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$Title{Civilizations Past And Present
China: The First Empire}
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$Author{Wallbank;Taylor;Bailkey;Jewsbury;Lewis;Hackett}
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$Subject{han
china
chinese
ch'in
first
empire
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$Date{1992}
$Log{See Ch'in And Han Empires*0059701.scf
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Title:       Civilizations Past And Present
Book:        Chapter 4:  The Asian Way Of Life
Author:      Wallbank;Taylor;Bailkey;Jewsbury;Lewis;Hackett
Date:        1992

China: The First Empire

     Some 1500 years after the founding of the Shang Dynasty around 1700 B.C.,
China was unified. The first centralized Chinese empire was the proud
achievement of two dynasties, the Ch'in and the Han. The Ch'in Dynasty
collapsed soon after the death of its founder, but the Han lasted or more than
four centuries. Together the two dynasties transformed China, but the changes
were the culmination of earlier developments.

Rise Of Legalist Ch'in

     Throughout the two centuries of the Warring States period (c. 450-221
B.C.) there was the hope that a king would emerge who would unite China and
inaugurate a great new age of peace and stability. While the Confucians
believed that such a king would accomplish the task by means of his
outstanding moral virtue, the Legalists substituted overwhelming might as the
essential element of effective government. The political philosophy of the
Legalists, who liked to sum up and justify their doctrine in two words - "It
works" - triumphed, and no state became more adept at practicing that
pragmatic philosophy than the Chin.

     The Ch'in's rise to preeminence began in 352 B.C., when its ruler
selected Lord Shang, a man imbued with Legalist principles, to be chief
minister. Recognizing that the growth of Ch'in's power depended on a more
efficient and centralized bureaucratic structure than could exist under
feudalism, Lord Shang undermined the old hereditary nobility by creating a new
aristocracy based on military merit. He also introduced a universal draft
beginning at approximately age fifteen. As a result, chariot and cavalry
warfare, in which the nobility head played the leading role, was replaced in
importance by masses of peasant infantry equipped with swords and crossbows.

     Economically, Lord Shang further weakened the old landowning nobility by
abolishing the peasants' attachment to the land and granting them ownership of
the plots they tilled. Thereafter the liberated peasants paid taxes directly
to the state, thereby increasing its wealth and power. These reforms made
Ch'in the most powerful of the Warring States. It soon began to extend the
area of its political and social innovations.

Ch'in Unites China

     In the middle of the third century B.C., a hundred years after Lord
Shang, another Legalist prime minister helped the king of Ch'in prepare and
carry out the conquest of the other Warring States that ended the Chou Dynasty
in 256 B.C. and united China by 221 B.C. The king then declared himself the
"First August Supreme Ruler" (Shih Huang-ti) of China, or "First Emperor," as
his new title is usually translated. He also enlarged China - a name derived
from the word Ch'in - by conquests in the south as far as the South China Sea.

     The First Emperor gathered the old nobility - some 120,000 families,
according to tradition - near the capital, where they could be closely
watched. To further forestall rebellion, he ordered the entire civilian
population to surrender its weapons to the state. A single harsh legal code,
which replaced all local laws, was so detailed in its provisions that it was
said to have been like "a fishing net through which even the smallest fish
cannot slip out." The entire realm, which extended into South China and
Vietnam, was divided into forty-eight provinces, administrative units drawn to
obliterate traditional feudal units and to facilitate direct rule by the
emperor's centrally controlled civil and military appointees. To destroy the
source of the aristocracy's power and to permit the emperor's agents to tax
every farmer's harvest, private ownership of land by peasants, promoted a
century earlier in the state of Ch'in by Lord Shang, was decreed for all of
China. Thus the Ch'in empire reflected the emerging social forces at work in
China - the peasants freed from serfdom, the merchants eager to increase their
wealth within a larger political area, and the new military and administrative
upper class.

     The most spectacular of the First Emperor's many public works was
repairing remnants of walls built earlier by the northern Warring States and
joining them into the Great Wall, extending from the sea into Central Asia for
a distance of over 1400 miles. Constructed by forced labor, it was said that
"every stone cost a human life." The wall was both a line of defense against
the barbarians who habitually raided into China and a symbol of the
distinction between China's agricultural society and the nomadic tribes of
Central Asia. It remains today one of the greatest monuments to engineering
skill in the preindustrial age and one of the wonders of the world. It is said
to be the only man-made structure on earth that can be seen from the moon.

