and for wives to contest such a divorce, but sometimes men were allowed to divorce their wives due to ambition, political expediency, or financial gain. The patrilineal system gave great privilege to men, as a man's son was not even allowed (by custom) to mourn for his mother if she had divorced the father prior to her death.
Page 41: Women's rights to initiate divorce were steeped in tradition, as the rise of family law during the Qin Dynasty does not seem to have affected accepted customs of women being able to divorce from their husbands. Women could divorce based on a variety of reasons, including QUOTE: "poverty, disease, and contentious in-laws."
Page 41: The patrilineal family was the core economic organization in China, and when a woman decided to divorce her husband, she was also making a decision to leave the economic mainstream and live a life of uncertainty. Divorcées, widows, and spinsters were left on the margins of society, while Han moralists took pity for widows and grouped them together with orphans, the elderly, chronically ill, and other unfortunate people. Due to a widow's weak position, Han martial law stipulated that if a son and father were both serving in war, and one died, the other had to accompany the coffin home. This was perhaps a humanitarian gesture to ensure that women of the family were looked after and provided for by some male of the house.

Remarriage[edit]

Page 41-42: Just as divorce was common, so too was remarriage, since being married provided a woman with a multitude of benefits and safety nets, including companionship, sex, a respectable social role, and ability to partake in the affairs of the economic mainstream of the patrilineal system.
Page 42: However, by ancient custom (and then by Qin Dynasty law) a widow without children from her previous marriage could remarry, but not a widow who had children from a previous marriage. By Qin law, if a woman divorced her husband simply to remarry immediately afterwards, she was punished with tatooing and forced to pound grain for the state. A widow with children was expected to be chaste.
Page 42: Since a marriage in Han China was seen more as a union of lineages than it was individual mates, a woman who remarried could cause problems for property distribution to her heirs. When the husband died, his wife was still viewed as part of the family.
Page 42-43: Replacing the old values of the Zhou-era aristocracy, the new Han proto-gentry elite based their status on property, so the drive for men of this elite group to safeguard patrilineal inheritance explains the rise in popularity of male opposition to female rights of divorcing their husbands and remarrying new ones. If a widow remarried, she undermined the financial interests of her previous in-law family since she could take the given dowry property out of their hands and hand it over to a new family through remarriage. The increasing use of dowries in marriage only increased the patrilineal male view that widow chastity was to their benefit and should therefore be exalted as a female virtue.
Page 43: Although emphasized more in the Song Dynasty when most women ceased to work, Han Dynasty women of high status were viewed as tokens of prestige which could elevate the status of a patrilineal family, should a male member of it marry a powerful and respectable woman. This explains why Han moralists would object to divorce and remarriage, since a high profile lady choosing to divorce her husband would cause him public disgrace; the humiliation would be made even worse if she were to remarry.
Page 43: Despite the views expounded upon in the writings of elite moralists, old popular customs held sway as remarriage was continually permitted in Han society. A woman who decided not to remarry was seen as virtuous, but most people in Han did not see it as a baseline decency and remarriage was not something beyond the pale. This view pervailed in later eras as well.
Page 44-45: The idea of female martyrdom in the case of widows arose during the Han, and it would influence thinkers of later eras. During the Han Dynasty, the issue of widows remarrying became even more contentious and controversial than in previous eras. Han moralists began arguing that women should go to extreme lengths to remain chaste and avoid forced remarriage, even to the point of committing suicide if necessary.

Family[edit]

Page 46-47: Interesting case of polyandry in Western Han China found on these two pages. The Chinese "family" was much in line with the Roman family unit under a pater familias, meaning that the Chinese household could house simply the nuclear family, or the addition of distant relatives, or the addition of extended households of nonrelatives. The bare minimum qualification of a Chinese family would be simply a group of people living together and sharing the same resources in the same household.
Page 47-48: Households during the Han Dynasty could range from housing two to forty people, although the average size was five people judging from Han records. Even with the emergence of the wealthy landlord elite during the Eastern Han, large extended households were still exceptional during that era. The trend of smaller family units began perhaps by the mid Warring States Period, and it gave wives greater influence in family affairs since husbands could devote more time to them instead of their brothers and other relatives.
Page 48: Qin Dynasty law actually forbade the existence of large families and extended family members living under the same household, seeing the grouping of large families as a threat to state security. The Western Han abolished this law and even encouraged the existence of large extended households by offering them rewards; despite this and Han moralists calling for a return to the large-scale kinship groups of Shang and Western Zhou China, most families during the Han remained relatively small and nuclear.

Power[edit]

Page 48-51: A long discussion on the major flaw and weakness of the Chinese kinship system in regards to the incessant conflict between the new wife and senior-in-laws, spurred by the demand of loyalty of a wife to her husband and parents to their son (i.e., the same male who played the dual role of husband and son in the household). Mencius and others argued that when a man became married, filial piety declined as he now had to pay attention to his wife and less attention to his parents.
Page 51: It was a wife's duty (namely the wife of the most senior male head of the household) to manage the day-to-day affairs of the household. The right to manage household affairs was a source of pride for women, so it became a battleground between the mother-in-law and daughter(s)-in-law of the household.
Page 51: People used literature to question the validity or goodness of the patrilineal system and whether or not it encouraged destructive or abusive behavior on behalf of senior members of a household who demanded the younger generation obey them; this is seen most explicitly in the narrative poem The Peacock Southeast Flew (Kongque dongnan fei), where a sadistic mother-in-law abuses her daughter-in-law even though the latter is entirely obedient. The mother-in-law forces her son to divorce his wife, leading the ex-spouses to commit suicide. Only after both were dead did the mother regret what she had done, but it was too late for she was now all alone (the dreaded role of a female in a patrilineal society).
Page 52: In regards to the The Peacock Southeast Flew, QUOTE: "This poem is also valuable in pointing out just how much kinship hierarchies differed from simple patriarchy. Central to the plot is the complete submission of a man to a woman; the son obeys his mother absolutely, even when her commands are mean and capricious. Their relationship shows that gender was not the only factor determining the relative status of various kinship roles. In this case, generation overrides gender in importance."
Page 52: A wife was theoretically subject to a husband's control in the patrilineal system, although wives were known to be defiant and marriage was defined as a relationship where each spouse had certain duties and privileges.
Page 52: Newlywed couples in Han Dynasty China did not always move into the household of the husband's family. In some cases a matrilocal residence (meaning the husband moved in with the wife's family!) was preferred. In this scenario, the husband had very limited authority in the presence of his wife's in-laws and could not easily control his wife.
Page 52-53: The high status of a woman's bloodline also trumped male gender superiority. When a man married an imperial princess, the marriage was called a shang, which means "to serve" or "to respect," meaning the husband was in a position of subservience, not the other way around. Han moralists argued that this tradition disturbed the cosmological forces of yin and yang and threw them out of balance, but the imperial Liu family did not share this sentiment, and promoted the higher status of its female members over any nonimperial man who chose to marry them. Nonimperial women who married imperial princes could also give orders to their natal family; QUOTE: "In theory, imperial marriage made her the head of the family of her birth." Yet some of these ladies were obviously pawns of their stronger brothers and fathers, but some of these newly exalted women independently exercised the full power of their new social role. For example, Empress Ma (Ming) was notorious for the way she severely ruled over the family of her birth. QUOTE: "When patrilinealism clashed with imperial interests, it seems that the ruling family usually won."

Mothers[edit]

Page 53-54: The role of mother was the most dominant social role that could be played by all women (given that they weren't barren). The Han Chinese viewed child rearing as a difficult task, so sons of daughters were obligated to unconditionally love their mother as dictated by social mores about reciprocity (bao) and repaying those who sacrificed for you.
Page 54-55: Stories like in the poem The Peacock Southeast Flew represent the morale of a filial son who never disobeys his mother's orders, no matter how right or wrong, good or bad. This ideal is also expressed in Han artwork. For example, in a Han Dynasty carved relief on stone of the Wu Liang shrine in Shandong, an elderly woman is about to strike her cowering son with her walking cane; instead of counteracting against his mother, the son sits still and worries that his frail mother might injure herself while hitting him (this is described in the incised writing next to the relief).
Page 55: In the patrilineal theory of the Han Dynasty, men were superior to women of their same generation, but an older woman was superior to a younger male, showing that generation trumped gender prerogatives.
Page 56: The Han Dynasty was perhaps the peak of maternal power, which seems to have declined, considering that mothers and widows had markedly less power over their sons and grandsons during the Song Dynasty.

Wealth and Work[edit]

Page 59-60: Although married women were in a precarious situation once they moved into the house of their husband's family, their roles were still essential to the maintenance of the house, as both male and female were dependent upon each others' tasks. QUOTE: "For the household to succeed as an economic organization, both female and male work roles had to be filled. A man supplied the family with grain, a woman with clothing. Men plowed, women carried water. Men harvested, women cooked. Men fought wars, women reared the children who would care for their aged parents. Some male roles may have been especially prestigious, but the roles of both women and men were equally necessary. Hence both were accorded due respect."
Page 60: QUOTE "Nor were these roles easily interchangeable. Some skills such as textile production took years of expertise to master. A man would find it impossible to suddenly pick up a spindle and distaff and begin making his own clothes...In other words, marriage was an economic parternship."

Wealth[edit]

Page 60-61: Since the line "While his parents are alive, a son should not dare to consider his wealth as his own," was attributed to Confucius, patrilineal moralists not only dominated their sons in this regard, but also their daughters and daughters-in-law. While this depressed the status of junior-ranked women in the household, it exalted the chief mother of the household, especially if she was a widow. One text in the Han suggested that married women of junior status should hand over any gifts they received to their parents-in-law, and that they should decline taking it back, and even if the parents-in-law insist that they keep their gifts, they should be set aside for when the parents-in-law might want to accept it again.
Page 61: However, this was merely an ideal of a small elite. Most elite and upper class women throughout the Qin and Han did not live in multigenerational households with many males. Many women were in complete control of their finances, although this was less so for their poorer counterparts.
Page 61: Women of the imperial house often owned huge amounts of land, slaves, and other property. It was considered a great wrong when tyrannical officials seized the property of a princess.
Page 61-62: When a male head of the household was around, he was expected to handle the family's finances. But when he was not around (such as in the moral tale of the shiftless gambler Xu Sheng and his wife Rong of Eastern Han), then the chief woman was expected to fill his role as leader of the household.
Page 62: As established in Qin law and respected by Han, women could own and inherit property, and according to Qin (and Han) law a widow of a deceased official was not liable to pay his debts, showing that she had clearly defined jurisdiction over her own estate, and he his.
Page 62: Women were also taxed differently in the poll tax. The rate varied according to her age, while unmarried women over the age of 15 and younger than 30 were taxed six times the normal rate (a measure no doubt to encourage marriage in society). After the birth of a child, the government suspended the poll tax on mothers for the first three years of their child-rearing days. An additional postnatal grain allowance was also issued to them.
Page 62-63: Ritual texts of the Han do not even mention dowry (ji), while the "bride price" (pin) given by the groom's family to the bride's family was considered the only thing necessary for a marriage. However, popular custom trumped all of this, as the dowry was the basis for a wife's wealth; in fact, in popular custom it was considered more important than the "bride price". If a wife had a large dowry in land, she could continue to support her parents if their sons died or proved to be incompetent, while a large dowry enhanced the status of an estranged wife who lived with her husband's family.
Page 63: It should be noted that a wife also owned the dowry which was supposedly given to the groom's family in exchange for the bride price. Qin and Han law state that the husband is the manager of the household property, but if the wife accused her husband of a crime which the state found him guilty of, the state confiscated his property while the wife was allowed to keep all the original property stipulated in her dowry. If a wife was accused of a crime and found guilty, her dowry property was forfeited to her husband. If a husband divorced his wife, he was obliged by law and custom to return the dowry property to his wife. All of this implies that a wife owned her dowry, contrary to patrilineal ideals of property.
Page 64: Although Qin and Han law stipulated that only sons were to inherit the property of their father, and in equal shares (as opposed to primogeniture), there is evidence in popular custom that women sometimes inherited property from their deceased husbands. There are also bamboo records of a female head of the house drawing up the will of her dying son (who took no part in it) to equally distribute property to her grandsons.

Household Labor[edit]

Page 65: In the ancient Chinese ideal, women did domestic duties while men performed duties outside the house; for example, the woman stayed at home to weave clothes while the man went out into the field to till and cultivate the farmland. By confining their work to stereotypical female duties, they retained an image of female virtue. Some rich women could relegate their responsibilities to servant girls, while the head wives of ordinary households could relegate responsibilities to junior female members.
Page 65-66: In addition to childcare, women were also expected to take care of chores around the house, including cooking (references to men cooking in Han society are somewhat rare and seems to be virtually a female duty).
Page 66: QUOTE: "The cook had to slaughter animals, cut up kindling and firewood, fan up a fire in the hearth, and carry heavy loads of water from the nearest potable source. Complex and flavorful sources had to be prepared to complement the proper meal. The brewing of alcohol (a standard accompaniment to meals and also a necessity for sacrificial ritual) was often a female preserve. Whole kernels of tough grains such as millet could only be rendered edible through a toilsome process considered women's work. Before being cooked, grain had to be laboriously pounded, boiled, sifted, trodden, and soaked. Considering that tough grains constituted the staple of most people's simple diet, this drudgery was a continuous burden. Women were also ideally expected to serve and remove the food and then wash the cooking and eating utensils."
Page 66: Other duties included cleaning clothes, brushing pillows and mats, sweeping the floor, making the bed, combing a husband's hair, and attending a husband during a ritual bathing rites.

Agriculture: Filed Work and Textiles[edit]

Page 67-68: Although patrilineal moralists clearly defined the roles and separated spheres of men and women, the latter were still mentioned as partaking in agricultural duties on occasion, such as in plowing, sowing, weeding, and harvesting. Increased female involvement in agriculture may have had something to do with the new pit-farming method first described in the Writings of Fan Shengzhi in the 1st century BC. This QUOTE: "required tillers to concentrate labor and fertilizer within shallow, small square pits instead of on conventional ridges and furrows. High concentration of resources made this method especially effective in raising yields from marginal lands, thereby bringing greatest benefit to the poorest households. But because the pits were too small to use animals or large equipment, it was vital for all members of the household to participate in intensively cultivating these pits if this technique were to succeed. Wherever this method of farming was employed, women's participation in agriculture became a necessity."
Page 68-69: Yet taking part in textile production was a main component of a woman's feminine identity, just as field work was a main component to a man's masculine identity. A woman working in textiles wasn't merely making cloth for practical purposes; QUOTE: "Spinning, sewing, weaving, and dyeing were all ways of being a woman." She became a true woman when she performed the tasks that society expected of a woman. Whereas some women engaged in agriculture, no man was expected to engage in textiles. This was especially so during the Han Dynasty, when independent silk and hemp industries (aside from the silk workshops of the state) did not exist and were considered agricultural products made from multitudes of different family homes. Women making clothes was a parallel agricultural duty to men's work in the field to provide food.
Page 69: By custom and by law, women's work in textiles was considered their only duty equaling the toil of a man's duty. QUOTE: "According to Qin law, the work expected fro one male bondservant artisan was divided between two adult women and five girls. But for the highly skilled and traditionally female work of embroidery, a woman's labor as considered equal to the output of a man." Furthermore, women's work in textiles made up roughly half a family household's income from market sales and could be used as de facto currency or as a means of paying taxes; this gave the so-called "women's work" of textile craftsmanship a lot of prestige.
Page 70: QUOTE: "Although the state ran some textile shops, the bulk of the industry remained under private management. On the simplest level, the women of many households produced extra cloth to trade for other goods. Cloth making thereby allowed ordinary people a way to acquire manufactured goods. When practiced on a larger scale, cloth production could be a route to prosperity. Zhang Anshi (mid-first century B.C.E.) amassed part of his wealth from his wife's weaving. Even as the economy changed during the Eastern Han and large estates began to emerge as the focus of production, female cloth production continued to be a staple industry of the manorial economy."
Page 70-71: One of the only opportunities for ordinary unmarried, widowed, or divorced women to stay self-sufficient in Han society was to weave textiles and sell them. If household production of textiles was small, they had greater command over the profits, but the larger the household production, the less control they had over the flow of income. Some women even formed their own communal spinning and weaving groups. By coming together to form these groups, these women had a practical end in sight: to pool their money together to share the costs of candles, lamp oil, and heat while working late into the night or in winter. It also gave them a chance to form a non-kinship organization for their own benefit, while easing their hours of toil by giving them a chance to chat with friends and neighbors.

Trade[edit]

Page 72: Making textile cloth was one thing, but selling it was another, as one Han proverb makes explicit: "To prick embroidery does no pay as much as leaning upon a market-door." Hence, women were regularly seen in the market, selling everything from foodstuffs to pearls and silks.
Page 72-73: As proven by Han records, some women even aided their husbands in making business decisions and how to compensate creditors.
Page 74: Male and female merchants and vendors alike were scorned by the scholarly elite for their economic role, which was considered parasitic to society. Some Han poetry of officials and landlords even scorned successful women merchants for their fine clothes that rivaled the clothes worn by women of imperial consort families and the imperial family. Female merchants were considered the counterpoint to the virtuous female weaver, the latter who dutifully enacted her gender role (i.e. working in textiles), the former who strayed from it (i.e. by working solely in business).

Services[edit]

Page 74-75: Besides trade, women also worked in services. Some women were employed as hand carriage (rickshaw???) pullers hauling around people and others in poling ferries to move people across river. Others hauled goods in carts and carried goods on their heads. Yet women were for the most part exempted from the corvée labor service expected of men. There were rare instances when this was an exception. For example, when Dong Zhuo moved the capital from Luoyang to Chang'an, he drafted 146,000 men and women for thirty days in 192 AD to build new walls for the new capital. This was unusual, since only women condemned as bondservants worked for the state, and even then this work entailed transporting grain, raising domesticated animals in imperial parks, and assisting in imperial offices.
Page 75: Shamans had existed since antiquity as healers, diviners, and sorcerers in an informal clergy. During the Han Dynasty, many of these shamans were actually women. While the state and ancestral cults did not afford women high positions (due to its fusion with the patriarchal and patrilineal ideals of the elite), popular religion such as this did provide women with a great deal of status in QUOTE: "primitive sexual egalitarianism."
Page 77-78: Beyond he female shamans acting as healers, some women actually acted as credible herbal pharmacists and physicians who diagnosed illnesses. This is no surprise considering the long-held tradition of having women gather wild vegetation for food. Han records also state that the empress had female physicians attend to her. Since food and medicine is closely linked in Chinese culture and women were so heavily associated with cooking, the fact that women became physicians was an obvious development. In diagnosing an illness, one of the first things that Chinese people still do is alter their diet.
Page 78: Some women also served in entertainment as acrobats and musicians. Others worked in physiognomy and claimed to know people's fates by looking at and feeling their physical characteristics. Some lactating women served as wet nurses. Others were domestic servants or slaves, who were required among the huge staffs of wealthy estates. Others at the bottom of the barrel served as prostitutes.

Law[edit]

Page 79: The various laws of the Zhou-era states were unified under the Qin, and from Qin's tradition the Han established their own law code, which only partially survives today with further finds that hopefully will be made through archaeology.
Page 80: Unlike later dynasty's legal codes, the Han code was not fully a Confucian construction, although Confucian influence at this stage can already be seen. For example, there was a legal dictum which stated that if one beat his or her elder sister, the punishment given to that person should be higher than if they had beat a younger sister. Matricide was considered one of the heinous crimes which spurred ethical outrage amongst Confucians, who classified such acts as "great refractoriness."

Women Under Early Law[edit]

Page 81: Like their male counterparts, women were afforded due process before the law and protections against false accusation. If someone was found making a false accusation against someone else, even against a woman, they were liable to be punished with the death penatly for perjury. Murdering or harming even a female slave was a crime worthy of severe punishment (yet the same applied to male slaves, commoners, and accusers).
Page 81: The Han legal system did not uphold a permanent prison system as they lacked provisions for permanent convicts (they were sentences to labor, though). However, the accused were imprisoned when awaiting trial or awaiting execution. Witnesses were also temporarily jailed to ensure they would show up to trial. The jails could be very bleak and did not accomodate separation of the sexes; when Emperor He of Han sentenced Empress Yin Lihua and her relatives (including an elderly grandmother Deng Zhu 鄧朱) to prison on charges of witchcraft, all of them were beaten to death in the jail.
Page 81-82: Han jurists were against forcing women into such unsavory conditions. In 174 AD, the wives and mothers of marquises were protected from unauthorized summons or arrests. In 4 AD and 27 AD, imperial edicts made it illegal for women witnesses to be interred before trial.
Page 82: Men could be punished for beating their wives; even in the Qin Dynasty code there was a law that stated if a man beat his wife, he would suffer the shame of having his distinguished beard shaved. As Ban Zhao in the Eastern Han noted, women had the power to divorce their husbands if necessary, which gave men pause before they considered mistreating their wives.
Page 82: The law distinguished between "consensual fornication" (hejian) and "forced fornication" (qiangjian), the latter being the legal term for rape, which was considered a violent assault. There were many rape cases during the Han, owing to the unequal relationships between men and women in society, but the fact that so many were brought to court shows that it was taken seriously.
Page 82: It is important to note that women in the Han could accuse men of wrongdoing, and Han jurists believed that women were capable of telling the truth in court.
Page 82: QUOTE: "One of the most vexing problems facing Chinese jurisprudence has always been balancing the interests of the family with those of the individuals and society as a whole. Early imperial law did not take a clear-cut approach to the conflict. For example, the Qin legal system bolstered the interests of individual women by allowing women to denounce their husbands. However, as if to discourage wives from doing so, the law stated that if a wife's accusation led to her husband's banishment she was to share his punishment. This provision deviated from the standard treatment of a woman whose husband suffered banishment for (as an example) official corruption, in which case the wife did not share his exile. This contradictory regulation epitomizes the conflict between individual and group interests. While recognizing that women could accuse men of wrongdoing, it sumultaneously adhered to the principle that a wife would share her husband's guilt. A woman was both an individual and a family member. Sometimes the different interests of these two roles clashed."

Kinship[edit]

Page 83: Confucius thought it virtuous of a son and father if the two concealed each other's faults, even if they were criminal wrongdoings. This proved to be QUOTE "an extremely dangerous doctrine" since it justified hiding criminal activity which the state sought to quell and highlighted the conflict between loyalty to kin and loyalty to the state.
Page 84: Han Dynasty jurists found a compromise with this problem by following the principle of the Confucian social hierarchy, that is, if a child conceals the wrongdoing of a parent, the wife conceals for a husband, or a grandchild for a grandparent, then they are not to be brought to trial. However, if a father concealed for a son, a husband concealed for a wife, or a grandparent concealed for a grandchild, they could be punished with execution. Notice how gender is neutralized in this regard and only the role of one family member to another is important in deciding guilt or innocence.
Page 84: QUOTE: "A grandson was legally obligated to treat his grandmother well. In line with patrilineal values, seniority within the family outweighed gender in determining the relative legal status of these two individuals. Nor was this an empty injunction. In the second century B.C.E., the king and queen of Liang were punished for behaving badly toward the king's grandmother. They had allegedly threatened her, refused to visit her when she was ill, and in the end failed to attend her funeral. As punishment, the king had his territory diminished by five prefectures. His wife, however, suffered execution."

General History Outline[edit]

Huang's Book[edit]

Huang, Ray. (1988). China: A Macro History. Armonk & London: M.E. Sharpe Inc., an East Gate Book. ISBN 0873324528.

