Week 8 Making empire Last: Western Han Section 1: Introduction

1. Making Empire Last: Western Han

Given that the failed so utterly and so quickly, it looked to many people that the kind of empire it had created-- a centralized, bureaucratic empire, where one family held the throne and sent officials out to the countryside to govern on its behalf-- looked to many that was an utter failure, that the only possibility would be to return to the Zhou model.

And yet it turns out that in Chinese history, the Qin model of centralized, bureaucratic empire was successful. It was the that followed the Qin that made it work, that succeeded, that showed that a centralized bureaucratic empire could be a success, could last.

I want to approach the issue of how the Han established its empire and how it made it last on three fronts-- first, what might be called court politics, an understanding of what happens at court in terms of the people that make decisions, the rivalries among them.

The second approach I'm going to take is to talk about fundamental institutional tensions that have to be resolved or balanced in some way in order to make a polity endure. And these tensions are not just limited to . We can think about them-- and in fact, we'll ask you to think about them-- in terms of your own countries as well.

The third approach I'm going to take is by looking at questions of ideology. Once you have such a powerful center, when resources are flowing to the imperial center, how do you set about to constrain and limit the autocrat, the August Thearch, the Huangdi, the emperor?

2. Historical Overview

The earlier years of Han faced continual threats at home and abroad. The Han administration system was a compromise between the Qin centralized bureaucracy and Zhou feudal system. Half of the empire were divided into kingdoms ruled by princes who constantly struggled for power with the central court. The largest revolt of the princes took place in 154 BCE, nearly sounding an early end for Han.

To the north, the took advantage of Han's internal unrest and engaged in constant raiding. After a humiliating defeat in 201 BCE, the Han began to adopt conciliatory foreign policies, including the practice known as alliance, or heqin, where Liu princesses are sent to be married to Xiongnu leaders along with lavish gifts.

Emperor Wu, or Wudi, who reigned from 141 to 87 BCE, was the great-grandson of Liu Bang, turned the tide on many fronts. He greatly curtailed the territories of the feudal princes and concentrated power in his own hands. He engaged in aggressive expansionist policies, campaigning against the Xiongnu and sending expeditions every direction from Central Asia to . Under in his reign in the year of 108 BCE, the Han territory reached its maximum. In order to fund his campaigns without raising taxes, Emperor Wu took over the minting of coins, implemented state monopoly on major industries, as well as commercial taxes on private business. Unprecedented amount of coins were in circulation.

At last, Emperor Wu made into a state-sponsored ideology. And from this point on, Confucian classics, such as the Book of Odes, or Shijing, and the Book of Documents, Shangshu, became the core texts for the education of government officials.

In 9 CE, a powerful minister named put himself on the throne, ending the first half of the Han Dynasty, now known as Western Han, and founding short-lived Xin Dynasty. Wang Mang attempted to reconstruct the ideal state of Zhou as described in Confucian classics but completely failed.

Section 2: Court Politics

1. Court Politics

Let's begin with the whole question of court politics. I'm going to sit down, relax a bit, and take you through a whole series of events that mark the Han Dynasty. Because the Han Dynasty begins in a rebellion against the Qin. Eventually, there's going to be usurpation. And there's going to be an interregnum with something called the New Dynasty. And then the Han Dynasty will be restored.

The former Han Dynasty, capital at Chang'an, the Eastern Han Dynasty, capital at , marks this period. The Han Dynasty lasts, if we put all those two sides together, lasts about 400 years.

Let's talk about court politics and why it's so attractive. In some ways because the kind of intrigue that goes on in court politics with backroom deals between people, all of the sort of things we cynically expect of people. People are competing with each other. All sorts of things happen. And sometimes, and particularly in the Han Dynasty, bloody things happen. The winner takes all and the loser loses his head.

Let's consider some examples, beginning with the Qin. Why does the Qin fall? And there are lots of explanations. It depends on your stand, right?

Some people would say it's because the emperor kept seeking the drugs of immortality. He sent expectations to what he thought was the land of the fairies, the land of the immortals to get their drug. Some say it's the fault of his son, the second emperor, who listened too much to the chief eunuch, who was persuaded that he should never appear in public. No one should ever see him. For Confucians, perhaps, it was the fact that books that talked about antiquity were burned and that scholars were buried alive.

When we look at the Han, it was not without its problems, not without its successes. Liu Bang, when he's victorious, gathers his chief allies around him and says to them why do you think we were successful? And they say to him, you sire, you were such a great leader, such a great commander. It was you. And he says no, it wasn't me at all.

