Han China

Rome’s answer to the problem of rule was procedure. Greece’s was several hundred competing constitutions. Han China’s was a career, and of the three it has lasted longest.

The Han inherited from the Qin a centralised apparatus built on Legalist principles: standardised weights, script and axle-widths, commanderies administered by appointed officials rather than hereditary lords, and law applied uniformly and harshly. The Han kept the machinery and replaced the ideology. Under Emperor Wu, and through the work of Dong Zhongshu, Confucianism became the state doctrine, which meant the apparatus of a police state was handed to men trained in a philosophy of moral obligation and ritual propriety. The tension between those two inheritances runs through the whole of subsequent Chinese statecraft.

Recruitment is the innovation. The Han began systematically selecting officials by recommendation and examination on the classics rather than by birth, and established an academy to train them. It was never a meritocracy in the modern sense, since literacy in the classics required leisure and leisure required land. But it created something no other ancient state possessed, a governing class defined by education, whose members were posted away from their home districts, rotated, ranked by salary in measures of grain, and assessed on performance.

The legitimating theory was the Mandate of Heaven, and it is an unusual piece of political thought. Heaven confers the right to rule on a dynasty conditionally, and withdraws it when the ruler fails, with natural disasters, portents and rebellion serving as evidence of withdrawal. This makes rulership revocable in principle, and makes successful rebellion self-justifying, since whoever wins demonstrates that the Mandate has passed. Above the dynasty sat tianxia, “all under heaven”, a claim to universal rather than territorial rule, which meant the empire’s edge was less a border than a gradient of civilisation.

The Han military problem was singular and permanent. It was the steppe. To the north lived the Xiongnu, a mounted confederation that could concentrate rapidly, strike, and disperse before infantry could respond, and against whom territorial conquest was close to meaningless, since there was nothing to hold.

The technological answer was the crossbow, and it deserves more attention than it usually gets. The Han crossbow was mass-produced to standardised specifications, with interchangeable bronze trigger mechanisms of real precision, and it could be used effectively by a conscript after brief training. That is the opposite of the Greek hoplite or the Roman legionary, both of whom represented years of investment. A state that can convert peasants into effective missile troops quickly has a different relationship with its own population than one that cannot.

The strategic answers were plural and mostly not military. Heqin, marriage alliance combined with substantial payments of silk and grain, bought peace at a price that Chinese officials debated bitterly and that looks, from the steppe side, indistinguishable from tribute flowing the wrong way. Periodic offensive campaigns pushed deep into the steppe at enormous cost. And the Great Wall, which was never one wall, was extended and garrisoned as a system of ramparts, watchtowers, beacon stations and forts.

Its function invites direct comparison with Hadrian’s Wall. Neither was built to stop an army. Both were built to observe, delay, control movement and pass warning at speed. The Han beacon system could send a signal along the frontier faster than a rider could carry it, and the Wall’s main work was carrying information.

Han China was an agrarian empire of enormous scale, and it counted itself. The census of AD 2 records a population of roughly 57 million in some 12 million households, the earliest population figure of that size anywhere in the world that historians treat as broadly usable. That a state could conduct such a count, and that the figure survives, tells you as much about Han administration as any treatise.

The agricultural base divided along a line that still matters, with millet and wheat in the drier north and rice in the wetter south, and the state invested heavily in irrigation, canals and flood control. Chinese statecraft treats water management as a central obligation of government, and the mythology agrees. The founding hero Yu earns the right to rule by dredging the rivers rather than by conquest.

The most revealing economic document is an argument. In 81 BC the court convened a debate on whether the state should keep its monopolies on salt and iron, and the record of it, the Discourses on Salt and Iron, preserves government officials defending state enterprise as necessary for frontier defence and price stability against Confucian scholars attacking it as competition with the people and a corruption of the state’s moral purpose. It is a policy argument about the proper limits of state economic power, and it has not been superseded.

Silk was the export that named the road, and inside China it worked as something close to currency. Taxes were assessed in it, officials were paid in it, and the steppe subsidies were counted in it. Most of what travelled west along the Silk Road was relayed through intermediaries rather than carried by Chinese merchants, so Rome and Han China knew of each other largely as rumours at the far end of a chain.

Han society had an official hierarchy and a real one, and the gap between them is the most revealing thing about it. Officially, below the emperor and the aristocracy came the scholar-officials, then peasants, then artisans, and last of all merchants, on the reasoning that they produced nothing and profited from the labour of others. In practice merchants were often the wealthiest people in the empire, and the state responded with sumptuary laws restricting what they could wear and ride, which is what a hierarchy does when reality stops cooperating.

The unit of society was the household, and the obligation that structured it was filial piety, a duty running upward to parents and beyond them to ancestors, and outward by analogy to the ruler. That made it political as well as private. Confucian political theory derives the state from the family, which makes disobedience to a magistrate the same kind of offence as disobedience to a father, and makes the emperor’s ritual duties toward his own ancestors a matter of public consequence.

On women the central document is difficult. Ban Zhao, sister of the historian Ban Gu and the scholar who completed the Han shu after his death, wrote Lessons for Women, a text prescribing female humility, deference and self-abnegation. It was composed by one of the most accomplished intellectuals of the age, a woman who tutored the empress and finished a dynastic history, and it became the foundational text of female subordination in China for the next two millennia. Both facts are true at once and neither cancels the other.

