Now on (and/or back) to Period Six – the mighty (brief) Qin Dynasty (with a short prelude)

So it’s back to the Dynastic history but before I note notable Qin notes I want to refer to a bit of archaeology and it actually relates to the following Han dynasty period. The first piece of archaeology involved comes from Mawangdui (馬王堆) in Central China and it relates to a burial site. Essentially I’m noting this with the Qin history because most of Qin history too is really archaeological in a way with one exception: the actual historical work of Sima Qian. I’ll consider Sima, who was a Han official, in the next post.

The Han burial site was excavated between 1972 and 1974 and the two primary burials were of Countess Dai (died 175 BCE) and the son of Li Cang, the Marquis of Dai. Countess Dai’s decorated and sealed coffin contained a version of the Dao De Jing with her mummy (safely wrapped in about twenty layers of clothing). In addition, there was a notable burial excavated in 1968 at Mang Cheng in North China (of Dou Wan, the wife of a Han notable and ruler of Zhong Shan). At least one magnificent jade suit/shroud was found there. This would have been very expensive. Jade was, of course, a symbol of immortality due to its own durability. Burials in various places interest us because they indicate the similarities or otherwise in religious belief and practice between regions.

Briefly, here are a few of the things we’ve discovered both through archaeology and writings that have to do with life and death. The belief concerning souls was that the living had souls called Po (魄) and Hun (魂) and the dead had disembodied souls called Gui (鬼). You can see the Gui character has become a radical in the Po and Hun characters. “Oh, soul, come back” would be shouted from the roof of a ‘recently departed’ person’s house to ensure the soul had definitely departed. One of the above burials contained a T-shaped banner painted on silk that would have been used in such a ritual. It depicted the order of the universe with two crouching men presumed to be calling out to the soul from a rooftop and contained no characters.

There were regional peculiarities. In parts of the southwest, for example, souls of sick children would be cajoled, coaxed and enticed with promises and threats to stay in the ‘safe’ body and away from the ‘dangerous’ underworld. To keep the Po with the body, food was left in coffins. Lady-in-waiting dolls were also found in the coffins of notables by the Han period so at least real ladies-in-waiting no longer needed to be sacrificed. Coinciding somewhat with the growth of bureaucracy and the use of money in the living world, money also began to be required in coffins (to ‘pay the (bureaucratic) ferryman’, as it were).

The Qin period is interesting archaeologically mainly at the believed site of the burial of its first Emperor (still uncovered and not located with complete certainty) and the (presumably) nearby “Terracotta Warriors”. The burial is believed to be under a low wide mound. The warriors were moulded and then individualised with the shaping of additional smeared clay. We have evidence that Qin crossbow-men such as the ones depicted could fire arrows 800 metres.

We also have evidence from the wording of later Qin edicts that earlier edicts concerning weights and measures had very quickly come to be ignored by the people. People may have been buried alive as punishment – a very legalist-style punishment. Did such features of legalism as those eventually bring about a popular revolt that in turn brought about the Han dynasty? Certainly the earliest Han decisions made murder, theft and grievous bodily harm the only capital crimes and this would have been an improvement for the commoner but the first Hans were also still somewhat legalist in practice. Whatever the case was, taxes were still imposed but a new Mandate of Heaven (first discussed in relation to Zhou rulers (especially by Mencius)) seems to have been given for an extended period.

Jack Dull suggested how to read the ending of the Qin using Anton Hulsewé’s archaeological work at Yünmeng. A bamboo-strip administrative manual reckoned to date to around 217 BCE (mid-Qin) was discovered that contained punishments that were not as harsh as (perhaps biased) contemporary (and later) sources indicated. Supervisors of corveés, for example, were mainly to be merely given a dressing down if the labourers arrived up to five days late for work. Corveés were merely dismissed if there was a heavy downpour of rain whereas earlier evidence had suggested they were killed and that this had been alleged as one reason for the alleged popular ‘corveé revolt’ allegedly ending the Qin. Perhaps the rules again weren’t being followed. We do know that the peasants under this supposed brutal regime were given time out to buy fish and that they had silk and cinnabar (used to make vermillion).

The leader of the revolt, Chen She, may have been more senior in the dynasty than was first thought. He apparently had the wherewithal to impersonate the son of the Emperor. This was one of the ways he was able to gain support, again not suggestive of the greatest hatred of the Qin. Imagine the son of Bashshar al-Asad being widely welcomed as a potential ruler in Syria at the moment. Dull checked out everybody’s backgrounds. He proposed that the revolt may have actually been led by a recently overthrown Confucian royal from the local free (pre-Qin) state of Qu and that his pride may have been involved. The methods employed may certainly have been or become populist and also loosely regionalist. In the next post, I’ll move on to the Chinese idea of history, the Han period and Sima Qian, that great Han historian.