Han Xin, he says, you're much better at leading in war than I am, leading in battle. , you're much better at logistics than I am. Zhang , you're a better strategist than I am. However, I'm good at managing men. And that, he was. Now Liu have may have been good at managing men, but he was not so good at managing his wife. Empress came from a more prestigious family that him and probably never let him forget it. And along the way, Liu Bang started to acquire concubines. And it became clear that he favored a particular concubine and her son.

And Empress Lu saw that her own son, who was the heir apparent, was about to be supplanted. She maneuvered against the concubine and prevented that from happening. But once Liu Bang, known now to us posthumously as Emperor Gaozu, died, she saw that that concubine and her clan were exterminated, and that the children that were threats to her own son were killed, and that she would rule through over her weak son, the heir apparent, as he assumed the emperorship.

Well, in the end her dominance of the government lasted to her death in 180 BC, at which point the Han house, so to speak, came back and reestablished itself. The house of Liu, the Han imperial house, is threatened a generation later by a revolt from some of their own members, the kings of the Eastern Kingdoms, descendants of the first emperor of the Han.

The story goes that Jing Di, Emperor Jing, when he was still heir apparent, is having a game of liubo-- you can see this game here-- liubo, with the heir apparent of one of the Eastern kings. And he gets so mad at him that he picks up the heavy stone board and throws it at him and kills him. And the Eastern king never forgave him. And when Jing Di, or Emperor Jing, takes the throne, the Eastern king plots with his allies in the East to overthrow him.

Now, that revolt was eventually put down. And the Han Dynasty reaches a height of power under Emperor Wu, who dies in 87 BC. But two generations later, almost three generations later, the Han Dynasty falls to the usurper Wang Mang. Wang Mang revolts and usurps the throne in 9 AD.

We have here a really good example of court political thinking or this personalization of politics that is so much part of court politics. And it's in the form of an opera. It's called the Beheading in the Sutra Hall . And want to show you a clip. And as you watch, I'll tell you what it's about.

You see the actor with all the flags poking our from his back, meaning that he's a general. In this case, the general is a man named Wu Han. And he was a general serving Wang Mang. And so Wang Mang gave him his daughter to wed.

Wu Han's mother at that point tells him something she had not told him his whole life. She says son, your father was killed by Wang Mang, who you now serve. Now, his daughter, the princess, has become your wife. She must be killed to revenge your father.

Wu Han is distraught. How is he going to choose between the wife he loves and his responsibility towards his mother? Doesn't he have a responsibility to avenge his father? Isn't his family more important than his service to the state?

He tells his wife and she realizes what his duty is. And so she aims to kill herself to relieve him of this burden, being a loving wife.

2. The Beheading in the Sutra Hall

When the scene opened, he had come in, Wu Han had come in, and seeing his wife on the ground. And he's crying and distraught. And he tells the story, tells the story of what he had done and what had happened, what his mother told him. Now, at first, the wife tries to kill herself and doesn't succeed. But then she tries again, and does succeed. At this point, Wu Han's mother decides that he can never, never forgive her for causing the wife he loved to commit suicide to help him so that he could take revenge on behalf of his family against her father, Wang Mang.

And so his mother kills herself to free him from any doubts and lingering resentment so that now he can go off to war and seek revenge against Wang Mang and serve his family. And this is what Wu Han does. He packs up his mother's bones in his knapsack and goes off to war, joining the Han prince, Liu Xiu, who would restore the Han dynasty, and defeats Wang Mang.

That seems to me an archetypal court politics story. Intrigue, loyalties divided-- in this case, loyalties that are divided between family and state, but also, importantly, between mother and wife. The mother wins.

3. What can Court Politics Explain?

Does court politics explain anything important? At some level, it must. After all, Liu Bang does found a dynasty. He is good at managing men. The dynasty is under threat. People are involved. People do make decisions.

And yet I don't think it adequately accounts for the survival of the Han Dynasty. For one thing, one of the things we learned from court politics is the Han Dynasty was almost always in trouble. There always are problems in court. There always are threats.

Section 3: Institutional Tension #1 Centralism vs. Regionalism

So let's turn to what I think is going to be more useful form of explanation, which concerns, institutional tensions that exist when you're trying to govern a country the size of China. The first of these tensions is centralization, or centralism versus regionalism.

Let's begin, look back at the geography of China. If we take this geography and look at a map, what we'll see is that, in fact, China is composed of regions. We have the North China Plain. To the Northwest, we have the area behind the passes, where Chang'an, the capital of Western Han is located.

We can look to the Southeast, the marshy and wet Southeast, where rice agriculture takes place. We can look to the West, to Sichuan. These are really the areas in Han that matter.

