Han and Conceptions of Unity in China
A student walks across a modern university campus dressed in traditional silk robes. It might seem curious, but it is not uncommon in twenty-first century China. Members of the Hanfu, or “Han Dress,” movement celebrate the revival of traditional Chinese culture by donning ancient clothing and sporting traditional hairstyles of the Han Dynasty. Hanfu’s identity as a movement might be nebulous, but it is already a source of controversy. Heated conversations on WeChat, China’s primary social media app, center around accusations that Hanfu clubs promote Chinese ethno-nationalism. Han Chinese (the ethnonym “Han” takes the same character as the dynasty) represent roughly 96 percent of China’s population of 1.2 billion people, and Han are recognized as the dominant ethnic majority. Hanfu members defend the practice as a form of channeling and self-fashioning that resists commodification. Hanfu robes, unlike factory-made clothing, are hand stitched and made of high-quality fabrics, all of which highlight the values of craftsmanship being shunted aside under global capitalism. During conversations between one of the book’s authors and Chinese archaeology students, it was interesting to hear how China’s Gen Z, colloquially called the “moonlight clan,” held very different ideas about what Hanfu might represent. One student saw it for what its practitioners claimed: the commemoration of a prosperous era through costuming and reenactment, much like cosplay. Another student saw little substantive historical engagement, summing it up as a heritage movement likened to those ethnic minorities’ cultural revitalization projects.
The growing phenomenon of “Han Dress” raises probing questions about Chinese identity as well as the circulation of “Han” as a conspicuous yet fluid sign that seemingly exceeds the contents of nationalism. The question of “Why Han?” is interesting and perhaps less straightforward than anticipated. This book is an attempt to field that question and trace its emergence as both a political and a cultural-historical problem. If China has a long, winding history extending back four millennia and originating in the foundations of Xia and Shang kings, why is the dynastic Han taken as the reference point and model for Chinese identity and tradition? The Han Dynasty, which ruled from 202 bce to 212 ce, had a comparatively long reign and brought under its rule a territorial extent comparable to the modern-day People’s Republic of China. Of course, one might view these romantic appropriations of Han as part of China’s nation-building efforts in the twenty-first century and its ongoing attempts at restoring a sense of national identity. The founding father of the Chinese republic, Sun Zhongshan, went as far as to elevate the “Han” as a distinctive ethno-racial group. Lexically, “Han” not only modifies and distinguishes the Chinese people – Hanzu – as a cultural and ethnic group, Mandarin, the national language, is likewise called Hanyu.
From Sun Zhongshan to modern youth culture, the term Han conveys a distinctive sense of cultural and political unity, one that draws on the reverberations of a historical legacy. Its emergence as a meaningful category of the self and group is a central focus of this book; though our position, as the reader will see, is a contentious one, especially among western scholars of China. While historians of early China are quick to note that any notion of Chinese ethnicity is an anachronism without equivalence in antiquity, they do not deny that Han culture and Han society are themselves valid subjects of study. The pairing of culture and society purports a degree of unity that is not without historical foundation; the first two centuries bce saw the expansion of state bureaucracy, law, monetization, and Confucian ideology that brought about the integration of a vast dominion. Here, traced back to the Han dynasty, lies the early spatial footprint of modern-day China (Fig. I.1 a) and the foundations of moral and universal rule encompassed by the concepts tianxia (All-under-Heaven), yitong (unified rule or system), and yijia (one family).1 Why this Han legacy appeals to the contemporary imagination cannot be solely chalked up to rising nationalistic sentiment in China and therefore dismissible as mere propaganda. Rather, what motivates any identification with the Han is that it offers a vision of unity that differs from its predecessors, the Qin, and thus draws a contrast and an alternative to the coercive and oppressive rule of Shihuangdi, the self-titled “First Emperor,” whose despotic regime (if book burning and burying scholars alive are any indication) only lasted for a short eleven years. To this day, the First Emperor’s reputation oscillates between that of a revered and a maligned historical figure.2
Figure I.1 Four different ways of mapping Han empire. (a) Commandery map of Han empire 108 bce (after Loewe), (b) Capital-core-periphery divisions, (c) Transport networks map (after Reference Von Glahnvon Glahn 2016, 119 and 151), (d) Major macro-regions map.
Why these invocations of unity from the past continue to have currency in the present may be due in part to what they also put into question: What is a political community and how can it cohere? In placing emphasis on interconnections between heaven, ruler, and family, the Han appealed to a vision of unity that was organically and relationally constituted, one that downplays the forces of institutional or top-down subjugation. Unified rule, or yitong, is conceived as a relation between the sovereign and his subjects, though not exclusively as ruler and ruled since the idiom of family frames these relations in terms of intimate and interpersonal bonds (Reference GaoGao 2019; Nylan 2008; Sun 2018). Unified rule is also more than the establishment of a political order, for the very idea of All-under-Heaven evokes a self-constituting cosmic world (Reference Mittag, 309Mutschler and MittagMittag 2008). In this regard, these ideas emphasize the casting of a new emergent world and of the shared bonds that motivate the body politic. Taken together they describe unity as both a possibility and a project with populist appeal, something which, according to historians, really had no precedent in China’s history before the Qin and Han.3 How and why unity emerged as a distinctive outlook about the world that acquired universal significance during this period is the subject of this book’s exploration. We argue that much is at stake in this examination because it forces us to turn to questions such as ways of belonging, self and group identity, and the meanings of political community as they first arose in China’s history and in a period deemed to have launched a longer imperial career. These are issues that we think are of interest and relevance to others who study states and empires.
Before proceeding, however, we need to explain where the book’s guiding questions land in relation to current scholarship on the Han – an ongoing debate over whether it was a fictive or real empire. In her introductory essay for Verge: Studies in Global Asias, Pamela Crossley states,
On the ground, Rome and Han as cultural or moral entities were, in all likelihood, notional outside of the capital or the cities that were the base of provincial government.
