Early China: A Social and Cultural History

by Li Feng

  Chang, Chun-shu, The Rise of the Chinese Empire, vol. 2, Frontier, Immigration, and Empire in Han China, 130 BC – AD 157 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007).

  1 See Hans Bielenstein, The Bureaucracy of the Han Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp. 7–69.

  2 See Michael Loewe, “The Administrative Documents from Yinwan: A Summary of Central Issues Raised,” posted on the website of the Society for the Study of Early China, www.lib.uchicago.edu/earlychina/res.

  3 See Yongping Liu, Origins of Chinese Law: Penal and Administrative Law in its Early Development (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 260–266.

  4 Ibid., p. 255.

  5 Ibid., pp. 302–308.

  6 These include the “Statutes on Transportation of Grain,” “Statutes on Inventory,” “Statutes on Land,” “Statutes on Market,” and most importantly, the “Statutes on Currency.”

  7 These include “Statutes on Establishment of Offices,” “Statutes on Awards,” “Statutes on Exemption from Labor Services,” and the “Statutes on Post Office.”

  8 But this point can be modified by the possibility that neither the Zhangjiashan nor Shuihudi statutes represent the whole corpus of Han or Qin law.

  9 These are the two types of convicts most commonly mentioned in Han sources. The male convicts were forced to labor in the construction of city walls; in the case of females, forced to labor in processing grain.

  10 “Gatherers of Fuel for the Spirits” were male convicts of lesser degree who were forced to gather firewood in the mountains; “White-Rice Sorters” were female convicts forced to pick a specific type of white rice. Both are for sacrificial purposes.

  11 See the long treatment of the issue by Clarence Martin Wilbur, Slavery in China during the Former Han Dynasty, 206 BC – AD 25 (Chicago: Field Museum of Natural History, 1943), pp. 72–236.

  12 See Robin D. S. Yates, “Slavery in Early China: A Social–Cultural Approach,” Journal of East Asian Archaeology, 3.1–2 (2001), 297–300.

  13 See Ch’u T’ung-tsu, Han Social Structure (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1972), pp. 135–141.

  14 Although the increase of population in the south could somehow balance the decrease in the north (which is estimated at as many as nearly 18 million individuals), the overall population change is significant. See Hans Bielenstein, “The Census of China: During the Period 2–742 A.D.,” Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities (Stockholm) 19 (1947), 139, 144.

  15 Bielenstein, “The Census of China,” 143. For a more systematic discussion of this process, see Denis Twitchett and Michael Loewe (eds.), The Cambridge History of China, vol. 1, The Ch’in and Han Empires (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 556–559.

  16 Ch’u, Han Social Structure, pp. 202–209.

  17 Some of these materials are systematically discussed in Michael Loewe, Records of Han Administration, 2 vols. (London: Cambridge University Press, 1967).

  18 The official history of the Western Han Dynasty records the population of the Zhangye Commandery as 88,731; Jüyan was one of the ten counties belonging to the Zhangye Commandery.

  19 Chun-shu Chang, The Rise of the Chinese Empire, vol. 2, Frontier, Immigration, and Empire in Han China, 130 BC – AD 157 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), pp. 23, 78, 107–118.

  20 Ibid., pp. 53–73.

  21 Ibid., pp. 135–142.

  22 Ibid., p. 171.

  23 Anne Behnke Kinney, Representations of Childhood and Youth in Early China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004) pp. 183–200.