Page 36: The Han Dynasty is the first time in Chinese history when a commoner became an emperor and people from commoner backgrounds became high officials. Liu Bang had been a police officer under Qin before he founded the dynasty. The chancellors Xiao He and Cao Cen both had been county clerks under Qin. The prominent Han general Chen Ping had once been a butcher. The famous general Han Xin had once begged for food in his youth. This indicates that much of the aristocratic order in China had been uprooted due to the violence and chaos of the reign and fall of Qin.
Page 37: Since the central government was not powerful enough to handle the entire empire at first, it held sway over only some of the old Qin commanderies while new large kingdoms allotted to Liu Bang's brothers, uncles, and cousins were established; some of his generals also became marquises. Over time many of these fiefs were abolished, due to infractions committed by the kings and marquises; after a rebellion of kings was put down in 154 BC, their power was decreased even more sharply since the surviving kingdoms were reduced in size and their internal administrations were taken over by the central government.
Page 37-38: Emperor Wu of Han (r. 141–87 BC) promoted Confucianism over the other schools, but he also incorporated teachings from other schools into his policies. For example, he favored the Legalist approach when he curbed QUOTE: "mercantile interests in deference to food production."
Page 38: The court erudites under Emperor Wu QUOTE: "expounded a theory that the five material agents (wood, fire, earth, metal, and water) retained certain corresponding values with the four directions plus the center, with the five principal colors, with the pentatonic musical scale,, with the five key personal virtues, and even with the five governmental functions; for example, fire belonged to the summer, the color of which was red, and it remained an agent of the Ministry of War. This concept was anchored in the belief that every 'thing' in the universe, be it a natural phenomenon or a social occurrence, belonged to some visible or invisible scale and therefore carried a certain rhythm that could be mathematically manipulated. Its origin can be traced to an ancient classic, the Yijing, or Book of Changes."
Page 39: The Xiongnu, a northern nomadic people who spoke one of the Altaic languages, posed a major threat to China; Emperor Wu initiated campaigns in hopes of terminating the nomadic threat once and for all, but he ended up nearly bankrupting the state coffers and did not succeed in wiping out the threat. The Xiongnu had formed a twenty-four tribe confederation stretching from Manchuria to Kokonor (Qinghai province). In 200 BC, they overpowered the forces fo Liu Bang in today's Shanxi province with a large army. They were able to assemble forces quickly since their men lived on horseback and used their weapons as their daily tools, thus never lacking mobility while China had to induct, train, equip, transport, and supply its troops.
Page 40-41: Although absent from the battlefield (save one instance for an inspection tour in 110 BC), Emperor Wu still personally directed the offensive campaigns he launched, giving orders to his commanders and deciding on rewards and punishments for them. Besides engaging the Xiongnu, Emperor Wu also launched campaigns into Korea, Vietnam, and Kokonor to fight Tibetan tribes. Once an enemy was removed, Emperor Wu enacted repopulation schemes to secure the new territories. To fund such an ambitious colonization of new lands, he was forced to implement a new QUOTE: "property tax on merchants, a license tax on boats and carriages, commutation from punishment to fines, a state monopoly on wine, salt, and iron, and government participation in trade. All these measures, together with the conduct of the war itself, pushed the empire's centralization further. And Wu-di's personal control over the army, as we shall soon see, had a profound effect on Han court politics."
Page 42-43: QUOTE: "Because the Han Dynasty endowed the provincial governors with sufficient manpower, they could select their subordinate officials. But those in charge of the local districts could never maintain such close contact with the governed as the feudal lords did in their fiefs. The system stipulated a land tax that was supposed to be one-fifteenth (less than seven percent) of the crop yield, and a head tax of 120 copper cash for each adult. And the universal conscription called each able-bodied male to an annual frontier duty of three days, commutable at paying 300 cash. This level of extraction was not exceedingly high in terms of the national wealth of the Han empire. But the taxation was applied horizontally to the populace—to a man who owned five mu of land no less than to a man who owned 500 mu of land. And in the rural areas, the tax laws could not always be administered in an orderly way."
Page 43: QUOTE: "After Wu-di, the vigorous frontier policy was abandoned. Fortunately, not much later, the Xiongnu also dissolved their confederation. There was another Chinese expedition to the steppelands in 72 B.C., but in 55 B.C. the Xiongnu split into five groups and fought among themselves. Subsequently their southern branch accepted Chinese suzerainty, which permitted the Han court to reduce the frontier garrison even further."
Page 44: Huo Guang, half-brother of the general Huo Qubing (who was the nephew of Empress Wei Zifu), served as the regent for the eight-year-old Emperor Zhao of Han following Emperor Wu's death. Years after taking the regency, in 80 BC Huo Guang finally had the faction that opposed him purged, which included Sang Hongyang (who was charged with treason in an attempt to dethrone the current emperor). When Zhao died without a successor, the regent consulted with the empress to have a prince succeed him, but when he, Prince He of Changyi, proved insufficient to be emperor, he had him replaced with another descendant of Emperor Wu's, Liu Bingyi, who took the throne as Emperor Xuan of Han.
Page 45: Huo Guang's regency was popular with the Confucian establishment. He reduced the taxes imposed by Emperor Wu. He initiated peace negotiations with the Xiongnu. When the court conducted a court conference in 81 BC on the state monopolies, the monopoly on the distillation of wine was abolished.
Page 46: QUOTE: "Huo Guang died peacefully in 68 B.C. But two years later, still another charge of conspiracy claimed the lives of his wife and son, along with many relatives and family associates. The chain of events did not even end there. Imperial-in-laws continued to play a dominant part in court politics. The position of the grand commandant had ceased to be that of a field commander. Customarily it was occupied by the reigning emperor's father-in-law or maternal uncle, who, more a politician than a general, overshadowed both the civil bureaucracy and the cloistered sovereign. This trend, once established, continued to gather momentum, until it precipitated Wang Mang's usurpation."
Page 46-48: Wang Mang was not only the nephew of a Han empress, but three of his uncles and one cousin had served in the capacity of regent for twenty-eight consecutive years before he occupied this position in 1 BC. He faced many problems when he came to power. One was the antagonistic relationship that had formed between the "inner court," composed of the palace and aristocracy, and the "outer court," composed of the officials drafted and appointed on basis of merit. In the countryside, many taxable land and available manpower was hoarded and controlled by local strongmen and thus tax collectors found it difficult to gather their dues (this situation is called jianbing, or "takeover by annexation"). Since the census system for assessing the land tax was often out of date and inaccurate, many people went untaxed by the government while others were often abused by local authorities and were made to cough up the difference to tax collectors. This drove many into banditry and caused even greater tax-collecting nightmares for authorities. Wang Mang sought to reform society with ambitious new policies including nationalizing agriculture and indentured labor (he outlawed the sale of indentured servants as well) and introducing a very complicated currency system which included even cloth and cowrie shells as money that could be interchangeable with precious metals and bronze coins. He increased government monopoly schemes, government trading, and even established government banking. To secure his reforms, he proclaimed himself emperor in 9 AD, shifting the top political order with new officials. However, when Wang's economic policies became a huge failure, massive peasant revolts ensued. Wang Mang was killed in 23 AD, and two years later Liu Xiu, a ninth generational descendant of Liu Bang, was proclaimed Emperor Gaozu of Han and initiated the Later Han dynasty with a new capital at Luoyang. Since the city was positioned to the east of Chang'an, some historians refer to the new period as the Eastern Han Dynasty.
Page 49-50: Although the purported enrollment of 10,000 students (for the 10,000 dormitory compartments) of the Imperial University during the reign of Wang Mang was perhaps an exaggerated figure, its role in shaping China's elite was anything but trivial. Liu Xiu, later the Emperor Guangwu of Han who refounded the dynasty, was a university student, as well as Deng Yu (2–58) who became a senior advisor and his classmate Zhong Chong, who became the imperial tutor to the heir apparent (later Emperor Ming of Han). Emperor Ming lectured on ancient history in 59 AD at the Imperial University in Luoyang, allegedly attracting crowds of thousands. By the 2nd century AD the university had 240 buildings with a total of 1,850 rooms which accomodated 30,000 students. This does not even include the many tens of thousands of students privately tutored by prominent scholars who gathered 500 or even up to 3,000 willing disciples.
Page 50: Although the grand timber structures built at the capital cities of Chang'an and Luoyang have long since perished, there are remains of the ancient cities, such as wheel-ruts showing that four carriages could pass through each of the city gatehouses simultaneously.
Page 51: The Han left behind many luxurious bronzes, lacquerwares, and clay models, yet the bas-reliefs they made are the most revealing about how they lived, since they not only show historical episodes, legendary figures, and tales of mythological origin, but also scenes of daily life that count as a valuable source for social history.
Page 51: QUOTE: "The upper class in those days wore robes with long sleeves, and their headgear in the form of a kerchief was ubiqitous. They sat on floor mats to hold banquets, play musical instruments and games, and conduct lectures. A two-seat carriage was a common contrivance of transportation. Hunting and fishing were acceptable pastimes of gentlemen. The theater remained undeveloped, even though entertainers skillful at dancing and singing were abundant. The well-to-do were also amused by jugglers and magicians, and some of the scenes of merrymaking maintain their appeal to this day."
Page 51: QUOTE: "The common people wore pajama-like garments and shorts while working. Sometimes, but rarely, a knee-length overcoat was added. While the single household remained the basic unit, agricultural work constantly required cooperation among neighbors. Millet, wheat, and rice were the major food crops. Women attending to silkworms were almost universal. Iron forging and salt production remained two principal state industries even though, during the Later Han, the governmental monopoly on them was abolished. Commerce was prominently represented by single-family stores engaging in retail trade, as is still the case in the inland cities in the twentieth century."
Page 52: China's slave population never reached over 1% of the total population, according to scholarly consensus.
Page 52: QUOTE: "Following the empire's military conquest, China's cultural influence reached past the Yalu River to portions of Korea, and to parts of Vietnam as far south as the Gulf of Tonkin. Pockets of unassimilated subcultures, however, remained along the China coast. About 200 years ago a golden seal was discovered on the northern tip of Kyushu, a major island of Japan, which indicates that the Han had conferred vassal status on a Japanese chieftain. Similar seals of the same design and stylized engraving have been found in many parts of China."
Page 52: During the Eastern Han period, the once major threat of the Xiongnu failed to materialize as they their power and influence was significantly diminished with two Han campaigns in 73 and 89 AD. In fact, the protracted wars with the Tibetans in Kokonor (Qinghai) proved more costly to the Han court, yet the Tibetans were unable to organize any serious unified command that could threaten Han's existence.
Page 52-53: Here Ray Huang mentions Ban Chao, "brother of historian Ban Gu," and his military missions into Central Asia ranging from 73 to 102 AD. His influence on nearby states reached as far as the Caspian Sea and often led a mixed force of tens of thousands from China and native states west of the Pamir Mountains.
Page 53-54: QUOTE: "The founder of the Later Han, Liu Xiu, fits nicely the modern definition of 'the gentry class.' The relationship of his family with the imperial household of the Former Han had been decreasing over the generations. Its aristocratic influence had been progressively diminishing as the forefathers of his lineage, having branched out from the houses of a prince and a marquis, took scaled-down positions as governors, district military commanders, and, as in the case of Liu's own father, county magistrates. The first time Liu Xiu appeared in history, he was a young man versed in farm management. At one time he represented his uncle in enlisting the aid of local officials to collect unpaid rent; on another occasion he sold grain in a district where there was a food shortage. Because of his background and the similar outlook of his close followers, the Later Han government is sometimes referred to as a coalition of the well-to-do. While this observation is literally true, one cannot draw the modern inference that the regime's make-up dictated that it advance gentry interests. There were no legal means to implement such policies. Furthermore, it was not backed up by an ideology adequate to motivate the bureaucrats for such a movement. Institutional arrangements that clearly define the rights of private property and the rendering to them of legal protection are historical concepts particular to the modern West."
Page 54: QUOTE: "We can say without reservation that elements of 'national religion' dominated Han thought, perhaps more conspicuously during the Later Han period. The idea is that the universe is organic. The interplay of yin and yang reveals itself in natural phenomena and in human affairs, which are identical because the same inner rhythms are at work...This cosmic unity makes it impossible to separate church from the state, the spiritual from the mundane. When carried to its logical conclusion, it even makes it difficult to draw a clear line between this life and the hereafter...In the Later Han records we read passages showing that which the arrival of the winter solstice, which marked the shortest day of the year and therefore the turning point for the yin to give way to the yang, Han officials, in both the imperial capital and the provincial government seats, changed into robes of crimson color. Musical instruments were tuned. Earth and charcoal were put on the scale to compare their relative weight as affected by the spirit of the day. The shadow of the gnomon was measured. It is unclear whether this flurry of activity was meant to symbolically publicize the seasonal change, or to actually contribute to the spiritual transition."
Page 54-55: QUOTE: "Accepting all these as components of its state cult, the Han, especially the Later Han, could never see itself as solely a worldly creation. To defend the rights and privilege of a special social class would have been out of order. Staying away from such earthly terms, the state nevertheless had an obligation to Heaven for seeing to it that the populace was content and happy. In 54 A.D. when Liu Xiu was urged by his courtiers to sacrifice to Heaven at Taishan to confirm his mandate, he declined on the grounds that the people were not yet in a state of felicity. Two years later, however, he reversed himself and performed the ceremony—a maneuver of dubious merit. What was the criterion of contentment and happiness? And who was to judge? But the ambiguity served a purpose. In a modern perspective, the ideology of the Later Han can be summed up as a political philosophy of the status quo and trying to get along with all sides. Liu Xiu's contest with Wang Mang was short-lived. His empire was actually wrested from the peasant rebels and local warlords, and that campaign lasted over a dozen years. Indeed he and his followers had not lost sight of their family interest, and it was self-defense that had driven them to take up arms in the first place. But Liu's exposure to the Confucian classics and his rural experience also convinced him that the stability of the empire depended on a peasant population whose basic needs were satisfied. These divergent impulses could not be easily reconciled. The preaching on cosmic unity and natural harmony, however, gave him sufficient free play to achieve the purpose of moderation and reconciliation in a more subtle manner."
Page 55: Emperor Guangwu of Han and Emperor Ming of Han both believed that the best approach to build economic stability was to implement low taxes, specifically one-thirtieth of the crop yield for the land tax. They also abolished the profitable government monopolies on certain commodities. Guangwu was very strict and paid close attention to details; a year after the tax register was reestablished in 39 AD, ten governors were imprisoned for submitting false or inaccurate reports to the throne.
Page 56: Ray Huang writes that the way the Han dealt with private wealth, however, led to the dynasty's downfall. QUOTE: "The emergence of private wealth in a dominantly agrarian country always presents a problem. It can be instantly transformed into political power, and on many occasions it is compelled to take an active role in politics...To begin with, rural China was made vulnerable by the large number of small self-cultivators...Since all of them were small businessmen of a sort, the appearance of a few bigger businessmen inevitably led to imbalance and tension...There was a natural tendency for the wealthier and more powerful to displace the poorer and weaker. The government, unable to implement any plan of progressive taxation, would first face the loss of revenue, and then the effort to provide relief to the poor would also suffer...The pattern of small holdings put any meaningful legal service further beyond the reach of the villagers. Thus rarely were cases of indebtedness, mortgage, foreclosure, and dispossession carried out under the orderly supervision of the law. As a rule it was the local ruffians who took matters into their own hands, conveniently under the direction of the rural wealthy. Yet the abuse did not end there. When cases could not be peacefully settled in the villages, rarely could they be handled better in the governmental offices. The magistrates who were compelled to review them faced an abiding dilemma. Their Confucian training compelled them to act with compassion toward the poor; yet in the name of law and order they could not ignore the interests of the rich. Frequently they either had to ingratiate themselves with certain influential persons who were behind the disputes or defy them to make a righteous name for themselves."
Page 57: QUOTE: "The complacency of the status quo and getting along with all sides and the quasi-religious outlook of seeking fulfillment in this world prevented [the government] from moving in any single direction. A laissez-faire policy enabled the empire to recover and rehabilitate itself after a general disturbance caused by the Wang Mang interlude, but in the second century A.D., the further accumulation of wealth in private hands, especially without an adequate outlet except reinvestment in land, disturbed rural tranquility to such an extent as to incapacitate the local government, which was long on ideology but short on administrative skills."
Page 57: QUOTE: "The promotion of Confucianism during the two Han periods, while contributing to ideological cohesion among the bureaucrats, also had an adverse effect. Learned men found few outlets for their talent other than governmental service. Knowledge for its own sake was not encouraged at all. In the second century A.D., Zhang Heng conceived the brilliant notion that 'heaven is like an egg and the earth its yoke.' The bronze seismograph he designed in A.D. 132, of which now only an illustration of a reconstruction remains, is said to have measured eight feet in diameter. His close contemporary Wang Chong persistently refuted the assumed connections between natural phenomena and human affairs. Neither of these two brilliant thinkers gained a significant following. In contrast, the stone tablets erected in front of the imperial university in A.D. 175 on which were engraved the text of six Confucian classics, daily attracted scholars and students arriving in more than 1,000 carriages. Their thirst was for a knowledge already engraved on the stone surface."
Page 58: QUOTE: "Although factional quarrels traced their origins to the local districts, they always exploded in the capital. A pattern had been established: When provincial officials triedto check local ruffians, the most notorious were found to be under the protection of the rural wealthy, who in turn maintained connections with holders of high offices, not infrequently palace eunuchs. Magistrates and governors of righteous reputation were compelled to act. Their summary jurisdiction and prompt executions of the offenders on moral grounds invited reprisals. When that happened, the sacrifices laid down by these virtuous officials themselves, along with their families and associates, wer no less than the price paid by the villains. From A.D. 153 to 184, many events that were not to occur elsewhere until modern times took place in Han China. Students by the thousands demonstrated in the streets o floyang and delivered petitions to the imperial court. Mass arrests ensured; black lists were compiled. Hundreds of political prisoners died in confinement, some of them without any public notice...The capital split because the eunuchs and their cohorts were well received by the upstarts in the countryside but rejected by the established gentry, both represented by the civil officials. Perhaps an imperial ruling of A.D. 135, which permitted the eunuchs to pass on their ranks and estates to their adopted sons, complicated pecuniary matters in the local districts. The charges against them for obstruction of justice, therefore, are logically convincing."
Page 59-60: QUOTE: "The showdown of A.D. 189 put all pretensions aside. He Jin, a half brother of the empress dowager, became grand commandant in A.D. 184 when a peasant group called the Yellow Turbans threatened the capital. His successful suppression of them added prestige to his power. In this instance he was allied with Colonel of Censure Yuan Shao. Their scheme to purge the eunuchs hinged on their summoning to the capital a division of frontier troops. But eunuch Zhang Rang acted first. Zhang, whose brother had been executed by a former colonel of censure in a contested case, was linked to the imperial family by a duaghter-in-law who as none other than the empress dowager's own sister. He managed to lure He Jin into the palace and had him murdered on the spot. When Yuan Shao avenged this deed, he burned the palace and killed all the eunuchs in sight, causing Zhang Rang to drown himself."
Page 60: QUOTE: "As it happened, the throne itself became a pawn of a family quarrel, sparking a power struggle...if in name only, the dynasty hung on for another thirty years. With the emperor a prisoner, and the capital burned down, the population had yet to see what seemed to be a senseless warfare turn the entire countyside into a revolving stage and convert civil leaders into warriors, some of them against their wishes."
Page 60-61: The Battle of Guandu in A.D. 200 is an interesting interlude, not because it solved anything, but because the background of the participants gives us insight into the dimensions of the struggle. The invading army was led by Yuan Shao, none other than the colonel of censure who has earlier wanted to purge the eunuchs. On this occasion he intended to make himself the overlord of the rising regional forces. His sixth generation ancestor Yuan Liang had started the family fortune as an expert on the Book of Changes. After serving as a court academician, Yuan Liang passed his specialty onto his grandson Yuan An. The latter, on the strength of scholarship and recognized righteousness, rose from being a country magistrate to being a provincial governor and then a grand minister. From then on, not a single generation of the household was omitted from the highest court distinction, until those who claimed to be office subordinates and former disciples of the Yuans crowded every province. When Yuan Shao raised the standard, the family protégés and their associates contributed a fighting force that was said, probably with exaggeration, to be 100,000 strong. Food was delivered form north China on 10,000 carts. Opposing him was Cao Cao, whose background was more complex. His foster grandfather was a eunuch and the emperor's reader-in-waiting. But Cao himself received the nomination of xiaolian. In the early stages of his career he went along with the bureaucrats and established a reputation for being capable. He built up his army from Yellow Turbans who had surrendered, and fed them with the produce from his own military farms. His declared aim of restoring the Han central authority was one of the most controversial issues of the period."
Page 61: QUOTE: "Cao Cao emerged victorious from the battle of Guandu, but the Han dynasty was not revived. Until the reappearance of a unified empire with the rise of the Sui dynasty in the late sixth century, China was going to witness many short-lived dynasties and experience the invasions of the barbarians."

Hansen's Book[edit]

Hansen, Valerie. (2000). The Open Empire: A History of China to 1600. New York & London: W.W. Norton & Company. ISBN 0393973743.

Doubting the Han's Historical Record on Qin[edit]

Page 109: QUOTE: "The Han scholar Jia Yi (201–169 B.C.), who was born after the end of the Qin dynasty, rendered the following famous verdict on the years of Qin rule:
- QUOTE: "Qin, with its originally tiny territory and a force of only one thousand chariots, nevertheless summoned to itself the eight regions of the world and made its peers pay court to it for more than a century. Later, after it had converted everything within the six directions into its home and made the Xiao and Han passes into its strongholds, a single fellow created trouble, whereupon its seven ancestral temples straightway toppled, its ruler died at the hands of men, and it became the laughing stock of the world."
- QUOTE: "Why? Because it failed to display humanity (ren) and righteousness (yi) or to realize there is a difference between the power to attack and the power to consolidate."
Page 109: Hansen writes, QUOTE: "Jia Yi's analysis seems to have much to recommend it. Opposition to the Qin sprang from all quarters. The nobles and rulers of the defeated six kingdoms numbered some one hundred twenty thousand people whose aristocratic ranks were removed and who were forced to move to the Qin capital, where the emperor could keep close watch over them."
Page 109-110: QUOTE: "We must be cautious, though, in using later sources to study Qin. In one of the most infamous incidents recorded by later historians, the Qin emperor launched a large-scale book burning in 213 B.C. that sought to destroy all dissenting points of view. The famous Confucian classics, including The Book of Songs and The Book of Documents, were banned, as were the historical annals of earlier kings. Only books on agriculture and divination were permitted. Still, we must remember that book-making technology remained in its early stages. Because most classical learning, and certainly The Book of Songs, continued to be orally transmitted from teacher to student, a book burning would not have had much effect. Later sources also allege that, one year later, the emperor sentenced to death four hundred sixty scholars who opposed his rule. Some sources say the men were buried up to their necks and then trampled by horses, but the phrasing strongly suggests a later interpolation added after the Qin had fallen."
Page 110: QUOTE: "Jia Yi's Confucian viewpoint, with its emphasis on humanity and righteousness, provided the Han dynasty with the perfect justification for the overthrow of the Qin. As a piece of historical writing dictated by political considerations, the story of the rebelling laborers further contributed to the myth. In the Grand Historian Sima Qian's account of the Zhou conquest of the Shang (described in Chapter 1), the last Shang king, surrounded by beautiful women and luxuries, could do no right, while the first Zhou king could do no wrong. The same kind of stereotyping shaped later accounts of how the Han dynasty leaders overthrew the Qin."
Page 110: QUOTE: "A tomb excavated in 1975 provides a surprising corrective to received wisdom about Qin brutality. The legal materials from the Shuihudi tomb reveal that men called up for service who failed to report or who absconded were liable to be beaten, not killed, as the Han historians falsely maintained in their account of the dynasty's founding. The officials in charge of a group of laborers could be fined one shield if the laborers were six to ten days late; a suit of armor if over ten days late. We must conclude that the Han-dynasty historians overstated these punishments to discredit the previous and fallen Qin dynasty."

The Finds at Shuihudi[edit]

Page 110: QUOTE: "Located in Yunmeng county, Hubei province, the Shuihudi tomb held a Qin-dynasty official who died at the age of forty-five in 217 B.C., five years after the unification of the empire. The stagnant water in which the tomb was submerged preserved the contents of the official's tomb in much the same way as standing water in German or Danish peat bogs kept Iron Age corpses in excellent condition. Beginning as a scribe, Mr. Xi worked his way up the bureaucracy to the rank of prefectural clerk, eventually gaining the right to hear criminal suits. Although the Shuihudi tomb lacks anything as dramatic as the terra-cotta warriors, it contained 1,155 bamboo documents, including both legal writings and divination manuals Mr. Xi must have intended to use in the netherworld. The presence of these texts suggests that he fully expected to hold the same kind of clerical position in the underworld bureaucracy as he had held in the Qin-dynasty bureaucracy during his lifetime."
Page 110-111: QUOTE: "Before the invention of paper in the second century B.C., people used bamboo or wood as writing materials. They cut slips of the same size—approximately three popsicle sticks long—in which they punched holes at regular intervals. They then strung the slips together so that they formed something like a modern placemat. Wood or bamboo texts took up much more space than paper or silk rolls; one estimate put the records of the Han dynasty at two thousand wagon loads in A.D. 25."
Page 111: QUOTE: "The Shuihudi cache illuminates daily life at the lowest level in China. One fo the bamboo texts specified how to choose which days were lucky for certain activities and which were not. Some of the activities, like apprehending criminals or sentencing wrongdoers, directly impinged on the work of local officials, while others, like choosing a good day to build a wall or to wed, affected everyone."
Page 111: QUOTE: "As an official needed to consult a daybook, he also needed to check legal reference books. Mr. Xi took several such books with him, including selections from the Qin code relevant to his administrative duties and a book in question-and-answer format explaining terms and phrases to be used by judges. The collected statutes pertained directly to Mr. Xi's tasks, which included overseeing government granaries and labor service, performed both by free men and by criminals. The answer's in the judge's handbook also occasionally cite the Qin statutes. Because these are the only sections of the Qin code to survive today, they allow us to judge whether Qin law was as brutal as later historians suggested."
Page 111-112: QUOTE: "Contrary to the writings of the Han historians, and contrary to the expectations of modern scholars, the provisions from the Qin code stress close adherence to a rigorously delineated series of judicial procedures. Since the Legalist code specified particular punishments for particular crimes, the handbook included model cases elucidated by question and answer. These examples instructed officials how to determine whether a person killing someone in a fight had done so accidentally, which would bring a charge of manslaughter, or deliberately, which constituted murder. The law distinguished between weapons that one might pick up in the heat of the fray, like an awl, and those that one had to unsheathe, like a knife. Another example described a fight between two women, one of whom subsequently miscarried. The judge was charged with determining the age of the fetus and whether the fight had caused its death. Parents could kill a deformed baby at the time of the birth, explained the manual, but not a healthy baby simply because they had too many children. This manual also held that spontaneous confessions had greater value than those coerced by beatings or torture."
Page 112: QUOTE: "The Shuihudi materials also described a system of punishments that strike modern readers as grisly, although they were no more so than crucifixions done in the contemporaneous Roman empire. Decapitation, which was thought to divide a person's head from the body even in the afterlife, constituted the most severe punishment. Those who committed lesser offenses were sentenced to hard labor: men were required to build walls and women were forced to pound grain. The records refer to some of those sentenced to hard labor as 'complete' or 'intact,' meaning they had not been mutilated. The less fortunate had one foot cut off or the nose severed. Because any damage to the body (a gift from one's parents) caused great shame, tattooing, head shaving, and beard shaving were all prescribed for lesser offenses. Actual sentencing occasionally diverged from Legalist teachings that all stood equal before the law. The Shuihudi materials show that because privileged people could pay fines and avoid these grim punishments, they received less onerous punishments than commoners or slaves."
Page 112: QUOTE: "As instructive as they are, the Shuihudi materials remain prescriptive rather than descriptive. They explain how the legal system was supposed to function, not how it actually functioned. Even so, the Shuihudi materials depict a legal system that stressed careful procedures usually marked by unvarying punishments for specific crimes—they show, in short, a legal system far different from that suggested by Han-dynasty denunciations of the unjust rule of the Qin."

Liu Bang and the Beginning of Han[edit]

Page 112-114: During the fall of Qin, the peasant leader Liu Bang came to prominence. Previously under Qin, he had passed an examination and had become a low-level neighborhood head who supervised a thousand households. He became the first of only two emperors in Chinese history to found a dynasty, the other being the Hongwu Emperor who founded the Ming Dynasty. When his victorious forces entered the Qin capital, he proclaimed that he would abolish most of the Qin laws, but during his time as a neighborhood head he must have become impressed with the Qin legal system, because he more or less retained its structure for his new Han Dynasty while abolishing its more strict and draconian regulations and punishments. Many punishments for certain crimes were simply commuted from capital punishment to simple monetary fines.
Page 114: QUOTE: "One major departure from Qin policies concerned the treatment of the nobility. Where the Qin emperor had required all the nobility of the vanquished kingdoms to reside in his capital, the Han founder created a new nobility. He gave nine of his brothers and sons the title of king and the lands necessary to sustain them, and named one hundred fifty of his most important followers to the rank of marquis. Two-thirds of his territory remained in the hands of his sons and other relatives. Only one-third of his empire, the crucial-western half containing the capital, remained under direct administration. We should remember that the core of the Han-dynasty lay in the region around Chang'an, or the modern city of Xian in the province of Shaanxi, while the coastal areas and much of south China remained backwaters largely populated by non-Chinese peoples."
Page 114-115: The early Han court was beset with many problems. The emperor had to formulate many new state rituals that would largely remove him from the public and give him an aura of power and authority. This would help him transcend the old relationship he had with his drinking buddies now turned generals and marquises, so that they would not be encouraged to get too familiar with him. Despite this, he had to put down several revolts of his new nobility. To make matters worse, the Xiongnu were making major encroachments. Although the Qin Dynasty at first had success pushing the Xiongnu out of the Ordos Desert, after a new shanyu (Modu Shanyu) came to power in 209 BC, he managed to best Chinese forces. He trapped the Emperor and his forces in a walled city for seven days, which resulted in a later peace treaty in 198 BC that entailed humiliating terms for the Chinese. QUOTE: "The Chinese agreed to present gifts of textiles, foodstuffs, and wine to the Xiongnu, who were designated a borther, or peer, state of the Han. They also promised to send a Chinese princess to marry the Xiongnu leader. In exchange, the Xiongnu promised only that they would not invade China."

The Reign of Empress Lü[edit]

Page 115: QUOTE: "In 195 B.C., the dying Liu Bang named his docile fifteen-year-old son Huidi (reigned 195–188 B.C.) to succeed him, confident that Huidi's mother, the Empress Lü (reigned 188–180 B.C.) would guide the empire with the help of the chancellor. The Grand Historian Sima Qian recounts how she became engaged to Liu Bang, a man so poor he could not afford the fee required to sit at the more expensive tables at a banquet. The father of the empress told people's fortunes on the basis of their facial features, and Liu Bang's face was so unusual, Sima Qian reports, that the fortune-teller decided to give his daughter to Liu Bang in marriage. Liu Bang went on to fulfill his father-in-law's predictions by founding the Han dynasty, and his wife, Empress Lü, matured into a powerful woman."
Page 115-116: When Emperor Hui died in 188 BC, she replaced him with an infant (Liu Gong), and when he died, she replaced him with another infant (Emperor Houshao of Han), thus allowing Lü to rule as regent until her death in 180 BC. She allegedly had four able-bodied princes killed so that they would not claim the throne. She refused a letter from Modu Shanyu asking her to wed him since both were widowers, insulted by his gesture but more importantly wanting to effectively retain her rule over an empire with rather weak defenses, so she wrote a conciliatory and humble rejection letter in hopes that he would not attack China.
Page 116: Although she appointed many of her own relatives to power, they were expelled when she died and Emperor Wen of Han, son of Liu Bang and his concubine Empress Dowager Bo, took the throne.

The World of the Regional Rulers: The Mawangdui Finds[edit]

Page 117-119: Despite the hot and humid climate of Changsha, the tombs and the items within them at Mawangdui have been well-preserved over the centuries. Tomb Number 2 belonged to the marquis Li Cang (d. 186 BC), one of the supporters of the dynasty's founder Liu Bang. In 194 BC he was appointed as the chancellor to the regional King of Changsha (ruling over parts of what is now Hunan, Guangxi, and northern Guangdong; the kingdom was established in 202 BC). The seals in his tomb made it possible to identify the persons buried in the other tombs. His wife, Lady Dai, died at age 50 and sometime after the year 168 BC before being buried in Tomb Number 1, while his thirty-year-old son did die in 168 BC and was buried in Tomb Number 3. Lady Dai's corpse had been well preserved due to being encapsulated into four interlocking coffins and her body wrapped in twenty layers of shrouds. The many luxury items in her tomb were listed in an inventory on bamboo slips.
Page 119: QUOTE: "Lady Dai's tomb permits a singular glimpse of Chinese conceptions of the afterlife in the centuries before Buddhism came to China. Like the tomb of the Qin emperor and that of the low-ranking official at Shuihudi, hers provided a home for one of her souls after her death. Written sources from the period differ in the details, but overall they concur that people had two kinds of soul; the superior spirit-soul (hun) that could travel to the land of the immortals and the inferior body-soul (po). The inferior body-soul might reside in the tomb, but it could also travel to the netherworld unless sufficient preventive measures were taken. The three side chambers of Lady Dai's tomb held many goods for the use of the body-soul: 154 lacquer vessels, 51 ceramics, 48 bamboo suitcases of clothing and other household goods, and 40 baskets holding clay replicas of 300 gold pieces and 100,000 bronze coins."