She argues that any unity between empire and culture was ultimately an “imaginal” one. The concepts of “All-under-Heaven” and “one family,” in this regard, represent political covers for what was really a commercial and military enterprise (Reference CrossleyCrossley 2016, 85). Whatever claims made then about the unified world were rhetorical in nature, and, by implication, so were notions of self-identity and political community, with perhaps some exceptions made for the Han capital Chang’an and urban centers. Other historians of early imperial China have expressed similar reservations on literary grounds, questioning the translatability of the English term “empire” in the absence of a linguistic equivalent in classical Chinese: the closest term All-under-Heaven did not refer to sovereign rule over extensive territories, in the western sense of colonialism, but was primarily employed for moral purposes in reference to a realm of shared cultural values originating in the Central States (Reference NylanNylan 2008; Reference Nylan and LoeweNylan and Loewe 2010).
This sense of not-quite-empire and the “imaginal” have also compelled a spatial revision of the Han state in the form of new maps.4 As one of the largest imperial undertakings in antiquity, Han campaigns during the reign of Emperor Wu (r. 141–87 bce) acquired new territories encompassing parts of North Korea, Mongolia, and Vietnam (Fig. I.1 a), reaching a geographic extent comparable to Rome and a population of 13 million at the beginning of the Western Han to between 57.7 and 59.6 million by 2 ce (Shang 2008). In contrast to conventional representations of a unified empire enclosed by spatial boundaries, however (Fig. I.1 a), one now encounters maps that consider the tenuous nature of Han dominion by visually distinguishing the capital from the inner core and the periphery in an effort to re-present the empire as different types of “state spaces” (Fig. I.1 b). Other renderings show the empire as noncontiguous macro-regions (Fig. I.1 d) and as zones linked by economic networks (Fig. I.1 c). In comparing these maps, our aim is not to expose hidden biases behind representations of space, but rather to show how increasingly diffusive mappings can make the “imaginal” so convincing visually such that we are no longer sure what to make of the Han empire and perhaps of Asian imperialism in general. It is worth noting that this debate comes at a time when historians and archaeologists of Rome are calling for a reckoning with the “darker sides” of Roman expansionism after prior decades of focus on deconstructing the self-image of Romanitas and Romanization (Reference Fernández-Götz, Maschek and RoymansFernández-Götz et al. 2020; Reference MattinglyMattingly 2011). If western imperialism is a political project with real consequences, we are left here with an Asian imperialism that is at best examined at the level of discourses and representations.
On the other side, historians contend that this illusory view of empire dismisses the power of Han institutions deployed with the goal of establishing cultural and political hegemony. By adopting and expanding the administrative bureaucracy established by the Qin, a road system 35,000 km in length (Fig. I.1 c), and a standardized coinage system, the Han inserted itself so deeply into civilian life that historians have coined the term “state activism” to characterize the embeddedness of state presence.5 Both Mark Lewis and Yuri Pines have argued in their respective books that the shape of “Chinese culture” is generally attributable to “the invention of the emperor as the embodiment of the state,” as well as the promotion of a “uniform written language” that extended bureaucratic control over the means of mass communication (Reference LewisLewis 2007, 1; Reference PinesPines 2015, 2). Proponents of this view have argued that the Qin and Han actively engineered individual identities through this bureaucratic regime, which tasked officials – an estimated 120,000 to 150,000 men – with the job of managing the identity of subjects by registering every individual’s location, rank, and surname within their territory (Chang 2007; Reference KorolkovKorolkov 2021). Far from being an imaginal enterprise, we are left with the sense that “All-under-Heaven,” to borrow Marshall Sahlins’ retort to Michel Foucault, is basically “power, power everywhere” where the only outlet to personhood is as subjects through state and bureaucratic inscription. With respect to concepts like All-under-Heaven and unified rule, we are thus reminded “how the signs do shrink” (Reference Sahlins2002, 20). Left imaginable here is an extraordinarily passive, prostrate society. In such a framework, it is difficult to explain why a feeling for and intimacy with one’s subjects, as elicited by the term “one family,” would take on particular stakes.
If these contradictory viewpoints are any indication, this book is reckoning with an impasse and searching for an alternative analytical opening at the same time. What if, instead of starting with the premise that unity is a centralized formation of power, people, and resources, comparable or not with historical norms, we approach unity as a meditation and preoccupation with the constitution of sovereign space and people in the context of China’s first formative expansionary project? The term “tianxia,” as shown by Yuri Reference PinesPines’ (2002; Reference Pines, Biran, Rüpke, Pines, Biran and RüpkePines et al. 2021) analysis of politico-philosophical discourses, no longer referred specifically to a cultural realm but also concerned the constitution of a political space. Increasingly for political thinkers of the early imperial age, the question shifted toward asking “where the limits of this world” lie (107): Are the boundaries of All-under-Heaven limited to the Central States or elsewhere and beyond? However rhetorical these various invocations about unity under heaven may sound, if we approach these claims with a critical eye, we can also turn what is not made explicit into new directions of inquiry after this would-be-realm: What frictions in space, for instance, are being glossed over by the unity of cosmos? Which body politic is being addressed by the term family? Why does family appeal as an intuitive framework, somehow capable of smoothing over interpersonal differences? What we find allayed in the discursive field is a deeper confrontation with the very conditions and terms of inclusion – a conjecture hastened by the precarious expansionist campaigns of the Han state over the course of two centuries from 202 bce to 19 ce. These meditations on inclusion, an encompassing of the cosmos and family, do not simply recapitulate symbolic ideas but underscore that space and the social body are first and foremost being recast in the settling of this new political community. As Reference LewisMark E. Lewis (2005) argues in Construction of Space in Early China, empire was largely conceived as a project of reworking the basic spatial units such as the body, the household, the region, and the world into a whole. Inverting the imperial rhetoric similarly moves us toward this analytic opening: to examine unity as a preoccupation with correlating a certain kind of space, a certain kind of body, and a framework generative enough to encompass widened geographies and bodies of difference. In a departure from Lewis’ seminal study, however, our book focuses on Han archaeology and material culture over the discursive (i.e., the plans and deeds of kings, lords, and architects), using those observations to assess how the lives of subjects also factored into the interpolation of space and bodies. To borrow from Lefebvre (trans. Nicholson-Smith 1991), how “state” or “non-state” spaces are constituted requires an analysis of the actual and the lived, in addition to the ordered representations of space.
