Hou Hanshu Research Articles

Hans Bielenstein on the civil war in Ancient China in 23-36 AD. A review of Hans Bielenstein’s book “The restoration of the Han Dynasty, with prolegomena on the historiography of the Hou Han Shu; Volume II”

Subject of this review is the second volume of fundamental work of american sinologist H. Bielenstein on war for restoration of Han empire (Bielenstein H. The Restoration of the Han Dynasty: The Civil War: II // Bulletin of the Musum of Far Eastern Antiquities,. 1959. Vol. 31 P. 1287). Authors research purpose was reconstruction of the military actions of the civil war in the first century AD in Ancient China. Highlighting the period of civil war in early history of Eastern Han empire became a big step forward in study of history of this empire. This book and other books of H. Bielenstein become classical for the foreign scientists, but it is little known in our country. This review also seeks to determine the nature of the sources (the types of the texts contained within Hou han shu) he used for his research and it is clear, that the majority of these sources are plot-driving narratives, rather than annals.

Runse hongye: Hanshu wenben de xingcheng yu zaoqi chuanbo

Runse hongye: Hanshu wenben de xingcheng yu zaoqi chuanbo

Wang Anshi and Song Poetic Culture

Wang Anshi and Song Poetic Culture

Fashion and Historical Imagination: The Case of Sun Shou’s “Bewitching and Strange Appearances”

Sun Shou (d. 159), the vilified and powerful wife of notorious regent to the throne Liang Ji (d. 159), is famous for her invention of novel fashions, including new styles of eyebrow, makeup, and hair, and even new ways of walking and smiling. In Hou Hanshu and elsewhere, Sun Shou’s invention of these styles plays an important role in constructing a condemnatory historical judgment of her character, which is informed by systems of correlative cosmology and sumptuary regulation. Significantly, however, attitudes to these fashion statements are not uniform. The negotiation in textual and archaeological sources of the styles associated with Sun Shou, especially the popular duoma ji (“falling off a horse buns”), reveals a process of reimagining and re-appropriation that challenges simplistic or purely linear notions regarding the connotations that attach to and evolve along with individual fashion trends and styles. Read within the frameworks provided by cosmological and historical understandings of dress as a social and political marker, discussions of Sun Shou, duoma ji, and the other styles provide a compelling, lasting example of concerns regarding the ominous force of sumptuary behavior while also indicating processes of redefinition surrounding particular styles and historical actors.