  14 Ideological changes and their reflections in Han culture and Han art

  The preceding two chapters discussed the political development and social conditions of the Han Empire. The 400 years of the Han Empire constituted a period of paramount importance in the cultural and intellectual history of China. In general, despite the great military glory of the Han Empire, Han society as a whole respected men of letters and the Han court had a deep interest in establishing the empire not only on military strength, but also on the basis of a carefully chosen ideology. The government itself was open for educated men to enter the service of state, and scholars had high standing in the Han bureaucracy. The great philosophers of the Warring States period deeply cultivated the world of thought in China; building on this early heritage, almost every aspect of Chinese culture was again profoundly modified and further developed under the Han. A bold outline of the intellectual trend over the course of the Han dynasty can go as follows: in the early years of the Western Han Empire, Naturalism, or more precisely the Huang-Lao school of thought, was favored by the Han court as its guiding philosophy. Incorporating both Daoist and Confucian ideas, the Syncretism of Dong Zhongshu (175–105 BC) became dominant towards the end of the second century BC. The study of the classics was revived under Emperor Wu, and Confucianism monopolized the intellectual sphere of the Han Empire, providing the empire with a new ideology. Near the end of the Eastern Han, Daoism was revived as a popular religion and Buddhism was introduced to China from India.

  Huang-Lao Thought as State Ideology

  Naturalism was a broad intellectual stream developed in the middle to late Warring States period, considered by some scholars as the fountainhead of the Chinese sciences and scientific thought.1 Although this intellectual stream brought into its current both more theoretically oriented thinkers like Zou Yan (305–240 BC) and other variously oriented practitioners of natural or supernatural magic or occult arts,2 there was a common thread that was shared by all scholars and masters associated with the tradition. That is, they were all thoroughly interested in or truthfully play on the relationship between the human world and the world around, or broadly the relationship between culture and nature.

  The core concepts of the Naturalist philosophy are yin and yang (two opposing forces of the universe), concepts that were borrowed from such Daoist texts as “The Great One Gives Birth to Water” or the “Classic of Way and Virtue” (Laozi), securely dated to the middle of the fourth century BC. Different from the concepts of yin and yang, the real invention of the naturalist tradition was the concept of “Five Elements.” The theory argues that the external world is composed of (or can be classified into) five elements: metal, wood, earth, water, fire. The five elements conquer each other in order and the last element “fire” then conquers the first “metal” hence making a circle. The proof for this relationship is everywhere, and in a temporal fashion the five elements also represent “five phases” in a grand circle of time. Because of the last point, the “Five Elements” theory had in its foundation seeds for developing into a theory of history and this step was taken by Zou Yan who associated the “Five Elements” with five preceding dynasties each having the virtue of a single element. By the early Han, the “Five Elements” had come to be associated also with the four cardinal directions plus the center: west (metal) – east (wood) – south (fire) – north (water) – center (earth). Furthermore, the “Five Elements” were transferred into a color scheme that was used to classify the imperial cults of the gods: White Emperor (Metal) – Blue Emperor (wood) – Red Emperor (Fire) – Black Emperor (water) – Yellow Emperor (earth, center) (Table 14.1). In short, the “Five Elements” had become a common knowledge by the early Han Dynasty.

  Table 14.1 The “Five Elements” and the correlative thinking of Han

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  The maturity of the Naturalist philosophy in the late Warring States represents a strong inquiry into the unity of natural order and the position of human society in it. This tradition stood strong even under the Qin Empire although the guiding policies of Qin had much influence from Legalist philosophy. There is, in fact, no conflict between the Legalist agenda of the state and the Naturalist or Occult practices, as the First Emperor himself employed some of the occult practitioners to help him find chemicals for longevity. Instead, nature had come through to acquire a new meaning in Naturalist philosophical tho
ught, differing from the “Nature” (ziran) in the Daoist view. It is no longer an eternal self-willed existence that is uncertain, unpredictable, and untouchable; instead, nature is understandable, analyzable, and even influenceable.

  If Naturalism can be considered a science, then “Huang-Lao thought” would have to be called the “political science” of ancient China. In the early Han, a number of prominent officials at the imperial court, including the ministers Cao Cen and Chen Ping, are all said to have been followers of Huang-Lao philosophy. Both Emperor Jing and his mother Empress Dowager Dou had a strong Huang-Lao agenda. Particularly the dowager exercised long-lasting influence on the court after the death of her husband Emperor Wen until the maturity of her grandson Emperor Wu. Even Sima Qian’s own father is reported to have studied Huang-Lao philosophy. There seems little doubt that in the early Han Empire, Huang-Lao philosophy was both dominant in the imperial court and widespread across the intellectual spectrum of Han society. However, for 2,000 years, no extant texts could be attributed to the Huang-Lao school. In the absence of authoritative texts, knowledge of the school, gleaned from a handful of citations in the historical records, was fragmentary and contradictory at best.

