Vigorous rulers
In the middle of his reign, Emperor Zhao Di ordered scholars to compile and collate a collection of every book in the land. Liu Xiang was given the task of revising classics, biographies, writings of the pre-Qin philosophers, and shi and fu poetry, while the army official Ren Hong and others worked on books concerning military strategy and mathematics, and the court physician Li Zhu dealt with texts about medicine and divination. Emperor Cheng Di, who is portrayed as having been so obsessed with the concubine Zhao Feiyan that he lost interest in all else, in fact reviewed and commented on the completed texts of these revised works, in addition to handling the affairs of state.
After Liu Xiang's death, his son Liu Xin was ordered by Emperor Ai Di to carry on where his father left off. Father and son became known as the founding fathers of Chinese bibliography. When Liu Xin had completed the task of revising all the books he presented the results, classified by content and organized in such a way as to provide a foundation for effective governance, social prosperity and general peace of mind among the population.
In addition to revising and classifying existing books, Liu Xiang wrote the Biographies of Women, the first volume in Chinese history dealing exclusively with the lives of women. National administration was sufficiently developed at this time to allow for the emergence of a system of government by civil officials, and both the Historical Records and the History of the Former Han Dynasty record many tales of upright officials and tyrannical officials. As the system of civil administration became more deeply rooted, biographies of such officials became an increasingly common literary topic.
In their collated forms, the written works of earlier eras also now became targets for reappraisal by following generations of critics. Yang Xiong, a writer working at the start of the first millennium, penned "Fan Lisao," inspired by the famous Qu Yuan poem, and another scholar, Wang Chong, spent 30 years producing the tome Lun Heng, in which he took critical aim at the philosophies of Confucius, Mencius and Laozi. Wang so embodied the spirit of skepticism that Science and Civilization in China author Joseph Needham said when Wang died, Chinese scientific skepticism died with him.
Implementing ideas
"Don't assume that the Han dynasty was lacking in ideas," says NTU Chinese department professor Ko Ching-ming, a keen devotee of Han writings. The thinking of the pre-Qin philosophers was the jewel in the crown, but it lacked practical application. In the same way, the Romans were not as creative as the ancient Greeks but were more advanced in their systems of politics and law. The main achievement of the Han dynasty was to provide a concrete form for everything, enabling these things to be perpetuated through Chinese history.
In terms of politics, Chien Mu considered the reign of the Han dynasty's Gao Zu to represent the beginning of "centralized government under a Son of Heaven who was born a commoner." The reign of Wu Di meanwhile represents China's first "centralized government at the head of a civil administration," or in other words, the start of rule by those best qualified for the job.
The Outline of National History lists several major political objectives that governments of the Han dynasty aimed to fulfil. These included: ensuring that the prime minister was selected on merit, was able to assist the emperor and function as government leader, and could take responsibility for practical executive matters; recruiting officials throughout the land by examination, in line with open standards, with a state education and practical administrative experience as key qualifications; setting personnel quotas in accordance with average numbers of registered households in each district; treating the entire population as equal before national law; and ensuring that taxation and military service were implemented in accordance with legal provisions. The Han dynasty created a political system which has survived, in outline, up to the ROC of the present day.
The Han dynasty also operated a highly thorough household registration system. As explained in the Cultural History of China, edited by Academia Sinica fellow Tu Cheng-sheng, Qin Shihuang abolished principalities and instituted a system of prefectures and counties, so breaking up the old fiefdoms and introducing direct rule by the Son of Heaven. The next step was to establish a registration system, providing the ruler with enough information for effective control of the population and establishing a basis for tax collection and labor conscription. This information was recorded on bamboo slips, and those that have been dug up carry comprehensive details about the houses, property, population, slaves and livestock of a local district.
Better lives
It was in the period of Emperor Yuan Di and his three short-lived successors that the political situation began to slip out of control, with power falling into the hands of the imperial consorts and their families. But for society at large, after more than a century of stability under Han rule, life was getting better and culture was flourishing.
Wu Di had sent his generals Huo Qubing and Wei Qing north to attack the Huns, and commissioned Zhang Qian to open up the Silk Road to the West, and according to Yang Xiong's poem "Shudu Fu," it was via the Silk Road that a variety of new agricultural produce came to China, vastly enriching the quality and variety of Chinese cuisine.
Towards the end of the Western Han dynasty, China's first dedicated book about agriculture was produced, the Fan Sheng Zhi Shu. This contained a description of "separated field farming," a technique for improving dryland yields that was claimed to produce 100 piculs of grain for every mu of land-far more than conventional farming could achieve at that time. The Fan Sheng was divided into 18 chapters, covering each of over a dozen different types of major crops including standing grains, millet, rice, wheat and soybean, along with discussion of seed selection and storage, and grafting technique. It also described methods for controlling the flow and temperature of irrigation water.
