by Li Feng
Fig. 12.2 Bronze objects from the Ordos region, 400–200 BC. (From Tian Guangjin and Guo Suxin, E’erduosi shi qingtongqi [Beijing: Wenwu chubanshe, 1986], pls. 12, 15.)
Fig. 12.3 The Han–Xiongnu war depicted in a Han pictorial carving, Xiaotangshan, Shandong Province. (From Édouard Chavannes, Mission archéologique dans la Chine septentrionale [Paris: Leroux, 1909], pl. 50.)
Fig. 12.4 Wang Mang’s architectural structures in Chang’an. (From Wang Zhongshu, Han Civilization, fig. 30.)
Fig. 13.1 Strips of Han law from Zhangjiashan. (From Wenwu 1 [1985], pl. 1.)
Fig. 13.2 Population decline in the Han Empire from AD 2 to AD 140. (From Hans Bielenstein, “The Census of China: During the Period 2–742 AD,” Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities [Stockholm] 19 [1947], pls. 2, 3.)
Fig. 14.1 Fragment of the Xiping stone classics found in Luoyang. (From Kaogu xuebao 2 [1981], 187.)
Fig. 14.2 The jade funeral garment of the king of Zhongshan in Mancheng. (From Zhongguo wenwu jiaoliu fuwu zhongxin et al., Zhongguo wemwu jinghua [Beijing: Wenwu chubanshe, 1990], pl. 88.)
Fig. 14.3 Lacquer wares and painting from the tombs at Mawangdui, Changshan. (From Fu Juyou and Chen Songchang (eds.), Mawangdui Han mu wenwu [Changsha: Hunan chubanshe, 1992], pp. 19, 53, 54.)
Fig. 14.4 The Wu Liang shrine: “Assassination of the First Emperor.” (From Rong Geng, Han Wu Liang si huaxiang lu [Beijing: Yanjing daxue Kaogu xueshe, 1936], pp. 11–12.)
Maps
Map 2.1 Major Neolithic archaeological sites in China
Map 3.1 Distribution of Erlitou culture sites
Map 3.2 Erligang and contemporary or nearly contemporary Bronze Age societies
Map 4.1 The external world of late Shang
Map 6.1 Location of the pre-dynastic Zhou cultural sites and the Zhou conquest campaign of 1045 BC
Map 6.2 The Zhou central area: royal domain
Map 6.3 Distribution of the Zhou major regional states
Map 8.1 Major states of the Spring and Autumn period
Map 9.1 The Warring States period
Map 11.1 Route of early Qin migration
Map 11.2 The Qin Empire
Map 12.1 The Han Empire in 195 BC
Map 12.2 The Han Empire in 108 BC
Map 12.3 The northern zone and the Xiongnu Empire
Map 12.4 The Central Asian city–states
Map 12.5 Han campaigns against the Xiongnu Empire
Preface
When Cambridge University Press’s commissioning editor, Marigold Acland, appeared in my office in spring 2006, it was clear to me that our common goal was to produce a book that could offer a first lesson about Early China to the advanced undergraduate and graduate students and any non-specialist readers. It immediately came to mind that the monumental volume The Cambridge History of Ancient China: From the Origins of Civilization to 221 BC (edited by Michael Loewe and Edward L. Shaughnessy; Cambridge, 1999) can serve as a rich introduction to Early China. However, it was also understood that the volume’s intimidating size and the essentially sinological nature of its presentation leave an immediate need for a future book that could better meet the needs of students beginning to study this critical period of Chinese civilization.