The Cuisine of the Han Dynasty[edit]

Page 119: QUOTE: "The plates in Lady Dai's tomb contained a variety of meat dishes and cups for beer. The grave inventory mentions two kinds of beer, one an unfermented malt drink with low alcoholic concent, perhaps for women, and the other, a stronger brew fermented with yeast. The meat would have complemented the beer perfectly since the people of the Han did not eat their main staple of steamed grain when they drank beer (Even today few people choose to eat rice when drinking alcohol). Elsewhere in the tomb, archaeologists found the remains of rice, wheat, barley, and two varieties of millet as well as soybeans and red lintels. The tomb inventory lists seven kinds of meat, prepared in thirteen different ways, suggesting that Lady Dai was going to feast in her next life on much of the same foodstuffs wealthy people ate in this world."
Page 119-121: QUOTE: "Although Lady Dai could afford an expensive diet, the foods she ate divided into the same categories of dishes and starch used by the people of Anyang. The grave inventory provides recipes for several versions of the most popular dish in the Han, a stew of vegetables and meat cooked in a pot until it gained the consistency of a thick soup. The suggested variations include beef and rice stew, dog meat and celery stew, and even deer, fish, and bamboo shoot stew. Many modern seasonings were also listed: salt, sugar, honey, soy sauce, and salted beans. The cooks of the Han took particular pleasure in cutting their meats precisely, as one anecdote suggests. A man imprisoned in Luoyang recounts that he recognized his mother's stew by the shape of the meat cubes: 'When my mother cuts the meat, the chunks always come in perfect squares, and when she chops the scallions, the pieces always come in sections exactly one inch long.' Like Lady Dai, this man ate meat stew frequently, but many ordinary people had to make do with just grain and vegetables."
Page 121: QUOTE: "Lady Dai's sitting room, the north chamber of the tomb, contains home furnishings in use during the Han dynasty, including curtains on the wall and tatami-like mats on the floors. On one side, the room contained a painted screen, an armrest, and a wooden cane that she had to use when she walked; the other held figurines who would dance, play music, and attend to her needs, including the food she would eat at her party."

Han Views of the Afterlife[edit]

Page 121: QUOTE: "Inside three outer coffins was a fourth coffin, on top of which lay a T-shaped banner formed by three different textiles. The banner can be divided into horizontal scenes. The narrow, lower section shows Lady Dai standing, propped up by her cane, with two men kneeling before her and three women standing behind her. This scene depicts her body-soul as she will live in her underground tomb. Below her is a scene of a feast, complete with large ritual vessels standing on the ground. Her attendants flank a lower table with a shelf. The bowl with the chopsticks standing upright marks this as an offering to the dead, and indeed her wrapped corpse is the rounded object lying on the lower table. Her relatives hoped that her body-soul could remain in her tomb, as the banner depicts, and not travel to the underworld shown at the very bottom, which holds two earth goats flanking the intertwined fish."
Page 121: QUOTE: "The top section, all analysts concur, shows the realm of the immortals, whose entrance is guarded by two hatted figures—the gods of destiny who keep records of each individual's allotted life span. In the upper left hangs the moon and its characteristic residents, a toad and a rabbit, and in the upper right is the sun with its corresponding raven. (The ten blank disks underneath the sun may illustrate its different stations.) The figure floating at the top of the banner, seated on the snake, poses the greatest mystery, with some arguing she represents the Queen Mother of the West, a goddess who presides over the realm of the immortals. Othes contend, more convincingly, that she represents the immortal Lady Dai will become, with the two birds to the left and the three to the right representing the same five figures who surrounded her in the two other scenes below. Gone is her cane, and she appears as a much younger woman."
Page 123: QUOTE: "The three scenes, then, show three different phases after death: the laying out of the corpse, existence in the underworld, and release into immortality. Although no texts explain the relationship among the three, it seems most likely that they are related in the same way that different bands on earlier bronzes had been. That is, they depict different, nearly simultaneous activities, not a chronological sequence. Lady Dai's spirit-soul would ascend to the world of the immortals, while her body-soul would reside in her grave without traveling tto the dreaded underworld. The T-shaped banner, then, illustrates all the possibilities for Lady Dai's afterlife, but it does not explain how one ascends to the realm of the immortals, perhaps the most pressing question of all."
Page 123: QUOTE: "Because Lady Dai prepared forty-eight suitcases but no reading matter for her journey to the underworld, she may have been illiterate. In contrast, her son's tomb contained a library of books, maps, and treatises—the earliest manuscripts written on silk found thus far in China. Each text had to be hand copied in the age before printing. Awkward as writing on bamboo slips was, it was much easier than writing on silk. Because a slip of the hand could destroy a whole page, one had to use just the right pressure on the brush."

A Library in the Second Century B.C.[edit]

Page 123: QUOTE: "The tomb of Lady Dai's sons contains manuscripts of text already well known to scholars, such as The Book of Changes (Yijing), a version fo a book closely related to Intrigues of the Warring States, and two copies of The Way and Integrity Classic. These excavated books permit us to examine texts as they circulated in the centuries before Christ. Although the Mawangdui editions reverse the two halves of The Way and Integrity Classic, the tomb texts overlap with the transmitted text to a surprising degree, suggesting ancient Chinese copyists scrupulously copied the classics each time they reproduced them."
Page 123: QUOTE: "If the Mawangdui manuscripts have increased the confidence of the scholarly community in the accuracy of transmitted texts, the discovery of so many previously unknown texts has also forced scholars to reassess the intellectual world of the Han. Before the discovery of the tomb, scholars had calculated that of 677 books listed in an imperial library catalogue from the year 0 [sic!], only 23 percent survive today, revealing that many books had been lost. Confirming this view, tomb number 3 introduced previously lost texts on law, fortune-telling, and even sexual techniques, which are of even greater interest than the books already known to scholars."
Page 124: QUOTE: "When the historian Sima Qian's father, Sima Tan, listed the important schools of the Han dynasty, he mentioned the Huang-Lao school, a philosophical school whose texts did not survive to the present. Scholars knew that Huang, literally 'yellow,' referred to the Yellow Emperor, one of the legendary kings of yore, while Lao stood for Laozi, the putative author of The Way and Integrity Classic. Because the new texts in tomb number 3 mention both figures, many modern scholars see them as the missing Huang-Lao texts."

The Philosophy of the Huang-Lao School[edit]

Page 124: QUOTE: "Of the texts newly discovered in the tomb, a series of short texts appended to The Way and Integrity Classic have commanded the most attention because they reconfigure political philosophy. Unlike Confucius, who looked down on law as the tool of lesser rulers, and unlike The Way and Integrity Classic, which derided law as an unnecessary encouragement to criminals, several short Mawangdui texts award law a more important position. Modern commentators sometimes refer to these short untitled texts as The Classic of Law. These texts, possibly by one author, possibly by multiple hands, envision a world in which rulers must govern their states in accord with nature, or the Way. The Classic of Law begins by saying:"
- QUOTE: "The Way (dao) brings forth law. Law is the mark that indicates success and failure and distinguishes the crooked from the straight. Therefore one who holds fast to the Way can produce laws but dares not transgress them."
Page 124: QUOTE: "These texts make further demands on the ruler, who is to balance punishments with rewards, who can undertake only just wars, and who is required to live on a reasonable budget. Still, for all its statements about the need for rulers to adhere to the Way and to follow the law, The Classic of Law offers no specific mechanism to check a ruler who does not adhere to its teachings."
Page 124-125: QUOTE: "Along with The Classic of Law, tomb number 3 contained a variety of other texts giving guidance in various areas of life. Some offered explicit sexual advice to couples, usually from the male author's point of view. Detailed drawings of female anatomy accompanied instructions for bringing one's sexual partner to a climax. Startlingly frank, 'Prescriptions for Nourishing Life' instructed readers how to heighten sexual pleasure, while a work entitled 'Joining yin and yang' listed different sexual positions, and enumerated female reactions to them—including the five noises women make when excited. Like the Huang-Lao texts, these sex manuals seem to have dropped from sight soon after being written, to be recovered only when tomb number 3 was excavated."
Page 125: QUOTE: "The deceased also buried fortune-telling books along with the three maps in his tomb. The smallest map shows the tomb area, but the two other maps show larger areas: a topographic map covers the borderlands between the Han territory, as ruled by the king at Changsha, and the kingdom of the Southern Yue peoples; the other shows the garrisons the Han troops used in a 181 B.C. attack on the Southern Yue. Ruled by a Chinese leader, the Yue lived by fishing and agriculture. The Chinese called this region Nanyue, meaning Southern Yue, but the people who lived there reversed the two words. They pronounced the word Yue as Viet, and the compounds as Vietnam, which is still the word used today. The lands they occupied included the southern Chinese provinces of Guangdong and Guangxi in addition to modern Vietnam."
Page 125: QUOTE: "The maps in the tomb of Lady Dai's son indicate that he served as a military official in charge of defending borders against the attacks of the Southern Yue peoples. Just as Lady Dai expected to receive her guests, he fully expected to continue fighting in the next world. The maps remind us that the Han Chinese continued to expand the territory under their control, often at the expense of non-Chinese speakers like the Yue, who left no records of their defeats."
Page 125-126: "Li Cang, the Marquis of Dai, buried in tomb number 2, had assumed the position of chancellor at the request of the local king, the only regional king not related to the Han founder. When Li Cang died in 186 B.C., a new chancellor was named—not by the local king but by the central government. In 157 B.C., when the king died, the central government replaced him with a member of the imperial family. What was happening on the periphery also occurred elsewhere in the empire as the Han took measures to centralize its power. The emperor who took the most effective measures to do so, Emperor Wu, began to rule in 140 B.C. By the time he died in 87 B.C., he had established Confucian institutions and precedents for all his successors."

The Han Dynasty under Emperor Wu[edit]

Page 126: Emperor Wu of Han was only fifteen when he took the throne, yet real power was vested in his grandmother and grand empress dowager, Empress Dou (Wen), as well as the chancellor. She died in 135 BC, while the chancellor died in 131 BC, thus the two obstacles to his gaining of power were removed.
Page 126-127: The Confucianism that Emperor Wu sponsored at court was deeply influenced by the ideas of Dong Zhongshu, who believed that the emperor served as a link between heaven and his subjects. In accordance with the Mandate of Heaven, Wu expected Heaven to send portents (eclipses, floods, droughts, etc.) as warning if he was guilty of misconduct, and if he acted appropriately, he believed Heaven would continue to support him. Dong believed that all human history was a QUOTE: "manifestation of a larger pattern. Complementary yin and yang forces alternated with each other, so taht light, activity, and heat predominated at some times, and dark, inactivity, and cold in others. Once one force had become predominant, it began to wane, while the other ascended. Each phase of change was marked by one of five different elements: wood, fire, earth, metal, and water. The book Luxuriant Gems of the Spring and Autumn (Chunqiu fanlu) attempted to explain the rise and fall of previous rulers in terms of this five-phase theory. Although traditionally attributed to Dong Zhongshu, it was actually written down long after his death, sometime in the third to sixth centuries A.D."
Page 127: QUOTE: "In the years just before or just after the empress's death, the emperor named five scholars to the position of Erudite Scholars, each of whom specialized in a different Confucian classic: The Book of Changes, The Book of Documents, The Book of Songs, The Book of Rites, and The Spring and Autumn Annals. The selection of these five books as the most important texts marked the first step in the formation of the Confucian canon. When the emperor named fifty students to study with the Erudite Scholars in 124 B.C., he created an imperial academy, whose students could enter the government. It grew quickly, enrolling three thousand students in the next seventy-five years. Emperor Wu also established schools in each locality; students in these schools could join the local government, attend the imperial academy, or be recruited into the central bureaucracy."
Page 127: QUOTE: "The Han dynasty continued to recruit officials largely by recommendation, but it required its officials to take examinations after they arrived in the capital in order to place them in appropriate entry-level positions in the bureaucracy."
Page 127: Hansen talks about the outlawing of primogeniture here: QUOTE: "Emperor Wu...took strong measures to curtail the power of the regional rulers empowered by the Han founder. Starting in 127 B.C., he required that when a given ruler died, |his lands were to be divided among all his sons—not passed down intact to the oldest son as had previously been the case. Like the Qin founder, he required these families to move to a new city close to the capital, and he forbade members of some families to live together. Emperor Wu broke with earlier practice, too, in his consistent refusal to appoint the sons of these powerful families to high office. Emperor Wu chose his own appointees instead."
Page 128: The Han merchants, especially those from Sichuan, upheld trade with independent state of Nanyue, exporting iron arms and tools, silks, lacquerwares, and bronze mirrors while importing horses, yaks, cows, and slaves. However, in 109 BC the Nanyue Kingdom was conquered by the armies of Emperor Wu.
Page 128-129: A little interesting tidbit of information: Hansen goes over the failed mission of Li Ling (Han Dynasty) (d. 74 BC), who chose to surrender instead of doing what was considered honorable and committing suicide on the battlefield. Su Wu (d. 60) was also taken prisoner by the Xiongnu, but he did not surrender; instead he was captured while trying to commit suicide. While imprisoned, Li Ling pleaded with Su Wu to formally capitulate to the Xiongnu but he refused. When the Han and Xiongnu signed a peace in 81 BC, Su Wu was returned to the capital while Li Ling still lived among the Xiongnu, forever exiled as a traitor to the Han.

Economic Problems during the Han[edit]

Page 130: Emperor Wu of Han could not rely on the land tax alone to fund all of his various military campaigns and bureaucratic reforms. Emperor Gaozu of Han and Empress Lü Zhi kept the land tax rate at one-fifteenth (6.67%) of a farmer's agricultural produce, while Emperor Wen of Han reduced this even further in 168 BC to one-thirtieth of a farmer's agricultural produce. In order to rake in the kind of money the government needed, Emperor Wu took drastic measures: he nationalized the salt and iron industries. With these two monopolies in place, he established fifty iron foundries worked by several hundred thousand convicts and conscripts. They used blast furnaces to make iron and tipped drills to dig boreholes for reaching salt pools. This proved to be highly profitable for the government, so much so that it decided to nationalize the copper and bronze industries in 115 BC. This was coupled with a government monopoly imposed on minting currency, a right that was taken away from private hands and commandery governments alike. In 98 BC the government created yet another monopoly on the production of wine, or specifically fermented drinks made from grain.
Page 130-131: The protracted fight against the Xiongnu and the heavy tax burdens did not go unnoticed by the state; in 86 BC, a year after Wu died, the state created a commission to investigate the people's suffering. In 81 BC there was a scholarly debate at a court conference which sought to find solutions for acute financial and social problems. The Salt and Iron Debates, written years after 81 BC, records the arguments of two factions in this conference, those who defended the monopolies and those who wanted them abolished. The side that wanted them abolished also wanted to reduce trade with foreigners and return to a more simpler, frugal, agrarian lifestyle. A minister on the side of the monopolies countered this assault on trade, and in defense of the practical advantages of trading with the Xiongnu, wrote:
- QUOTE: "Thus, a piece of Chinese plain silk can be exchanged with the Xiongnu for articles worth several pieces of gold and thereby reduce the resources of our enemy. Mules, donkeys and camels enter the frontier in unbroken lines; horses, dapples and bays and prancing mounts, come into our possession. The furs of sables, marmots, foxes and badgers, colored rugs and decorated carpets fill the Imperial Treasury, while jade and auspicious stones, corals and crystals, become national treasures. That is to say, foreign products keep flowing in, while our wealth is not dissipated. Novelties flowing in, the government has plenty. National wealth not being dispersed abroad, the people enjoy abundance."
Page 131: Hansen writes, QUOTE: "This spirited defense of trade with the Xiongnu provides a useful picture of foreign trade during the first century B.C. For silk, the Chinese obtained a wide array of goods, including animal skins, rugs, and rare stones."
Page 131-132: QUOTE: "A satiric essay by Wang Bao (active in 61–54 B.C.) echoes the scholars' concern that the traditional social and economic order had changed too quickly during the years after Emperor Wu's death. In the essay, a slave named Bianliao refuses to go and buy wine for the guest of his widowed mistress. Although the text does not explain how Bianliao became a slave, it does call him 'bearded,' an indication that he was of non-Chinese ancestry. Other sources reveal that there were several paths to slavery during the Han dynasty. In some cases, people from neighboring kingdoms were captured in battle and subsequently enslaved; these slaves may have looked slightly different from their Chinese owners, but over time they could absorb Chinese ways. In other cases, people who became deeply in debted were forced to enslave themselves or their family members to pay off their debts. Some convicts performed forced labor for specified periods. Slavery was not necessarily a permanent condition. Slaves who made enough money could buy themselves out of slavery, and their masters could also free them. One estimate is that the total number of slaves was 1 percent of the entire population, which the earliest extant census put at 58 million in A.D. 2."
Page 132: QUOTE: "All that the fictious Bianliao says about his past is, 'When my master bought me, Bianliao, he only contracted for me to care for the grave and did not contract for me to buy wine for some other gentleman.' The angry guest asks the widow why she had not yet sold the slave, and she explains that she could not find a buyer. The guest then agrees to purchase the recalcitrant slave, who asks the guest to list all his duties in the contract because he will 'not do anything not in the contract.'"
Page 132: QUOTE: "The resulting contract with its many clauses mocks the excessively detailed contracts in favor at the time. The text specifies all the slave's tasks, from morning sweepings to midnight feedings of the horse and cattle, and assumes he will continue to work for the widow. The slave lives on a farm where livestock is raised and where different crops—melons, eggplants, onions, garlic, beans, and fruit—are grown, presumably for the widow's household to eat. The contract also requires the slave to hunt deer, wild ducks, and turtles, testimony to the extensive wildlife of this era."
Page 132-133: QUOTE: "Although the slave is instructed to gather crops and to hunt wild animals, the widow's farm is not self-sufficient. Many of the slave's tasks involve going to market:"
- QUOTE: "Behind the house there are trees. He should hew them and make a boat, going downriver as far as Jiangzhou and up to Jianzhu. On behalf of the storehouse assistants he shall seek spending money, rejecting the strings of cash which are defective. He shall buy mats at Mianting, and when traveling between Du and Luo he should trade in the small markets to get powder for the ladies. When he returns to Du he shall carry hemp about on his pole, transporting it out to the side markets. He shall lead frogs for sale and peddle geese. At Wuyang he shall buy bitter auce, and he shall carry lotus on his pole from the Yang family pool. When he travels to market assemblies he shall carefully guard against the practice of theft. When he enters the market he may not squat like a non-Chinese, loll about, or indulge in evil talk or cursing. He shall make many knives and bows, and take them into Yizhou to barter for oxen and sheep. The slave shall teach himself to be smart and clever, and may not be silly and stupid."
Page 133: QUOTE: "Although we have nothing with which to compare it, this contract, with its sardonic close, seems to list many more tasks than a normal contract would. While Wang Bao exaggerates the detail of a contract, he has no reason to distort the economic activity taking place around him."
Page 134: QUOTE: "When the new owner finished reading the contract, the stunned slave bemoaned his initial refusal to obey his new owner's request to purchase wine. Traditional views required the slave to obey a guest's request with alacrity, but as Wang Bao's spoof shows so tellingly, this new-style slave would only do what his contract requires."
Page 134: QUOTE: "This essay, written in the middle of the first century B.C., reflects a growing sense that Han-dynasty society was divided into two groups: estate owners, here represented by the widow, and those who worked the land, like the slave Bianliao. Although divided, Han-dynasty society was fluid. Nobles could be stripped of their property and reduced to slavery while slaves could purchase their freedom and rise in society."

Usurpation of Wang Mang[edit]

Page 134: Rural wealthy families during the late Western Han amassed larger and larger estates, often through purchasing and swallowing up land from poorer farmers who became indebted and had no choice but to sell their land. These powerful families, very influential on the local level, often evaded taxation and thus caused a loss in revenues for the central government. To combat this, the central government tried to institute a reform in 7 BC which limited the amount of property for one family to a maximum of three thousand sixth-acres and a slave population of no more than two hundred. Due to powerful interests, these laws never took effect. However, Wang Mang was determined to undermine the power of the rich estate owners when he assumed control of the throne in 9 AD, founding the Xin Dynasty. He wanted to return to the early golden age of the Zhou Dynasty, the one which Confucius had longed for.
Page 134: In his campaign to allegedly support the poor and fight the interests of the wealthy, Wang Mang outlawed all sale and purchase of land while limiting the size of individual holdings (side note: this was known as the system of the King's Fields 王田, or wángtián) while ceding any excess land to the landless. He also outlawed slavery. However, these sweeping reforms were almost impossible to implement and were largely ignored.
Page 135: QUOTE: "Although his measures antagonized the estate holders, Wang Mang's reign came to an end when he lost the support of those who worked the land. A massive flood of the Yellow River delivered the fatal blow to his short-lived government. The Yellow River is one of China's two largest rivers (the Yangzi is the other). Its course runs 4,300 kilometers (2,700 miles) in total, starting in the high mountains to the west and traversing the yellow clay soil, or loess, plains of north China as it makes its way to the sea. For the last five hundred miles of its course the level of the river drops only one foot per mile. Yet as it flows, the river deposits particles of yellow silt in the riverbed, which causes the river's level to rise year after year. Only the construction of high dikes of mud and stone can block its course and prevent annual flooding. When the dikes give way, the resulting floodds can inundate an area several hundred kilometers wide. This is is what happened in A.D. 11."
Page 135: QUOTE: "The river's original course had been south of the Shandong peninsula, reaching the sea near what is now the modern city of Tianjin. But during the floods the river formed two arms, one flowing south of the Shandong Peninsula and the other flowing north. The resulting flooding displaced thousands of peasants who rose up against the central government. Because the rebels painted their foreheads red in hopes of gaining the increased energy of red blood, they were called the Red Eyebrows. A loose coalition of powerful landowning families joined together to suppress the rebels, and after they had defeated both the rebels and the imperial troops, they agreed to place a distant heir of the Han founder on the throne. The coalition forces killed Wang Mang in A.D. 23 but they gained full control only in A.D. 25, when the new emperor ordered the capital moved to Luoyang, which served as the capital until A.D. 190."

Restoration, the Later Han[edit]

Page 135-136: The last half of the dynasty was called Later Han, also the Eastern Han because the new capital Luoyang was east of Chang'an. The Eastern Han capital within the defensive walls had an area of 10 square kilometers (3.91 square miles), yet the city that existed outside the walls stretched out to an area of 24.5 square kilometers (9.4 square miles). The only cities that outranked it in its era were Chang'an (33.5 square kilometers/13 square miles) and Rome (13.8 square kilometers/5.3 square miles). Within the walls of Luoyang were imperial palaces, inns, canals, markets, and schools. It had 10,000 women and eunuchs in the palaces, 5,000 imperial guards, and 50,000 students at one point in the Imperial Academy and its dependents. If all the residents within the walls and the surrounding areas were counted, the population is estimated to have been roughly 500,000 people.
Page 136: The Eastern Han had many problems, but one of the more prominent ones was how the eunuchs would play a role. They weren't too powerful in Eastern Han until 92 AD, when Emperor He of Han had reached his majority and used the eunuchs to stage a coup against a powerful faction at court which opposed him.

Wang Chong[edit]

Page 136-137: The philosopher Wang Chong (27–97 AD), who studied with great writers such as Ban Biao (d. 54 AD), was of meager means in his youth and instead of buying books he used his incredible memory to store away in his head much of the materials he read at book stalls in the new capital. QUOTE: "In a long work entitled Balanced Discussions, completed circa A.D. 50, Wang Chong describes many contemporary religious beliefs and then denounced them for lacking any logical basis. Although critical in approach, Balanced Discussions contains much information about the practices Wang examined, practices followed by the majority of his contemporaries. For instance, since the people of his time feared digging into the ground and disturbing the spirits of the earth, they made a figurine out of dirt to which they performed ceremonies asking forgiveness. Wang Chong clearly explained his opposition:"
- QUOTE: "If one examines this more closely, then one realizes that it is empty trickery. How can one test it? Now, the earth is like a human body, with everything in the empire forming one body with head and feet at different ends some 10,000 third-miles apart. People live on the surface of the earth, much as lice live on a person's body. Much as lice eat and steal human skin, people pierce the earth and steal the earth's body. If some of the lice understood and wanted to propitiate the person, and they gathered together to propitiate and ask for pardon from what they were going to eat, would the person know? Much as the person could not know the sound of lice, so too can the earth not understand the speech of people."
Page 137: QUOTE: "This passage perfectly embodies Wang Chong's approach. After equating the presence of people on the earth with the presence of lice on the body, he argued that, as we would never notice lice performing a ceremony, similarly the earth gods would not notice any human activity."
Page 137: QUOTE: "Wang Chong devoted an entire chapter of his book to 'Daoist Untruths,' which provides an unrivaled description of Daoist practices during the first century. Like the original followers of Zhaungzi, Han-dynasty Daoists continued to refine their breathing techniques, to urge their followers to adhere to a strict diet, and to make potions—all in the hopes of attaining immortality. Laozi, the putative author of The Way and Integrity Classic, was among those who these Daoists believed had gained immortality. Wang Chong resoundingly rejected the Daoists' claims to be able to fly to the realm of the immortals:"
- QUOTE: "If the Daoists and students of immortality could first grow feathers and plumes several inches long so that they could skim over the earth and rise to the terraces of high buildings, one might believe that they could ascend to heaven. Now there is no sign that they are able to fly even a small distance, so how can they achieve the goal of flying high?"
Page 137: QUOTE: "As he proceeded point by point to demolish the Daoists' claims, he painted a picture of a small community of individuals aiming to achieve the status of invincible 'pure men,' an aim beyond the reach of a larger lay community. Wang Chong's description, the best source about Daoism at the time, mentions several teachers and holy men, but no organized religious community."

A Literary Family: Accomplishments of the Ban Family[edit]

Page 137-138: QUOTE: "Wang Chong's teacher Ban Biao was well known for the size of his private library and for the success of his talented children. One daughter, Ban Zhao (ca. 45–120), became the most famous woman writer of the Han dynasty. Chinese girls read her Lessons for Women and the imitations it spawned until the twentieth century. Ban Zhao had twin brothers. One twin was a famous general who fought in northwest China; the other, Ban Gu (A.D. 32–92), perfected a new literary genre, the rhapsody (fu), which strung together countless adjectives and brilliant nouns to make a verbal picture of a place, often a city. In one famous rhapsody, two men debated the virtues of the two Han-dynasty capitals and concluded that Luoyang outranked Chang'an. In praising the new capital, the poet was also praising the reigning emperor, who he argued surpassed the rulers of the former Han. His favorable attitude toward the reigning emperor qualified him for another literary pursuit, the writing of officially commissioned history."
Page 138: QUOTE: "When his father died in A.D. 54, Ban Gu resolved to complete his father's history of China, which began where the Grand Historian Sima Qian had left off, during Emperor Wu's reign. Ban Gu undertook his father's task without official support. Later, when a contemporary charged him with distorting the records, he was thrown into jail, only to be released by Emperor Ming (reigned 58–75). The emperor was so impressed by his draft that he granted Ban Gu privileged access to court archives. This set an important precedent: because the historians chronicling the events at court received the sponsorship of the reigning emperor, they could not criticize their patron—unlike Sima Qian's far freer independent effort. When the historian Ban Gu died in A.D. 92, the emperor commissioned his brilliant sister Ban Zhao to complete his unfinished history, a testament to the remarkable literary talents of this woman."

Ban Zhao: China's Most Famous Female Scholar[edit]

Page 138: QUOTE: "Little is known of Ban Zhao's own life. In the introduction to Lessons for Women, she explained that forty years after her marriage at the age of fourteen, she had decided to write down what she felt every woman should know. Ban Zhao described the unequal treatment accorded to females from the moment they are born until they marry and die."
Page 138: QUOTE: "Fearful that the newborns might not survive the first days of life, Han-dynasty families delayed presenting them to the ancestors until the third day. If a family was unable to raise a child, it oculd abandon the newborn before three days had passed. Ban Zhao's account of how girls should be raised begins on the third day after birth. 'On the third day after the birth of a girl the ancients observed three customs: first to place the baby below the bed; second to give her a potsherd with which to play; and third to announce her birth to her ancestors by an offering.' Ban Zhao explained that 'now to lay the baby below the bed plainly indicated that she is lowly and weak, and should regard it as her primary duty to humble herself before others.' The potsherd represented hard work, while the announcement to the ancestors reminded the infant of her obligation to serve them."
Page 138-139: QUOTE: "The theme of subservience to men and others shapes Lessons for Women. Women are to serve their husbands, obey their in-laws unflinchingly, and avoid any conflicts with their sisters-in-law. Ban Zhao listed four qualities women should have: '1. womanly virtue, 2. womanly words, 3. womanly bearing, and 4. womanly work.' The modest woman remained chaste while watching her every motion, spoke with care, maintained a high standard of personal hygiene, and devoted herself to weaving, sewing, and food preparation. Ban Zhao's counsels of restraint deny women any opportunity to speak their minds or to question anyone in their families, but Ban Zhao's ideal woman was educated. She begins her book by instructing the young women in her family to copy down her instructions, evidence that they were literate."
Page 139: "In one telling passage, she complained that the husbands of her day 'only know that wives must be controlled and that the husband's rules of conduct manifesting his authority must be established.' Accordingly they teach their sons to read. Here, Ban Zhao's objections contain a moving plea for equal education:"
- QUOTE: "Yet only to teach men and not to teach women—is that not ignoring the essential relation between them? According to the Rites, it is the rule to begin to teach children to read at the age of eight years, and by the age of fifteen years they ought then be ready for cultural training. Only why should it not be that girl's education as well as boys' be according to this principle?"
Page 139: QUOTE: "Few women received the kind of education Ban Zhao had, but that remained her ideal. Yes, women were to serve their husbands and their families, but not as ignorant servants. Women should not scold their husbands, Ban Zhao argued, but neither should husbands beat their wives. Both husband and wife bore a responsibility to sustain a harmonious and intimate 'marriage relationship.'"

