What do you think?
Rate this book
History of Imperial China #1
The Early Chinese Empires: Qin and Han
In 221 bc the First Emperor of Qin unified the lands that would become the heart of a Chinese empire. Though forged by conquest, this vast domain depended for its political survival on a fundamental reshaping of Chinese culture. With this informative book, we are present at the creation of an ancient imperial order whose major features would endure for two millennia. The Qin and Han constitute the "classical period" of Chinese history--a role played by the Greeks and Romans in the West. Mark Edward Lewis highlights the key challenges faced by the court officials and scholars who set about governing an empire of such scale and diversity of peoples. He traces the drastic measures taken to transcend, without eliminating, these regional the invention of the emperor as the divine embodiment of the state; the establishment of a common script for communication and a state-sponsored canon for the propagation of Confucian ideals; the flourishing of the great families, whose domination of local society rested on wealth, landholding, and elaborate kinship structures; the demilitarization of the interior; and the impact of non-Chinese warrior-nomads in setting the boundaries of an emerging Chinese identity. The first of a six-volume series on the history of imperial China, The Early Chinese Empires illuminates many formative events in China's long history of imperialism--events whose residual influence can still be discerned today.
336 pages, Hardcover
First published April 20, 2007
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 64 reviews
September 17, 2021
Mark Edward Lewis inaugurates Harvard University’s ‘History of Imperial China’ series in this first installment. The major themes are set, and the format remained mostly consistent over six volumes and three authors. Generally 100 pages are dedicated to political and military history, and 200 to urban and rural life, family and foreigners, religion, literature and law. The emphasis is on a synthesis of these elements, rather than in discrete essays. Major dynasties (such as the Han, Tang and Ming) are paired with pivotal ones (such as the Qin, Sui and Yuan). Minor dynasties are glossed over in favor of brevity.
Lewis begins with an inevitable comparison of the Han empire with the Roman empire, which co-existed during 27 BC to 229 AD. He sees a distinction in the Chinese empire’s ‘ability to reform itself again and again after periods of disunity’ due to a ‘reshaping of Chinese culture by the earliest dynasties, the Qin and the Han’. It is true that all later and even foreign dynasties (such as the Yuan and Qing) would adopt Han culture as their own. Lewis shows how future dynasties ‘cannot be understood without a grasp of China’s first period of unification’, as Western culture cannot without the Greco-Roman periods.
The five major features of the Chinese classical period are defined by Lewis as: ‘regional cultures transcended but not eradicated’, a ‘political structure centered on the emperor’, a ‘state-sponsored script and literary canon’, ‘military activities assigned to people on the frontier’ and ‘wealthy families in the countryside who maintained order’. This last principle differed from Roman patricians in that the great Han families were not large landowners deriving wealth from tenant or slave workers. They were groups of relatives and business associates who formed leagues able to challenge the power of the state.
The Han city had outer defense walls and an inner walled forbidden city. ‘Unlike Rome, where the ruler showed himself to the people, the ruler in China derived status from being invisible’, writes Lewis. While Rome had Latin and Greek for law and science, the Qin invented non-alphabetic symbols so that different languages could share the same written words. ‘Pliny complained that all of Rome’s gold was flowing east to pay for silk’. Silk was used by China to pay nomadic military confederates. ‘Whereas the stone ruins of Rome survived, the wooden capitals of China burned when a new dynasty took control.’
Lewis, as with his other two volumes in the series, is consummately erudite. When he discusses the material in the topical sections, he provides readings from the ancient sources his text is based on. This is a cut above the mere use of footnotes. By engaging the reader in his process of interpretation Lewis reveals the lens the distant past is being viewed with. Usually this is through a glass darkly, but happily the Chinese (like the Romans) have a great wealth of historical and other literature to draw from. A generalist in Chinese history, he is equally at home with religion and art as in war and law. A tour de force.
Lewis begins with an inevitable comparison of the Han empire with the Roman empire, which co-existed during 27 BC to 229 AD. He sees a distinction in the Chinese empire’s ‘ability to reform itself again and again after periods of disunity’ due to a ‘reshaping of Chinese culture by the earliest dynasties, the Qin and the Han’. It is true that all later and even foreign dynasties (such as the Yuan and Qing) would adopt Han culture as their own. Lewis shows how future dynasties ‘cannot be understood without a grasp of China’s first period of unification’, as Western culture cannot without the Greco-Roman periods.
The five major features of the Chinese classical period are defined by Lewis as: ‘regional cultures transcended but not eradicated’, a ‘political structure centered on the emperor’, a ‘state-sponsored script and literary canon’, ‘military activities assigned to people on the frontier’ and ‘wealthy families in the countryside who maintained order’. This last principle differed from Roman patricians in that the great Han families were not large landowners deriving wealth from tenant or slave workers. They were groups of relatives and business associates who formed leagues able to challenge the power of the state.
The Han city had outer defense walls and an inner walled forbidden city. ‘Unlike Rome, where the ruler showed himself to the people, the ruler in China derived status from being invisible’, writes Lewis. While Rome had Latin and Greek for law and science, the Qin invented non-alphabetic symbols so that different languages could share the same written words. ‘Pliny complained that all of Rome’s gold was flowing east to pay for silk’. Silk was used by China to pay nomadic military confederates. ‘Whereas the stone ruins of Rome survived, the wooden capitals of China burned when a new dynasty took control.’
Lewis, as with his other two volumes in the series, is consummately erudite. When he discusses the material in the topical sections, he provides readings from the ancient sources his text is based on. This is a cut above the mere use of footnotes. By engaging the reader in his process of interpretation Lewis reveals the lens the distant past is being viewed with. Usually this is through a glass darkly, but happily the Chinese (like the Romans) have a great wealth of historical and other literature to draw from. A generalist in Chinese history, he is equally at home with religion and art as in war and law. A tour de force.
February 28, 2015
I have never felt so much the dirty, smelly Westerner that I am as while I was reading the opening chapters of this book. While my ancestors were eating chestnuts, probably raw, and fighting a rear-guard action against the unwanted, unnecessary innovation of 'fire', people in China were creating the totalitarian state. That sounds bad, but consider the intellectual leap necessary to organize hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people into a unified polity. Remarkable stuff.
Those opening chapters really are doozies: on the one hand, structured around themes (geography, military, politics), on the other, giving you just enough information that you'll have an elevator speech about the Qin and Han (Warring states period ends, Qin create something like the first empire; it falls apart after the death of the first emperor; the Han win out among the following chaos; they separate themselves from the more horrifying aspects of Qin methods, while taking over enough to keep the empire unified).
And then, like the Chinese empire after the death of the first Qin emperor, the book falls apart. The thematic chapters are no doubt very nice for students looking specifically for information about, e.g., the topography of Chinese market towns. They are not very useful for understanding why things happened when they happened. By intentionally avoiding narrative, Lewis makes it almost impossible to judge the importance of the facts he provides to the reader. Thank heavens for the chronology at the end of the book.
Lewis does a good job avoiding some fashionable nonsense ("Eastern Imperialism is just a projection of Western prejudice"), but swallows a lot of it whole. I can't be the only reader upset that e.g., the Yellow Turban movement, which *Lewis* says was a major cause of the Han dynasty's ultimate fall, gets about two paragraphs of text--whereas merchants get two pages, and a bunch of nonsense theory about how they were subverting the imperial center by selling gooseberries or whatever. Welcome to contemporary academia: actual revolutions or rebellions are ignored; the soi disant subversion of everyday life is always *this close* to instaurating utopia.
Anyway, given how little up to date writing there is on ancient China, you have no option but to read this book, or remain mostly ignorant. And so I'll probably keep reading the series. But this was a real missed opportunity to do the job well.
Those opening chapters really are doozies: on the one hand, structured around themes (geography, military, politics), on the other, giving you just enough information that you'll have an elevator speech about the Qin and Han (Warring states period ends, Qin create something like the first empire; it falls apart after the death of the first emperor; the Han win out among the following chaos; they separate themselves from the more horrifying aspects of Qin methods, while taking over enough to keep the empire unified).
And then, like the Chinese empire after the death of the first Qin emperor, the book falls apart. The thematic chapters are no doubt very nice for students looking specifically for information about, e.g., the topography of Chinese market towns. They are not very useful for understanding why things happened when they happened. By intentionally avoiding narrative, Lewis makes it almost impossible to judge the importance of the facts he provides to the reader. Thank heavens for the chronology at the end of the book.
Lewis does a good job avoiding some fashionable nonsense ("Eastern Imperialism is just a projection of Western prejudice"), but swallows a lot of it whole. I can't be the only reader upset that e.g., the Yellow Turban movement, which *Lewis* says was a major cause of the Han dynasty's ultimate fall, gets about two paragraphs of text--whereas merchants get two pages, and a bunch of nonsense theory about how they were subverting the imperial center by selling gooseberries or whatever. Welcome to contemporary academia: actual revolutions or rebellions are ignored; the soi disant subversion of everyday life is always *this close* to instaurating utopia.
Anyway, given how little up to date writing there is on ancient China, you have no option but to read this book, or remain mostly ignorant. And so I'll probably keep reading the series. But this was a real missed opportunity to do the job well.
March 4, 2015
This is smart but austere survey of the first two dynasties of China, dating from 221 BC to 220 AD. The Qin and Han Dynasties arose from the bedlam of the Warring States, a sort of perpetual civil war which most accounts portray as a military stalemate with mass peasant misery occurring underfoot over a couple hundred years. Nothing novel there, just more of it. This all changed with the Qin who rose from that region to unite the central portion of the mainland which was understood to be somewhat nominal China at the time. This enterprise despite being short-lived, it lasted 15 years, fomented some interesting ideas about political philosophy, an idea called legalsim after the fact. The notion is that humans are mean and lazy and the state should restrict their impulses and channel them towards positive outlets, outlets like agriculture and war. This notion caught on, which is really impressive, given that it is 200 BC. There were egalitarian measures along the way about land distribution but these are shot down by the GOP, I mean the wealthy families whose members in government always lean against these propositions. The author is in his spare accounts of these matters, appears to be Foucauldian. He ruminates on the use of space in urban areas and palaces, especially how the Han Emperors preferred to be "hidden or invisible".
Kinship is very saucy in this context. Land inheritance isn't as significant as government appointments in terms of advancement or ambition. One has to grease the wheels somehow. There is a reign of serial gifts which isn't exclusively corruption as it has metaphysical dividends with the ones' ancestors and related vague purgatorial bullshit. The role of women is likewise dorsal and volatile. Mothers, stepmothers and daughters murk about and skew the more conservative patriarchal dynamics. The anecdotes about such made me appreciate my knowledge of Asian action cinema, such has come in handy, finally.
This is an adequate point of departure, though lacking too juicy a bibliography for me personally. I am moving on.
Kinship is very saucy in this context. Land inheritance isn't as significant as government appointments in terms of advancement or ambition. One has to grease the wheels somehow. There is a reign of serial gifts which isn't exclusively corruption as it has metaphysical dividends with the ones' ancestors and related vague purgatorial bullshit. The role of women is likewise dorsal and volatile. Mothers, stepmothers and daughters murk about and skew the more conservative patriarchal dynamics. The anecdotes about such made me appreciate my knowledge of Asian action cinema, such has come in handy, finally.
This is an adequate point of departure, though lacking too juicy a bibliography for me personally. I am moving on.
October 19, 2021
A Lot of Information Very Quickly, Yet Not Overwhelming
This book probably shouldn’t be your first book on Chinese history. It consciously eschews the more traditional political narrative (check out John Keay’s China: A History for a good example of that) and instead divides the book up by subjects that cut largely across the era as a whole. On the other hand, it probably won’t serve your needs if you’re a student of Chinese history. It covers a lot of material in an organized manner, but given its size and the complexity of its topic it can’t help but cover the material in a fairly superficial manner. So what this book is designed for is the beginning student who’s read a little Chinese narrative history but wants to know more about society and the development of Chinese culture.
I feel that in saying that I’m making this book sound very limited. Not at all. For one thing, I fall firmly in that category of people. I think there are a fair number of people who do. And for another it does a very good job of thoroughly exploring the Han and Qin. The book is divided up into 10 sections which, peeking ahead, are largely common across the entire series. It covers geography, Warring States government/military, imperial government, imperial cities, rural society, foreign relations, the family, religion, literature, and law. These can sound a bit limited, but Lewis often takes a broad angle on them. For example, the opening chapter on geography covers much more than just the layout of China – it explains why different states (particularly Qin) developed the way they did and offers brief outlines of their history.
I felt that the subjects covered are appropriate and valuable. They go Geography (how geography leads to political and social differences), A State Organized for War (Qin and society’s reorientation to war in the Warring States), Paradoxes of Empire (the transition – failed in Qin’s case – from conquest to rule), Imperial Cities (urbanization and imperial ideology), Rural Society (what it sounds like), the Outer World (China’s neighbors and foreign relations), Kinship (the contradictions between nuclear family and ancestor worship), Religion (what it sounds like), Literature (what it sounds like), Law (how laws work but also political structures and legal theory). This is followed by a conclusion which lays out the fall of the Han Dynasty in frankly insufficient detail. I love every one of these topics, but it can’t help but be a little frustrating to start over at the beginning for each chapter and advance over the same ground. This may be less of a problem in later books since much of the background will have been established in the previous book and won’t need to be covered again. But then if Eastern and Western Han are different they’re nothing on Northern and Southern Song. Or Yuan and Ming. Or Qing pre vs. post-Opium War. I look forwards to finding out.
While I wouldn’t advise using the book as a narrative, it does provide limited narrative sections. The section on geography in the beginning, for example, includes an excellent look at how the nature of Chinese geography influenced Qin culture and gave them an edge against their competitors. The second chapter on Qin military (A State Organized for War) also includes narrative sections on how Qin military and political reforms made them extra competitive in the quest for sole rule. This was one of the clearest descriptions of Qin’s rise to power I’ve read. Generally, the book is full of insightful observations, most of them to do with Chinese psychology. For example, the conflict between regional and universal identities is explained in a way that explains why the latter is emphasized so heavily at the expense of the former. The regional identities are regarded as inherent to the regions and all that unites them is the person of the emperor. Thus the different regions paying tribute to the emperor is not just a show of power but a demonstration of the unity the emperor brings by being above any specific region.
While I understand why these books are the way they are it is also true that there are definitely a shortage of historical narratives focusing on specific eras in Chinese history. Keay’s book is excellent, but it covers more than 3,000 years in about 500 pages. Most other introductions to Chinese history are similar. Or they take the opposite approach and cover a much narrower event (like the Opium War, Taiping Rebellion, or Boxer Rebellion) in immense detail. Which is great but leaves a definite gap in the middle which still needs to be filled. How many books are there that cover the political or military history of the Han Dynasty? Or any dynasty? I wish Harvard University Press would consider organizing such a series. It feels like such a necessary series really ought to exist. I also feel, and this feeling was only increased by the discussion in the beginning of this book, that a history of the early empire that doesn’t cover the Warring States Period is only half a book. The Warring States Period made China and yet has been criminally underexplored in English scholarship.
I really liked this book and consider it probably the best I’ve ever read on China. That said, I’m definitely in a very narrow market as far as interests/goals are concerned – I’m a Romanist teaching World History and want to be well read enough to know more than my students without necessarily becoming a real expert. If you’re one of the literally dozens of people in the same boat as me, well, consider this an unvarnished recommendation. Obviously my situation will not be the same as everyone else’s, but I suspect that people will know from the above description if they too will find this book useful. I think it genuinely does provide a great guide to Han and Qin culture… provided you’re familiar with the background already. But the lack of narrative does provide a limitation for someone at the very start of their journey into China’s past. Check out Keay’s book, check out Frances Wood’s The First Emperor of China (another thematic approach), and then come back to this one. I found it very rewarding and I think you will too.
This book probably shouldn’t be your first book on Chinese history. It consciously eschews the more traditional political narrative (check out John Keay’s China: A History for a good example of that) and instead divides the book up by subjects that cut largely across the era as a whole. On the other hand, it probably won’t serve your needs if you’re a student of Chinese history. It covers a lot of material in an organized manner, but given its size and the complexity of its topic it can’t help but cover the material in a fairly superficial manner. So what this book is designed for is the beginning student who’s read a little Chinese narrative history but wants to know more about society and the development of Chinese culture.
