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On 28 February 202 BC, with Xiang Yu dead and Chu subdued, Liu Bang of Pei ‘assumed the position of Supreme Emperor’. At this point in his narrative Sima Qian ceases calling him ‘the king of Han’ (‘Liu Bang’ and ‘Lord of Pei’ had long since been dropped) and switches to his posthumous imperial title of Gaozu. History would adopt this title exclusively, commemorating him as Han Gaozu, ‘the Han Great Progenitor’ (or sometimes Han Gaodi, ‘the Han Progenitor-Emperor’). The first commoner to rise to the dizzy heights of emperor, he would be the last for 1,500 years. Founding a dynasty from such obscurity was no small achievement, and the Grand Historian, writing at a time when the strongest of all the Han emperors occupied the throne, acknowledged a remarkable lineage by hailing its imperial progenitor.

Yet in 202 BC the future of the Han dynasty, and that of China as a unitary empire, was far from assured. The territorial colossus amassed by Qin had been so severely shaken that the chances of the Great Progenitor’s progeny controlling the most extensive and enduring of all ancient China’s imperial constructs looked remote indeed. South of the Yangzi watershed Han’s writ scarcely ran at all; it was contested in the east and north, and vigorously repudiated on the northern frontier where the Ordos region, so laboriously fortified by the wall-minded Meng Tian, was quickly abandoned.

A long reign would have helped, but Han Gaozu lived only seven more years (202–195 BC), most of these being spent suppressing rebellions and fending off incursions. Helpful too would have been a strong successor; instead he was followed by a timid teenager (who was at least his son), then two infants (who were probably not his grandsons). Falling an early prey to the palace intrigues that attended every minority, by 190 BC Han authority was being wielded, and the throne effectively usurped, by the Dowager Empress Lü, Gaozu’s bride from the days when he was a nonentity in Pei. Qin’s imperial phase had lasted a paltry fifteen years; Han’s looked likely to last only slightly longer.

All along there had been something less than convincing about Liu Bang’s rise to power. As he candidly admitted, success had been achieved despite his capabilities rather than because of them, and at the expense of some hefty compromises. To win support he had had to appear to repudiate Qin repression. That meant dismantling the legalist state, disowning its penal authoritarianism, lessening the burdens of taxation and conscription, and cultivating a more consensual ideology and a more approachable persona. Yet without unchallenged authority, strict regulations and access to unlimited manpower and revenue, an effective government was scarcely possible. It was the old problem of the tactics and behaviour appropriate to winning an empire being unsuited to ruling it. Gaozu must needs ‘change with the times’.

His personal reformation was gradual. The hard-drinking habits of a life in the field continued. The emperor liked nothing better than a bacchanalia of brimming cups, earthy jokes and clumsy horseplay in the company of cronies from Pei. Heavy drinking meant frequent ‘visits to the toilet’ (as Sima Qian’s English translator puts it), where bad things happened; people didn’t come back, they got slandered in their absence, cornered by ‘wild bears’ or, in the case of one young lady, cornered – then urgently ‘favoured’ – by the emperor. Toilets were not nice places. Then as now, the excrement was collected for manuring the fields; along with adjustable ploughs and the development of a seeding machine for drill sowing, this is thought to have contributed substantially to increased agricultural yields under the early Han. The dung accumulated beneath the privy in a noisome pit. Here rootled hogs and briefly, in 194 BC, ‘the human pig’, described as a blind, dumb, demented creature without ears, feet or hands but of a distinctly womanly form. This was the once lovely Lady Chi after the Dowager Empress Lü had finished revenging herself on one whose only crime was to have given birth to an imperial contender. ‘Empress Lü was a woman of very strong will,’ says Sima Qian. Huidi, her teenage son who had just been enthroned as Gaozu’s successor, was so horrified by Lady Chi’s fate that he too then ‘gave himself up each day to drink’ and played no further part in affairs of state.