The Political Influence of the Consort Families[edit]

Page 139-140: QUOTE: "Powerful families often married a daughter to the emperor in the hope that she would give birth to the crown prince or be named dowager empress should the emperor die childless. If the emperor died young and a member of the consort's family held the all-important post of regent, the empress's family could appoint a child to the throne and so gain a controlling voice in the governing of the empire. Court intrigue marked the last two centuries of the Han-dynasty history during which consort families often chose the new child emperor, while their daughters ruled as dowager empresses. Ban Zhao herself served as tutor to the young Empress Deng while her husband was alive, and advisor to her once she became dowager empress in A.D. 106, a position Deng held until her death in 121 (Ban Zhao died at the age of seventy-five in A.D. 120)."
Page 140-141: From the Han archives, a curious report survives from the year 147 of the inspection of female candidates for marriage to Emperor Huan of Han (r. 146–168). The inspector of these candidates was a palace lady named Maid Wu, who would take the girls into a private room and inspect their naked bodies for imperfections. She commented on the young Liang Nüying (d. 159, later to become Empress Liang Na), who she said had a "voice like a wind moving through a bamboo grove, very pleasant to the ear," along with other glowing attributes. Yet Hansen asserts that her beauty and demeanor were not the real reasons why she was eventually chosen to wed Huan: QUOTE: "she had a far more important qualification. A member of the powerful Liang family who dominated court politics for much of the second century, she was the younger sister of the reigning empress dowager and the regent Liang Ji (d. 159), who arranged for her to marry the emperor."
Page 141: QUOTE: "The new empress's husband, Emperor Huan, ascended to the throne in 146 while still a boy of only fourteen. Like many of the emperors of the Later Han, he was chosen by a consort family—in his case, the Liang family. His wife's older brother Liang Ji served as regent to his predecessor and to him. At the peak of his power, Regent Liang Ji commanded so much respect that visitors came to see him even before they visited Emperor Huan. The suffocating power of his in-laws frustrated Emperor Huan, and he gained his opportunity to challenge them in 159, when his first wife, Liang Nüying, died. In a secret plot with five eunuchs concluded in a privy, he launched a coup and unseated the Liang family. This move was unpopular with many of those living in the capital, including students. In what must be among the earliest student protests in world history, the students resident in the capital, whom one source puts at thirty thousand, took to the streets to chant the names of the members of families they supported and the eunuchs they opposed."

Refusal to Serve in Government[edit]

Page 141-142: QUOTE: "After his unpopular coup in 159, which had depended on eunuchs to succeed, Emperor Huan invited five men to serve as officials in his new government, but all declined on the grounds that government service could only contaminate men of virtue. These men's refusal to accept office evoked the precedent of Confucius and his disciples who had not held office. A sixth man gave the following explanation:
- QUOTE: "Now if I seek a salary and look for advancement, this would follow my ambitions. Yet there are thousands of women in the imperial harem, and how shall their number be reduced? There are tens of thousands of houses in the imperial stables, and how shall their number be diminished? The attendants at the imperial court are powerful oppressors, and how can they be removed?"
Page 142: Hansen writes, QUOTE: "For him, holding office meant having to censure the emperor. As long as critics of the emperor were punished, he saw no way he could serve in the emperor's government."
Page 142: There was a similar case involving one Wu Liang (78–151) of Shandong a few years earlier. His brother and nephew had served as low-ranking officials, but Wu Liang refused to follow this path as the epitaph at his tomb explains:
- QUOTE: "He studied widely and examined the texts in detail. He inquired into the roots of texts, and there was no book that he did not read. The departments of the prefecture and the district invited and summoned him to official posts, but he declined on the grounds of illness. He contented himself with the poverty of his humble home and was pleased with the righteousness that he learned every morning."
Page 142: Hansen writes, QUOTE: "Like the men who refused Emperor Huan's summons, Wu Liang did not believe he could sustain a virtuous life as an official."
Page 142-143: An interesting note about the stories expressed in the scenes of stone-carved artwork of Wu Liang's tomb shrine, QUOTE: "Wu Liang's scope exceeded that of the Grand Historian. Like Sima, he depicted all of human history, but he went beyond him to show the land of the immortals, presided over by the Queen Mother of the West and her counterpart the King Father of the East, in the west and east gables of the shrine. The gables suggest the shrine was intended as a home both for his body-soul that would remain in the tomb, and for his spirit-soul that could travel to the realm of the immortals."

Rise of the Organized Daoist Church[edit]

Page 144: QUOTE: "Uncertain of his support from the righteous scholars, Emperor Huan tried instead to tap support from members of a new religious movement, the Daoists. Daoist beliefs underwent a major transformation during the second century. In the previous century, the putative author of The Way and Integrity Classic, Laozi, had attracted followers who hoped they could attain immortality, as reported by the skeptic Wang Chong in his denunciation of Daoist beliefs. Starting sometime in the second century, Daoists began to believe that Laozi was a deity who could appear to his followers as a prophet and who could bring them salvation."
Page 144: QUOTE: "Even as a boy under the control of the regent Liang Ji, sometime between 146 and 149, Emperor Huan had founded a temple to Laozi. In 166 the emperor made a personal visit to the temple, where he made offerings to the deity Laozi. One source mentions that the emperor also prayed to the Buddha, a foreign deity from India who was often associated with Laozi during this early period...Daoism, or the worship of Laozi, offered an alternative to Confucian teachings, which stressed one's obligation to father children so that they could worship one's ancestors."
Page 144: QUOTE: "The emperor's efforts to depict himself as a devout Daoist did not prevent a series of uprisings against the Han dynasty. Many of these peasant leaders claimed to have seen Laozi, who foretold the beginning of a new utopian era. The best documented and the most influential of these groups was based in the Hanzhong region in the mountains near the northern Yangzi River. They were known by two names: either the Celestial Masters or the Five Pecks of Rice, which was the offering they asked from their followers. They dated their founding to A.D. 142 when their leader, a man named Zhang Daoling (originally Zhang Ling) had a vision of the deified Laozi who appointed Zhang to be his earthly representative. As described in a later source, Zhang Daoling was to found a purer religion in which the priests worshipped only clean gods and refused to accept money, hence the offerings of rice. The god of this earthly representative wrote up their pact on a piece of iron that they smeared with the blood of a white horse."
Page 144: QUOTE: "Much in Zhang Daoling's vision broke with earlier Daoist practices. Where earlier practitioners had taught only selected adepts breathing exercises, sexual techniques, and medical potions—all to enhance that individual's ability to attain immortality—Zhang shifted the focus of Daoist religion away from those few individuals to a larger lay community, who did not actively seek immortality. Zhang established a hierarchy for his church, in which the already initiated were called 'libationers,' a title suggesting they had the social honor equivalent to that of the elders who took the first drink at a village feast. The libationers presided over a section of the laity, who made offerings to the priesthood and promised to give up the worship of unclean gods who accepted meat offerings. In exchange, Zhang promised them good health. Zhang's biography in a later history explains, 'They all taught the people to be sincere and not to lie. If anyone was sick, he had to confess his wrong-doings.' These Daoists linked illness with bad behavior: anyone who fell sick must have violated their teachings, and the libationers heard confessions before instructing the ill how to recover."
Page 145: QUOTE: "The Five Peck Daoists were active in Sichuan, a region that houses many non-Chinese minorities even today. Zhang Daoling grew up in Jiangsu, where he studied the traditional Daoist arts of making potions to seek immortality. Only after his move to Sichuan did he receive the revelation taht allowed him to found a new Daoist church. The Chinese state often appointed local governors to serve as the hereditary rulers of such border states, and they did the same with the Five Peck Daoists, so that first Zhang Daoling, then his son, and then his grandson served as the local representative of the Chinese government."
Page 145: QUOTE: "Important continuities linked the practices of the Five Peck Daoists with earlier Daoist teachers like those described by Wang Chong. The Five Peck Daoists worshipped the Dao, in the person of the deified Laozi, and their members recited The Way and Integrity Classic as a means of curing illness. Another group of Daoists, called the Yellow Turbans, was active at the time in the area between the Yellow and the Huai rivers on the eastern coast of China, but they differed from the Five Peck Daoists in that they rebelled against Han-dynasty rule."

The Yellow Turban Revolt[edit]

Page 145: QUOTE: "The minimal information known about the Yellow Turbans reflects the point of view of official historians who saw these Daoists as dangerous insurrectionists, named for the yellow cloths they tied around their heads. The Yellow Turbans shared many practices with the Five Peck Daoists. Both groups considered illness a sign of wrongdoing, and both encouraged the confession of sins. The Yellow Turbans gave patients holy water as a cure; if the patients did not recover, their sins were assumed to be too great to be absolved."
Page 145-146: QUOTE: "A series of epidemics had broken out in the years leading up to 184, which may account for the Daoists' stress on curing illness. The Yellow Turbans established their own religious hierarchy with a leader, a second-tier of thirty-six adepts, and further divisions under the adepts. They claimed to inaugurate a new age, which they called the 'Era of Great Peace' (taiping). (The Taiping rebels of the nineteenth century would use the same term some 1,700 years later.) The year 184 fell on the first year of the sixty-year cycle in the Chinese calendar, an auspicious year that they prophesied marked the beginning of a new epoch."
Page 146: QUOTE: "The Yellow Turbans found support at different social levels, spanning the peasants in the countryside, whose crops had been damaged by recent flooding of rivers, and eunuchs within the palace. The Yellow Turbans planned their rebellion for the third month of 184, but government officials discovered their plot ahead of time. The arrest of one adept, who had been in communication with some palace eunuchs, prompted all the adherents to rebel ahead of schedule. One source reports that 360,000 insurgents from 8 provinces joined the movement. The central government dispatched its own imperial troops, and it recruited the armies of several independent generals, including one named Cao Cao (155–220). The Daoist rebels proved no match for the combined forces, who captured and killed all the important leaders by the end of 184. Although a few rebel groups held out briefly, the Yellow Turbans disappeared as quickly as they had formed, leaving the Five Pecks as the only surviving Daoist group."
Page 146-147: QUOTE: "The Yellow Turban uprisings rattled the palace leadership. Emperor Huan was the last emperor to act on his own, and his decision to use eunuchs to attack the consort family of the Liangs ushered in decades of conflict between eunuchs and consort families in which the child emperors played no role at all. After Emperor Huan died in 168, three more emperors came to the throne, but each one was placed there by powerful consort families, who tangled with the eunuchs at their peril. In one memorable incident in 189, the eunuchs managed to wrest power from a consort family and to decapitate the reigning regent, tossing the severed head to those questioning their authority. The following year, the anti-eunuch forces, backed by a regional army, captured the emperor, forced the dowager to name a new emperor, moved the capital back to Chang'an, and took over the regency. In 192, Cao Cao, the general who had suppressed the Yellow Turbans, became regent. General Cao Cao...never gained control of more than one-third of the empire. When Cao Cao died in 220, the Han-dynasty puppet-emperor was still in place, but he was forced to abdicate by Cao's son, who proclaimed himself the foudner of a new dynasty. Three centuries of disunity ensued."
Page 147: QUOTE: "Official sources describe the amassing of huge estates by dominant families in the countryside during the last two centuries of the dynasty, yet it seems they continued to pay their taxes for much of the period. The government was able to raise more funds by selling offices in the second century. Certainly the emperors had sufficient funds to maintain enormous households staffed by eunuchs, slaves, and palace women. Openly hostile sources estimate that Emperor Huan had six thousand women in his harem, and descriptions of the power struggle in 189 record the generals as killing some two thousand eunuchs."
Page 148: Going back to the Wu Liang tomb shrine but then discussing the gentry class, Hansen writes, QUOTE: "Wu Liang belonged to a network of powerful people whose amorphousness frustrates social historians. His family must have owned land, and its male members sought official posts—unless they, like Wu Liang, felt government service would tarnish rather than contribute to their reputations as worthy scholars. They built the shrine to their father in hopes of further enhancing their reputations. Families like the Wus enjoyed a high rank in their localities, as did the families who supplied the emperors with their consorts. But what was the source of their power? Certainly not the civil service examinations, which did not become a standard means of recruitment until several centuries later. Nor could their position rest on aristocratic titles, which the Qin had abolished and which had died out by the end of the Han."
Page 148: QUOTE: "These landed, scholarly families stood at the top of a social model that had become widely accepted by the end of the Han dynasty. Peasants and artisans made something, so they ranked second and third, while merchants, who produced nothing, ranked at the bottom of the society. Merchants often sought ways to place their sons in the ranks of the privileged, and they must have had better luck than either peasants or artisans. By the end of the Han, women played the same subordinate roles they had at the beginning of the Qin. Even so, the brilliant literary career of Ban Zhao and the political success of the various dowager empresses proved women could break out of their traditional roles when given the opportunity."

Foreign Relations[edit]

Adshead's Book[edit]

Adshead, S.A.M. (2000). China in World History: Third Edition. New York: St. Martin's Press, Inc. ISBN 0312225652.

Page 24-25: Although it is arguable if Euthydemus I of Greco-Bactria had made efforts to promote contact and trade with China, the origins of the Silk Road lie in the Chinese Han Dynasty's efforts to win allies in the Western Regions against the Xiongnu. Curiosity about the west was spurred by Zhang Qian's return to Chang'an from Central Asia in 126 BC. Traveling embassies to and fro along a fortified route from Dunhuang to Karasahr followed Zhang's missions abroad. The royal Liu family of the Han Dynasty, plebeian upstarts in origin, sought to strengthen the legitimacy of their rule by associating it with Zou Yan's international theory, which stated that there were nine continents, thus China was not the center of the world and should make efforts to contact other civilized parts of the world and bring fame to China. Emperor Wu of Han, once he learned the validity of Zou Yan's theory via Zhang Qian's travel testimonies, sent out embassies carrying gifts to ruling courts in Bactria, India, Parthia (Persia), and Mesopotamia. Despite the complaints of those at court about the expenditures of sending out envoys and entertaining foreign diplomats in the capital, the court poet Sima Xiangru summed up the justification for all of this: QUOTE: "The proof that our ruler has received the mandate of heaven lies in this very undertaking to the west."
Page 27: Although the details are sketchy, we do know that overeas trade contacts between China and the Malay Peninsula existed during the reign of Emperor Wu of Han. The usurper Wang Mang is said to have sent an embassy by sea to Bengal in order to obtain a rhinoceros.
Page 30: Adshead speculates that the merchants who arrived at Hanoi (in modern Vietnam) in 166 AD claiming to be representatives of Marcus Aurelius of the Roman Empire were most likely Greek merchants associated with the sea trade from India.
Page 35: There was a diplomatic of Parthia to Han China in 101 AD.
Page 36: The peach and the apricot came from Han China and became well regarded in the Mediterranean world, transferred there via Persia. The Kushan Empire in India also received the peach from China, where it was known as cinani. In return, China received many other food items from the west, including grapes, pomegranates, walnuts, and alfalfa (lucerne). After grapes were imported to China following Zhang Qian's missions, Emperor Wu is said to have enjoyed them immensely (planting grape and alfalfa fields outside his summer palaces and pleasure towers), but the grape never gained the same level of popularity in China that it did in the Mediterranean.
Page 36-37: Emperor Wu of Han's obsession with alfalfa is related to horses, since it was the large and powerful cherpadh or arghumaq horse of Transoxania which fed on alfalfa and was a far more superior stud than the common tarpan or pony. The Chinese called the larger steppe horse these the 'heavenly horse' and desired to breed it en masse in order to fight against the steppe nomads. The Chinese general Li Guangli's conquest of Fergana in 101 BC was a direct result of this desire, but the climate of China proper proved too warm to breed this horse, thus it would have to remain a costly import. The western-originated donkey, however, became a success on native Chinese turf, introduced to China via the Middle East. The Chinese offered the western world no significant amount or types of animals, and certainly no draft animals.
Page 37-38: While the Chinese used silk as a heavy brocade, the Romans preferred silk clothes to be a light gauze. The latter word derives from Gaza. The Roman poet Marcus Annaeus Lucanus wrote that foreign Chinese silk was unpicked and rewoven in Egypt to fit western Roman tastes, producing the Sidonian weave. The Book of Later Han speaks of a fine cloth produced in Daqin (Roman Empire) which was allegedly produced from the 'down of a water-sheep.' This was perhaps the high grade linen which was produced as an export item in Roman Egypt.
Page 39: Roman coins dating from 14 to 275 AD have been found in Shanxi province. The Chinese also received glass originated from Roman Alexandria. The Book of Later Han asserts that the pillars in the palace halls of Daqin were made of crystal and so were their royal dishes which were used to serve food.

Torday's Book[edit]

Torday, Laszlo. (1997). Mounted Archers: The Beginnings of Central Asian History. Durham: The Durham Academic Press.

Xiongnu Beginnings[edit]

Page 71: The Records of the Grand Historian, or Shiji, and the Book of Han, or Hanshu, each devote a special chapter for the nomadic Xiongnu. From the Shiji, the first time the Xiongnu name is evoked is within context of when the State of Qin reduced the number of independent states to Seven Warring States. The Shiji asserts that the Xiongnu peoples lived at the borders of three of these states, Qin, Zhao, and Yan. As Torday points out, the eighth state before this was the State of Song, conquered by Qin in 286 BC, while the seventh, the State of Han, did not fall to Qin until 230 BC. Therefore, it is within this window of time, 286 to 230 BC, that the Xiongnu make their first appearance in Chinese chronicles.
Page 71-72: The first major Chinese offensive against the Xiongnu was ordered by Qin Shi Huang, who had his general Meng Tian lead an army of 100,000 into the Ordos Desert to expel the Xiongnu, who were then led by King Toumen (the earliest known shanyu). Meng Tian succeeded in driving the Xiongnu out of this wasteland, which allowed the Chinese to build new fortifications along the Yellow River and reinforce the old walls built by the previous Warring States along northern Shanxi.
Page 72-73: Toumen was forced to flee far into the grasslands of the north, but after the fall of Qin, the Xiongnu came to prominence under his wayward son, Modu Shanyu. Modu was the hostage of a rival tribe, the Yuezhi, that had defeated the Xiongnu; the Shiji alleges that Modu was handed over to the rival Yuezhi tribe since Toumen wanted Modu's younger brother to succeed him, but Torday speculates that this is merely Modu's propaganda to justify the assassination of his father, Toumen. This is buttressed by the fact that a significant defeat of a tribe meant a higher-ranking prince had to be handed over; the Yuezhi victory trounced the Xiongnu and Modu was handed over as the eldest son of Toumen. According to the Shiji, Modu was allegedly able to escape the confines of the Yuezhi camp when the Xiongnu under Toumen attacked them in 210 BC. Impressed with him, Toumen granted Modu an army of 10,000 mounted archers. After Modu drilled them and gained their loyalty, he turned on his father, brother, his entire family, and any other guilty party, killing them out of retribution for exiling him.
Page 73: Shortly after this coup and ascension as the shanyu, Modu assaulted and defeated the Eastern Barbarians, or Donghu, by killing their leader, enslaving their people, and seizing their cattle. His forces swept through the Ordos Desert and what is now Gansu province, inflicting a significant defeat against the Yuezhi. His forces also subdued five notable Turkic tribes, including the Dingling in the north.

Initial Conflict with the Han[edit]

Page 75: After Liu Bang became the victor in the Chu-Han contention and took the throne as Emperor Gaozu of Han in 206 BC, he became concerned with the cross-border trade between Xiongnu and wealthy Chinese merchants in the northern states. He felt that this trade legitimized unwanted incursions by the Xiongnu and thus was a security risk. However, he did not want to infuriate the merchants by simply cutting off their trade wealth; instead, he appointed these merchants as highly paid officials in Dai and Yan so that their new handsome salaries neutralized their need to engage in trade with the Xiongnu. Gaozu even convinced these new officials to uphold a trade embargo against the Xiongnu. To the Xiongnu this was an outrage, and in 200 BC the Xiongnu launched an assault against Mayi, which was in danger of capture or surrender.
Page 75-76: The reports to Chang'an became more dismal with word that the King of Dai had defected from Han and had made an alliance with the Xiongnu. Xiongnu advancements threatened the capital itself. Liu Bang assembled a large army to deal with the threat, personally marching them out into the winter cold and snow-blanketed lower Fen valley. Han forces spotted Xiongnu scouts south of Taiyuan; the scouts fled any possible engagement and the Han army slowly pursued. However, Gaozu and the elite guard of the army found their advance to be too slow, and so bolted towards the direction of the Xiongnu in the upper Fen valley while leaving the bulk of their force to slowly catch up. Instead of heading west towards Mayi, Gaozu's elite forces occupied Pingcheng (at modern-day Datong, Shanxi). Gaozu's forces made camp on high ground known as the White Peak, which Gaozu realized was a terrible tactical mistake by the time dawn broke and he made a survey of the terrain. Every possible escape route would be blocked by Xiongnu cavalry. His forces were stuck in their snowy camp for seven days, running short of food, before Gaozu accepted that it was a hopeless situation. The Shiji states that Modu let Gaozu escape unscathed due to generosity; Torday says that this is unlikely and a face-saving for Gaozu, who more likely than not struck a trade deal with Modu in order to be allowed to flee with his head untouched. This speculation is affirmed by the fact that soon after Gaozu reached safety, he sent officials to the Xiongnu camp to agree on specific terms of a treaty. However, things remained inconclusive as Modu lured more merchants from Dai, Yunzhong, and Yan over to his side and engaged in little skirmishes with Han forces. When Han forces were sent to recapture territories in 198 BC, QUOTE "it was precisely at this moment of temporary Han advantage that terms between the two rulers were finally agreed."

The Heqin Era[edit]

Page 76-77: It should come as no surprise that Modu wanted unfettered trade with Han merchants, exchanging his surplus of animal hides and meats for Chinese surplus of agricultural grain, since the grassy northern steppe which Modu ruled guaranteed good grazing grounds for nomads with its heavy and irregular rainfall on the hills around Lake Baikal and the Altai foothills, but the season for growing cereal crops was far too short to sustain a sedentary lifestyle.
Page 77: QUOTE: "Unfortunately the imperial court, as other authorities in like circumstances elsewhere, was mesmerised by the perceived danger of weapons reaching the nomads. While attempts were occasionally made to regulate the exchange by drawing up lists of contraband goods, no-one [sic] ever believed that barter could be adequately policed. Rather than permitting it on a restricted basis, a blanket ban was thought to be safer, a decision which created the right conditions for a profitable black market, and encouraged the defection of high officials who operated it. It was via this illegal trade, incidentally, that the donkey found its way to China where it soon became the favoured beast of burden."
Page 77: Due to these anxieties about weapons, the issue of trade was left out of the 198 BC treaty, which instead addressed other issues like addressing the shanyu as a brother and co-equal, setting the fixed border of both realms at the Great Wall of China, the handover of a Han princess to the Xiongnu shanyu, as well as presenting annual tribute to the Xiongnu in the form of silk floss, cloth, grain, rice, liquor, and gold in fixed quantities. This was the heqin or "harmonious" relationship. It was the first in a long series of renewed peace treaties. There were problems with this from the beginning, since the Chinese were sensitive about the implication that they were conquered and thus had to pay tribute; the tribute itself also did not fully appease the Xiongnu's veracious appetite for Han goods, who often broke the rules of the treaty in the hope of getting even better deals and treaty terms (which they did).
Page 77-78: Debates were made at the capital in Chang'an that the world order had become perverted and flipped upside down, since it was supposed to have the emperor at the top and barbarians at the bottom of the power scheme. They also argued that since the Chinese population absolutely dwarfed that of the Xiongnu, why were they bowing to the Xiongnu? The scholarly counterargument to this was that the Han tribute goods were slowly coaxing, corrupting, and subduing the Xiongnu to become dependent on China for its material wealth and thus drawn into its culture. The shanyu was made aware of this argument by a defecting Chinese official, who warned that Chinese silks did not last long in the wilderness and that native felt and leather were more practical anyway, and that the Xiongnu should forget the luxury of Chinese food and concern themselves only with milk, cheese, and kumiss. In the end, the Xiongnu shanyu still sought Han goods.
Page 78: After he died from a wound in 195 BC, Emperor Gaozu's child son Emperor Hui of Han took the throne, but he had not yet reached his majority and so Gaozu's widow Empress Lü Zhi, now the empress dowager, took control of central government affairs. During her de facto reign, four of the seven sons Gaozu had with consorts were poisoned to death. Emperor Hui also died in 188 BC without having an heir, so Empress Lü had one of Gaozu's three remaining sons take the throne. He died soon after, as well as his younger brother who was emperor-elect. All of this political intrigue and murder allowed Empress Lü to rule as a regent until her death in 180 BC; the only notable event during her rule involving the Xiongnu was the persuasion by ministers for her to avoid another Pingcheng episode after she was insulted by Modu Shanyu and wanted to attack him. With the throne vacant, the Lü family attempted to oust the Liu family from power, but they were defeated and their clan eliminated by Gaozu's surviving son, who took the throne as Emperor Wen of Han.
Page 79: Empress Dou (Wen), a staunch follower of the founder of Daoism, Laozi, was the wife of Emperor Wen of Han, was empress dowager during the reign of Emperor Jing of Han, and grand empress dowager during a large portion of Emperor Wu of Han's reign. The stability of the heqin era had much to do with her steady presence at court. Under Emperor Jing, the heqin agreement was not only renewed, but he also opened border trade with the Xiongnu for the first time, a measure which led to a decrease in border conflicts. When Dou died in 135 BC, however, Emperor Wu was free to halt the heqin policy of appeasement and pursue an aggressive foreign policy and open warfare with the Xiongnu.
Page 79: The Han armies which faced the Xiongnu were made up of volunteers, convicts whose punishments were excused in exchange for service, and conscripts aged 23 to 56. The latter spent one year in training and another year in active service; after this they were placed in reserves as ex-servicemen but still had to serve one month out of the year. They were often trained as infantry, but due to the decline of charioteer forces in Chinese armies, mounted cavarly units became more widespread. In fact, even before Empreror Wu took the throne, the Han maintained 36 pasture lands where 30,000 slaves tended to 300,000 horses for the army. In 103 BC, with the amount of horses still deemed inadequate for the army, the government offered generous tax exemptions for anyone who privately bred horses for the government.
Page 80: Despite the large size of the army, it did not have a professional senior officer corps; colonels and generals came from privileged social positions and were appointed temporarily for campaigns. Officers lower than this were career officers who risked severe punishments if they failed in their mission. If they succeeded, they could be granted titles, land, and raised income.
Page 80-81: In 177 BC, reports came in to Chang'an that the Wise King on the Right of the Xiongnu had breached the Great Wall of China in the northwest and plundered the local 'loyal barbarian' tribes who lived under Chinese protection. The chancellor led a large force to meet the Xiongnu, but the latter fled out of sight by the time he arrived in the northwest. Following this, Modu Shanyu sent a letter to Emperor Wen in 176 explaining that the Wise King on the Right had been provoked and insulted by Han border officials, so that the Wise King disregarded the idea of gaining permission from the shanyu to act and took his counsel's advice that the Chinese Han officials should be punished with a raid. Modu Shanyu then asserted that he punished the Wise King on the Right by forcing him to perform military campaigns for him against the Yuezhi, who were defeated. But he also claimed to have conquered Loulan (a state on the northwestern reaches of the Lop Nur salt marsh), the Wusun (nomads who grazed the lower slopes of the Tian Shan), and the Hujie (an unidentified tribe), thus QUOTE: "All the people who live by drawing the bow are now united into one family," or rather, the Xiongnu Confederation. Modu Shanyu concluded his letter by saying that he hoped the heqin agreement could be resumed, warning that the Xiongnu would approach China's frontier if the treaty was not renewed.
Page 81: On this, Torday asserts the following: QUOTE: "Viewed in the light of the campaign described in this letter, the raid across the Great Wall occurred at the commencement of a great westward sweep through Kansu and beyond and Mao-tun's attempt to blame Han officials for the violation of the treaty must be dismissed as a smoke-screen. Stripped of this excuse, it is crystal clear that his main objective was the forcible recruitment of diverse western barbarians to the Hsiung-nu federation."
Page 82-83: After lengthy debate in the capital, Emperor Wen accepted the Xiongnu demand for a renewal of the heqin agreement. However, the tribute sent to Modu Shanyu did not reach the ailing leader, since he died that year in 174 BC. Instead his son, the Wise King on the Left, received the tribute as the new shanyu; Modu had lived so long, that by the time he died, his son, the Wise King on the Left, was already an eldery man. Therefore, the Chinese called him Old Shanyu. The latter died in 159 BC and was succeeded by Junchen Shanyu, who had the heqin agreement renewed, but this was a waste of money for the Han, since Xiongnu armies swarmed around the passes of Dai in 157 BC. Han armies approached but the elusive Xiongnu fled the scene; shortly after, Emperor Wen died in 156 BC. After Emperor Jing of Han took the throne, he had to deal with the revolt of kings in the south, while the King of Zhao in the north became involved in secret negotiations with the Xiongnu shanyu. However, Han forces were made aware of this and entered the rogue kingdom, defeating its renegade king, and forcing the shanyu to cancel those plans of invading China through that territory.
Page 83-84: After this, Emperor Jing cemented peace with the Xiongnu not just be renewing the heqin treaty, but also by allowing the Xiongnu to have free access to the border markets. This decision must have been influenced by Empress Dou (Wen), since this cross-trade arrangement was not halted until after her death in 135 BC. In fact, the opening of the border markets led to a relative peace between the Han and Xiongnu, as the latter made no serious incursions into Chinese territory after the border markets were opened (and until the border markets were closed by Wu). Emperor Wu was indecisive at first, conceding to the opinion of one scholarly debate that the heqin agreement should be resumed and not until a second scholarly debate in 134 was his mind changed to break the heqin agreement. If relations were peaceful, why did Wu pursue an aggressive foreign policy? Scholars have suggested a wide range of reasons; the ease of the Xiongnu in penetrating Shanxi and thus threatening the capital at Chang'an; the possibility of the Xiongnu linking up with the Qiang and thus posing a greater threat to Han; Emperor Wu's paranoia about the threat of Xiongnu encroachment; the large amount of tribute given to the Xiongnu which took a bite into the overall Han economy (Torday argues that this is the weakest point in common scholarly arguments, noting the vast material wealth of China and efficient methods of tax collection at the time). Torday believes that the best argument for why Emperor Wu chose to break the heqin treaty was the Confucian argument at court that it was an offense to the emperor that he paid tribute to barbarians and not the other way around. Although the Confucians, whose influence at court was greatly enhanced under Wu, detested war as an admission that the emperor was a failure, they nonetheless argued that the emperor needed to save face and restore his rightful place as leader of all under heaven.