More important, we examine this mutual process of crafting space and bodies beyond the confines of the “capital or cities of provincial government” to consider those spaces “notionally outside,” paying heed to exchanges with non-Han persons described in the Chinese Standard Histories – in particular, in connection with the practice of an imperial unification strategy called jiaohua (teaching and transformation) that called on imperial officials to teach locals moral conduct (Reference BrindleyBrindley 2021). A passage from the Hou Hanshu (History of the Later Han), which celebrates the accomplishments of two administrators for their pacification of southern natives, conveys just how closely space and bodies are mutually implicated:
Xi Guang was responsible for Jiaozhi and Ren Yan was the governor of Jiuzhen. They thereupon taught the people to farm, set forth policies on headwear and shoes, for the first time setup matchmaking and dowry customs, introduced them to weddings and marriage procedures, established schools, and led them with the rites and propriety.6
Assuming that the order of procedure taken is significant, the historian Liam Kelley has raised a puzzling question regarding the causal connection drawn between farming and clothing (e.g., wearing of hats and sandals). If “farmers were supposed to walk around in rice fields wearing sandals and hats, wouldn’t mud stick to the sandals? Were Han dynasty hats designed to block the sun?”7 Why, if anything, does this procedure matter in terms of successfully converting natives? If one were to examine the first phrase figuratively, according to Kelley, it is possible to read “hats and shoes” as a reference to a proper hierarchy of the body: a hat’s proper place is above and a shoe’s is below. Hats and shoes therefore index a lower and higher ordering of being. It thus follows that, by teaching people how to farm, local natives can perhaps learn to distinguish the head from the feet and restore the human body to its full capacity. What is being articulated, moreover, is differences between people that are attributable to environment and modes of economic livelihood. The first lesson in jiaohua involves farming, for it is presumed that natives only knew how to hunt. In this regard, their nakedness is a persistent condition of that way of life in the wild versus in the fields. The formula for imperial unification thus entails some procedural knowledge, beginning firstly with the remaking of land, then bodies, and finally culture.
“Educational transformation,” as a form of civilizational discourse, did not “revolve only around some weak notion of ‘Chinese culture’” as Brindley cautions us (2021, 2).8 It was informed by an earlier policy originally developed to educate and integrate the common masses through a classical Huaxia [sic] Confucian culture. In pre-imperial periods, people did not employ “Han” or “Qin” as ethnic categories but used Huaxia and Zhuxia to denote the idea of a people (ren) who self-identified as heirs of a tradition originating in Zhongguo (Central States) and Zhongyuan (Central Plains).9 Over the course of Han expansionist campaigns, according to Brindley, the policy of jiaohua came to designate specific bodily norms associated with a cultivated self, with implications for constructing inclusion in materially manifest ways. It was also during this period that the toponym Zhongguo, the modern term for China, became increasingly defined “against the groups of southerners and those inhabiting the northern and southwestern fringes” (Reference Nylan and LoeweNylan and Loewe 2010, 3; Reference OlberdingOlberding 2022, 143). In light of these semantic shifts and accounts from the frontier, the constitution of a Huaxia subjectivity requires us to give as much focus to “zones of friction” (Reference TsingTsing 2005, 4) in the borderlands as to the capital. This means that archaeological remains culled from poorly attested regions in the documentary sources figure prominently in this book’s analysis of “state spaces.”
A Networks Perspective on Empire
In a departure from other studies of early imperial history, this book takes up Zhongguo as itself a changing geographic concept over the course of the Han, one that begins to acquire different associations for territoriality. In this regard, we are drawing on the insights of younger Chinese historians of early China, in particular Luo Xin (2009) and Reference HuHu Hong (2017), who describe a shift in the semantic fields of Huaxia and its uptake as a point of reference for ethno-political affiliation during the Han. How did these semantic shifts arise? Where Ren Yan’s and Xi Guang’s accounts press on issues of identity and difference, this book attempts to reconstruct the context and interactions that brought the toponym Zhongguo and ethnonym Huaxia into the fray.
Admittedly, how one moves from the archaeological record to discussions of identity formation and problems of unity is not without its own set of interpretative challenges. Given the range of objects enlisted by Xi Guang and Ren Yan in their campaign, it is important to keep in mind that jiaohua was both an ideological and material formation. To learn and become a moral being, as these accounts imply, depends on taking concrete actions in the world, which are manifested through the effective use of material objects. Though textiles (e.g., headgear and shoes) in general do not preserve well, Xi’s and Ren’s instructional plan also establishes a role for more durable goods – iron tools, bronze mirrors, crock pots, ceramic roof tiles, and coffins – to act in the world and potentially leave traces behind. Archaeology, the discipline that privileges discard activity, is particularly adept at tracing the flows of commodities intertwined with consumption practices. And as Lori Khatchadourian has argued in Imperial Matter, it is often a focus on “the mundane material things of the most solid and chunky sort” (Reference Khatchadourian2016, 66) that attunes us to how abstract notions like civility, intimacy, and well-being get mobilized via people’s interactions with everyday things. However, not all things get appropriated equally, and it is by looking at differences in artifact distributions across space that we can begin to understand how material values are not pre-given but are always open to appraisal and judgment. How people consume and engage with material objects, in other words, has the capacity to shape social understanding by making it possible for people to recognize certain kinds and qualities of persons (Keane 2003).
Because what is recovered and documented will always be incomplete and partial, it is important to lay out some of the empirical problems at the outset and explain why an approach guided by “network thinking” is both intuitive and productive. At a general level, what archaeologists have available for observation are things in circulation across a vast geography, and we proceed by tracing connections, or density of connections, between sites (microscale) and regions (macroscale) of the empire (Reference BrughmansBrughmans 2010). Archaeology is therefore an accounting of objects as they appear across many scales and a highlighting of their role in communication – a prospect that Reference Barbieri-LowBarbieri-Low (2007) has explored with the use of trademarks to distinguish standards in mass-produced commodities. A network approach can be useful in this regard because it takes into consideration the articulation of different scales of interaction as an empirical problem (Reference BrughmansBrughmans 2010). Because objects proliferate, as Carl Knappett reminds archaeologists, they are “released from proximity” and carry the potential to rework the micro- and macroscale into the same domain of experience. “The capacity for an object to act as a kind of marker of non-present space” is thus a potent one because it also enables “humans to exist across scales” (Reference Knappett2011, 10). In other words, certain artifacts (e.g., from shoes and tools to architectural styles) are central to the framing of settings for social interaction. Understanding their patterns of distribution across space can recover not only aspects of economic life but the relationship between consumption and imperial identity formation.
