FA Cop 2.
SLAVERY IN CHINA DURING THE FORMER HAN DYNASTY
206B.C.— A.D.25
BY
CLARENCE MARTIN WILBUR
SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS
FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
IN THE FACULTY OF PHILOSOPHY
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
ANTHROPOLOGICAL SERIES
FIELD MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY
VOLUME 34
JANUARY 15, 1943
PUBLICATION 525
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CHINA DUUING THE FuRMKU HAN DYNASTY, CA. 100 B.C.
Publications
OF
FIELD MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY
ANTHROPOLOGICAL SERIES Volume 34
THE LIBRARY OF THE
SEP 5 1944
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS
f.W NATURAL ^\ ^ HISTORY >•)
\SWlCAGJ
CHICAGO, U.S.A. 1943
SLAVERY IN CHINA DURING THE FORMER HAN DYNASTY
SLAVERY IN CHINA DURING THE FORMER HAN DYNASTY
206B.C.— A.D.25
BY
CLARENCE MARTIN WILBUR
SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS
FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
IN THE FACULTY OF PHILOSOPHY
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
THE LIBRARY OF THE
SEP 5 1944
UNIVERSITY OF ILIINOIS ANTHROPOLOGICAL SERIES
FIELD MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY
VOLUME 34
JANUARY 15, 1943 PUBLICATION 525
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA BY FIELD MUSEUM PRESS
0-^
FA i^e^^
CONTENTS
PAGE
List of Illustrations 9
Preface 11
PART I
Abbreviations Used in Part I 16
List of Rulers During the Former Han Dynasty 16
I. Han History and Society 17
Decline of Feudalism and Beginning of Empire 17
The Han Dynasty 20
First Phase: Founding, Consolidation, and Recuperation .... 20
Second Phase: Expansion and Depletion 22
-<^ Third Phase: Gradual Economic Decline 25
Fourth Phase: Last Minute Reform, and Collapse 27
1/ Distribution of Population, and Urbanization 30
Local and Central Administration 31
Class System 33
Commoners 33
The Bureaucracy 35
The Nobility 36
Consort Families 38
The Lowest Social Classes 40
Fluidity of Social Position 41
n. Historical Sources, and Definition of Terms 50
Historical Sources 50
Nature and Deficiency of Sources 53
N Advantages of Sources 55
V Method of Using Sources 58
"J Problems of Definition 60
. .Tj^lave Terminology of the Former Han Period 64
^ in. Enslavement 72
vv Enslavement of Criminals and Their Families 72
Distinction Between Convicts and Slaves 80
Enslavement Because of Economic Distress 85
Legality of Sale into Slavery 88
Illegal Forced Enslavement 90
Importation of Foreign Slaves 92
\> IV. Were Prisoners of War Enslaved? 98
'Y Records of Captives 99
Differentiation Between Surrendered and Captured Enemy .... 102
S ■ (J\' Typical Reports of Wars and Captures 103
Presumptive Evidence for Enslavement of Captives 109
Proportion Enslaved, and Disposition of Others 114
>^ 7
8 CONTENTS
PAGE
V. Acquisition, Hereditary Slavery, and Manumission 118
Acquisition of Slaves 118
Buying and Selling Slaves 121
Hereditary Slavery 126
Manumission of Government Slaves 129
Manumission of Private Slaves 134
VI. Status of Slaves 140
Customary Attitude Toward Slaves 140
Slaves in Criminal Law 146
Legal Rights of Masters over Slaves 152
Slaves in the Courts of Law 156
"Mixed Marriages," and Status of Children 158
VII. Slave Owners and Numbers of Slaves 165
Types of Slave Owners 166
Numbers of Slaves Individually Owned 169
Total Number of Slaves 174
VIII. Service Functions of Private Slaves 178
Duties of Domestic Slaves 178
Treatment and Position of Domestic Slaves 184
Slaves as Instruments of Power 187
IX. Productive Employment of Private Slaves . 195
Evidence and Presumption of Slaves in Agriculture 195
Relation Between Slave and Free Labor 203
Factors That Produced Landless Free Labor 204
Use of Land Owned as Investment 210
_, Probable Unimportance of Slaves in Agriculture 215
tK'f Use of Slaves in Manufactures and Commerce 216
X. Functions of Government Slaves 221
Government Enterprises and Labor Supply 222
Hypothetical Spheres of Government Slave Work 226
Service Duties of Government Slaves 227
Productive Employment of Government Slaves 232
XI. Synthesis 237
Evidences of Historical Development 237
Former Han Slavery Generalized 240
Reasons for Arrested Growth 244
PART II
Notation and Methods of Translation 255
Abbreviations Used in Part II 256
Documents: Numbers 1-138 258
Appendix: Abstracts of Lesser Documents 469
Bibliography 473
Index 482
FACING PAGE
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PLATES
1. Mortuary figurine of a servant or slave of the Han Period . 178
2. Scenes of upper-class life during the Han Period, showing
services often performed by slaves 186
MAP
China during the Former Han dynasty 1
PREFACE
The economic history of Greece and Rome, and of our own nation before 1860, cannot be understood without a knowledge of slavery. China, too, had a slavery system, but it has never been adequately described by Western historians. Noting many similarities between ancient China and the classical world, modern Chinese scholars have recently devoted considerable attention to this subject, and their research has fostered an ardent dispute concerning its impor- tance in successive periods. How important was slavery in ancient China? Is the social and economic history of that country, or of any of the periods in its development, also unintelligible without a clear picture of slavery and its function there?
Chinese slavery may be studied either extensively or intensively. The first method would seek to describe the institution throughout a period longer than that from Homeric times down to the middle of the nineteenth century. More than a hundred years ago Edouard Biot used the extensive method in his "M^moire sur la condition des esclaves et des serviteurs gag^s en Chine." Toni Pippon used the same approach in his "Beitrag zum Chinesischen Sklaven- system," pubHshed in 1936. The present work employs the intensive method, concentrating entirely upon the first period for which native historical literature allows a detailed examination of the system in its historical and economic setting. Chinese slavery did not originate during the Former Han dynasty (206 b.c.-a.d. 25), but it expanded rapidly at that time. Slaves probably then achieved their greatest numbers in proportion to the total population, and the period is the first in which it is possible to suppose, on the basis of historical texts, that slavery had an important place in Chinese economy.