  In December 1973, the famous tombs at Mawangdui in Hunan Province were excavated (see below). Among the treasures from the tombs are two well-preserved silk scrolls dating back to early Han. The two scrolls carry a total of more than 120,000 characters, and each offers a version of the complete text of the “Classic of Way and Virtue” (called Laozi A and B). On the same scroll with Laozi B, believed to have been written during the reign of Liu Bang on the basis of the character-taboo fashion displayed by the text, and indeed preceding the Laozi B text, there are four new texts: “Canonical Laws” (Jingfa), “Sixteen Classics” (Shiliu jing), “Weighing” (Cheng), and “Origins of the Way” (Daoyuan). A first study of the four texts published by the famous paleographer Tang Lan identified these texts with the so-called “Four Classics of the Yellow Emperor” listed in the bibliography chapter of the official history of the Western Han dynasty, and traditionally believed to have been the core texts of the Huang-Lao school. Although this identification quickly met objections from other scholars, given the special intellectual context of early Han in which the texts were produced and entombed and their close relationship with the Laozi text written on the same scroll, there is a good possibility that they indeed belong to the large Huang-Lao tradition. But they might not be the so-called “Four Classics of the Yellow Emperor.”

  Working from assumption that these new texts are the so-called “Four Classics of the Yellow Emperor,” R. P. Peerenboom provided what still stands as the most comprehensive analysis of the philosophical ideas of the Huang-Lao school in English.3 Although it raised questions that have not been fully answered, there is no doubt that this study has opened up new ways for understanding the philosophy represented by the four texts as well as the overall intellectual climate of the early decades of the Han Empire. First, Huang-Lao thought starts with a three-tier cosmology and draws fundamental distinctions between the “Way of Heaven,” the “Way of Human,” and the “Way of Earth.” The first is manifested through the movement of yin and yang, the change of seasons, and the celestial bodies; the second is represented by all human institutions including the kingdoms and the empire; the third is the earth, formed by the “Five Elements.” Second, Huang-Lao is fundamentally Naturalism in the sense that the unquestionable cosmic order (“Way of Heaven”) serves as the basis for everything, and is the foundation for human orders. It is the human’s obligation to obey the Heavenly rules to construct political and social institutions that maximize the use of the “Five Elements,” the “Way of Earth.” Third, correlated to this foundational Naturalism is a natural-law theory – laws that govern human society are constructed as objective rules derived from a predetermined natural order.4 Fourth, because the law has its origin in the predetermined heavenly order, there is a strong sense that the law is moral, something that humans are obligated to obey. In this regard, Huang-Lao thought, despite its sharing with Legalism the reverence for social order achieved through the implementation of law, is very different from positive law theory of Legalism. Fifth, there is a distinctive correspondence with epistemology in which natural order is predetermined and humans can directly discover and understand it by eliminating bias and subjectivity.5