Sima Qian’s Shiji treats of the Dowager Empress Lü in its section on ‘Rulers’, as if it was she who was Gaozu’s successor, while Huidi (‘Emperor Hui’, the di suffix signifying ‘emperor’) gets no separate treatment, just occasional mentions. From Gaozu’s death in 195 BC until her own death in 180 BC, the dowager empress most emphatically ruled while emperors barely reigned. Huidi’s only achievement was to encourage Shusun Tong, the dynasty’s expert on ceremonial and ritual, in the elaboration of a Han dynastic mystique.

A noted Confucian scholar with a large following, Shusun Tong had joined Gaozu in his ‘King of Han’ days, had then stage-managed his enthronement, and thereafter set about introducing some decorum into the imperial court. This was not easy. Gaozu was so contemptuous of formal erudition that he was known to snatch off the cap of the nearest scholar to use as a chamber pot. Yet while informality was all very well in reaction to Qin sobriety, even the emperor was irked when drinking companions burst in on his lovemaking. What was needed, said Shusun Tong, were rules of protocol and court ritual. The emperor somewhat doubtfully agreed. ‘See what you can do, but make it easy to learn…it must be the sort of thing I can manage.’

A task force of scholars was assembled, the texts duly scanned, and a month spent practising the new choreography in a specially built pavilion. When Shusun Tong was ready, he invited Gaozu’s approval. A sigh of relief greeted the emperor’s ‘I can do that all right’. The new ceremonial was immediately introduced, and at the 199 BC New Year’s celebrations, when nobles and officials from all over the empire came to pay court, ‘everyone trembled with awe and reverence’. Gaozu at last ‘understood how exalted a thing it is to be an emperor!’¹³ Shusun Tong was rewarded and, during Huidi’s reign, he devised and orchestrated the ancestral rites to be accorded to the deceased ‘Great Progenitor’ and his successors.

But it was one thing to indulge Confucian ideas of ritual and decorum, quite another to embrace Confucian notions of rulership. Gaozu was too busy shoring up his authority to set an example of moral excellence; arguably his empire was too unruly to respond to it. Laws and taxes were essential, not least because, without them, there would be no point to the amnesties and remissions with which he and his successors rewarded loyalty and assuaged resentment. Though Han emperors were more inclined to listen to advice, Qin’s autocratic legacy was not in fact repudiated. Han Gaozu made special provision for the maintenance (and perhaps the restoration) of the First Emperor’s tomb and for the conduct of his ancestral rites. The legalist framework of government – registration and rankings, group responsibility, a tariff of punishments and rewards, universal taxation, corvée and conscription – was retained in toto; and though somewhat relaxed in practice, it would remain fundamental to Chinese empire.

The relaxation was most notable during the reigns of the scholarly Han Wendi (r. 180–157 BC), one of Gaozu’s sons who became emperor when the Dowager Empress Lü died, and that of the filial Han Jingdi (r. 157–141 BC), who was Wendi’s son. But if a Confucian gloss was later given to this leniency, it was only partly thanks to their employing notable scholars, some of a Confucian bent, and more obviously because in retrospect the whole half-century from Gaozu’s death to that of Jingdi came to be seen as a golden age. Relative peace prevailed, although at some cost in respect to the northern frontier, as will be seen; harvests were generally good, a sure sign of celestial favour; and remissions and pardons were frequent. Wendi’s virtue was ‘of the highest order’, concluded Sima Qian, who even found a good word for Dowager Empress Lü: during her ‘reign’ ‘punishments were seldom meted out and evil-doers were few; the people applied themselves to the work of farming; and food and clothing became abundant’.¹⁴

Jingdi’s moment of glory came in 154 BC when six kingdoms rose in revolt and were defeated. The trouble dated back to Gaozu’s reign and was a legacy of his war with Xiang Yu. At the decisive battle of Gaixia in Anhui, the victors had been the Han generals. It was their forces which had overpowered Xiang Yu’s while, in Sima Qian’s words, ‘the King of Han followed behind’. Doubtful whether Liu Bang would ever defeat his rival, the generals had risked their troops only after being promised substantial kingdoms by way of reward. When the same generals had urged Liu Bang to assume the emperorship, they had done so partly in comformity to a traditional formula for such occasions, partly because it really mattered to them; for as they explained, ‘if our king does not assume the supreme title, then all our own titles will be called into doubt’.¹⁵ Thus, when the king of Han obliged and stepped up to the imperial throne, a clutch of far from submissive generals clambered on to royal thrones of their own.