This study of Chinese slavery is divided into two sections:
Part I seeks the solution to two general questions. What was the nature of Chinese slavery in Former Han times? What were the position and function of slaves in Han society and economics? Since these problems relate to a particular epoch in China's develop- ment, the period itself must be described from the point of view of its unfolding history, its society, and its general economic system. The success of the answers depends upon the adequacy of the available source material, the way it is used, the precision with which the term "slave" is defined, and the degree of identity that can be established between our usage and the terminology found in Chinese sources. The first question asks for a descriptive answer, and requires
11
12 PREFACE
an analysis of the sources of slaves, acquisition by owners, the slave trade, hereditary slavery and manumission — everything that might be called the "life cycle" of slaves in the abstract. The position of slaves in Former Han society is illustrated by their status, both customary and legal. Servile status depends to a considerable degree upon the kinds of people that owned slaves, the purposes for which slaves were owned, and the proportion of slaves to the total population. When we know what kinds of people owned slaves it is possible to ask why they owned them, that is to say, what functions the slaves fulfilled: whether they were important to their masters or to the state as producers of wealth — that is, as labor — or whether they were more important in other ways.
The response to the two major questions raises a third. What were the place and function of the whole slavery system in China as a whole, during the Former Han period? But is it permissible to discuss China during two and a quarter centuries "as a whole"? What evidences are there of rigidity or of historical change in the slavery system? Answers to such queries should contribute to a solution of the controversy, namely: Was the society of the Former Han period a "slavery society," and was the economic system a "slavery economy"?
Part II, which was prepared first, translates and annotates some 140 passages on slaves discovered in historical literature written during the Former Han period or shortly thereafter. When all the basic documents are placed in one section they retain their independent validity (except for that personal factor of translation), and therefore may be employed by any investigator without regard to the analysis of them in Part I. Aside from being the foundation of this book, the documents are an integral part of it, constantly referred to by number in substantiation of all descriptions and con- clusions. Many reveal, inter alia, fascinating details about life in the imperial palaces or patrician households, the political system of the dynasty, and the rise and fall of Chinese statesmen, generals, or relatives of the imperial house by marriage. For casual readers I venture to recommend document Number 14-, which poignantly describes the reunion of a young slave and his elder sister after she unexpectedly became Empress; Number 27, which tells how a chorus girl captivated Emperor Wu and ultimately became his consort; the revealing account of jealousy and intrigue in a royal household, detailed in Number 37; the report, in Number 55, of an imperial investigating commission which substantiated the claim that a
PREFACE 13
rustic old dame was the maternal grandmother of Emperor Hslian; the lurid story of a pathologically jealous queen, recounted in Number 6Ji.; and document Number 75, the confidential report of a detective who had been commissioned to spy upon a man deposed from the imperial throne and suspected of plotting a coup d'Hat. There are many other passages of general interest, but perhaps the most revealing of all is Number 107, which gives an eye-witness description of the machinations of an imperial concubine. She so dominated Emperor Ch'eng that he weakly submitted to her wishes and destroyed his only sons, thus dying without an heir, and most calamitous of all, leaving no direct line to carry on his ancestral worship!
Many people and institutions have assisted in the preparation of this book. I wish to record first my gratitude to Hollis Adelbert Wilbur and Mary Matteson Wilbur, my parents.
At Columbia University Professor William Linn Westermann, himself an authority on ancient slavery, provided the first inspiration for the study, and his continued interest and critical advice have been very stimulating. Dr. Luther Carrington Goodrich, Executive Officer of the Department of Chinese and Japanese at Columbia, provided unflagging encouragement for my research, and has read the entire manuscript, making numerous suggestions for improve- ment. Professor Jan Julius Lodewijk Duyvendak, Director of the Sinologisch Instituut at Leiden and Visiting Professor of Chinese at Columbia, went through most of the translations with infinite care, correcting errors, and proposing many felicitous renderings. Two other friends of long standing in the same department. Dr. Cyrus Henderson Peake and Mr. Chi-chen Wang, have read the manuscript and made numerous useful suggestions.
During several years of extensive correspondence. Dr. Homer H. Dubs, Professor of Philosophy at Duke University and translator of the Imperial Annals in the History of the Former Han Dynasty, has thrown light on a number of vexing problems concerning the China of those ancient days. He has meticulously read most of the manuscript, suggesting innumerable corrections and offering additional information from his storehouse of knowledge and notes. Likewise, during a period of more than two years Mr. Charles Y. Hu £fe^^, a gifted graduate student in the University of Chicago, worked with me on the translations and their analysis.
It is also a genuine pleasure to express my gratitude to Dr. Charles Sidney Gardner, of Harvard University; to Dr. Herrlee
14 PREFACE
Glessner Creel, of the University of Chicago; to Dr. A. W. Hummel, Chief of the Division of Orientalia of the Library of Congress; and to Mr. and Mrs. Carl Whiting Bishop of the Freer Gallery of Art. Mrs. John King Fairbank kindly made the delicate and accurate restoration of the rubbing which is reproduced on Plate 2. Mr. Robert Yule Mi^^, of Field Museum, Assistant in Archaeology, drew the map, and greatly improved the legibility of the sixteenth century copy of the contract for a slave, reproduced in document 83. Miss Rose Harris and Mrs. Anna Pfeiffer did the tedious work of typ- ing, and patiently checked and rechecked citations through several recensions. There is also my wife, who would prefer to see no mention of her part; and indeed there is no way to describe the extent of her aid and of my gratitude.
Through the good offices of Mrs. Emily M. Wilcoxson, Librarian at Field Museum, I have been freely allowed to borrow books in Chinese and Japanese from the Division of Orientalia, Library of Congress, and from the Far Eastern libraries of Columbia University, the University of Chicago, and the Harvard-Yenching Institute. Some of the preliminary work on this book was done during after- hours when I was a Fellow of the Social Science Research Council; its support is gratefully acknowledged here again. By a happy arrangement, the American Friends of China, Chicago, enabled me to continue work with Mr. Charles Hu longer than would have been otherwise possible. To the American Council of Learned Societies I am indebted for a grant which provided the electrotypes of the Chinese texts printed in the second part of the book. Mr. Mortimer Graves, Administrative Secretary of the Council, aided greatly by working out the technical details. Dr. George A. Kennedy, of Yale University, supervised the setting of the Chinese type, which was made doubly difficult by the frequency of archaic forms.