The present book certainly is not a summary of The Cambridge History of Ancient China, nor does it intend to show any resemblance to the latter work. Instead, it offers a reinterpretation of the process of formation of Chinese civilization from the beginning of farming life in China to AD 220, the end of the Han Dynasty, informed by many important new archaeological discoveries and the advances they have brought to the field over the past ten years. It would be adventurous if not considerably risky for anyone to try to write a general account of such a long period (in contrast to the short period in which one usually conducts his or her own research), thus exposing oneself to potential criticisms by scholars who have had much longer experience in certain periods or subject areas covered by the book. While this would seem inevitable, for no individual writer can be specialized in all periods, this is still a risk worth taking because a single-author book has the advantage of achieving a higher level of comprehension of the grand trends of development in a civilization. Such trends are observable only over a long span of time based on one’s deep understanding of the logic of history, a level that is often difficult to reach by a collaborative work by multiple authors who are informed by different theoretical frameworks and who often insist on opposing views. Therefore, the present book promises to be a consistent account (at least within the book) of early Chinese civilization, although it cannot and should not be the only account of it.
As a historian of China, I have always believed that the best way to understand China’s history is to study it as a part of the common human experience in a comparative framework. Over the millennia of early human experience, there have been a number of critical moments, each understood as the result of a social and cultural process, and each has had a major impact on the course of human history: the beginning of agricultural way of life, the formation of regionally based social organization, the chiefdom, the emergence of urban culture, the rise of the state, the emergence of bureaucracy and bureaucratic administration, and the formation of empire. These processes have been widely attested across the globe and discussed in depth by anthropologists and historians alike. The present book takes the social development in Early China towards more massive and more complex organizations as its main line of presentation and explores political and cultural institutions that supported this development. It does so not for the purpose of fitting the Chinese data into a global theory of social development, but to use social theories to help highlight the meaning of great changes in Early China, and to achieve a coherent understanding of the trajectory of early Chinese civilization.
Such a book will fit well, I hope, into Cambridge’s new series titled New Approaches to Asian History, which promises to introduce to students some of the epoch-making events and developments that have happened in the history of Asia, from its border with Europe to the far Pacific coast, on the collective merit of recent scholarship. The book covers some essential historical facts or events as necessary to clarify the general outline of the history of Early China for non-specialist readers, and scholars who endorse the ultra-skeptical view that nothing is knowable in history, particularly in Early China, cannot avoid finding themselves disappointed. But the author believes that although we will continue to debate about many things that we study, there are basic historical processes in Early China on which most scholars with objective judgment can agree and which can be made the basis for further intellectual inquiry. However, this book is not a simple narrative of the rise and fall of kingdoms and empires, which is in fact impossible to narrate for a long period in Early China due to the absence of reliable written records. Instead, it strikes a balance between a general introduction and a review of our current evidence for Early China, and, as such, it says as much about how history should be viewed as what it really was. For this reason, the discussion within each chapter is arranged around subject topics to allow for consideration of different interpretations as meaningful in highlighting the salient features as well as problems of each period. While discussing the general trends in early Chinese history, it is also hoped that the book will serve as a general introduction to the current scholarship on Early China.
The selection of topics for discussion in this book has been influenced by the content of my course “History of Ancient China to the End of Han” which I have taught many times at Columbia University. Therefore, I would like to first and foremost thank the students who have participated in the course and raised thoughtful questions which have certainly helped enrich the contents of this book. Particularly in the past two years when the manuscript was circulated to the class, students have carefully read and helped me assess the level of difficulty of its presentation as a textbook. One student, Robert Alexander Woodend, deserves special thanks for his help with proofrea
ding a large part of the manuscript prior to its final submission. In a more subtle but definitely sure sense, the book has been nourished enormously by presentations and discussions at the Columbia Early China Seminar, and I am grateful to all members of the seminar for their contributions that have profoundly helped expand the vision of this book. I owe special debt of gratitude to Marigold Acland, a debt that was only deepened by the fact that the book was not able to meet the target for publication before her recent retirement; but at least now with some delay I can fulfill my promise to her. I thank too the anonymous readers appointed by Cambridge University Press who carefully examined the book and offered constructive suggestions to improve it. My thanks are due further to the many friends including Cao Wei, Jiao Nanfeng, Zhang Jianlin, Zhou Ya, Huang Xiaofen, Fang Hui, Liu Li, Chen Xingcan, and Chen Chao-jung who have provided me with new images to be used in the book or helped acquire permissions. The author and publisher also acknowledge the following sources of copyright material and are grateful to the institutions for the permissions they granted. Among them, the Institute of Archaeology, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, deserves special thanks for generously permitting the use of multiple images it published. Other institutions include the Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica (Figs. 1.3 and 9.3), Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (Fig. 6.4), Bloomsbury Publishing, London (Figs. 3.1 and 3.4), Yale University Press (Figs. 2.1, 4.2, 12.1, and 12.4), and the National Museum of China, Beijing (Figs. 3.6 and 4.12). While every effort has been made, it has not always been possible to identify the sources of all material used, or to trace all copyright holders. If any omissions are brought to our notice, we will be happy to include the appropriate acknowledgements on reprinting. Finally, I would also like to thank Lucy Rhymer for her willingness to pick up the responsibility for this book and to oversee its final production.