Forming the Early Chinese Court: Rituals, Spaces, Roles by Luke Habberstad

Reviewed by: Forming the Early Chinese Court: Rituals, Spaces, Roles by Luke Habberstad Charles Sanft Forming the Early Chinese Court: Rituals, Spaces, Roles by Luke Habberstad. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2017. Pp. xii + 240. $90.00 cloth, $30.00 paper, $30.00 e-book. Luke Habberstad's Forming the Early Chinese Court is an original, lucid, and insightful consideration of developments in Western Han governance. Habberstad examines the development of bureaucratic offices in the period, portraying a process of increasing differentiation among roles. The center of politics at the time was the imperial court, and Habberstad examines changes that the emperors, their associates, and their competitors made in the interests of power and improved administration. Although Habberstad incorporates some archaeologically excavated texts, most sources for his study are texts from the received tradition. [End Page 228] Many generations of scholars, premodern and modern, have studied those materials, and it can be difficult to say something new about them. Habberstad does it, though. One of the things that set Habberstad's work apart from most studies in this vein is his approach to his sources. He treats his sources as subjects for close reading and not mere collections of information. The result is a multifaceted and agile book that will be of interest to scholars who study the Han dynasty and to those who study bureaucracy as a broader phenomenon. Much of Habberstad's analysis emerges from comparisons between Shiji 史記 and Hanshu 漢書, which is itself not new. According to Hou Hanshu 後漢書, Ban Biao 班彪 (3–54) took inspiration for his historiography from Sima Qian 司馬遷 (d. ca. 80 BCE), creator of Shiji, and his work became the kernel that his son built upon when writing Hanshu.1 Medieval metahistorical works such as Shitong 史通, by Liu Zhiji 劉知幾 (661–721), contrast Shiji and Hanshu, and Ni Si's 倪思 (1147–1220) Ban Ma yitong 班馬異同 is an extended consideration of their differences and similarities. Many modern scholars, such as Wang Liqi 王利器, have also made comparisons that at first glance might seem to be similar to Habberstad's.2 Habberstad distinguishes his approach from those of preceding scholars by giving his source materials the kind of close examination most often reserved for the study of literature. Doing so leads him in a different direction than most treatments of early bureaucracy, which often fall under the rubric of institutional history. Habberstad both acknowledges the value of institutional studies, which is immense, and differentiates his own work (pp. 11–13). This is not to say that historiographical aspects are absent from Forming the Early Chinese Court; just the opposite. Habberstad's comparisons put his subjects into historical contexts, which combine with his detailed examinations to depict shifting practices and shifting conceptions of bureaucracy. The result is a work that does not fit into the usual categories of early China studies, which makes its approach all the more penetrating. [End Page 229] The ways that Forming the Early Chinese Court goes beyond common divisions of sources are perhaps most evident in chapter 5, "The Literary Invention of Bureaucracy" (pp. 139–67). While the title might seem to promise a consideration of literature, and literature is indeed a large part of the discussion, Habberstad gives equal prominence to charts in which Shiji and Hanshu depict institutional change over time. Under Habberstad's analysis, the tables, no less than literary considerations of what an official should be like, demonstrate developments toward an understanding of bureaucracy in which distinctions among official positions become more important and indeed clearer. The means for making those distinctions and their implications are important throughout the book. Habberstad devotes a chapter (pp. 33–60), for instance, to considering salaries and sumptuary privileges that Western Han practice gave persons of particular status and how they related to those of other statuses. He addresses one of the most interesting questions about those rules, which is the frequency of their violation. Habberstad presents these systems "not as clearly defined tools for asserting power but as a collection of processes" (p. 58). Such privileges were not only part of Han officials' lives. Habberstad centers a chapter (pp. 61–84) on discussions about how the leader of Xiongnu 匈奴 would participate in an imperial...

The Place of Hou Hanshu in Early Chinese Historiography

Fan Ye’s Hou Hanshu stands at the center of a period when historical writing in China was proliferating and diversifying in an unprecedented fashion. That period might be framed by two important works of historiography: the Han scholar Ban Biao’s short “General Essay” (“Lüe lun”), which was written around 40 CE and includes a description of the rise of early Chinese historical writing, and a series of fourteen essays found in the history division of the Suishu “Bibliographic Treatise” (“Jingji zhi”). Despite being separated from one another by approximately six centuries, these two works share at least two themes: first, the writing of history is invariably linked in some way to officialdom and has a tradition leading from Chunqiu to Shiji to Hanshu; and second, historical writing is fundamentally an act of compilation in which earlier sources often fall to the wayside. This article examines how Hou Hanshu fits into the pattern of these themes.

Fan Ye and the Hou Hanshu

This special issue on Fan Ye’s Hou Hanshu is the result of a workshop held in Paris in 2017, organized by Beatrice L’Haridon, Universite Paris Diderot and Anne Cheng, College de France. The idea to...

No Comment

This article compares the solar eclipse records in Fan Ye’s Hou Hanshu “Benji” 本紀to those in the Dongguan Hanji (225 CE), Sima Biao’s Xu Hanshu “Wuxing zhi” 五行志, Yuan Hong’s Hou Hanji, as well as Espenak and Meeus’ Five Millennium Canon of Solar Eclipses to comment upon the source, selection, reliability, and function of the eclipse records included in his imperial annals of the Eastern Han (25–220 CE). It finds that while Fan Ye stuck faithfully to the reliable observational record in the Xu Hanshu he at once replaced its interpretative apparatus of omenology with one of politico-ritual action for simple reasons of genre.