China's first astronomical recording instrument is generally thought to have been the armillary sphere of the Eastern Han's Zhang Heng, who compiled his celestial charts into the Huntianyi Tuzhu. But in fact, as early as the reign of the Western Han's Xuan Di, the minister in charge of agriculture, Geng Shouchang, is recorded as having "an astronomical device cast of bronze, with which to map the heavens."
Archaeological relics also testify to the fact that while science and technology were branching out during this era, the use of colorful designs for vessels and burial articles was also becoming popular. It became common for the aristocracy and gentry of the late Western Han to live in luxury and have large, elaborate funerals when they died, and it was around then that tri-color glaze pottery-until recently thought to have originated in the Tang dynasty-first began to appear. Plenty of brown-and-green glazed funerary figurines from the Eastern Han have also been unearthed in recent years.
Art in life
In addition to the rational, systematic approach to politics, research and education that characterized the Han dynasty, there was also a toughness that the Han inherited from their Qin predecessors, something of the frontier spirit of the peoples of the north. This led them to expand the boundaries of the empire, and challenge the limits of human longevity.
The Han dynasty was steeped in mythology, with popular and imaginative themes such as the legendary tale of how Wen Wang, the Zhou king, met with the Goddess of the West. These were often recorded in picture form, and famous engravers carved images from such stories onto tile and stone, using a dynamic, flowing style that continues to serve as inspiration for painters and sculptors to this day.
The border regions were more or less under control during the Han dynasty, with the empire ranging from the Pacific coast in the east and the south, to Annam in the southeast, and-with the establishment of the four western prefectures under Wu Di-as far as Dunhuang in the northwest. As written in Introduction to the Cultural History of China: "With the stability of centralized government and the establishment of civil administration, political problems were gradually resolved. But the end of equal distribution of wealth within farming settlements, and the burgeoning of commercial enterprise, led many people to focus on the issue of society's widening economic gap."
The first industrial revolution
The early Western Han emperors Wen Di and Jing Di believed in governing with a light touch ("wu wei er zhi"), and favored a form of "laissez faire" economics. Private ownership of land was encouraged, and people were free to dig mines, mint coins and produce salt. After Wen Di ascended the throne tax collection was halted for the next 11 years. The fact that the population was relatively free of the scourges of war and large-scale tomb construction also stimulated the development of commercial enterprise and boosted the economy.
Few people had the wherewithal to run mines or mint coins, however, and a class of rich "capitalists" emerged to exploit these opportunities, so while the overall wealth of society grew, the gap between rich and poor grew even faster. For the tycoons, making money was the only concern-even to the extent that when Wu Di was quelling internal disorder at the same time as he battled foreign aggression, the rich merchants of the capital and its environs were unwilling to help out.
With the "over-privatization" of the land, big landowners were able to appropriate more and more territory, reducing much of the peasantry to the status of serfs. Many of the poor became slaves. Wealthy families in the Han dynasty sometimes owned upwards of 1,000 slaves, and there was even a slave market in the capital, Chang'an.
The question of how to limit monopolies and reduce the wealth gap, exercised the minds of generations of ministers during the Han dynasty. Some, like Chao Cuo and Dong Zhongshu, regularly petitioned the emperor with policies and proposals. During the reign of Zhao Di, in the year 81 BC, some 60 or so "people's representatives" from throughout the land were summoned to court, to participate with state officials in China's first ever economic policy convention. Topics included national economic policy and the direction to follow in foreign relations: Should we make war on the Huns, and if so, where will the money come from? Would state ownership of salt and iron production generate a backlash from those deprived of their profits? The records of this debate were compiled by Huan Kuan in The Salt and Iron Papers. Eventually, during Wang Mang's "New" dynasty (9-23 AD) salt, iron, alcohol and copper coinage, along with the country's main mountains and rivers, were all placed under direct state control, in an effort to reduce society's economic inequalities.
An idealist and socialist
The governments of the Han had no shortage of idealist officials determined to do something about the chronic problem of economic inequality, and it was under their pressure that emperors agreed to frequent policy revisions. After the reigns of the Western Han emperors Zhao Di and Xuan Di however, Confucian scholars began to despair of the way society was developing, and calls for the ruling house to relinquish the throne began to circulate.
