Han Dynasty Quotes

For us, the events which took place between 1500 and 1800 on the soil of Western Europe constitute the most important third of “world” history; for the Chinese historian, on the contrary, who looks back on and judges by 4000 years of Chinese history, those centuries generally are a brief and unimportant episode, infinitely less significant than the centuries of the Han dynasty (206 B.C. to 220 A.D.), which in his “world” history are epoch-making.

During that critical battle, the Han Army strategically used ambushes, virtually from all directions, to defeat the Chu Army. The loss by the Chu established the famous Han Dynasty.

In the chaotic decades following the overthrow of the Qin dynasty in 202 BC, the emperors of the newly installed Han dynasty pursued a loose fiscal and monetary policy, spending beyond their means and financing their deficit by issuing new money.

Modern organizations have other characteristics as well. Samuel Huntington lists four criteria for measuring the degree of development of the institutions that make up the state: adaptability-rigidity, complexitysimplicity, autonomy-subordination, and coherence-disunity.16 That is, the more adaptable, complex, autonomous, and coherent an institution is, the more developed it will be. An adaptable organization can evaluate a changing external environment and modify its own internal procedures in response. Adaptable institutions are the ones that survive, since environments always change. The English system of Common Law, in which law is constantly being reinterpreted and extended by judges in response to new circumstances, is one prototype of an adaptable institution. Developed institutions are more complex because they are subject to a greater division of labor and specialization. In a chiefdom or early state, the ruler may be simultaneously military general, chief priest, tax collector, and supreme court justice. In a highly developed state, all of these functions are performed by separate organizations with specific missions and a high degree of technical capacity to undertake them. During the Han Dynasty, the Chinese bureaucracy ramified into countless specialized agencies and departments at national, prefectural, and local levels. While much less complex than a modern government, it nonetheless represented an enormous shift away from earlier governments that were run as simple extensions of the imperial household. The two final measures of institutionalization,

This is how we tend to learn about world history: as discrete civilizations that developed on their own over time. Now imagine a different kind of museum, one organized solely by era. You could stroll through a gallery, for example, and see a Roman silver denarius coin, a bronze coin from China’s Han dynasty, and a punch-marked coin from India’s Mauryan Empire. You would see right away that three major civilizations were going through remarkably similar changes at roughly the same time, despite the vast distance between them: each had become an empire, and each was running an economy based upon coin currency.

Unity succeeds division and division follows unity. One is bound to be replaced by the other after a long span of time. This is the way with things in the world. At the end of the Zhou Dynasty* the empire was divided into seven competing principalities, warring against one another till finally they were united by Qin.† When Qin had fulfilled its destiny, there arose Chu‡ and Han§ to contend for the reign, and ultimately it was Han that united the country.

Oracle bones

the conquests of the Achaemenid and Hellenistic dynasties encouraged commercial and intellectual exchanges reaching from central Asia to India to the western Mediterranean. In the East, the expansion under the Han and Tang dynasties had similar catalytic impacts within China. The intellectual residue left by these exchanges shaped the cultural traditions of the Persian, Indian, Chinese, and Mediterranean worlds.

Archaeologists recently unearthed a Han dynasty latrine dating to 206 BC. Complete with a running water supply, stone bowl, and an armrest, this 2,400-year-old Chinese technology looks downright modern. And that’s the problem: when it comes to our indoor plumbing, not much has changed in a very long time.

It's tempting to imagine that economic injustice destabilizes societies to the point where they collapse and have to reform themselves, but the opposite appears to be true. Countries with large income disparities, such as the United States, are among the most powerful and wealthy countries in the world, perhaps because they can protect themselves with robust economies and huge militaries. They're just not very free. Even societies with income disparities that are truly off the chart—medieval Europe had a Gini coefficient of .79—are relatively stable until a cataclysmic event like the plague triggers a radical redistribution of wealth. During the last decades, progressive reforms have reduced the Gini coefficient—and stabilized the economies—in many Latin American countries. From every standpoint—morally, politically, economically—such reforms are clearly the right things to do. But throughout the great sweep of human history, egalitarian societies with low Gini coefficients rarely dominate world events. From the Han Dynasty of Ancient China to the Roman Empire to the United States, there seems to be a sweet spot of economic injustice that is moderately unfair to most of its citizens but produces extremely powerful societies. Economist Walter Scheidel calculates that 3,500 years ago, such large-scale states controlled only 1 percent of the Earth's habitable landmass but represented at least half the human population. By virtually any metric, that's a successful society. 'For thousands of years, most of humanity lived in the shadow of these behemoths,' Scheidel writes. 'This is the environment that created the 'original one percent,' made up of competing but often closely intertwined elite groups.' The question, then, is how do ordinary people protect their freedom in the face of such highly centralized state control?

