Early China: A Social and Cultural History

by Li Feng

  The Founding of the Han Dynasty

  The First Emperor of Qin died in summer 210 BC, only eleven years after he unified China; in fact, he died on his last tour through the empire in eastern China, a thousand miles away from the capital. It was said that in order to disguise the odor of the imperial corpse to conceal his death, officials in his entourage decided to fill up ten carts with fish and carried the emperor back to the Wei River valley. In the process, they forged the emperor’s letter in which he allegedly demanded the crown prince Fu Su, stationed for years on the northern border, to commit suicide, which he did, and upon arriving in Xianyang they established his younger son as the second emperor. But the people’s fear for this vicious and godlike figure was finally gone.

  In the summer of 209 BC, a group of 900 conscripts were marching north to guard the border. When they arrived in northern Jiangsu, formerly Chu territory before the unification, heavy rain delayed their movement and made it impossible for them to reach the guard posts on time; failing to do so would lead to capital punishment according to Qin law. Thus, Chen Sheng, leader of the group, forged highly provocative signs by putting a fabric written with words into the stomach of a fish which revealed Chen Sheng’s kingship and by making someone scream in the bush in the voice of a fox: “The Great Chu will be restored, and Chen Sheng is our king!” Instantly, they killed the Qin officers watching them and attacked the county towns nearby. From northern Jiangsu, the rebels moved west into southern Henan where they declared the founding of a new Chu kingdom. By early winter when they attacked the Wei River valley, more than 10,000 farmers had joined them. For Chen Sheng, the goal was clearly to overthrow the Qin Empire, and indeed the empire itself opened ways for him to do so, for most of its legions were either stationed along the northern border or far in the south engaging in operations aimed at controlling the southeast China coast. With no time to pull these troops back, the Qin court armed the slaves and laborers working on the First Emperor’s mausoleum and sent them to counter-attack the rebels. Chen Sheng’s army was defeated about 60 km from the Qin capital and subsequently withdrew from the Wei River valley.

  However, the Qin Empire survived this first blow only to meet more serious challenges – by early 208 BC, half the world had rebelled against Qin. These new rebels, all in eastern China, were composed of people of various social backgrounds. Some of them were farmers or local clerks at most, but many had real connections to the ruling houses of the former territorial states conquered by Qin. In fact, all of them rebelled in the name of the former kings but none of these could alone withstand the might of the Qin forces when they were remustered and put in field by the Qin court. After many defeats, the various rebel groups gradually merged into two stronger military forces, the first led by the former Chu general Xiang Liang and his nephew Xiang Yu who restored the Chu kingdom, and the second by Liu Bang, a county clerk from northern Jiangsu who had no significant family background. The armies were jointly defeated in a military catastrophe in western Shandong during which even Xiang Liang himself was killed by Qin troops.

  However, when the Qin army then turned north to attack the restored kingdom of Zhao in Hebei, the defeated eastern rebels developed a clever strategy by sending the main body of the army led by Xiang Yu north to meet the enemy again at the Zhao capital, and at the same time sending a flank attack, led by Liu Bang, directly to the Qin heartland – the Wei River valley. Liu Bang was also aided by the cunning decision not to confront the Qin troops along the main roads through western Henan; instead, as totally unexpected by the Qin court, he traversed the Han River valley from Hubei and suddenly broke into the Wei River valley from the south. When Liu Bang arrived at the Qin capital in the tenth month of 206 BC, the last Qin emperor did not even put him up for battle but instantly surrendered to Liu Bang, putting a sudden end to the Qin Empire.

