THE HAN DYNASTY (206 B.C.-A.D. 220)
I Development of the gentry-state
In 206 B.C. Liu Chi assumed the title of Emperor and gave his dynasty the name of the Han Dynasty. After his
death he was given as emperor the name of Kao Tsu.[4] The period of the Han dynasty may be described as the
beginning of the Chinese Middle Ages, while that of the Ch'in dynasty represents the transition from antiquity to the Middle Ages; for under the Han dynasty we meet in China with a new form of state, the "gentry state". The feudalism of ancient times has come definitely to its end.
[Footnote 4: From then on, every emperor was given after his death an official name as emperor, under which he appears in the Chinese sources. We have adopted the original or the official name according to which of the two has come into the more general use in Western books.]
Emperor Kao Tsu came from eastern China, and his family seems to have been a peasant family; in any case it
did not belong to the old nobility. After his destruction of his strongest rival, the removal of the kings who had made themselves independent in the last years of the Ch'in dynasty was a relatively easy task for the new
autocrat, although these struggles occupied the greater part of his reign. A much more difficult question, however, faced him: How was the empire to be governed? Kao Tsu's old friends and felow-countrymen, who had helped
him into power, had been rewarded by appointment as generals or high officials. Gradualy he got rid of those
who had been his best comrades, as so many upstart rulers have done before and after him in every country in
the world. An emperor does not like to be reminded of a very humble past, and he is liable also to fear the rivalry www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/11367/pg11367.html
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of men who formerly were his equals. It is evident that little attention was paid to theories of administration; policy was determined mainly by practical considerations. Kao Tsu alowed many laws and regulations to remain
in force, including the prohibition of Confucianist writings. On the other hand, he reverted to the alocation of fiefs, though not to old noble families but to his relatives and some of his closest adherents, generaly men of inferior social standing. Thus a mixed administration came into being: part of the empire was governed by new
feudal princes, and another part split up into provinces and prefectures and placed directly under the central power through its officials.
But whence came the officials? Kao Tsu and his supporters, as farmers from eastern China, looked down upon
the trading population to which farmers always regard themselves as superior. The merchants were ignored as
potential officials although they had often enough held official appointments under the former dynasty. The
second group from which officials had been drawn under the Ch'in was that of the army officers, but their military functions had now, of course, falen to Kao Tsu's soldiers. The emperor had little faith, however, in the loyalty of officers, even of his own, and apart from that he would have had first to create a new administrative organization for them. Accordingly he turned to another class which had come into existence, the class later caled the gentry, which in practice had the power already in its hands.
The term "gentry" has no direct paralel in Chinese texts; the later terms "shen-shih" and "chin-shen" do not quite cover this concept. The basic unit of the gentry class are families, not individuals. Such families often derive their origin from branches of the Chou nobility. But other gentry families were of different and more recent origin in respect to land ownership. Some late Chou and Ch'in officials of non-noble origin had become wealthy and had
acquired land; the same was true for wealthy merchants and finaly, some non-noble farmers who were
successful in one or another way, bought additional land reaching the size of large holdings. Al "gentry" families owned substantial estates in the provinces which they leased to tenants on a kind of contract basis. The tenants, therefore, cannot be caled "serfs" although their factual position often was not different from the position of serfs.
The rents of these tenants, usualy about half the gross produce, are the basis of the livelihood of the gentry. One part of a gentry family normaly lives in the country on a smal home farm in order to be able to colect the rents.
If the family can acquire more land and if this new land is too far away from the home farm to make colection of rents easy, a new home farm is set up under the control of another branch of the family. But the original home remains to be regarded as the real family centre.