Finally, there is Field Museum of Natural History, whose Director, Colonel Clifford C. Gregg, allowed me to devote the greater part of the past year, and some of my Museum time previously, to this study. Dr. Paul S. Martin, Chief Curator of Anthropology, constantly encouraged me and, by lightening my routine tasks, allowed me more uninterrupted time for study and writing. Miss Lillian Ross, Associate Editor of Scientific Publications, has greatly improved this book in seeing it through the press.
C. Martin Wilbur August 1, ISIfl
SLAVERY IN CHINA DURING THE FORMER HAN DYNASTY
PART I
ABBREVIATIONS USED IN PART I
BEFEO Bulletin de I'Ecole Frangaise d' Extreme-Orient
BMFEA Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities
CHHP Ch'ing Hua hsiieh pao (Tsing Hua journal)
CHS Ch'ien Han shu
CLHP Chin Ling hsiieh pao (Nanking journal)
HFHD The history of the Former Han dynasty by Pan Kii, translated by
Homer H. Dubs
HHS Hou Han shu
HJAS Harvard journal of Asiatic studies
JAOS Journal of the American Oriental Society
JNCBRAS Journal of the North China Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society
MH Les memoires historiques de Se-ma Ts'ien, translated by Edouard
Chavannes
MRDTB Memoirs of the Research Department of the Toyo Bunko
MSOS Mitteilungen des Seminars fiir orientalische Sprachen
SC Shih chi
TP T'oung pao
YCHP Yen Ching hsiieh pao (Yenching journal of Chinese studies)
LIST OF RULERS DURING THE FORMER HAN DYNASTY
B.C.
Emperor Kao (Kao-tsu) 206-195
Emperor Hui 194-188
The Empress Dowager nee Lij 187-180
Emperor Wen 179-157
Emperor Ching 156-141
Emperor Wu 140- 87
Emperor Chao 86- 74
Emperor Hsuan 73- 49
Emperor Yuan 48- 33
Emperor Ch'eng 32- 7
Emperor Ai 6-1
A.D.
Emperor P'ing 1-5
Wang Mang (Regent) 6-8
Wang Mang 9-23
Ascension to the throne usually occurred in the year preceding the official commencement of the reign.
16
I. HAN HISTORY AND SOCIETY^
Storming down from Tibet, arching into a great northward loop around the Ordos, racing south between Shensi and Shansi, the Yellow River finally cuts its way eastward through loess-covered hills to flow sluggishly across its delta, the rich north-China plain, to the sea. The lower basin of the river and the valley of its affluent, the Wei, are the arena of early Chinese history. Screened behind the Tibetan massif, which has deserts to the north and jungles to the south, China stands at the eastern end of the great Eurasian continent, her history the central history of eastern Asia. The deserts and steppes of Mongolia fix northern limits to the spread of China's economy of intensive agriculture. But southward lie no natural barriers, and century after century the Chinese pushed their way and spread their culture from the Yellow River, first to the Yangtze, then slowly southward to the sea.
The southward expansion had only begun in early Han times. The political center of the Former Han empire was in the northwest, where the fertile valleys of the Wei and the Ching rivers served during most of the period as the main economic base. Blest with strong natural defenses, this region "within the pass" was populous, and rich in agricultural and grazing land. Set in the heart of an irrigated, mountain-surrounded plain, Ch'ang-an, the capital, kept its watchful eye upon the strategic eastward passes from the south bank of the Wei. Outside those passes were the regions which had been independent feudal kingdoms only a few decades before the Han dynasty commenced.
Decline of Feudalism and Beginning of Empire
History always begins mi medias res. The Han dynasty arose from the ruins of the Ch'in empire, which was originally only one of many states into which China was divided along feudal lines. The two centuries prior to the beginning of the Han empire saw a
1 This chapter is designed as a historical and societal framework for the rest of the book. Much that would be important from some other point of view has been omitted, and only primary historical trends and the essentials of the social system are discussed. In order that a conception of the period may be presented in broad outline and without interruption, the documentation has been placed in a long note at the end. There is no attempt to cover every statement with exact citation, but many assertions made here are more fully developed and better substantiated in later chapters.
17
18 SLAVERY IN THE FORMER HAN DYNASTY
revolution in Chinese society. Shortly after 400 B.C. feudal govern- ment began to assume a regional quality, presaging empire. One evidence of this regionalism was the building of great walls which apparently attempted to define "forever" the maximum areas that could be ruled by feudal forms: walls not only between China and the slowly emerging steppe society on the north, but also interior barriers between the great states, between Wei and Ch'in, Ch'i and Ch'u, and between Ch'u and the smaller states of the middle Yellow River Valley. Within the great states a system of administration was developing which increased state power at the expense of the various vassal lords. Ch'in dominated the northwest, Ch'i lorded over a group of small states in the east, while Ch'u controlled most of the area in the south between the Yellow River and the Yangtze, and the coastal area northward to Shantung. Disunited, Chao, Wei, and a different Han, the succession states of the once powerful Chin in the north, were in danger of being rolled up from the west by Ch'in. Warfare was changing in both technique and objective. Mounted archers, trained infantry, and crossbowmen gradually replaced the clumsy feudal chariots surrounded by poorly armed serfs, and the objective was no longer to assert leadership among vassals, but to destroy defeated ruling houses and to absorb defeated states. Ch'in, the protagonist of this non-feudal way of fighting, succeeded little by little in consolidating adjacent areas, west, east, and south, into one ever-expanding empire.
Among the internal reforms of Ch'in, giving it superiority over all rivals, was its change in the system of land tenure, ascribed to Shang Yang, to whom in the capacity of Chancellor was intrusted the rule of Ch'in state. In feudal China the owning of land had been almost a religious matter, and only nobles could hold it either in fee or in domain. The actual farmers were serfs working part of the land for the overlord and part for themselves. Shang Yang, who is stylized by formal Chinese history as the originator of changes going forward in many regions, is credited with permitting private ownership of land by the comm.on people, thereby shattering the foundations of feudalism and forwarding the subjugation of the nobility to an absolute monarch. By introducing direct taxation in kind, Ch'in helped to transform the actual farmers from serfs to free peasants, who no longer owed their lord stated amounts of labor, but owed only a tax to the state and perhaps rent to a land- lord. For administration and law-enforcement, families were grouped into fives and tens, the members of which were severally responsible
HAN HISTORY AND SOCIETY 19
for the conduct of all the others. By direct taxation, emphasis on agriculture, and encouragement of immigration, Shang Yang en- deavored to increase the amount of surplus grain, and thus support a large professional army solely in the service of the state.