The turn to networks also paves the way for a reappraisal of Crossley’s imaginal empire by taking alternative models of territorial sovereignty into consideration. As Maxim Korolkov and Anke Hein (2021) and Reference OlberdingGarret Olberding (2022) argue in their recent appraisals of the Qin and Han concepts of territoriality, early Chinese empires are better conceived as “a network of state spaces” mobilized by projects of population migration rather than as a space of contiguous territories. What a network perspective contributes then is an analysis of spatial relations that are not solely determined by categories of analysis such as empire and colony (see Reference HauserHauser 2015) or, in the Han case, the junxian system – a capital-commandery-county spatial hierarchy – shown in the political geography map (Fig. I.1 a&b) (Zhou et al. 2016). With an eye toward spatial circulations and connections (Fig. I.1 c&d), we are exercising caution so as not to confound capital, inner, and outer domains with core and periphery asymmetries (c.f. Reference TongTong 2021), or to conclude with a weak or fictional view of empire in the absence of absolute geographic contiguity. To do so would risk overlooking different formations of power motivated by systemic (practical), metrocentric (aspirations in the center), and pericentric (developments in the periphery) forces (Reference DoyleDoyle 1986). Here it is productive to consider the coexisting forces of power at play: one encompassed by processes of centralization and hierarchy, and the other driven by diversification of circuits and interstitial connections. While the major roads shown in Figure I.1 c, for instance, are connected to Chang’an, the capital of the empire, there are just as many, if not more, links to the city of Luoyang from the lower Yellow River plain and Yangzi River basin, thus ascribing it with a “hub”-like distinction. The connections between cities in the Guandong or lower Yellow River plain – centers producing industrial and craft goods such as textiles, lacquer, and metal work – and the Yangzi and Lingnan macro-regions allow us to consider producer–consumer interactions in the context of pericentric networks. The potential for one imperial zone, in turn, to become an interstice linking two peer regions shows that political spaces can consist of noncontiguous forms of territoriality – a development that both Maxim Reference KorolkovKorolkov (2021) and Michèle Reference DemandtDemandt (2019) have documented for Qin and Han campaigns in regions to the south of the Yangzi River valley. There, imperial exploitation of dendritic networks facilitated the extraction of tropical resources and the development of trade relations beyond the confines of prestige or elite and tributary systems (Reference KorolkovKorolkov 2021). Paying heed to these spaces of ambiguity, one of our priorities is to fill in this apparent lacuna by reconstructing potential links and nodes gleaned from recent studies of settlements and newly defined infrastructural features.10
Finally, our interest in networks is not only a heuristic one but draws on more recent scholarship and their insights on the role of social networks in the constitution of power in early China (Cai 2019a; Reference CampbellCampbell 2010; Reference MillerMiller 2020). How the notion of unified rule as a universal good moved from the realm of political thought to become a reality under the Qin and Han was, as mentioned earlier, not a seamless top-down process. The conventional narrative that the alternative – a multicentered version of empire comprised of power sharing among “old” aristocratic houses – came to be subsequently sidelined as the Han central court became increasingly prosperous and power hungry. This narrative, however, has come under scrutiny for projecting a retrospective account of change which assumes that the Han rulers always intended to dominate rivals.11 Reference MillerAllison Miller’s (2020) study of the first sixty years of Han rule, a period characterized by power brokering between royal networks and the formation of an inclusive “high culture,” has complicated this narrative.12 From a bottom-up perspective, Reference SanftCharles Sanft (2014) has argued that unification ultimately depended on the rallying of popular sentiment toward the idea. Notably, he expands on the development of communication or road networks as an emergent medium of advertisement and a tool of “good publicity” – a possibility that appears less foreign when we consider our own frequent encounters with political signage on freeways today. An important move in these works is to highlight how “political communities” are being remade in parts of the network where connectivities are less obvious or particularly tenuous.13 In the next section, we outline how imperial periods are organized in the book in an effort to expand on unity as a changing problem.
Setting the Stage: Introduction to the Chronology of the Western Han
Distinguishing Han Transformations and Political Forms in Early China
The era of empire building in China actually begins with the expansionary projects initiated by the Qin State (221–207 bce) and pursued by its rival and successor state, the Han, over the course of the first two centuries bce. The Qin was the first political state that succeeded in annexing rival classical states in north and central China and bringing these territories under unified dynastic rule. With the consolidation of rule under a centralized bureaucracy and the backing of a strong military, the Qin carved up these rival kingdoms and reorganized them into individual administrative units under the capital-commandery-county-district-ward structure and placing them under the rule of officials. It is often taken as a matter of fact that the Qin’s novel bureaucratic formulations and legal apparatus laid the practical groundwork for empire building, which the Han adopted to realize its expansionist ambitions. Under Emperor Wu (r. 141–87 bce) during the period known as the middle Western Han (distinguished from the Later or Eastern Han Dynasty), Han campaigns acquired new territories encompassing the geographic extents shown in Figure I.1 a.
From the expansion of administrative geography to the enforcement of a standard script and currency system, the Han carried on reforms implemented by the Qin and are often viewed as inheritors of Qin ideas. These Qin policies facilitated the integration of the economy and promulgated the rule of law. The notion of an imperial society constituted by civilian subjects, which posits an identity position that departs from the feudal aristocratic order, is also an extension of the Qin’s rank system based on twenty social grades. By further expanding these social ranks, the Han recruited civilian officials and further expanded a salaried bureaucracy that, toward the end of the Western Han, numbered between 120,000 and 150,000 officials deployed across its 100-plus commanderies.14
Compared to the short-lived fifteen years of Qin rule, it is perhaps unsurprising that the legacy of empire comes to rest on the career of its successor state, the Han. Yet the Han imperial legacy was enduring in part because, even as its rulers terminated rival states, they recognized in the Qin downfall a failure to legitimize the exercise of power and violence. Reflecting on the Machiavellian tendencies of Qin rule, Western Han rulers saw a redemptive potential in the development of ideological repertoires. What importantly distinguishes the Han is a renewed concern with the nature of power, and the obligation of the ruler to care for the people (Reference Beck and VankeerberghenBeck and Vankeerberghen 2021). To cultivate popular consensus, advisers at court argued that people – from farmers to newly conquered groups – must align their interests and find pleasure in the virtues of imperial rule (Reference NylanNylan 2008).15 A return to ritual systems from pre-Qin periods therefore provided a means to restore and unify people’s moral convictions. By encouraging people to participate in rites, such as ancestor and farming deity worship, the empire aligned people’s spiritual life with that of the ruler, who also conducted similar rites (Reference TianTian 2013).
