The founding emperor of the Han envisioned the noble rank (lie hou) as a system rewarding “merit” (gong) that mainly referred to military achievements. However, the criteria for granting the noble rank changed considerably throughout the Han. This is reflected by the various categories of nobles in the Han shu tables: meritorious ministers (gongchen hou), the kings’ sons (wangzi hou), and the imperial affines and favorites (waiqi enze hou), as well as the new category of eunuch nobles (huanzhe hou) in the Eastern Han. This article argues that the Han shu tables should be read as one of the multiple narratives about the noble rank and merit during the Han rather than an objective statistical summary. Whereas the Han shu tables emphasize Gaozu’s original definition of merit, the imperial edicts granting the noble rank kept reinterpreting merit to serve the court’s contemporary needs. Recently excavated Han manuscripts provide a third way of viewing merit based on the length of service.

The Chengba site is the only city site dated from the late Warring States Period in eastern Sichuan Province, China. New discoveries of artefacts and structures at the site enable exploration of the regional role and management of counties that were established at this time by the central government.

This article traces the spread of a norm of confidentiality within elite political culture during the Warring States, Qin, and Western Han periods. Instead of an emphasis on secrecy within military and administrative contexts, it explores discussions of “leaking” (xie 泄/洩 or lou 漏) and characterizations of “confidentiality” (zhou 周 and mi 密) in idealized representations of political action. While Warring States texts drew upon a medical language of qi circulation to fashion a model of a perfectly leakproof ruler, by Western Han attention had shifted from rulers to officials. This valorization of official confidentiality was connected to institutional developments, especially proscriptions against leaking from privileged spaces at the imperial court, visible in sources from the late Western Han. In this final period there arose a celebrated norm of circumspection, shared by rulers and officials alike, that in theory would allow all parties to evade disaster.

The White Tiger Hall conference, held in the fourth year (79 c.e.) of the Jianchu 建初 reign in the Eastern Han, was a significant event in both politics and classical learning during and after that time. As the summary of the conference, composed after its conclusion, the Baihu tong 白虎通 is the main resource for investigating the details of this conference. Clarifying the formation process of the Baihu tong is helpful to elicit information regarding the White Tiger Hall conference from the findings recorded in its text. By tracing the history of the court conferences as an administrative institution and considering the particular nature of manuscript compilation, textual genre formats, and literary circulation during the Han, this paper suggests that the Baihu yizou 白虎議奏 referred to in the sources represents the compilation of the positions of the different debaters during the conference by Chunyu Gong 淳于恭 that was eventually sent to Emperor Zhang 章帝 for his approval; the Baihu tongde lun 白虎通德論 would be the corpus of the final rulings that had already been compiled before the conference ended and then edited by Ban Gu 班固. Later, the Emperor instructed his archivists to compose the Baihu tong by condensing the Baihu tongde lun. According to its formation process, the Baihu tong is the work of a collection of experts, rather than a compilation by a single person. Evidence shows that, although Emperor Zhang could weigh in on the court discussions (chengzhi linjue 稱制臨決), he could not ignore the consensus, nor could he simply mandate that the conference participants agree with him. In this regard, the Baihu tong cannot be considered a synthesis of the court's findings, establishing a single court ideology. Rather, it is best to see the text we have now as evidence of vigorous debates among the conference participants, including the Emperor himself and a range of other officials. In conclusion, the best way to uncover the facts about the White Tiger Hall conference via the Baihu tong is to reverse the process of textual formation, to glean information about the probable historical basis for the disputes recorded in the text.

For almost a thousand years, Chinese scholars have debated the existence of a Classic of Music in pre-Qin times. Some say the text once existed but was later lost; others say it was incorporated into other works, or that it only existed as a collection of musical scores. Some say it never existed at all. Though Western scholars have tended to sidestep the issue, most have at least assumed that it was believed during Han that a music classic had once existed.

Not only is there no convincing evidence that a music classic existed during the Warring States era, however, few if any in the Han believed that it had. Indeed, the first claims that a Classic of Music had once existed emerged only in the latter part of the Six Dynasties era. This article will introduce the debates that have animated scholars on this controversy, examine the evidence for the existence of a pre-Qin music classic, and identify when Chinese scholars came to believe that such a text had once existed. I will argue that the belief that a classic music text had previously been extant reflects early medieval misunderstandings of the role occupied by written texts in antiquity.