In a typical gentry family, another branch of the family is in the capital or in a provincial administrative centre in official positions. These officials at the same time are the most highly educated members of the family and are often caled the "literati". There are also always individual family members who are not interested in official careers or who failed in their careers and live as free "literati" either in the big cities or on the home farms. It seems, to judge from much later sources, that the families assisted their most able members to enter the official careers, while those individuals who were less able were used in the administration of the farms. This system in combination with the strong familism of the Chinese, gave a double security to the gentry families. If difficulties arose in the estates either by attacks of bandits or by war or other catastrophes, the family members in official positions could use their influence and power to restore the property in the provinces. If, on the other hand, the family members in official positions lost their positions or even their lives by displeasing the court, the home branch could always find ways to remain untouched and could, in a generation or two, recruit new members and
regain power and influence in the government. Thus, as families, the gentry was secure, although failures could occur to individuals. There are many gentry families who remained in the ruling élite for many centuries, some over more than a thousand years, weathering al vicissitudes of life. Some authors believe that Chinese leading families generaly pass through a three- or four-generation cycle: a family member by his official position is able to www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/11367/pg11367.html
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acquire much land, and his family moves upward. He is able to give the best education and other facilities to his sons who lead a good life. But either these sons or the grandsons are spoiled and lazy; they begin to lose their property and status. The family moves downward, until in the fourth or fifth generation a new rise begins. Actual study of families seems to indicate that this is not true. The main branch of the family retains its position over centuries. But some of the branch families, created often by the less able family members, show a tendency
towards downward social mobility.
It is clear from the above that a gentry family should be interested in having a fair number of children. The more sons they have, the more positions of power the family can occupy and thus, the more secure it wil be; the more daughters they have, the more "political" marriages they can conclude, i.e. marriages with sons of other gentry families in positions of influence. Therefore, gentry families in China tend to be, on the average, larger than ordinary families, while in our Western countries the leading families usualy were smaler than the lower class families. This means that gentry families produced more children than was necessary to replenish the available leading positions; thus, some family members had to get into lower positions and had to lose status. In view of this situation it was very difficult for lower class families to achieve access into this gentry group. In European countries the leading élite did not quite replenish their ranks in the next generation, so that there was always some chance for the lower classes to move up into leading ranks. The gentry society was, therefore, a
comparably stable society with little upward social mobility but with some downward mobility. As a whole and
for reasons of gentry self-interest, the gentry stood for stability and against change.
The gentry members in the bureaucracy colaborated closely with one another because they were tied together
by bonds of blood or marriage. It was easy for them to find good tutors for their children, because a pupil owed a debt of gratitude to his teacher and a child from a gentry family could later on nicely repay this debt; often, these teachers themselves were members of other gentry families. It was easy for sons of the gentry to get into official positions, because the people who had to recommend them for office were often related to them or knew the position of their family. In Han time, local officials had the duty to recommend young able men; if these men turned out to be good, the officials were rewarded, if not they were blamed or even punished. An official took less of a chance, if he recommended a son of an influential family, and he obliged such a candidate so that he could later count on his help if he himself should come into difficulties. When, towards the end of the second century B.C., a kind of examination system was introduced, this attitude was not basicaly changed.
The country branch of the family by the fact that it controled large tracts of land, supplied also the logical tax colectors: they had the standing and power required for this job. Even if they were appointed in areas other than their home country (a rule which later was usualy applied), they knew the gentry families of the other district or were related to them and got their support by appointing their members as their assistants.
Gentry society continued from Kao Tsu's time to 1948, but it went through a number of phases of development
and changed considerably in time. We wil later outline some of the most important changes. In general the
number of politicaly leading gentry families was around one hundred (texts often speak of "the hundred families"
in this time) and they were concentrated in the capital; the most important home seats of these families in Han time were close to the capital and east of it or in the plains of eastern China, at that time the main centre of grain production.
We regard roughly the first one thousand years of "Gentry Society" as the period of the Chinese "Middle Ages", beginning with the Han dynasty; the preceding time of the Ch'in was considered as a period of transition, a time in which the feudal period of "Antiquity" came to a formal end and a new organization of society began to www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/11367/pg11367.html
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become visible. Even those authors who do not accept a sociological classification of periods and many authors who use Marxist categories, believe that with Ch'in and Han a new era in Chinese history began.