I feel that in saying that I’m making this book sound very limited. Not at all. For one thing, I fall firmly in that category of people. I think there are a fair number of people who do. And for another it does a very good job of thoroughly exploring the Han and Qin. The book is divided up into 10 sections which, peeking ahead, are largely common across the entire series. It covers geography, Warring States government/military, imperial government, imperial cities, rural society, foreign relations, the family, religion, literature, and law. These can sound a bit limited, but Lewis often takes a broad angle on them. For example, the opening chapter on geography covers much more than just the layout of China – it explains why different states (particularly Qin) developed the way they did and offers brief outlines of their history.
I felt that the subjects covered are appropriate and valuable. They go Geography (how geography leads to political and social differences), A State Organized for War (Qin and society’s reorientation to war in the Warring States), Paradoxes of Empire (the transition – failed in Qin’s case – from conquest to rule), Imperial Cities (urbanization and imperial ideology), Rural Society (what it sounds like), the Outer World (China’s neighbors and foreign relations), Kinship (the contradictions between nuclear family and ancestor worship), Religion (what it sounds like), Literature (what it sounds like), Law (how laws work but also political structures and legal theory). This is followed by a conclusion which lays out the fall of the Han Dynasty in frankly insufficient detail. I love every one of these topics, but it can’t help but be a little frustrating to start over at the beginning for each chapter and advance over the same ground. This may be less of a problem in later books since much of the background will have been established in the previous book and won’t need to be covered again. But then if Eastern and Western Han are different they’re nothing on Northern and Southern Song. Or Yuan and Ming. Or Qing pre vs. post-Opium War. I look forwards to finding out.
While I wouldn’t advise using the book as a narrative, it does provide limited narrative sections. The section on geography in the beginning, for example, includes an excellent look at how the nature of Chinese geography influenced Qin culture and gave them an edge against their competitors. The second chapter on Qin military (A State Organized for War) also includes narrative sections on how Qin military and political reforms made them extra competitive in the quest for sole rule. This was one of the clearest descriptions of Qin’s rise to power I’ve read. Generally, the book is full of insightful observations, most of them to do with Chinese psychology. For example, the conflict between regional and universal identities is explained in a way that explains why the latter is emphasized so heavily at the expense of the former. The regional identities are regarded as inherent to the regions and all that unites them is the person of the emperor. Thus the different regions paying tribute to the emperor is not just a show of power but a demonstration of the unity the emperor brings by being above any specific region.
While I understand why these books are the way they are it is also true that there are definitely a shortage of historical narratives focusing on specific eras in Chinese history. Keay’s book is excellent, but it covers more than 3,000 years in about 500 pages. Most other introductions to Chinese history are similar. Or they take the opposite approach and cover a much narrower event (like the Opium War, Taiping Rebellion, or Boxer Rebellion) in immense detail. Which is great but leaves a definite gap in the middle which still needs to be filled. How many books are there that cover the political or military history of the Han Dynasty? Or any dynasty? I wish Harvard University Press would consider organizing such a series. It feels like such a necessary series really ought to exist. I also feel, and this feeling was only increased by the discussion in the beginning of this book, that a history of the early empire that doesn’t cover the Warring States Period is only half a book. The Warring States Period made China and yet has been criminally underexplored in English scholarship.
I really liked this book and consider it probably the best I’ve ever read on China. That said, I’m definitely in a very narrow market as far as interests/goals are concerned – I’m a Romanist teaching World History and want to be well read enough to know more than my students without necessarily becoming a real expert. If you’re one of the literally dozens of people in the same boat as me, well, consider this an unvarnished recommendation. Obviously my situation will not be the same as everyone else’s, but I suspect that people will know from the above description if they too will find this book useful. I think it genuinely does provide a great guide to Han and Qin culture… provided you’re familiar with the background already. But the lack of narrative does provide a limitation for someone at the very start of their journey into China’s past. Check out Keay’s book, check out Frances Wood’s The First Emperor of China (another thematic approach), and then come back to this one. I found it very rewarding and I think you will too.
March 2, 2009
The Early Chinese Empires: Qin and Han is a readable overview of the histories and culture of the first two dynasties of imperial China, a period lasting from 221 BC to AD 220. It’s the first in a series of histories about China published by The Belknap Press of Harvard. If they maintain the quality evidenced in this book, I’ll be interested in seeing subsequent volumes. However, one of the drawbacks in any work of this sort is that the reader flies at a tremendous height over China’s landscape, only dipping down occasionally to take a look at an interesting feature of the geography, getting little in the way of a sustained argument for a particular interpretation. If a reader doesn’t have some background in Chinese history, they can easily get lost. That, I think, is my strongest criticism of Lewis’ effort – he may assume too much prior knowledge on the general reader’s part. I wouldn’t recommend this book to anyone other than a person who already has a good but not extensive background in the period and wants to know more without necessarily getting bogged down with academic focuses like “The Development of Han and Wei Yueh-fu as a High Literary Genre.” A fascinating article, I’m sure, but probably more information about that particular topic than the general reader wants to know. Which is why the bibliography and the notes are two of the more attractive features of the book – anyone interested in a specific topic has a good resource to find more specialized knowledge (I acquired four books for my own To-Read shelf). To get a better handle on the general history of the period a reader might want to start with an edition of Jacques Gernet’s A History of Chinese Civilization or Wolfram Eberhard’s A History of China.
The book is divided into ten chapters that cover the usual suspects starting with “The Geography of Empire” and continuing through “A State Organized for War,” “The Paradoxes of Empire,” “Imperial Cities,” “Rural Society,” “The Outer World,” “Kinship,” “Religion,” “Literature” and “Law,” and a short concluding essay. One of the greatest pleasures in reading was that every chapter held heretofore unknown information and/or made me see China in a slightly different light, enhancing my understanding of the era.
Chapter one: Early China was divided along two axes – an east-west one (the floodplain of the Yellow River and the highlands west of the Hangu Pass) and a north-south one (the Yellow River and Yangzi River valleys, respectively). The eastern side of the axis (Guandong) represented the economic and cultural center of early Chinese life; the western half (Guanzhong) represented the military and political focus of the empire. In this period, the north-south divide was one of culture – the north was the home of civilization; the south was full of uncultured barbarians still, it’s later economic and demographic dominance awaited the Song dynasty. From its earliest days, the empire struggled to suppress local customs, laws and culture in its effort to create a unitary, universal kingdom. The superior man (the sage) was someone who knew the text-based, universal wisdom of Shang and Zhou; inferior was the man who only knew the wisdom of a particular region, which (at best) was the corrupted knowledge of the ancient sages.
Even before unification, Qin had been a highly regimented state devoted to maintaining the army and the agricultural base that supported it. These policies (reminiscent of Sparta’s in the West) were carried over into the empire and were a major cause in Qin’s overthrow. Yet Han also tried to maintain a base of small, independent farmers to man and feed their armies. Unfortunately, imperial policies didn’t always lead to imperial goals, and the Han were less and less successful in curbing the centrifugal developments that eroded imperial authority.
Another stereotypical feature of Confucian governance – its loathing of the merchant class – found early expression in imperial policy: Income from mercantile activity was taxed at twice the level of landed wealth. A strong incentive for the wealthy to convert as much of their wealth into land as possible; and an irresistible force pushing peasants into tenancy and turning the wealthy into landlords.
Chapter two picks up and amplifies the discussion of Qin’s political organization. Much of its success during the Warring States period was due to its subsummation of other priorities to waging war. Qin fielded armies better led, trained and supplied than any of her enemies could hope to muster (or were willing to). But this organization proved inadequate to governing a unified state and, as we saw in Chapter one, led to the first dynasty’s collapse not even a generation from its founding. The most interesting section of this chapter is Lewis’ discussion of strong evidence for a growing, powerful regionalism that the Qin and Han ruthless suppressed. He suggests that, absent the Qin, Chinese unification was not a foregone conclusion. In an alternate universe, a China as politically and culturally diverse as Europe is not farfetched.
Chapter three charts three trends that led to a political unification that has shown surprising resilience for the last two millennia. The first is the professionalization of the armies. A process that every major state undergoes when its peasant levies or citizen militias prove inadequate to the demands of the state. The second factor was the enforcement of a common imperial culture as the government assumed control over the patronage of art and literature. Local variations continued, of course, but their legitimacy went unrecognized, and any ambitious man was perforce obligated to master what the capital prescribed to secure any position. The third factor in unification was the growth of an elite commited to imperial service, which owed its position and wealth to local networks of family and allies (an uneasy compromise between the interests of court and gentry).
In “Imperial Cities,” I was struck by the dual nature of most Chinese cities: There were two quite distinct districts. One was devoted entirely to the government; the other was devoted to residents and the economic pursuits of the city. Lewis argues that this was the physical expression of the deep divide existing between the state and the urban elements that threatened its power: mercantile wealth; gangsters and “wandering swordsmen”; and the grey market of esoteric teachers, beggars and prostitutes.
Chapter five is an unfortunately (but unavoidably) cursory overview of rural China. As with all premodern civilizations, the overwhelming majority of Chinese were farmers, and imperial policy was explicitly formulated (at least in theory) to support them. It discouraged trade, inhibited landlordism and protected the small farmer. In theory. As mentioned above, the state constantly struggled to curb the growth of large estates full of tenants not paying their taxes.
One of the more interesting sections here was Lewis’ discussion of the elite’s ethos – namely, the strong ethic to redistribute wealth. To accumulate too much was to invite immorality – “wealth was of value only when circulated” (p. 123).
Chapter six takes a look at the early empire’s relations with its neighbors, primarily the nomads to the north and west. For most of the time, these were represented by probably the first of the great nomadic “empires” that periodically arise in the steppe – the Xiongnu. It’s interesting to note that the Chinese emperors (huangdi) acknowledged the equivalency of the Xiongnu leader (chanyu), which departed from later dynasties that made all rulers subordinate to the suzerainty of the emperor. Ultimately this policy failed: The Xiongnu were broken in the late second century AD, no similar nomad empire took its place, and the Chinese were never able to understand the nomads as anything other than a mirror image of the imperial court. A cultural blindness that made it difficult to respond effectively to nomad threats. It didn’t help, either, that the Eastern Han (post AD 25) tended to neglect the western provinces and the army.
“Kinship,” Chapter seven, is a fascinating essay. Lewis highlights the competing visions of the family. On the one hand you have “lineages,” tracing descent from father to son across generations. Competing with this vision is the “household,” defined by the nuclear family and the relationships between husband/wife and parent/child. Also under the Han, children first became the topic of literary reflection. Adumbrating the “Baby Einstein” craze of a few years ago, Chinese philosophers stressed the importance of the prenatal environment in the child’s destiny. What the mother saw, ate, heard, said and did were critical to producing a “good” child. Or – to be avoided – Damien from “The Omen.”
Chapter eight introduces us to early imperial religious practice. There were four primary intersections between the secular and spiritual. The first was at the sacrificial shrine or altar. The second was contact with spirits, usually mediated by a shaman. The third consisted of geographical foci – mountains, lakes, streams, etc., or the extreme ends of the earth (the Taoist Immortals were rumored to live on floating islands to the east, for example). The final contact with the supernatural was via divination, which didn’t predict specific events so much as illuminated general trends and possibilities. Religion, as a whole, is characterized by a lack of systematized mythology or creation myths, and focused on maintaining a proper order betwixt the quick and the dead, heaven and earth. The afterlife is of a nature with this one; so much so that it’s just as prone to bureaucratic inefficiency as the earthly empire. (For the interested, Gore Vidal’s novel Creation is the marvelous account of Zoroaster’s grandson’s adventures as the Persian ambassador to the kingdoms of China and India where some of these differences between eastern and western spirituality are explored in a setting that doesn’t demand knowledge of or even great interest in Chinese history.)
Passing quickly to the final two chapters: “Literature” discusses what the Chinese (the elite, at any rate) were reading. In its efforts to control thought, the empire quickly established several classes of “legitimate” writings: The canons (jing) (which included belles lettres) and their commentaries (zhuan or shuo), which were universal principles and explanations that showed how to apply them. Of somewhat lesser stature were the encyclopedias, which endeavored to gather together the sum of all knowledge. The last class of literature is the history, which aimed to give expression to the “project of empire” (p. 214). As with every aspect of imperial culture, authors such as Sima Qian were remarkably focused on upholding and justifying the idea of a unified empire under a universal monarch governing with universal principles. The very idea of intellectual disunity reflected decay and social disorder. An attitude which strongly mitigated intellectual curiosity or dissent.
“Law” proved to be another fascinating chapter. There’s a surprisingly modern “feel” to the rules for investigating crime scenes. The investigator is supposed to carefully inspect the physical evidence; closely question witnesses and suspects; and extract a confession from the guilty. Punishments were usually corporal, usually brutal, often fatal, though there was in increasing tendency for many to be condemned to serving as laborers or in the armies.
The concluding essay wraps things up nicely. Lewis argues here that the fundamental reason for Eastern Han’s collapse was that its court lost touch with its subjects and, more importantly, lost its monopoly on violence, i.e., it lost control of its armies, which became the personal militias of landlords and generals. A phenomenon all too common in both modern and premodern states.
The book is divided into ten chapters that cover the usual suspects starting with “The Geography of Empire” and continuing through “A State Organized for War,” “The Paradoxes of Empire,” “Imperial Cities,” “Rural Society,” “The Outer World,” “Kinship,” “Religion,” “Literature” and “Law,” and a short concluding essay. One of the greatest pleasures in reading was that every chapter held heretofore unknown information and/or made me see China in a slightly different light, enhancing my understanding of the era.
Chapter one: Early China was divided along two axes – an east-west one (the floodplain of the Yellow River and the highlands west of the Hangu Pass) and a north-south one (the Yellow River and Yangzi River valleys, respectively). The eastern side of the axis (Guandong) represented the economic and cultural center of early Chinese life; the western half (Guanzhong) represented the military and political focus of the empire. In this period, the north-south divide was one of culture – the north was the home of civilization; the south was full of uncultured barbarians still, it’s later economic and demographic dominance awaited the Song dynasty. From its earliest days, the empire struggled to suppress local customs, laws and culture in its effort to create a unitary, universal kingdom. The superior man (the sage) was someone who knew the text-based, universal wisdom of Shang and Zhou; inferior was the man who only knew the wisdom of a particular region, which (at best) was the corrupted knowledge of the ancient sages.
Even before unification, Qin had been a highly regimented state devoted to maintaining the army and the agricultural base that supported it. These policies (reminiscent of Sparta’s in the West) were carried over into the empire and were a major cause in Qin’s overthrow. Yet Han also tried to maintain a base of small, independent farmers to man and feed their armies. Unfortunately, imperial policies didn’t always lead to imperial goals, and the Han were less and less successful in curbing the centrifugal developments that eroded imperial authority.
Another stereotypical feature of Confucian governance – its loathing of the merchant class – found early expression in imperial policy: Income from mercantile activity was taxed at twice the level of landed wealth. A strong incentive for the wealthy to convert as much of their wealth into land as possible; and an irresistible force pushing peasants into tenancy and turning the wealthy into landlords.
Chapter two picks up and amplifies the discussion of Qin’s political organization. Much of its success during the Warring States period was due to its subsummation of other priorities to waging war. Qin fielded armies better led, trained and supplied than any of her enemies could hope to muster (or were willing to). But this organization proved inadequate to governing a unified state and, as we saw in Chapter one, led to the first dynasty’s collapse not even a generation from its founding. The most interesting section of this chapter is Lewis’ discussion of strong evidence for a growing, powerful regionalism that the Qin and Han ruthless suppressed. He suggests that, absent the Qin, Chinese unification was not a foregone conclusion. In an alternate universe, a China as politically and culturally diverse as Europe is not farfetched.
Chapter three charts three trends that led to a political unification that has shown surprising resilience for the last two millennia. The first is the professionalization of the armies. A process that every major state undergoes when its peasant levies or citizen militias prove inadequate to the demands of the state. The second factor was the enforcement of a common imperial culture as the government assumed control over the patronage of art and literature. Local variations continued, of course, but their legitimacy went unrecognized, and any ambitious man was perforce obligated to master what the capital prescribed to secure any position. The third factor in unification was the growth of an elite commited to imperial service, which owed its position and wealth to local networks of family and allies (an uneasy compromise between the interests of court and gentry).