Ceramics discovered at Yan'an, Shaanxi, are glazed using a polychrome technique previously unknown in the Han Dynasty. Chemical analysis shows similar technological methods to those used during the Warring States period. This paper demonstrates two possible influences for the polychrome decoration that ultimately suggest Eurasian cultural hybridity and exchange.

The ‘Qin & Han Iron Smelting Site Investigation Project’ aims to illuminate the early use and production of iron during the Qin and Han Dynasties in south and south-west China. Here, the authors report on attempts to discover the origins of iron objects from the Lingnan region.

Excavations at Shichengzi, the probable location of ancient Shule, have revealed diverse burial practices suggesting a population with varied cultural backgrounds. Together with archaeobotanical evidence, this indicates a community of agro-pastoralists and Han Dynasty migrants using diverse cropping patterns to attain self-sufficiency. The project raises interesting questions about the impact of migrations on the identities of inhabitants.

Headhunting has a long and well-documented history in China, but most people are today unaware of this practice, first recorded in Shang oracle bones and regularly mentioned in ancient Chinese texts until the Han dynasty. This ignorance is because headhunting subsequently came to be seen as a barbaric practice and knowledge concerning its long history was destroyed: this was achieved by inventing a new character, guo 聝, which means “to cut the ear of a dead enemy combatant” and using this to replace (and thus confuse meanings with) an older character guo 馘, which refers specifically to headhunting. Ancient texts in which headhunting practices are documented have been misunderstood and misrepresented by imperial era scholars to prevent anyone from seeing that ancient China was a headhunting culture. This study shows how dominant cultural norms can impact on the way in which texts are read.

Excavation of the Han Dynasty chambered tomb at Laoguanshan in Chengdu, south-west China, has provided the earliest known evidence of pattern loom technology. Four model looms, along with accompanying artefacts and figurines relating to the weaving process, give insight into the technique of jin silk production. The discovery is hugely significant as it provides the first direct evidence of pattern-weave textile production in ancient China. Jin silk, made using this method, was both valuable and widely distributed, and the design of the machine influenced the invention of later looms and the spread of technology throughout Eurasia and Europe, representing great technological accomplishment for the second century BC.

The extensive cemetery at Hepu in southern China represents one of the best-preserved tomb complexes of the Han period. It contains many elaborate tombs with exotic luxury materials that testify to the status of Hepu as the home port of the maritime Silk Road. This trading network carried Chinese products (notably silks) by sea to kingdoms and communities of South and Southeast Asia, and was the southern counterpart to the more famous overland Silk Road through Central Asia. The materials found in the Hepu tombs demonstrate the range and geography of contacts, including semi-precious beads from India and ceramics from the Parthian empire. This far-flung trade network had major impacts both on southern China and on the other regions that it connected.

In the 1930s, the French Archaeological Delegation discovered a few fragments of Chinese lacquerwares at the Hellenistic town of Begram in Afghanistan. These lacquerware fragments, along with other artifacts from this site, have puzzled generations of scholars. Through a comparison of these fragments with lacquerwares discovered in China proper and beyond, this article offers a new chronology of the period from 74 BC to AD 23. This temporal frame corresponds to a time when the social life of Begram is vague in historical records, but it appears that the local aristocracy, for a period of about a hundred years, must have had some political and economic interactions with the late Western Han and Xin dynasties.

Study of the role of astronomical alignments in shaping the built environment suggests that centuries before establishment of the Empire in 221 BCE, the Chinese had already developed practical, geometrical applications of astronomical knowledge useful in orienting high-value structures. The archaeological record clearly shows this fundamental disposition was already firmly established by the formative period of Chinese civilization in the early 2nd millennium BCE. The cosmological identification of the imperial center with the celestial Pole and an intense focus on the circumpolar ‘skyscape’ are manifested in the highly symbolic orientation of early imperial capitals. Certain features of this cosmological world-view may have emerged as early as the Neolithic.

History, legend and memory have long pointed to Co Loa, an earthwork enclosure outside Hanoi, as the seat of an indigenous power that gave identity to the people of the Bac Bo region, north Vietnam. Survey, excavation and a set of radiocarbon dates now put this site on the historical map. The main rampart of the middle circuit was built in the later centuries BC, before the coming of Han Imperial China. Nor was this rampart the first defence. The authors show the potential of archaeology for revealing the creation and development of a polity among the prosperous people of the Dongson culture.