Slavery existed but did not carry production as it did in Rome or Athens. Han slaves were concentrated in domestic service and state workshops, and the great mass of agricultural labour was done by free peasant households subject to tax, corvée and conscription. That is a different social structure with different pressure points, and it is why Chinese dynastic crises so often begin with peasant rebellion rather than servile revolt.

Han China had no single religion, no church, and no word that maps cleanly onto the category. What it had was a set of overlapping practices and cosmologies that most people took part in at once without any sense of contradiction, which is itself the most important thing to understand about it.

The foundation was ancestor worship. The dead required feeding, and in return they influenced the fortunes of the living, so the family line ran in both directions across the boundary of death. That is why filial piety is a religious duty as well as a social one, and why the archaeology is in the tombs. Han elite burials were provisioned with everything the deceased would need, including model houses, granaries, servants and livestock in fired clay.

Above the household sat state ritual, which the emperor performed as the hinge between heaven and earth. The cosmology that organised it held that yin and yang alternate, that the five phases succeed one another, and that the human and natural orders resonate, so political failure and natural disaster were the same kind of event. An eclipse or a flood was a report on the government’s condition.

Alongside all this ran the pursuit of personal transcendence through alchemy, breathing and dietary regimens, the search for the elixir of immortality, and the deities and immortals of what would later be organised as Daoism. And in the first century AD Buddhism arrived along the Silk Road. It was the first system to enter China with foreign scriptures, a monastic institution and a doctrine that placed obligations above the family, and its long negotiation with a society built on filial duty reshaped both.

Almost nothing survives of Han building above ground, and everything survives below it. Han architecture used rammed earth and timber, which does not last, and Han tombs were cut into rock and sealed, which does. The consequence is that we know the Han world largely through what it buried, and what it buried was a complete model of itself.

The capitals were arguments in city planning. Chang’an and later Luoyang were laid out on cosmological principles, oriented to the cardinal directions, walled and gridded, with the palace complex placed so that the emperor faced south, the direction of authority. A Chinese capital was a diagram of the proper order of the world, and the imperial procession through it was that diagram performed.

The tombs are where the artistry is. Painted and moulded bricks, lacquerware Europe had nothing to compare with, bronze mirrors, jade suits sewn with gold wire for the highest nobility, and the tomb figurines that supply most of what we know about Han dress, music, agriculture and entertainment. These objects were not made to be seen by the living. They were provisioning for a continued existence, which is why they are so unguarded and so informative.

Silk itself belongs in this section as much as in the economy. Han weaving achieved patterned polychrome textiles of a complexity that required drawlooms and division of labour, and the surviving examples, many recovered from the dry sites of the Silk Road at Dunhuang and Loulan, are among the finest textiles produced anywhere in the ancient world.

Greek mathematics demanded proof from axioms. Chinese mathematics demanded a method that worked. The Nine Chapters on the Mathematical Art is organised as 246 problems with procedures for solving them. It is a manual of algorithms covering areas, proportions, simultaneous equations, negative numbers and root extraction, written for surveyors, tax officials and engineers rather than philosophers.

It is tempting and wrong to rank these. The algorithmic tradition produced solutions to systems of linear equations more than a millennium before comparable European work, and its practical orientation reflects who was doing the mathematics, officials with land to measure and grain to allocate. What it did not develop was the axiomatic habit of asking why a procedure is guaranteed to work, which is a real difference, and one that mattered later.

The technological record is formidable. Paper was developed into a usable writing medium under the Han and began to displace bamboo strips and silk, which changed what an administration could store and move. Zhang Heng built a seismograph that indicated the direction of distant earthquakes, and an armillary sphere driven by water. The stern-post rudder, the wheelbarrow and cast iron are all Han or earlier, and Han writers describe a lodestone device that pointed south.

Astronomy was a department of state rather than a private pursuit, because the calendar was an instrument of legitimacy, and a dynasty that could not predict the seasons or explain an eclipse had a problem. Han astronomers kept observational records with a continuity few traditions match, and modern astronomers still use them to study historical supernovae and comets.

Medicine took a systematic turn in the same period. The Yellow Emperor’s Inner Canon presents illness as imbalance within a body understood as a system of circulation and correspondence, and established a framework that governed Chinese medical thought thereafter.

The Roman record was written by senators about themselves. The Greek record was written by citizens about their cities. The Chinese record was written by the state, and that difference shapes everything that can be known.

Sima Qian’s Shiji, completed early in the first century BC, is the foundation. Its author was castrated on the emperor’s order for defending a disgraced general, chose to live rather than take the honourable exit, and finished the work anyway. He explains that decision in a surviving letter that is among the most affecting documents to come out of the ancient world. The structure he devised became the template for two thousand years: basic annals of rulers, chronological tables, treatises on subjects like ritual and waterways, hereditary houses, and biographies.

His successors institutionalised it. Ban Gu and, after his death in prison, his sister Ban Zhao produced the Han shu, and thereafter each dynasty wrote the official history of its predecessor. That convention has an obvious consequence. The history of a dynasty is composed by the regime that replaced it, and that regime needs to explain why the Mandate passed. Han sources on the Qin are not neutral, and later sources on the Han are not either.

Against the official record stands the buried one. Tomb excavations have produced administrative documents, legal texts, medical manuscripts and philosophical works on bamboo and silk that had been lost for two millennia, including versions of texts that differ from the transmitted ones, which lets us see the editing. Frontier garrison archives from the northwest preserve duty rosters, supply accounts and letters. As at Vindolanda, the paperwork nobody meant to preserve turns out to be the most trustworthy thing we have.