Ch'in used its new military machine ruthlessly, encouraged its troops to slaughter defeated enemies, and gave bonuses according to the number of heads taken in battle. At the same time it slowly suppressed its great feudal families, and created a new but honorary aristocracy of fighters and people of wealth. As its old nobility was shorn, or as new territory was conquered, Ch'in established commanderies or prefectures whose officials were directly appointed by the Ch'in king.
During the fourth and third centuries B.C., other states also were altering their political, economic, and social forms. A whole class of "political scientists," men like Shang Yang, traveled from court to court advising on statecraft and war. Ch'in seems to have had the edge on its rivals by an early start and by a more thoroughgoing economic reform which made its base more productive than any of the other great regions, with the possible exception of Ch'u. In war Ch'in had the great advantage of nearly impregnable natural defenses on the south and east, together with control of passes and head-waters leading into the territories of its rivals.
The climax of the last two centuries before Han came during the reign of the First Emperor of the Ch'in dynasty, who ruled (246- 210 B.C.) first as King of Ch'in, then as the Emperor of a consolidated China. The breath-taking speed with which he mastered all the rival kingdoms is shown by the following chronology of conquest and annexation: 230 B.C., Han; 228, Chao; 225, Wei; 223, Ch'u; 222, Yen; 221, Ch'i — all of China conquered. Principally on the advice of his great minister, Li Ssu, the First Emperor crushed the old feudalism wherever he found it and established the Chinese imperial system whose main forms endured for two millenniums. He further encouraged private landowning and introduced a standard coinage. He tried to enforce a detailed and harsh criminal code, emphasizing legalism in place of the essentially feudal customary morality. He unified the forms of the written characters, and attempted to remove from circulation the ancient historical literature employed by scholars to oppose his reforms. He established an administrative system using a civil bureaucracy, and divided the country into thirty-six commanderies, laying the basis for the provincial and prefectural system of today.
20 slavery in the former han dynasty
The Han Dynasty
FIRST phase: founding, consolidation, and RECUPERATION
The First Emperor enjoyed his empire for only a dozen years. After his death in 210 B.C. it burst apart. Rebelhon sprang up in southern Honan and spread quickly all over eastern China. It began as a mel^e of regional armies and rival generals, some of whom were members of the old aristocracy, others mere commoners who gave their local revolts the color of legitimacy by sponsoring various royal scions. In this respect the rebellion was a re-assertion of feudalism. But it was also a popular movement arising from the masses. As the rebellion progressed, the aristocracy proved inca- pable, while commoners fought their way to the top. The capture of the Ch'in capital late in 207 B.C. was the signal for a bitter struggle between Hsiang Yii, descended from famous generals of Ch'u, and Liu Chi, a former village official who turned bandit and then became a rebel leader. This struggle lasted until 202, when Liu Chi finally slew his rival, absorbed his army, and was made Emperor by his nobles and adherents. Thus the Han dynasty began. Liu Chi is known historically by his temple name, Kao-tsu, "the Eminent Founder," or by his posthumous title. Emperor Kao; and the dynasty officially begins in 206 B.C., the first year after the Ch'in dynasty fell.
During nearly seven years of rebellion and civil war, rival armies had crossed and recrossed north China, conscripted troops, besieged towns, burned stores of grain, looted, and fought pitched battles. Disrupting agriculture and trade, they brought on cruel famines which in some areas cut the population in half. Emperor Kao therefore faced the colossal problem of organizing an empire, de- mobilizing and rewarding his troops, and returning his country to a productive, peace-time basis. Fortunately he had competent advisers for, though he was a good leader of troops and a shrewd politician, he had had no experience in governing. One of his first acts was to claim Shensi for himself and to establish there his capital. Other regions he awarded as kingdoms and marquisates to his best generals and to some of Hsiang Yii's leaders who had surrendered to him. This policy quickly spelled trouble, and Kao-tsu had to devote much of his reign to quelling revolts among seven kings not of the house of Liu. At his death, nine of his sons or relatives occupied kingdoms, while men from his native prefecture held practically all the important government positions.
HAN HISTORY AND SOCIETY 21
Thus, while the early years of the dynasty witnessed a return to regionalism, with political administration in several important areas controlled by virtually independent nobles, it was not a return to Chou feudalism. Organization of society and developments in economics, especially land ownerships, prohibited that. In areas not controlled by kings, Kao-tsu set up commanderies and pre- fectures just as the Ch'in rulers had done. Furthermore, the new nobility was not descended from the old aristocracy, but was com- posed entirely of members of his own clan and of his followers, some of whom had risen from very humble station. During the course of the next century actual control over the whole country, including the feudal fiefs, was wrested from the nobility and lodged again with the central government.
The first serious threat to Kao-tsu's imperial line came from his Empress nee Lii, a forceful and scheming woman who had con- siderably aided Kao-tsu in his conquests. She succeeded in getting her son made Heir-apparent, although he was neither the oldest nor the favorite son of the Emperor. She closely controlled Emperor Hui during his seven years on the throne, and after his death appointed a child for whom she ruled as Regent. When this child died she appointed another, asserted to be a son of Emperor Hui, but in reality from her own clan. Some members of the Lii clan had assisted in Kao-tsu's conquest and had been awarded mar- quisates. During her regency the Empress ennobled many others from her own clan, even making some of them kings; she placed one of her nephews in charge of the civil government, and another in command of the army. This conspiracy to steal the empire was crushed within six weeks after her death in 180 B.C., when Kao-tsu's relatives and old followers, supported by the army, massacred the entire Lii clan. Yet the fear that a consort family might usurp the throne haunted every ruler thereafter.