The new dynasty required an imperial capital to accommodate its ancestral tombs and temples, not to mention its court and administration. Emulating the Eastern (Later) Zhou, Gaozu had lit on Luoyang, which was well sited in the heart of the Zhongyuan (‘central plain’) between Qin and Chu. But no sooner had he settled there than he was persuaded to remove to a remoter but far more defensible site at Chang’an in the western fastness of Qin (it was near Xianyang at the modern Xi’an). Luoyang had been revealed as a death-trap, for in rewarding his generals Gaozu had relinquished direct control over much of its hinterland. He had in fact alienated practically all the territories that had been awarded to Xiang Yu when in 203 BC the exhausted rivals had partitioned the empire between them. Thus the entire eastern half of what had been the First Emperor’s domain had been parcelled out as ten kingdoms, with only the western half remaining as directly administered commanderies. In effect victory had been bought at the cost of reinstating the discredited system of hereditary ‘feudal’ enfeoffment, plus all that it implied in terms of diminished imperial authority. Luoyang and the pitiful fate of its last Zhou emperors may have served as a reminder.

Though the work of clawing back these enfeoffed kingdoms had begun immediately, they remained a threat, and the task would not be completed for the best part of a century. Gaozu’s efforts concentrated on a change of personnel. Erstwhile generals and other potential challengers were gradually replaced as kings by less bellicose members of his own family. Empress Lü continued the process by installing members of her own family. Wendi, in replacing them, took the opportunity to break up some kingdoms and reclaim others. The 154 BC revolt suppressed by Jingdi provided a further opportunity for undermining the kingdoms. All of this forestalled a relapse into the chaos of the ‘Warring States’ era, although so long as kingdoms rejoicing in illustrious names like Qi, Zhao, Yan and even Chu survived, the integrity of the empire remained compromised.

Dynastic history tends to portray these Han kingdoms, or ‘subkingdoms’, as recalcitrant satellites vainly contesting a manifest imperial destiny. Archaeology once again provides a corrective. Several royal tombs of the early Han period have been discovered; and until the day when Qin Shi Huangdi’s great mausoleum is opened, they afford the most striking glimpse of ancient China’s material culture. Admittedly subterranean chambers are less exciting than Graeco-Roman colonnades. But stone was scarce in much of China. The population was concentrated on the alluvial flood-plains where construction meant hangtu footings and wooden superstructures. Buildings of several storeys slung with saddleback roofs and upcurled eaves are depicted in tomb paintings and described in texts. They look spectacular. But timber rots and brickwork crumbles. Save for extensive foundations, such as those traced at the new imperial capital of Chang’an, and a few glazed roof tiles, very little survives.

Yet if China’s landscape is short on ancient monuments, compensation lurks beneath. Courtesy of a mental outlook that avidly embraced the afterlife, ancestors were cherished not just as loved ones but as progenitors deserving of the Confucian respect due to all parents, and as intermediaries in any dealings with the spirit world. Their tombs were carefully prepared. The deceased were interred in as pristine a condition as possible (cremation would have been even more dishonourable than dismemberment or mutilation); and to meet their ongoing needs in terms of comfort, sustenance, status and diversion, they were provided with the accoutrements they had enjoyed in life. In this sense every tomb reflected its occupant’s lifestyle and became, like the First Emperor’s, a microcosm of the material world that he or she had relinquished.

The tombs of the Han kings were no exception; they may be taken as providing reliable evidence of the resources and tastes of their royal occupants. When in 1968 some soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army discovered what proved to be the tombs of the king and queen of Zhongshan (a Han kingdom in Shanxi), it was the royal couple’s jade suits which excited the most interest. A dazzling hoard of silks, lacquerware, figurines and inlaid bronzes also impressed the fatigues-clad militiamen; but for sheer extravagance the jade tailoring was in a class of its own. Discoveries elsewhere of Han-period jade suits in various stages of disintegration have since ensured pride of place in many of the country’s museums for what may be the world’s only stone clothing.

