From periphery to borderland: Yelang metallurgy and Han imperial governance of Southwest China

Although long considered to be a barren region on the periphery of ancient Chinese civilization, the southwest massif was once the political heartland of numerous Bronze Age kingdoms during the first millennium bc. Their distinctive material tradition—intricately cast bronze kettledrums and cowrie shell containers—have given archaeologists and historians a glimpse of the extraordinary wealth, artistry, and power exercised by highland leaders in prehistory. After a millennium of rule, however, imperial conquest under the Han state in 109 bc reduced local power, leading to the disappearance of Bronze Age traditions and a fraught process of assimilation. Instead of a clash between center and periphery or barbarism and civilization, this book examines the classic study of imperial conquest as a confrontation of different political times. The author grounds an archaeological account of the region where landscape histories and funerary traditions associated the Dian and Mimo polities bring to light a history of competing elite lineages, warrior cultures, and chiefly genealogies. In particular, the book illustrates how precious funerary offerings—drums, ornate weaponry, and cowries—distinguished personal biographies and memories that were central to the transmission of status across generations. Imperial incorporation therefore emerges as a problem that entangled Han bureaucratic time and historical production with the generational time of highland leadership and its political cycles. The book extends conventional approaches to empires to show how the political time of prehistory can complicate imperial governance and recast rupture less as a fateful consequence than a contentious process involving local actors and generating new stakes.