Though we have made these comparisons to highlight differences between the regimes of the Qin and Han, it is crucial to distinguish the Western Han as two discrete historical periods – a phase of recuperation which then set the stage for expansion. These two centuries, chronologically divided into early (206 bce–141 bce) and middle-late Western Han (141 bce–9 ce), provide the backdrop for the narration of continuity and change. The early Western Han, the six decades of power sharing that are the focus of Allison Miller’s aforementioned monograph, has been conventionally characterized as a period of restoration and “recuperation,” starting with the founder Liu Bang’s (r. 206–195 bce) rise to power after the outbreak of civil war that followed the Qin collapse. Because Liu Bang, himself a low-level functionary from the Han River region, did not have sufficient military resources, he relied on a coalition of “old” aristocratic families that the Qin had earlier suppressed, and close kin to help him claim the throne and reestablish control. In return for their loyalty and support, Liu Bang and his successors awarded them a large number of fiefs known as semiautonomous kingdoms (guo), effectively reviving the pre-imperial states of Zhao, Yan, Qi, and Chu, and titles such as “king” (wang). Liu Bang’s successors also awarded titles and land grants to kinsmen, officials, and personal favorites to create marquisates (houguo). According to some estimates, an astonishing 788 nobilities were created during the early to middle Western Han with each nobility being, in theory, semi-independent and in charge of their own tax collection and legal affairs. Yet, as Miller’s reappraisal has shown, this period of restoration was not exactly a return to the “old” standard; nor is “regressive” an accurate characterization (Reference Miller2020, 10). In Parts i and iv of this book, our analysis covers the same period, tracking the politics of these networks and the debate surrounding continuity versus change. We also extend our analysis beyond Chang’an to include the cities of old nobility. How cities, the basic spatial units mediating a multicentered versus unified world, are implicated in conceptions of unity will be closely examined in Part i.
The beginning of the middle Western Han, a period marked by the reign of Emperor Wu (c. 141 bce), represents a distinctive transition toward increasing political centralization and the initiation of imperial expansion beyond the classical Central Plains sphere. Aided in part by robust revenues generated by improvements in farming and iron technologies, Emperor Wu was on firmer fiscal ground than his predecessors. In our evaluation of evolving conceptions of unity, we are often looking at the specific transformations made to basic spatial units enacted during this period of expansionism and consolidation.16 While Qin campaigns did venture far beyond the regions of the Central Plains (Reference KorolkovKorolkov 2021), the territorial pursuits under Emperor Wu intensified environmental encounters that redefined the edge of Han geographies and the probable limits of All-under-Heaven. Until the late second century bce, half of what is encompassed under modern-day China remained outside its political and cultural world. Over the course of the middle to late Western Han, cultural and ecological encounters became increasingly unfamiliar and less resolvable within previous schemes, adding a new twist to the conception of unity.
The Han state, as the book aims to clarify, was not simply an enlargement of the Qin domain but a project of managing cultural, linguistic, and ecological differences in the Jiangnan region, the semitropical zone south of the Yangzi River and the steppes of Central Asia. How these interventions collided with preexisting spatial ontology is a question we explore in the book. The challenge of integrating conquered lands, as we proposed with Xi Guang’s and Ren Yan’s activities, was as much about defending territory as it was about transforming these spaces into a social or civilized domain through farming. Specifically, in Parts I and II, we turn to studies of settlement and agrarian systems to draw out how expansionism and consolidation engender a process of spatial production. Existing scholarship on Han agricultural production focuses almost uniquely on the managerial dimensions of state power, where discoveries of administrative documents featuring avid “bean counters” reinforce a view of “state activism” embedded at the granular level (Reference HsuHsu 1980; Reference Pines, Shelach and ShakedPines and Shelach 2005). Control, however, is as much a matter of managing people’s labor as it is of facilitating their actions through efforts that “create favorable conditions for production by altering the physical or social environment in which producers labored” (Reference Sinopoli and MorrisonSinopoli and Morrison 1995, 90). Intensification, in other words, can be extractive, but it is also a collaborative scheme that draws on new infrastructures (e.g., canals, reservoirs, field divisions, and dikes) and the cooperation of people (Reference SanftSanft 2014). Imperial harvests were moreover sources of food redistribution for the people, binding rulers and ruled together in relations of reciprocity (Reference KimKim 2021). It is important to iterate that farming, as Part II of the book shows, is a transformative process where land use regimes not only generate economic surplus but also create an intimate sociocultural landscape. To more fully understand why farming is both a mode of subsistence production and a framework for social identification, it is crucial to understand how these landscapes acquired new social and economic meanings, thereby elaborating zones of inclusion and exclusion.
Another important development in the middle to late Western Han are demographic changes connected to the mass relocation of populations from “old” and newly acquired territories.17 Migration is a topic that is just beginning to receive scholarly attention, and the scale of these population transfers was quite unprecedented for the ancient world (Barbieri-Low 2021b). Based on a survey of population numbers given in the Standard Histories, Reference Korolkov and HeinKorolkov and Hein (2020, 16) estimate that in 198 bce 100,000 elites were moved from the middle and lower parts of the Yellow River to the capital region, while upwards of 2 million refugees and voluntary recruits were resettled in the frontier provinces between 132 and 107 bce.18 The mass migration of an estimated ten percent of the population over the course of two centuries of rule was not only state-induced, as Korolkov and Hein note, nor did it only include conscripts, slaves, and soldiers, as settler families and even Confucian scholars made the move (Cai 2019a; Reference Yao, Boozer, Düring and ParkerYao 2020). Accompanying the expansion of the imperial realm, new avenues of institutional participation emerged that afforded local men degrees of social mobility and visibility in the body politic (Reference BrownBrown 2002; Reference HsingHsing 2017). One understudied topic is how migrants, uprooted from their localities and shuffled into new state spaces, developed new forms of “associative life” and ways of belonging.19
Making diasporic and sojourner experiences a subject of study takes into account the role of an overlooked group of peoples in actively making cultural boundaries. To be fair, borderlands have long been recognized as a critical space for examining the formation of ethnic identities. Drawing to some extent on the legacy of anthropologist Reference BarthFredrik Barth’s (1969) seminal work on boundary formations, Nicola Di Cosmo’s study of Chinese historiography of the northern frontier problematized notions of a primordial Huaxia self-identity, instead locating the emergence of Han ethnic consciousness in relation to the escalation of border conflicts with the semi-nomadic Xiongnu polity during the Western Han (2002, 2020).20
Although such contributions have done much to add nuance to static notions of a singular and assured Sinocentric self, showing how these cultural boundaries are remade, we suggest that taking a constructivist approach to its logical end also creates interpretive issues. In particular, the primacy placed on identities in opposition has the unintentional effect of reducing all matters of self-identification to binaries. The implications are such that Huaxia is only meaningful in the sense of “what we are not,” which assumes in some respects that the “we” is already an intuitive and coherent collective.