Each tight-fitting suit covered its corpse entirely, including face, feet and fingers, like a suit of armour. Jade was supposed to have preservative qualities, presumably more spiritual than chemical, that were effective only if no part of the body remained exposed. But though appearing to be a single garment, each outfit was typically a fourteen-piece suit including matching gloves, footwear, face-mask, separate sleeves and helmet. Like the armour of the ‘terracotta warriors’, all these items were made up of small and precisely butted rectangular plates, some two to three thousand jades per suit, each sewn to its neighbours using thread of either gold, silver or silk. Not even the pharaohs dressed their dead in jade-mail stitched with gold. Whether assessed in terms of craftsmanship, weight or value, such tailoring testifies to an opulence and patronage beyond the means of most ‘satellite kings’ – and possibly even emperors.

At Changsha, the capital of another kingdom created by Gaozu for one of his generals (but this time south of the Yangzi in Hunan), no royal tombs have been discovered. A mound excavated at Mawangdui in the city’s outskirts in the 1970s, however, was found to conceal comparable treasures within the gargantuan nested coffins of the kingdom’s chancellor, otherwise the marquis of Dai (d. 186 BC), of his wife the Lady Dai, and of a literary gentleman thought to be their son. Not being kings, none of the family merited a jade suit, although more mundane methods of preservation – such as carefully sealing the coffins against damp and bacteria – had served one of the deceased well. After 2,100 years, silk-wrapped and swaddled in her innermost coffin, the Lady Dai was found to be intact, albeit phenomenally aged and in dire need of a hairdresser. Unlike the Tarim Mummies, her corpse was not desiccated; her joints could be moved and her flesh was responsive to a gentle poke. A post-mortem revealed her medical history, plus ‘138 and a half seeds’ still lodged in her digestive system; the Lady Dai had last snacked on musk melon.

The furnishings of her tomb are known in some detail because among them were found bamboo slips containing a complete written inventory. This listed, for instance, not only the various receptacles that were unearthed in her dining area but the delicacies that once filled them; seven kinds of meat are mentioned, with cooking suggestions, and two of ale, one unfermented and the other perhaps a stout. Exquisitely painted silks decorated the walls of the chamber and a T-shaped silken banner was draped over the innermost coffin. Miraculously preserved, the banner appears to depict an elderly Lady Dai bent over the walking stick that was found among her grave goods. Below her a feast is in progress complete with some of the first chopsticks to be depicted; above, a celestial concourse awaits her spirit.

The tomb contained no manuscripts on silk. These came only from the supposed son’s tomb and included two uncorrupted versions of Laozi’s Daodejing, hitherto unknown works on medicine, astronomy and divination, a sex manual, and some historical fragments of which even Sima Qian seems to have been unaware; they must have been lost to scholarship in the decades between the burial and his writing the Shiji. Predating the textual hoards previously discovered along the Silk Road, the Mawangdui collection should indeed prove ‘of monumental importance to historians in their reconsideration of ancient Chinese history’.¹⁶ In the same tomb were also found three of the earliest scale maps yet known. Evidently the result of careful survey and intended for military reference, one presents a topography that is still recognisable provided it is inverted; the Chinese preference was for south at the top of a map and north at the bottom. It covers the sensitive border region comprising the southern half of Changsha kingdom and the northern half of Nanyue.

Nanyue (‘Southern Yue’) was a Han kingdom with a difference: it owed nothing to Han Gaozu and had imperial pretensions of its own. Corresponding roughly to Guangdong province plus neighbouring parts of Guangxi and northern Vietnam, its capital was at Panyu. This was the then name for the metropolis of Guangzhou (Canton), in the heart of whose international district were excavated in 1983 yet another Han-period royal tomb and, in the 1990s, the remains of the royal palace gardens.