There's a series of questions the Han-- and any dynasty, or any government, has to deal with, once it recognizes that it has different regions. Are these regions going to be administered from the center, or should they have their own governments? What proportion of wealth can stay back in the region, and what proportion needs to go to the central government to fund its activities?

Should policies and institutions be the same for all regions? If you have a rice-growing region and a wheat- growing region, and if they have different calendars, the harvests happen at different times, should we tax these regions in the same fashion? Is that the way we should do it? Or should we recognize regional diversity? Should we allow customary law of land ownership? In the north, where all the fields are flat on the North China Plain, it's going to be a very different from the Southeast, where you have to invest in rice paddy, and water, and irrigation to make sure your crop comes in.

Now, there are pros and cons to both. Centralism has a great advantage that it concentrates resources from all regions in one place. And that gives the center power, both to defend the country, but also to make targeted investments in new canals, for example, joining different regions together-- things that wouldn't happen if regions had all the power on their own.

So centralism is great. We could say, it concentrates resources. It's essential for national defense, which serves many regions. It allows targeted investment and projects like canals that cross regional boundaries.

On the other hand, regionalism is very good, too, because the region understands its own needs. It doesn't try to follow uniform policies. It tries to suit policies to the real and practical needs of that region. You could argue the case either way.

Now we know, if we look at Qin versus Han, that Qin was committed to a policy of centralization. There would be no regional variation allowed whatsoever. And that, of course, is one of the problems that Qin created for itself by forcing its own rules on all the states it conquered.

Han recognizes the problem. If I look at this map now, what I see is that what Han did was, it, in fact divided the country, really, into two parts-- the West, the Northwest, behind the passes in Sichuan, were governed directly by the capital in Chang'an, by the Emperor. But most of the territory to the east was governed by princes, or kings, who had created their own kingdoms. And these are the people that would revolt in 154 BC.

So we see the Han recognizing that, in fact, the old feudal states of Zhou that Qin had conquered, really wanted some degree of independence. Now, over time, the kings of the Eastern kingdoms see that they want to have hereditary control over their regions. They want to put their sons into place.

And ministers at court warned the Emperor that the Eastern kings have now become a threat to the continued existence of the Han. If they don't supply resources, if they don't support the center in war, then the center can fall.

In the end, the Han moves away from its initial dual system of giving regional powers a great deal of authority and goes back, in fact, along the road of Qin bureaucratic centralization. After it puts down the revolt of the seven feudatories, or the seven eastern kings, it, in fact, starts to limit the amount of land, or the amount of territory that belongs in kingdoms. It takes the commandery county system from Qin and starts to apply it to more kingdoms in the East. By and large, the trend is towards centralization and away from regionalism.

Section 4: Institutional Tension #2 Feudalism vs. Bureacracy

1. Feudalism vs. Bureacracy

That gives us a second question. Once you have your territory figured out and units figured out, how do you employ your officials? And here, we're really talking about two great models-- feudalism versus bureaucracy. And we tend to think bureaucracy is a problem, but certainly that is better than feudalism. And that, by and large, was the consensus in Chinese history, at least later Chinese history, as well.

What does feudalism do? It says I, as ruler, delegate authority over territory to this official. And this official will have limited authority over the law, the administration of the law, over taxation, over infrastructure, building and investment. And in the Han, at least, the idea would have been that they would have had no real authority over armies. But in fact, that, eventually, was happening as well.

But feudalism has a great advantage. Feudalism means that the official who has the feudal power, who has limited sovereignty over a place, his existence really depends upon that place supporting him. He has to do well by the place in order to maintain his power. So from that perspective, feudal rule is a very good thing. It's good for the locality.

2. What does Bureacracy do?

Other hand, a bureaucratic system changes the relationship entirely between the official, who's sent out to govern as a bureaucrat-- from the center, let's say-- and the land that he governs. Because the bureaucrat is not there permanently. He doesn't control all powers. He has particular powers that have been delegated to him by the center. And he carries those out.

And he must carry them out according to the wishes of the center if he wishes to be promoted. This is how a civil service works. It's very common, both in China and America-- in the state department, for example-- that officials are sent out for limited terms over particular places to carry out certain tasks. And when they're finished with their term, they're promoted or they're kept on or they're dismissed-- whatever. But there interest is in pleasing their superiors and doing what they're ordered to do.

3. Qin and Han as Case Studies

We can make a case for both bureaucrats and feudalists. And it was clear that Han tried to balance the two. Qin had gone for bureaucracy only. The nobility had almost no rule and they relied on bureaucrats.