Historians Writing about Historians

This article takes three famous historians writing about historians and history-writing as its subject, considering Fan Ye’s work in light of Liu Zhiji’s understanding of history and Fan Ye’s writing on Ban Gu. It seeks to discover in Liu Zhiji’s work the principles for writing a guoshi 國史 (court history), reading Liu Zhiji’s principles in relation to Liu’s assessment of Fan Ye’s Hou Hanshu (History of the Later Han) in general, and, it provides, more particularly as a case study, a study of Fan Ye’s treatment of the earlier historian Ban Gu, author of the Hanshu (History of Han). The article builds the cases that Liu Zhiji and Fan Ye are model historians, insofar as they were responsible for supplying plausible accounts of the past based on the evidence available to them. Liu Zhiji’s metahistorical rules and Fan Ye’s biography of Ban Gu serve in the article as examples in this regard. The article presumes that the historians’ experiences in their own lifetimes inevitably shaped both the style and content of their works, as no “objective” or “scientific” account of history is possible. The good historian instead holds himself accountable for the judgments rendered. So although modern historians of China today may well prefer the rhetorical style of one of the three early historians to that of the others, moderns would do well to ponder, and in some cases emulate features of the early histories under review here.

The Historian's Judgement and the Peers' Judgement in the “Biographical Chapter on the Proscribed Party” of the Hou Hanshu

In the array of biographical chapters in the Hou Hanshu, the “Danggu liezhuan” 黨錮列傳 (Biographical Chapter on the Proscribed Party) presents the specificity to be organized not around the destiny of one person, or of a group of persons gathered for thematic reasons, but around a political event, the proscription of a party of reformist literati and officials. The historian’s way of intertwining the biographies of eminent literati who were engaged in the political activity of “understanding men,” that is of judging the qualities of their peers, sheds light not only on the events themselves but also on the importance of the peers’ judgement as a politico-social phenomenon during this specific historical moment. I will inquire the manifold relationships between this type of judgement on contemporary peers, and the historian’s judgement, which is confronted with the catastrophic consequences of this political activity.

The Southern Man People as a Political and Fiscal Problem in Han Times

Starting from what the Hou Hanshu says about the Southern Man in Later Han times, this article aims to measure the prescriptive importance of Fan Ye’s text, through a comparison with other types of documents, mostly unearthed documents from the Middle Yangzi area. Beyond the stereotypical image of benevolent officials educating savage barbarians, it suggests that the “Man problem” was not an ethnic issue, but rather a political and fiscal one. Indeed, most Man rebellions occurred not only because of the gradual imperial colonization of the southern part of the realm, but also because the officials holding office in the Middle Yangzi regularly questioned the Man’s fiscal status.

Fan Ye's (398–446) Depiction of the Gengshi Years (23–25 CE)

The Gengshi emperor’s two-year-long reign (23–25) has posed a problem to historians of the Later Han dynasty (25–220). As the member of the Liu family who defeated Wang Mang (r. 9–23) became emperor and was, for some time, the superior of the later dynastic founder Guangwu (r. 25–57), Gengshi and his role in the transferal of the Mandate of Heaven needed to be explained. The official history of the Later Han, the Dongguan Hanji, painted a picture of an illegitimate puppet emperor who never possessed the Mandate of Heaven. However, the establishment of a state-sanctioned narrative did not completely stop the controversy surrounding Gengshi’s legitimacy. Our sources indicate that the discussion was not settled until the Tang dynasty and that the controversy only vanished with the rise to prominence of Fan Ye’s Hou Hanshu, which closely followed the Dongguan Hanji version and portrayed Gengshi as an illegitimate ruler and a puppet of his generals. This article is an attempt to retrace the reception of the Gengshi emperor and to analyse Fan Ye’s narrative.

Literary Works and Allusion in Three Biographies of the Hou Hanshu and Their Purpose

This article analyses pieces of literature included in Fan Ye’s chapters on Zhang Heng, Ma Rong, and Cai Yong. It interprets these pieces within the context of its authors’ biographies, coming to the conclusion that they represent different approaches to the Confucian theme of how to serve and survive in times when there is no good ruler. While Zhang Heng was able to make a career under such circumstances, Ma Rong survived but ran into great difficulties and Cai Yong was ultimately executed.