In “Imperial Cities,” I was struck by the dual nature of most Chinese cities: There were two quite distinct districts. One was devoted entirely to the government; the other was devoted to residents and the economic pursuits of the city. Lewis argues that this was the physical expression of the deep divide existing between the state and the urban elements that threatened its power: mercantile wealth; gangsters and “wandering swordsmen”; and the grey market of esoteric teachers, beggars and prostitutes.
Chapter five is an unfortunately (but unavoidably) cursory overview of rural China. As with all premodern civilizations, the overwhelming majority of Chinese were farmers, and imperial policy was explicitly formulated (at least in theory) to support them. It discouraged trade, inhibited landlordism and protected the small farmer. In theory. As mentioned above, the state constantly struggled to curb the growth of large estates full of tenants not paying their taxes.
One of the more interesting sections here was Lewis’ discussion of the elite’s ethos – namely, the strong ethic to redistribute wealth. To accumulate too much was to invite immorality – “wealth was of value only when circulated” (p. 123).
Chapter six takes a look at the early empire’s relations with its neighbors, primarily the nomads to the north and west. For most of the time, these were represented by probably the first of the great nomadic “empires” that periodically arise in the steppe – the Xiongnu. It’s interesting to note that the Chinese emperors (huangdi) acknowledged the equivalency of the Xiongnu leader (chanyu), which departed from later dynasties that made all rulers subordinate to the suzerainty of the emperor. Ultimately this policy failed: The Xiongnu were broken in the late second century AD, no similar nomad empire took its place, and the Chinese were never able to understand the nomads as anything other than a mirror image of the imperial court. A cultural blindness that made it difficult to respond effectively to nomad threats. It didn’t help, either, that the Eastern Han (post AD 25) tended to neglect the western provinces and the army.
“Kinship,” Chapter seven, is a fascinating essay. Lewis highlights the competing visions of the family. On the one hand you have “lineages,” tracing descent from father to son across generations. Competing with this vision is the “household,” defined by the nuclear family and the relationships between husband/wife and parent/child. Also under the Han, children first became the topic of literary reflection. Adumbrating the “Baby Einstein” craze of a few years ago, Chinese philosophers stressed the importance of the prenatal environment in the child’s destiny. What the mother saw, ate, heard, said and did were critical to producing a “good” child. Or – to be avoided – Damien from “The Omen.”
Chapter eight introduces us to early imperial religious practice. There were four primary intersections between the secular and spiritual. The first was at the sacrificial shrine or altar. The second was contact with spirits, usually mediated by a shaman. The third consisted of geographical foci – mountains, lakes, streams, etc., or the extreme ends of the earth (the Taoist Immortals were rumored to live on floating islands to the east, for example). The final contact with the supernatural was via divination, which didn’t predict specific events so much as illuminated general trends and possibilities. Religion, as a whole, is characterized by a lack of systematized mythology or creation myths, and focused on maintaining a proper order betwixt the quick and the dead, heaven and earth. The afterlife is of a nature with this one; so much so that it’s just as prone to bureaucratic inefficiency as the earthly empire. (For the interested, Gore Vidal’s novel Creation is the marvelous account of Zoroaster’s grandson’s adventures as the Persian ambassador to the kingdoms of China and India where some of these differences between eastern and western spirituality are explored in a setting that doesn’t demand knowledge of or even great interest in Chinese history.)
Passing quickly to the final two chapters: “Literature” discusses what the Chinese (the elite, at any rate) were reading. In its efforts to control thought, the empire quickly established several classes of “legitimate” writings: The canons (jing) (which included belles lettres) and their commentaries (zhuan or shuo), which were universal principles and explanations that showed how to apply them. Of somewhat lesser stature were the encyclopedias, which endeavored to gather together the sum of all knowledge. The last class of literature is the history, which aimed to give expression to the “project of empire” (p. 214). As with every aspect of imperial culture, authors such as Sima Qian were remarkably focused on upholding and justifying the idea of a unified empire under a universal monarch governing with universal principles. The very idea of intellectual disunity reflected decay and social disorder. An attitude which strongly mitigated intellectual curiosity or dissent.
“Law” proved to be another fascinating chapter. There’s a surprisingly modern “feel” to the rules for investigating crime scenes. The investigator is supposed to carefully inspect the physical evidence; closely question witnesses and suspects; and extract a confession from the guilty. Punishments were usually corporal, usually brutal, often fatal, though there was in increasing tendency for many to be condemned to serving as laborers or in the armies.
The concluding essay wraps things up nicely. Lewis argues here that the fundamental reason for Eastern Han’s collapse was that its court lost touch with its subjects and, more importantly, lost its monopoly on violence, i.e., it lost control of its armies, which became the personal militias of landlords and generals. A phenomenon all too common in both modern and premodern states.
August 14, 2019
Mark Edward Lewis’s “The Early Chinese empires” is a classic unambitious historical overview of the first two Chinese dynasties of which we have adequate written sources; the Qin and han dynasties.
I say unambitious for I feel like the author did not stray far beyond a classic structure of rise and fall presented alongside a few chapters on cultural aspects of the then Chinese society namely; religion, literature, law and kinship. I am not saying this is necessarily a bad thing and from an informative point of view this structure has its merits but this kind of structure often has problems leaving a lasting impression. Only once did I feel like he went a bit off the beaten track by talking about life in cities of those the authorities considered undesirable specifically gangs of youths who lived near the markets and became a source of trouble in times of crisis. But I can’t help but notice that the founder of the Han dynasty had been one such youngster and whose first followers had been his band of youth friends and fellow nogooders and therefor Lewis attention to this societal phenomenon is not that surprising.
As far as Mark Lewis is concerned; the lesson to be taken from these dynasties is perhaps something akin to a quote by Tywin Lannister on the late king Robert Baratheon; a man who thought conquering and ruling were the same thing. This is particularly true of the first and only true Qin emperor whose state had been organized on near totalitarian principles that after the final victory suddenly lost the raison d’être for most of its institutions leading to it collapsing under the collective weight of inadequate management. The book of Lord Shang by Shang Yang has got to be one the most spine curling texts to be read and to think that this was considered a state ideal with its praising of a society built for total war. In particular the suggestion that the people should never have any real surplus of food, for even a little surplus make them weak and waste time on music, family and culture when they should only be thinking of survival and war…. One has to wonder why no one or no one with enough influence ever wondered what would happen if their were no more enemies to fight….
The Han on the other hand were a more complex story of structural societal problems involving growing landlorddship and powerful alternative powerstructures based on extendend kinship ties that in themselves might not have sealed the fate of the Han state; but combined with like the Qin a radical change in their warfare needs to wich they failed to adapt (thanks due to the structural societal changes that had shaped Han China) the warlords that followed almost seemed like a natural conclusion. However it all seems to me to be a bit to smooth a story; Mark Edward Lewis is clearly out there to tell one story of this period. Two times this became obvious. The first was a commentary on the relationship between the state bureaucracy and the will of the emperor and by extension the inner court. Mark Edward Lewis indulges a few conflicting theories that attributed a certain extent of autonomy for the bureaucracy, these he flat out calls out to be wrong. In his defence he does explain why but still it felt a bit harsh to simply flat out say no; they are are wrong. A second line I could not help but notice was when discussing the widining gap in wealth in rural China a gap brought upon by a combination of factors but one of which is the ability to acquire and use new technologies such as oxen pulled plows, new deeper wells and so on. These new technologies only made the existing gap worse because on the richer landowners could afford them. In theory, says Lewis, poorer independent farmers could have bought these as group, but that could never works because ownership is not clear. Excuses me? Classic outdated tragedy of the commons rhetoric much? I acknowdledge that it might not have been easy but to flatout deny the possibility of communal investment based on assumptions that these farmers would not have been able to find a working condition, I found this to be quite baffling. These two example do make me wary for other similar assumptions worked into the text that I failed to spot.
All in all I can’t say I found this to be that interesting a book, it is ok for starting to explore the era and subject. I have to say I did really like that Lewis included an adequate part on the nomadic Xiongnu whose defeat set in motion the internal failing of the Han state. I appreciated that more time was spent on the asiatic steppes people then on the overemphasized and possibly exaggerated connection between China and Rome that has come to grasp the imagination and attention of many sholars on Central Asia. If, as Lewis emphasised, a sort of exotic craze existed among the Han elite for steppe products, going as far as one emperor having a mock yurt set up in the palace, then clearly these people and their interaction with China were far more important then some far away city state turned imperial subjugator. Likewise I was amused to discover the rather haunting way which the deceased were viewed and for whom house like tombs were built. Funny thing considering their capitals all got burned down, tombs are the biggest structures of the Qin, western and Eastern Han that have lasted but still tombs are not what is associated with Ancient China, I sure didn’t.
I would have liked a bit more tough on the Yellow turban rebellion, the warlords and the civil chaos that led to the end of the Han and the rise of the Three kingdoms; if it had I would have given three stars; as it is I will limit my scoring to two.
I say unambitious for I feel like the author did not stray far beyond a classic structure of rise and fall presented alongside a few chapters on cultural aspects of the then Chinese society namely; religion, literature, law and kinship. I am not saying this is necessarily a bad thing and from an informative point of view this structure has its merits but this kind of structure often has problems leaving a lasting impression. Only once did I feel like he went a bit off the beaten track by talking about life in cities of those the authorities considered undesirable specifically gangs of youths who lived near the markets and became a source of trouble in times of crisis. But I can’t help but notice that the founder of the Han dynasty had been one such youngster and whose first followers had been his band of youth friends and fellow nogooders and therefor Lewis attention to this societal phenomenon is not that surprising.
As far as Mark Lewis is concerned; the lesson to be taken from these dynasties is perhaps something akin to a quote by Tywin Lannister on the late king Robert Baratheon; a man who thought conquering and ruling were the same thing. This is particularly true of the first and only true Qin emperor whose state had been organized on near totalitarian principles that after the final victory suddenly lost the raison d’être for most of its institutions leading to it collapsing under the collective weight of inadequate management. The book of Lord Shang by Shang Yang has got to be one the most spine curling texts to be read and to think that this was considered a state ideal with its praising of a society built for total war. In particular the suggestion that the people should never have any real surplus of food, for even a little surplus make them weak and waste time on music, family and culture when they should only be thinking of survival and war…. One has to wonder why no one or no one with enough influence ever wondered what would happen if their were no more enemies to fight….
The Han on the other hand were a more complex story of structural societal problems involving growing landlorddship and powerful alternative powerstructures based on extendend kinship ties that in themselves might not have sealed the fate of the Han state; but combined with like the Qin a radical change in their warfare needs to wich they failed to adapt (thanks due to the structural societal changes that had shaped Han China) the warlords that followed almost seemed like a natural conclusion. However it all seems to me to be a bit to smooth a story; Mark Edward Lewis is clearly out there to tell one story of this period. Two times this became obvious. The first was a commentary on the relationship between the state bureaucracy and the will of the emperor and by extension the inner court. Mark Edward Lewis indulges a few conflicting theories that attributed a certain extent of autonomy for the bureaucracy, these he flat out calls out to be wrong. In his defence he does explain why but still it felt a bit harsh to simply flat out say no; they are are wrong. A second line I could not help but notice was when discussing the widining gap in wealth in rural China a gap brought upon by a combination of factors but one of which is the ability to acquire and use new technologies such as oxen pulled plows, new deeper wells and so on. These new technologies only made the existing gap worse because on the richer landowners could afford them. In theory, says Lewis, poorer independent farmers could have bought these as group, but that could never works because ownership is not clear. Excuses me? Classic outdated tragedy of the commons rhetoric much? I acknowdledge that it might not have been easy but to flatout deny the possibility of communal investment based on assumptions that these farmers would not have been able to find a working condition, I found this to be quite baffling. These two example do make me wary for other similar assumptions worked into the text that I failed to spot.
All in all I can’t say I found this to be that interesting a book, it is ok for starting to explore the era and subject. I have to say I did really like that Lewis included an adequate part on the nomadic Xiongnu whose defeat set in motion the internal failing of the Han state. I appreciated that more time was spent on the asiatic steppes people then on the overemphasized and possibly exaggerated connection between China and Rome that has come to grasp the imagination and attention of many sholars on Central Asia. If, as Lewis emphasised, a sort of exotic craze existed among the Han elite for steppe products, going as far as one emperor having a mock yurt set up in the palace, then clearly these people and their interaction with China were far more important then some far away city state turned imperial subjugator. Likewise I was amused to discover the rather haunting way which the deceased were viewed and for whom house like tombs were built. Funny thing considering their capitals all got burned down, tombs are the biggest structures of the Qin, western and Eastern Han that have lasted but still tombs are not what is associated with Ancient China, I sure didn’t.
I would have liked a bit more tough on the Yellow turban rebellion, the warlords and the civil chaos that led to the end of the Han and the rise of the Three kingdoms; if it had I would have given three stars; as it is I will limit my scoring to two.
January 23, 2024
En intressant genomgång av Kinas historias äldsta period, på det sättet att den är tematisk. Ganska bra, och väldigt pedagogisk, men tidvis ointressant i sin detaljorientering - å andra sidan är det trots allt en smakfråga.
January 27, 2022
Not sure how much I liked this the second time around. Plenty of information (probably the most comprehensive out there for this time period in English), but it seems haphazard at best. As another reviewer pointed out, there is next to nothing about the Yellow Turban revolt, but plenty of information regarding somewhat esoteric topics (probably very interesting to the scholar, but not so much to the layperson who is trying to get the general information before getting the details).
Anyway, I'll leave it at four stars for now.
Anyway, I'll leave it at four stars for now.
August 9, 2015
It took a while, but I finally finished this book. I thought some of it was incredibly interesting, informative and insightful and other parts incredibly boring. I really don't think this is an indication of the quality of the book. I think this is an indication of my own personal interests in history since the book is written thematically instead of as a narrative.
For example, I found the chapters on the development of the Qin and Han state, the policies they pursued, and the consequences of those policies on society, the economy, and the state's actual power and future prospects to be fascinating. The rise of landlordism is a very good example, during the Qin and Early Han the state based its state around individual peasant plots and crushed landlordism and other bases of power in order to strengthen the power of state by being able to collect taxes more easily, and then use these peasants in their massive standing armies to conquer and crush their enemies.
That all started to change during the mid Han when the Empire needed more money to finance expensive campaigns and other things so he started demanding taxes in cash and taxed merchants at twice the rate. Well, this hurt the peasants quite a bit and basically further and further put them into debt. Merchants started buying up land to avoid taxes, and bam, landlordism. Another huge factor was technology. The iron plow, leather harness, and irrigation and well works increased crop yields significantly, but the initial investment was significant and poor farmers really couldnt compete. Interestingly, the author makes the point that landlordism might have actually been a benefit to the peasants because the demands of landlords were not nearly as severe as what European serfs face and these Chinese serfs got access to the new technology that signficantly increased crop yields.
Still, landlordism was bad for the Han state because eventually these landlords were able to create huge lineage structures that basically took control over areas in the Eastern Han, and they were the ones able to pay and field armies (along with other groups like the actual army who was now not beholden to the Han state either), and bam, we get regional struggles, fighting, and the break up of the Han state. It was already super weak at this point, but the fighting seems to have been kicked off by peasant revolts since they were just getting squeezed thanks to a weak state, competing powers and some lineages and landlords nad local power bases that actually squeezed them hard (obviously some were greedy fucks) and bam, war and chaos.
I also found the chapters on the city and the countryside absolutely fascinating as well since it dealt with social groups, their daily lives and how the state and society saw and interacted with them. I think that is one of the hardest things to continue to remember about history. It is easy to just get wrapped up in the political narrative and the major themes and just kinda assume that society is basically ruler, peasant, craftsman, and merchant. Ruler rules, peasant works on farm, craftsman makes shit, and merchants trade food and crafts throughout the nation and world. Society is a lot more complex than that though and I think it is interesting to read about their daily lives. For example:
The Market's violence and criminality were generally associated with butchers and 'wicked youths' but most importantly with 'wandering swordsmen' or gangsters--men who devoted themselves to an ethic of vengeance, faithfulness to oaths, and devotion to death. The Poems on Han capitals place these men ad ntheir gangs of sworn followers in the markets. The histories situate them in the alleys and wards of the major cities. like other denizens of the market, they are described as acting for porofit, in this case as bandits, kidnappers, grave robbers, and hired assassins rather than merchants. Gangsters formed associations of professional killers who intimidated or bribed officials. Memorials written in the Easten Han described them as the creators of a private law based on vengeance that threatened to supplant the states legal codes...