Han, as we have already seen, creates Eastern Kingdoms. It allows for a certain amount of feudal control. The result was that Han starts to build a very large civil bureaucracy. The number I have seen is something like, including senior clerks in the Han system, something like 120,000 people in the civil service, which would make it rather larger than what we see in later dynasties. Section 5: Institutional Tension #3 Heredity vs. Merit

This leads to a third issue. How do officials get recruited? Two great possibilities in Chinese history. One is hereditary right. And the other is by merit.

What do we mean by this? Well, the easy way to understand hereditary right, which comes in Chinese to be called the protection privilege or the Yin privilege. Hereditary rights typically says that somebody can inherit the right to be in office.

Now, sometimes this means you can inherit actually the title of your father or grandfather. Nobility works that way. But in practice, what hereditary right means is that high officials have the right to see that their sons or grandsons are given office or given official rank and become eligible to serve in office. The alternative-- or at least the Chinese alternative to hereditary right-- is merit. That means you have to define the criteria by which somebody has merit.

Is it military merit? Success in battle can lead to a promotion. Is it educational merit? Or is it some other kind of competence or specialization? A typical one, for example, would be specialization of the law. These are all ways of assessing merit.

Now again, we know that the Qin had a very strict meritocratic system, in which people's success in the military led to their promotion and led to their appointment in the civil service and in the military-- higher officers, higher ranked in the military service.

What does Han do? Well, Han actually, as we might expect at this point, begins by trying to give more, more space to hereditary right. It backs off the strictness of the Qin meritocratic system.

And we can see this happening in various ways. It allows high officials to have sons and grandsons given official rank and be eligible for appointment to office. It allows officials who've been found guilty of crimes and brought before the law courts-- once they've been found guilty, once they've been assigned a punishment-- to use money, or copper in this case, to buy off their punishment.

Now all this made it easier for officials to perpetuate themselves, keep their family in office. In some sense, it made it easier for officials to see as government-- serving a government to serve their family interest.

At the same time, Han had various criteria of merit in recruiting officials, as well. It had a policy of allowing people who were known as honest and filial-- filial meaning that they serve their parents-- people who are honest and filial to be recommended to court for office-- a moral criteria, people who had exhibited moral conduct.

It had schools at the capital. And students who attended these schools became eligible for office.

Tend to think merit is good. The best person should win. The most talented person, the most qualified person should be employed.

But there's a problem with this. Somebody could be very smart and not necessarily be very virtuous. Somebody could be very talented but also very crafty.

And so the argument to be made, in fact-- not one that we tend to agree with-- but still the argument can be made that, and has been made in Chinese history, that hereditary right is a good thing. That it brings people into government who come from families with long traditions of service, families of proven loyalty, people who've grown up with good political connections and know how to make alliances and know who to call upon.

There are all sorts of ways we could argue merit versus hereditary right. And they've been argued throughout Chinese history, as well.

Section 6: Institutional Tension #4 Civil vs. Military

The fourth tension I want to talk about is between military and civil interest. So we have territory. We know how the territory will be administered. We know how we're going to recruit officials to govern the territory. What do we do with all the resources that come into this state, that come into this center, or even come into the regions?

And here I think there's a great division between military versus civil interests. By this we mean that, very simply, that military interests tend to be the concern of investing in the army, investing in military power. In the Chinese case, it often means expanding territories. And in fact, we see the Han dynasty expanding in all directions at various points.

The civil interests are interests in doing things like investing in roads and canals, reducing taxes, letting people take home more money, letting them spend it on themselves. The Qin dynasty, we know, never let military interests become subordinate to civil interests. It was a mobilization state meant for war.

The Han, when it takes over, backs off from that position. The first reigns of the upper tribes at one point, in the first reigns to launch campaigns against the northern tribal people fails, says enough of that.

The first couple reigns are benign neglect, if you will. The government gets its revenue. And the people get richer.

But there's a certain moment at which government has money to spend, too much money. And it hasn't been spending it. And very often governments think about military power and extending its authority and extending its territories and fighting its enemies. And this happened in Han.

By the reign of Emperor Wu, the treasuries were rich. A great historian of the time, , who you'll meet a bit later, says the "grain was turning red with mildew" in the granaries. And the ropes that held the strings of together were rotting, so much unexpended surplus was there.

Under the reign of Emperor Wu, the court takes up policies of expansion. Look at this map now. You can draw arrows going into Korea, into Vietnam in the South, but also to the South West along towards Burma, through the high mountains and deep valleys along what would later be called the Burma Road. North against the Xiongnu, to the North West into the desert areas, far into the West expeditions are sent.

At first, they were very successful. But once you've launched military campaigns, you have to maintain them. The troops were now in garrisons far away. All of a sudden that surplus that was in the granaries and treasuries was gone. At that point, the Han needed more revenue. We'll come to that problem in a later module.

