The Story of China: The Epic History of a World Power from the Middle Kingdom to Mao and the China Dream

by Michael Wood

Zheng village lay on the right bank of the Yangtze, in lands liable to flood, on the great curve of the river in northern Hubei. In the Han period, this was a region of agricultural colonisation, with the extension of irrigation systems and the building of new river dykes to protect from summer floods.

These people laboured, like most of the poor through history, to feed the rich before they could feed themselves. The receipts record the amount of cultivated land and the complete population of the village, enabling us to take one community in the heyday of the Han and see the subsistence level of its ordinary people.

The average Han farmer, then, if this is anything to go by, had a small amount of land by Western standards, especially if compared with the Roman estate surveys or Anglo-Saxon England, where, though admittedly in a much more sparsely populated land, one family had a notional 120 acres.

With such pressure on people in daily life in Han China, there was no room for failure, especially in times of famine.

In the south, as many as three or even four crops may be grown simultaneously. No doubt that was how farmer Ye and his family survived, along with selling or bartering their tiny surplus, but living conditions and labour must have been harsh indeed.

the Chinese system of agriculture was more like market gardening. Everywhere the landscape was a pattern of smallholdings, as still can be seen in parts of the Yangtze delta, with the fields divided into gardens rather than what might be called farms.

This system of small farms was always intensive, aimed at feeding the greatest number of mouths on the spot.

The extraordinary thing is how little some of these factors changed over Chinese history. In 1909, the American soil scientist and agronomist Franklin King made a nine-month tour of the Far East, with a longer stay in Shandong. There he looked closely at the lives of what he called the ‘Farmers of Forty Centuries’. Among the farmers he interviewed was one man with a family of twelve that included parents, his wife and children along with a working donkey, a cow and two pigs. He farmed 2½ acres, where he grew wheat, millet, sweet potatoes and beans. Another holding of 1⅔ acres supported a family of ten.

On average, a well-to-do peasant farmer might have 15–20 mu of land for eight people. A less well-off cultivator might have 2–5 mu, with a couple of cows, a donkey and eight to ten pigs. These are exactly the figures in the Han documents.

King’s estimate, though, by averaging the seven holdings he recorded, was a density of nearly 1,800 people per square mile, excluding animals. This shows why governments from the Han onwards attempted to relieve the pressure on farming that had existed throughout Chinese history.

with such huge population density, ‘it is clear that either very effective agricultural methods are practiced or else extreme economy is exercised’. The answer, of course, was that both were true.

With the experience of centuries behind them, Han dynasty farmers, like Mr Ye in Zheng village, used their skills, ingenuity and energy to wrest a living from the soil. Constant attention to detail, unremitting toil and infinite patience provided them with a means of subsistence in normal times.

For Farmer Ye and his neighbours, who were still responsible for taxes and forced labour dues, it was easy to be driven into bankruptcy. When big landowners bought up the farmland of bankrupt tenants, the landless men had to become hired labourers, a pattern to be seen throughout Chinese history.

By the end of the Han era, wealthy families had come to own huge numbers of once independent small farms. Some of these are depicted on the walls of Han tombs, with their manor house, barns and stables, fruit and vegetable gardens, industrial workshops and outhouses making beer and wine.

At the very bottom were the penal slaves, ‘earth pounders’ or ‘wall builders’, and the convict work gangs made up of bankrupted farmers and enslaved prisoners. They provided the forced labour on state projects, palaces, city walls and road and bridge construction.

In a satellite cemetery of about 20 acres, 10,000 or more prisoner labourers were buried, some with chains still on their feet or neck.

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Another cemetery was found just outside the walls of Luoyang, in a place local farmers had long called ‘Skeleton Gully’. The whole area is some 12 acres. One section, which was dug in 1964, had 500 graves.

One or two broken bricks were found with each skeleton, with crudely incised inscriptions. These recorded the name of the supervising unit, the skill, if any, of the prisoner, the presence of shackles or not, the name of the original prison from which they had been brought to Luoyang, the organisational unit to which they belonged, the date of death and the category of the penalty.

Grave number 7, row 8, names a slave called Shi Shuyong, whose date of death was 28 January 108 CE, a time of year when frosts are often severe in the Luoyang basin. He came from Rencheng prison, much further away down the Yellow River, by modern Jining. He was unskilled and had a fifth-degree sentence, the most severe.

This is the unseen presence behind the great empire visited by the Antonines in the 160s, though we should not pretend that slaves on estates in Roman Britain, or under the Saca in India, or the Kushans, were any less severely treated.

The government of the Han was therefore a continuation of the Qin, albeit less oppressive. If Confucius and his followers had laid down the ideal of moral rulership, and if the Qin had created a model of administration run on legalist principles, then the Han rulers took these ideas and bent them to their will over a 400-year period, and all later empires rested on its foundation.

As standardised by the Qin, writing was now used by the state at every level, and so scribes were essential components of an increasingly complex bureaucracy.