In peacetime, 'wicked youths' were portrayed as wastrels with no proper occupations, who passed their time in the market gambling, cock fighting, and coursing hounds These activities were so common that they were depicted on tomb tiles. In times of disorder, however, these urban gangs formed a reservoir of recruits for those engaged in large-scale vendettas or rebellion. The biographies of many leaders in the Uprising against the QIn show that their first followers were recruited from among the youths.
The final social element that gathered in the market and challeneged the authority of the state comprised the masters of esoteric techniques, particularly divines and shaman doctors. This group was accused of claiming supernational powers in order to swindle peasants. And because divination, medicine, and related religouis practices were a source of wealth, the group was denounced for luring idle young people away from proper occupations and into their own disreputable pursuits.
I think that sort of gives a vitality and a sense of it actually being a real and complex society that often is lacking in many history that doesnt really deal with social history.
The part on rural society was also fascinating since it discussed, as mentioned before, technological changes like improved irrigation and well-building, the iron plow, fertilizes, better agricultural practices, oxen nose ring, combined plow and seeder. This increased agricultural production, increased trade, fostered urbanization, which further increased trade, crafts, and new ideas due to a culture of urbanization. I really think that agricultural production is definitely one of the most important themes throughout history.
As for a peasant working under a landlord being better off:
If a newly landless peasant was lucky enough to remain a tenant share-cropper, he would have the use of land, tools, oxen and a house in excahnge for 1/2 to 2/3rds of his crop. If, as often happened, he was removed from the local registers by his master and therby escaped tax and corvee labor, his life probvabl improved. With his rent set as a fixed percentage of his harvest, he could escape misery in all but the worst years, while avoiding the need to convert crops into cash to pay poll tax to the state. He also had access to oxen and tools that he could never have afforded on his own.
Another interesting quote:
Of all textiles , silk was the most precious. While large-scale production of cloth in workshops owned by the state of great families used some male labor, many woprkers in such enterprises were women. Han records refer to great families that employed as many as 700 women to weave silk cloth both for use by the mistress or the house and for sale.
I think that is really interesting since we really don't associate that sort of large scale production like that in the west until industrialization. Obviously it happened before that since in Renaissance Italy there was a huge wool industry that employed like half the town, but you really don't hear about that in the middle ages (likely to due to no urbanization). Did that sort of stuff happen in Rome as well? Honestly curious.
A major difference between Rome and Han was how rural society developed. Rome had huge tracts of land that used slave labor. In the Han, they divided and subdivided their holdings:
The ambition of the great families was not simply to amass land and wealth, but rather to use this land and wealth to build up extensive networks of kin, clients, and neighbors whose loyalties they could command
I remember reading that Rome also had a client-patronage relationship thing, so I don't think the dichotomy is totally true, but it seems certain that Han China practiced a whole hell of a lot more of it since they instituted that sort of thinking into their property, inheritance and society, and not just personal relationships.
Most locally powerful lineages divded themeslves into many- in some cases hundreds-of nuclear households. They then dominated their districts, commanderies, or regions through alliances of these households and marrage ties with other great surnames...
This is also one of the major reasons why China developed the legal practice of wiping out lineages for major crimes. Lineages were stupidly powerful and loyal and had a code of vendetta as well, that a lineage should take revenge on whoever wronged them. Officials who sentenced a member of the lineage was sometimes killed by other members of the lineage in revenge. So, the state wasn't being totally oppressive and cruel, but actually situating itself into the society and culture of the nation (and also ensuring its power).
Obviously, the Han saw these massive lineages as a huge threat to their power and obviously they were not really able to do anything about it. The Eastern Han was basically established by powerful lineages so they didnt even really try.
It wasnt all bad for the peasants because:
Village society was constituted in reciprocal obligations created by the regular exchange of figts or services. Richer members were under moral pressure to distribute their weath among their pooer neighbors, in exchange for which they received status and certain customery forms of service. This pattern of reduceing inequalities, as well as establishing moral and emotional links, was still visiale in late imperal and republican China, where wealthier families sponsored feasts, operas and relgious festivals that secured their own status and gained the support of their neighbors.
The rest of the chapters dealt with more cultural history, such as kinship, literature, religion and law (obviously kinship and law arent really cultural history, but I still found them rather dull). And I was a lot less interested in these areas. I struggled to get through these chapters.
For example, I found the chapters on the development of the Qin and Han state, the policies they pursued, and the consequences of those policies on society, the economy, and the state's actual power and future prospects to be fascinating. The rise of landlordism is a very good example, during the Qin and Early Han the state based its state around individual peasant plots and crushed landlordism and other bases of power in order to strengthen the power of state by being able to collect taxes more easily, and then use these peasants in their massive standing armies to conquer and crush their enemies.
That all started to change during the mid Han when the Empire needed more money to finance expensive campaigns and other things so he started demanding taxes in cash and taxed merchants at twice the rate. Well, this hurt the peasants quite a bit and basically further and further put them into debt. Merchants started buying up land to avoid taxes, and bam, landlordism. Another huge factor was technology. The iron plow, leather harness, and irrigation and well works increased crop yields significantly, but the initial investment was significant and poor farmers really couldnt compete. Interestingly, the author makes the point that landlordism might have actually been a benefit to the peasants because the demands of landlords were not nearly as severe as what European serfs face and these Chinese serfs got access to the new technology that signficantly increased crop yields.
Still, landlordism was bad for the Han state because eventually these landlords were able to create huge lineage structures that basically took control over areas in the Eastern Han, and they were the ones able to pay and field armies (along with other groups like the actual army who was now not beholden to the Han state either), and bam, we get regional struggles, fighting, and the break up of the Han state. It was already super weak at this point, but the fighting seems to have been kicked off by peasant revolts since they were just getting squeezed thanks to a weak state, competing powers and some lineages and landlords nad local power bases that actually squeezed them hard (obviously some were greedy fucks) and bam, war and chaos.
I also found the chapters on the city and the countryside absolutely fascinating as well since it dealt with social groups, their daily lives and how the state and society saw and interacted with them. I think that is one of the hardest things to continue to remember about history. It is easy to just get wrapped up in the political narrative and the major themes and just kinda assume that society is basically ruler, peasant, craftsman, and merchant. Ruler rules, peasant works on farm, craftsman makes shit, and merchants trade food and crafts throughout the nation and world. Society is a lot more complex than that though and I think it is interesting to read about their daily lives. For example:
The Market's violence and criminality were generally associated with butchers and 'wicked youths' but most importantly with 'wandering swordsmen' or gangsters--men who devoted themselves to an ethic of vengeance, faithfulness to oaths, and devotion to death. The Poems on Han capitals place these men ad ntheir gangs of sworn followers in the markets. The histories situate them in the alleys and wards of the major cities. like other denizens of the market, they are described as acting for porofit, in this case as bandits, kidnappers, grave robbers, and hired assassins rather than merchants. Gangsters formed associations of professional killers who intimidated or bribed officials. Memorials written in the Easten Han described them as the creators of a private law based on vengeance that threatened to supplant the states legal codes...
In peacetime, 'wicked youths' were portrayed as wastrels with no proper occupations, who passed their time in the market gambling, cock fighting, and coursing hounds These activities were so common that they were depicted on tomb tiles. In times of disorder, however, these urban gangs formed a reservoir of recruits for those engaged in large-scale vendettas or rebellion. The biographies of many leaders in the Uprising against the QIn show that their first followers were recruited from among the youths.
The final social element that gathered in the market and challeneged the authority of the state comprised the masters of esoteric techniques, particularly divines and shaman doctors. This group was accused of claiming supernational powers in order to swindle peasants. And because divination, medicine, and related religouis practices were a source of wealth, the group was denounced for luring idle young people away from proper occupations and into their own disreputable pursuits.
I think that sort of gives a vitality and a sense of it actually being a real and complex society that often is lacking in many history that doesnt really deal with social history.
The part on rural society was also fascinating since it discussed, as mentioned before, technological changes like improved irrigation and well-building, the iron plow, fertilizes, better agricultural practices, oxen nose ring, combined plow and seeder. This increased agricultural production, increased trade, fostered urbanization, which further increased trade, crafts, and new ideas due to a culture of urbanization. I really think that agricultural production is definitely one of the most important themes throughout history.
As for a peasant working under a landlord being better off:
If a newly landless peasant was lucky enough to remain a tenant share-cropper, he would have the use of land, tools, oxen and a house in excahnge for 1/2 to 2/3rds of his crop. If, as often happened, he was removed from the local registers by his master and therby escaped tax and corvee labor, his life probvabl improved. With his rent set as a fixed percentage of his harvest, he could escape misery in all but the worst years, while avoiding the need to convert crops into cash to pay poll tax to the state. He also had access to oxen and tools that he could never have afforded on his own.
Another interesting quote:
Of all textiles , silk was the most precious. While large-scale production of cloth in workshops owned by the state of great families used some male labor, many woprkers in such enterprises were women. Han records refer to great families that employed as many as 700 women to weave silk cloth both for use by the mistress or the house and for sale.
I think that is really interesting since we really don't associate that sort of large scale production like that in the west until industrialization. Obviously it happened before that since in Renaissance Italy there was a huge wool industry that employed like half the town, but you really don't hear about that in the middle ages (likely to due to no urbanization). Did that sort of stuff happen in Rome as well? Honestly curious.
A major difference between Rome and Han was how rural society developed. Rome had huge tracts of land that used slave labor. In the Han, they divided and subdivided their holdings:
The ambition of the great families was not simply to amass land and wealth, but rather to use this land and wealth to build up extensive networks of kin, clients, and neighbors whose loyalties they could command
I remember reading that Rome also had a client-patronage relationship thing, so I don't think the dichotomy is totally true, but it seems certain that Han China practiced a whole hell of a lot more of it since they instituted that sort of thinking into their property, inheritance and society, and not just personal relationships.
Most locally powerful lineages divded themeslves into many- in some cases hundreds-of nuclear households. They then dominated their districts, commanderies, or regions through alliances of these households and marrage ties with other great surnames...
This is also one of the major reasons why China developed the legal practice of wiping out lineages for major crimes. Lineages were stupidly powerful and loyal and had a code of vendetta as well, that a lineage should take revenge on whoever wronged them. Officials who sentenced a member of the lineage was sometimes killed by other members of the lineage in revenge. So, the state wasn't being totally oppressive and cruel, but actually situating itself into the society and culture of the nation (and also ensuring its power).
Obviously, the Han saw these massive lineages as a huge threat to their power and obviously they were not really able to do anything about it. The Eastern Han was basically established by powerful lineages so they didnt even really try.
It wasnt all bad for the peasants because:
Village society was constituted in reciprocal obligations created by the regular exchange of figts or services. Richer members were under moral pressure to distribute their weath among their pooer neighbors, in exchange for which they received status and certain customery forms of service. This pattern of reduceing inequalities, as well as establishing moral and emotional links, was still visiale in late imperal and republican China, where wealthier families sponsored feasts, operas and relgious festivals that secured their own status and gained the support of their neighbors.
The rest of the chapters dealt with more cultural history, such as kinship, literature, religion and law (obviously kinship and law arent really cultural history, but I still found them rather dull). And I was a lot less interested in these areas. I struggled to get through these chapters.
November 28, 2018
I learned a lot and will definitely read more in this History of Imperial China series. I unfortunately found the actual writing dry and somewhat boring, but I wanted to learn so I stuck with it.
I am happy to have read it as I can see a bit of how China is shaped today through looking back on this history.
I am happy to have read it as I can see a bit of how China is shaped today through looking back on this history.
April 19, 2022
So, while it's true that this is kind of a dry monograph, that's almost a virtue, as the author gives you the schematics of how the Qin dynasty differed from the Zhou and the Warring States that preceded them, and how their successors, the Han, compared and contrasted with them. In the last case the answer is not as much as Han propaganda would suggest! The real problem with the Qin is that having created a social machine for total war, the first historic emperor really didn't know how to make peace. While much of this will probably not be news to serious scholars of Chinese history, there was a lot of clarification for me, and I expect to be reading further books in this series.
July 25, 2022
This book lacks spirit. China has an incredibly rich, vibrant, character-driven history, none of which comes through in this book. While the dry facts are still interesting, I can't help but feel that the average reader who takes this as their first history of China will be likely to take it as their last.
January 19, 2024
A thematic rather than narrative history. It can be dry at times, but it gives a comprehensive overview of the era.
June 24, 2017
"Qin’s ultimate military and political success was grounded in agrarian reforms instituted by Shang Yang."
"The Qin government legally recognized ownership of land by individual peasant households, along with the right to buy and sell it ... In exchange for recognition of their land ownership, peasants were obliged to pay taxes and provide service, especially military service."
"Qin’s heartland in the Wei River valley was gridded by pathways and irrigation ditches into uniform plots that could be given away as rewards or inducements for loyalty to the government. This transformation of the structure of Qin agricultural lands and the relation of its people to that structure underlay the state’s rise to power."
"Xiang Yu pursued a similar vision of restoring a confederacy of states in the image of the Eastern Zhou. Making himself king of Chu, he sought to divide the rest of the empire into eighteen states held loosely under his authority. These kingdoms were distributed to his generals and to rivals whom he hoped to appease. One of the latter was Liu Bang, who became king over a state in the valley of the Han River, one of three carved out of the old Qin state. Now known as the king of Han, Liu Bang went on to defeat Xiang Yu and found the Han dynasty."
"Han emperors, Wen (r.179–157 b.c. ) and Jing (r.156–141 b.c.), weakened the regional kingdoms in four ways.First, when the ruler of a large kingdom died, his lands were divided among his children or among other Liu relatives.Thus, the state of Qi was divided into six states within forty years of its foundation.Second, if a king left no heirs, then his kingdom reverted to direct imperial control.Third, part of the territory of several rulers was confiscated as a penalty for supposed crimes. Finally, the imperial court carved up the kingdoms of rebels, supposed or real."
"When a peasant rebellion challenged Wang Mang’s authority, the leading families of the east China plain joined the rebellion, overthrew his Xin dynasty, and helped to establish a distant relative of the Liu lineage as first emperor of a “restored” Han in a new eastern capital."
"Early in his reign [Guangwu] erected shrines in Luoyang to his own ancestors, men who had never been emperors nor even enfeoffed as kings. When this led to vociferous protests about corrupting the imperial line, Guangwu moved the shrines from the capital to his old home at Nanyang, just to the south of Luoyang. In their place he worshipped the seventh- and eighth-generation emperors Xuan (r.74–49 b.c. ) and Yuan (r.49–33 b.c. ) as his own father and grandfather. A fictive family was thus created that grafted the revived dynasty onto the last ruler of the Western Han who had produced an heir."
"The landlord author Cui Shi (d.170) quoted a popular saying that summarized the court’s loss of authority in local society: 'Orders from the provincial and commandery governments arrive like thunderbolts; imperial edicts are merely hung upon the wall as decoration.'"
"These rebels, called Yellow Turbans because of the headdress that showed their allegiance to the new Heaven, were defeated within a year, but only with the assistance of the private armies of powerful lineages. Moreover, other rebellions inspired by the Yellow Turbans soon broke out
"Cao Cao conquered the Yellow River valley, thereby reuniting the north.However, his abortive attempt to impose his authority in the Yangzi valley ended in disaster at the battle of Red Cliff, where he was defeated by the youthful warlord Sun Quan. When the last Han emperor finally abdicated to Cao Cao’s son, Cao Pi, in 220, only three warlords remained: Cao Pi in the north, Sun Quan in the lower Yangzi, and Liu Bei in Sichuan. Each declared himself emperor—of Wei, Wu, and Shu, respectively—thus initiating the period of the Three Kingdoms."
"A seventh-century army would not have exceeded 10,000 men, and even greatly expanded forces in the late sixth century consisted of no more than 50,000 soldiers. Warring States armies, on the other hand, may have numbered in the hundreds of thousands, with the largest force mentioned numbering 600,000."
"Here Shang Yang’s reforms cause families to break up into individual nuclear households, which leads to devaluation of kin ties. The greed and the animal-like nature of the Qin people, which figured in earlier texts as inborn character, appear here as a consequence of culture, specifically Shang Yang’s reforms. Jia Yi laments that his own Han dynasty carried on these corrupted Qin customs."