The balance between civil and military interests can shift very easily. In my own country, the United States, I remember the day before classes in 2001, September 11-- 9/11 as it's known. And the Trade Centers, the two great towers, the World Trade Center in York City were attacked. And within a week, the country changed from a focus on the civil-- giving taxes back to the wealthy, relaxing all sorts of restrictions-- to a military focus of going to war and finding who had done this.

Things can change quickly when it comes to policy-- civil and military policy.

Section 7: Institutional Tension #5 Inner Court vs. Outer Court

1. Inner Court vs. Outer Court Finally, and this is the fifth and final tension, who makes the decision? Who makes the decision? And here in the Chinese case, we really have to talk about two points, two centers of power. One we'll call the inner court, which is the emperor and those immediately around him. And the other is the outer court, the civil officials, and sometimes military officials, who have risen through the ranks and who lead the bureaucracy.

Who is the inner court? Well, it's the person of the emperor. But remember, the emperor often is a child. And so, it also includes the regents.

The emperor marries. And the relatives of the emperors, or sometimes the relatives of the concubines, have a say in the inner court as well through their daughters, that have been placed in proximity to the emperor. The eunuchs, who see the emperor on a daily basis, are part of the inner court.

All those people whose existence and power and wealth depends upon their direct connection to the person of the emperor that constitute the inner court. And they have a vested interest in making sure that the emperor's prerogatives are maintained. Because if he has power to decide everything, they have power derived from him to.

On the other hand, we have the civil bureaucracy, the people who make government work, the people who set policy, who understand the tax system, the people who carry out the law and run the courts. These are people who gradually rise through the ranks until they become prime ministers or chief counselors. And they want to see that policy is made rationally.

They don't like arbitrary whim from the emperor. They don't the eunuchs around him. And they want to see that policy decisions are made by them. And thus, there's always a battle taking place between the inner court and all those involved in their court and the bureaucracy and the leaders of the bureaucracy.

In the Qin Dynasty, there is no question about the emperor's control-- in control. And certainly, the first emperor was a man of great powers. But his bureaucratic apparatus seems to have been functioning very well at the same time. His successor, the inner court, gains great authority. Thanks to the eunuchs around the emperor and the emperor's belief that he had to be invisible to the public, the inner court has taken back a lot of power and not handled it well.

In the Han Dynasty, we see efforts by the inner court-- Empress Lu is an example-- to try to control power. But by and large, there's a consensus in the bureaucracy that the House of Liu should be in control.

2. Court Women and Consort Families

There's another phenomenon in the Han which is worthy of note. And this is the consort families, the families of imperial women, the families that supply empresses and sometimes regents. And given the role of Empress Lu in subverting the house of Liu early on in the dynasty, it's been typical in to blame the role of women in politics, and to see in Han dynasty the role of the families of the women married to emperors as sources of problems.

I have a slightly different view. It seems to me that these consort families, as they're known, very strong in the capital, could present great problems. And there, in fact, we know of factional fighting at the end of Emperor Wu's reign that goes on for days in the capital. But one could also argue that the consort families actually, in Han, played a very important role, because they bridged the inner court and the outer court.

They often were high officials. They often provided daughters to emperors and regents. And that bridging was probably a good thing. 3. The Balancing Act

So the Han begins very much as a reaction against Qin centralization. Makes room for hereditary right. Is inclined to allow greater regionalism. The appointment-- the resurrection of feudal lords. Greater concern for domestic interests rather than military interests. Problems between the inner court and the outer court to be sure.

But gradually, over time, it moves in the direction of Qin. But it moves in a way that is gradual, that takes into account the interests of official families, that allows for regional flexibility. And that is, I think, a large part of why Han succeeds.

Not because the inner court is so well administered. Not because of great leadership. But because it's found a way of balancing these tensions between center and region, hereditary right and merit, domestic and military. Section 8: Issue – How to Constrain Imperial Power

This brings me to the third topic I want to address and that is how do you constrain the center? And this is really a discussion of ideology or ideological possibilities, if you will. What's interesting is the concern with how to constrain the emperor, how to limit his power. It really becomes most apparent during the reign of Emperor Wu, the most powerful of all the Western Han emperors save the founder of the dynasty.