Emperor Hui had no living male descendant. The Liu clan there- fore selected the oldest living son of Kao-tsu to be the next Emperor. Canonized as Emperor Wen, he gave China a long and model reign. It was under his successor. Emperor Ching, that there arose the second threat to the dynasty: the Rebellion of the Seven States, in 154 B.C. This was a contest between central control and the regional power lodged in a group of kings, all from the house of Liu. Both Emperors Wen and Ching had systematically limited the authority of their kingly relatives whenever a suitable opportunity arose. Thus, when the King of Ch'i died without a son in 164 B.C.,
22 SLAVERY IN THE FORMER HAN DYNASTY
Emperor Wen divided Ch'i into seven parts, placing one of the King's brothers over each district, thereby automatically weakening that important region. Emperor Ching reduced the territory of Chao, Ch'u, and Chiao-hsi, and planned to do the same with Wu, the richest and strongest of all. But the King of Wu rebelled, and was quickly joined by the Kings of Chao, Ch'u, and four divisions of the former Ch'i. The imperial armies quelled the revolt, but it cost thousands of lives, including those of the seven rebels, whose king- doms were abolished and made into commanderies. Thereafter, the imperial governm.ent methodically reduced the power of the kings by directly appointing for each noble a chancellor who actually governed the fief, and by dividing fiefs among all the sons of a deceased noble, thus finally settling for that dynasty the question of regionalism versus empire.
The first seventy years of the d5masty was a period of rest and recuperation for the people, marred only by the revolts during Kao-tsu's reign, the Rebellion of the Seven States, and sporadic conflict with the Hsiung-nu. Most of the harsh, exacting laws of Ch'in were revoked. Empress Dowager nee Lli gave a good adminis- tration, and the long, frugal reign of Emperor Wen was a golden period for the common people. In 195 B.C. the basic tax on agricul- tural products was set at one part in fifteen, a reduction from the Ch'in tithe; in 167 it was entirely abolished, and in 156 it was restored at only half the earlier rate. Emperor Wen insisted on lighter corvee duties for the people; his edicts, and the memorials of such great statesmen as Chia Yi and Ch'ao Ts'o, show real solicitude for the condition of the farmer. Developments in irriga- tion brought increased yields, while an edict of 163 B.C., stating that the amount of farm land per person was greater than in ancient times, suggests that over-crowding of the land was not yet the problem it later became. Peace and reconstruction brought a general prosperity and an ever-increasing flow of taxes to the government. Ssu-m^a Ch'ien pictures economic conditions after the first six decades of peace in glowing terms, and reports treasuries and granaries bursting with unspent revenue.
SECOND PHASE : EXPANSION AND DEPLETION
Emperor Wu's long reign (141-87 B.C.) was a period of foreign wars and territorial expansion, but also of economic depletion and frantic experiment in government finance. Although a map of the Han Empire after Emperor Wu's wars shows nearly all of south
HAN HISTORY AND SOCIETY 23
China and even part of northern Annam under Chinese control, this is deceptive. Between 135 and 110 B.C. the imperial armies did conquer the principal coastal states, and even parts of present Yunnan, by costly and sometimes ingenious military campaigns. But these wars were not the central effort, and China was not yet ready to absorb the south into its economic system. It is doubtful whether the government collected there more than enough taxes to support Chinese officials stationed in a few occupied towns. Chinese armies also conquered a fringe of southern Manchuria and northern Korea, but the colonies established there had little impor- tance in the empire's structure or internal economy. The south and northeast were the fringes; the central drama of Emperor Wu's reign was the wars against the Hsiung-nu on the north and northwest.
Contemporary Chinese described the Hsiung-nu as war-like nomads inhabiting the steppes of Mongolia from Manchuria west into Chinese Turkestan. Their whole economy revolved about sheep and cattle, horses and camels, and the search for fresh pasture determined their seasonal migrations. During the Ch'in period they had been welded for the first time into a confederacy of tribes, each with its traditional grazing land, and all acknowledging the suzerainty of one ruler, the Shan-yil. Probably not numbering more than a few million, they were nevertheless a formidable enemy, masters of the powerful Asiatic bow, expert horsemen, and highly mobile.
From the beginning of the dynasty, China had been subjected to frequent plundering raids by swift-moving Hsiung-nu cavalry units which penetrated deep into the frontier commanderies, looting, slaughtering, and kidnaping. During Emperor Wen's reign one such band of raiders actually came within sight of the capital. The first wars under the "Martial Emperor" were at least partly punitive, but there must have been other reasons, not all of which are under- stood. Lattimore has adduced one such cause of conflict, emphasiz- ing the wide marginal terrain supporting a people of mixed Chinese and Hsiung-nu culture who employed a mixed economy neither intensively agricultural nor entirely nomadic. The necessity of holding this border region within the Chinese political orbit, and the pull of this frontier region, led China into vastly expensive campaigns both into the steppe and into the desert.
Emperor Wu was drawn by his early successes into larger and larger campaigns against the Hsiung-nu. Many of his best generals came from the frontier and were adept at border fighting. The
24 SLAVERY IN THE FORMER HAN DYNASTY
Chinese armies often numbered from fifty to a hundred thousand cavalry with even larger infantry and supply columns. Equipping and provisioning such armies cost the government enormous sums, not to speak of hidden costs in forced labor for transporting provisions and military supplies. Rewards to victorious troops mounted into hundreds of millions of cash. The government furthermore fed and clothed surrendered Huns, on one occasion numbering 40,000, till they could be established in new colonies.
Chinese armies wrested from the Hsiung-nu all the area of what is now southern Suiyuan, eastern Kansu, and Ningsia, within and adjacent to the great northward bend of the Yellow River, and also the lengthy Kansu corridor leading out to the "Western Regions" of Chinese Turkestan. This territory, though not agriculturally important, became a strategic part of the empire, populated, it is said, by more than 700,000 Chinese colonists who were moved there at government expense and mixed with surrendered allies of the Hsiung-nu. Between 129 and 119 B.C. China crushed the armies of the Shan-yil in the east, the west, and the center, but conflict still flared up sporadically until 51 B.C. By controlling the Kansu corridor the imperial armies were able to penetrate the Tarim basin, subjugating and loosely attaching various oasis kingdoms to the empire, till China dominated all of Chinese Turkestan politically. Chinese leaders became aware of other nations and other cultures to the west, of India, of Persia, and dimly of the Roman Orient.