2 Situation of the Hsiung-nu empire; its relation to the Han empire. Incorporation of South China
In the time of the Ch'in dynasty there had already come into unpleasant prominence north of the Chinese frontier the tribal union, then relatively smal, of the Hsiung-nu. Since then, the Hsiung-nu empire had destroyed the
federation of the Yüeh-chih tribes (some of which seem to have been of Indo-European language stock) and
incorporated their people into their own federation; they had conquered also the less wel organized eastern
pastoral tribes, the Tung-hu and thus had become a formidable power. Everything goes to show that it had close relations with the territories of northern China. Many Chinese seem to have migrated to the Hsiung-nu empire,
where they were welcome as artisans and probably also as farmers; but above al they were needed for the
staffing of a new state administration. The scriveners in the newly introduced state secretariat were Chinese and wrote Chinese, for at that time the Hsiung-nu apparently had no written language. There were Chinese serving as administrators and court officials, and even as instructors in the army administration, teaching the art of warfare against non-nomads. But what was the purpose of al this? Mao Tun, the second ruler of the Hsiung-nu, and his
first successors undoubtedly intended ultimately to conquer China, exactly as many other northern peoples after them planned to do, and a few of them did. The main purpose of this was always to bring large numbers of
peasants under the rule of the nomad rulers and so to solve, once for al, the problem of the provision of
additional winter food. Everything that was needed, and everything that seemed to be worth trying to get as they grew more civilized, would thus be obtained better and more regularly than by raids or by tedious commercial
negotiations. But if China was to be conquered and ruled there must exist a state organization of equal authority to hers; the Hsiung-nu ruler must himself come forward as Son of Heaven and develop a court ceremonial similar to that of a Chinese emperor. Thus the basis of the organization of the Hsiung-nu state lay in its rivalry with the neighbouring China; but the details naturaly corresponded to the special nature of the Hsiung-nu social system.
The young Hsiung-nu feudal state differed from the ancient Chinese feudal state not only in depending on a
nomad economy with only supplementary agriculture, but also in possessing, in addition to a whole class of
nobility and another of commoners, a stratum of slavery to be analysed further below. Similar to the Chou state, the Hsiung-nu state contained, especialy around the ruler, an element of court bureaucracy which, however,
never developed far enough to replace the basicaly feudal character of administration.
Thus Kao Tsu was faced in Mao Tun not with a mere nomad chieftain but with the most dangerous of enemies,
and Kao Tsu's policy had to be directed to preventing any interference of the Hsiung-nu in North Chinese affairs, and above al to preventing aliances between Hsiung-nu and Chinese. Hsiung-nu alone, with their technique of
horsemen's warfare, would scarcely have been equal to the permanent conquest of the fortified towns of the
north and the Great Wal, although they controled a population which may have been in excess of 2,000,000
people. But they might have succeeded with Chinese aid. Actualy a Chinese opponent of Kao Tsu had already
come to terms with Mao Tun, and in 200 B.C. Kao Tsu was very near suffering disaster in northern Shansi, as a
result of which China would have come under the rule of the Hsiung-nu. But it did not come to that, and Mao
Tun made no further attempt, although the opportunity came several times. Apparently the policy adopted by his court was not imperialistic but national, in the uncorrupted sense of the word. It was realized that a country so thickly populated as China could only be administered from a centre within China. The Hsiung-nu would thus
have had to abandon their home territory and rule in China itself. That would have meant abandoning the flocks, www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/11367/pg11367.html
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abandoning nomad life, and turning into Chinese. The main supporters of the national policy, the first principle of which was loyalty to the old ways of life, seem to have been the tribal chieftains. Mao Tun fel in with their view, and the Hsiung-nu maintained their state as long as they adhered to that principle—for some seven hundred
years. Other nomad peoples, Toba, Mongols, and Manchus, folowed the opposite policy, and before long they
were caught in the mechanism of the much more highly developed Chinese economy and culture, and each of
them disappeared from the political scene in the course of a century or so.
The national line of policy of the Hsiung-nu did not at al mean an end of hostilities and raids on Chinese territory, so that Kao Tsu declared himself ready to give the Hsiung-nu the foodstuffs and clothing materials they needed if they would make an end of their raids. A treaty to this effect was concluded, and sealed by the marriage of a
Chinese princess with Mao Tun. This was the first international treaty in the Far East between two independent powers mutualy recognized as equals, and the forms of international diplomacy developed in this time remained
the standard forms for the next thousand years. The agreement was renewed at the accession of each new ruler,
but was never adhered to entirely by either side. The needs of the Hsiung-nu increased with the expansion of
their empire and the growing luxury of their court; the Chinese, on the other hand, wanted to give as little as possible, and no doubt they did al they could to cheat the Hsiung-nu. Thus, in spite of the treaties the Hsiung-nu raids went on. With China's progressive consolidation, the voluntary immigration of Chinese into the Hsiung-nu empire came to an end, and the Hsiung-nu actualy began to kidnap Chinese subjects. These were the main
features of the relations between Chinese and Hsiung-nu almost until 100 B.C.