We can see the various strands of thought that appear as being directed against imperial autocracy, but also against the notion-- which we associate with a book called the and one of the Liu princes, Liu An-- and that ideally, the ruler should be able to orchestrate everything in life, control all people from the imperial center. I won't go on about explain how that book, the Huainanzi, justifies and imagines this possibility. But the things we're talking about all are in fact efforts to cut down and cut back on the notion that the emperor was above the law, that he could be the supreme autocrat. Section 9: History as an Answer

1. Sima Qian: Voices from Outside the Center

So the first of these strands I want to talk about is represented by Sima Qian, the great historian, and by the effort of historiography. I have with me here a copy of his great work, The Shiji, begun by his father and continued by Sima Qian. The text we have here, which Chris Foster has just given me, is from the .

And you can see again we have the similar arrangement where we have the main text and the commentary that's right and interesting and the main text commentary so in fact although we've talked about the classics as having commentaries Sima Qian the historian his text becomes a classic in a sense in its own right and it also has commentaries on it.

2. The Record of the Grand Historian Basically it's a history of civilization, going as far back as he knows. It is composed of various parts. And it begins with Basic Annals, going back in time, back to the mythical emperors of the past-- emperors like Huangdi, the , and so on.

We have treatises, which are extended discussions of the history, for example, of law, of the building of canals and dyking the , of the economy-- the private economy, the tax system, the calendar.

Most importantly, it includes-- and I would say this probably is close to half of the book-- it includes biographies. Now, that's an interesting feature of this, and it becomes a standard feature of all later historiography.

3. Shiji: A History of Multiple Perspectives

Sima Qian tells us that when he began work on his great history that he had the idea that he would see the ways in which the patterns of heaven and the patterns of humankind were parallel. He was looking for universal patterns. And he thought he would find them by looking at history. He doesn't find them.

What happens instead-- and this where I think biography becomes such a large part of his history-- he starts to see that you can look at events from many different points of view, that everybody who participates in an event has their point of view. And you can take their biography and see the trajectory that person is on, take another biography and see the trajectory that person is on. And we can understand events, not only through tables and treatises and a day-by-day record of court events, but also through the motivations and goals of the individuals who are involved.

Sima Qian, it is clear, is no fan of the Qin dynasty. But he's not a fan of Emperor Wu either. And he sees Emperor Wu and his expansionist military policies following in the steps of the Qin. And he uses history to warn against it.

But he also makes the point that the problems of the Han did not occur overnight. They developed gradually. And they cannot be changed overnight. To look at history is to see the consequences of the choices humans have made and to think about what it would take to undo some of those choices and those consequences.

There's another story about Sima Qian that I should mention. Sima Qian at one point in his career had defended the honor of an official, who was not a particularly close friend of his, who was accused of being a traitor. And for that, he was brought before the law courts and his castration was ordered. In other words, he was going to be made into a eunuch in effect.

Now, Sima Qian, because of his rank, had the right to use copper to commute his sentence, to buy off the punishment of castration. He did not have enough money. And no one wanted to lend it to him.

And he writes a marvelous letter where he talks about why he chose to accept the humiliation of castration and rather than commit suicide. And he did it, he tells us, so that he could finish this book, so that people a myriad generations later would be able to read it. And that's what you're doing now. Section 10: Confucian Classics as an Answer

1. Finding Models in the Classics So Sima Qian is finding a way to say, if we look to the past, we learn how to judge the present. We learn to figure out what's on the wrong track, and we can think about ways of changing it.

The second strand I want to talk about is a man named Dong Zhongshu, who's thought of as the great Confucian of the Western Han Dynasty. Now, Dong Zhongshu has his finger in many pies. One of them, in fact, is cosmic resonance. He writes a little book which uses cosmic resonance theory. He's interested in statecraft.

But I think behind his statecraft concerns-- you know, how do we govern, how do we govern well-- and cosmic resonance theory-- which is, how is the human world a microcosm of the universe-- we actually see something else. Which is that-- and that's central to Dong Zhongshu-- and that is the notion that the Classics, that there are a set of texts from antiquity, which he is going to call Classics, that provide the model for the Han Dynasty.

Dong Zhongshu finds in the Classics, in the from the normative models for the conduct of government and civilization. And he runs through the Classics. And Sima Qian actually quotes this, and this is where I'm getting it from. The Documents, he says, records the achievement of the agents. The Classic of Odes, the unspoiled naturalness of the human will. The Classic of Changes explains heaven and earth and calculates probabilities. The Spring and Autumn Annals judge right and wrong, and the Rites regulate distinctions and introduce self-cultivation and his rule in politics.

Now we have a short, as we call them, that goes with this. And one of the graduate students, Yu Wen will explain in greater detail what the Five Classics are about if you wish to see that. Why did the Han Dynasty accept that the Classics had such authority?

They didn't view that at the beginning. In fact, we associate the early Han with a mixture of this kind of Confucianism, kind of cosmic resonance theory, and Daoism as well. And the Han does, in fact, is the first time that these texts are regarded as official Classics and taught officially by erudites at the school.