Women of Later Han

Though Confucian teachings might require them to subjugate themselves to the interests of their husband and his family, women of the Han period had a degree of personal autonomy, with rights to property, divorce and remarriage, and some capacity for independent action. At the head of the state, moreover, an empress dowager held regency power during an imperial minority. Despite their formal freedoms, however, in practice most women found their fate and fortune subordinated to the interests of men; and while all people were under constant threat of disease and death, a woman faced particular danger in time of childbirth. Based on accounts from the Hou Hanshu of Fan Ye and other sources, the present study considers some aspects of this situation.

Treatise on the People of Wa in the Chronicle of the Kingdom of Wei: The World's Earliest Written Text on Japan by Saeki Arikiyo

Reviewed by: Treatise on the People of Wa in the Chronicle of the Kingdom of Wei: The World's Earliest Written Text on Japan by Saeki Arikiyo John R. Bentley (bio) Treatise on the People of Wa in the Chronicle of the Kingdom of Wei: The World's Earliest Written Text on Japan. By Saeki Arikiyo; translated by Joshua A. Fogel. MerwinAsia, Portland ME, 2018. x, 420 pages. $55.00, cloth; $32.00 paper. Imagine students in a history class at a high school on the North American continent in the year 3719 CE. They are reading an ancient record about an emissary from an ancient country called France journeying to a loose federation that was once known as the United States of America. This emissary's record states, Ambassador Bernard and his group depart from a port called O'Hare in a settlement known as Chicago; they travel north 75 miles and arrive at a place called Milwaukee. The ruler there is a chieftain called Barrett. The emissary and his group bend their journey west, heading 35 miles, arriving at a cultural center called Oconomowoc. A minor chieftain called Mayor resides here. Traveling another 60 miles west the ambassador and his party reach a lake called Madison. This locale is famous for cheese. Reading this account, the students learn about their early ancestors who lived in a territory called Wisconsin. Perhaps unwittingly, several questionable assumptions are made based on this surviving text. The most tenuous assumption is that these linguistic fragments represent an early form of their modern (English) language. After roughly 1,700 years, the knowledge that these six place names represent five different languages, only one of which is English, would have been primarily lost. Chicago, Milwaukee, and Oconomowoc are actually from two different native Amerind languages (Miami and Potawatomi). Little is known about the inhabitants of the Japanese islands around the third and fourth centuries. During the first 250 years CE, emissaries from Eastern Han and Cao Wei China or from the commanderies on the Korean peninsula traveled the peninsula then crossed the Tsushima Straits to Kyushu and into parts of Honshu, recording the titles, toponyms, and cultural artefacts of the people they observed. Depending on the locale, the Chinese referred to these non-Chinese peoples by specific labels, such as "Han (韓)" or "Wa (倭)." The label "Wa" survived into the Yamato dynasty [End Page 444] in early Japan, so modern readers and scholars find it difficult to resist the temptation to connect the Wa with the ancestors of the Japanese. While the connection is logical, this assumption is still not scientifically proven. These archival accounts of the Wa were compiled in varying degrees of detail in Hou Hanshu (fifth century), Wei lüe (circa 260, lost), and Wei zhi (circa 284). The common reaction in modern Japan is to view the accounts in these records as describing the people and culture of early Japan. Wa titles and toponyms in Wei zhi are often interpreted as being Japanese linguistic forms that are then uncritically mapped on to surviving titles and toponyms, but this exercise tends toward obfuscation instead of elucidation. It is easy to forget that we really do not know much about the Wa who lived 1,700 years ago, so these data in Wei zhi need to be used with great care. Saeki Arikiyo's important two-volume work, Gishi wajinden o yomu (rendered by Joshua Fogel as "Treatise on the People of Wa in the Chronicle of the Kingdom of Wei"), starts by amassing a large amount of documentary evidence to demonstrate that the account in Wei zhi should be taken seriously and not swept aside as wholly unreliable. Having said that, it is still prudent to be cautious as we approach this text and what it can (or cannot) tell us about the early inhabitants of the Japanese islands. Saeki's important contribution is to help the reader process the information in Wei zhi as accurately as possible. Saeki goes through the 2,000-character account of the Wa piece by piece. He does this by combing through the considerable amount of Chinese texts that have accrued over time, picking up examples of...

