At the beginning of the first millennium in the Western calendar, China was in the midst of the 400-year-long Han dynasty (206 BC to 220 AD), while in the West Rome was making the transition from a republic to an empire that would last until 476 AD. Coincidentally, the two empires had roughly the same population, about 50 million people.

The Han dynasty and the Roman Empire were unified imperial states facing complex problems, and as a result shared much in common. In particular, their legal systems were extremely pragmatic and concrete, with the focus on day-to-day governance. This set them apart from their predecessors, the Qin in China and the ancient Greeks in the West, who spent more time talking than ruling.

The Roman Empire's well-established political system and legal code provided the foundation for its glory. Though in the early Han dynasty the government attitude was mainly laissez-faire, the dynasty's ability to sustain itself for so long also depended on a comprehensive legal code.

From the "Nine Chapters" of the esteemed Han minister of state Xiao He-which covered, among other things, lawsuits, standards for arrest, and criminal punishments for robbery and theft-to the later marriage laws, there were 906 volumes under more than 60 separate legal headings. If you add to this supplementary sources of law, like precedents and debates by legal scholars, then the Han code could handle everything that is covered by both statute and customary law in the modern world.

The comprehensive legal spirit of the Han era was given its fullest development under the prime minister Dong Zhongshu, a Confucianist who served in the reign of the emperor Wu Di. He required that every legal decision be accompanied by an explanation. Moreover, drawing on the essence of classics such as the Spring and Autumn Annals, he introduced a consciousness of the value of the human individual into the law.

Hsing Yi-tien, a researcher in the Institute of History and Philology at the Academia Sinica, has done in-depth research into Han dynasty law. He has concluded that the concept of human rights appears in Han dynasty law far earlier than in Roman law.

He explains: "The Han dynasty, for the first time, began to show systematic respect for human life and to protect it under the law." Although philosophers from the Warring States period to the Qin dynasty had anthropocentric (as opposed to deistic) philosophies, China's early rulers saw people primarily as state resources and lacked any real respect for individual life. People were considered the same as animals, as expressed in the influential Qi theory, which said that people, like all things, came from Qi, and their nature differed little from the beasts: "Easy to get along with when things are good, fighting when angered, taking advantage of every chance for gain, and running away to avoid harm." This type of dehumanizing thinking is evident in such early texts as Spring and Autumn Annals of Lu and Huai Nan Zi.

The flourishing of Confucian thought in the Han dynasty led to the concrete manifestation in law of the humanistic ideas of Confucius and Mencius. Life began to gain statutory respect. Take for example infanticide, a common practice in ancient times, which was often done purely for superstitious reasons. During the reign of the emperor Zhang Di of the Eastern Han, students of Confucius concluded that parents did not have the right to take a child's life, and that a father who killed his son or daughter should be put to death. As Hsing Yi-tien suggests, "The Chinese saying that human life and death are matters for Heaven to decide could very well date back to this time."

During the reign of the emperor Wu Di, Dong Zhongshu suggested that slave owners be forbidden from being able to kill their slaves at will. In historical records from the Han dynasty, there are many cases of punishments being meted out for killing of slaves. After the second son of Wang Mang killed a slave, Wang did not stop at severe condemnation of the act, but ordered his son to commit suicide.

In his article "Human Rights in Ancient Chinese Law," Hsing Yi-tien points out that the emperor Guangwu of the Eastern Han also placed a high value on human life, including the lives of slaves. The emperor declared: "It is in the nature of things that humans are precious. No leniency shall be shown for those who kill slaves."

Meanwhile, in the Roman Empire, it was only in the second half of the second century that slave owners were formally stripped of the power of life and death over their slaves. Finally, in the fourth century, Constantine, the first Christian emperor, stipulated that the killing of a slave would be punished in the same way as the killing of a free citizen. Yet this was already 300 years after similar provisions had been made by Guangwu. Hsing notes: "In Rome, the legal code was only changed with the introduction of Christianity, whereas in China, Confucian ethics had long played a similar role."

Grave offenses

We can also see that human life was more valued in the Han dynasty from discussions about sentences handed out to criminals. In one case, someone stole the grave marker from the family grave of an imperial concubine. The concubine felt that the thief should be sentenced to death, but the official in charge of the case argued that it should be handled strictly according to law. Otherwise, he argued, if stealing a gravestone was punishable by death, then what should be the punishment for much more severe crimes like grave-robbing?

Hsing cites yet another example of early human rights. On a Han-era bamboo slip unearthed in Juyan, entitled "Arrest Law," it clearly stipulates that officials could not enter the homes of citizens to arrest people without due cause. "The basic spirit of this law was that no one, not even an official, had the right to trespass on the private property of an innocent individual. A property owner had the right to 'appropriate self-defense.' Thus the killing of a thief on one's property was not considered a crime, and injuring an official in defense of one's home was considered different from making an unprovoked assault on an official."

In the reign of Xuan Di, Lu Wenshu suggested that criminal punishments be less severe. He argued that law should primarily protect life. Since the dead can never be brought back to life, it would be better to err on the side of leniency than to kill an innocent. He also criticized jailers for the use of torture to elicit confessions, constables for employing entrapment, and magistrates trying to make a name as crime-busters for the rampant use of capital punishment with complete disregard for correct legal procedure. We may say that Lu has the honor of having been the first Chinese to call for the protection of defendants' rights.

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The Han emperor Guangwu was, for his time, a progressive on human rights. He believed that people were the same regardless of social class and he banned mistreatment of slaves and on several occasions even ordered their release.