The Early Chinese Empires: Qin And Han, by Mark Edward Lewis

While this book is by no means perfect, it is the sort of book that someone could profitably read if they had very little knowledge about Chinese history and wanted a brief and not particularly challenging or ambitious text to give them some basic information about the narrative of Chinese history as well as about some notable details. The author gives more than the minimum, but there are definitely some missed opportunities here where the author could have done a lot better of a job in conveying information that people would want to know about early Chinese history. In some ways, perhaps the author took the austere tone and critical tone of Chinese histories too much to heart in providing one of his own, one that reflects the author’s own concerns and what might be subjects of greater intertest to Western “modern audiences” than to me in particular as a reader. When I brought up the subject of this book to someone I was reading the book around, it is funny that the subject of which he and I were both looking to see material in the book was one that the author not only chose not to talk about, but at the end of the relevant chapter (“Religion”) deliberately stated that he would not be covering the subject, which I found to be egregious trolling, personally. This sort of attitude of trying to deliberately subvert the expectations of the reader is not something I appreciate.

This book is a bit more than 250 pages of material, divided into ten chapters that are organized in a topical nature. The author begins with a short introduction that lays out the scope and approach of the book. This is followed by a discussion of the geography of empire, which points out the Northern-focused nature of early Chinese empires, where barbarian regimes were close by and where China ruled over many areas in the South that were full of minority peoples who were subjects but not really Chinese in culture (1). This is followed by a discussion of the Qin empire in particular as being a state organized for war (2), followed by a discussion of the paradox of empire in which the Qin found that unifying China brutally did not make it easy to hold onto China after it was conquered (3). The next two chapters deal with the contrast between imperial cities, with the desire on the part of leaders to minimize the importance of trade and business and to maximize the role of government (4), along with the importance of food production by the otherwise neglected rural peasants (5). The author examines the relationship of China to the outer world that they only gradually and partially came to know during the period (6), as well as the importance of family (7), with a feminist bent that comments on the way that women were considered to be aliens to the family whose loyalty was in question unless they made drastic sacrifices to show their devotion to the patriline. The author then discusses various matters of religion (8), literature (9), and law (10) in a generally superficial manner. The book then concludes with a conclusion, dates and usage, acknowledgements, notes, a bibliography, and an index.

If one is looking for a book which provides a superficial but by no means uninteresting discussion of the main political and social tendencies of the first two dynasties of Chinese imperial history, pointing out how it is that the Qin dynasty found itself a prisoner of its own success, unable to transition from the cruel and harsh policies it had undertaken to unite China from the different task of how to rule China, or how the Han empire did not change as much from the Qin as it proclaimed, and when it did seek to demilitarize the interior of the country, found out that it had sabotaged its own efforts to deal with overly powerful provincial governments, local landlord elites, or footloose and angry peasant hordes, this book will do nicely. It is not a book one should read if one wants to gain information about Chinese cosmology and mythology, though, as the religion discussed in these pages mostly deals with ancestor worship and local spirits as well as religious charlatans and emperors seeking to gain immortality through toxic elixirs and promiscuous sexual predation. The author also makes some interesting comments about the urban ne’er-do-wells who were such a problem for the legal order of Qin and Han China, among whom, interestingly enough, was Liu Bang, the founder of the Han dynasty himself. Similarly, the author shows great interest to the problem of Chinese attempts to control publishing, which in turn limited the supply of texts that were able to survive the ravages of history and the destruction of Chinese capitals in times of social unrest, as well as the way in which many Chinese writings had very divergent canons which presented difficulties for those who wanted a pure text to better understand the writings of the past. These are, it should be noted, problems that are relevant far beyond ancient China.