Instead, nationalist forces under Chiang Kai-shek and Communist armies under Mao Zedong battled for supremacy until 1949, when the Communists emerged victorious and the Nationalists withdrew to Taiwan. That same year Radio Beijing announced: ‘The People’s Liberation Army must liberate all Chinese territories, including Tibet, Xinjiang, Hainan and Taiwan.’ Mao centralised power to an extent never seen in previous dynasties. He blocked Russian influence in Inner Mongolia and extended Beijing’s influence into Mongolia. In 1951 China completed its annexation of Tibet (another vast non-Han territory), and by then Chinese school textbook maps were beginning to depict China as stretching even into the Central Asian republics. The country had been put back together; Mao would spend the rest of his life ensuring it stayed that way and consolidating Communist Party control in every facet of life, but turning away from much of the outside world. The country remained desperately poor, especially away from the coastal areas, but unified.

The heartland is the political, cultural, demographic and – crucially – the agricultural centre of gravity. About a billion people live in this part of China, despite it being just half the size of the United States, which has a population of 327 million. Because the terrain of the heartland lent itself to settlement and an agrarian lifestyle, the early dynasties felt threatened by the non-Han regions which surrounded them, especially Mongolia with its nomadic bands of violent warriors. China chose the same strategy as Russia: attack as defence, leading to power. As we shall see, there were natural barriers which – if the Han could reach them and establish control – would protect them. It was a struggle over millennia, only fully realised with the annexation of Tibet in 1951. By the time of the famous Chinese philosopher Confucius (551–479 BCE) there was a strong feeling of Chinese identity and of a divide between civilised China and the ‘barbarous’ regions which surrounded it. This was a sense of identity shared by 60 million or so people.

Another peak rises above you. High, elegant, it draws you, but looking down there is a forest blocking your path. The forest is dark, the way is rough; strange fogs confuse the trees; you hear growls on one side, howls on the other. It is a fearful route but, for the bold adventurer, this makes it all the more imperative to find a way through. Not just for the high peak that waits on the other side, but the forest itself contains infinite riches of beauty. If I may, I would like to look at a part of our history as just such a journey. The Han Dynasty and Tang Dynasty are plainly commanding heights in our history. They were such powerful empires and cultures that I sometimes like to refer to all of Chinese civilization as Han-Tang culture. But we must not forget that between the high points of the Han and the Tang, there was a deep thicket of history: the wars of the Three Kingdoms, the brief and troubled Jin Dynasties, and the divided China of the Northern and Southern Dynasties. Within this dark forest, there was no certainty, no single universe under watchful skies. There was no unity of vision: Everywhere was chaos and conflict; every moment was flight and death. Conspiracies sprouted in all corners. The names we know from that time trailed drama in their wake, but all the chaos, all the disruption did not douse the human spirit.

For this was Jingdezhen, porcelain capital of China, where the pottery made from local clay was shaped, painted, glazed, and fired in the town’s kilns—of which, if one counted even the smallest, there were more than nine thousand. The potters of Jingdezhen had been making porcelain since the Han dynasty, more than fifteen hundred years ago. There were many varieties, but the most famous was the blue and white.

As an empire built upon a succession of dynasties, China had never had a fixed name as a country, nor anything like a universally shared national language, nor for that matter anything remotely resembling a national history. Here again, Liang Qichao played a leading role, in essays like his 1901 “Introduction to Chinese History,” helping formulate an idea of the nation for the first time. “What I feel most shameful of is that our country does not have a name. The name of the Han or people of Tang are only names of Dynasties, and the name ‘China’ that foreign countries use is not a name that we call ourselves.” From Hawaii two years earlier, Liang had written, “The Chinese people do not even know there is such a thing as a national people [guomin]. After several thousand years, there have been the two words guo jia [state, family] but I have never heard the two words guo min [state, people] ever uttered.

It is impossible to fathom current Tibetan attitudes toward the Chinese government without grasping the enormity of what befell them in the 1950s and early 1960s. Tibetans often speak about “when the Chinese invaded”—only to be chastised by Chinese who point out that this eastern part of the plateau had been part of the Qing dynasty’s China since the early eighteenth century. But the Qing emperors were Manchus, a northern people who were nominally Tibetan Buddhists. The Han Chinese were virtually strangers. And what difference does it make? When somebody who speaks a different language comes to your town, confiscates your home, your clothing, your shoes, and your food, destroys that which is most sacred to you, imprisons the young men in your family, and shoots those who resist, it feels like an invasion whether that person is a fellow citizen or not. Tibetans aren’t talking about the fine points of international law or the definition of sovereignty: they are speaking honestly about what they experienced.

He developed a program offering government assistance, including loans and exemptions from taxation, to widows and widowers, orphans, and elderly people with no children. Grain, wine, and meat were to be given out each month to people who were older than 80 years of age; cloth and cotton were provided for those over the age of 90.