In fact, we have pictures of them out of these Classics engraved on stone in the Han Dynasty still, although the full stone blocks are no longer available. I think that the reason may be not so much that the court wanted to follow the Classics is that the Classics had become popular, ever more popular, with people who served in government but didn't have high connections and didn't have influence, because they represented the role of education.

To know the Classics was a kind of merit, and provided an entry, a merit-based entry, into the official system. And for the government to recognize the Classics as Classics, to recognize the authority of Confucius, was in a sense to recognize the contribution that these scholars, scholar officials, were making.

The Classics were a way of saying to the emperor, we need emperors. You should rule. But there are higher standards by which to govern.

2. Introduction to the Five Classics

I'm here with Yu Wen, who's very much involved in this course, both as a teaching fellow in the online course as well as the head teaching fellow for our college course. She's a student of modern Chinese history and we've actually asked her here to talk about the classics. The Five Classics. And you'll see why in a minute when I ask her-- well why don't you tell our audience what is it that you study? What is your research on?

My dissertation research is about the so-called Guoxue Chinese National Learning Movement in 20th century China. This movement happened at the moment when thousands of years of political system based on classical and Confucian learning was over, or was the end of the imperial order. And a group of serious Confucian scholars and other like-minded scholars started to think how this whole body of Confucian learning tradition ought to provide important source to the government, to the scholarship, and intellectual value to modern China.

And so the classics remain part of that from their perspective.

Exactly. From their perspective, the classics are living traditions.

Let's look start to look at the classics. But first, I think for many people who are watching this, they're not going to really have the knowledge of how a Chinese book works. Now books appear later in Chinese history, but why don't you begin by explaining how we should-- how they should-- look at a Chinese book.

OK. So for instance, there is a page the book and then how should we read? You see columns and characters for each page which should move from the right side to the left. Within each column, we should start from the top to the bottom. The bigger characters are the main text of the classics. And then the smaller characters next to the bigger ones are commentary text, or sometimes sub-commentaries on commentaries.

So it's the reader who punctuates it in this case, right?

Yes.

The owner, in this case, of this book, punctuated it.

Yeah. You can show the traces of a reader trying to understand what the meaning of the sentences are.

So then as we're going through, we have the American-- or the Western-- back of the book is the front. And these pages are in fact sewn together. There's actually one page.

It's one page and folded.

Why this arrangement?

This kind of formality has its historical origins from the use of the bamboo strips or the wooden strips very early on. For instance, this is one bamboo strip. The characters are carved or written on the bamboo strip. And then let's look at this page again, and you can tell that each page all those lines. So like a group of bamboo strips lined up and tied together.

And here we have some images of the silk scroll with written text. So during Han dynasty paper was invented, and it allowed a much cheaper distribution of written text. And until printing was invented in the , and then we have new technology in book binding, then replaced the paper scroll as the unit, or media, for knowledge.

And this is printing block, you can tell. You can see the lines, the columns, and the characters. What people in Song dynasty would use.

If I look through all these Five Classics, every single one of them is filled with commentary. And there's more commentary than there is classic text.

Than the classic text. Yeah. And commentaries, in fact, are a very important vehicle in the Chinese tradition for expressing ideas, for offering new philosophies by going back, in fact, to the classics and revising them or reinterpreting them in a new way. But what are the Classics?

We begin with the Classic of Songs, or Shi Jing, or the Classic of Odes, the different ways of translating them. So actually it is anthology of the 305 songs, poems. By and large, they are categorized in three parts. Some of them are eulogies, or some of them are hymns. The main body of those anthologies are actually the so-called Guofeng Airs from the feudal states of Zhou dynasty.

Scholars have been generally believing that those airs, these Folk Songs from the common people, they're collected from different feudal states, are a very, very important medium from which the politics, that the society, or the morality of the rule would be seen.

Sort of the notion of these spontaneous songs of the people, their folk songs, shines a light on rule.

Yes. And the second, Shangshu, we really translate it as the Classics of the Documents. The Shangshu is a collection of important records of the political actions of the government of the sage kings So generally scholars believe that studying this body of text will allow them to understand the deeper, or general, political and moral principles underlying the rules of the sage kings over the centuries.

And this is Liji, the Book of Rites. It is a very broad collection of essays, generally believed as written by Confucius and his followers, about self-cultivation, about proper behaviors, and also about the right government. And an important point I think we can make based on this book is that the essays all together sort of tied the personal to the public.