"When agriculture is the sole source of energy (the “single gate”), and warfare its only outlet, the people will risk mutilation and death (“what they hate”) to serve the state. By concentrating all the people’s efforts on these two activities, the state produces the energy and manpower it needs to fight. The effective ruler gets the people to “forget their lives for the sake of their superiors” and makes them “delight in war” so that they “act like hungry wolves on seeing meat. ” All other human values or activities become threats to the state order."
"Thus, the state organized for war, as analyzed in the Book of Lord Shang, requires not only that all the energies of the people be devoted to agriculture and war but that there must always be another war to fight, another enemy to defeat. Ultimately, war was fought not for gain but for loss, to expend energies and wealth that would otherwise accumulate in the hands of those who, by virtue of their growing prosperity, would come to serve their own interests rather than those of the state."
"The Qin government created a new, simplified nonalphabetic script to be used throughout the empire. It reduced the complex and variable Large Seal script with its curving lines—the kind of writing used on Zhou ritual vessels—into simpler, more rectilinear forms. The Qin writing system may have suppressed as much as twenty-five percent of the pre-Qin graphs."
"The Qin government tried to control political thought by limiting access to written texts, but there was no systematic destruction of them. That damage was done in 206 b.c. when Xiang Yu sacked the Qin capital and burned the imperial library to the ground."
"In Han and later accounts this event was described as the “burning of the books,” but it was actually a policy of unification rather than destruction. When a scholar argued that the First Emperor should imitate the Zhou founders by enfeoffing his relatives, the chief minister, Li Si, retorted that what the state should do was put an end to such criticism of current institutions through reference to an idealized antiquity."
"The standardization of script, the textual canon, measures, coinage, and law (as we will see in Chapter 10) seems conventional today, and it requires a leap of imagination to realize what innovations they were in the third century b.c. Many of these advances did not appear in Europe until the French Revolution, over two millennia later. A unified empire was an entirely new political form in China."
"When the Qin dynasty collapsed after only two decades, it was succeeded, after several years of civil war, by the Han dynasty. Since the Qin had been the first state to impose its rule on the whole Chinese world, it remained the unique model of how an empire should be administered. The Han dynasty thus inherited many Qin practices.However, the longterm survival of the Han depended on the alteration, usually groping and gradual, of these Qin practices, and the adoption, often unwilling, of new modes of control."
"Power shifted from the formal bureaucracy to whatever group of people—largely eunuchs or imperial affines (relatives by marriage)—surrounded the emperor’s person. This shift of power from “outer” court to “inner” court was institutionalized by the reign of Emperor Wu, and was repeated throughout early imperial and medieval China."
"As chief administrator, high judge, and chief priest, the emperor knew no limits to his authority except the not-inconsiderable ones imposed by biology. Since he was the descendant of earlier emperors, his proposals for major changes in law or cult could be criticized as unfilial.Yet, throughout the Han dynasty, whenever an emperor chose to alter the practices of his ancestors, he was able to do so.Nevertheless, emperors relied on other people to provide them with information, and they were thus constrained by their ignorance of the world outside the court. They also depended upon officials to carry out their commands in distant provinces
"Similarly, many emperors, like other people, preferred leisure to work, and were happy to leave the governing to others."
"As long as an emperor was young, power devolved to whoever could speak in his name. Since it was in the interest of the court to have a weak emperor in power, Han history is marked by an increasing tendency toward young emperors ... This reached a climax in the last century of the dynasty, when no adult ever acceded to the throne."
"The empire-wide legal code [of the Qin] remained a central tool of imperial unification. Although the Han initially attempted to simplify Qin laws and make them less brutal, it soon reverted to largely following the Qin pattern."
"The Qin government legally recognized ownership of land by individual peasant households, along with the right to buy and sell it ... In exchange for recognition of their land ownership, peasants were obliged to pay taxes and provide service, especially military service."
"Qin’s heartland in the Wei River valley was gridded by pathways and irrigation ditches into uniform plots that could be given away as rewards or inducements for loyalty to the government. This transformation of the structure of Qin agricultural lands and the relation of its people to that structure underlay the state’s rise to power."
"Xiang Yu pursued a similar vision of restoring a confederacy of states in the image of the Eastern Zhou. Making himself king of Chu, he sought to divide the rest of the empire into eighteen states held loosely under his authority. These kingdoms were distributed to his generals and to rivals whom he hoped to appease. One of the latter was Liu Bang, who became king over a state in the valley of the Han River, one of three carved out of the old Qin state. Now known as the king of Han, Liu Bang went on to defeat Xiang Yu and found the Han dynasty."
"Han emperors, Wen (r.179–157 b.c. ) and Jing (r.156–141 b.c.), weakened the regional kingdoms in four ways.First, when the ruler of a large kingdom died, his lands were divided among his children or among other Liu relatives.Thus, the state of Qi was divided into six states within forty years of its foundation.Second, if a king left no heirs, then his kingdom reverted to direct imperial control.Third, part of the territory of several rulers was confiscated as a penalty for supposed crimes. Finally, the imperial court carved up the kingdoms of rebels, supposed or real."
"When a peasant rebellion challenged Wang Mang’s authority, the leading families of the east China plain joined the rebellion, overthrew his Xin dynasty, and helped to establish a distant relative of the Liu lineage as first emperor of a “restored” Han in a new eastern capital."
"Early in his reign [Guangwu] erected shrines in Luoyang to his own ancestors, men who had never been emperors nor even enfeoffed as kings. When this led to vociferous protests about corrupting the imperial line, Guangwu moved the shrines from the capital to his old home at Nanyang, just to the south of Luoyang. In their place he worshipped the seventh- and eighth-generation emperors Xuan (r.74–49 b.c. ) and Yuan (r.49–33 b.c. ) as his own father and grandfather. A fictive family was thus created that grafted the revived dynasty onto the last ruler of the Western Han who had produced an heir."
"The landlord author Cui Shi (d.170) quoted a popular saying that summarized the court’s loss of authority in local society: 'Orders from the provincial and commandery governments arrive like thunderbolts; imperial edicts are merely hung upon the wall as decoration.'"
"These rebels, called Yellow Turbans because of the headdress that showed their allegiance to the new Heaven, were defeated within a year, but only with the assistance of the private armies of powerful lineages. Moreover, other rebellions inspired by the Yellow Turbans soon broke out
"Cao Cao conquered the Yellow River valley, thereby reuniting the north.However, his abortive attempt to impose his authority in the Yangzi valley ended in disaster at the battle of Red Cliff, where he was defeated by the youthful warlord Sun Quan. When the last Han emperor finally abdicated to Cao Cao’s son, Cao Pi, in 220, only three warlords remained: Cao Pi in the north, Sun Quan in the lower Yangzi, and Liu Bei in Sichuan. Each declared himself emperor—of Wei, Wu, and Shu, respectively—thus initiating the period of the Three Kingdoms."
"A seventh-century army would not have exceeded 10,000 men, and even greatly expanded forces in the late sixth century consisted of no more than 50,000 soldiers. Warring States armies, on the other hand, may have numbered in the hundreds of thousands, with the largest force mentioned numbering 600,000."
"Here Shang Yang’s reforms cause families to break up into individual nuclear households, which leads to devaluation of kin ties. The greed and the animal-like nature of the Qin people, which figured in earlier texts as inborn character, appear here as a consequence of culture, specifically Shang Yang’s reforms. Jia Yi laments that his own Han dynasty carried on these corrupted Qin customs."
"When agriculture is the sole source of energy (the “single gate”), and warfare its only outlet, the people will risk mutilation and death (“what they hate”) to serve the state. By concentrating all the people’s efforts on these two activities, the state produces the energy and manpower it needs to fight. The effective ruler gets the people to “forget their lives for the sake of their superiors” and makes them “delight in war” so that they “act like hungry wolves on seeing meat. ” All other human values or activities become threats to the state order."
"Thus, the state organized for war, as analyzed in the Book of Lord Shang, requires not only that all the energies of the people be devoted to agriculture and war but that there must always be another war to fight, another enemy to defeat. Ultimately, war was fought not for gain but for loss, to expend energies and wealth that would otherwise accumulate in the hands of those who, by virtue of their growing prosperity, would come to serve their own interests rather than those of the state."
"The Qin government created a new, simplified nonalphabetic script to be used throughout the empire. It reduced the complex and variable Large Seal script with its curving lines—the kind of writing used on Zhou ritual vessels—into simpler, more rectilinear forms. The Qin writing system may have suppressed as much as twenty-five percent of the pre-Qin graphs."
"The Qin government tried to control political thought by limiting access to written texts, but there was no systematic destruction of them. That damage was done in 206 b.c. when Xiang Yu sacked the Qin capital and burned the imperial library to the ground."
"In Han and later accounts this event was described as the “burning of the books,” but it was actually a policy of unification rather than destruction. When a scholar argued that the First Emperor should imitate the Zhou founders by enfeoffing his relatives, the chief minister, Li Si, retorted that what the state should do was put an end to such criticism of current institutions through reference to an idealized antiquity."
"The standardization of script, the textual canon, measures, coinage, and law (as we will see in Chapter 10) seems conventional today, and it requires a leap of imagination to realize what innovations they were in the third century b.c. Many of these advances did not appear in Europe until the French Revolution, over two millennia later. A unified empire was an entirely new political form in China."
"When the Qin dynasty collapsed after only two decades, it was succeeded, after several years of civil war, by the Han dynasty. Since the Qin had been the first state to impose its rule on the whole Chinese world, it remained the unique model of how an empire should be administered. The Han dynasty thus inherited many Qin practices.However, the longterm survival of the Han depended on the alteration, usually groping and gradual, of these Qin practices, and the adoption, often unwilling, of new modes of control."
"Power shifted from the formal bureaucracy to whatever group of people—largely eunuchs or imperial affines (relatives by marriage)—surrounded the emperor’s person. This shift of power from “outer” court to “inner” court was institutionalized by the reign of Emperor Wu, and was repeated throughout early imperial and medieval China."
"As chief administrator, high judge, and chief priest, the emperor knew no limits to his authority except the not-inconsiderable ones imposed by biology. Since he was the descendant of earlier emperors, his proposals for major changes in law or cult could be criticized as unfilial.Yet, throughout the Han dynasty, whenever an emperor chose to alter the practices of his ancestors, he was able to do so.Nevertheless, emperors relied on other people to provide them with information, and they were thus constrained by their ignorance of the world outside the court. They also depended upon officials to carry out their commands in distant provinces
"Similarly, many emperors, like other people, preferred leisure to work, and were happy to leave the governing to others."
"As long as an emperor was young, power devolved to whoever could speak in his name. Since it was in the interest of the court to have a weak emperor in power, Han history is marked by an increasing tendency toward young emperors ... This reached a climax in the last century of the dynasty, when no adult ever acceded to the throne."
"The empire-wide legal code [of the Qin] remained a central tool of imperial unification. Although the Han initially attempted to simplify Qin laws and make them less brutal, it soon reverted to largely following the Qin pattern."
June 15, 2013
The history, the government, the religion, the families, imperial cities and rural farms, law and literature. . . this book covers a lot of ground.
If you put the First Emperor in a book as the Evil Overlord, people would denounce you for having so unrealistic and cliched a villain. A man who actively pursues war to keep people in poverty so they can't get interested in food, or beautiful women, or reputation, or rites, or poetry, or filial piety, or brotherly love.
Attempts to tame northern barbarians foundering on the lack of control in those societies.
Tribute from western countries, to which China, of course, reciprocated with even better gifts, to show off, and so the countries regarded it as just a form of trade -- some even sent merchants instead of officials.
The growing desire to carefully cordon off the land of the dead. Tombs being provided with not just the ritual vessels of earlier, but with everything needed for daily life. Careful inscriptions to ward them off and keep them carefully dead.
The change to nuclear family household, propelled by both Qin and Han policies to maximize the land used. And whatever rites said, the mother commanded the sons, she did not obey them.
Music bureau songs, which are songs commissioned by the government for rites. Many show many signs of the folk tradition.
The imperial cities with their lanes reserved for the emperor on the streets and their elevated walkways for his walking. A temple had to be relocated so that a procession honoring an ancestral emperor did not pass under such a walkway, which is unfilial. And the towers -- to climb a tower is great, while to stay in an enclosed location is to be akin to the dead. And they are built of wood, which is only fitting, because they are invariably destroyed by the next dynasty.
At first the emperor honored the last four emperors and the founder. When another emperor got perpetual rites, they started to acquire them all over the place -- hard to justify keeping out once you've admitted one.
The wicked stepmothers of literature, and the righteous stepmother -- as in, once two half-brothers were found near a murdered man. Both claimed to have done it, to shield each other. The stepmother said to execute the younger, her son. The king asked why him; the stepmother said that her husband had conjured her to care for her stepson. Also, her son was the junior. At which point the king pardoned them in honor of her devotion to duty.
The agricultural improvements -- iron plows, better ox harnesses, brick-lined wells -- that gave the rich farmers such an edge over poor ones. Plus, the capitation tax was collected in money, which meant they needed to sell more of their crop for it in good years, and in bad years, didn't have any crops to sell, so they went into debt. (It took them years to exempt children under six -- not until people were killing children to avoid the tax.) Also, mercantile wealth was taxed at double rate and officials had no way to convert salaries into permanent wealth except land. The Han officials deplored the practice of buying up land without ever noticing they were causing it.
Child prodigies -- like Tang, who caught, convicted, and executed a rat for stealing a piece of meat -- all in perfect form.
A man received money from the Emperor. He held banquets with it. When told he should think of his heirs, he says they have his original estate, which will support them. Wealth will only dampen their ambition, augment their faults, and inspire envy. Since he can not morally improve his descendants, he will just enjoy the money with his friends and relations.
Ranks, which were handed out for service, or to everyone for momentous occasions like establishing an imperial heir. (So age would mean rank.) You could trade them in for some punishments.
Some interesting cults. Like the Yellow Turbans, which were out to establish a new dynasty. Or the Five Pecks of Grain, which built a Daoist theocracy. Or the Great Mother movement. . . religion was a matter of proper sacrifices, not systemic theology or even mythology.
If you put the First Emperor in a book as the Evil Overlord, people would denounce you for having so unrealistic and cliched a villain. A man who actively pursues war to keep people in poverty so they can't get interested in food, or beautiful women, or reputation, or rites, or poetry, or filial piety, or brotherly love.
Attempts to tame northern barbarians foundering on the lack of control in those societies.
Tribute from western countries, to which China, of course, reciprocated with even better gifts, to show off, and so the countries regarded it as just a form of trade -- some even sent merchants instead of officials.
The growing desire to carefully cordon off the land of the dead. Tombs being provided with not just the ritual vessels of earlier, but with everything needed for daily life. Careful inscriptions to ward them off and keep them carefully dead.
The change to nuclear family household, propelled by both Qin and Han policies to maximize the land used. And whatever rites said, the mother commanded the sons, she did not obey them.
Music bureau songs, which are songs commissioned by the government for rites. Many show many signs of the folk tradition.
The imperial cities with their lanes reserved for the emperor on the streets and their elevated walkways for his walking. A temple had to be relocated so that a procession honoring an ancestral emperor did not pass under such a walkway, which is unfilial. And the towers -- to climb a tower is great, while to stay in an enclosed location is to be akin to the dead. And they are built of wood, which is only fitting, because they are invariably destroyed by the next dynasty.
At first the emperor honored the last four emperors and the founder. When another emperor got perpetual rites, they started to acquire them all over the place -- hard to justify keeping out once you've admitted one.
The wicked stepmothers of literature, and the righteous stepmother -- as in, once two half-brothers were found near a murdered man. Both claimed to have done it, to shield each other. The stepmother said to execute the younger, her son. The king asked why him; the stepmother said that her husband had conjured her to care for her stepson. Also, her son was the junior. At which point the king pardoned them in honor of her devotion to duty.
The agricultural improvements -- iron plows, better ox harnesses, brick-lined wells -- that gave the rich farmers such an edge over poor ones. Plus, the capitation tax was collected in money, which meant they needed to sell more of their crop for it in good years, and in bad years, didn't have any crops to sell, so they went into debt. (It took them years to exempt children under six -- not until people were killing children to avoid the tax.) Also, mercantile wealth was taxed at double rate and officials had no way to convert salaries into permanent wealth except land. The Han officials deplored the practice of buying up land without ever noticing they were causing it.