  Apparently, Huang-Lao thought was not homogeneous. It seems most likely that, although taking Naturalism as its foundation, Huang-Lao thought absorbed elements from both Legalism and Confucianism, making it politically more appealing to the early Han Empire. The Han Empire perceived itself to be the ideological enemy of the Qin Empire and its Legalist method of government. However, the Qin laid the foundation for the political institution of the empire that the Han took over, so Han needed to legitimize itself on a new ideological basis. Huang-Lao thought timely answered this call by setting the empire in the framework of cosmological orders and on the basis of moral correctness. It is the new law of the empire that everyone has a moral obligation to obey, rather than being forced to comply as in the ideology of the Qin Empire. Moreover, in my view, Huang-Lao thought revolutionized the concept of Wuwei which had previously long been interpreted to mean “No Action” as it is used in the “Classic of Way and Virtue” and the Zhuangzi. “No Action” (Wuwei) is said to have been the highest guiding principle for the early Han Empire in adopting the policy of minimum interference in the lives of the people. But in reality, as the Zhangjiashan legal strips show, even in the early years of Empress Lü, the Han Empire implemented sets of laws and punishments that were often more strict than Qin laws. But from the perspective of Huang-Lao thought, and since the Chinese word wei could mean both “to act” and “to create,” the Han founders could still have argued that they adhered to the principle of Wuwei, which did not mean “No Action,” but meant “Not to Create by Oneself” in early Han contexts, because whatever they were doing was merely patterned on the “Way of Heaven.” In short, Huang-Lao thought as an ideology suited the political needs of the early Han Empire extremely well, and this explains its popularity during early Han.

  The Confucianization of the Han Empire and the Rise of Classical Scholarship

  As Empress Dowager Dou (d. 135 BC) approached the end of her long life in the early years of Emperor Wu (r. 140–87 BC), Confucianism began to make heavy inroads in the Han court, supported by influential figures first of all among the imperial relatives. Under their advice, two scholars of the Book of Poetry, Zhao Wan and Wang Zang, were put in important positions in the government, with the former serving as the Chancellor. Thus, the change that took place in the early years of Emperor Wu marked both an intellectual shift and a political triumph of the faction of the younger generations at the Han court that took Confucianism as their guiding principle. As soon as the dowager died, Emperor Wu sponsored at least two open conferences attended by some 300 scholars for the purpose of bringing new light to the policies of the empire and discovering men of talent and virtue. Rising from these occasions were two important figures who both had their intellectual roots in the Spring and Autumn Annals, but represented different regional traditions of scholarship on the text. The first, Gongsun Hong, went on to serve as Censor-in-Chief and then Chancellor; the second, Dong Zhongshu, was less successful in officialdom and was sent, partly because of the jealousy of the first for his fine scholarship, to serve as advisor to two local kings. But it was Dong Zhongshu who was able to formulate a grand theory that provided the Han Empire with its new ideological foundation.

  Dong was from Guangchuan Commandery in present-day Hebei Province, and had already been appointed Erudite (see below, p. 311) by Emperor Jing for his excellent scholarship. He is said in the official history of the Western Han Dynasty to have conducted himself strictly according to Confucian ritual and expounded from behind a screen during courses of instruction. After his return from the local kingdoms he devoted himself entirely to teaching and scholars
hip in the imperial university in Chang’an and was closely consulted by the emperor whenever there was a major policy discussion that took place at the imperial court, but he never appeared at the court in person. Dong left some 123 essays including the memoranda that he submitted to the throne, and a large part of his writing was gathered in the current version of the long text called “Luxuriant Gems of the Spring and Autumn Annals” (Chunqiu fanlu). However, the best statement of his philosophical views is found in the multiple memoranda which Dong had submitted to the emperor, copied into Dong’s biography in the official history of the Western Han Dynasty.

  These memoranda suggest that Dong had the fundamental belief that virtuous teaching is preferred to punishment, and in this regard he is thoroughly Confucian. In Dong’s view, the reason that the people can still enjoy peaceful life in a time long after the sages had passed is precisely because of the teaching of rites and music which touched people’s skins and sank into their bones. Therefore, “Teaching and Transforming” (jiaohua) by means of ritual and music is fundamental to the state and has the potential to reform people’s nature and customs which will in turn reduce punishment to the minimum level. Furthermore, he interpreted the relationship between virtue and punishment in terms of yin and yang, as summer and winter that together make a complete year. But because misuses of punishment can lead to the accumulation of evil emotions among the people which can endanger the state, when a ruler received Heaven’s Mandate to conduct government he relied on virtuous teaching and not punishment. To Dong Zhongshu, the worst scenario would be to punish people without teaching them. These are profound expressions of the fundamental belief of Confucianism.