     The First Emperor tried to enforce intellectual conformity and make the
Ch'in Legalist system appear to be the only natural political order. He
suppressed all other schools of thought - especially the Confucians who
idealized Chou feudalism by stressing the obedience of sons to their fathers,
of nobles to the lord, and of lords to the king. To break the hold of the
past, the emperor put into effect a Legalist proposal requiring all privately
owned books reflecting past traditions to be burned and "all those who raise
their voice against the present government in the name of antiquity [to] be
beheaded together with their families."

     The First Emperor constructed a huge mound tomb for himself and, nearby,
three large pits filled with the life-sized terra cotta figures of his
imperial guard. Over half a million laborers were employed at the site. The
mausoleum has not been excavated, but the partial excavation of the pits
revealed an estimated 7000 soldiers. Strangely, each head is a personal
portrait - no two faces are alike.

     When the First Emperor died in 210 B.C. while on one of his frequent
tours of inspection, he was succeeded by an inept son who was unable to
control the rivalry among his father's chief aides. Ch'in policies had
alienated not only the intellectuals and the old nobility but also the
peasants, who were subjected to ruinous taxation and forced labor. Rebel
armies rose in every province of the empire, some led by peasants, others by
aristocrats. Anarchy followed, and by 206 B.C. the Ch'in Dynasty, which the
First Emperor had claimed would endure for "ten thousand generations," had
completely disappeared. But the Chinese Empire itself, which Ch'in created,
would last for more than 2000 years, the longest-lived political institution
in world history.

     At issue in the fighting that continued for another four years was not
only the question of succession to the throne but also the form of government.
The peasant and aristocratic leaders, first allied against Ch'in, became
engaged in a furious and ruthless civil war. The aristocrats sought to restore
the oligarchic feudalism of pre-Ch'in times. Their opponents, whose main
leader was Liu Pang, a peasant who had become a Ch'in general, desired a
centralized state. In this contest between the old order and the new, the new
was the victor.

[See Ch'in And Han Empires: 221 BC to 87 BC]

The Han Dynasty: The Empire Consolidated

     In 202 B.C., the year that the Romans defeated the Carthaginians at the
battle of Zama, the peasant Liu Pang defeated his aristocratic rival and
established the Han Dynasty. Named after the Han River, a tributary of the
Yangtze, the new dynasty had its capital at Chang-an. It lasted for more than
400 years and is traditionally divided into two parts: the Earlier Han, from
202 B.C. to A.D. 8, and the Later Han, from A.D. 23 to A.D. 220, with its
capital at Lo-yang. In time and importance, the Han corresponded to the late
Roman Republic and early Roman Empire; ethnic Chinese still call themselves
"Men of Han."

     The empire and power sought by Liu Pang and his successors were those of
the Ch'in, but they succeeded where the Ch'in had failed because they were
tactful and gradual in their approach. Liu Pang reestablished for a time some
of the vassal kingdoms and feudal states in regions distant from the capital.
Peasant discontent was mollified by lessened demands for taxes and forced
labor. But the master stroke of the Han emperors was to enlist the support of
the Confucian intellectuals. They provided the empire with an ideology that
would last until recent times. The Chins' extreme Legalistic ideology of harsh
punishment and terror had not worked.

     The Han emperors recognized that an educated bureaucracy was necessary
for governing so vast an empire. The ban on the Confucian classics and other
Chou literature was lifted, and the way was open for a revival of the
intellectual life that had been suppressed under the Chin.

     In accord with Legalist principles, now tempered by Confucian insistence
on the ethical basis of government, the Han emperors established
administrative organs staffed by a salaried bureaucracy to rule their empire.
Talented men were chosen for government service through an examination system
based on the Confucian classics, and they were promoted by merit.

     The examinations were theoretically open to all Chinese except merchants.
(The Han inherited both the Confucian bias against trade as an unvirtuous
striving for profit and the Legalist suspicion of merchants who put their own
interests ahead of those of the state and society.) The bureaucrats were drawn
from the landlord class because wealth was needed to obtain the education
needed to pass the examinations. Consequently, the earlier division of Chinese
society between aristocrats and peasants was transformed into a division
between peasants and landowner-bureaucrats. The latter are also called
scholar-gentry, a term first used in the eighteenth century by the British.
They saw a parallel with the gentry who dominated the countryside and
administration of their own country.

Wu Ti And The Pax Sinica

     After sixty years of consolidation, the Han Empire reached its greatest
extent and development during the long reign of Wu Ti ("Martial Emperor"), who
ruled from 141 to 87 B.C. To accomplish his goal of territorial expansion, he
raised the peasants' taxes but not those of the great landowners, who remained
virtually exempt from taxation. In addition, he increased the amount of labor
and military service the peasants were forced to contribute to the state.