Les « Hommes singuliers » (duxing) dans le Livre des Han postérieurs (Hou Hanshu, 5e s. apr. J.-C.)

Abstract Fan Ye’s Hou Hanshu (“The Book of Later Han”, 5th AD) devotes a (collective) biographical chapter to the duxing, i.e. “[men of] singular conduct” (ch. 81, “Duxing liezhuan”), namely twenty-four men singled out for their infallible loyalty, strong sense of friendship or filial piety. This paper attempts to grasp the nature of these moral figures, notably in relation to other biographic categories like hermits and knight-errants, with whom the duxing share a number of traits: to some extent, the duxing can be understood as tamed variations of such political outsiders; notably, several duxing refused employment out of loyalty for the Han regime, in ways reminiscent of hermits or recluses declining to accept office out of moral reasons. The duxing chapter is also potentially informative of the moral values of lower social strata such as the regional nobility or even local servants, in supposed contrast with the higher, “Confucian” values of the court and the central administration. A conclusion is that the duxing represent a transition category between (late) Han dynasty values and medieval categories. The duxing chapter is also instructive in historiographical terms, because the nature of the materials collected gives clues to the methods of the historian.

The Silla Annals’ Anachronistic Reference to Queen Himiko, the Wa Ruler of Yamatai*

It is becoming increasingly apparent to historians and archaeologists alike that the twelfth-century Samguk sagi’s datings for many of its early entries, especially those appearing in its Silla Annals (Silla pon’gi 新羅本紀) and Paekche Annals (Paekche pon’gi 百濟本紀), are problematic. Having devoted a number of years to the study of these two texts, I have come to the conclusion that the vast majority of the early entries in both chronicles are accounts of actual historical events that have been systematically antedated. It is evident that the records upon which the Silla and Paekche chronicles were based were, for the most part, originally dated according to the sexagenary cycle (K. kanji 干支 cycle). Thus when accounts of later events in Silla’s or Paekche’s histories were antedated to fill the chronological void created by the implausibly early foundation dates ascribed to the two kingdoms, in most instances the redating was done in multiples of sixty years. In this paper I will first demonstrate through a comparison with evidence derived from two much earlier Chinese sources—the third-century Sanguozhi and the fifth-century Hou Hanshu—that the Silla Annals’ date of 173 for the arrival at the Silla court of a diplomatic mission allegedly sent by the Japanese queen Himiko (K. Pimiho) is not only anachronistic, but impossible. I will then argue through a comparison primarily with evidence from the late eighth-century Japanese history, the Shoku Nihongi, that the embassy to Silla purportedly sent by Himiko in the late second century is actually an antedated account of an embassy recorded as having been sent by a female Japanese ruler of the early eighth century.

A note on the “peculiar” name Jingzhuguo 淨住國 for India in the lost Hou Hanshu of Xie Cheng

Han E, in his treatise Suihua jili, quotes a passage from the lost Houhanshu of Xie Cheng which contains the “peculiar” name of Jingzhuguo (country of pure dwelling) for the land of the Buddha, India. The present paper discusses the conditions under which this name could have arisen.