The Confucianism of the Western Han drew on the occultist teachings of the Yin-and-Yang school of the late Warring States period (475-221 BC), advocating the principle of mutual support between Heaven and man, asserting the need for ongoing changes in political culture and rejecting the ideal of an eternal dynasty. According to this school of thought, it was the Yin-Yang formula that accounted for China's evolution during her legendary golden age, the time of the "five emperors and three ancient dynasties." The notion of "reform and abdication" (abdication in favor of the next talented ruler) came to be a key tenet of the political theory of Han dynasty Confucianism.
From the middle period of the Western Han onwards, the dynasty was widely perceived to have lost its way. Wang Mang was an official who came up through the Imperial College and was related to the royal family on its female side-a fact which he made good use of. He showed the greatest respect for men of learning, and appealed to people's sense of integrity, and in this way won the support of many Confucian scholars of his day.
Born during the reign of Cheng Di, at time when the collating and editing of the pre-Qin classics was more or less complete, Wang was well-read and thoroughly steeped in the Confucian tradition. As an idealistic and ambitious statesman he wanted to solve the problems of society, drawing on ancient teachings to shape a new system. First as regent, and later when he took the throne, Wang instituted a system of "King's fields" and abolished slavery, aiming to solve the problem of land appropriation and reduce the gap between rich and poor. With these measures, Wang implemented ideas that had been part of the Han Confucian ideal ever since the time of Jia Yi and Dong Zhongshu. Academics have compared Wang's reforms to the "state socialism" of the modern era.
But Wang was over-hasty and his policies seemed to chop and change, "issuing an order in the morning and rescinding it in the evening." For example, his repeated attempts at currency reform only undermined the economy and exacerbated people's problems. As a result, the grievances of small-scale farmers mounted up, while the big landowners actively opposed him, and it was one of their families that was eventually to provide the first ruler of the restored Han dynasty-the Eastern Han's Guangwu.
Such a fine land
Posterity gave Wang Mang a bad rap, because written histories of the period were all based on Ban Gu's History of the Former Han Dynasty. "If not by refuting Wang Mang, how could Guangwu affirm his own position?" points out Ko Ching-ming. Bookworm that he was, Wang Mang hadn't done anything particularly nefarious, so the only way to attack him was by condemning his personal morality.
The failure of Wang Mang leads Chien Mu to lament the disappearance thereafter of the political theory of "reform and abdication," and its gradual replacement by the idea of an eternal and unified monarchy. Once the preservation of the royal family became the sole objective of politics, very little attention was given to the concerns of ordinary people. This was not only a loss for Wang Mang, but also a loss for China during the subsequent evolution of its society.
The start of the first millennium coincided with the start (and rapid demise) of a new form of civil administration in China. Unfortunately it was to be the last such start for 2,000 years, until the arrival of the democratic era.
p.8
Dating from 2,000 years ago, this vivid image engraved on a tile brick shows Han dynasty students taking class. The teacher sits on a dais while the students, seated to the left and right, read from volumes of bound bamboo slips. The one in the middle appears to be answering the teacher's question, and at his waist wears his book-knife-used for scraping the surface of the bamboo slips.
p.9
During the early Han period, private production of salt and iron was allowed. This tile brick shows a salt mine with workers on a derrick (lower left) using a pulley system to extract brine, which flows into a reservoir on the right.
p.11
After Qin Shihuang's burning of the books, Han dynasty scholars threw themselves into the task of recovering and editing the classics of preceding dynasties, in what has been termed China's first "renaissance." The picture shows a text from the "Yin-Yang Five Elements" school of ideas, written on stiff silk in the clerical script. Before the spread of Cai Lun's technique for paper production, books were mainly made of silk or bamboo. (courtesy of Liang Yi Culture Co. Ltd.)
p.13
The Song dynasty painting "Asking about an Ox" refers to the story of how Bing Ji, prime minister under the Han dynasty emperor Xuan Di, was traveling along a country lane one fine spring day when he passed a local who was slowly leading a gasping ox. Bing stopped and courteously inquired of the man whether the rhythms of nature were out of order. His concern was that the lives of the people might have been adversely affected by unseasonable weather conditions-as indicated by the apparently exhausted beast. (courtesy of the National Palace Museum)
p.14
The Song dynasty painting "The Broken Balustrade," tells the moving tale of Zhu Yun, an honest official at the court of the Han dynasty emperor Cheng Di, who feared his ruler was being misled by another official, the sycophantic Zhang Yu, and petitioned the emperor to execute Zhang. Enraged, the emperor ordered his guards to drag Zhu away and behead him, but Zhu clung tightly to the balustrade until it came away in his hands. At this point, the general Xin Qingji kowtowed to the emperor and pleaded for Zhu to be spared, and at last the emperor relented. Thereafter, he ordered that the broken balustrade be left unrepaired, in recognition of the honesty of an upright official. (courtesy of the National Palace Museum)
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