An overlooked extension of Barth’s insights that the book builds upon is the problem of negotiating inclusivity or sameness, especially within diasporic communities. In particular, Barth notes that the process of ethnic ascription depends as much on constructing a coherent “we” through intragroup dynamics as it does on intergroup differentiation. “Since belonging to an ethnic category implies being a certain kind of person,” intragroup relations really rest on two people establishing conditions and terms of mutual recognition (Reference BarthBarth 1969, 15). A claim on identity, according to Barth, therefore also implies an invitation to be judged and to judge others alike, on the assumption that both have shared standards. Shared standards are not the province of a few but are instead contingent on people building on the prospects of those social interactions, or, as Barth calls it, doing the work of “organizing amity.” This work of building “good will” need not be an abstraction. We argue that it is present in the making of a “homescape” or a space of familiarity on the frontier (Reference Sunseri, Ferris, Harrison and WilcoxSunseri 2014). Through prosaic social activities ranging from the sharing of food and labor to mourning, migrant persons were also implicated in the lives of each other, collectively negotiating the boundaries of affiliation and membership.
Four Thematic Sections
Different from works on intellectual and economic histories of the Han, this book is first and foremost an archaeological history of the first two centuries of the Han empire (also known as the Former or Western Han). Though more fragmentary and less detailed than documentary sources, the archaeological record draws on social lives beyond the capital. What we aim to show is how the idea of unity is articulated through a reworking of spatial units – the body, the household, the community, and the region. The book is divided and organized into thematic examinations attending to each of the spatial and bodily frameworks through which Huaxia identity is interpellated. Following the procedural steps outlined by Xi Guang and Ren Yan, we begin our discussion with the state’s production of imperial space in Part i (Chapters 1 and 2); agricultural expansion and the organization of the empire’s body politic in Part ii (Chapters 3 and 4 on farming and foodways); consumption practices that shaped Han regimes of value in Part iii (Chapters 5 and 6 on craft); and finally, in Part iv, ritual etiquette and the prospects of teaching others about bodily norms (Chapters 7 and 8 on mourning rites).
Core and Periphery: A Note on the Organization of Han Geography
Before moving on to a more detailed discussion of each chapter, we want to clarify why each thematic section is divided into two chapters, with one chapter discretely focused on the “core” and one on the “periphery” of the empire. This presentation is partly a pragmatic one. Because the volume aims for breadth and coverage, from archaeological landscape reconstructions and excavations of settlements to the analysis of subsistence, we believe this treatment of core and periphery as complements readies our readers for comparisons when patterns from the core or heartland are clearly foregrounded from the outset. References to core and periphery may strike an uncomfortable chord with our readers, especially given ongoing critiques of this binary construct. Yet the core and periphery model bears some resemblance to the “emic” spatial categories employed by Han administrators: a radiating political space defined by a capital region (sanfu), the interior provinces (neijun), and the frontier provinces (bianjun) (Fig. I.1 b). For instance, the capital and interior provinces are demographically and economically more integrated than the frontier provinces. Together they also correspond with the dianfu (central), houfu (lords), and binfu (guest) zones in Han cosmological space (Yü 1986). This core body-politic made up of lords and friends is also in part reproduced by the historical and political significance ascribed to the Yellow River Valley as the heartland of ancient China, a cultural sphere cohering around an inherited classical Zhou system and spatially rooted in the Central Plains. The outer frontiers, by contrast, are an alien non-Zhou geographic space that vacillates between a yaofu (controlled) and a huangfu (wild) zone (Fig. I.1 b).
While core and periphery are useful as an organizing framework in this regard, this distinction is not uniformly maintained across the book’s chapters. Chapter 1 begins with a consideration of the formation of the political core as a reconstitution of the capital and the wider Guandong (Yellow River) region in the early Western Han period. While in Chapter 3, the “core” refers more specifically to the capital (Fig. I.1 d). As illustrated by the roadways on Figure I.1 c, the geographic extent of Guandong encompasses the Nanyang and Qi-Lu macro-regions as integral to the commercial pursuits of the empire. Chapter 5 again returns to the “core” as an expanding space, most notably the Nanyang and Qi-Lu macro-regions as constituting a new economic, industrial “core” outside the capital. Commercial cities in this macro-region, which are woven together by a mesh-like structure, link the capital-interior region. It is through bearing in mind the increasing demand for goods of value – a shiny bronze mirror and tightly woven silk for instance – that we consider how All-under-Heaven came to be perceived as a sensuous quality in the commodity form. While Pamela Crossley downplays the effects of these “commercial inducements,” the circulation of imperial goods created not only economic dependencies but also expanded the repertoire of goods paving the grounds for judgement about self and others.
Chapter 7, by contrast, identifies ritual currents outside Central Plains, placing the Chu heartland in the Yangzi macro-region as the core area where popular beliefs in the afterlife gained initial traction (Fig. I.1 d). While ancestors are conventionally associated with the teachings of Confucius, it is in the “south” where we find a myriad of creative endeavors to reach spirits and the afterworld. We do not want to reduce core and periphery here to mere abstractions but rather approach the dynamics that structured the capital-interior-frontier tripartite division as a contingent and evolving one. As we explore in the book, when particular networks and cross-regional interactions are taken into account, the boundaries between core and periphery become more fluid in space, suggesting the inner–outer distinction was a changing one.