The Incident at Mayi[edit]

Page 91: The mission of Zhang Qian in 139 BC to seek out the Yuezhi for an alliance against the Xiongnu might seem like the first instance where there was a foreign policy shift under Emperor Wu of Han, but Torday is quick to remind the reader that Zhang's embassy QUOTE: "had such modest proportions, its resources were so meagre, and the hazards of the journey so formidable, that no-one could have reasonably expected it to achieve its stated aim. A more credible explanation for the venture would be to regard it as an intelligence mission staffed with expendable personnel. According to the Shih Chi, by 139 BC the court had obtained unconfirmed reports of an earlier Hsiung-nu attack on the Yüeh-shih in Kansu which triggered off their flight to an unknown western destination. Because information on the political situation in Kansu and points west was clearly of essence, the despatch of Chang's mission can hardly be regarded as proof of change in han strategic thinking."
Page 91: Torday is more convinced that the shift in policy had much to do with the death of "that advocate of peaceful coexistence," the Empress Dou (Wen), who was the grand empress dowager upon her death in 135 BC. By 134 BC, Emperor Wu was convinced that a break in the heqin agreement and a subsequent offensive strategy against the Xiongnu were necessary. He resolved to capture Junchen Shanyu and destroy his forces. To achieve this, Emperor Wu relied on a merchant of Mayi in the Kingdom of Dai to be his agent provacateur. This man was ordered to bring a caravan full of contraband goods to the Shanyu in order to gain his trust. He was also to inform the Shanyu that the people of Mayi were willing to defect to the Xiongnu if the Shanyu willed it. If the bait was taken, then two carefully placed Han armies would act as ambushing forces to seal the deal. This consisted of a force allegedly 300,000 strong outside Mayi City in the hilly countryside, while the second force rode further north so that it could be positioned to cut off the shanyu's baggage train and escape route in the rear.
Page 91-92: Junchen Shanyu was apparently enticed by the prospects laid before him by the conniving Han merchant, so he allegedly rode with some 100,000 Xiongnu, bypassing the Great Wall of China, and headed towards Mayi. However, a curious sight caught the attention of Xiongnu scouts, who reported to the shanyu that none of the usual shepherds were to be found amidst the expanse of large pastures fit for grazing countless sheep and cattle. Junchen Shanyu suspected that he was falling into a trap. This was confirmed when the Xiongnu raided a watchtower and forced a captured Han soldier to confess anything he knew about the situation. He immediately ordered his army to retreat and head back north. To the dismay of the second Han army waiting to ambush the baggage train, they now were faced by a head-on collision of the main Xiongnu force; the general of this force made haste and escaped a confrontation. However, this incident, an embarrassment for the Han, officially broke the heqin alliance and signalled the first act of open hostility between the two sides. For seven years to come, both sides fought a number of battles in northern Shanxi without either side gaining any decisive victory.

Recapturing the Ordos[edit]

Page 92: Emperor Wu wanted to neutralize the Xiongnu from the center quickly due to fears of a powerful Xiongnu flank from the north through the Dai Kingdom in Shanxi and another attack from the Wise King of the Right coming through the Hexi Corridor of Gansu. The Xiongnu conquest of this vital passageway in Gansu in 177 (along with the later expulsion of the Yuezhi in some year before 139 BC) was made known to the court of Emperor Wen in 176 BC, and ever since then the Chinese had feared a simultaneous invasion from the north and the west, which was a serious threat for the nearby court at Chang'an. These fears explain the change in tactics in 127 BC when Wu chose not to focus on the fight in the immediate north in Shanxi but in the west, i.e. the Ordos Desert of Inner Mongolia, Shaanxi, and Gansu, which was then controlled by the Wise King of the Right and his 30,000 cavalry. For this mission, Emperor Wu sent his trusted general Wei Qing.
Page 92-93: Moving in a southwestern direction from his camp near Hohhot, the general Wei Qing managed to kill several thousand Xiongnu, captured a million sheep, subdued the local nomadic chiefs, and restored Han control over the old, ruined Han fortifications along the Yellow River. From there he moved west towards Longxi, modern-day Lanzhou in Gansu, the point that was the westernmost extremity of the Great Wall of China. The city of Lanzhou was the gateway towards the Hexi Corridor, or the gateway from Hexi towards Chang'an, depending on the perspective of either the Chinese or the Xiongnu. Securing the Ordos was a necessary step for Wei Qing if he was to provide a buffer to the north for his advance into mountainous Gansu. Besides this good strategy, he was also blessed with the sudden death of Junchen Shanyu in the winter of 126 BC. To make things even better, the legal successor, Wise King of the Left, was challenged by the Left Luli King, which caused this Wise King to defect to Han China.
Page 93: By the summer of 125 BC, the Xiongnu mustered enough strength to make a counterattack. The new shanyu invaded the Dai Kingdom while the Wise King of the Right assaulted the Ordos Desert. Despite the huge invasion, the shanyu's army made no breakthrough victories and were contained while the valiant Wei Qing defeated the Wise King of the Right. By 124 BC, Han China had fully regained control over the Ordos.

The Major Offensives[edit]

Page 93-94: The Hexi Corridor is a narrow strip of valley running in a northwest direction towards the oasis of Suzhou, bordered on both sides by tall mountains, the outermost of which are called the Qilian Mountains. As one passed through the corridor, the trail followed a tributary river of the Yellow River before embarking through a mountain pass and then a watered plain surrounding the oasis of what is now Liangzhou District. It was another 150 miles from here before one even reached Ganzhou District, where a settlement was situated along a river (now called the Ruo River, but in Han times was the Juyan River) running from the slopes of the Qilian. From Ganzhou, it was another 130 miles until one reached Suzhou, the last great oasis of the corridor. About 60 miles west of Suzhou is where the ancient Jade Gate is located, where the Great Wall would be extended to by 100 BC in order to protect the corridor from the north. The westernmost military outpost during Wu's reign, however, was at Dunhuang when it was known as Shazhou.
Page 95: When the Yuezhi were driven from the Hexi Corridor in Gansu by the Xiongnu, reports came to Chang'an stating that some of the Yuezhi had found refuge with the nomadic Qiang herdsmen of the swampy uplands bordering the Tibetan Plateau in Qinghai. However, when Han forces marched through the Hexi Corridor, they discovered that some of the Yuezhi oasis-dwellers had stayed behind to cultivate and farm patches of rich soil in the corridor, albeit under Xiongnu control.
Page 95-96: When Zhang Qian reported on his way out in 139 BC and on his way back to the capital in 125 BC that the Xiongnu controlled the lands west of Lanzhou, it was incentive for Emperor Wu to make a decisive strike, since Wei Qing had just secured the Ordos in 126 BC and thus QUOTE: "sterilised the northern flank of any Chinese attack on Kansu." The general Huo Qubing led 10,000 light cavalry to Lanzhou and in the early winter of 121 he reached Ganzhou where Han forces fought the Xiongnu for 6 days, killing 8,000 enemies. In addition, the Han captured the holy idols of the Xiutu King and captured Xiongnu dignitaries, including the son of the Kunye King (of the Kunye tribe west of Ganzhou).
Page 96: In the summer of 121, Huo Qubing rode out from Beiti, northeast of Lanzhou, with less than 30,000 cavalry and reached Suzhou where he cornered the Kunye King at the Qilian Mountains. The Han army allegedly lost a third of its forces, but they inflicted even greater damage against the Xiongnu, who lost 30,000 cavalry. Huo Qubing also brought back spoils of war and captives such as Xiongnu princes and high officials.
Page 96-97: Although most of the Yuezhi had earlier been driven from the area, when Huo Qubing rode along the Etsin Gol (Mongol name for the Ruo Liver mentioned above) he came upon oasis farming communities managed by Yuezhi, who retained their smallholdings even though the Xiongnu were overlords of the area.
Page 97: Given their defeats, the surviving Xiutu and Kunye kings would have to report to the shanyu of the Xiongnu, who would have most likely executed the two for their failures. Instead of meeting this fate, the two kings chose to defect to Han, but they disputed as to which terms they should accept from Han, so Kunye murdered Xiutu and combined his forces with Xiutu's. He then unconditionally surrendered this entire force to Han. The Han court had the tribespeople from Gansu evacuated and sent to the Ordos wasteland, where they would have to prove themselves as loyal barbarians amidst the many attacks on the region by the shanyu. Thus, with the Hexi Corridor cleared out, the Han Dynasty was free to pursue westward expansion and contact with exotic foreign kingdoms which were discovered and reported on by Zhang Qian.
Page 97-98: The Xiongnu counterattack was largely confined to the Ordos, which was still controlled by Wei Qing. The latter was now Commander-in-Chief, and he was commissioned along with the cavalry specialist Huo Qubing to go on the offensive against the shanyu and the Wise King of the Left, given that the Wise King of the Right was still emasculated from defeat. In the following campaigns, the goal was to acquire 250,000 horses, 100,000 of which would be used by cavalry and the rest for the baggage train carrying equipment and necessities. This feat was accomplished quickly, by the spring of 119 BC. The Western Army was led by Wei Qing, who rode north with the central portion of his forces and faced the bulk of the shanyu's army. When evening came after a long day of fighting, a sudden sandstorm blew up, causing confusion within the Xiongnu ranks, which was Wei Qing's opportunity to throw in the two reserve wings he had in the rear. The shanyu saw that all was lost, so he and his bodyguard fled the scene to escape north while the rest of his army was slaughtered. In the end, the Han killed some 20,000 Xiongnu. Yet even more were killed when Huo Qubing rode some 600 miles northwest of modern Beijing to meet the Wise King of the Left; in this separate battle, the Xiongnu reportedly lost 70,000 troops while the rest fled the battle.

Aftermath of Xiongnu defeat[edit]

Page 98: In the wake of this shameful defeat in 119 BC, the Xiongnu sent envoys in hopes to strike a political settlement and peace treaty, but Emperor Wu of Han refused any negotiations unless the Xiongnu were ready to accept the status of tribute-paying vassals. This enraged the shanyu and all deals were once again off the table.
Page 98: QUOTE: "In sum, the northern victory deprived the empire of 30,000 men and 100,000 horses against enemy losses of 90,000 cavalry. To the Han, the most damaging aspect was not the human cost, but the loss of horses. The fact that after the war Ch'ang-an was chronically short of cavalry for a long time meant that it was in no position to aim for total military victory in the foreseeable future. What it did gain from the war was a respite from the attentions of the exhausted Hsiung-nu for a little over a decade. During this time the enemy retired to its Transbaikalian pastures and, though the two antagonists continued to quarrel in the years to come, nothing of any consequence is recorded across the Great Wall until 103 BC."
Page 99: While a short era of peace prevailed, Emperor Wu used this time to build up his army's strength and consolidate the frontiers. With 50,000 conscripts, he established irrigation works for agriculture in the area around Hohhot, Inner Mongolia. In the Hexi Corridor, a series of garrisoned commanderies were established all the way to Dunhuang, which was located at the edge of the Taklamakan Desert. He also had the Jade Gate built, along with various watchtowers from here all the way to Suzhou. However, there was a weak point in the Etsin Gol valley near where fortifications were not enough to abate Wu's worries, so he resumed the offensive against the Xiongnu in 103 BC with hopes of driving them further into the steppe. This effort was led by Li Guangli, who secured the 'Heavenly Horses' from Fergana, as well as Li Ling (Han Dynasty), who was eventually executed.
Page 99-100: In the middle of the 1st century BC, the Xiongnu house was split between two rival shanyus and was consumed by civil war, with one side defecting to Han. The other, Zhizhi Shanyu, was stationed in southwestern Siberia where he was finally killed by a Chinese army in 36 BC at the Battle of Zhizhi. Cordial relations between the surrendered Xiongnu and Western Han continued until the fall of Western Han, whereupon the Xiongnu reconquered the Western Regions. However, the Xiongnu became split and consumed by civil war again, this time into the Northern Xiongnu and Southern Xiongnu, the latter defecting to Han as vassals with the promise of financial aid. They were settled within Shanxi, Gansu, and Inner Mongolia. Meanwhile, the Northern Xiongnu continued to fight Han, yet without significant military victory. Moreover, many of their followers defected to the Southern Xiongnu while the up-and-coming powers of the Wuhuan, Dingling, and Xianbei challenged Northern Xiongnu dominance over the northern steppe. In fact, when the Xianbei inflicted a heavy defeat against the Northern Xiongnu in 87 AD, the Northern Xiongnu federation splintered into bits, some fleeing to the Southern Xiongnu, some to the far west, some to southwestern Siberia. The Southern Xiongnu, on the other hand, remained inside of China while their sinicized descendants created a barbarian dynasty in 304 AD, the Han Zhao kingdom.

Travels of Zhang Qian[edit]

Page 104: QUOTE: "It is now appropriate to discuss in more detail the remarkable results of Chang Ch'ien's two journeys to the western region during Wu-ti's reign. Up to that time, and for as long as records reached back, China's eyes were turned inward and its foreign policy, if that is the right expression, was exclusively directed to the containment and conquest of its diverse border barbarians. As to possible worlds at the far side of the wild zone, there have always been speculations and stories about fabulous lands near to where the edge of the world met the limitless oceans. Tales were told of voyages to these countries by the legendary emperors, but these were no more than part of the relevant mythology surrounding the divine dynasties. Given this backdrop, it is hard to overstate the impact caused by Chang's down-to-earth account of a real world at the back of beyond. It would be tempting to compare the effect his news had on China with that of Columbus's discoveries on the west, sixteen hundred years later. The parallel is only valid in that the new territories were quickly exploited by kings and merchant adventurers of both west and east. But in the west, the new discoveries merely extended the map of the inhabited world. In the east, however, what Chang found at the edge of the world, which his people implicitly believed in, but a number of wealthy kingdoms where, as in China, people tilled the soil, bought and sold goods, used metal coins and were familiar with writing and sundry other civilised arts. To the Han, the sheer existence of such civilisations, outside of their own, was nothing short of culture shock."
Page 104-105: The 123 chapter of the Records of the Grand Historian and the 61st chapter of the Book of Han both cover the remarkable life of Zhang Qian. He was born southwest of Chang'an and became a palace attendant under Emperor Wu of Han from 140 BC onward. When very old news had reached the Han court that the Yuezhi were defeated by the Xiongnu, the Han court was told that the Yuezhi swore vengeance against the Xiongnu, but could find no suitable ally to challenge them. Wudi needed capable men to seek out the Yuezhi, which would mean traversing through enemy territory. Zhang Qian stepped forth and volunteered, was given an escort of 100 men, as well as a personal slave named Ganfu, originally a nomad.
Page 105: The party set out from Lanzhou but were captured by Xiongnu soldiers. Zhang was then brought to interrogated by the shanyu. When the shanyu learned that Zhang was seeking out the Yuezhi, the shanyu compared this act to if he had sent a party to seek out a southwestern barbarian group while traveling through Chinese territory; wouldn't the Chinese imprison them as well? So the shanyu kept Zhang as a prisoner. While in captivity, Zhang was given hospitable treatment and even handed a Xiongnu wife, who bore him a son. Despite this, Zhang's loyalty to his country did not falter and he never relinquished the imperial insignia he was given by Wu.
Page 105: Ten years later, with the guards around him becoming lax in their duties and befriending him, Zhang found his chance to escape. He fled west on horseback in search of the Yuezhi, and arrived in a kingdom called Dayuan, or Fergana. Zhang learned that the natives of this country had already heard of China and wished to establish ties with it. Upon request (and promise of return gifts from Emperor Wu for such kindness), the ruler of Fergana provided Zhang with guides and interpreters from Kangju, who brought him to the land inhabited by the nomadic Da Yuezhi (the name the Chinese gave to the Yuezhi who fled west, while the Xiao Yuezhi were those who the stayed behind in Gansu as a tiny minority). When Zhang was presented to the King of the Yuezhi, he learned that he was the son of the previous ruler killed by the Xiongnu. Despite this, the ruler was not interested in revenge or allying with China. The Yuezhi King was content in being the overlord of his southern neighbor Daxia, or Bactria, and had no warlike contendors to worry over.
Page 105-106: Although disappointed, Zhang left the matter open for consideration while he visited Daxia, or Bactria, for about a year, whereupon he pressed the matter again, but the Yuezhi King once more refused. Seeing that there was no persuading this ruler, Zhang decided to venture back home to Han China, choosing a route leading through the Qiang people's territory to avoid the Xiongnu. To his misfortune, he fell into Xiongnu hands again (captured by either the Kunye or Xiutu tribes in the Hexi Corridor), only to escape a second time a year later during the chaos of Junchen Shanyu's death in the winter 126 BC and the vacant Xiongnu throne disputed by the Wise King of the Left and the Left Lilu King. Zhang, still accompanied by his faithful wife and slave Ganfu, was able to slip away unnoticed while the Xiongnu were thrown into confusion. He returned home to China after 13 years abroad, one of only two original people who survived the journey (his slave Ganfu was the other).
Page 106: When Zhang did return to Chang'an by spring or summer of 125 BC, he was rewarded with the post of Supreme Palace Councillor. He became famed for discovering kingdoms to the west, the ones he visited including Dayuan, Daxia, Kangju, and Da Yuezhi, but also his reports about other distant kingdoms he did not visit. Working back through time and given the chronology of events, it is certain that Zhang's stay in Dayuan and Daxia lasted from 129 to 128 BC, since he was captured for the second time by the Xiongnu in late 127 BC. If he was gone for thirteen years, as the Shiji alleges, then he departed China in 139 or 138 BC.
Page 107: Modern scholars believe that when Zhang entered Dayuan, he was stepping foot onto what is now modern-day Uzbekistan.
Page 108: The Records of the Grand Historian by Sima Qian describes Dayuan as follows in the 123rd chapter focused on Zhang Qian:
- QUOTE: "Ta-yüan lies south-west of the territory of the Hsiung-nu, some ten thousand li directly west of China. The people are settled on the land, plowing the fields and growing rice and wheat. They also make wine out of grapes. The region has many fine horses which sweat blood; their forebearers are supposed to have been foaled from heavenly horses. The people live in houses, in fortified cities, there being some seventy or more cities of various sizes in the region. The population numbers several hundred thousand. The people fight with bows and spears and can shoot from horseback."
Page 110: Sima Qian wrote that the nomadic herdsmen of Kangju, or Sogdiana, resembled the Yuezhi in customs and were capable of raising a large army of some 80,000 to 90,000 horseback archers. The Kangju nomads told Zhang that they were once a vassal of the Xiongnu and at one point also a dependent state under the Da Yuezhi.
Page 110: As Sima Qian reveals, the Yuezhi were not pushed out of Gansu by Modu Shanyu, but by his son, who the Chinese called the Old Shanyu (r. 173– 159 BC). Apparently, the Old Shanyu killed the Yuezhi king and made his skull into a drinking cup. The remnant Yuezhi fled west, becoming the Da Yuezhi, and conquered Daxia, or Bactria, where they established a court for their king on the bank of the Gui River.
Page 110-111: Of the Kingdom of Daxia, or Bactria, that the Da Yuezhi apparently subjugated but did not occupy, Sima Qian had this to say in his Records:
- QUOTE: "Ta Hsia is situated over two thousand li southwest of Ta-yüan, south of the Kuei river. Its people cultivate the land and have cities and houses. Their customs are like those of the Ta-yüan. It has no great ruler but only a number of petty chiefs ruling the various cities. The people are poor in the use of arms and afraid of battle, but they are clever at commerce. After the Ta Yüeh-shih moved west and attacked and conquered Ta Hsia, the entire country came under their sway. The population of the country is large, numbering some million or more people. The capital is called the city of Lan-shih and has a market where all sorts of goods are bought and sold."
Page 111: While staying in Daxia, Zhang Qian heard of the country of Shendu, or the Indus River valley of North India, which has a description in the Records as well:
- QUOTE: "The kingdom of Shen-tu is situated several thousand li south-east of Ta Hsia. The people cultivate the land and live much like the people of Ta Hsia. The region is said to be hot and damp. The inhabitants ride elephants when they go into battle. The kingdom is situated on a great river."
Page 112: By the way, the "Gui" or "Kuei" river named here is the Chinese name for the Oxus River, named so by the Greeks.
Page 112: Of Anxi, or the Empire of Parthia in Persia, another country that Zhang Qian heard of but was unable to visit, Sima Qian writes in his Records that:
- QUOTE: "An-hsi is situated several thousand li west of the region of Ta Yüeh-shih. The people are settled on the land, cultivating the fields and growing rice and wheat. They also make wine out of grapes. They have walled cities like Ta-yüan, the region containing several hundred cities of various sizes. The kingdom, which borders the Kuei river, is very large, measuring several thousand li square. Some of the inhabitants are merchants who travel by carts or boat to neighboring countries, sometimes journeying several thousand li. The coins of the country are made of silver and bear the face of the king. When the king dies, the currency is immediately changed and new coins are issued with the face of his successor. The people keep records by writing horizontally on strips of leather."
Page 112: The name "Anxi" is a Chinese transliteration of the Persian "Arshak", the ruling dynasty of Parthia, which the Greeks called the Arsacid Dynasty.

Zhang's later career[edit]

Page 112-113: Emperor Wu of Han was greatly excited by Zhang Qian's stories and desired to establish commercial ties with Dayuan, Daxia, and Anxi, but since this was still 125 BC, he was wary about the prospect of a trade route that would have to traverse through the lands of armed nomads like the Xiongnu, the Yuezhi, and the Kangju. Zhang thought about a solution to this by suggesting an alternate route. He stated that when he was in Daxia, browsing the trade items featured in its markets and bazaars, he came across bamboo canes and cloth items that were obviously products of China's native regions of what is now Sichuan and Yunnan. When he questioned the Bactrian merchants about these items, they told him that they came from Shendu, or North India. Given the distances he calculated in his travels from China to Bactria, he reasoned that North India was fairly close to southwestern China. If a southern route was unknown to Chinese officials, it was because private traders kept it a secret.
Page 113: Thus, Emperor Wu commissioned Zhang Qian to head a mission south to clear a path for Han trade leading west that would bypass the Xiongnu. However, his plans were interrupted by hostile tribes in Sichuan. Despite this, he interrogated merchants in the area, who confessed that passes were in use which led to a kingdom called Tianyue, where the inhabitants rode on elephants. Torday suspects that Tianyue was Burma; the route through it was not officially opened up by Han until some years after 120 BC, after the Han consolidated the southwestern region of China.
Page 113: After this rather unfruitful mission, Zhang was attacked to the staff of Commander-in-Chief Wei Qing in the north, since it was thought that Zhang's knowledge of the northern steppe would be useful for the army in finding wells. For his services rendered to the army, Zhang Qian was made a marquis in 123 BC, while he was also made a colonel in 122 BC with his own forces stationed in the north. While Huo Qubing was busy conquering the Hexi Corridor in 121 BC, the army of Li Guang, which was four-thousand strong, was under heavy attack by the Xiongnu Wise King of the Left. If not for the timely arrival of Zhang Qian's detachment, Li Guang could have been defeated and killed. The well-connected Li Guang would lose his reputation if he did not save face for this embarrassment, so he used Zhang Qian as a scapegoat, blaming him for arriving too late to the debacle. In Legalist fashion, Zhang Qian was sentenced to death, although this sentence was commuted due to intervention by pleading ministers, so that Zhang was pardoned but lost his wealth, rank, and titles.
Page 114: Despite this loss, Zhang's career was not over, as Emperor Wu continued to seek his advice on matters of foreign affairs. After the Xiutu and Kunye tribes were forcefully evacuated from Gansu and resettled in the Ordos Desert by Han authorities in 121 BC, the Hexi Corridor running from Lanzhou to Dunhuang was now an empty vacuum. Sometime after 119 BC, Zhang Qian suggested to Emperor Wu that the best way to fill the territory immediately would be to encourage a loyal nomadic group allied with Han to settle there. He suggested the Wusun, who had been defeated by Modu Shanyu back in 178–177 BC, thus would be natural enemies of the Xiongnu. Emperor Wu accepted this and appointed Zhang Qian as 'general of the palace attendants', sending him off as chief envoy to the Wusun sometime after 119 BC. His embassy included 300 men with brought with them numerous cattle and baggage animals hauling gold, silk, and other valuable gifts. Zhang was also accompanied by lesser envoys who were to reestablish contacts with the states of Central Asia.
Page 114-115: When Zhang arrived, he was disappointed to learn that the King of the Wusun was unwilling to provoke the Xiongnu by moving into the Hexi Corridor, since he did not know how to gauge the strength of Han but knew full well the might of the Xiongnu. He welcomed the emperor's gifts, but the aged ruler had too many internal political problems to contend with since there was a debate over his succession after his heir apparent and eldest son had died. He chose his second-eldest son to succeed him instead, although many protested that he should have his orphaned grandson succeed him. Thus, Zhang could not do much but continue with despatching his sub-envoys to Dayuan, Kangju, Da Yuezhi, Daxia, Anxi, Shendu, Yutian (Khotan), and Yumo (Hami, also known as Kumul). He returned to Chang'an with a small Wusun embassy that brought gifts of horses for Emperor Wu.
Page 117: QUOTE: "As to the envoy's personal story, we know that after he came back from Wu-sun, he was once more honoured with high office, but died a year or so later. A few years after his death the sub-envoys returned from their diverse destinations escortd by visiting foreign delegations. It is recorded that not only were proper relations established with these states, but the court gained an insight into the affairs of the west and grew confident of its expectations of fat profits from trade. Early commercial missions could muster up to several hundred persons; anything between five to ten such 'embassies' would leave China each year and might stay away for up to several years."
Page 117: There were two trading routes that left China in the north; one hugged the northern rim and the other the southern rim of the Taklamakan Desert in the Tarim Basin.