Juedixi: An Entertainment of War in Early China

Juedixi is a performance genre of the Western Han (206 BCE-23 CE) that developed from rites of the central state in early China. The genesis of this art from competitions and performances dedicated to wu (martiality) and held in autumn and winter is detailed. The relationship of the art to a Han strategem to soften and control nomad opponents is explained. The high point of the genre came under Emperor Wu, who used it to impress local and foreign audiences even as he waged a costly war on the frontier. The genre's excesses were related to the excesses of the unsuccessful war. Juedixi faded after Emperor Wu, but its legacy of variety performance was inherited by the hundred entertainments and wu would later reappear in xiqu as one of the two fundamental categories of performance style. Dallas McCurley is on the faculty at Queens College--City University of New York. She received a PhD from the University of Hawai'i at Manoa with a specialty in Chinese theatre. She has published in Italian and Chinese as well as English, and has staged productions fusing Asian and Western styles in Asia, Europe, and the United States. ********** This article considers how juedixi, the spectacular performance form of the Western Han dynasty (206 BCE-23 CE), was used as mode of impressing enemies and allies and mythologizing the power of the Chinese empire. As exploited by Emperor Wu (literally, the martial emperor) it exemplified art as a military strategem. It grew from Chinese rituals of winter, struggle, and death, which saw violence as part of the cosmic cycle. It became an antecedent of the hundred entertainments. (1) While juedixi faded after Emperor Wu, understanding this form can help clarify aspects of Chinese performance history and help explain the historical significance of the performance category of wu in xiqu. In a larger perspective, juedixi allows us to contemplate performance where military display, sport, and theatre spectacle interpenetrate in ways that have political impact. Juedixi is made up of three words: jue (horn, or the aggressive action of horning), di (resisting), (2) and xi (entertainment, which much later came also to denote theatre). (3) Juedixi's history can be traced back to jueli (horning-strength), competitive displays staged during the Warring States period (481-221 BCE) as rites (Ye 1985: 2-3, 20-21; Dolby 1983: 11; Dieny 1968: 58). The name was changed to juedi (horning-resisting), and various nonmartial acts seem to have been added during the Qin dynasty (221-206 BCE). By the time we reach juedixi, in the reign of the Han Emperor Wu (r. 140-87 BCE), (4) we are confronted with an immense spectacle including not only feats of strength and displays of skill with weaponry, but also acrobatics, song and dance, wondrous technical effects, sequences of transformations, magic acts, and a skit in which an over-the-hill magician battles a white tiger--the whole permeated by a multivalent symbology. Juedixi was marked by its derivation from state rites and its link to Emperor Wu's long war against the Xiongnu nomads, a war that coincided with the first major Chinese imperial expansion. By the time its descendant baixi, or the hundred entertainments, was being staged, the country had undergone antiexpansionist reaction and patronage was passing from imperial to private sponsors. Juedixi allows us to contemplate oriented theatre as a tool of state, and its demise is linked to failure of that state. Promoting Wu (Martiality) through Jueli and Juedi As background to juedixi it is important to see how it relates to earlier forms, the competetive ritual jueli of the Warring States and the more theatricalized juedi of the Qin. Jueli (horning-strength) encompassed a range of competitive performances: weightlifting, (5) wrestling, (6) archery, chariot-handling, and what seems to have been a rowdy and violent team sport known as taju (kickball) (Hou Hanshu: 3123, 3136) Jueli fulfilled three intertwined aims. …

The Place of Filial Piety in Ancient China

A cursory look at the prehistory and the early texts concerning filial piety suggests that the latter has been important in the Chinese ethos since earliest times. The near unanimity of the philosophers of the Golden Age confirms this initial intuition. The Canonical Book of Filial Piety, the Xiaojing, probably assembled around the third or second century B.C., codified this universal belief in the validity of the virtue and, in spite of its mediocrity as a philosophical text, remained an important part of the Confucian canon until modern times. Filial piety is shown as an essential part of life in the early texts (Shangshu, Zuozhuan) and, at least as early as the end of the Former Han dynasty, enters more and more frequently into the dynastic histories and other historical works. The descriptions of filial behavior, particularly in the Hou Hanshu, show sons and daughters trying to surpass themselves in order to manifest their attachment to their parents. Their extraordinary actions, which sometimes caused their deaths, can best be explained by the fact that filial piety in China came to be seen as having absolute value and that the worship of one's parents (that is, one's creators) can be compared to the worship of God in the West.