  When Xiang Yu, the hero with unmatched muscle strength and an imposing personality, arrived in the Wei River valley after having crushed the Qin army near Zhao, he executed the Qin Emperor and carried out systematic destruction of the Qin capital, extending the damage probably to the accessible structures around the First Emperor’s tomb, as archaeological evidence suggests. Furthermore, he decided to completely slice up the Qin Empire into eighteen independent kingdoms, all using state names of the pre-unification period; Xiang Yu himself then assumed the title of the “Hegemon King” and at the same time set himself up as the king of Chu. Liu Bang, because he had no connection to the Warring State kings, was given the Han River valley to rule as the “King of Han,” locked deeply in the mountains of southern Shaanxi and cut off from all other kingdoms in eastern China. Xiang Yu’s intention was clearly to prevent Liu becoming a major power to challenge his hegemony in the east.

  However, Liu Bang succeeded in turning this strategy designed to contain him into the concealment of his real ambition – only four months after Xiang Yu returned to the east, Liu Bang’s army suddenly broke into the Wei River valley, defeating all three local kings set up by Xiang Yu, and annexing the entire Wei River plain as his new base. In the next three years, China was virtually divided between two military camps with Liu Bang based on the Wei River plain in the west, and Xiang Yu centering on present-day northern Jiangsu. This was a long and difficult war for both sides. With continuing reinforcements sent by his able administers from the Wei River valley, Liu Bang eventually proved to be the more effective, and he forced Xiang Yu, the “Hegemon King,” into suicide after a decisive defeat in northern Anhui in the twelfth month of 202 BC which left the latter with totally no chance for recovery. Thereupon, Liu Bang returned to the west and formally assumed the title “Emperor” of the Han Dynasty, posthumously called “Emperor Gaozu.”

  The Pivot of the Imperial Structure: Reorganizing the Empire

  The heart of the empire was the Wei River valley again, where a new capital was constructed and named Chang’an, “Forever Peace” (Fig. 12.1). It was said that the layout of the imperial city embodied the formation of the constellation of the Northern Dipper with its stars falling exactly at the joints of walls of the city. However, studies show that the city was by no means a one-time project; therefore, there was little chance for it to have encoded a cosmological meaning in its general planning.1 During Liu Bang’s reign, only two major palace complexes in addition to the Armory located between them were constructed, each being surrounded by a walled enclosure. The outer wall of Chang’an was added during Emperor Hui’s reign, and more units of construction were added even later, during the long reign of Emperor Wu, thus making up nearly 100 years of history of the construction of the imperial city. It was strictly an imperial city because almost the entire area was taken up by units of palatial architecture, allowing little space for residences outside the emperor’s own home.2

  Fig. 12.1 The imperial city Chang’an.

  However, beyond the imperial capital, the Han Empire was hardly a unified empire, not at least for its first half century. Side by side with the commanderies and counties located in the west centered on the Wei River valley, a state structure inherited from Qin, there were multiple kingdoms ruled by hereditary kings in the east, together taking up the larger half of the Han Empire (Map 12.1). This was certainly an institutional contradiction that had its historical origin in the previous age and which the Han had to work hard to overcome. This struggle between regionalism and centralization had profoundly influenced dynastic policies and guided the course of Chinese history.

  Map 12.1 The Han Empire in 195 BC.

  In front of the Han emperor, there were two paradigms, that of Zhou and that of Qin. In the special historical context of the early Western Zhou, the “Fengjian” system implemented by the Zhou court was inevitable if the Zhou were to control a large geographical area such as the middle and lower reaches of theYellow River combined in an age when the imperial bureaucratic machine had not been invented, and it was indeed a great success. However, from the mid Western Zhou period, the system began to show its loose en
ds and the incessant wars in the 500 years after the fall of the Western Zhou capital completely destroyed the hope for political unity that the “Fengjian” system was designed to achieve. The Qin imperial system was created clearly with the Zhou model as its reference, and indeed as the remedy to Zhou problems, by putting all power in the single hand of the emperor who ruled through a strictly centralized bureaucratic system extending to the whole realm of the empire, which prevented larger territories from falling under control by the various local rulers. However, the early collapse of the Qin Empire revealed problems in the Qin system in which bureaucracy provided the only ties that bound officials to the emperor. When the center was struck down, the whole system was paralyzed overnight.