New documentary discoveries show that there were scribal schools under the Han and that the office of scribe often ran in families, handed down from generation to generation, similar to diviners and keepers of the calendar.

Already literate at home by seventeen years old, they would then go to school for three years of formal study. If a pupil failed, the teacher was fined.

There were written and oral tests in mid-autumn, and this is the first evidence for any kind of ‘civil service examination’ in China, where men of skill and merit were recruited for government service.

A prospective diviner had to read and write 3,000 words from the same scribal primer, but also chant 3,000 words from a diviner’s book and then perform six test divinations for the examiners using yarrow stalks.

The control of writing as an instrument of governance, therefore, was central to the Han system of rule. In early China, as anthropologists and social scientists have often noted in all early societies, ‘writing favoured the exploitation rather than the enlightenment of mankind

It was in Sima Qian’s lifetime that the first direct contacts took place between Han China and the West.

Great Silk Road oases like Samarkand were vectors of Greek culture and goods, easily reachable from the Tarim basin on the western edge of the Han world.

Han diplomacy began to put feelers out to the many kingdoms in the vast tracts of Central Asia, between the Iranian plateau and Xinjiang, across the Pamirs to Samarkand and Parthia.

The Han envoy groups that travelled west to Central Asia varied in size, some of them numbering over several hundred, the smallest ones made up 100 or so. Later, when the Han court became more familiar with the regions, the number of envoys decreased; only some ten or more groups departed to the West, sometimes as few as five or six.

These envoys, travelling long distances to the ‘Far West’, possibly the Mediterranean, could take as long as eight or nine years to complete a round trip, ‘even the shortest ones could take several years to accomplish’.

From the western end of the Ming Great Wall, at the Jiayuguan Pass in Gansu, the westernmost point of traditional China, the traveller can look out from the ramparts to where the mud-brick Han dynasty frontier wall snakes off into the sand dunes westwards.

The postal system already existed under the Qin, but by the Han it extended across vast distances into Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia.

The letters were of bamboo or wooden slips and boards, but also paper and silk.

Letters in silk envelopes have been found in the dry climate with the address and delivery instructions still on the package.

Yumen was the final stop leaving Han China to the fifty or so kingdoms or small city-states of Central Asia that are named in the Han documents.

On one occasion, the king of Khotan came with 1,700 people, most of whom must have stayed in tents. To host such a large company, supplies and personnel were sent forward in advance. In the station there were also rooms for the post courier personnel and the garrison, and stables for horses.

The letters and administration documents had been thrown out as rubbish, along with coins, tools, old weapons, cart parts, combs and lacquered chopsticks, as well as the remains of foodstuffs, grain and animal bones. In all, an astonishing 35,000 discarded documents were discovered.

Twenty-three thousand of these were mainly wooden tablets and boards along with 12,000 bamboo slips and fragments, only a handful of which (a few hundred s...

The letters are about the business of daily life, asking favours, enquiring about deliveries of goods, swapping news, and also, perhaps, asking for promotions. Some official post was carried by travellers and merchants. In one letter a man named Yuan, a storekeeper in an outlying fort, writes to Xuanquan station and addresses someone who is apparently an old friend, but perhaps of higher rank.

Chinese New Year in the Han was evidently the great festival it always has been and the garrisons get New Year’s allowances from the authorities, while friends exchange gifts with each other.

If correctly understood, the sender, Zheng, was living at an outpost near Hohhot in Inner Mongolia, astonishingly 2,000 kilometres from Dunhuang, where the letter was found. Not surprisingly, Zheng is feeling cut off after five years on duty, his social contacts confined to a small group of local regional military elite and the occasional merchant or traveller, as it was not a major trade route.

‘It is a truth universally acknowledged’, as we might loosely paraphrase the famous opening of the novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms, ‘that an empire long united will fall apart.’ In around 200 CE, the Han fell apart in civil war.

The climactic Battle of the Red Cliffs was fought in the winter of 208/9 CE between a divided north and south. In the south were the warlords Sun Quan and Liu Bei, and in the north the generalissimo Cao Cao, who had attempted to conquer the lands south of the Yangtze and reunite the Han.

Its location, which is still hotly disputed, was somewhere on the Yangtze, southwest of Wuhan, perhaps at the Red Cliff at Chibi in Hubei, where a carved inscription from the eighth or ninth century is still visible above the river waters.

Defeated in a huge naval engagement, Cao Cao made a disastrous retreat northwards to the Han River, where his remaining...

The Red Cliffs battle would go down in legend as the end of the Han dynasty. This is another of those moments when China threatened to break apart for ever. When the warlord Cao Cao died, he left instructions that he should be buried with no treasures and no ceremony, ‘for the country is not at peace’.

China broke into two on the old north and south divide, initiating the longest period of division in its history, over 350 years.

there is no agreed name for this time of disunity. But during this time important...