The Book of Changes. So I think it's a very interesting book. It's very interesting, and it's still very much used by Chinese people today in their daily life for many different reasons. So first, we can see that this is book of images. It contains 64 different this kind of images, which we really call a hexagram. So one hexagram contains stacked lines, some are broken, and some are solid. So scholars believe that the 64 hexagrams, of which each hexagram has a different name, and then they actually came from eight trigrams. Multiply eight trigrams and you've got 64.

Eight by eight.

So generally, scholars believe that each hexagram is created originally by the sage kings, who have the ability to observe the natural world and understand the deeper mechanism and the principle based on which the cosmos change. And then generally scholars also believe that this kind of vision of the sage kings, therefore, are able to offer suggestions or explanations on human affairs as well. Many Chinese people still use it for fortune telling. So how it works.

Well, that's complicated.

It's complicated. But generally speaking, when we have questions, when we try to understand our own situations, when we have troubles, when we want to see what are the solutions that we can find, then people usually play some milfoil stalks, and then play with them according to certain divination method. And then based on the appearance those milfoil stalks, and then you generate, or you get, certain hexagrams.

Yeah, okay. Yeah. Then you look at those.

You look at those.

And you try to figure out how that's going to answer the question you bring to the text. How that will answer my question, because each line actually has independent meanings.

Yeah, OK. Good. One of the things that's unusual about these hexagrams is that you actually begin at the bottom and count up. So you begin with the bottom line and interpret that, interpret the overall hexagram and so on.

But there's one thing I want to add. So apart from being a book of images, it also has a lot of words. So another big part of the Book of Change, or Classic of Change, is the so-called Xici Zhuan, is the appended verbalization, which has its own significance in the whole Chinese intellectual history. Because it explained or it philosophized how those hexagrams were created by the sage kings and why the hexagrams could offer a link between the natural world and human affairs. And then so in this sense it offers really important vocabularies and references to Chinese scholars to understand how the natural world works and what is the role human agency plays in it.

And our final one, the Spring and Autumn Annals.

Chunqiu. Ostensibly it is a historical record of the history of the State of Lu. But it is not generally used as simply a historical book because people generally believe that it was written by Confucius to pass, or to let people know about, his judgment.

His judgement of political affairs.

The judgment of political affairs. So all the scholars know that the point of studying this book isn't just about learning about historical facts. But they really want to understand what are the general political or moral principles that Confucius had when he wrote the history.

So the Five Classics with Yu Wen. Section 11: Portents as an Answer

Interpreting Portents from Heaven

There was a third way of constraining the emperor. It didn't reach back to history, like Sima Qian. It didn't turn into a group of texts from antiquity, like Dong Zhongshu with the classics. Rather, it turned to the natural world, to heaven and Earth, to the natural order.

And this brought Cosmic Resonance theory to bear. We see in the Western Han frequent accounts of officials who see anomalies taking place. It may have been an eclipse of the sun that had not been predicted. It may have been a flood-- anomalies, things that were a sign that the cycles of heaven and Earth were not functioning perfectly.

And they would use these, and say, this is evidence that something is wrong at court, that the emperor's doing the wrong thing, that there are people around the emperor who are evil, and so on and so forth. We know the Han took this seriously, because we have occasions when there were reports of such anomalies and attacks on the court for malfeasance, that the court issues tax remissions to the entire empire, not just the place that was affected by a flood, but the entire empire, or tax remissions where the emperors confesses to not doing well enough.

Clearly, this was another way in which imperial power could be constrained. There are always problems in connecting human events to natural events. It involves interpretation. And of course, that's what politics is all about-- interpreting who's responsible for what. These three things I've been talking about-- the sense of history, the notion of the Classics, and natural events portent, or sometimes called portents, anomalies in nature that were assigned that something was wrong-- all come together in the usurpation of Wang Mang. Section 12: Conclusion

Wang Mang Justifies Usurping the Han

Wang Mang could point to history and say the Han Dynasty is on the wrong track. He could talk about the classics and say, I aim to restore the Zhou model. And he could talk about portents and say all these signs and anomalies and floods and earthquakes that have happened are signs that the Mandate of Heaven is moving and moving to me.

And he at first had great support for his usurpation. He was seen as a moment of renewal, of returning to the Zhou model of making things better. And, in fact, he calls his dynasty the new or the renewing, the Xin Dynasty.

There are two other times in Chinese history when this concept of the new or the renewing become central in politics. One was in the 1070's, so that's a thousand years later, when there's an effort by another official named Wang Anshi in this case, to expand the role of government and transform society. And the second time is much more recent. It was 1950s when Mao Zedong proclaimed a Xin Zhongguo, a new China, a total break with the past or with the recent past, but something that would renew the land and bring prosperity and happiness to all the people.