In the extreme south, around the present-day Canton, another independent empire had been formed in the years
of transition, under the leadership of a Chinese. The narrow basis of this realm was no doubt provided by the
trading colonies, but the indigenous population of Yüeh tribes was insufficiently civilized for the building up of a state that could have maintained itself against China. Kao Tsu sent a diplomatic mission to the ruler of this state, and invited him to place himself under Chinese suzerainty (196 B.C.). The ruler realized that he could offer no serious resistance, while the existing circumstances guaranteed him virtual independence and he yielded to Kao Tsu without a struggle.
3 Brief feudal reaction. Consolidation of the gentry
Kao Tsu died in 195 B.C. From then to 179 the actual ruler was his widow, the empress Lü, while children were
officialy styled emperors. The empress tried to remove al the representatives of the emperor's family and to
replace them with members of her own family. To secure her position she revived the feudal system, but she met with strong resistance from the dynasty and its supporters who already belonged in many cases to the new
gentry, and who did not want to find their position jeopardized by the creation of new feudal lords.
On the death of the empress her opponents rose, under the leadership of Kao Tsu's family. Every member of the
empress's family was exterminated, and a son of Kao Tsu, known later under the name of Wen Ti (Emperor
Wen), came to the throne. He reigned from 179 to 157 B.C. Under him there were stil many fiefs, but with the
limitation which the emperor Kao Tsu had laid down shortly before his death: only members of the imperial
family should receive fiefs, to which the title of King was attached. Thus al the more important fiefs were in the hands of the imperial family, though this did not mean that rivalries came to an end.
On the whole Wen Ti's period of rule passed in comparative peace. For the first time since the beginning of
Chinese history, great areas of continuous territory were under unified rule, without unending internal warfare such as had existed under Shih Huang-ti and Kao Tsu. The creation of so extensive a region of peace produced
great economic advance. The burdens that had lain on the peasant population were reduced, especialy since
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under Wen Ti the court was very frugal. The population grew and cultivated fresh land, so that production
increased and with it the exchange of goods. The most outstanding sign of this was the abandonment of
restrictions on the minting of copper coin, in order to prevent deflation through insufficiency of payment media.
As a consequence more taxes were brought in, partly in kind, partly in coin, and this increased the power of the central government. The new gentry streamed into the towns, their standard of living rose, and they made
themselves more and more into a class apart from the general population. As people free from material cares,
they were able to devote themselves to scholarship. They went back to the old writings and studied them once
more. They even began to identify themselves with the nobles of feudal times, to adopt the rules of good
behaviour and the ceremonial described in the Confucianist books, and very gradualy, as time went on, to make
these their textbooks of good form. From this point the Confucianist ideals first began to penetrate the official class recruited from the gentry, and then the state organization itself. It was expected that an official should be versed in Confucianism, and schools were set up for Confucianist education. Around 100 B.C. this led to the
introduction of the examination system, which gradualy became the one method of selection of new officials. The system underwent many changes, but remained in operation in principle until 1904. The object of the
examinations was not to test job efficiency but command of the ideals of the gentry and knowledge of the
literature inculcating them: this was regarded as sufficient qualification for any position in the service of the state.
In theory this path to training of character and to admission to the state service was open to every "respectable"
citizen. Of the traditional four "classes" of Chinese society, only the first two, officials ( shih) and farmers ( nung) were always regarded as fuly "respectable" ( liang-min). Members of the other two classes, artisans ( kung) and merchants ( shang), were under numerous restrictions. Below these were classes of "lowly people" ( ch'ien-min) and below these the slaves which were not part of society proper. The privileges and obligations of these
categories were soon legaly fixed. In practice, during the first thousand years of the existence of the examination system no peasant had a chance to become an official by means of the examinations. In the Han period the
provincial officials had to propose suitable young persons for examination, and so for admission to the state
service, as was already mentioned. In addition, schools had been instituted for the sons of officials; it is interesting to note that there were, again and again, complaints about the low level of instruction in these schools.