  The founders of the Han Empire found neither the Zhou nor the Qin system fully acceptable or indeed realistic. As a result, the Han imperial system was typically hybrid. In 201 BC, the Han court officially recognized the kingdoms of Chu, Liang, Hann, Changsha, Huainan, Yan, Zhao, Qi, Dai, and Huaiyang. In fact, this trend to return to political regionalism, echoing the Warring States situation, gained its initial sanction by Xiang Yu, when the Qin model of empire was called into serious question.3 Some of these kingdoms were ruled by Liu Bang’s own generals or relatives, such as the kings of Qi and Dai, but many others were regional leaders who allied with Liu Bang in the war defeating Xiang Yu. Some kingdoms had a territory equal to a few commanderies combined, and the Han court simply could not rely on their kings to protect the interests of the empire because their backgrounds were various and ambitions unrestricted, being different from the regional rulers under Western Zhou. In reality, one after another, these kings rose against the Han court or were accused of doing so, as in the case of the King of Liang who was effectively forced into rebellion and was captured for execution. There were also kingdoms, particularly those located near the northern borders, that constantly swayed their alliance between Han and the newly rising nomadic empire on the northern steppe, the Xiongnu Empire.

  On the whole, the struggle balanced in favor of the Han court when the kings were gradually replaced by members of the Liu family, and this process was completed in 195 BC. On his deathbed, Liu Bang swore an oath with his generals that if anyone who was not a member of the Liu family would again dare to assume the title of king, all people under Heaven should arise to eliminate him. Although the rule was soon broken by Empress Lü who had effectively ruled the Han Empire for fifteen years during which members of her own Lü family were entitled kings, in general it can be said that by the end of Liu Bang’s life, the empire seemingly had returned to the Zhou system with the western half put under direct imperial administration and eastern half divided among nine kings who were personal relatives of the emperor. Liu Bang might have thought that by balancing the commanderies with regional kingdoms in the hands of the Liu family, the empire could last forever.

  Ironically, even these Liu kings did not wait too long to strengthen themselves against the empire. The Han court had to fight very hard to maintain control over eastern China. Under Emperor Wen (r. 180–157 BC), the kingdoms of Zhao and Qi were divided and given to a number of princes of the two kingdoms. Under Emperor Jing (r. 156–141 BC), when a proposal was made by the emperor’s close advisor Chao Cuo to further reduce the territory of the larger states Wu and Chu in the south, this caused widespread resentment among the regional kings who instantly decided to rebel and all together marched on Chang’an in 154 BC. Under pressure from the rebels, the emperor ordered the execution of Chao Cuo, but then, he sent troops east to crush the rebellious kings. Using the kingdom of Liang as a stronghold, whose king was brother by the same mother as Emperor Jing and hence remained loyal to the court, the Han forces were able to cut the supply lines of the enemies and eventually put down the rebellion after three months of war. This incident, though for bad causes, brought forth decisive destruction to the power of the regional kings and was an important watershed in Han imperial history.

  During the reign of Emperor Wu (r. 140–87 BC), imperial power further crushed the conspiracy of the kingdoms of Huainan and Hengshan, converting their territories into new commanderies (Map 12.2). Meanwhile, in 127 BC, the court adopted a new policy called “Extending Imperial Favor” (Tuien) which allowed the kings to grant their sons titles and territories to form secondary states, thus effectively slicing the kingdoms into even smaller pieces. New generations of the imperial offspring, when established kings, were allowed to receive a certain amount of the tax quota from the territory they were supposed to “rule,” but they received no actual territories at all. This new system of regional “kings” without a territorial kingdom came as the result of the nearly century-long struggle between the imperial and regional powers and of the balancing between the Zhou and Qin political paradigms. It provided the empire with a pivot around which the imperial structure could revolve, and it was the key to the long-lasting stability of the imperial system itself. It was the marriage between “Empire” and “Dynasty” that could simultaneously satisfy the need to enforce imperial bureaucratic order throughout the empire and the need to build blood ties that could protect the empire’s dynastic root. By granting imperial kinsmen ranks superior to all bureaucrats, a super-privileged class was formed, and this class would in turn secure the ruling position of the imperial family. But this superior class was in no position to run the bureaucracy which only the emperor could command.