This warfare drained the abundant treasury with which the "Martial Emperor" had begun his reign. His advisers were fertile with schemes to replenish the coffers. One attempted method was the creation of eleven ranks of new nobility based on war chest donations ranging from 170,000 to 370,000 cash — the higher the donation the higher the rank. The central government exacted large contributions from the old nobility, and levied property taxes on merchants and speculators. Those who failed to report their total wealth had their fortunes confiscated, while informers were encouraged by the promise of one-half the confiscated property. By this device so many people were impoverished that the govern- ment, in addition to getting large amounts of cash, was temporarily embarrassed with less negotiable things, such as land, houses, and slaves. Several novel and sub-standard issues debased the monetary standards of the day, and then, because of a wave of counterfeiting, the central government instituted a monopoly on the coinage of money. Probably the greatest revenue-producing agency, however,
HAN HISTORY AND SOCIETY 25
was the government monopoly of those indispensable commodities, salt and iron, reinstituted in 119 B.C. after the pattern of the Ch'in dynasty.
The reign of Emperor Wu was a period also of intensive canal building, an activity designed primarily to improve transport of tax grain from regions not adequately tapped. A secondary purpose, but one which became increasingly important as mounting expenses cancelled the gains of better transport facilities, was to increase production in those areas from which the central government could economically collect its thirtieth part of the harvests. The greatest canal-digging enterprise was naturally in Shensi and nearby areas, from which the government could profit immediately. Cutting a canal from Ch'ang-an south of the Wei to meet the Yellow River, for example, greatly reduced the time and difficulty of that stage in the transit up the Wei which brought grain from Honan, Shansi, and regions farther east; but it also irrigated thousands of acres close to the capital. Other canals were dug, with increased produc- tion the primary aim. Furthermore, reorganization of the grain transport from the lower Yellow River basin quadrupled the yield from that area. Not till this improvement had made eastern China directly important to the capital did Emperor Wu tackle a twenty- year-old problem of flood control at Ku-tzu on the lower Yellow River.
As the tempo of foreign wars decreased, the various financial schemes and the increasing flow of tax grain began to refill the treasury. Thus, by the closing years of Emperor Wu's long reign, China's political boundaries were roughly staked out. The central government firmly commanded the territory between the Yangtze and the Great Wall, and it controlled by military power other areas which only later were fully absorbed into the Chinese social and economic pattern; but the people were economically exhausted.
THIRD phase: gradual economic decline
The century from 87 B.C., which covers the reigns of Emperors Chao, Hsiian, Yiian, Ch'eng, Ai, and P'ing, is not easy to generalize. A second period of recuperation, with only sporadic foreign wars, it also developed into an age of great luxury for the upper classes and increasing poverty for the masses, of corruption among rulers and officialdom, and of the labor-pains of peasant revolt. Young Emperor Chao was supported by wise ministers, who noted and tried to ameliorate the suffering of the masses; during his reign the
26 SLAVERY IN THE FORMER HAN DYNASTY
country began to recover from the costs of previous wars. Emperor Hsiian, who had grown up among the people, gave an enlightened rule. His reign was perhaps the zenith of the dynasty, the high point of Chinese diplomatic success, and a period of general economic stability. Early in the reign of his son. Emperor Yiian, the economic balance seems to have turned. This ruler and some of his ministers tried to halt the mounting expenses of government, to reduce the tax-fed bureaucracy, and to lighten the burdens on the people.
r But there was a fundamental maladjustment between population / and land, which the economic system could not solve. Steady / growth in population began to crowd the land, offsetting all gains through reclamation and irrigation, opening of state lands to the poor, slow peopling of new marginal territory, and improvements in \ farming techniques. Theoretically Chinese farmers had an unlimited \ frontier southward, but practically this frontier was limited by the need for extensive drainage works, and government projects are not reported south of the Huai River Valley. Farming techniques were still far below what they later became. The use of iron tools and plowing with animal power were apparently not very widespread. As late as about 90 B.C. the government attempted to increase production by teaching selected local officials and outstanding farmers the methods of crop rotation, and by giving them sample tools designed separately for plowing, planting, and harvesting. Spread of this knowledge was apparently slow except near the capital and in northern state-supervised agricultural colonies. Furthermore, an important part of the best-irrigated land passed gradually into I the hands of nobles, officials, merchants, and gentry, who owned it for investment and rented it to share-cropping tenants. It was the landlords who benefited most by the low tax on agricultural produce. The "average" peasant, working a smaller plot than his ancestor early in the Han period, or paying half his produce to the town- dwelling landlord, had small reserves against endemic north-China famine. Successive droughts or sudden floods sent swarms of refugees trooping along the highways in search of food and work in unaffected regions. Concurrently the tax-fed bureaucracy grew in numbers, while the nobility, higher officials, and merchants vied with one another in luxury.
This contrast was not the event of a single decade but a trend, already noted by ministers of Emperor Wu, which grew sharper and sharper as the dynasty reached its decline. During the weak reign of Emperor Ch'eng, four popular revolts, each starting with a few
HAN HISTORY AND SOCIETY 27
scores of desperadoes, rapidly spread to dangerous proportions before they were quelled. They were the storm signals of disaster. A few farsighted ministers tried to persuade Emperors Ch'eng and Ai to enforce sumptuary laws and break up the landed estates. Where only Draconian measures could have sufficed, Emperor Ch'eng relied upon exhortations to his officials, while the ordinances drawn up for Emperor Ai were prevented from becoming law by the objec- tions of his affinal relatives and his favorite, Tung Hsien. The 'dynasty had reached that stage when the officials and the great landlords were indivisible, when the personal stake of those who administered the government and enjoyed its bounties compelled them to resist any reform that touched the substructure of their wealth.
Tung Hsien is a singular example of that inner circle of imperial favorites and affinal relatives who strove to pile up family fortunes during a precarious heyday of power. During the brief reign of Emperor Ai, Tung Hsien rose from a mere court attendant to the rank of marquis, and held the office of Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces. After Tung Hsien was forced to commit suicide on the death of his imperial paramour, his property was confiscated and sold by the government for four billion three hundred million cash. In about five years he had acquired this fabulous wealth out of imperial grants, presents and bribes from officials, and the salaries and perquisites of office, all compounded by incomes from his investments and estates.
FOURTH phase: LAST MINUTE REFORM, AND COLLAPSE
The threat of consort families, first raised against the dynasty by relatives of the Empress nee Lii, was finally fulfilled by Wang Mang. His father's half-sister was the Empress of Emperor Yiian and mother of Emperor Ch'eng. The Wang family rose to great political heights during the reign of Emperor Ch'eng, but was eclipsed during the reign of Emperor Ai. When the latter died with- out an heir in 1 B.C., the Grand Empress Dowager nee Wang re- asserted her family's power, and called the most competent man of the family, Wang Mang, to take charge of the government. By skilful manipulation he continually augmented his power, first as Regent, then as "Acting Emperor," until he was strong enough to seize the throne in a.d. 9.