The tomb is that of King Wen, the second in the Nanyue succession and not to be confused with his contemporary Han Wendi, the emperor in Chang’an. In accordance with his rank, Nanyue’s King Wen was buried in a jade suit; it did nothing for the preservation of his corpse, although his many-chambered tomb is interesting. It represents in miniature the layout of his palace, with public rooms to the fore (banqueting hall in the east wing, treasure store in the west wing) and private apartments to the rear (including a chamber for those servants who accompanied him in death and another for concubines similarly ‘honoured’). Both Han and native Yue productions figure among the furnishings, along with African ivory, frankincense from southern Arabia and a circular silver bowl with lid that could be Persian. Then as now, the wealth of Panyu/Guangzhou stemmed from its Pearl River frontage on the South China Sea. Backed by the Nanling mountains, Nanyue seemed to have eluded Han ambitions and to be enjoying the perks of its balmy climate spiced with whatever foreign fancies came its way.

The Yue people are thought to have been Malayo-Polynesian rather than Mongoloid like the Xia Chinese. In northern China they were invariably deplored for their alien customs (e.g. banana leaves for plates) as much as for their steamy hillsides and malarial swamps. When the First Emperor extended his sway into the region, it was not a popular destination; only ‘fugitives, reprobates and shopkeepers’ were sent to settle there. Qin’s short-lived administration had been skeletal, and when the emperor died, it broke away. A Qin official, taking his cue from the melancholy Chen She’s uprising, had declared Nanyue an independent kingdom and himself its first king.

This was Zhao Tuo, otherwise King Wu of Nanyue. For ten years he was left in peace, Han Gaozu ‘having enough to do to take care of internal troubles’, according to Sima Qian. But in 196 BC the Han emperor sent a trusty troubleshooter, the Confucian ideologue Lu Jia, to talk King Wu into acknowledging Han supremacy. The king obliged in return for recognition of his assumed title, then reneged over a trade dispute. A Han embargo on iron sales, a strategic commodity since it was used for weapons, brought protests, followed by recrimination: King Wu declared himself an emperor, and troops sent south in 183 BC by the Dowager Empress Lü failed to quash this presumption. On the contrary, Nanyue’s troops began overrunning neighbouring territories. Their sovereign now rode in a carriage with a yellow canopy and issued his own ‘edicts’, both of these being imperial prerogatives.¹⁷

Sima Qian has Nanyue’s first king (and self-made emperor) dying in 137 BC. This seems unlikely; for if, as he says, King Wu was a magistrate under the First Emperor, he would have been at least a hundred and have outlasted two Qin and six Han emperors. More plausibly it was his successor, he whose jade suit now lies in the Guangzhou museum, who received the troubleshooting Lu Jia a second time and undertook to renounce the imperial style and send tribute to Chang’an. This was during Han Wendi’s reign and should have ended the matter; but unlike Qin’s incorporation of the Chinese ‘Midwest’ in Sichuan, the Han incorporation of its ‘Deep South’ dragged on.

Two more kings of Nanyue occupied the throne in Panyu before trouble broke out again. By then, from Chang’an the mighty Han Wudi, son and successor of Jingdi, was transforming Han’s patchwork dominion into a dynamic east-Asian empire. The much-fragmented ‘feudal’ kingdoms had been reduced to impotence and obliged to accept imperial appointees as their chancellors, or prime ministers. This innovation went down badly in Nanyue when it was introduced in 113 BC. No Nanyue king had as yet actually visited Chang’an to offer tribute; and when a pro-Han faction in Panyu persuaded the young king to do so, the country rose in revolt under its existing chancellor. Han envoys and supporters were massacred, an avenging force from Chang’an repelled.

The Han empire, which had just opened a grand salient into central Asia, was being humbled by ‘barbarians’ at its back door. Han Wudi could no longer trifle with the situation, and suasion having failed, only force remained. In 112 BC no less than four expeditions converged on Panyu by river and sea. The ‘General of the Towered Ships’ at the head of 20,000–30,000 men got there first. Joined by the ‘General Who Calms the Waves’, he stormed Panyu at night and, come dawn, the city surrendered. ‘Thus five generations, or ninety-three years after Zhao Tuo first became king of Southern Yue, the state was destroyed.’¹⁸ Sima Qian, then at work on his Shiji, felt nothing but satisfaction. There would be no more kings of Southern Yue, nor of Eastern Yue (in Fujian), which suffered a similar fate the following year. By the end of 111 BC all of mainland southern China plus the island of Hainan and the Red River valley of northern Vietnam were finally incorporated into the empire.