Chronology of Early China
* * *
Early farming communities
Pre-Yangshao 6500–5000 BC
Yangshao Period 5000–3000 BC
Early complex societies
Longshan Period 3000–2000 BC
Early settlement-based states
Erlitou State (Xia Dynasty?) 1900–1555 BC
Shang Dynasty 1554–1046 BC
Zhou Dynasty 1045–256 BC
Western Zhou 1045–771 BC
Eastern Zhou 770–256 BC
Spring and Autumn Period 770–481 BC
Territorial states
Warring States Period 480–221 BC
Early empires
Qin Dynasty 221–207 BC
Han Dynasty 206 BC – AD 220
Western Han 206 BC – AD 8
(New Dynasty) AD 9–24
Eastern Han AD 25–220
Collapse of early empire
* * *
Map
1 Introduction: Early China and its natural and cultural demarcations
“Early China” refers to a long period from the beginning of human history in East Asia to the end of the Eastern Han Dynasty in AD 220, a date that is often, though imprecisely, used to mark China’s entry into the Buddhist Era. As the initial period that gave the Chinese civilization much of its foundation, Early China has always served as the gateway to China, by offering a series of essential lessons in government, social practice, art, religion, and philosophical thought, necessary for students of all periods of Chinese history. But in a more general sense, if history is the best way to teach about a culture in which people live, it is perfectly natural that knowledge of Early China can provide what is often the most fundamental explanation of aspects of the social life in modern China and of its underlying values. As a field of research, Early China Studies is one of the areas that have most dramatically benefited from the advancement in modern academia, particularly in the discipline of archaeology which has been renewing daily our understanding of China’s distant past. It is also a field that has seen occasional interplay between politics and scholarship, and that has been much shaped by different national or international traditions.
To begin our journey into this distant past, below I will first introduce the natural and temporal settings of Early China as necessary for understanding the social and cultural developments soon to be discussed in this book. For the same purpose, the chapter will then turn to a brief discussion of the process by which Early China Studies has emerged as a modern academic field, and the state of the field will alert the reader to the need not only to see the past, but also to understand the different ways in which it was seen and interpreted.
A Geographical China: Natural Environment
Geographers of China often tend to analyze China’s topography in four massive steps: the Qinghai–Tibetan Plateau with an average elevation of 4,000 m above sea level is known as the “Roof of the World.” The high plateau combines the territories of the modern Qinghai Province and the Tibet Autonomous Region, taking up about a quarter of the total area of the People’s Republic of China (see map of China, p. xxii). The second step extends north and east from the edges of the Qinghai–Tibetan Plateau and it consists of multiple ranges of mountains and high plateaus such as the Loess Plateau and Inner Mongolia, rising to an average height of 1,000–2,000 m above sea level. The third step is formed by floodplains such as the North China Plain, the Manchurian Plain in northeastern China, and the Yangzi Delta in the south, interspersed by hilly grounds generally ranging between 500 and 1,000 m in elevation. The fourth step is the continent itself, extending into the seas beyond the east and south coasts of China.