  Map 12.2 The Han Empire in 108 BC.

  Han and Xiongnu: A World Divided into Two Halves

  The Han Empire was not alone. To its immediate north was the nomadic empire Xiongnu, which at the height of its power conquered the vast steppe region stretching from Manchuria in the east to Central Asia and southern Russia in the west. The southern periphery of this political–geographical landmass was formed by the grass-covered hill slopes and valleys straddling the great arch of the Yellow River in present-day northern Shaanxi, Shanxi, and southern Inner Mongolia, broadly called the Ordos region. To its immediate north was located the vast Gobi Desert across the current China–Mongolia national border. On the eastern edge of the Gobi is the grassland called “Hulun Baier,” the home of the later Mongols. Crossing the Gobi Desert farther north the landscape gradually transforms into grassland in central and northern Mongolia and the forest-covered low hills in southern Russia (Map 12.3).

  Map 12.3 The northern zone and the Xiongnu Empire.

  Despite their many known or unknown cultural or ethnic roots in this vast steppe region, current archaeology suggests that the Xiongnu (at least a part of them) might have been among the distant cultural descendants of a distinctive early Bronze Age culture in the Ordos region, contemporary with the late Shang state (1200–1046 BC) centered on Anyang. From the 1950s to the 2000s, more than twenty groups of bronzes were discovered in northern Shaanxi and across the river east in Shanxi. While tools and weapons found in this region showed overwhelmingly northern steppe features, the bronze vessels found in the region included both distinctive local types and types apparently imported from the Shang culture. The subsistence system of the local communities was characteristic for the high degree of mixture of pastoralist life with widespread non-intensive agriculture. The later excavation in Zhukaigou in Inner Mongolia pushed the region’s cultural horizon farther back in the late Neolithic period,4 situating the region on the periphery of the sphere of agricultural life that had evolved centered on the middle and the lower Yellow River drainage basin since about 7000 BC (see Chapter 2). It also pushed the local history of bronze manufacturing back to around 1700 BC, contemporaneous with the early Shang.

  There is still considerable debate as to whether the local bronze industry had its source of influence from the nearby Erlitou culture (1900–1500 BC) or received stimuli from farther west. What is clear is that during the eleventh century BC Ordos entered a period of sharp decline, and there is good reason to consider that this change was due to the rise of the Western Zhou state in the south. One of the long Western Zhou ins
criptions, the Xiao Yu ding, records that the Zhou captured as many as 13,081 people, killing another 4,800, in a battle against the Gui Fang, very likely to have been located in the Ordos region.5 On the other hand, the region seems to have been a participant in the broader social transition to nomadism that took place in the northern steppe regions during the tenth to the seventh centuries BC. When Ordos figures highly in the archaeological records again from the fifth century BC on, it was clearly integrated into a large steppe cultural complex that was at least partly associated with the ethnic Xiongnu. Such were the findings from a number of cemeteries located in Inner Mongolia contemporary with the late Spring and Autumn to the Warring States period in the middle Yellow River region. Weapons are the main items from these cemeteries, which also yielded various types of animal-shaped objects (Fig. 12.2), the most characteristic being bronze plates with zoomorphic designs, together with remains of animal and human skulls in their burials. The similar assemblage of bronze objects with typological variations has been found far north across the Gobi Desert in tombs excavated in the vast grassland in the central and northern Mongolia Republic and southern Russia, showing strong cultural links between the two zones of the vast steppe.