Child prodigies -- like Tang, who caught, convicted, and executed a rat for stealing a piece of meat -- all in perfect form.
A man received money from the Emperor. He held banquets with it. When told he should think of his heirs, he says they have his original estate, which will support them. Wealth will only dampen their ambition, augment their faults, and inspire envy. Since he can not morally improve his descendants, he will just enjoy the money with his friends and relations.
Ranks, which were handed out for service, or to everyone for momentous occasions like establishing an imperial heir. (So age would mean rank.) You could trade them in for some punishments.
Some interesting cults. Like the Yellow Turbans, which were out to establish a new dynasty. Or the Five Pecks of Grain, which built a Daoist theocracy. Or the Great Mother movement. . . religion was a matter of proper sacrifices, not systemic theology or even mythology.
January 2, 2013
This is an excellent look at the social and political history of the Qin and the Han periods. It would be a great place to start for someone who didn't have much background in Chinese history as well as containing enough interesting detailed information for those already familiar with the period to be able to enjoy as well. 5 years ago I took a class from Patricia Ebrey on early Chinese history and a lot that was covered in that class was included in this book. At that time I asked her if she had recommendations for a book on early Chinese indigenous religion, pre-Buddhist and Toaist, and she said that Lewis was the best writer on the subject but he'd only written articles not books. So I was fascinated to read the chapter he'd written about religion in this book. It did not disappoint. It covered both the state cults, cults of the ancestors and local religion. It looked at how religion differed from the Zhou and later dynasties. The book starts with the geography of the area and the political and military history. But for me the most interesting aspects was the social history, there were great descriptions of city life, the position of women, relationship with foreigners as well as interesting intellectual history looking at the development of orthodoxy within the Han dynasty. Even the chapter on law was very interesting, with a large quote about the forensic steps that should be taken when investigating a possible suspicious death, what to observe about a body that was hanging, noting the position of the noose, the victims tongue, how far he was from the ground etc. and then what to look for when you took him down and questioning the family of the deceased. There was also a translation on how to interrogate your suspect. It was all very cool. The book has great illustrations of rubbings from Han tombs and includes several pictures of the Queen Mother of the West (西王母) that I'd not seen before. While the rubbings were not in perfect condition I thought they really added to the book and are not something that I've come across a lot in other books. I'd highly recommend this to anyone interested in the period. He's also just released a book on the three kingdoms and period of disunion following the Han, which I also checked out from the library and am really looking forward to.
October 3, 2012
One thing I almost never like to do is give a bad review and I thought it only fair to say a few words on why this book only receives a single star from me. Really, the problem seems to be with the entire series of books and the method used to discuss Imperial China in segments.
Having recently completed my read of a later book in the series, "The Troubled Empire" which covers Yuan and Ming dynasties, I can conclude that there was a consistent method applied to their writing, in that each chapter is an essay on the specifics of both empires. So, for example, you could read a chapter on infrastructural growth that would cover the entirety of the Qin and Han empires, another chapter would do the same for political landscapes and then agriculture and so forth.
And herein lies the problem: in attempting to cover what would be generations of history on each topic, spanning two consecutive dynasties, each chapter/essay comes off a bit hurried, squeezing in oral histories, facts, stories and anecdotes that cause the dynasties to run into one another, only marginally seperated by a few compartive analyses.
And what is history but the retelling of people, places and events? This all seems to get lost in the muddle of relating the individual topics. It was only possible to remember specific names and details by each book's end, and by that point, the memory of earlier details become lost or chronologically confused.
Perhaps if I'd picked up this book specifically for reference on the details of these dynasties, I'd have been more satisfied with it as a read, but even so, because so much is to be covered in each topic, there's no assurance to the reliability of receiving those details in full. And, again, I have to cite that because each chapter covers two dynasties with a lot of run on between them, it's difficult to parse out what is specific to each dynasty.
If anything, these books have encouraged me to dig deeper into the subject of Imperial, Dynastic China... it's just unfortunate that the digging will have to continue elsewhere. "The Early Chinese Empires" and "The Troubled Empire" just did not achieve in returning these people to life for me.
Having recently completed my read of a later book in the series, "The Troubled Empire" which covers Yuan and Ming dynasties, I can conclude that there was a consistent method applied to their writing, in that each chapter is an essay on the specifics of both empires. So, for example, you could read a chapter on infrastructural growth that would cover the entirety of the Qin and Han empires, another chapter would do the same for political landscapes and then agriculture and so forth.
And herein lies the problem: in attempting to cover what would be generations of history on each topic, spanning two consecutive dynasties, each chapter/essay comes off a bit hurried, squeezing in oral histories, facts, stories and anecdotes that cause the dynasties to run into one another, only marginally seperated by a few compartive analyses.
And what is history but the retelling of people, places and events? This all seems to get lost in the muddle of relating the individual topics. It was only possible to remember specific names and details by each book's end, and by that point, the memory of earlier details become lost or chronologically confused.
Perhaps if I'd picked up this book specifically for reference on the details of these dynasties, I'd have been more satisfied with it as a read, but even so, because so much is to be covered in each topic, there's no assurance to the reliability of receiving those details in full. And, again, I have to cite that because each chapter covers two dynasties with a lot of run on between them, it's difficult to parse out what is specific to each dynasty.
If anything, these books have encouraged me to dig deeper into the subject of Imperial, Dynastic China... it's just unfortunate that the digging will have to continue elsewhere. "The Early Chinese Empires" and "The Troubled Empire" just did not achieve in returning these people to life for me.
April 6, 2018
I really wanted to like this, but it feels like such a missed opportunity. It talks about seemingly everything EXCEPT the actual Empires themselves. You get no sense of how the Qin or Han empires were formed, who led them, what campaigns they undertook. But you certainly learn a lot about the legal scholarship of the day.
The other major issue I had with this book is that it often assumes the reader already knows the history of the Qin and Han, and associated texts and works. It drops references to names, geography, texts, and other assorted things, without any additional context. For example, during certain religious ceremonies, the author references "sacrifices" -- without ever specifying what exactly those sacrifices entailed. Are we talking human sacrifices here? (Obviously not, but we may as well have been for the lack of context)
Another example occurs when the author talks about how, without landlords, whole villages would move to the hills and build walled settlements, then ends that section by writing, "Such migrations inspired Tao Yuanming's fourth-century AD story of the hidden, egalitarian utopia of the 'Peach Blossom Spring.'"
Ah, of course! The Peach Blossom Spring! By the legendary Tao Yuanming, obviously!
No further explanation is given regarding either the author or the work. If I'm already familiar with the author and his work, and the context it's in, then why would I even bother with a book like this in the first place? On the other hand, if I'm a newcomer to Chinese history, then this book isn't of any help, either. It occupies some weird space between being an introductory text and a more academic reference. But it's written for a general audience. In short, this is a book that doesn't know what it wants to be, and what audience is reading it. And it's a shame, because this could be a heck of a book. Instead, it feels like a missed opportunity.
The other major issue I had with this book is that it often assumes the reader already knows the history of the Qin and Han, and associated texts and works. It drops references to names, geography, texts, and other assorted things, without any additional context. For example, during certain religious ceremonies, the author references "sacrifices" -- without ever specifying what exactly those sacrifices entailed. Are we talking human sacrifices here? (Obviously not, but we may as well have been for the lack of context)
Another example occurs when the author talks about how, without landlords, whole villages would move to the hills and build walled settlements, then ends that section by writing, "Such migrations inspired Tao Yuanming's fourth-century AD story of the hidden, egalitarian utopia of the 'Peach Blossom Spring.'"
Ah, of course! The Peach Blossom Spring! By the legendary Tao Yuanming, obviously!
No further explanation is given regarding either the author or the work. If I'm already familiar with the author and his work, and the context it's in, then why would I even bother with a book like this in the first place? On the other hand, if I'm a newcomer to Chinese history, then this book isn't of any help, either. It occupies some weird space between being an introductory text and a more academic reference. But it's written for a general audience. In short, this is a book that doesn't know what it wants to be, and what audience is reading it. And it's a shame, because this could be a heck of a book. Instead, it feels like a missed opportunity.
September 18, 2021
Much of what we understand China and Chinese culture to be originated in her "classical" period (3rd cent. BC to 3 cent. AD), when China was first united into a single empire by the Qin and then ruled for 4oo years by the Han dynasty. This short and readable work is not a narrative but rather contains a brief overview of the rise and fall of these dynasties before going on to describe how their government functioned, urban and rural life, family relations, their interactions with the outer "barbarian" world, religion, law and literature. If you aren't familiar with ancient China and this, her most formative period, Lewis's work is an excellent introduction. The illustrations are informative and there are some useful maps, although a map of modern Chinese provinces, to which he constantly refers, also would have been helpful.
January 13, 2024
Harvard's "History of Imperial China" series covers China's dynasties from Qin through Qing in six volumes. These volumes are organized thematically rather than chronologically, allowing readers to get to know the wider socioeconomic, literary, and cultural dynamics of each period. This volume on the Qin and Han dynasties, for example, covers geography, war, imperial cities, rural society, relations with neighbors, religion, literature, and law, to name a few.
The thematic (vs. chronological) approach has its pros and cons. I'll be honest: I prefer a chronological approach. This book does not give us as good of a picture of chronological developments, and does not provide comprehensive biographies of all the emperors of the times and what took place under their rule. On the other hand, the thematic approach does have its benefits as well: while the chronology of the overall era is treated rather succinctly, the revisiting of different dynamics of the Qin, early Han, and late Han periods helps us to see the era from a more comprehensive perspective than is usually the case (and not as easily done) through the chronological approach. And other chronological facets of the period can, after all, in the absence of better English treatments (or the expensive Cambridge history of the period), be accessed via Wikipedia and online research.
A few things I found noteworthy or interesting from reading this book:
- The characterization of the Han dynasty as both the heir and the negation of the Qin dynasty, with the failures of the Qin explained as coming from the brutality and barbarism of the Qin's laws, with the tradition developed that the First Emperor sought to impose his will on Heaven and Earth in a war against nature. The Han portrayed themselves as patrons of the moral government and classical intellectual traditions that the First Emperor tried to destroy.
- Whereas the ruins of ancient Rome and Greece often survived, the ancient capitals of China were burned to the ground whenever a new dynasty took control.
- Whereas the Zhou dynasty started with a lineage system and eventually became more bureaucratized, the Han system started with a relatively more bureaucratic system that then became more of a lineage system in the Eastern Han period.
- The history of the Qin and Han empire versus the nomadic Xiongnu people (a pre-Mongol people) is fascinating reading, starting the long history of China's relationship with the north as a threat (see also the Yuan and Qing dynasties). China distinguishing itself against barbarism and nomadism became a longstanding tradition in Chinese history.
- On gender: "The intensity of this suspicion of women is shown by the extraordinary acts of self-negation to which they are called in order to demonstrate their loyalty to a patriline. For male members of a patriline, physicial mutilation and suicide were among the highest crimes, threats not only to the self but to the lineage. That women could have been celebrated for such actions shows their marginal position in classicist thinking" (p. 160).
- On gender and the spatial structuring of the household as a logic of outer and inner: spatially, power was located in the interior - the closer you get from the outer to the inner part of the house (or capital or palace) the closer you get to power. But paradoxically and contradictorily, women - who were excluded from power - were ALSO located in the interior. "The institutional expression of this contradiction was that as power flowed inward toward the hidden emperor, it flowed away from male officials in the outer public realm and into the hands of women, their kind, and the eunuchs who shared their physical space. This reality, which represented a radical disjunction between the formal institutions of power and its actual locations, always came as a shock and a scandal, despite its regular occurrence" (p. 165).
- The Han concept that the soul of the deceased survived as long as the living remembered and cared for it and the imperial tradition that the four most recent ancestors had shrines, whereas older shrines would be discarded. That tradition, however, was changed as particularly notable emperors were thought to deserve continued remembrance, eventually leading to a significant expansion of shrines and continued memorialization of the dead emperors.
- The Qin Emperor and Emperor Wu both searched for the immortals through expeditions across the Pacific Ocean and to the mountains of the far west. The immortals (who theoretically were not actually immortal, but just thought to live significantly longer than humans) were thought as existing on the Earth, but in far distant realms.
- While early Zhou ritual focused on the connection between the living and the dead, the late Warring States period emphasized the separation of the living and the dead as a major goal of funerary ritual - with the dead in the Eastern Han period being depicted as frightening ghosts who brought misfortune or vengeance to the living.
- The custom of mie zu, "destruction of the lineage," or collective punishment of kin was practiced socially but also taken up by the state. As a result, there were instances where the state would punish and execute not just one person responsible for an offense, but that person's entire extended family as well.
- The Eastern Han regime's attempt to achieve internal security through demilitarization eventually resulted in the remilitarization of provincial governors, who basically became warlords through obtaining the right to command their own (semi-)private armies. The Han also abandoned direct administration of the countryside. The result of all this was the breakup of the Han dynasty into warlords, leading to the Three Kingdoms era.
The thematic (vs. chronological) approach has its pros and cons. I'll be honest: I prefer a chronological approach. This book does not give us as good of a picture of chronological developments, and does not provide comprehensive biographies of all the emperors of the times and what took place under their rule. On the other hand, the thematic approach does have its benefits as well: while the chronology of the overall era is treated rather succinctly, the revisiting of different dynamics of the Qin, early Han, and late Han periods helps us to see the era from a more comprehensive perspective than is usually the case (and not as easily done) through the chronological approach. And other chronological facets of the period can, after all, in the absence of better English treatments (or the expensive Cambridge history of the period), be accessed via Wikipedia and online research.
A few things I found noteworthy or interesting from reading this book:
- The characterization of the Han dynasty as both the heir and the negation of the Qin dynasty, with the failures of the Qin explained as coming from the brutality and barbarism of the Qin's laws, with the tradition developed that the First Emperor sought to impose his will on Heaven and Earth in a war against nature. The Han portrayed themselves as patrons of the moral government and classical intellectual traditions that the First Emperor tried to destroy.
- Whereas the ruins of ancient Rome and Greece often survived, the ancient capitals of China were burned to the ground whenever a new dynasty took control.
- Whereas the Zhou dynasty started with a lineage system and eventually became more bureaucratized, the Han system started with a relatively more bureaucratic system that then became more of a lineage system in the Eastern Han period.
- The history of the Qin and Han empire versus the nomadic Xiongnu people (a pre-Mongol people) is fascinating reading, starting the long history of China's relationship with the north as a threat (see also the Yuan and Qing dynasties). China distinguishing itself against barbarism and nomadism became a longstanding tradition in Chinese history.
- On gender: "The intensity of this suspicion of women is shown by the extraordinary acts of self-negation to which they are called in order to demonstrate their loyalty to a patriline. For male members of a patriline, physicial mutilation and suicide were among the highest crimes, threats not only to the self but to the lineage. That women could have been celebrated for such actions shows their marginal position in classicist thinking" (p. 160).
- On gender and the spatial structuring of the household as a logic of outer and inner: spatially, power was located in the interior - the closer you get from the outer to the inner part of the house (or capital or palace) the closer you get to power. But paradoxically and contradictorily, women - who were excluded from power - were ALSO located in the interior. "The institutional expression of this contradiction was that as power flowed inward toward the hidden emperor, it flowed away from male officials in the outer public realm and into the hands of women, their kind, and the eunuchs who shared their physical space. This reality, which represented a radical disjunction between the formal institutions of power and its actual locations, always came as a shock and a scandal, despite its regular occurrence" (p. 165).
- The Han concept that the soul of the deceased survived as long as the living remembered and cared for it and the imperial tradition that the four most recent ancestors had shrines, whereas older shrines would be discarded. That tradition, however, was changed as particularly notable emperors were thought to deserve continued remembrance, eventually leading to a significant expansion of shrines and continued memorialization of the dead emperors.
- The Qin Emperor and Emperor Wu both searched for the immortals through expeditions across the Pacific Ocean and to the mountains of the far west. The immortals (who theoretically were not actually immortal, but just thought to live significantly longer than humans) were thought as existing on the Earth, but in far distant realms.