Part i Imperial Geography
By now the reader is probably acutely aware that space and geography are major themes in Han archaeology. Part i provides readers with an introduction to Han imperial geography and is divided into two chapters. Chapter 1’s focus is on the metrocentric processes leading to the transformation of the Yellow River basin from a “league of cities” to a new political cartography anchored by the imperial capital at Chang’an. Chapter 1 familiarizes our readers with the capital region of Chang’an in the Guanzhong basin and its relationship to the middle and lower reaches of the Yellow River, referred to as Guandong (Nanyang and Qi-Lu macro-regions). Our examination of the archaeology of the wider basin shifts focus on Chang’an away from questions of urbanism (i.e., the city) to ones of urbanization – the infrastructural experiments to redevelop water sources, rural spaces, parklands, and Qin ruins to support city life. While studies inspired by Paul Wheatley’s The Pivot of the Four Quarters often treat Chang’an as an imperial center without precedent, which assumed the apex of the administrative geography, we argue that what was exemplary was not the iconic form of the city itself but a logistics system that combined rural and urban divides into a metropolitan zone. It is in this context that the capital as eternal places, distinguished by an urban culture (Reference YoffeeYoffee 2005, 213), was invented, thanks in part to Han writers who captured this street life and memorialized it through their rhapsodies. In the second half of Chapter 1, we take up the institutionalization of the junxian system, turning to a problem about spatial sovereignty made long ago by the eminent Chinese historian Qian Mu (1975): imperial jurisdictions were often in flux with the boundaries of political units (e.g., commanderies and counties) being provisional rather than fixed entities in space. Instead of making political units the starting point of discussion about territoriality, we begin by asking what the objects of spatial reworking in the Guandong and middle Yangzi geographic regions are. Our analysis examines how this territorial process was tenuously negotiated in those regions caught between a state and a multicentered sovereign order. Chapter 1 presents evidence from the archaeology of centers and towns of vanquished states – Chu, Qi, and Lu – to argue that the empire’s territorial politics involved redefining urban morphology with new architectural features and the extension of networks and nodes that increased interdependencies between “old” centers and “new” commanderies.
Outside the geographic limits of the Guandong region are two ambiguously unmapped frontiers. These ecologically divergent regions – the northern steppes (Hetao or Ordos) and the forested semitropics (Lingnan) in the south – are the focus of Chapter 2 and we trace the emergence of an imperial footprint in these two regions from the early to late Western Han. Frontier settlement archaeology conducted in the last ten years has shown striking changes in occupation as well as land use histories, which not only fill a lacuna in our knowledge about the imperial frontier but also illuminate the extent of military and settler colonial activity in the peripheries. Using settlement data and excavated documents, Chapter 2 examines how distance, environment, and local societies shape the differentiation of borders into bounded territories (Hetao), frontier zones, and networks (Lingnan) (Reference ParkerParker 2006; Reference TackettTackett 2008). The forging of a legible space through the installation of walls and infrastructures transformed the built environment of the steppe zone. Though comparably less intrusive, the imperial project in Lingnan focused on widening capacities for trade in forestry and exotic products, specifically through the development of riverine and coastal nodes for water transport. We argue that both kinds of pericentric processes generated concepts of “border-consciousness” but with different implications: where the Ordos hardened the geographic and cultural limits of the Huaxia world, the Lingnan region represented an imperial periphery and a hub, one that was being reconfigured as a frontier center.
Part ii Food Production and Foodways
Following Part i’s discussion of the Han territorial project, Chapters 3 and 4 focus on the relationship between the state and its imperial subjects through the politics of food production. Chapter 3 argues that agricultural production presented a problem that belied economics and was far more than a matter of feeding the masses. Rather, farming was a cultural and ideological matter that became fundamental to the empire’s creation of a legible state order. In particular, we discuss how productivity is envisioned not only as being about improvements in crop yields but also in terms of the productivity of a sedentary populace that can be tracked via the property registration system. It is in the capital region surrounding Chang’an where farming technologies – irrigation canals, transport canals, ridged fields (daitian), and nonlocal crops – are first introduced to enhance the productivity of the land and the labor of a growing populace. We also discuss how bureaucratic “infomatics,” from calendars and daybooks (rishu) to the surveillance of granaries, organized people’s sense of time and space while extending the state’s ability to coordinate agricultural activities at all levels. Taken together, farming extends James Scott’s notion of institutionalization as “simplification,” which “makes the phenomenon at the center of the field of vision far more legible and, hence, far more susceptible to careful measurement, calculation and manipulation” (Reference ScottScott 1995, 191). The building of agricultural infrastructures along the capital region’s transport arteries further elucidates the facilitative role played by Chang’an as a redistribution node in the empire, collecting grain supplies from the Guandong region and moving them to the northwest frontier.
Chapter 4 traces the expansion of Han agrarian technologies into the northwest (Hexi corridor) and southern frontiers (Yangzi and Lingnan). Given the lower population densities in the south, the intensification of food production appeared to follow a more attenuated process there. Paddy rice cultivation and oxen plows were adopted in the Yangzi region but did not become fully established in Lingnan until the end of the Western Han. We also examine the verity of Ren Yan’s claim that people did not know how to farm, and show how local cultivation practices focused on a polyculture rather than on a single crop regime, which may have incurred Ren Yan’s dismissiveness. The role of farming (and bodies) with the interpellation of the Huaxia self takes on a renewed urgency in the northwest frontier as the Han sought to contain the Xiongnu, a nomadic polity. In contrast to the southern frontier, the security of the empire depended on intensifying food production to support a burgeoning settler and garrison population in the northern frontier. Convicts, merchants, sojourners, and soldiers from the interior brought with them a taste for the five classic grains of the Central Plains to this arid border zone. Farming in an environment better suited for animal husbandry, however, required massive state interventions in the engineering of soil, water, and cultigens to create fields. We discuss how terraforming practices – from irrigation canals and wells, field systems, to fortifications – transplanted a new ecology to the steppe deserts of the Hexi corridor.
