This book traces how a discourse of honor and shame helped create the imperial state in China. Through examining changing claims to honor, it studies Warring States articulations of new social roles and networks, early imperial redefinitions of the state’s power and its agents’ status, and how groups not employed by the state asserted a status that matched or exceeded that attributed to the bureaucracy. Such groups also denounced as shameful the elite pursuits of wealth or high office that motivated those who constituted the formal state and political elites. These groups included scholars, hermits, bravoes, writers, and locally powerful families, and, while not formally part of the state-defined public realm, in practice they became essential to the functioning of the imperial order. The roles that they played, and the language in which these were justified, came to define a non-state public realm which remained in permanent tension with the imperial government. Thus the evolving language of honor and shame allows us to move beyond a focus on the court and bureaucracy to achieve a more complete picture of Han imperial state and society.