- While early Zhou ritual focused on the connection between the living and the dead, the late Warring States period emphasized the separation of the living and the dead as a major goal of funerary ritual - with the dead in the Eastern Han period being depicted as frightening ghosts who brought misfortune or vengeance to the living.
- The custom of mie zu, "destruction of the lineage," or collective punishment of kin was practiced socially but also taken up by the state. As a result, there were instances where the state would punish and execute not just one person responsible for an offense, but that person's entire extended family as well.
- The Eastern Han regime's attempt to achieve internal security through demilitarization eventually resulted in the remilitarization of provincial governors, who basically became warlords through obtaining the right to command their own (semi-)private armies. The Han also abandoned direct administration of the countryside. The result of all this was the breakup of the Han dynasty into warlords, leading to the Three Kingdoms era.
Read
October 4, 2015The first in Timothy Brook's admirable Chinese History project with Harvard University Press. The goal was to create relatively short, accessible texts that were also high quality scholarship for each of the major periods in Imperial chinese history. Mark Edward Lewis provides the first three. The series does not take the more direct route, that one would find in the Cambridge histories. Instead of narrative history, Lewis focuses on material culture, as well as legal, religious, and societal structures of the Qin/Han.
December 23, 2012
I enjoyed this book more than any other books in the series. Would like more books on the Qin and Han dynasties.
April 3, 2021
Mark Edward Lewis's "The Early Chinese Empires: Qin and Han" is the first book of a six -volume series on the history of imperial China, covering the more than two thousand years from the establishment of the first imperial dynasty in 221 BCE, when the Qin state conquered the other Warring States of what is today the eastern part of China and unified the country, to the deposition of the last Qing emperor at the beginning of the 20th century and the formation of the Republic of China. The initial volume focuses on the first two dynasties, the Qin, who after defeating their rivals managed to rule for only a few years before succumbing to a series of revolts, and the Han, who took over after a brief interregnum and created a strong state that survived for more than 400 years, until 220 CE, with only one significant break which saw usurpation, the capital moving from the western region to the east, and a different branch of the Han family taking the throne. The policies adopted in this age set the course for the future development of the Chinese state and created new cultural trends, or entrenched old ones, that in some cases survived in a recognizable form for millennia.
As the sheer scope of the series suggests it is not intended for casual readers, though Lewis writes in a clear and accessible style and makes an effort to illustrate with an adequate amount of background the reasoning and the cultural and religious beliefs underpinning both social practices and decisions taken by the imperial administration. Each chapter of the book is dedicated to a different topic with the first giving an overview of the geography of China in this age and a short summary of the principal events of the pre-unitary period and of the Qin and Han dynasties, sufficient to jog the memory of a reader already familiar with the history of China but not providing nearly enough information for somebody with only a cursory knowledge of this time. The following chapters then analyse in greater detail such different topic as state organisation and political thought, urban and rural society, foreign relations and conflicts with the neighbouring steppe polities, familial structure, religion, literature and legal systems, and their changes and transformations from the pre-unification era to the collapse of the Eastern Han dynasty. The result is a rich, in-depth portrait of the social structure and culture of China in this formative time, with plenty of interesting subject-specific details that are tied together by some common threads that return often in the discussion, like the always-present opposition between institutions and popular beliefs and practices and the ideological and philosophical vision of a proper state and society promoted by literates and scholars, who often had influential roles in the imperial administration, or the interplay between the centralising and uniforming policies of the imperial court and administration and the autonomist tendencies of powerful local clans, landlords and provincial officials.
The sophistication of the philosophical schools that flourished at this time and the importance accorded to them by the imperial government, to the point of choosing one of them as state ideology and reforming (or trying to reform) society, rituals and administration according to its injunctions, is probably what will be more surprising in this book for somebody versed in the history of contemporary Near East, Middle East and Mediterranean Basin, where, though by no mean uninfluential, philosophical thought existed usually on a parallel plane with respect to both government and religion and couldn't directly shape institutions and policies.
The richness and the amount of detail in this book is its strong point but at the same time it’s also its most significant weakness: a reader not already comfortable with at least the broad lines of the history of China will often find himself lost and will also find very hard to frame new information in the appropriate context. The general schema of the book and its division in thematic chapters have their own trade offs, on one hand allowing Lewis to delve deeply into every subject but on the other hand sometimes obfuscating scale and significance of even major events: to make only an example all the factors that contributed to the large Daoist-inspired rebellions that critically weakened the Eastern Han, like the increased power of the landlords, the corruption and distance of the court and the imperial administration, the contrasts between official rites and popular cults and the concentration of the army in the frontier away from the inner provinces, are examined in their own chapters but there’s no clear explanation anywhere of how they all came together at the right moment and with what huge consequences.
In conclusion, I appreciated this book but I can recommend it only to readers who are already knowledgeable about the history of China, who want to learn much more than what can be found in more general surveys, and who are willing to dedicate time and thought to it.
As the sheer scope of the series suggests it is not intended for casual readers, though Lewis writes in a clear and accessible style and makes an effort to illustrate with an adequate amount of background the reasoning and the cultural and religious beliefs underpinning both social practices and decisions taken by the imperial administration. Each chapter of the book is dedicated to a different topic with the first giving an overview of the geography of China in this age and a short summary of the principal events of the pre-unitary period and of the Qin and Han dynasties, sufficient to jog the memory of a reader already familiar with the history of China but not providing nearly enough information for somebody with only a cursory knowledge of this time. The following chapters then analyse in greater detail such different topic as state organisation and political thought, urban and rural society, foreign relations and conflicts with the neighbouring steppe polities, familial structure, religion, literature and legal systems, and their changes and transformations from the pre-unification era to the collapse of the Eastern Han dynasty. The result is a rich, in-depth portrait of the social structure and culture of China in this formative time, with plenty of interesting subject-specific details that are tied together by some common threads that return often in the discussion, like the always-present opposition between institutions and popular beliefs and practices and the ideological and philosophical vision of a proper state and society promoted by literates and scholars, who often had influential roles in the imperial administration, or the interplay between the centralising and uniforming policies of the imperial court and administration and the autonomist tendencies of powerful local clans, landlords and provincial officials.
The sophistication of the philosophical schools that flourished at this time and the importance accorded to them by the imperial government, to the point of choosing one of them as state ideology and reforming (or trying to reform) society, rituals and administration according to its injunctions, is probably what will be more surprising in this book for somebody versed in the history of contemporary Near East, Middle East and Mediterranean Basin, where, though by no mean uninfluential, philosophical thought existed usually on a parallel plane with respect to both government and religion and couldn't directly shape institutions and policies.
The richness and the amount of detail in this book is its strong point but at the same time it’s also its most significant weakness: a reader not already comfortable with at least the broad lines of the history of China will often find himself lost and will also find very hard to frame new information in the appropriate context. The general schema of the book and its division in thematic chapters have their own trade offs, on one hand allowing Lewis to delve deeply into every subject but on the other hand sometimes obfuscating scale and significance of even major events: to make only an example all the factors that contributed to the large Daoist-inspired rebellions that critically weakened the Eastern Han, like the increased power of the landlords, the corruption and distance of the court and the imperial administration, the contrasts between official rites and popular cults and the concentration of the army in the frontier away from the inner provinces, are examined in their own chapters but there’s no clear explanation anywhere of how they all came together at the right moment and with what huge consequences.
In conclusion, I appreciated this book but I can recommend it only to readers who are already knowledgeable about the history of China, who want to learn much more than what can be found in more general surveys, and who are willing to dedicate time and thought to it.
September 4, 2022
I am quite surprised at the number of reviews here frustrated with this text for providing too much detail in the societal norms, economies, military, and cultural evolution of the Qin and Han dynasties. I believe that this criticism may be fair if the reader is a beginner to these periods and looking for a linear telling of their histories, but otherwise, the merits of this book far eclipses any other I have been able to find on these subjects. I think readers should not judge too harshly if they are looking for an introductory text because it's clear to me that every history text is written for a specific audience, and this should not be blamed if it is more valuable to those searching for deeper knowledge.
As it is, this book discloses so much information on the finer societal values, political and economic structures, philosophical evolution of the Qin and Han that I have never encountered in any other source (though make no mistake, it is all well-cited). As a result, it helped breakdown so many common misconceptions and generalizations about these two dynasties, introducing far more complex and nuanced analyses. For example, while most general sources on the Qin describes it as a tyrannical regime which burned books, and were cruel and inhumane in their punishments—their only merits being standardizations of writing and measurements and a classless system of justice—few ever delve rigorously into their actual domestic policies.
Through this book, I learned for the first time that the Qin mantra dictated that all surplus of "time and energy" were detrimental to the state, for they granted the people the possibilities of cultivating diversity of thought and the resources to threaten the government's control. The Qin therefore organized itself as a perpetual war machine which forever sought to expend "surplus" energy, exhausting its populace and treasury to just the right degree that they remained strong but kept the people pliable subjects. In a horrifying program which eerily echoes the dystopia of 1984, the Qin strove to ensure that "agriculture [would be] the sole source of energy ('the single gate'), and warfare its only outlet"; they would never have any leisure or resources to develop the intellectual and material capacity to question the state. Notwithstanding this, the bureaucracy was kept as weak as possible so that statesmen could little threaten the sovereign; justice was therefore enforced by the common people, who were all brought up to be agents of mutual surveillance willing to report even their families for dissent.
By presenting these little known facts about the Qin, Lewis clarifies and deconstructs prevailing myths fostered by generalizations in less exacting texts. On one hand, in providing such precise details on Qin policies, their political thought, and their motivations behind them, supported by text from both Qin and Han sources, he lends credence to the real nature of their tyranny, debunking the cliché that they were only demonized because "history is written by the victors". On the other hand, he simultaneously corrects simple false narratives like their burning of books and burying of scholars which tend to obscure the actual institutional failures of Qin politics.
Notwithstanding this, he rights the usual Eurocentric belief that the warring states of China lacked the concept of a shared, overarching cultural identity (of being Chinese). By explaining how the Qin, alone, steadily became sundered from the Chinese identity as they grew in power from their military reforms and became retrospectively regarded as a "barbarian" people, he incidentally illustrates to us the complex realities of how national identity can evolve in unique ways.
This is but one extended example of the invaluable depth of information Lewis's work provides for students of Chinese history. He informs us of how the Eastern Han conceived of a dichotomy in symbolism between the former "militaristic" capital of Chang'an, situated in the old Qin homeland, and the more "cultured" Luoyang. He finally answered one of the questions I never understood about Chinese society: why were entire generations slaughtered for the crimes of a single man? It is because rulers were well aware of how entrenched the culture of obligations to bonds is to the Chinese people, such that entire networks had to be wiped out to eliminate the power of one man. He reconstructs a magnificent portrait of daily life in the bustling cities and the challenges of the common farmer. Even the Han's interactions with foreign peoples and their impact on their eventual fate is not left unexplored.
Of every text I have found so far on this period of Chinese history, this is the only one which truly goes into every minute facet of their society, economy, lifestyle, military, religion, philosophy, etc., leaving nothing untouched. So often other books summarizes these topics, resulting in less-than-accurate generalizations which little evidence to verify their assessments. With this text, I was finally able to reconstruct a vision, a glimpse, of how the daily life was like in this classical era of my ancestors.
It is a font of knowledge which I believe is indispensable for any student of Chinese history, and that it trades off a linear narrative of this period's events is a worthy price. With that having been said, it should probably not be read in isolation, and readers should have some basic knowledge of the Qin and Han history first.
There are a few constructive criticisms I have of this book. The first is that he needs to clarify his conclusion that there is a paradox—one which he implies but never explicitly calls hypocritical—where the Han demonized the Qin in spite of using them as their grand model for their imperial system. To support this argument, he presents all the fanciful stories Han scholars told about the villainy of Qin Shi Huang while retaining the megalomania of the imperial cult. However, many of the Qin institutional policies, indeed the worst of them, were evidently overturned by the Han. Their retention of the imperial culture, standardization program, and concept of equal justice aside, the Han ended the mass mobilization of the populace into a state of perpetual war and reinvigorated trade and education. Lewis goes as far as to remark that the Han scholars focused their criticism exclusively on the First Emperor without critiquing their institutional flaws even while using textual proof to the exact contrary in just the preceding chapter. Hence, this was one section, at the end of "Chapter 3: Paradoxes of Empire" that I think needed polishing. It is important to acknowledge the Han paradox of drawing inspiration from the Qin imperial cult, but Lewis should have addressed whether this paradox is truly hypocritical in light of the fact the Han chose not to inherit the worst excesses of the Qin. Without doing so, an awkward contradiction seems to appear in his analysis given all the changes he describes taking place under the Han.
He seems to somewhat imply that the Han did, in fact, retain all of the Qin's institutional policies initially, but given what one might know of the first few rulers of the Han from other sources, this seems dubious. For example, the Taoist Emperor Wen and Empress Dou were praised for their pacifism, their social welfare system impressively paired with laissez-faire economics, and their reduction in severity of criminal justice; it is hard to believe that they had preserved the ultra-militarism of the Qin that strangled the livelihoods of the common people to the point that the Qin imploded in a single generation. Lewis makes no mention of this couple in the slightest.
Other than that, I would have appreciated it if he had expended the little additional effort to provide the hanzi for each title and name he references. There are a number of obscure figures he cites who cannot be easily searched online by their romanized names but would not have been an issue using their names in the native hanzi. Even though not every reader will be able to read Chinese, this is an important feature to allow verification of the people he cites.
In spite of these three criticisms I have of the book, I remain blown away by its wealth of information that I had so much trouble finding anywhere else. Ultimately, I absolutely love this book, and I highly recommend to everyone studying classical Chinese history, if not as an introductory text then as an entry into deeper research.
As it is, this book discloses so much information on the finer societal values, political and economic structures, philosophical evolution of the Qin and Han that I have never encountered in any other source (though make no mistake, it is all well-cited). As a result, it helped breakdown so many common misconceptions and generalizations about these two dynasties, introducing far more complex and nuanced analyses. For example, while most general sources on the Qin describes it as a tyrannical regime which burned books, and were cruel and inhumane in their punishments—their only merits being standardizations of writing and measurements and a classless system of justice—few ever delve rigorously into their actual domestic policies.
Through this book, I learned for the first time that the Qin mantra dictated that all surplus of "time and energy" were detrimental to the state, for they granted the people the possibilities of cultivating diversity of thought and the resources to threaten the government's control. The Qin therefore organized itself as a perpetual war machine which forever sought to expend "surplus" energy, exhausting its populace and treasury to just the right degree that they remained strong but kept the people pliable subjects. In a horrifying program which eerily echoes the dystopia of 1984, the Qin strove to ensure that "agriculture [would be] the sole source of energy ('the single gate'), and warfare its only outlet"; they would never have any leisure or resources to develop the intellectual and material capacity to question the state. Notwithstanding this, the bureaucracy was kept as weak as possible so that statesmen could little threaten the sovereign; justice was therefore enforced by the common people, who were all brought up to be agents of mutual surveillance willing to report even their families for dissent.
By presenting these little known facts about the Qin, Lewis clarifies and deconstructs prevailing myths fostered by generalizations in less exacting texts. On one hand, in providing such precise details on Qin policies, their political thought, and their motivations behind them, supported by text from both Qin and Han sources, he lends credence to the real nature of their tyranny, debunking the cliché that they were only demonized because "history is written by the victors". On the other hand, he simultaneously corrects simple false narratives like their burning of books and burying of scholars which tend to obscure the actual institutional failures of Qin politics.
Notwithstanding this, he rights the usual Eurocentric belief that the warring states of China lacked the concept of a shared, overarching cultural identity (of being Chinese). By explaining how the Qin, alone, steadily became sundered from the Chinese identity as they grew in power from their military reforms and became retrospectively regarded as a "barbarian" people, he incidentally illustrates to us the complex realities of how national identity can evolve in unique ways.
This is but one extended example of the invaluable depth of information Lewis's work provides for students of Chinese history. He informs us of how the Eastern Han conceived of a dichotomy in symbolism between the former "militaristic" capital of Chang'an, situated in the old Qin homeland, and the more "cultured" Luoyang. He finally answered one of the questions I never understood about Chinese society: why were entire generations slaughtered for the crimes of a single man? It is because rulers were well aware of how entrenched the culture of obligations to bonds is to the Chinese people, such that entire networks had to be wiped out to eliminate the power of one man. He reconstructs a magnificent portrait of daily life in the bustling cities and the challenges of the common farmer. Even the Han's interactions with foreign peoples and their impact on their eventual fate is not left unexplored.