     The Martial Emperor justified his expansionist policies in terms of
self-defense against Mongolian nomads, the Hsiung-nu, known to the West later
as the Huns. Their attacks had caused the First Emperor to complete the Great
Wall to obstruct their raiding cavalry. To outflank the nomads in the west, Wu
Ti extended the Great Wall and annexed a large corridor extending through the
Tarim River basin of Central Asia to the Pamir Mountains close to Bactria.
This corridor has ever since remained a part of China.

     Wu Ti failed in an attempt to form an alliance with the Scythians in
Bactria, but his envoy's report of the interest shown in Chinese silks by the
peoples of the area was the beginning of a commercial exchange between China
and the West. This trade brought great profits to wealthy merchant families.

     Wu Ti also outflanked the Hsiung-nu in the east by the conquest of
southern Manchuria and northern Korea. In addition, he completed the conquest
of South China, begun by the Ch'in, and added North Vietnam to the Chinese
Empire. All the conquered lands experienced considerable Chinese emigration.
Thus at a time when the armies of the Roman Republic were laying the
foundations of the Pax Romana in the West, the Martial Emperor was
establishing a Pax Sinica ("Chinese Peace") in the East.

Han Decline

     Wu Ti's conquests led to a fiscal crisis. As costs increased, taxes
increased, and the peasants' burdens led to revolt. The end result was that
the central government had to rely more and more on local military commanders
and great landowners for control of the population, giving them great power
and prestige at its own expense. This cycle of decline after an initial period
of increasing prosperity and power has been the pattern of all Chinese
dynasties. During the Han this "dynastic cycle," as Western historians of
China call it, led to a succession of mediocre rulers after Wu Ti's death and
a temporary usur ation of the throne (A.D. 9-23), which divided the Earlier
from the Later Han.

     The usurper, Wang Mang, united Confucian humanitarianism with Legalist
practice. Like his contemporary in the West, the Roman Emperor Augustus, his
goal was the rejuvenation of society. By Wang Mang's day the number of large
tax-free estates had greatly increased while the number of tax-paying peasant
holdings had declined. This was a by product of the private landownership
that, under the Ch'in, had replaced the old communal use of the land. Rich
officials and merchants were able to acquire the lands of small
peasant-owners, who became tenants paying exorbitant rents. The conflict of
landlordship and tenancy, along with the concentration of power of great
families, became a major problem in Chinese history.

     More and more peasants fell behind in their rents and were forced to sell
themselves or their children into debt slavery. To remedy this situation and
increase the government's tax income, Wang Mang decreed that the land was the
property of the nation and should be portioned out to peasant families, who
would pay taxes on their allotments.

     Wang Mang sought to solve the long-standing problem of inflation, which
had greatly increased since Wu Ti first began debasing the coinage when he
found himself in financial difficulties, by setting maximum prices on basic
commodities. He also sought to stabilize prices by instituting "leveling" -
the government bought surplus commodities when prices fell and sold them when
scarcity caused prices to rise. (In 1938, a chance reading of Wang Mang's
"leveling" proposal inspired the "ever-normal granary" program of President
Roosevelt's New Deal. ^5)

[Footnote 5: Wm. Theodore de Bary, East Asian Civilizations: A Dialogue in
Five Stages (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 19]

     Wang Mang's remarkable reform program failed, however; officials bungled
the difficult administrative task, and the powerful landowners rebelled
against the ruler who proposed to confiscate their land. Although Wang Mang
rescinded his reforms, he was killed by the rebels in A.D. 23.

     The Later Han Dynasty never reached the heights of its predecessor.
Warlords who were members of the rich landowner class seized more and more
power, and widespread peasant rebellions (one band was led by "Mother Lu," a
woman skilled in witchcraft) sapped the state's resources. Surviving in name
only during its last thirty years, the Han Dynasty ended in A.D. 220, when the
throne was usurped by the son of a famous warlord. Three and a half centuries
of disunity and turbulence followed - the longest in China's long history and
often called China's "Middle Ages" - as it did in Europe after the fall of the
Roman Empire. But China eventually succeeded where Europe failed: in A.D. 589
China once again was united by the Sui Dynasty (see ch. 8). With minor
exceptions, it has remained united to this day.