Even when we are talking only about the areas that can be considered as part of Early China, back in a time when “China” as a nation was still in her infancy, we find that more cultural developments had taken place in the valleys and strips of plains that are surrounded by the mountains and plateaus on the second step mentioned above, or on the transitional belts along the major mountain ranges, but not at the centers of the floodplains located in the east.1 The reason for this development was simply ecological, given the fact that in the second millennium BC most of the eastern China plains were still covered by marshes and lakes,2 and the coastline in some sections was at least 150 km inland from today’s seashores. The pre-Qin texts record the names of more than forty marshes or lakes on the North China Plain, most of which had dried out after the third century AD. In fact, for millennia the North China Plain was continuously caught in the process of sedimentation by the Yellow River which carried on its way east huge quantities of earth from the topographical second step. The natural environment, particularly landforms and climatic change doubtless had a very major impact on the early development of human society and culture. On the other hand, human subsistence activities could also transform the surface of the earth and cause modifications to the environment in very significant ways, as most dramatically shown by the expansion of the industrial societies in the modern era.
Over the past thirty years, Chinese paleoclimatologists have made significant progress through fieldwork in understanding long-term climate changes in China across multiple ecological zones (Fig. 1.1).3 By correlating data from different locations, the researchers were able to isolate a number of periods of important change in the temperature fluctuations over some 11,000 years. As the world was moving out from the last Glacial Age at the end of the Pleistocene Epoch in about 11,700 BP,4 the temperature in North China climbed up to a level of 3–4 °C higher than the average temperature of the present years, and the precipitation was 40% (150 mm per annum) more than today’s. This meant very abundant rainfall and a large number of lakes and marshes in most areas of North China up to perhaps the edges of the Qinghai–Tibetan Plateau, and China as a whole enjoyed very warm and humid weather and thick vegetation prior to the beginning of the agricultural way of life. This high temperature (the long lower curves in Fig. 1.1) continued from 8000 BP to 5000 BP with wide fluctuations in the later millennia until the arrival of the third millennium BP when the temperature suddenly dropped down to belo
w the present-day level.5 In historical chronology this drop corresponded with the end of the Shang Dynasty (1554–1046 BC) and the early Western Zhou (1045–771 BC) period. But even during most of the Shang Dynasty, the temperature in North China was still about 2 °C higher than today’s. After the sudden drop around the beginning of the third millennium BP, temperature rose again for a period of time, but in the most recent 1,500 years, as we move out from Early China, the temperature in North China was mostly considerably colder than it is today.
Fig. 1.1 Temperature fluctuation in China, 11,000 BP to present.
South China was relatively less affected by the climate changes discussed above. But the south is more mountainous than the north, being divided by the major mountain ranges into largely three independent zones along the Yangzi River: the Sichuan Basin, the middle Yangzi lakes and marshes, and the lower Yangzi Delta. The recent drop in temperature close to the middle of the first millennium AD had also caused some major lakes in South China to shrink and dry up. For instance, in pre-Qin times, a large stretch of the middle Yangzi plain of some 120 km from present-day Wuhan westwards was under the water of the famous Yunmeng Marsh, known also by its nickname of the “Great Marsh” in historical records. But after the third century AD, most of this marsh had gradually dried up and had long been transformed into agrarian fields surrounding urban centers.
Seafaring along the eastern China coast was certainly possible in Early China as indicated by early cultural contacts widely stretching across the coastal regions from the north to the south. This is also evidenced by the cultural connection in archaeology between the southeast Mainland and the island of Taiwan inhabited by the various groups of the Austronesian-language-speaking people who had further connections to the Pacific Islanders.6 In the southwest, through the rainforests of present-day Yunnan, cultural contacts with the South Asian subcontinent were established in the late Bronze Age and were expanded under the Qin and Han Empires. In the northwest, there were many oases leading the way west out of China. Although the exchange of material goods and ideas over these oases or broadly across the northern steppe might have begun by the early Bronze Age if not earlier, China’s geographic isolation from the inner Asian continent was not completely broken until the first century BC. Even after the discovery of the road into Central Asia in the second century BC by the early Chinese explorers, the trip along the emerging “Silk Road” was known to have been very difficult.