The Heavenly Horses of Dayuan[edit]

Page 118: Emperor Wu of Han was obsessed with the so-called 'heavenly horses' which were bred in Dayuan, or Fergana, an obsession which allegedly led to the most expensive and long-range war waged by Emperor Wu. After Zhang Qian died, the Wusun came to the Han court with some of these horses presented as gifts. The Shiji remarks on this occasion:
- QUOTE: "Some time earlier the emperor had divined by the Book of Changes and been told that: 'divine horses were due to appear from the north-west'. When the Wu-sun came with their horses, which were of an excellent breed, he named them 'heavenly horses'. Later, however, he obtained the blood-sweating horses from Ta-yüan, which were even hardier. He therefore changed the name of the Wu-sun horses, calling them 'horses from the western extremity' and used the name 'heavenly horses' for those of Ta-yüan."
Page 118: Torday writes QUOTE: "Chinese mythology knew of diverse heavenly horses, variously associated with gods, wisdom, ancestors and longevity. To give rational foundations to the emperor's insatiable passion for them, some commentators argue that in Wu-ti's time the introduction of a superior breed of horse was a military priority. It is urged that the breed in Ta-yüan was larger and more powerful than its counterpart reared by the Hsiung-nu and Wu-sun on the Mongolian steppe. Yet as noted earlier, it was the hardiness of the small Hsiung-nu horse which was coveted by the Chinese. So was its ability, unmatched by any western breed, to find and get at grass buried by up to eighteen inches of snow. Readers will form their own judgment on the blunt statement in the Shih Chi that the original cause of friction was Ta-yüan's refusal to sell horses to the Han. It is said that, initially, China enjoyed profitable trade with that country, particularly in grape-seeds and alfalfa, but that latterly the natives kept their horses hidden and declined all offers for them. To tempt them further, the emperor sent a party of able envoys carrying thousands of pieces of gold and a golden horse, at that time an astonishingly generous offer for a small breeding stock. Yet the people of Ta-yüan, elsewhere described as 'clever at commerce', reasoning that the Han was too far away to force their hands, 'plotted together' to refuse to trade. Not content with that, they set an ambush for the homeward-bound party of frustrated envoys and robbed them of all their possessions. Beyond suggesting that the inhabitants of Ta-yüan evidently held their horses in high regard, no explanation is offered for their irrational and aggressive behaviour."
Page 118-119: This was an outrage to Emperor Wu. He assembled an army of 6,000 cavalry and 30,000 infantry and placed general Li Guangli at the head of this attack force to punish Dayuan and force them to hand over the coveted horses. His force was to besiege the capital at Ershi, departing for it in 104 BC. However, that year a plague of locusts devastated the oases en route, which caused starvation among the troops. This forced Li Guangli to turn his army back to Dunhuang. In 103 BC renewed hostilities enacted by the Xiongnu led many ministers to persuade Emperor Wu to forget about Dayuan and focus on their main nomadic foe. However, Emperor Wu would not budge, as the insult and humiliation was too great and Han reputation had to be restored.
Page 119: To buttress Li Guangli's army still stationed at Dunhuang, Emperor Wu freed all bowmen from prison and even called upon youth and horsemen from border states with bad reputation to band together and reinforce Li's army. In all, it is said that the reinforcements numbered 60,000, not counting porters and attendants. The army was granted 100,000 oxen, well over 30,000 horses, tens of thousands of donkeys, mules, and camels, as well as a grand amount of crossbows and provisions. Under Li's command, he was granted fifty subordinate commanders to direct in the fight against Dayuan. Furthermore, 180,000 troops were sent to garrison the districts of the Hexi Corridor in order to provide protection for this army.
Page 119: En route to Dayuan, this Han army subdued every oasis of the Tarim Basin that was in its path; the only oasis that resisted, a settlement near Kashgar, was wiped off the map by Han forces. Arriving in the Fergana Valley, Han forces laid siege to Ershi for forty days. To force the city to surrender, military engineers diverted entire rivers to flood the city. The Han army managed to knock down one of the walls and capture an enemy leader soon after. The Fergana people in the inner fortress of the city weighed their options and decided to kill their king, presenting his head to Li Guangli, as well as promising the Han forces that they could pick which horses they liked. They warned Li, though, that the Kangju would arrive at the city soon to help Fergana lift the siege against Han. Li Guangli, knowing that Kangju scouts were about, decided to quickly accept the city's surrender.
Page 119-120: For the meager amount of horses the Han came back with, it does not seem to have been much of a benefit considering that they lost all but 10,000 foot-soldiers and 1,000 cavalry from the much larger original force. However, the real objective of this campaign, not the procurement of horses, becomes clear when Li Guangli established Dayuan as a puppet state by installing a Han-appointed king, a local nobleman who would be favorable and loyal to China. Despite this, the Han-appointed king was overthrown just a year or two later and replaced by the brother of the previous king. However, the Han had made their point and the Dayuan Kingdom would never again dare to slight them or worse, close off the lucrative trade route leading west that China relied on for contacting and trading with all the other kingdoms. Torday believes that Sima Qian's refusal to address this is a politically correct means to hide the fact that Wu, who should have been worried about pacifying the barbarians of the wild zone, instead chose to secure commercial routes through a distant war. The war was thus justified within a safe narrative of retaliation against arrogant horse-traders in Dayuan who dared insult the emperor.

Li Ling debacle; Sima Qian and Ban Gu[edit]

Page 123-124: Li Guangli, the conqueror of Dayuan, was given orders in the autumn of 99 BC to lead 30,000 cavalry against the Wise King of the Right which stirred trouble in the Qilian Mountains. He had Li Ling (Han Dynasty) as one of his subordinate officers, a man who had no kinship with Li Guangli, but was a grandson of the officer Li Guang. Li Guangli ordered Li Ling to take 5,000 archers and infantry and march them 300 miles north of the Etsin Gol river to report on enemy movements or to block the enemy from advancing if necessary. This force was not large enough to meet a substantial Xiongnu army, nor was it small enough to act as an effective reconnaissance force. Li Ling met no enemies at his destination, yet on his way back he was ambushed by 80,000 mounted archers led by the shanyu. His soldiers fought a running battle for eight days, but became cornered in a narrow valley and was forced to surrender, which would mean capital punishment for him if he returned home to China. Worse still, Li Ling accepted the offer of the shanyu for a Xiongnu princess bride to wed.
Page 124: When news of this reached Chang'an, Emperor Wu ordered (in the Legalist tradition) that Li Ling's family should be killed and his name dishonored. However, this order was to be put forth through a palace council first, which included the notable Sima Qian. The latter let his heart overrule his head when he argued in defense of the Li family's many great achievements and pleaded with the emperor to change course and exonerate them. Sima, a historian, wanted the man's fame not to be besmirched and wanted to save the lives of his wife and children. This allowed Emperor Wu to turn his rage against Sima Qian, putting him under investigation, which found that Sima was trying to decieve the emperor, another capital crime which could only be commuted by paying a hefty fine. However, since Sima was valued as a man of learning, Emperor Wu gave him the option of castration instead. In a letter from his cell to a friend that was preserved in the Book of Han, Sima contemplated committing suicide or facing humiliation with castration. He could not bring himself to commit suicide, since that would mean failing to fulfill his filial obligations to his father in completing his historical work.
Page 124-125: Sima accepted castration, and thus was sent to the 'silkworm house' where only women worked, as it was them who traditionally performed the mutilation. He was thus turned into a eunuch, re-admitted to the court to attend to Emperor Wu's concubines' harem. This would buy him some time to finish the Shiji; he died around 90 BC, a few years before Wu.
Page 125: QUOTE: "The format adopted by Ssu-ma was largely retained by each of the 24 Dynastic Histories published in subsequent centuries. The Shih Chi has 130 chapters divided into five sections. The first contains the Basic Annals which are diary entries covering the reign of each previous emperor. The second is taken up with chronological tables and the third is a collection of essays on special topics of economic, political, and cultural interest. The fourth tells the story of the noble houses of pre-dynastic China, while the fifth is made up of the so-called Memorials. This last, with its chapters on border barbarians, countries in the western region and biographies of great men, is the one with the greatest relevance. The two features which set the Shih Chi apart from its successors were its span, stretching as it does from the earliest times to around 100 BC, and the journalistic quality of those of its portions which cover the first four decades of Wu-ti's reign. Some of them contain thinly veiled criticism of imperial policies which, it is thought, might have contributed to the harsh treatment meted out to the author. It may not be without significance that the diary entries of the first four decades of Wu's reign are missing from the Basic Annals in the first section. Whether they were ever included will now never be known, but if they were, their disappearance or destruction is not entirely surprising. No subsequent dynastic historian was again tempted to record the political acts of his reigning emperor. Nor is it surprising that for well over a century after Ssu-ma's death, no-one came forward to continue where he had left off."
Page 125: The next great historical work following Wang Mang's usurpation and during the Eastern Han was more "official" than Sima Qian's Shiji. This was the Book of Han, sponsored by the reigning court, written by since 36 AD by Ban Biao (d. 54 AD), his son Ban Gu (d. 92 AD), and his sister Ban Zhao (d. between 110 and 121 AD). Ban Gu's brother was the famed general Ban Chao.
Page 126: Much later during the fifth century, the Book of Later Han was compiled by the historian Fan Ye, a historical work that covered the Eastern Han period.
Page 126-127: In his autobiographical chapter in the Book of Han, Ban Gu writes that Sima Qian's history, being 'privately composed', lacked official approval and was 'negligently written'. Han scholars must have balked at the idea of Sima comparing the early Western Han to the Qin Dynasty, the nemesis that it had vanquished; to compare the two was an act viewed as having extremely poor taste by Han scholars. Ban Gu's criticisms of Sima Qian must have been due to pressure, though, as Ban spoke and wrote more like a flattering courtier towards Emperor Guangwu of Han than a blunty honest historian. Plus, Fan Ye reveals in his Book of Later Han an event about Ban Gu which obviously points to the fact that he was under pressure to write certain things about Sima Qian. QUOTE: "It was from this source only, not from Ban Ku and Pan Chao, that we learn of the contributions of their father, Ban Piao, who was evidently the first to revise and update portions of the Shih Chi. According to Fan Yeh, he did so because in his view Ssu-ma's text 'lacked polish' and the author had failed to utilise all available sources. After Pan Piao's death, again according to Fan Yeh, Pan Ku judged his father's work to be 'insufficiently detailed' and decided to remedy its defects. Later, he went far beyond the gentle reproof directed at his father when he accused Ssu-ma Ch'ien of lacking official approval and being guilty of irreverence, but by this time he was obviously under official pressure. Fan Yeh explains that Pan Ku's initial revision of Pan Piao's work was branded by the emperor as an attempt at 'privately re-fashioning the history of the state'. As a sign of imperial displeasure Pan Ku was promptly imprisoned. After a term in jail, he was ordered to re-edit what he had formerly written and it is this last version, as eventually completed by Pan Chao, which was finally filed in the archives as a document fit to be read by officers of the state."
Page 127: Due to the highly-structured nature of the Book of Han, Torday concludes that it was intended to be a work of reference. An abridged version was also published by Xun Yue (荀悅), who wrote the Hanji (漢紀) from 196 to 205 AD. This book contains many quotations from the Book of Han as it existed at the time, and QUOTE: "serves as a control text for checking corruptions in the present version of the main work."

Ban Chao and the Kushan Empire[edit]

Page 388: The term "Guishuang" is the Chinese transliteration for the western word "Kushan" used for the political ruling family of the Kushan Empire founded by Kujula Kadphises. The western name "Kushan" is confirmed by Greek-style minted coins and Kharoṣṭhī script inscriptions on monuments (of Gandhara) left by the people of the Kushan Empire.
Page 389-390: The 'petty chiefs ruling the various cities' of Daxia (Bactria) as described by Zhang Qian would by about 90–80 BC be consolidated into five princedoms ruled by five princes, or xihou 翖侯, who still claimed nominal loyalty to their overlord, the King of Da Yuezhi. As described in the Book of Later Han, the prince Qiujiuque 丘就卻, or Kujula Kadphises, of Guishang, which was one of the five Daxia princedoms described in Han records, eliminated the other four princes and seized the throne of the Da Yuezhi sometime between 10–30 AD, around the time time Gondophares was installed as ruler of the Indo-Parthian Kingdom based at Taxila (now in modern Pakistan). As written in the Book of Later Han, this Indo-Parthian Kingdom, an eastern rival to the Arsacids of Parthia, controlled Gaofu (Kabul) and Puda (Paktia) in what is now modern Afghanistan until these areas were invaded and conquered by Kujula Kadphises. The Book of Later Han then described the exploits of Kujula's son and successor Yangaozhen 閻高珍, or Vima Takto, claiming he invaded and conquered Tianzhu (Northwestern India). The Book of Later Han then revealed that while the people within their country and in other nations referred to this new country as Guishuang, or Kushan, the Han continued to call it Da Yuezhi, since it was the Da Yuezhi throne that the Guishuang prince Kujula had usurped.

Coin of Kujula Kadphises, in the style of the Roman emperor Augustus. Legend in Kushan language, corrupted Greek script: ΚΟΖΟΛΑ ΚΑΔΑΦΕΣ ΧΟϷΑΝΟΥ ΖΑΟΟΥ ("Kozola Kadaphes Koshanou Zaoou"): "Kudjula Kadphises, ruler of the Kushans".

Page 390-391: Kujula Kadphises was the son and successor of Heraios of Kushan (Guishuang), a Daxia prince who minted Greek-style coins with faithful weight standards used in Attica, Greece. Kujula Kadphises's copper coins minted in the valley of Kabul imitate the silver coins of Heraios, while those minted in the Punjab region imitate the coins earlier issued by Gondophares of the Indo-Parthian Kingdom. Kujula, no doubt influenced by the Roman Empire, issued a copper coin that had a weight standard, in the general format and obverse bust, that entirely imitated the silver denarii of the Roman emperor Augustus. Torday says this is no surprise, since Augustan denarii have been found in the region and thus filtered east as the Romans purchased Chinese silk. On some of the bilingual tetradrachms issued by Kujula, he still referred to himself as a Kushan Yabghu, revealing that he still touted his old xihou 翖侯 title even after he had usurped the Yuezhi throne. The Chinese Book of Later Han claims of his conquests of Kabul and Arachosia are confirmed by mint marks on coins issued during his reign.
Page 392: The Book of Han by Ban Gu lists one of the five princedoms ruled by the xihou 翖侯 of Daxia (Bactria) as Gaofu (Kabul), yet Fan Ye in his Book of Later Han called this an anachronistic mistake and had to set the record straight by noting the fifth xihou territory was actually Dumi, or Termez. As Fan Ye explains, Kabul never belonged to the Da Yuezhi during the Western Han period; it later belonged to what he called Anxi, but in this case not actually Parthia but the Indo-Parthian Kingdom ruled by Gondophares. Fan asserts that the Da Yuezhi (now meaning the Kushans) did not control Kabul until they forcefully seized it from the Indo-Parthian Kingdom during Kujula's reign. Apparently, as Chavannes and Torday assume, Gaofu (Kabul) did not figure into Chinese knowledge (and thus the authors of the Book of Han) until its significance as a territory conquered by Kujula, who came to power between 10–30 AD.
Page 392-393: Ban Chao, the brother of Ban Gu and Ban Zhao, was the Chinese general most responsible for reasserting Han dominance over the Tarim Basin states, which had been lost during the fall of Wang Mang. With little funds, he embarked into Central Asia and used his skills of diplomacy to win over more troops from the local oasis states. After he defeated the Xiongnu at Hami and Barkul in 73 AD, he was made Protector General of the region from 91 to 92 AD. He died shortly after returning to Luoyang in 102 AD. After his death, the Tarim Basin states revolted against Han rule and cut off relations. They were not subjugated again until the reconquest of the region by Ban Chao's son, Ban Yong. The latter wrote a large swath of notes on his experiences, completing them in 125 AD. These notes were available to Fan Ye centuries later when he completed the Book of Later Han.
Page 393: In 86 AD, Ban Chao assaulted Turfan with his "Yuezhi" allies from the Kushan Empire. After Ban Chao's successful mission, the "Yuezhi" leader wanted a Chinese princess bride as a reward for helping Ban quell Turfan, pressing the issue with Ban Chao. Ban Chao rejected this request, as he could not speak for the emperor. The "Yuezhi" then allegedly sent 70,000 troops to Wakhan to avenge this slight. However, the "Yuezhi" were unable to defeat Ban Chao, so a "Yuezhi" envoy sued for peace in 90 AD.
Page 394: Despite repeated instances where the Han could have corrected their mistakes about the Kushan Empire in the Book of Han and Book of Later Han (especially since Ban Chao was in direct contact with his historian siblings), the Chinese still preferred to call the leader of Kushan a "Yuezhi," despite the fact that he was ethnically Asii. The Kushan monarchs ruled over a diverse group of people, such as Indian natives of the Punjab region, Iranian peoples in old Bactria, Parthian people, the Saka, and the Yuezhi people who are considered Transoxanian.
Page 400: By the 3rd century AD, the Kushan Empire was already in decline. The 3rd-century Assyrian text called Book of the Laws of the Land stated that the Kushan kings were only rulers of Bactria. The Kushans allegedly only had local status when King Ardashir I overthrew Artabanus IV of Parthia and founded the new Sassanid Empire in 226 AD. The 9th-century historian Muhammad ibn Jarir al-Tabari claimed that the King of Kushan submitted to Ardashir I after he conquered Balkh and Khwarezm. A Kushan King is said to have given his daughter in marriage to the Sassanian king Hormizd II (r. 301–319 AD). By the 5th century those calling themselves Kushans were but petty chieftains in Balkh and Gandhara and were, more importantly, no longer of the original royal lineage.
Page 403: Despite political changes and the fact that an ethnically-Asii xihou prince from Guishuang (Kushan) conquered and absorbed the Da Yuezhi, the Chinese referred to all people living in the Oxus River valley of Bactria simply as "Yuezhi" people. People from this region and the Xiao Yuezhi still living in Gansu had their individual names amended with a "Zhi" as the initial syllable. This system actually applied to all foreigners names which were "transliterated into polysyllabic terms" to indicate the country of origin they came from. For example, since Parthia was called "Anxi" by the Chinese, a person from Parthia would be given a name by the Chinese starting with an "An", whereas Sogdians from Kangju would be given a name starting with "Kang" by the Chinese, and people from Tianzhu or India would be given a name starting with "Zhu" by the Chinese. To illustrate this point, the Kushan monk Lokaksema, despite being from Gandhara, was called 支婁迦讖 Zhī Lóujiāchèn by the Chinese; notice the "Zhi" at the beginning of his name.

Akira's Book[edit]

Akira, Hirakawa. (1998). A History of Indian Buddhism: From Sakyamani to Early Mahayana. Translated by Paul Groner. New Delhi: Jainendra Prakash Jain At Shri Jainendra Press. ISBN 8120809556.

An Shigao and Lokaksema[edit]

Page 247-248: According to legend, after Emperor Ming of Han (r. 57–75 AD) had a startling dream about a golden man in 67 AD, he sent emissaries to the Uyghurs to inquire what this dream might have meant. Allegedly, two foreign monks, Jiashemoteng (Kāśyapa Mātanga?) and Zhu Falan (Dharmaratna?), were brought to China to translate Buddhist texts. This was supposedly the book Sishier zhangjing , or the Sutra of Forty-two Chapters. However, it is now confirmed that the Sutra of Forty-two Chapters contains excerpts of sutras that were written at a later date, thus throwing doubt that this legend involving Emperor Ming and these monks ever occurred.
Page 248: Although there were perhaps 1st century AD Sanskrit Buddhist translations into Chinese, we do know as a fact that during the reigns of Emperor Huan of Han (r. 146–168) and Emperor Ling of Han (r. 168–189) the Parthian monk An Shigao came to China from Persia and translated thirty-four Hinayana texts into forty Chinese fascicles.
Page 248: In the same century, a monk from the Kushan Empire known as Zhi Luojiachen, or Lokaksema, translated fourteen works into twenty-seven Chinese fascicles. Modern scholars are of the consensus that at least twelve of these fourteen works are genuine translations by Lokaksema. Although he arrived in China earlier, the period of 178 to 198 seems to be the era where he was actively translating Sanskrit materials into Chinese.
Page 248: Among the various works that Lokaksema translated was the Aṣṭasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā (Chinese: 道行般若經 Dào Xíng Bānruò Jīng, English: Perfection of Wisdom in 8,000 Lines). Lokaksema's version is almost identical to a translation of the same text by Kumārajīva (an Indian monk from Kucha) in the year 408. This means that by Lokaksema's time, this Buddhist text had already reached its finalized form.
Page 251: Among the Buddhist concepts which Lokaksema introduced to China through his translated works were the perfection of wisdom, Akshobhya Buddha, Amitābha Buddha (of Pure Land Buddhism), the Shurangama Sutra, the Pratyutpanna Sutra, and teachings about Manjusri.
Page 251: At the same time Lokaksema was translating these works into Chinese during Emperor Ling of Han's reign, the Parthian monk An Xuan was busy translating the Ugradattapariprcchā, or the Fajing jing, into Chinese.

Literature[edit]

Hardy's book on Sima Qian[edit]

Hardy, Grant. (1999). Worlds of Bronze and Bamboo: Sima Qian's Conquest of History. New York: Columbia University Press. ISBN 0231113048.

Introduction: Why History?[edit]

Page 1-3 In 1975, among a number of Qin Dynasty graves that were discovered at Shuihudi, Yunmeng County, Hubei Province was a grave of a Qin archivist and chronicler named Xi in Tomb 11; his identity was presumed to be Xi due to the Biannianji (Chronicle Record) text which was placed under the head of the corpse like a pillow and the corpse's age roughly matching that of the man Xi described in biographical notices of the text, i.e. born in the forty-fifth year of King Zhao (262 BC). His chronicle covered events of the State of Qin and Qin Dynasty from 306 to 217 BC.
Page 3: QUOTE: "In this case, a work of history has filled an intriguing function. Whne faced with a daunting, unknown, and perhaps terrifying future, Xi attempted to gain control of his situation with an appeal to history. By mastering the past through a personalized chronicle, he firmly grounded his own life in the greater context of the history of the state he had served. History afforded him a clear identity, a sense of purpose, and a record of obstacles that had already been overcome. The state of Qin had, durig the last hundred years, brought order out of political chaos in its inexorable drive for unification. With the Chronological Record under his head, Xi was similarly ready to wrest order from whatever chaos might await him."
Page 4: QUOTE: "By the time of the Qin dynasty the Chinese had accumulated enviable traditions of mythology, divination, ritual, philosophy, and protoscientific analyses of the natural world, any one of which he could have employed to discover and fix his place in the cosmos. But his choice of history was perhaps not unexpected. From earliest times, Chinese civilization has been uncommonly bound to its past, and it can claim the longest, most elaborately documented historiographical tradition in the world. Indeed, the fixation with continuing and interpreting the record of the past has been both one of China's chief glories and one of its major sources of difficulty in adapting to the modern world of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries."
Page 4: QUOTE: "A little more than a hundred years after Xi was buried with his history, another historical text, also written on bamboo slips, was buried by its author, Sima Qian (145? – 86? B.C.E.), for safekeeping. The Shiji (Records of the scribes) was Sima's attempt to bring order to the whole world of human history, and although he was still alive at the time of the Shiji's interment, he was exquisitely aware of the personal cost incurred in its production. In order to have enough time to finish the Shiji, Sima had opted for castration rather than the death sentence imposed after he had attempted to defend a fellow official from the emperor's wrath. By doing so, he brought his family line to an end, heaped shame on himself and his father, and imperiled his own posthumous condition. The Shiji is thus his vindication, his offering to his father, and the metaphorical son that would carry on his name. The Shiji was to have a profound impact on the historical consciousness of the Chinese, but before we examine in detail the circumstances of Sima Qian's writing of this text, it may be useful to review some of the cultural factors that impelled him to turn to history."

The Role of History in Chinese Culture[edit]

Page 5: Hardy identifies ancestor worship, Confucianism, and bureaucracy as the main factors which made gave the study of history a dominant role in the culture of China. From Chinese civilization's very beginnings in the Shang Dynasty, the divinatory oracle bone script writings scratched onto oracle bones display the Chinese emphasis given to ancestors by posing questions to their spirits and determining the ancestral spirits' roles and interventions in everyday life. The Chinese looked to these spirits for guidance and aid. QUOTE: "It is important to note that this appeal to the past was not especially esoteric, for the dead were conceived of as acting in the present, and the sense of their presence was given concrete form by the use of impersonators who took their places at the ritual feasts and sacrifices of a clan."
Page 5-6: Respect for one's ancestors, an emulation expressed by song and story, could be used to subordinate the young to their elders, since the latter would become ancestral deities on the moment of their death.
Page 6: QUOTE: "When the Zhou people defeated the Shang and began a new dynasty, they were quick to renounce the claim of innovation; instead, they portrayed themselves as the inheritors and restorers of a tradition that had fallen into decline. Likewise, when the Zhou dynasty weakend and the traditional convergence of political, religious, and lineage authority gave way to the competition, usurpation, and chaos of the Warring States era (403–221 B.C.E.), most of the strategists and philosophers who arose to resist the increasing tide of warfare and political strife argued for their various remedies by appealing to historical precedents. Confucians looked back to the golden age of the early Zhou dynasty; Mohists fastened on the age of the legendary emperor Yu as their ideal; and Daoists looked back even further to a time before organized government. It seemed obvious to many that what was called for was not new measures but, rather, the tried and proven methods of the past. As Confucius famously noted, 'I transmit, not create; I am faithful to and love antiquity.'"
Page 6: (look here at User:PericlesofAthens/Sandbox Cambridge3#Later Han for Ban Gu's Legalist attitude to match) QUOTE: "The idea that the harmonious organization of society had already been achieved by the ancestors was a powerful argument, and the appeal to the past was so pervasive that even the Legalists, who brusquely rejected anything old as outdated and useless, at times stooped to appealing to historical precedent to support their rejection of historical precedent. Accordingly, the Book of Lord Shang argues:"
- QUOTE: "As rulers, King Tang and King Wu did not follow the ancients and yet they came into power; but the destruction of the Xia and Shang dynasties occurred despite the fact that they did not alter the customs. Therefore you need have no doubts: turning from the ancients is not necessarily bad, and following custom does not guarantee increasing good."
Page 7: QUOTE: "Political advisers scrambled to dress up their arguments with historical allusions, and the result was greater confusion as people cited alternative traditions (in some cases creating more ocnvenient versions of the past) or sought to understand how contradictory and incomplete records could be used with certainty or deplored the whole process...The intense argumentation that accompanied the competition of Warring States scholars for positions of power and influence at various courts eventually led to the development of a historical professionalism, since arguments could be won if a king could be convinced that one's historical references were more accurate than those offered by one's rivals or if another scholar's claim to knowledge was demonstrably spurious. The Confucians—whose recommendations that kings personally conform to the ethical standards of the past had never made them popular—were the vanguards of this movement. Confucianism, therefore, can serve as a heading for the second cluster of factors that encouraged the emphasis on history that characterizes Chinese civilization."
Page 7: QUOTE: "Confucius himself recognized that the records of the Xia and Shang dynasties were too sparse to allow the reconstruction of their customs, but he considered the current Zhou dynasty—still in existence, though much weakened, after almost six hundred years—to be the culmination of earlier traditions, and Zhou practices could be documented. Confucius and his followers therefore set about to gather together the available historical sources on divination, poetry, ritual, official documents, and chronicles, and they edited these records into the five Confucian classics: the Classic of Change, Classic of Poetry, Classic of Documents, Record of the Ritualists, and Spring and Autumn Annals. They then made themselves experts on the transmission, interpretation, and historical contexts of these writings. As Confucian teachers and commentaries on the classics multiplied, what had once been the common heritage of Chinese civilization assumed a decidedly Confucian bent."
Page 7: QUOTE: "Actually, this brief synopsis owes a great deal to Sima Qian's own historical and heroic reconstruction of Confucius's labors. As Stephen Durrant has admirably documented, the process of compiling and canonizing the Confucian classics took several centuries, and many of the details surrounding the creation of these texts, including the identity of editors and redactors, remain unclear."
Page 8: QUOTE: "Within six years of founding the Han Dynasty, Emperor Gaozu turned to the Confucian expert Shusun Tong to create his court ritual, and during the reign of Emperor Wu (141–87 B.C.E.) official positions were set up for experts in the Five Classics. Backed by the full authority of the state, Confucianism gained a prominence that carried it through, with only a few lapses, until the end of the imperial age in 1911. The ascendance of Confucianism guaranteed the continuing dominance of reverential attitudes toward history as described in the texts edited by Confucians, and the number of both Confucians and texts increased through the centuries."
Page 8: QUOTE: "In applying the labels of Daoist, Legalist, Mohist, and Confucian to trends of the Warring States era, I am following the broad classifications that Chinese scholars invented in the Han dynasty. Before that time, schools and positions were more fluid and eclectic, and there are surprising similarities between rivals as well as fierce controversies in what we now consider a coherent school. For example, even a Confucian as orthodox as Mencius could state, 'If one were to completely believe the Classic of Documents, it would be better not to have the book at all. As for the 'Wu Cheng' chapter, I can only accept two or three bamboo slips of it.' Nevertheless, the individuals whom we group together as Confucian did share certain general understandings of historical evidence and historical change, and these ideas retained their currency throughout the imperial era."
Page 8-9: QUOTE: "Foremost among these concepts was the 'Mandate of Heaven' (tian ming), which offered a moral explanation for dynastic change in which the rather impersonal force of tian, or Heaven, granted its seal of approval to a virtuous man who was thereby authorized to rebel against a wicked and corrupt tyrant. This pattern was repeated as strong and wise dynastic founders were eventually succeeded by descendants whose cruelty and addiction to pleasure obliged Heaven to take back its charge and bestow it on someone more deserving. The paradigmatic example of this pattern is preserved in the Classic of Documents, in which the first king of the Zhou dynasty explains to the officials of defeated Shang that what he has done is no different from what the Shang founder did to the Xia dynasty. This appeal to precedent for legitimacy eventually led to the production of a long line of official histories, the twenty-six zhengshi, for it was incumbent on new regimes to document the evils of their defeated predecessors."
Page 9: QUOTE: "Confucianism is often characterized as a practical, 'this-worldly' school of thought, because Confucius stressed ethics and social relations and had very little to say about abstract ideals, grand philosophical systems, incredible phenomena, or an afterlife. This pragmatic attitude colored the Confucian reading and writing of history. History was valued for its didactic lessons, for its descriptions of individuals whose dealings with those around them could be categorized as good or evil. Indeed, the dramatic interplay of individuals was seen as the driving force behind historical change. By reading history, one could understand society and find appropriate models for the conduct of life. The pragmatism and rationalism of Confucians were also evident in their dislike of mythology, which was regularly excluded from their histories or at least transformed into something more sensible. Miraculous claims were disparaged, and legendary figures (especially those put forward as heroes by rival philosophical schools) and even gods were often stripped of their supernatural attributes and given historical dates and pedigrees."
Page 9: QUOTE: "By transforming myth into history, Confucians not only rejected mythological thought, but they also denied it a place in educated discourse. As a result, there was no sharp divide between the age of heroes and the present. Unlike ancient Greece where everyone acknowledged that people no longer walked and talked with the gods as the heroes of the Iliad had, in China the remote ages of the past were not thought of as qualitatively different from the present. Things continued for the most part as they always had, and if the achievements of the past ages no longer held sway, it was still theoretically possible to follow the ancients exactly. Of course, the absence of a distinctly supernatural, transcendent realm was not entirely due to the efforts of Confucians. The Chinese never really had a creation myth that posited the existence of a transcendent creator, and the cult of ancestor worship also narrowed the gap between the mundane and the holy."
Page 10: QUOTE: "Respect for the past was also sharpened by what eventually became a founding myth of Confucian studies, the famous burning of the books by the First Emperor in 213 B.C.E. When the unifier of China found that scholars dared to criticize his achievements, he sought to cut off the basis for those criticisms by forbidding the private ownership of all texts except practical handbooks of medicine, divination, and agriculture. Proscribed texts were collected and burned. If Confucian accounts can be believed, works of history were a primary target of this literary purge, which was soon followed by the mass execution of more than 460 Confucians, who became martyrs for the cause. Derk Bodde has argued that the loss of ancient literature due to this notorious edict was not so uniquely devastating as it has often been made out to be, and in fact, the First Emperor's actions had an unexpected consequence:"
- QUOTE (of Derk Bodde): "One othe very important effect, however, which the Burning of the Books has had, is that far from blotting out antiquity, as Li Ssu [Li Si, the adviser who first suggested the ban] had intended, it has made the Chinese inordinately conscious and interested in their past. The very fact that literature had been destroyed, made the Han scholars bend every effort toward the recovery of this literature. The result has been the development of what may almost be called a cult of books in China, and a tremendous reinforcement of the interest, already strong, of the historically minded Chinese in their historical records."
Page 10: QUOTE: "Like the Confucians, the First Emperor realized that control of the past was an integral component of political power in China, and this leads us to a third cluster of factors, the role of the state bureaucracy in promoting historical thinking. As Etienne Balazs has pointed out, in China 'history was written by officials for officials.'"
Page 10-11: QUOTE: "Perhaps the term incipient bureaucracy better fits the conditions of Sima Qian's China, but from earliest times, Chinese rulers looked to genealogy, ritual, and portents from Heaven to confirm the legitimacy of their administration, and they gathered about them educated officials who were capable of performing ceremonies and recording significant events. The Shang kings had their diviners, who carefully preserved the oracle bones for future reference, sometimes later adding notations of just how a prediction had been fulfilled, and the early Zhou court had employed numerous record keepers as well. Scribes (shi) of the Spring and Autumn era are mentioned, sometimes by name, in the Zuo zhuan, and since this is a Confucian text, the courage, independence, and strict moral judgment of these individuals are duly celebrated."
Page 11: In addition to aiding a ruler by keeping record of revenues, population numbers, and legal procedures, the scribes of Zhou Dynasty China could also use the historical record to criticize a ruler by recalling his bad deeds.
Page 11-12: The Classic of Documents emphasized the need to use the earlier actions of Shang Dynasty rulers as metaphorical 'mirrors' which could be used by contemporary Zhou Dynasty rulers to judge their own actions and as guiding examples for how they should act. QUOTE: "The image of history as a mirror by which one could find an identity and correct one's faults recurs frequently and is cited by Mozi, Mencius, Hanfeizi, and in the Narratives of the States. Later, one of the most influential synopses of Chinese history went by the title of the Comprehensive Mirror for Aid in Government (1084 C.E.)."
Page 13: QUOTE: "If citing noble examples of old, warning about the Mandate, and threatening the emperor's descendants did not persuade a ruler to follow their advice, bureaucrats could always hold out the judgment of future generations as an incentive. The extensive reports, correspondence, edicts, and memorials to the throne that were necessary to the functioning of a large bureaucracy were carefully preserved, both for practical reasons and also as political weapons. Rulers were encouraged to take responsibility for their recorded actions, and bureaucrats tried to ensure that documentation was as detailed as possible. Once again, this practice followed past precedents. The Zuo zhuan reports that in 671 B.C.E. an adviser tried to dissuade his king from taking a ritually inappropriate journey with the words, 'The ruler's travels must be recorded. If what is recorded does not follow the standards, how will this be viewed by your posterity?' The persuasiveness of this argument depended on the assumption that future generations would continue to care about the past."

