The Early Chinese Empires: Qin and Han (review)

Lewis's work on the history of the Qin and Han dynasties is a welcome contribution to the study of early imperial Chinese history, particularly because it is. the first book by a single author that analyzes the history of Qin and Han from a comprehensive perspective in English. Needless to say, the Cambridge History of China (volume 1, The Ch'in and Han Empires, 221 B.C.–220 A.D.) edited by Twitchett and Loewe has been and still is the largest and most comprehensive history of Qin and Han, and sets an authoritative tone. Yet Lewis makes his book especially noteworthy by his hypothesis that there were five major features in Qin and Han, two dynasties hailed by Lewis as the "classical" era of Chinese civilization. These five features brought out in the introduction are

(1) the distinct regional cultures whose divisions were transcended, but not eradicated, by the imperial order; (2) the consolidation of a political structure centered on the person of the emperor; (3) the cultivation of literacy based on a non-alphabetic script and of a state-sponsored literary canon that sanctioned the state's existence; (4) demilitarization of the interior, with military activity assigned to marginal peoples at the frontier; [and] (5) the flourishing of wealthy families in the countryside who maintained order and linked the villages to the center of power.

(pp. 1–2)

Based on these five features, this book explores the history of Qin and Han through a way different from the Cambridge History. The Cambridge History, like various versions of the History of Qin and Han written by Chinese written scholars including Jian Bozan and Lin Jianming , uses chronology as the main thread of narration, while Lewis's book is divided into ten chapters according to varied topics that are closely related to the five major features. These topics are crucial, as Lewis says, for us to understand the structure of the Qin and Han empires. It seems to me that it is this difference that makes this book relatively systematic, and systematism, as it shows in Lewis's earlier published work Writing and Authority in Early China, is always his main concern.

The first chapter examines the geography of the early empires, which, Lewis argues, is a tale of distinct regions in Qin and Han. Compared with the Warring States period when many competing states highlighted their regional particularities, Qin and Han, as the first two unified empires in Chinese history, criticized local customs and advocated administrative uniformity. Nonetheless, Qin did not succeed in the reform of administration and kept ruling other conquered areas as its subordinate states, not equal parts of the empire. More or less, the early Han state retained the division between the Guanzhong area, where the capital was, and the other areas in the empire; the regional powers were to great extent weakened from the the time of reign of Emperor Wen to that of Emperor Wu.

The tendency swerved after Emperor Wu's reign, resulting mainly from Han agricultural policies, which pushed peasants to borrow money from the wealthy. Consequently, there came into being a powerful landlordism. The central court began losing the control of the local area and gradually isolated itself from the local society in the Eastern Han. Meanwhile, the local military power became stronger and stronger, and finally Cao, a warlord, took charge of the central court.

In the second chapter, Lewis argues that Qin was a state organized for war. This argument is a logical development of what he discusses in the first chapter. The reason why Qin did not know how to administer the whole country appropriately after the unification is that the combative nationality of Qin required always another enemy to defeat. In the very beginning of Qin's rise in the Warring States, Shang Yang's reform made Qin unique in a universal military service and notorious for its inimitable savage...