Asia Blog: China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam

The Han ruled for 206 BCE - 220 AD, a considerably long time, with a minor break for a temporary usurper. To this day, the Han are remembers for their imprint on modern Chinese civilization, primarily the notion of the unified empire. This notion never goes away–to this day, China is one large politically unified entity, more or less. Ethnically, the Chinese people call themselves Han, after this dynasty. Their empire reaches into the Korean peninsula and down into the south east and an arm into the north west–the silk road, carved into the mountains above Tibet. Vis-a-vis the Turkish middlemen, the Chinese are able to interact with the rest of the world. This has been very much downplayed in China in the way the Chinese civilization is taught.

Sima Qian writes about the Xiongniu mostly as a nuisance, but it’s clear that the Xiongniu were major economic threat to the empire. In Europe, we would have called them the Huns. We suspect that the Xiongniu were around in the Zhou period and only became a major nuisance in the Han.

Liubo, “Cosmic board game”
Microcosms

A board game invented in the Warring States period and is enormously popular in the Han. The board is an intricate carved board with a square in the center, and an L shaped tile in the corners, a T shaped tile in the sides, almost like Tetris pieces. It is also a microcosm of the way the cosmos works, with constellations, planetary bodies, comets, cardinal directions, the sun, and the moon.

Why was this made a board game and not an instructional manual? To play this game with 18-sided dice and move your tigers and dragons was difficult and we no longer are sure what the goal was. A few people who paid attention to divination suggested that there is a connection between divination and gambling, and this game may have been involved in a notion of dice-throwing energy in divination and explaining the universe.

TLV Mirrors
Configuring space

The vast majority of people in the Chinese empire, according to a Han census, live either around the capital or the North China plain. There are others around the Delta as well as what is now Sichuan. The Han is spreading out, but by and large, when we talk about Han, we talk about the North China plain.

The other way we see the configuring of space is in official documents, where everything is made organized and symmetrical. For example, marketplaces are not laid out in a grid pattern and are not orderly. They are governed by no rules, and do not take an official shape. However, in the Han, rows of shops and lanes are laid out to systematize and well-order everything. Although this was contrary to fact, it gave the higher-ups a feeling of peace at night.

Spiritual efficacy

The fundamental principles of Feng Shui involved positioning the house or positioning the grave. Underlying all of this is a belief that events can be explained by the great unseen energies of the world. Cosmic order requires regular human effort to draw it out. The role assigned to humans is to mediate the relations between heaven, earth, and the spirits. Even today you can find the notion that people must perform duties at an assigned time and place–this is so efficacious that it sets the system in motion.

High v.s. Low culture
Rise of Religious Daoism

By the end of the Han, they appear. There is a lot of popular folky religion going on in China at this time. At the local level, you’re more susceptible to charismatic local leaders than to a traditional theology due to a shortage of scholars. As the government loses power in the late Han to do public works, the new group of religious Daoists is able to.

Arrival of Buddhism

We will discuss this in more detail next time. However, Buddhism and Daoism arrive at the same time!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 8th, 2006 at 6:24 pm and is tagged with warring states period, unified empire, chinese civilization, zhou period, tetris pieces, tigers and dragons, korean peninsula, sun and the moon, economic threat, unified entity, silk road, planetary bodies, cardinal directions, sided dice, board game, middlemen, usurper, microcosm, divination, constellations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback.

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