Sima Qian and History[edit]

Page 14: QUOTE: "About 108 B.C.E. Sima Qian, the Grand Astrologer at the court of Emperor Wu, turned to history and began to write a book that would summarize in a comprehensive and systematic fashion the history of the world from its legendary origins to his own day. Like Confucianism, Sima Qian both drew on and extended the historical consciousness of Chinese culture, and in the end he produced an account so persuasive and so tantalizingly unfinished that for two thousand years educated Chinese have read it, argued over it, admired it, written continuations, and tried to imitate its organization and its literary style. Eventually, the Shiji, Sima Qian's text, took its place as the first of the twenty-six Standard Histories (zhengshi), all of which adopted Sima's basic format and approach and together constitute our first source for imperial Chinese history. Homer H. Dubs once estimated that the first twenty-five Standard Histories included more than 20 million characters, a scholarly translation of which would run to about 450 volumes of 500 pages each."
Page 14-15: Sima Qian divided his historical work into basic annals, chronological tables, treatises, hereditary houses, and categorized biographies. This was actually a synthesis of different historical organizational types found previously in China. The Qing Dynasty historian Zhao Yi (1727–1814) commented on this:
- QUOTE: "In ancient times, the historian on the left recorded the words of the emperor and the historian on the right recorded his actions. The record of words became the Classic of Documents and the record of actions became the Spring and Autumn Annals. Later these developed into two types of history—narrative and annalistic. In narrative histories, each chapter narrates one event, but is not able to include everything from that time period. Conversely, annalistic histories are not able to concentrate on single individuals and observe the beginnings and endings of each one. Sima Qian carefully considered the whole of history and invented the form of comprehensive history (quanshi), which revealed the commonplace and uncovered examples through the basic annals, which narrate kings and emperors; the hereditary houses, which recount nobility and kingdoms; the ten tables, which link times and events; the eight treatises, which detail institutions; and the categorized biographies, which record human affairs. Afterwards, the rulers, subjects, government, events, and worthies of a time period were not lost, but were all gathered within one compilation. Ever since this model was first established, historians have not been able to surpass its scope. It is the highest standard for true historians."
Page 15: The core difference between later works of the Twenty-Six Histories and the Shiji is the fact that later histories focused only on one dynasty, not the history of China from its origins to the present. However, the Zizhi Tongjian by Song Dynasty scholar Sima Guang in the 11th century did cover 1,326 years of history. Also, the historians Zheng Qiao (1108–1166) and Ma Duanlin (1245–1322) added new topics within Sima Qian's treatise genre, such as changes in tax codes, government organizations, and penal laws over the course of several dynasties.
Page 16: Why did Sima Qian pursue history? His culture which promoted historical learning was one factor; but it also had much to do with the difficulties he faced in life. Everything we know about his life actually comes from just two documents, his autobiography in the Shiji's last chapter (chapter 130) and a letter he wrote to Ren An which is preserved in the Book of Han.
Page 16-17: Due to his recounting of the deeds of his ancestors, which included prominent scribes of the Zhou Dynasty, Sima Qian was influenced by ancestor worship. His father, Sima Tan, became Grand Astrologer from 140 to 110 BC, studying philosophy and astronomy. Although Sima Tan had written an essay which seemed to favor Daoism, Sima Qian was clearly a follower of Confucianism with all his praise of Confucius and his book's QUOTE: "rationalized mythology, its tables imitating the Spring and Autumn Annals, and its adoption of the dynastic cycle based on Mandate of Heaven theories."
Page 17: However, in the Records of the Grand Historian, Sima Qian records his father's deathbed regrets and wishes for his son that greatly parallel Confucian values. He lamented his inability to participate in the feng sacrifice at Mount Tai. He advised his son to uphold filial piety and imparted on his son to complete an unofficial historical work that he began in order to honor their ancestors. Sima Tan also cited Confucius and wanted Sima Qian to even correct and continue the Confucian classics and become the successor of Confucius (i.e. the "Second Confucius"); this would be considered pure blasphemy to later conventional Confucian scholars. Sima Qian, perhaps in an act to disassociate himself from such a heretical stance, merely discussed and commented on the Spring and Autumn Annals (erroneously attributed to Confucius and his disciples' editing), which had a huge influence on his written work of the Shiji. QUOTE: "Sima Qian appears to subscribe to the view that Confucius, frustrated by his lack of success, encoded his moral judgments in the text of the Annals, hoping that they would serve as a model for later rulers. We might conclude that Sima similarly intended his history to serve as a moral handbook and to convey his analysis of the patterns of historical change, were it not for his explicit disavowal at the end: 'If you compare my history with the Annals, you are mistaken.'"
Page 18-20: Sima Qian's work was a private one that was circulated privately after his death; it was not an official history sponsored by the court like the later major dynastic histories. The astrologers at court, despite having access to court archives, were not expected to take part in court debates on bureaucratic matters; thus Sima's flirtation with bureaucratic affairs cost him in 99 BC. When Li Ling (Han Dynasty) surrendered to the Xiongnu after promised reinforcements failed to arrive, Emperor Wu of Han was furious with him due to the fact that he expected his generals to either win or die. Sima Qian argued that Li Ling, who was a brilliant commander with many successes, merely wanted to keep himself alive in order to continue to serve Emperor Wu. This argument implied a criticism of the general who should have led the reinforcements, a general who happened to be the brother of Emperor Wu's current favorite. For this, Sima Qian was charged with "defaming the emperor" and would have been sentenced to death; officials often bought their way out with huge sums of money or they committed suicide before being arrested, but Sima could choose neither option, since he was not rich enough and had promised his father that he would finish his history book. Instead, Sima Qian accepted the disgraceful punishment of castration. His letter to Ren An (another official who found himself in trouble with the law) contained his justification for taking this punishment as the need to finish the Shiji, the unfulfilled work of his father that could be transmuted from a failure into a success (no doubt an act of filial piety to accept castration in order to honor his father's wishes). His Shiji also QUOTE: "not surprisingly exhibits a fascination with the problem of how to criticize rulers and yet survive unscathed."
Page 22-23: Despite some of the more positive things which could be said of Emperor Wu's reign in the Shiji, including his sponsorship of Confucianism and Sima Qian's own involvement in the calendar reform of 104 BC as part of a rejuvenation of the imperial reign and confidence in China, Grant Hardy says that there is a noticeable current of pessimism embedded in the work. Troubled by the far-reaching reforms of Emperor Wu in his military conquests, establishment of new colonial settlements, state monopolies on salt, iron, and currency, raised taxes, and an increase in legal severity, Sima Qian turned to history for answers on how to judge these actions. In veiled criticism of Emperor Wu within the Shiji, QUOTE: "There are hints of profound dissatisfaction with Emperor Wu's economic, military, legal, ritual, and personnel policies, and the lengthy discussion in Sima's autobiography of Confucius's Spring and Autumn Annals highlights this aspect of his work."
Page 23: Another reason that Sima Qian might have wanted to complete the history work of his father was to bring about a restoration, unity, and synthesis to the world. He noted that although the unification of China under Han reversed the dissipation of culture of the late Zhou and had allowed for systematized codes of law, military regulations, the calendar, units of measurements, and rituals, there was still confusion in the scattered sets of history, literature, and philosophy of his day. Sima, in his 526,500 character-long work of 130 chapters, wanted to synthesize Chinese culture and thought in his history and to produce the best historical work to date.

Representing the World[edit]

Page 27: The Histories (Herodotus) of the Greek Herodotus QUOTE: "set the basic pattern of historiography that continues to this day (and, indeed, informs the book you are now holding). A historian, as Herodotus invented the role, is someone who, through a combination of curiosity, intelligence, and questioning, has managed to discover something of the past and then offers the results of these researches to the public in his or her own voice. As we read his Histories, we are constantly aware of the presence of the author at our elbow, telling stories, pointing out this or that, offering judgments, and generally exhibiting the wit, sensibility, and chattiness that makes Herodotus a memorable guide through the past...The role of a historian has been refined since Herodotus's day—more emphasis is now given to the critical reading of sources, to the documentation in the public reporting of research, to the identification of causes, and to the recognition of the historian's own biases—but the central issue remains that of Herodotus."
Page 28: QUOTE: "Historical rhetoric in the West is a mode of persuasion, the object of which is to convince the reader that the historian's account of history reflects the truth, that her reconstruction accurately represents what actually happened."
Page 28: QUOTE: "It is possible to fit Sima Qian's history into this general framework, and early Western sinologists were eager to do so. Trying to convince their audience not only of their own credibility but also of the worth of their subject matter, they naturally stressed those elements of the Shiji that seemed to cast Sima Qian in the expected role. He turned out, not surprisingly, to be a tireless researcher and traveler, an archivist, a critical user of sources, and an 'objective' reporter. He was also blessed with the hallmarks of a great historian: he was a fine storyteller, an innovator, and a compassionate observer of human behavior. There is evidence in the Shiji for each of these characteristics, but taken together they do not fully account for Sima Qian's work, for the Shiji is a very different type of historical text."
Page 28: QUOTE: "The Shiji offers a multiplicity of voices and perspectives, and to read the text is to enter a confusing world of narratives and counternarratives, differing explanations and corrections, and a variety of literary styles and historiographical approaches. It presents neither a unified view of the past nor a consistent interpretation of what history means. This might not be surprising in a book that is a compendium of disparate materials gathered together with a minimum of editorial oversight, and in fact, many scholars have seen the Shiji in this light—the creation of an ambitious editor with too much material and too little time. Yet Sima Qian strenuously creates an identity for himself in the last chapter of the Shiji, which should give us pause. By revealing something of his own biography and motivations, he invites readers to speculate on the connections between his text and his life. By providing a comprehensive overview, chapter by chapter, with comments on why he chose to include each, he suggests that there is, despite appearances, an overarching plan to his method. Finally, by concluding with a few brief but suggestive remarks about the organization of the Shiji, he intimates that there is meaning in the arrangement of his history."
Page 28-29: QUOTE: "It is this last hint that we will be taking up in this chapter, for in trying to determine exactly how the Shiji handles history, it is useful to begin with its most distinctive feature—its structure. Here we will be 'reading' the organization of the Shiji and critiquing previous interpretations, holding off for a while most discussions of specific contents. The structure of the Shiji is complex, and it deliberately calls attention to itself in a way that contrasts with the more straightforward narrations of early Western historians. As we shall see in later chapters, much of the creative tension in the Shiji is due to the conflicting implications of its content and form."

The Structure of the Shiji[edit]

Basic Annals (chaps. 1-12)[edit]

Page 29: QUOTE: "Sima begins with a chapter on the legendary Five Emperors and devotes subsequent chapters to the Xia, Shang, and Zhou dynasties. He rationalizes mythical material, and with the Zhou dynasty, he is able to provide a clear chronology that he continues throughout the rest of the annals section, dating events by the year of the reigning sovereign. A chapter on the state of Qin follows and then the first chapter devoted to an individual ruler, the First Emperor of Qin, who unified China by conquering the states that had gradually gained autonomy as the power of the Zhou kings declined. Thereafter, all the annals describe individual rulers, including Xiang Yu, who managed to gain control of China after the overthrow of the Qin dynasty (even though he never officially became an emperor), and Gaozu, the founder of the Han dynasty. Sima devotes a chapter to Gaozu's wife, Empress Lü, who controlled the government after her husband's death (albeit indirectly through three boy emperors), and then recounts the reigns of rulers up until Emperor Wu, his own sovereign (unfortunately, this chapter has been lost). As his narrative moves closer to his own time, he has more sources to draw on, and from the First Emperor on, we have virtually a year-by-year account of major events of which are described in great detail."

Chronological Tables (chaps. 13-22)[edit]

Page 29-30: QUOTE: "In this section Sima once again covers the entire duration of Chinese history, beginning with the mythical past and continuing throuogh the reign of Emperor Wu, but here he offers very limited descriptions within a comprehensive chronological framework. Each table consists of a grid with time, in varying degrees of specificity, on one axis. The spaces within the grids are usually marked with numbers representing the progress of time by years or months, and these numerals allow readers to calculate just how long feudal lords or princes or government officials kept their positions. In addition, many spaces also include brief notations of events."
Page 30: QUOTE: "The first table is a genealogical chart that traces the family connections of the Five Emperors and the founders of the Xia, Shang, and Zhou dynasties. There are, accordingly, eight rows segmented into columns representing generations (Sima explained that his sources were not adequate to affix actual dates to this table). As each emperor or family receives the Mandate of Heaven, they are elevated to the top row, and their original row becomes blank. When the Zhou dynasty begins, therefore, the eight rows are suddenly transformed into twelve, with the Zhou at the top and the others filled in with the eleven major feudal houses."
Page 30: QUOTE: "This pattern is continued in the next two tables, which represent Chinese history year by year, from 841 to 207 B.C.E. The Zhou house once again takes the upper row, but now there are fourteen rows (two begin blank and then are filled in with the enfeoffment of the dukes of Zheng and Wu). Years are noted along the horizontal axis, and the grid is filled in with the major events in each state, with special notice given to the rulers' ascensions and deaths. Not every space has an event listed, but each does record the year of the current ruler's reign. This, in effect, correlates the calendars of the different states, which were based on the reigns of the local rulers. When a state is destroyed in the incessant fighting that characterizes this period, its row becomes blank. Finally, after 221 B.C.E. when the state of Qin defeats its last rival, the table offers only one space per year."
Page 30-35 (tables on pages 31-34): QUOTE: "In the fourth table, multiple rows reappear (representing nine old feudal houses), and the chaotic events between the death of the First Emperor of Qin in 210 B.C.E. and the founding of the Han in 202 B.C.E. are arranged into columns that mark off the months. This slower pace forces an almost microscopic analysis of these crucial years. When Xiang Yu gains control and enfeoffs his followers, the rows are increased to twenty, one for each of the nineteen subordinate kingdoms and one at the top for the putative emperor. The fifth table resumes the year-by-year coverage of twenty-six kingdoms from the ascension of Gaozu in 206 B.C.E. to 101 B.C.E. As kingdoms are awarded, divided, and taken away, the corresponding rows are filled in or left blank. The years of each local king's reign are numbered, and events are occasionally recorded in the grid, but the most common notation is simply 'came to court'."
Page 35: QUOTE: "The sixth table abruptly changes the pattern and lists 143 fiefs in vertical columns. Time is represented by seven horizontal rows; the top one lists the first individual enfeoffed and the reason for the honor, and the other six represent the reigns of the six major Han rulers. The grid is filled in with notations about the fate of the founders' descendants during these time periods. An eighth row at the bottom lists the order of merit assigned by Empress Lü in 187 B.C.E., and the table as a whole is arranged by chronological order of enfeoffment. This means that time is actually illustrated along both axes; reading from left to right gives the order of the original grants of territory, and reading from top to bottom within a column shows what happened in each fief over time."
Page 35: QUOTE: "The same basic arrangement characterizes the next two tables, which focus on fiefs that were granted by the later emperors. As the time nears Sima Qian's own day, the rows are made up of major chronological subdivisions of Emperor Wu's long reign. The ninth table retains this last chronological framework, but all the kingdoms listed along the top were granted to princes, simply because they were born into the right family."
Page 35: QUOTE: "The last table returns to the year-by-year pattern (with the years along the horizontal axis) and contains four rows with the following labels (from top to bottom); major events, chancellors, generals, and censors. The spaces in the bottom three rows are filled with notations about the men who held these positions. The period covered by this table is 206 B.C.E. to 20 B.C.E., which indicates a rather conspicuous problem, since Sima died around 86 B.C.E., but the portion of the table that can reasonably be attributed to Sima Qian usually is. Another odd feature of this table, which I have never encountered elsewhere in historical writing, is that some of the entries are deliberately printed upside down (these are primarily records of deaths and dismissals)."

Treatises (chaps. 23-30)[edit]

Page 35-36: QUOTE: "The treatises are essays on eight general subjects—ceremonial, music, pitch pipes, the calendar, the heavens, sacrifices, hydrography, and the economy. In the first five, Sima offers a brief hsitory of these topics from ancient times to his own day, which is preceded or followed by a more technical discussion, sometimes borrowed from an earlier source. For example, the bulk of the chapters on ceremonial and music consists of philosophical discourses taken from the philosopher Xunzi and a Confucian text of ritual the Liji, and the 'Treatise on the Heavens' includes a lengthy catalog of stars and descriptions of planetary movement as well as information on divination and the interpretation of celestial phenomena such as eclipses. Some commentators have suggested that several of these chapters were lost and that the borrowed material was added by later interpolators, but this is not necessarily the case, as Sima regularly filled out chapters with long quotations. Nevertheless, these first five treatises are mong the most problematic chapters in the Shiji, with regard to both their technical subject matter and their disputed textual history."
Page 36: QUOTE: "The 'Treatise on Pitch Pipes' is a case in point. Pitch pipes were used in music, divination, calendar making, and military strategy, but the chapter in the Shiji is confusing, and its authenticity has long been suspect. The treatise begins with a discussion of military affairs and concludes with technical descriptions of the eight winds and twelve pitch pipes. There is evidence that Sima originally wrote a 'Treatise on Military Matters' that was later lost, but the introductory discussion may be from Sima's brush, and the rest of the treatise may have originally been part of the 'Treatise on the Calendar.'"
Page 36: QUOTE: "These last three treatises consist of detailed accounts of the actions of the Qin and Han rulers with regard to state sacrifices, canals and dikes, and state finances. Only these treatises provide extended narratives, and not coincidentally, they give considerable attention to the policies of Emperor Wu. In fact, after the 'Basic Annals of Emperor Wu' (chap. 12) was lost, it was replaced by a long excerpt from the 'Treatise on Feng and Shen Sacrifices' (chap. 28), so that in the current editions of the Shiji, most of this chapter appears twice."

Hereditary Houses (chaps. 31-60)[edit]

Page 36-37: QUOTE: "In this section we once again start from ancient Chinese history and work our way toward Sima's own day, chapter by chapter, but this time the focus is on the families of feudal lords. Each chapter spans several generations, and the first fifteen hereditary houses are actually histories of the major feudal states in the Zhou dynasty, in which major events are narrated briefly and dated according to the local chronology. Unlike the tables, the chronology is not comprehensive. That is, there is not a notation or a space for every year; rather, here the events are primary and the chronology secondary. The first two hereditary houses begin with Shang dynasty progenitors, but after that each of the fifteen early chapters takes place almost entirely within the Zhou dynasty, and states that play major roles toward the end of the dynasty tend to appear later in the hereditary houses section. Thus the information within the chapters is arranged chronologically, and the chapters themselves follow a basic chronological sequence, although there is considerable overlapping."
Page 37: QUOTE: "The amount of detail accorded to different events varies considerably. Much of the first half of the hereditary houses section consists of extremely brief, dated notices (that is, '20th year, Duke Mu of Qin died'), but occasionally incidents are narrated at length, and when an event involves more than one state, it may be noted in several different chapters. In addition, some events that would seem to be internal affairs are noted in the hereditary houses of other states. For example, the assassination of Duke Yin of Lu in 712 B.C.E. is noted in seven hereditary houses. This device helps coordinate the local chronologies that are unique to each chapter, and it may also indicate that a particular event was influential abroad."
Page 37-38: QUOTE: "The pattern shifts somewhat with the hereditary houses of Zhao, Wei, and Hann [sic] (chaps. 43-45), which were not ancient feudal states. Rather, they were families who managed to carve out domains from the wreckage of the state of Jin in 403 B.C.E. Similarly, the next hereditary house, that of Tian Jingzhongwan, follows the fortunes of a family who switched states (originally from Chen, they usurped power in Qi in 481 B.C.E.), and the next two chapters recount the lives of individuals without states—Confucius, who was a peripatetic philosopher, and Chen She, who led the first rebellion against the Qin dynasty. The remaining hereditary houses are those of persons who gained prominence (and usually a fief) when the Han dynasty partially restored the old feudal order. Each chapter describes the achievements that led to that honor and then continues its narration through to the descendants who eventually lost the fief. The nine hereditary houses of families who were honored by Gaozu were divided into those who were related to him (chaps. 49-52), and those who earned their fiefs through merit (chaps. 53-57). The last three hereditary houses describe individuals who were enfeoffed by later emperors."
Page 38: QUOTE: "Two hereditary houses are anomalous in interesting ways. The 'Hereditary House of Chen Ping' (chap. 56) incorporates brief biographies of two men who were unrelated to Chen but were his close colleagues in the government. Other hereditary houses tend to focus on a continuous family line, although four of the hereditary houses on Han royalty contain sequential biographies of men related in various ways, and the chapter on Han empresses (chap. 49) offers the biographies of five women, one right after another. The other unusual hereditary house is the last, that of three sons of Emperor Wu, which consists almost entirely of memorials to the throne and edicts."

Categorized Biographies (chaps. 61-130)[edit]

Page 38: QUOTE: "The last and largest section of the Shiji (making up about a third of the total work) also begins with figures from the remote past and continues toward Sima's time, ending with the autobiography of the historian himself. We can classify these chapters as follows:"
- Chapter 61: Shang Dynasty
- Chapters 62-66: Spring and Autumn Period of the Zhou Dynasty
- Chapters 67-84: Warring States Period of the Zhou Dynasty
- Chapters 85-88: Qin Dynasty
- Chapters 89-91: Chu-Han contention
- Chapters 92-109, 111-112, 117-118, 120: Han Dynasty (rough chronological order)
- Chapters 110, 113-116, 123: Description of barbarian peoples (which often focus on individual leaders)
- Chapters 86, 119, 121-122, 124-129: Group biographies of assassin-retainers, compassionate officials, Confucian scholars, cruel officials, local bosses, imperial catamites, jesters, diviners (by lucky days and cracked turtle shells), and businessmen
- Chapter 130: The autobiography of Sima Qian
Page 38-39: QUOTE: "Most biographies begin by specifying their subject's native region and zi name and end with a personal comment by Sima Qian. Otherwise their contents are quite heterogeneous. Some provide full accounts of their subjects' lives, whereas others offer only a few anecdotes. Some consist almost entirely of primary sources such as letters or poems; some include lengthy quotations from earlier works like the Intrigues of the Warring States; and others appear to be original narratives written by Sima Qian."
Page 39: QUOTE: "Furthermore, how individuals are incorporated into biographical chapters varies considerably. Biographies may be devoted to single figures, or they may include accounts of two or more persons—sometimes in separate sequential narratives and sometimes intermingled. In addition, several chapters are explicitly devoted to groups of people united by common native region, temperament, or profession. These distinctions cannot always be determined from the titles of the chapters. For example, 'The Biographies of Mengzi and Xun Qing' (chap. 74) actually functions like a group biography of philosophers. Sima's comments occurs at the beginning of the chapter, and the thoughts of four men are described in some detail, with brief information provided on eight additional philosophers. Likewise, 'The Biographies of General Wei and the Cavalry General' (chap. 111) concludes with brief career summaries of eighteen Han generals."
Page 39-40: Sima's original purpose of bunching two different persons into the same biographical chapter seem to escape the logic of modern scholars; for example, bunching the story of Qu Yuan, a statesman of the Warring States, into the same chapter on the story of Master Jia, a Han Dynasty scholar. It also perplexes modern scholars that Sima Qian would not devote any chapter to some prominent figures in Chinese history while devoting generous amount of space to failed assassins and dissidents.
Page 40: Surprisingly, the autobiography chapter on Sima Qian doesn't have much to say about Sima Qian and is mostly concerned with the writings of Sima Tan and the deathbed wishes of Sima Tan imparted to his son, as well as a lengthy discussion on the Spring and Autumn Annals.
Page 41: Despite the fact that at least part of the Shiji is the work of Sima Tan and not Sima Qian, that interpolators might have edited his works a bit, and that Sima Qian borrowed wholesale from other works in quotations that were used to fill out sections of his own book, QUOTE: "the overall structure of the Shiji seems clear enough, and we can be reasonably assured that the form of the Shiji today is approximately that intended by Sima Qian, since it matches the chapter-by-chapter description that he thoughtfully provided in his last chapter."