Wang Mang is perhaps the most controversial figure in Chinese history. Some modern writers consider him a farsighted reformer, while the traditional view excoriates him as a political scoundrel
28 SLAVERY IN THE FORMER HAN DYNASTY
who lusted only for personal power. No man is so entirely lofty or so completely base as Wang Mang is variously portrayed. He unquestionably committed a great political crime by overthrowing an imperial house impermanently. His "reforms" failed, and his dynasty was swept away by popular rebellion. His greatest misfor- tune, coloring all historical judgment, was to have the succeeding dynasty established by a member of the old Liu house, making it a continuation of the Han dynasty. Although his biographer quotes archival materials both favorable and damning, they are interlarded with caustic comments which unconsciously prejudice our judgment. Publicly writing a story of the dynasty Wang Mang overthrew, and writing it during the continuation of that dynasty, the historian could not possibly have given Wang Mang a favorable treatment even had he so desired. But judgment of Wang Mang's political crime must be made, not from the viewpoint of those who supplanted him, but by considering the quality of the last weak and infamous rulers whom he supplanted. Likewise, his "reforms" cannot be fairly judged by how wise or foolish, how humanitarian or avaricious, they now appear. They must be judged against the background of economic and social conditions of his own day. These conditions he neither created nor successfully changed, although some of his reforms temporarily dug at the roots of the problems. Only the holocaust of his downfall, which greatly reduced the population and broke up the landed estates, ameliorated the economic unbalance and gave the house of Han another two centuries of grace.
When Wang Mang assumed the throne in a.d. 9, he issued a remarkable imperial order (translated in document 122). The introduction explains the reasons for instituting reform. He described how the Ch'in dynasty had made possible the accumulation of both land and offices in the hands of the same people, on the one hand by overtaxing the peasantry, on the other by abolishing the ancient communal land system. Not only did greed for wealth arise from this, but also the strong annexed the fields of the poor to such an extent that they did not even have enough land upon which they "could stand an awl." He also described the evils of slavery, and quoted the Book of History to prove that in antiquity only the government possessed slaves, and they were criminals. Admitting that the house of Han had reduced the tax on produce to one-third the Ch'in tithe, he called attention to the corvee service and extra poll-taxes levied on old and weak alike. Worst of all was the "usurious" rental charge, whereby tenants paid five parts in ten
HAN HISTORY AND SOCIETY 29
when the tax on produce was only one part in thirty. The reforms he proposed were these: All fields were to be nationalized and there- after called "the King's fields"; private slaves were to be called "private retainers." Neither fields nor slaves could be bought or sold. Furthermore, land was to be equitably distributed. Each family comprising less than eight males but owning more than 102 acres was to distribute its excess land among its clansmen and peighbors. Conversely, those without land were to receive it according to the regulations. Anyone who dared to oppose the new law would be banished to the frontier.
This was fundamental but it was not entirely novel, for elements of the reform had been openly advocated by Confucianists in the reigns of Emperors Wu and Ai. Introduced by executive decree, in an age when free ownership and free sale of land had long been legal, such a sweeping reformation could never have been enforced. To efi'ect it anywhere would require a bloody revolution. From the nobility and the highest officials down to the commoners, innumera- ble people were punished for refusing to obey, but the plan came to nothing in the end. Wang Mang was persuaded to repeal the law in three years.
In the shadow of this failure all the other measures were mere tinkering. The alteration and debasing of the coinage enriched the treasury but caused great hardship. The "six state controls" included several well-tried monopolies and new types of taxation. The "controls" also attempted to stabilize prices of basic commodities by a novel method, and made loans available to the poor without interest or at low rates. These acts were primarily designed to raise revenue, but some of them did benefit the poor. Even Wang Mang's defamers admit that he worked tirelessly, but he could not enforce his grandiose schemes, which, furthermore, were continually per- verted by his officials. Every new law created a host of enemies. Expensive wars and famines produced a rebellion whose seeds had been sprouting long before Wang Mang entered public life.
A rebellious movement called the Red Eyebrows first became active in Shantung about A.D. 18. A little later two pretenders from the house of Liu organized regional revolts. Strife followed the classic pattern. China fell apart into constituent regions all at war with the central authority and each ultimately opposing the other. By A.D. 22 all of eastern and southern China was lost to Wang Mang. Finally one rebelling army captured Shensi, invested the capital, and Wang Mang was killed in October, A.D. 23.
30 SLAVERY IN THE FORMER HAN DYNASTY
One of the rival pretenders, who had earher been made Emperor, fixed his capital at Lo-yang, then in the next year moved it to Ch'ang- an. His two years were anarchy. The Red Eyebrows devastated eastern China, and several rival emperors established themselves elsewhere. Then the Red Eyebrows, who had become the worst sort of plunderers, captured Ch'ang-an and took the first pretender captive. It was their pillage and burning that destroyed the old capital beyond repair. The city is said to have burned for three months. It is hard to understand how any of the imperial archives survived, although it is said that some hundreds of cartloads of books were later taken to the new capital at Lo-yang. The ultimate victor among all the rivals was Liu Hsiu, who is lauded for his humanitarian reign and brilliant victories by the posthumous title "Emperor Kuang-wu." Although he accepted the throne in A.D. 25, he still had years of warfare ahead, both against the Red Eyebrows and against rival political areas in China. Not till A.D. 36, when he conquered Szechwan, did he really control all of China, a country that had suffered nearly two decades of brutal civil war.
The census of A.D. 2 fists the population at 59,594,978. This was two decades before the death of Wang Mang. The earliest Latter Han census reported 21,007,820. This was in A.D. 57, almost thirty-five years after the death of Wang Mang, and following two decades of internal peace. Figures for the Latter Han period rose to more than 49,000,000 in A.D, 140 but never achieved the Former Han total. While Chinese census figures are always inaccu- rate in detail, this tremendous drop in the half-century between A.D. 2 and 57 eloquently bespeaks the leeching which relieved the fever if it did not cure the malady of China's ancient agrarian economy.