Of every text I have found so far on this period of Chinese history, this is the only one which truly goes into every minute facet of their society, economy, lifestyle, military, religion, philosophy, etc., leaving nothing untouched. So often other books summarizes these topics, resulting in less-than-accurate generalizations which little evidence to verify their assessments. With this text, I was finally able to reconstruct a vision, a glimpse, of how the daily life was like in this classical era of my ancestors.
It is a font of knowledge which I believe is indispensable for any student of Chinese history, and that it trades off a linear narrative of this period's events is a worthy price. With that having been said, it should probably not be read in isolation, and readers should have some basic knowledge of the Qin and Han history first.
There are a few constructive criticisms I have of this book. The first is that he needs to clarify his conclusion that there is a paradox—one which he implies but never explicitly calls hypocritical—where the Han demonized the Qin in spite of using them as their grand model for their imperial system. To support this argument, he presents all the fanciful stories Han scholars told about the villainy of Qin Shi Huang while retaining the megalomania of the imperial cult. However, many of the Qin institutional policies, indeed the worst of them, were evidently overturned by the Han. Their retention of the imperial culture, standardization program, and concept of equal justice aside, the Han ended the mass mobilization of the populace into a state of perpetual war and reinvigorated trade and education. Lewis goes as far as to remark that the Han scholars focused their criticism exclusively on the First Emperor without critiquing their institutional flaws even while using textual proof to the exact contrary in just the preceding chapter. Hence, this was one section, at the end of "Chapter 3: Paradoxes of Empire" that I think needed polishing. It is important to acknowledge the Han paradox of drawing inspiration from the Qin imperial cult, but Lewis should have addressed whether this paradox is truly hypocritical in light of the fact the Han chose not to inherit the worst excesses of the Qin. Without doing so, an awkward contradiction seems to appear in his analysis given all the changes he describes taking place under the Han.
He seems to somewhat imply that the Han did, in fact, retain all of the Qin's institutional policies initially, but given what one might know of the first few rulers of the Han from other sources, this seems dubious. For example, the Taoist Emperor Wen and Empress Dou were praised for their pacifism, their social welfare system impressively paired with laissez-faire economics, and their reduction in severity of criminal justice; it is hard to believe that they had preserved the ultra-militarism of the Qin that strangled the livelihoods of the common people to the point that the Qin imploded in a single generation. Lewis makes no mention of this couple in the slightest.
Other than that, I would have appreciated it if he had expended the little additional effort to provide the hanzi for each title and name he references. There are a number of obscure figures he cites who cannot be easily searched online by their romanized names but would not have been an issue using their names in the native hanzi. Even though not every reader will be able to read Chinese, this is an important feature to allow verification of the people he cites.
In spite of these three criticisms I have of the book, I remain blown away by its wealth of information that I had so much trouble finding anywhere else. Ultimately, I absolutely love this book, and I highly recommend to everyone studying classical Chinese history, if not as an introductory text then as an entry into deeper research.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
June 20, 2022
The Early Chinese Empires: Qin and Han, by Mark Edward Lewis, is a concise portrait of the social and cultural institutions that formed the basis for the first two imperial dynasties. The first chapter is a breathless an even dizzying overview of the major political activities between 221 BCE and 220 CE, when the many independent states and city-states where consolidated under the nominal rule of one individual. The political narrative is intertwined with China's complex geography. Most of the remaining chapters focus on specific aspects of Chinese society at the time: laws, literature, kinship, and religion are examples. Throughout the book, Lewis discusses how court elites created the ideology of empire that would last through to the 20th Century. If there is a shortcoming to book, it is the quality of the maps, which are simultaneously busy and lacking detail. For a book closely tied to geography, this is a shortcoming.
This is the first in a series of six books by Harvard University Press exploring the history of imperial china. Cambridge University offers a graduate level counterpart to Harvard's undergraduate level books.
This is the first in a series of six books by Harvard University Press exploring the history of imperial china. Cambridge University offers a graduate level counterpart to Harvard's undergraduate level books.
November 21, 2022
This is somewhat dry and concise for my taste and we don’t get a linear historical narrative, which would have been my preference. And does a Harvard publication really need to explain to its readers the meaning of the word “friable”?
Having said that, there is nevertheless much of interest here, and I could not discern any bias. It is the differences with the West which are most striking – including some details I hadn’t really considered before – such as the Chinese idea that the status of the ruler was reflected in his invisibility. The achievements of ancient China were remarkable – the Han dynasty, for example, standardised all kinds of things (script, coinage, weights and measures, law) which even two thousand later Europe had failed to do.
There is food for thought in pondering why, when China was so far ahead of the West in so many ways for so long, it was eventually overtaken in so many areas, and still lags behind. It seems obvious to me that this is all to do with the standardisation of human thought and the suppression of freedom and creativity. That’s the subject for another book.
Having said that, there is nevertheless much of interest here, and I could not discern any bias. It is the differences with the West which are most striking – including some details I hadn’t really considered before – such as the Chinese idea that the status of the ruler was reflected in his invisibility. The achievements of ancient China were remarkable – the Han dynasty, for example, standardised all kinds of things (script, coinage, weights and measures, law) which even two thousand later Europe had failed to do.
There is food for thought in pondering why, when China was so far ahead of the West in so many ways for so long, it was eventually overtaken in so many areas, and still lags behind. It seems obvious to me that this is all to do with the standardisation of human thought and the suppression of freedom and creativity. That’s the subject for another book.
March 1, 2023
This book is the driest type of academic history. It is a perfect example of why “it’s academic now”is a pejorative phrase.
Page after page of trivia with nothing to tie it all together. No context or explanations are ever offered.
You want to know how an early Han marketplace was set up? With fifteen examples? Each described in detail but giving the exact same information? None of it connected to anything else? This is the book for you.
There is also no context provided for anything. The author talks about sacrifices, about geomancy, and about Han literature assuming the reader will understand his references. He will say what something is subversive but not explain why was subversive.
There is a need for books on pre-1912 China in English, and this series was supposed to help fill that void. But I’ll add my name to the list of reviewers on here who put it down about halfway through. I can’t do it anymore.
Now IF you are a history grad student who finds this sort of dry social history of interest, you might enjoy this book. But even then it is a lot of the same information provided again and again. It isn’t even good ‘dry social history.’
Page after page of trivia with nothing to tie it all together. No context or explanations are ever offered.
You want to know how an early Han marketplace was set up? With fifteen examples? Each described in detail but giving the exact same information? None of it connected to anything else? This is the book for you.
There is also no context provided for anything. The author talks about sacrifices, about geomancy, and about Han literature assuming the reader will understand his references. He will say what something is subversive but not explain why was subversive.
There is a need for books on pre-1912 China in English, and this series was supposed to help fill that void. But I’ll add my name to the list of reviewers on here who put it down about halfway through. I can’t do it anymore.
Now IF you are a history grad student who finds this sort of dry social history of interest, you might enjoy this book. But even then it is a lot of the same information provided again and again. It isn’t even good ‘dry social history.’
July 6, 2022
I got this book because I was looking for a fairly comprehensive took on early China, as a way to expand my knowledge of the ancient world away from my familiar Graeco-Roman world. So I found this book which is the first of a series on Chinese history.
I enjoyed this book very much, although I did occasionally struggle to keep the period straight in my head. That is, of course, a sign of my unfamiliarity of the narrative of Chinese history, but was remedied by just going back and making sure I understood the sweep of the Qin and Han dynasties (well, add the Zhou as well). The structure is by topic, so the narrative is understood.
The result is a fascinating exploration of the politics, society and culture of ancient China, which really filled out a lot of what I didn't understand in my previous forays into Chinese history. As an introduction, this book is really quite excellent. It is clear and well supported by the sources. It is truly worth reading and I'm looking forward to starting the next in the series on the Tang dynasty.
I enjoyed this book very much, although I did occasionally struggle to keep the period straight in my head. That is, of course, a sign of my unfamiliarity of the narrative of Chinese history, but was remedied by just going back and making sure I understood the sweep of the Qin and Han dynasties (well, add the Zhou as well). The structure is by topic, so the narrative is understood.
The result is a fascinating exploration of the politics, society and culture of ancient China, which really filled out a lot of what I didn't understand in my previous forays into Chinese history. As an introduction, this book is really quite excellent. It is clear and well supported by the sources. It is truly worth reading and I'm looking forward to starting the next in the series on the Tang dynasty.
June 11, 2021
The Early Chinese Empires: Qin and Han is a comprehensive introduction to ancient Chinese history. I knew the first empire of China created the Terracotta Army, and I now know the story of that emperor. The Qin ended the warring states period because they were an efficient war machine. They laid the foundation for the first period of unified Chinese rule. Although they only lasted 15 years, the Han followed in their footsteps, with some improvements. The Han thoroughly established the idea of a unified China that was not overly regional. They had many struggles but lasted over 400 years.
Lewis documents many of the philosophical, legal, cultural, and religious foundations of China. I feel like my understanding of Chinese history, though very small, is rooted in a solid foundation from this book.
I often struggle to read history books. I still feel like I need to read more to "get the hang of it." I enjoyed The Early Chinese Empires: Qin and Han as a good challenge.
Lewis documents many of the philosophical, legal, cultural, and religious foundations of China. I feel like my understanding of Chinese history, though very small, is rooted in a solid foundation from this book.
I often struggle to read history books. I still feel like I need to read more to "get the hang of it." I enjoyed The Early Chinese Empires: Qin and Han as a good challenge.
October 27, 2021
An informative and insightful book but rather disjointed in its narratives. I don’t think I fully enjoy reading this book due to the fact that it is rigidly told, non-linear, non-chronological, and heavily structured around major themes set by Mark Edward Lewis himself. The major themes itself are interesting but the author’s constant avoidance of narratives makes it look like a compilation of monographs, with scattered tidbits of information here and there, instead of a single study of early imperial Chinese dynasties.
Each chapter focused on particular subjects such as the cultural distinctiveness caused by geographical position, state ideology during the Warring States period, reforms and alterations during the dynastic transition, the dualities of imperial cities, life in the rural villages, foreign relations, proper conducts among the patrilineal households, early beliefs, Confucianism as the foundation of classical literature, and the role of law in early imperial Chinese society. However, it doesn’t deal with the actual history of the early Chinese empire itself. It was more or less a comparison between Qin and Han dynasties of how they ruled and implemented their policies in regard to these chosen subjects. Still, it was a fascinating study and can be helpful for those who were already familiar with the history of China.
To understand how imperial China came into being is to learn how the Qin state, one among the seven Warring States, propounded a unified Chinese realm idea and managed its own human resources in an absolute totality to achieve its goal. Qin laid the groundwork for total unification and centralization of power while the Han retained it. Undeniably a considerable feat that was not easy to accomplish had it not been for the agrarian and militaristic reforms expounded by Shang Yang, the legalist scholar and chief-minister of Qin. Under Shang Yang, Qin was transformed into a militaristic state where able-bodied men of all levels of society, though the majority of them were peasants, would be mobilized as soldiers and whose ultimate goal was to expand and conquer. In addition to their service in the army, the peasant farmers of Qin were obliged to cultivate their own land to provide food supplies for the wars.
These two reforms were the bastion of Qin’s strength and to keep Qin’s citizens in check according to these reforms, Shang Yang began to discriminate against other professions such as merchants, scholars, and state officials as well as making sure the peasant farmers didn’t obtain more than they should have. Shang Yang argued that these professions and earning more than necessary were dangerous to the state’s unification goal.
Lewis argued that excessive suspicion on these other professions, especially merchants, was not a misplaced judgement at all. Wealthy merchants possessed similar authority and prestige as the government. They could sway away other self-serving individuals and buy lands from debt-ridden peasants, thus culminating in the rise of landlordism and great families who could threaten the government’s political power.
The most interesting part that I learned from this book was how the subsequent Western Han and Eastern Han dynasties carried forward the majority of Qin’s policies while vehemently denounced the former dynasty. According to Sima Qian, the collapse of the Qin dynasty was due to the severity of its law and ruthlessness in ordering a society, yet by the same token, the Han continued forward the same ruthless way of Qin in imposing their authority. The Han went as far as accusing Qin of burning various intellectual books but it was actually Xiang Yu, one of the rebel leaders from the state of Chu, who burned the imperial library and sacked the Qin’s capital.
This was an interesting read and a decent book although it could be better if Lewis branched out his study to encompass the early Chinese Emperors too. Lewis also provided many maps, images, philosophical and military texts, ritual handbooks as well as extensive notes and bibliography. It’s decent but lacking essential information usually accorded to the making of an empire.
Each chapter focused on particular subjects such as the cultural distinctiveness caused by geographical position, state ideology during the Warring States period, reforms and alterations during the dynastic transition, the dualities of imperial cities, life in the rural villages, foreign relations, proper conducts among the patrilineal households, early beliefs, Confucianism as the foundation of classical literature, and the role of law in early imperial Chinese society. However, it doesn’t deal with the actual history of the early Chinese empire itself. It was more or less a comparison between Qin and Han dynasties of how they ruled and implemented their policies in regard to these chosen subjects. Still, it was a fascinating study and can be helpful for those who were already familiar with the history of China.
To understand how imperial China came into being is to learn how the Qin state, one among the seven Warring States, propounded a unified Chinese realm idea and managed its own human resources in an absolute totality to achieve its goal. Qin laid the groundwork for total unification and centralization of power while the Han retained it. Undeniably a considerable feat that was not easy to accomplish had it not been for the agrarian and militaristic reforms expounded by Shang Yang, the legalist scholar and chief-minister of Qin. Under Shang Yang, Qin was transformed into a militaristic state where able-bodied men of all levels of society, though the majority of them were peasants, would be mobilized as soldiers and whose ultimate goal was to expand and conquer. In addition to their service in the army, the peasant farmers of Qin were obliged to cultivate their own land to provide food supplies for the wars.
These two reforms were the bastion of Qin’s strength and to keep Qin’s citizens in check according to these reforms, Shang Yang began to discriminate against other professions such as merchants, scholars, and state officials as well as making sure the peasant farmers didn’t obtain more than they should have. Shang Yang argued that these professions and earning more than necessary were dangerous to the state’s unification goal.
“If farmers have a surplus, they become concerned about living a long life and eating well; if merchants have a surplus, they become concerned about obtaining female beauty and affection; if officials have time to spare, they become concerned about personal ambitions and a reputation for virtue.” ~Passage from the Book of Lord Shang, chapter 2: A State Organized for War, page 49-50.
Lewis argued that excessive suspicion on these other professions, especially merchants, was not a misplaced judgement at all. Wealthy merchants possessed similar authority and prestige as the government. They could sway away other self-serving individuals and buy lands from debt-ridden peasants, thus culminating in the rise of landlordism and great families who could threaten the government’s political power.
“While merchants posed no direct political challenge to the state, their wealth allowed a life of luxury surpassing that of their political superiors. The merchants’ ostentatious wealth tempted officials to corruption and poor peasants away from a life of toil, taxes, and service to the state. This tension between a merchant order, defined by wealth, and an official order, defined by rank, was built into the structure of the dual cities and exacerbated by laws banning registered merchants and their descendants from holding office.” ~Chapter 4: Imperial Cities, page 84.
The most interesting part that I learned from this book was how the subsequent Western Han and Eastern Han dynasties carried forward the majority of Qin’s policies while vehemently denounced the former dynasty. According to Sima Qian, the collapse of the Qin dynasty was due to the severity of its law and ruthlessness in ordering a society, yet by the same token, the Han continued forward the same ruthless way of Qin in imposing their authority. The Han went as far as accusing Qin of burning various intellectual books but it was actually Xiang Yu, one of the rebel leaders from the state of Chu, who burned the imperial library and sacked the Qin’s capital.
A depiction of Killing the Scholars and Burning the Books. Painting located at Bibliothèque nationale de France
This was an interesting read and a decent book although it could be better if Lewis branched out his study to encompass the early Chinese Emperors too. Lewis also provided many maps, images, philosophical and military texts, ritual handbooks as well as extensive notes and bibliography. It’s decent but lacking essential information usually accorded to the making of an empire.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 64 reviews