Reading the Structure[edit]

Page 42: Sima Qian presented a history of the world as he knew it in his Shiji, providing year-by-year accounts from 841 BC onward in at least one chronological table, coverage of China's various regions and prominent families, personas, and even barbarian peoples on the periphery of Chinese civilization. QUOTE: "Within China itself, the focus is on the political and military elite, but Sima expands his account to include chapters on other individuals who possess different types of authority—doctors, philosophers, and diviners who have specialized knowledge, businessmen who enjoy economic power, local bosses who enjoy political influence that does not come under the jurisdiction of the emperor, poets who speak with extraordinary refinement and perception, and assassins who despite failure exhibit exceptional loyalty and determination. The Shiji thus offers a sociologically rich portrait of China, in which more than four thousand persons are mentioned by name. But this is not all."
Page 42: QUOTE: "In addition to portraying the human world, Sima also reserves space in his history for the natural world. The heavens are described in encyclopedic detail; spiritual beings are enumerated; and the treatises on pitch pipes and hydrography consider the operations of natural forces. Of course, the topics covered in the treatises are not unconnected to the human world—the heavens respond to human goodness and wickedness with omens; spirits require appropriate sacrifices; floods must be dealt with by governments; and pitch pipes have military uses. Even such human conventions as music and ritual are depicted as deriving their power from rhythms of the cosmos and the depths of human nature. Sima's perspective is firmly grounded in humanity, but the natural world is not entirely alien or indifferent to his concerns."
Page 42-43: QUOTE: "Finally, the comprehensiveness of the topics that Sima takes up in the Shiji is matched by the exhaustive range of his sources. Sima Qian's position at court gave him access to the imperial archives, and he names more than eighty texts that he consulted in composing the Shiji, in addition to numerous memorials, edicts, and stone inscriptions. As he noted in his autobiography, 'Of the remains of literature and ancient affairs scattered throughout the world, there is nothing that has not been exhaustively collected by the Grand Astrologers.' In compiling the Shiji, Sima Qian drew on all available sources to create a history in which everything has its place and everything is connected."
Page 43: QUOTE: "In these passages we see Sima struggling with problems of historical evidence and attempting to develop a critical methodology. He carefully identifies sources, both written and oral, and he evaluated documents by comparing them with texts of known authenticity. In addition, he tried to verify accounts by traveling extensively, personally examining important sites and artifacts, and when possible, interviewing eyewitnesses and reputable local experts. Sima made it a rule not to guess on matters for which he had insufficient evidence (particularly when dealing with ancient history), and he deliberately omitted details of doubtful authenticity. He argued that facts could be properly interpreted only in context and insisted that analyses take into consideration both the beginnings and the ends of historical processes. When he did discover that generally accepted accounts were false, he tried to point out and correct those errors in direct comments. Finally, he cultivated a critical attitude that acknowledged deficiencies in the Confucian classics, and he remained skeptical even of his own impressions."
Page 43-45: However, Sima does not follow a consistent narrative throughout the Shiji, and neither does he assert his voice, opinion, or commentary above other voices and sources that are represented in the Shiji (such as his father's, Sima Tan). Due to this, it is difficult to distinguish which thoughts or comments are genuinely Sima Qian's and which ones are not. Sima did clearly provide comments at the end of chapters to remind his audience that he was the organizer of the material, but he also fails to fully explain his narrative and simply reports what has been said by others without comparing arguments and checking for validity. Thus, it is hard to determine how Sima Qian truly judged the events in his historical record. QUOTE: "In the end, Sima's is simply one voice among many."
Page 45: The style of the Shiji differs from Western histories in that it does not sound like a transcription of a lecture, like the recordings of Herodotus as he gave public speeches about history. QUOTE: "The closest that Sima Qian comes to this personal tone is in the preface he provides for the chronological tables, the treatises, and a few of the group biographies...But for the most part, Sima seems intent on forcing readers to compare and evaluate explanations themselves, to become their own historians."
Page 45-46: There are other problems as well. Instead of flowing like a narrative, the Shiji often shows more concern with being chronologically accurate, thus functioning more or less like a chronicle in many respects. Plus, there is a problem with overlapping material, since four of the five major divisions of the Shiji begin at the same period of time, the legendary period, and end at Emperor Wu's reign. Likewise, a broad spectrum of chapters often describe the same people, places, and events, forcing the reader to digest the entire Shiji before they gain a truly complete and comprehensive view of any single person, place, or event.
Page 46-47: Due to the wide range of sources that Sima used, some of the sources he relied on and presented in his writing actually presented two or more contradicting versions of a historical event that Sima either did not recognize or did not have the time to amend or comment on. Thus, there are some factual inconsistencies within his book.
Page 47: Despite all of this, Grant Hardy believes that QUOTE: "Sima Qian's notions of accuracy, consistency, evidence, and rationality were similar to ours. I also believe that the Shiji, as we have it today, reflects a coherent conception of history and that Sima Qian brought his project to a successful conclusion. In other words, I think the fragmented and overlapping accounts that we find in the Shiji were deliberate and serve a well-thought-out historiographical purpose. Finally, I believe that Sima was a very active editor. Not every detail in the Shiji is the result of some conscious choice (after all, the Shiji is a very long book, and Sima Qian did not have the luxury of a word processor), but I nevertheless assume that the Shiji is, to a large extent, what Sima intended it to be. His ideas and judgments can be discerned in the arrangement of his material, as well as in specific statements."
Page 47-48: QUOTE: "My solution is that the Shiji is a 'reconstruction of the past'...It is, in fact, a textual microcosm. When we hold the Shiji in our hands, we are holding a model of the past itself, which intentionally replicates, though to a lesser degree, the confusing inconsistencies, the lack of interpretive closure, and the bewildering details of raw historical data." Read the next section "A Bamboo World" to get an idea of what he is talking about here; very fascinating!

A Bamboo World[edit]

Page 48-49: In his burial tomb, Qin Shi Huang had a raised-relief map model of his empire, complete with palaces, towers, mountains, and flowing rivers in representation of the real thing, all laid out on the floor of his tomb while the ceiling was decorated as to represent the heavenly constellations of stars. QUOTE: "The point of this particular model of the cosmos seems to be control. The First Emperor sought to represent his power and authority in concrete form. His ability to create and organize this miniature China reflected his dominion over its real counterpart, and his authority was more directly manifest in the vast resources of material and labor that he was able to summon for its construction. In addition, this model also had a ritual function. After his death, the First Emperor intended that his spirit (as a deified ancestor) would continue his domination of actual China by means of this intricate model."
Page 49: QUOTE: "Our account is taken from 'The Annals of the First Emperor of Qin' in the Shiji, and Sima Qian had reason to disparage the world model of the First Emperor, for it was a rival to his own work. The Shiji is itself a model of the cosmos, which includes a comprehensive representation of the heavens, China's waterways and geographical regions, and the empire's various officials. Like the First Emperor's tomb, it also preserves treasures, this time literary and philosophical, from throughout Chinese history, and it was similarly intended as a monument that would stand for all time. Sima concludes his history by noting that he has buried a copy in a famous mountain, where it will 'await the sages and gentlemen of later generations.' Unlike the First Emperor's tomb, however, the Shiji offers a version of the world based on a moral order, where events are produced by historical causes rather than by imperial fiat."
Page 49-50: The First Emperor's tomb was an image of a world created and maintained by bronze—the force of arms—whereas Sima Qian's Shiji offered an alternative depiction of the world, inscribed on bamboo slips and regulated by scholarship and morality (themselves often the product of books written on bamboo). If Sima's creation could not match the First Emperor's in coercive political power, it far surpassed it in influence, and eventually the famous mausoleum was known and understood by the place it held in Sima Qian's all-encompassing, bamboo world.
Page 50: QUOTE: "Three considerations lead me to regard the Shiji as a microcosmic model. First is its comprehensiveness, which I have already noted. The Shiji is a book in which everything and everyone have a place. But it is more than just a handbook or a catalog, for its constituent parts are arranged into meaningful sequences and clusters. Parallels and correspondences are woven into its structure, which in turn, mirrors the wider world. Whereas most models of the cosmos represent spatial relationships, the Shiji strives to convey temporal connections and social hierarchy, yet it does not manage to incorporate the essentials of human experience in a manner analogous to other models. For instance, one might consider models of a corporate headquarters. In addition to the familiar architectural scale-models, an organizational chart of corporate hierarchy is a useful reduction. The Shiji is like the latter, with the added features of depicting how the chart has changed over time and how different individuals have shaped their positions. If we consider our world system not just as referring to the physical earth but also as including human relationships and history, the Shiji is a fair representation. Also, at a few points Sima's hierarchical mapping correlates with more traditional cosmological models. For instance, near the conclusion of his autobiography, he writes:
- QUOTE: "As the twenty-eight constellations revolve about the Pole Star, as the thirty spokes come together at the hub, turning in unison without end, so too do the ministers who serve and assist [the king,] attend him like arms and legs. They follow the Way loyally and faithfully, and thus they support and uphold their ruler. So I have made the thirty Hereditary Houses."
Page 50: QUOTE: "In this case, the motions of the heavens (and the body) are mirrored by the actions of a particular class of human beings, which in turn are mirrored in the organization of the Shiji. Similarly, some early commentators of the Shiji professed to discover cosmological analogues to its five-part structure: the twelve annals corresponded to the twelve months of the year, the ten tables to the ten days of a xun-week, the eight treatises to the eight jie (the four days that begin the seasons, plus the equinoxes and solstices), the thirty hereditary houses to the thirty days of a month, and the seventy biographies to the human life span (with retirement at age seventy) or the seventy-two days in a xing period. Furthermore, the prominence of the number five significantly echoed Han cosmological speculations. These particular identifications are debatable, but in principle, Sima Qian, as an astrologer, could have been interested in duplicating natural cycles in the structure of his book. This was certainly something that other authors of the time were doing, as we shall see later."
Page 51: QUOTE: "The second feature of the Shiji that seems characteristic of a microcosm is its lack of interpretive closure. The Shiji can be frustratingly open-ended: accounts may be incomplete; loose ends are nver picked up again; connections among events may be unclear; and significance and meaning are frequently obscure. Part of this is due to the audacious scope of Sima's undertaking—trying to include everyone and everything—but equally important is the fact that the type of indeterminancy exhibited in the Shiji is also a feature of the past itself, which is notoriously complex and confusing. Although some Westerners migh regard the Shiji as unfinished history—the next step would have been for Sima to work all his meticulously researched facts into a unified, coherent narrative—I do not believe that Sima ever had such a goal. Rather, he wanted to represent accurately the world and its history in all its splendor and confusion."
Page 51: QUOTE: "This statement is not quite accurate, however. If the past is already a mass of confusion, why would anyone want to read a similarly confused book? The answer is that even though the Shiji shares the most important characteristics of history, it does so to a lesser degree. The Shiji is a model of the world, and like all models, it employs simplification and selection as aids to understanding. Models duplicate some functions or relations while sacrificing others. Obviously, models of the human body, or of airplanes, or of the earth, are accurate in some respects, but we have little trouble distinguishing between the model and the original; the simplifications are profound. So it is with Sima's model of the world and its past. The sum of human experience is too complicated and unweildy to graps, but a simplified and streamlined synopsis has its uses."
Page 51-52: QUOTE: "Sima Qian's account of the Spring and Autumn era, for instance, is complicated, fragmented, and not easily understood, but it is less so than the period itself (and less so than his primary source, the Zuo zhuan). Sima's version is in many ways superior to the raw data of history—he has verified the facts he includes; he uses standard chronologies; and he has selected what is most essential. The significance of events may still be unclear, but Sima's arrangement and selection are provocative. It is easier to derive meaning from the Shiji than from history itself. This is not to say that Sima chose facts to illustrate preconceived points; there is too much uncertainty, and his personal comments are far too tentative and tangential. Often Sima included details that he felt were important, without perhaps knowing exactly what they meant or how they fit together, but he did not expect that the Shiji would be the last word in history. In four of his personal comments he expresses his hope that later scholars would find his work useful in their own efforts to make sense of the world and its past."
Page 52: QUOTE: "This brings us to the third reason for regarding the Shiji as a microcosm of the universe: the ideal of microcosms, textual or otherwise, was one of the main intellectual interests of the Qin and Former Han dynasties. The fact that the world could be unified politically suggested that it might be consolidated in other ways, and scholars of the time labored in a variety of fields to produce representations of the world that were both comprehensive and compact. In each case, these were not just verbal descriptions of the cosmos but concrete objects whose form reflected the structure of the universe. These microcosms range from the relatively straightforward funeral banner of Mawangdui tomb I, which depicts the deceased midway between the heavens and the underworld, to the more abstract representations of bronze TLV mirrors, which are commonly found in Han tombs...These mirrors were related to diviner's boards (shi), which also represented the divisions of heaven and earth and were used by skilled practitioners to advise the living as to how they might calibrate their actions to the rhythms of the cosmos."
Page 53: Halls and entire palaces in Han China were designed with cosmological principles in mind. QUOTE: "Texts, like buildings, can also have complicated designs representing the shape of the cosmos. The most famous such book is the Classic of Change, a collection of short divinatory judgments arranged around the sixty-four possible combinations of six broken and unbroken lines (hexagrams). Eventually, this series of hexagrams was thought to represent every possible stage of natural development. Consequently, holding a copy of the Classic of Change is like holding the universe, only in a more abstract form."
Page 54: QUOTE: "Another example of a textual microcosm is the Spring and Autumn Annals of Mr. Lü. This book is arranged into three major divisions—'records,' 'surveys,' and 'discussions'—the first of which consists of twelve chapters, each divided into five sections. The second division contains eight chapters, each subdivided into eight sections, and the third division has six chapters of six sections each. The exact meaning of these numbers is disputed, but some cosmological significance was undoubtedly intended. This is evident in the fact that each of the twelve chapters in the first division begins with a discussion of the appropriate activities for its corresponding month. Certainly Sima Qian regarded this text as a microcosm, and he described its creation as follows:"
- QUOTE: "Lü Buwei therefore ordered his retainers to write down what they had heard, and they collected and organized [these traditions] into eight 'surveys,' six 'discussions,' and twelve 'records,' over 200,000 words in all. He regarded this as a complete rendering of heaven and earth, of the ten thousand creatures, and of affairs both ancient and modern, and he called it The Spring and Autumn Annals of Mr. Lü."
Page 54-55: QUOTE: "Individual sections of this work contain numerous historical anecdotes, but these are arranged by topic rather than by chronology, and the Spring and Autumn Annals of Mr. Lü is generally considered to be more philosophical than historical...The original Spring and Autumn Annals, by contrast, is a microcosmic text that is primarily historical. The Annals offers a year-by-year account of events in the state of Lu from 722 to 481 B.C.E. Unfortunately, incidents are recorded in only the most cursory manner, and the text amounts to little more than a dry list of deaths, official visits, battles, and sacrifices. Nevertheless, Han dynasty scholars believed that Confucius hiumself had composed the history, and they expended enormous amounts of energy in unraveling the hidden profundities supposedly encoded in nuances of its selection, sequence, and terminology. They also advanced the idea that the Annals was a microcosm incorporating all the essential moral and historical principles by which the world operated."
Page 55: QUOTE: "Especially prominent in this mode of reading the Annals was Dong Zhongshu (ca. 179–104 B.C.E.), a teacher of Sima Qian's, who outlined his use of the Annals as follows:"
- QUOTE: "The method of the Spring and Autumn Annals is to cite events of the past in order to explain those of the future. For this reason, when a phenomenon occurs in the world, look to see what comparable events are recorded in the Spring and Autumn Annals; find out the essential meaning of its subtleties and mysteries in order to ascertain the significance of the event; and comprehend how it is classified in order to see what causes are implied. Changes wrought in heaven and on earth, and events that affect a dynasty will then all become crystal clear, with nothing left in doubt."
Page 55: QUOTE: "In fact, Dong found the miniature world of the Annals so complete and satisfying that it almost entirely supplanted the real world for him. After he was appointed by Emperor Jing as an erudite in Annals studies, Dong Zhongshu lectured to senior students from behind a curtain, and these students then transmitted his teachings to other pupils, some of whom had never seen their master's face. Sima Qian records that 'for three years Dong Zhongshu did not even look out into his garden; such was his spirit.' Apparently the Annals provided such a fine model that whether one encountered the world through that Confucian text or through one's own senses, it was the same. One might go even further and suggest that the significance of Dong's curtain is that the superficial patterns of experience may actually distract one from the deeper truths that are more readily apparent in the Annals than in the world itself."
Page 55-57: In the preface to the chapter "Table by Years of the Twelve Feudal Lords," Sima Qian reveals that writers from Xunzi, to Mencius, to Han Fei, to Dong Zhongshu all participated in a genre of literature that centered around the Spring and Autumn Annals. QUOTE: "These books, however, generally are not strictly commentaries on the text of the Annals, as are the Gongyang and Guliang commentaries. Rather, they are philosophical works that seem related to the Annals because they address the same type of moral and social questions that Han theorists had found answered in Confucius's classic and because they rely on historical examples to prove their points. Of particular interest is the notion of ever smaller, more compact synopses of the main points of the Annals. Sima is about to best them all by compressing the essentials of the Annals into one chronological table, and his preface continues:"
- Page 57: QUOTE: "The Eminent Grand Astrologer remarks: The Confucians make judgments on the principles of righteousness [in the Annals] and the Itinerant Debaters recklessly expound its wording, but neither group takes into account the ends and the beginnings. Calendar-makers appropriate their years and months, Yin-yang specialists elaborate the divine twists of fortune, and Genealogists record only posthumous titles, but their comments are all quite sporadic. If one wished to grasp all the essentials at a glance it would be difficult. Therefore I have drawn up a table of the twelve feudal lords beginning with the Gonghe reign period [841-828 B.C.E.] and ending with Confucius in order to prevent the main arguments of the Narratives of the States and Annals specialists concerning prosperity and decline in [one] chapter. I have summarized and abridged this for the accomplished scholars who work with ancient writings."
Page 57-58: QUOTE: "Whereas the 'Table by Years of the Twelve Feudal Lords' is Sima Qian's audacious attempt to imitate and improve on the Spring and Autumn Annals, the Shiji as a whole is based on the structure of the Annals, with the narrative portions explicating the bare outline of the chronological tables. As early as the Tang dynasty, Liu Zhiji (C.E. 661–721) argued that the Shiji biographies (zhuan) explained and amplified the basic annals just as the canonized commentaries (zhuan) illuminated the Spring and Autumn Annals, but the tables are much more like the sparse and cryptic Annals than are Sima's basic annals. Sima deliberately drew attention to the parallels between his history and Confucius's by asserting in his autobiography that the Shiji ended with the capture of a unicorn in 104 B.C.E., that his text would 'await the sages and gentlemen of later generations' and that he was 'a transmitter' and not a 'creator' of history...However, the most important connection between the two texts is that the Shiji, like the Annals, is a model of the world that represents the structure of the universe and the sum of human history in microcosmic form."
Page 59: Grant Hardy is of the belief that QUOTE: "Sima would have considered his historical format to be more true to history as it had actually occurred. The past itself is confusing and complicated, and so an account that was not so could be judged inaccurate on those grounds. It is clear from his personal comments that Sima Qian was concerned with accuracy, but the attraction of this ideal was not based on Western notions of objectivity. Sima believed that there were moral patterns embedded in the working of the cosmos and that a truly accurate history would reveal them. Nevertheless, the ideal historian is not a neutral observer but someone who is personally attuned to moral standards, that is, a sage. I will return to this topic later, but for now we may note that Sima Qian did not want to produce a completely ordered and integrated history. An account of the world that exhibited that degree of control would have seemed more like the perfectly ordered and perfectly dead microcosm of the First Emperor's tomb. And like the tomb, it would also have been the expression of insufferable arrogance."
Page 59: QUOTE: "Sima Qian was very aware of his own limitations as a historian trying to uncover the long-past past. He was not confident that he had recovered everything or that he had discerned all valuable moral patterns. His Shiji is a compilation of what his research had uncovered (even if it is not presented in exactly this way), arranged in a suggestive manner, but he never intended it to be the definitive account of the past. He expected that later historians would continue his efforts, further untangling historical discrepancies and identifying lines of causation, moral and otherwise (though of course, this would have been a nonsensical distinction for him). A microcosmic model might be more effective than rational analsysis in revealing the patterns of the universe, for some things cannot be put into words. Some connections are so subtle that they may have escaped the historian, though perceptive readers might still be able to discover them in a microcosmic text."
Page 59: QUOTE: "The point is that the Shiji is not simply the sum of Sima's own opinions, and even if Sima was somewhat coy about fully expressing his ideas, the Shiji is not just a code waiting to be deciphered. By imitating the cosmos, the Shiji contains more than what Sima Qian deliberately placed inside. Sima wanted to discover historical principles, not create them, and because the Shiji's accounts are somewhat independent of their author, readers can be assured that the patterns they perceive are inherent in the past itself and are not just the fabrications of the controlling mind of the historian."
Page 59-60: QUOTE: "Finally, Sima's format forces his readers to become their own historians. A reader of the Shiji is not in a position simply to accept or reject the judgments of the author. He or she is constrained to make connections and interpretations, entering into a dialogue with the text, forming tentative hypotheses that may need to be revised upon reading alternative narratives in other chapters, and always keeping an eye open for possible contrasts and parallels. Indeed, this last point may be Sima Qian's most important contribution, for he was a reader-compiler, and just as important as the facts he amasses is the reading style that he teaches. The structure of any book rewards certain types of reading more than others, and the Shiji both requires and illustrates a particular mode of reading that underlies later Chinese attempts to make sense of the world."

Yao's Encyclopedia, A to N[edit]

Loewe, Michael. (2003). RoutledgeCurzon Encyclopedia of Confucianism: Volume 1, A–N. Edited by Yao Xinzhong. New York, London: RoutledgeCurzon, an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group. ISBN 0415306523.

Dong Zhongshu[edit]

Page 191: Dong Zhongshu (c. 179 BC – c. 104 BC), according to this encyclopedia passage on him by Loewe, QUOTE: "contributed to the emergence of what may be termed Han Confucianism more effectively than any other thinker in Han times before Liu Xiang, thus providing an intellectual basis for the maintenance of imperial government as an integral element within the cosmic system. His scheme comprised the interdependence of the three realms or estates of Heaven (tian), Earth (di), and Man (ren); the exercise of authority in conformity with the will of Heaven; respect for the ethical ideas that had been praised by Confucius; a recognition of the lessons to be learnt from the past and frmo the occurrence of strange phenomena; and the need both to encourage higher cultural standards and to train officials to serve the state."
Page 191-192: Loewe stresses that not all of Dong's lessons were original. What he did was combine a number of contemporary theories. He used the Spring and Autumn Annals as his main guide. He believed that Heaven was devoted to the welfare of mankind and was intent on giving the ruler of the world warning signs when there was trouble. He stressed the unique connection between Heaven and ruler. He conceived Heaven's operations as following the movements of yin and yang.
Page 192: Like Liu Jia, Dong Zhongshu was a critic of the Qin Dynasty's regime, but his argument for its decline rested much greater more on intellectual grounds. He asserted that a king should refrain from ruling his realm by means of fear or threat of punishment, as this was what the Qin regime had done while desecrating the moral system of the kings of old.
Page 192: Dong Zhongshu supported the Gongyang interpretation of the Spring and Autumn Annals, and is thus considered a New Text School advocate.
Page 192: Grand Empress Dowager Dou (or Empress Dou (Wen)) was a strong advocate of the worship of the Yellow Emperor and the sage philosopher Laozi, and due to her influence at court no one could question this. When she died in 135 BC, it allowed Emperor Wu of Han to pursue a more expansionist policy in regards to the imperial government. It promoted an economic policy that supported the state's interests over the individual. This would in turn allow China to use her resources to finally challenge barbarian incursions and expand China's influence. During this time, Dong Zhongshu had been an academician (ever since the reign of Emperor Jing of Han), but after Wu ascended to the throne, Dong was demoted and barely escaped execution for his veiled criticism of the government. Due to his rivalry with Gongsun Hong, he would never become a senior official in the central government, although he did become chancellor to the kings of Jiangdu and Jiaoxi.
Page 192: QUOTE: "The catalogue of the Han imperial library listed substantial writings under Dong Zhongshu's name, including a set of legal case-histories, items that were probably elucidations of some of his teachings and the texts of some of the memorials that he submitted. He is also named as the author of the Chunqiu fanlu, but opinion varies regarding the authenticity of all or parts of that work as received. The account of his thought that follows is based on the responses that he made to three decrees that were probably promulgated around 134 BCE."
Page 192-193: Dong's first response included the concepts of humaneness (ren), righteousness (yi), the practice of acceptable behavior (li), and music as means to conform with the Dao, which ultimately brings order to society and raises cultural standards. To him a dynasty did not decline because it had lost the Dao; it decilned because the dynasty failed to regulate itself according to its assumptions. QUOTE: "As opposed to Xunzi, Dong saw authority to rule as a function that is conferred by a superhuman power, i.e. Heaven, and is accompanied by signs that validate its acceptance."
Page 193: Dong's view of Heaven was that it was benevolent, always had good intentions for mankind, and tried to steer a ruler to do the right thing by providing him with warnings. When the Emperor requested to all that they explain why the dynasty was having recent shortcomings, Dong answered that greed was unrestrained, there was not enough motivation for moderation, and suggested ways to enhance culture such as building more schools.
Page 193: QUOTE: The second decree to which Dong responded asked for an explanation of an apparent inconsistency; how came it that some of the sage-kings of the past had ruled successfully by deliberately refusing to initiate any action, while others had been known for their ambitious and highly active ventures; some had relied on punishments as a means of control; others had refused to apply them. Dong replied that different circumstances require different types of approach and uniformity cannot be expected. Whiel the objectives of true kings are identical, the extent of their efforts or the degree of their idleness varies according to the problems and needs of the time."
Page 193: Dong contrasted the civic virtues and excellent results of educated minds under the Zhou kings with the opposing values of the despotic Qin created by Shen Buhai, Shang Yang, and Han Fei (who were against the traditions of ancient China). To promote greater learning thus a better culture, he proposed the establishment of the Taixue, QUOTE: "with a view to instilling the precepts and principles of the approved masters in the minds of those who would wish, or would be asked, to serve in the offices of the government. Senior appointments should be given to men of proven ability, and not simply to those who commanded wealth or who could boast of long experience in office. As a practical step, Dong suggested that senior officials should each year submit the names of two candidates for posts in the organs of government; should their nominees show the right qualities their sponsors would be rewarded; in contrary cases they would be punished."
Page 193: QUOTE: "The third decree reverted to the question of the relations between Heaven and Man. It also raised that of an apparent contradiction, in so far as the practices of the exemplary kings of the past were at variance with each other, while the principles of dao remain immutable. In his reply Dong explained that Heaven is the ancestor of all living creatures; it exercises a pervasive influence over all; it sets out the sun and moon, the winds and the rain to bring about harmony; it directs the sequences of yin and yang, and of cold and heat, to bring about creation. It was by taking Heaven as their model that the sages set up dao, and human activities follow a basic correspondence with the operations of Heaven."
Page 194: Dong wrote that the qualities of man made him separate from other living creatures, while the total fulfilment of these qualities marked the man of quality from other men. Dong believed that there was an "overriding and constant principle" which brought about cosmic unity, but the QUOTE: "failure of teachers to respect this concept had led to a wide disparity of opinion; the absence of a changeless model had resulted in popular confusion. Dong ended his response by calling for the suppression of teaching that lay outside the scope of the six texts," or "methods of Confucius" (i.e. the Book of Changes, Book of Documents, Book of Poetry, Spring and Autumn Annals, the texts on li, and the now lost Book of Music.)
Page 194: It is important to note that the concept of Wu Xing was not apparent in these works mentioned above or those attributed to Dong Zhongshu. He was against some of Emperor Wu's policies, since he favored peaceful relations and negotiation with the Xiongnu instead of open conflict. He called for changes to the economic system to reduce the gap between rich and poor. Dong's views became widely accepted from 70 BC onwards. Both Liu Xin and Ban Gu praised Dong Zhongshu's teachings.