Han Scholarship, Art And Technology

     Politically and culturally, the relation of the Han to the Chou
paralleled that of ancient Rome to Greece. Politically, the disunity of Greece
and the Chou was followed by the imperial unity and administrative genius of
the Romans and the Han. Culturally, just as the Romans owed a great debt to
the Greeks, so did the Han to the Chou. Furthermore, Greek and Chou
intellectual creativity was not matched by the Romans and the Han.

     Scholarship flourished under the Han, but it was mainly concerned with
collecting and interpreting the classics of Chinese thought produced in the
Chou period. As the basis of education for prospective bureaucrats, Wu Ti
established an imperial university in 124 B.C.; a century later it had 3000
students. The Han scholars venerated Confucius as the ideal wise man, and
Confucianism became the official philosophy of the state. Great respect for
learning, together with the system of civil service examinations based on the
Five Confucian Classics, became fundamental characteristics of Chinese
civilization.

     Han scholars started another scholarly tradition with their historical
writings. Their antiquarian interest in researching the past produced a
comprehensive history of China, the Historical Records (Shih chi). This
voluminous work of 130 chapters has been highly praised, in part for its
inclusion of a vast amount of information, beginning with the legendary past,
but even more for its freedom from superstition and careful weighing of
evidence. In the Later Han, a scholar wrote the History of the (Earlier) Han,
and thereafter it was customary for each dynasty to write the official history
of its immediate predecessor. The Chinese believed that the successes and
failures of the past provided guidance for one's own time and the future. As
stated in the Historical Records, "Events of the past, if not forgotten, are
teachings about the future."

     Archaeological investigation was used as an aid to the writing of
history. One scholar anticipated modern archaeologists by more than a thousand
years in classifying human history by "ages": "stone" (Old Stone Age), "jade"
(New Stone Age), "bronze," and "the present age" when "weapons are made of
iron." ^6

[Footnote 6: Kwang-chih Chang, The Archaeology of Ancient China, 4th ed. (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), p. 5]

     Another monument to Han scholarship was the world's first dictionary,
Shuo Wen (Words Explained), produced during Wu Ti's reign. It listed the
meaning and pronunciation of more than 9000 Chinese characters.

     In contrast to Han scholarship, Han art was clearly creative. The largely
decorative art of the past, which served a religious purpose, was replaced by
a realistic pictorial art portraying ordinary life. The result was the first
great Chinese flowering of sculpture, both in relief and in the round.

     Some of the finer examples of this realistic secular art are the
sculptured models of the tall and spirited horses that Wu Ti imported from
Bactria. The Han greatly admired these proud "celestial" and "blood-sweating"
horses from the West, and their artists brilliantly captured their high
spirit.

     During the Han period, China surpassed the level of technological
development in the rest of the world. Notable inventions included a primitive
seismograph capable of indicating earthquakes several hundred miles away; the
use of water power to grind grain and to operate a piston bellows for iron
smelting; the horse collar, which greatly increased the pulling power of
horses; paper made from cloth rags, which replaced cumbersome bamboo strips
and expensive silk cloth as writing material; and the humble but extremely
useful wheelbarrow. By the end of the first century B.C., the Han Chinese had
recognized sunspots and accurately determined the length of the calendar year.

Popular Taoism And Buddhism

     By the time the First Emperor united China at the end of the third
century B.C., a decadent or popular form of Taoism had emerged. Popular Taoism
was a religion of spirits and magic that provided the spiritual comfort not
found in either philosophical Taoism or Confucianism. Its goals were long life
and personal immortality. These goals were to be achieved not so much as a
reward for ethical conduct but through magical charms and spells and imbibing
an "elixir of immortality." The search for such an elixir, which was thought
to contain the vital forces of nature, led to an emphasis on diet and
ultimately to the culinary art for which the Chinese are famous.

     Popular Taoism also became a vehicle for the expression of peasant
discontent. In A.D. 184, the Yellow Turbans (one of the earliest of many such
uprisings throughout China's history) led a widespread peasant revolt inspired
by Taoist followers of a now-deified Lao-tzu. Over 300,000 rebels destroyed
much of China and greatly contributed to the anarchy that fatally weakened the
Later Han Dynasty.

     Buddhism, which appeared in China during the first century A.D., provided
another answer to the need for religious assurance. It was brought to China by
missionaries and traders through Central Asia. About A.D. 184 a Buddhist
missionary established a center for the translation of Buddhist writings into
Chinese at the Later Han capital. However, relatively few Chinese were
attracted to the religion during this period. Buddhism's great attraction of
converts and influence on Chinese culture came after the fall of the Han
Dynasty, when renewed social turmoil made its emphasis on otherworldly
salvation appealing to the great majority of Chinese.