It would be only appropriate to start with probably the most important and influential invention that the ancient Chinese gave to the world—paper. Today it might not seem like such an important innovation, but it actually transformed the world by making it easier to spread the written word,

In the rest of the world, they used papyrus, clay tablets, or parchment for writing, but they all had similar drawbacks. But during the Han Dynasty, according to myth, a court official looking at wasps building their nest became inspired to create paper from the bark of trees, rags of cloth, fishing nets, and remnants of hemp. And according to this story, this invention happened around 105 CE. But archeological findings go as far as the 2nd century BCE, but the first use for writing on paper is evidenced in 8 BCE.

Tap water is another example of a legally condoned public health hazard. As early as the Han dynasty (206 BC-AD 220) in China, the imperial government strictly enforced laws which required the public to clean their wells and water storage facilities regularly in order to maintain the purity of public drinking water. These laws also specified that pipes, vats, and basins used to transport and store drinking water must be made of clay, not metal, because the health hazards of heavy metals werw well known to Chinese health authorities. Today, public water utilities poison our drinking water with chlorine, fluoride, aluminum salts, and other substances which they call 'purifiers', then run it through metal pipes which further contaminate the water with lead, iron, nickel, cadmium, and other metals that are extremely toxic to the human system. Public utilities and private corporations combine to poison the food, air, and water upon which we must all rely to stay alive. Orthodox Western medical practice compounds these public health hazards by ignoring them as causes of disease, then further aggravates the situation by prescribing toxic drugs, injections, vaccines, and radical surgery as cures for the ills they cause.

Having reviewed diverse theories and hypotheses on the waning of the Age of Enlightenment in Central Asia, it is now time to step back and raise a larger question: does it really require an explanation? The assumption behind our search for causes is that if one or another factor had not come into play, the movement of thought would have continued. But that great period of intense cerebration, that age of inquiry and innovation, had lasted for more than four centuries. If more information on the centuries preceding the Arab invasion had survived, we might confidently extend that period of flowering even further back in time. Even without this addition, the Age of Enlightenment was five times longer than the lifetime of Periclean Athens; a century longer than the entire history of the intellectual center of Alexandria from its foundation to the destruction of its library; only slightly shorter than the entire life span of the Roman Republic; longer than the Ming or Qing dynasties in China and the same length as the Han; about the same length as the history of Japan from the founding of the Tokugawa dynasty to the present; and of England from the age of Shakespeare to our own day. As they say in the theater world, it had a long run. It is well and good to speak of causes of the decline of the passion for inquiry and innovation, or of some supposed exhaustion of creative energies. But just as we feel little need to discover the cause of a nonagenarian’s death, we need not inquire too urgently into the cause of the waning of this remarkable age. Of course, the question of why the region as a whole remained in a state of backwardness from the end of the Age of Enlightenment down to recent times is vitally important, but it involves many factors besides those that came into play in the intellectual decline. It should form the subject of another book.

Chinese chroniclers of the Han and Tang dynasties report tall, fiery-haired, and light-eyed barbarians with full beards and in felt caps and leather leggings in the Western Regions (today Xinjiang), who traded in jade and horses.20 Wall frescoes of the rock-cut Kizil Cave monasteries dating to the fourth through sixth centuries depict some native rulers, merchants, or Buddhist monks with red hair and fair-skinned features. The complex, often known as the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas, is seventy-five miles west of Kucha, a major oasis city on the northern side of the Tarim Basin. Kucha has yielded many documents in Tocharian B. The murals, dating between the third and sixth centuries AD, depict scenes from the life of the Buddha, and share close stylistic similarities to the contemporary art of Gandhara.21

Racially the vast majority of mainland China is Han, tracing their ancestry back to the dynasty of that name, which established itself about 200 B.C. The other eight or so percent of the population is made up of minority groups like the Tibetans, Mongolians and Manchus. The Uighurs (pronounced “wee-gurs”), whose people are from western China, were one such minority. Predominantly Islamic, their native region is considered central Asia and before being annexed by China was called East Turkestan. Hence, the Ghost’s name for them: “Turks.

Natural human sociability is built around two principles, kin selection and reciprocal altruism. The principle of kin selection or inclusive fitness states that human beings will act altruistically toward genetic relatives (or individuals believed to be genetic relatives) in rough proportion to their shared genes. The principle of reciprocal altruism says that human beings will tend to develop relationships of mutual benefit or mutual harm as they interact with other individuals over time. Reciprocal altruism, unlike kin selection, does not depend on genetic relatedness; it does, however, depend on repeated, direct personal interaction and the trust relationships generated out of such interactions. These forms of social cooperation are the default ways human beings interact in the absence of incentives to adhere to other, more impersonal institutions. When impersonal institutions decay, these are the forms of cooperation that always reemerge because they are natural to human beings. What I have labeled patrimonialism is political recruitment based on either of these two principles. Thus, when bureaucratic offices were filled with the kinsmen of rulers at the end of the Han Dynasty in China, when the Janissaries wanted their sons to enter the corps, or when offices were sold as heritable property in ancien regime France, a natural patrimonial principle was simply reasserting itself.