Nevertheless, through these schools al sons of officials, whatever their capacity or lack of capacity, could
become officials in their turn. In spite of its weaknesses, the system had its good side. It inoculated a class of people with ideals that were unquestionably of high ethical value. The Confucian moral system gave a Chinese
official or any member of the gentry a spiritual attitude and an outward bearing which in their best representatives has always commanded respect, an integrity that has always preserved its possessors, and in consequence
Chinese society as a whole, from moral colapse, from spiritual nihilism, and has thus contributed to the
preservation of Chinese cultural values in spite of al foreign conquerors.
In the time of Wen Ti and especialy of his successors, the revival at court of the Confucianist ritual and of the earlier Heaven-worship proceeded steadily. The sacrifices supposed to have been performed in ancient times,
the ritual supposed to have been prescribed for the emperor in the past, al this was reintroduced. Obviously
much of it was spurious: much of the old texts had been lost, and when fragments were found they were
arbitrarily completed. Moreover, the old writing was difficult to read and difficult to understand; thus various things were read into the texts without justification. The new Confucians who came forward as experts in the
moral code were very different men from their predecessors; above al, like al their contemporaries, they were
strongly influenced by the shamanistic magic that had developed in the Ch'in period.
Wen Ti's reign had brought economic advance and prosperity; intelectualy it had been a period of renaissance,
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new content. Socialy the period had witnessed the consolidation of the new upper class, the gentry, who copied the mode of life of the old nobility. This is seen most clearly in the field of law. In the time of the Legalists the first steps had been taken in the codification of the criminal law. They clearly intended these laws to serve equaly for al classes of the people. The Ch'in code which was supposedly Li K'uei's code, was used in the Han period,
and was extensively elaborated by Siao Ho (died 193 B.C.) and others. This code consisted of two volumes of
the chief laws for grave cases, one of mixed laws for the less serious cases, and six volumes on the imposition of penalties. In the Han period "decisions" were added, so that about A.D. 200 the code had grown to 26,272
paragraphs with over 17,000,000 words. The colection then consisted of 960 volumes. This colossal code has
been continualy revised, abbreviated, or expanded, and under its last name of "Colected Statues of the Manchu Dynasty" it retained its validity down to the present century.
Alongside this colection there was another book that came to be regarded and used as a book of precedences.
The great Confucianist philosopher Tung Chung-shu (179-104 B.C.), a firm supporter of the ideology of the new
gentry class, declared that the classic Confucianist writings, and especialy the book Ch'un-ch'iu, "Annals of Spring and Autumn", attributed to Confucius himself, were essentialy books of legal decisions. They contained
"cases" and Confucius's decisions of them. Consequently any case at law that might arise could be decided by analogy with the cases contained in "Annals of Spring and Autumn". Only an educated person, of course, a member of the gentry, could claim that his action should be judged by the decisions of Confucius and not by the code compiled for the common people, for Confucius had expressly stated that his rules were intended only for
the upper class. Thus, right down to modern times an educated person could be judged under regulations
different from those applicable to the common people, or if judged on the basis of the laws, he had to expect a special treatment. The principle of the "equality before the law" which the Legalists had advocated and which fitted wel into the absolutistic, totalitarian system of the Ch'in, had been attacked by the feudal nobility at that time and was attacked by the new gentry of the Han time. Legalist thinking remained an important undercurrent
for many centuries to come, but application of the equalitarian principle was from now on never seriously
considered.
Against the growing influence of the officials belonging to the gentry there came a last reaction. It came as a reply to the attempt of a representative of the gentry to deprive the feudal princes of the whole of their power. In the time of Wen Ti's successor a number of feudal kings formed an aliance against the emperor, and even invited the Hsiung-nu to join them. The Hsiung-nu did not do so, because they saw that the rising had no prospect of
success, and it was queled. After that the feudal princes were steadily deprived of rights. They were divided into two classes, and only privileged ones were permitted to live in the capital, the others being required to remain in their domains. At first, the area was controled by a "minister" of the prince, an official of the state; later the area remained under normal administration and the feudal prince kept only an empty title; the tax income of a certain number of families of an area was assigned to him and transmitted to him by normal administrative channels.
Often, the number of assigned families was fictional in that the actual income was from far fewer families. This system differs from the Near Eastern system in which also no actual enforcement took place, but where
deserving men were granted the right to colect themselves the taxes of a certain ar