Part iii Crafts
In Chapters 5 and 6, we investigate imperial transformations across a range of craft industries and the rise of a new value regime based on mass-produced goods. Why, for instance, does the difference between a good versus bad steel blade become a type of shared knowledge? In Chapter 5, we argue that the state control of craft industries was both an essential part of the imperial finances and the articulation of relations between rulers and ruled. The political and bureaucratic system of the Han state allowed it to build mega-sized production centers with scales of production unmatched in the pre-industrial world. To spotlight the organization of craft production, we examine evidence of various industries inside the capital region, from the production and supply of metal tools to ceramic wares of daily use, most of which appeared inadequate to meet local needs in the capital. Echoing the argument in Chapter 3 that Chang’an was a redistribution node in the empire, the transportation network connecting the capital region to other commercial centers outside was pivotal to the economic growth of the region. Recent archaeological studies of ironworks in the Guandong region in particular help reconstruct the complex outlines of this supply chain. We propose that mass production and transport of prestige goods and strategic metal commodities was a critical mechanism underlying the widespread distribution of Han-style goods. Moreover, its accessibility was one way the concept of All-under-Heaven became perceivable in the actions of daily routines.
Chapter 6 scrutinizes the imperial transformation of craft industries beyond the core region. This chapter argues that the Han empire may have “reshuffled” the organization of craft industries, as one part of its imperial strategies. We start with the textile industry. While weaving techniques in general were enhanced, the textile industry in the original Chu region, which had been established in the pre-Qin period, appeared to experience a decline in the subsequent Han era. Significant changes also occurred to the lacquerware industry; the Han state strengthened its control over the industry and centralized production in the Chengdu area. Besides textile and lacquerware, we examine evidence that is potentially related to bronze and iron manufacturing. The scarce traces of bronze and iron manufacturing in the peripheries favor the argument that the production of metal goods was centralized in state-controlled foundries. While the fiscal politics of centralization were certainly important, the role of goods in the imperial management of social identities should not be overlooked. The use of Han-style goods in feasting or funeral rituals, which were probably manufactured in the same production center, might have provided a nexus for elites, officials, and intellectuals in various peripheries to confirm the hierarchical relationship within the local communities nearby. This chapter concludes by discussing changes in the ceramic industries of the south, which, until recently, were poorly understood given the paucity of archaeological finds. We argue that the production of certain ceramic libation vessels in Lingnan, where imperial control remained uneven throughout the Han, provided a new set of symbols for provincial elites to use. This southern “high culture” was crucial to the creation of and participation in political communities on the periphery.
Part iv Death Ritual
Following in the footsteps of Ren Yan and Xi Guang, the two Han governors who were dispatched to the far south, the final section of the book arrives at the “ends” of civilizational progress with a focus on the power of li (rites and rituals), and identity formation and transformation. “Li” is a concept closely identified with Confucian rites and is also sometimes equated with “traditional” Chinese religion. That the classical canons make equal reference to ceremonies, customs, etiquette, and relationships as constituting aspects of li is not only indicative of its multiple denotations but also its implicitly social character. It is important here to take note of the polysemous character of li, for these other associations imply that “religion” extends beyond the realm of the symbolic to include activities of cultural life, recalling Asad’s critique of how religion is constructed by anthropologists (and the western liberal tradition) in part to canonize the “secular” (Reference Asad2003).
Perhaps no activity more fully illustrates the interrelationship between individual conduct and the spiritual or suprahuman world than ancestral worship, which, during the Han, evolved into highly elaborate funerary practices. Rites of mourning called on the living to properly care for the dead in their strivings after filial virtue. In this regard, mourning rites summoned the living to be a certain kind of person while at the same time exposing them to societal judgement. Chapter 7 combines recently excavated texts and archaeological studies of tombs to expand on the performative and public contours of mourning ritual. In particular, we show how people from different classes engaged with proper ways of mourning as a mode of social demonstration and as an intervention toward a better future. Although Confucian officials were highly critical of extravagant funerals, believing that over-the-top displays of mourning would eventually lead to moral decline, their reproach did not prevent people of all classes from elaborating and reinterpreting ritual norms for personal ends. Chapter 7 begins with a discussion of the tombs of emperors in Chang’an and their rivals, the Han princelings. By approaching Han state funerals as a kind of political theater, we interrogate how conjectures over a unified versus a multicentered realm turned royal bodies and tomb sites into contentions over both ritual propriety and the ideal of unified family (Reference MillerMiller 2020). The second part of Chapter 7 turns to the creative ritual pursuits taken by non-elites, in particular their assigning of the many commodity goods mentioned in Part iii to ritual paraphernalia for use in the postmortem world. We address this escalation in the materiality of sacrifice or conspicuous giving to the dead as constituting one part a form of care and another a kind of “ritual inflation” directed at one’s social networks and peers.
Turning our attention to funerary practices in the imperial peripheries, in Chapter 8 we examine the veracity of Ren Yan’s and Xi Guang’s claims about their campaign of ritual conversion. While previous archaeological accounts have sought to infer the scope of state activism and assimilation based on the degree of Han goods in local burials, our approach follows a different track. Our interrogation in Chapter 8 proceeds in reverse order by asking what conditions and encounters provoked Ren Yan’s and Xi Guang’s anxieties in the first place. Their preoccupations – from the proper hierarchy of the body (hats and shoes) to sexual mores (marriage procedures) to rites – converge around the problem of social relations. Because these accounts actually date to a century after conquest, one cannot presume that the civilizing imperative was an established objective, affirmed by a universal rationality, from the outset. Instead, we approach these policies as an intellectual formation generated out of a process of fraught encounters and misunderstandings. To address why they cared so much about the particulars of native bodies during rites of passage is then to ask what peculiarities stirred their unease, specifically of conduct seemingly so irredeemable and verging on the “asocial” or antisocial. This is an empirical question we examine through a careful study of non-Huaxia comportment at the level of bodies, dress, and gender. The analysis carefully traces evidence documenting the persistence of human sacrifice among steppe and “Yue” or “Viet” peoples. Moreover, the possible acceptance by imperial agents of these troubling practices reverberates with accounts of Central Plains migrants “going native” in the Han texts, highlighting the precarious status of Huaxia norms. Evidence for intermarriage blurring gender distinctions lends further weight to the problem of frontier social relations. It is against this potential for transgression that the management of cultural difference takes on a renewed force and a Huaxia self-identification becomes interpellated on the frontier.