Distribution of Population, and Urbanization
What was the structure of Chinese government and society during the Former Han dynasty, and in what manner did people live? The census which recorded a population just under sixty millions shows a distribution very different from that of modern times. The basin of the Yellow River stands out darkly on a map of population density. A great black nebula centers between Loyang and Kaifeng, blanketing eastern Honan, southern Hopei, and western Shantung. West of this area there is a heavy concentration around the capital, near modern Sian, in the irrigated region between the Ching and Wei rivers. Northeast and southeast of the nebula
HAN HISTORY AND SOCIETY 31
the distribution is fan-like, covering the northern coastal plain. South of the Yangtze is almost a vacuum, and so too are the northern and western frontiers.
Most of the people were peasant farmers, settled in tiny hamlets and concentrated where wheat, kaoliang and millet could be grown most abundantly. These regions were southern Shensi in the valleys of the Lo, the Ching, and the Wei, and the Honan-Shantung segment of the Yellow River, bordered by southern Shansi and Hopei, and northern Kiangsu and Anhwei. Because Han dynastic history is concerned primarily with the metropolitan upper classes and locates occurrences with reference to administrative centers, it suggests a degree of urbanization which probably did not exist. With a low level of industrial development and a primarily agricul- tural economy, most "cities" were merely walled towns, focal points for administration, grain-storage, garrisons, services, handicrafts, and market trade, and probably did not have more than ten or twenty thousand residents.
A few important cities there were. Lin-tzu, former capital of Ch'i, in the heart of silk-producing Shantung, bustled with processors and traders of silk. Yen, near Peking, was the emporium for trade in the north. Han-tan in modern Hopei, once capital of the state of Chao, and Yiian near modern Nan-yang in Honan, were centers of iron-smelting. The capitals of the commanderies of Pa and Shu, corresponding to Chungking and Chengtu in Szechwan, gathered the trade of the southwest, while Lo-yang maintained a certain importance as an old cultural center. All roads led, like the ribs of a fan, to the capital district, with a population of nearly two and a half millions. But the capital district was not a city; it was a congregation of fifty-seven towns, each with its tributary agricultural terrain, which together composed three commanderies. Ch'ang-an itself claimed a population less than a quarter of a million, and where individual figures exist no other Han metropolis (including surrounding farm land) is credited with more than three hundred thousand souls.
Local and Central Administration
The basic geographic unit of government was the prefecture or hsien, an area of agricultural land, villages, and towns, whose borders were seldom more than two days' walk from a central walled "city." The lowest extension of empire and the widest expansion of Chinese familism was the point where prefectural government,
32 SLAVERY IN THE FORMER HAN DYNASTY
in the hands of a prefect or chief and his staff, met local government, typified by the San-lao, or "Thrice Venerable." Hamlets were often composed of single clans or groups of families, each with its clan or family elder. According to a decimal scheme, perhaps more theoretic than real, ten hamlets made up a commune, or t'ing, with a chief in charge of civil and military affairs, and ten fing composed a district (hsiang). Early in his reign the first Han Emperor, who himself had been chief of a t'ing, adopted the system of San-lao, whereby venerable men of cultivated personality, "able to lead the masses and do good," were selected, one in each district. Among the district San-lao one was chosen to serve as consultant for the Prefect and his staff.
Somewhat equivalent to prefectures in function, but more military in nature, were the tao, or border marches, primarily inhabited by barbarians. Many prefectures were designated as marquisates or as estate-cities of female nobles, but they were apparently not governed directly by the nobles.
Prefectures, border marches, marquisates, and estate-cities were grouped into commanderies or kingdoms that roughly corresponded in function to modern Chinese provinces, though they were smaller and much less populous. Each commandery was under an adminis- trator in charge of civil affairs, and a military governor. Kingdoms were actually independent of the central government early in the Han period. As the dynasty progressed, however, the kings, all of the house of Liu, were slowly shorn of political power, and their royal bureaucracies were controlled by chancellors appointed by the central government and approximating commandery adminis- trators in function and power. Toward the end of the dynasty, groups of commanderies and kingdoms were loosely joined together into thirteen chou, or provinces, but these were not administrative divisions so much as circuits under inspectors who reported to the central government on the administration and activities of officials. The "Treatise on Geography" in the Ch'ien Han shu gives popula- tion figures for each commandery and kingdom during the reign of Emperor P'ing, and lists all the constituent divisions by name. At the end of the dynasty there were 103 commanderies and kingdoms, 83 and 20 of each. They were made up of 1,314 prefectures and estate-cities, 32 marches, and 241 marquisates.
The government of the empire centered in the capital district around the Emperor at Ch'ang-an. There resided the Chancellor, in charge of civil government, the Grand Marshal and Commander-
HAN HISTORY AND SOCIETY 33
in-Chief, in charge of military affairs, the Grandee Secretary, who acted as a check upon the Chancellor, and many other high officials. There, too, were the many departments and bureaus that administered state finances, justice, affairs of the nobility and dependent or foreign states, agriculture and commerce, and public lands. There, also, was that part of the government more directlj'- connected with the imperial household, the dynasty as distinguished from the empire. Officials of various departments administered the affairs of the privy purse, the palaces, and the ancestral ceremonies, and cared for the needs of the imperial family. The capital district was a special administrative area, organized by commanderies and prefectures, and having officials and bureaus that were a part of the central government. By the time of Emperor Ai, the bureaucracy numbered some 130,285 officials, counting from junior clerks up through the Chancellor.
Class System commoners
In Han times, just as recently, the Chinese "large family," rather than the individual or the marriage group, was the basic unit of society from the Emperor down to the bottom of the social scale.
The structure of society was already complex in Former Han times, but the class system was fairly simple as referred to by con- temporary writers. The mass of the people was called "commoners" ishu-jen), or "the people" {min), being thus differentiated from two higher classes, the officials and the nobility, and two lower groups, convicts and slaves.
Commoners included all the peasantry, as well as artisans, shop- keepers, merchants and the like. They were the governed, who supported the state and enriched the upper classes by their taxes, their corvee labor, and their industry. Taxes of the common people varied greatly during the two and a quarter centuries of the Former Han epoch. They depended also upon occupation and place of residence — whether, for example, on the frontier, in a marquisate, or near the capital. The average adult commoner during most of the dynasty paid a poll-tax of 120 cash annually to the state and 63 cash for the uses of the imperial family, while children were charged 20 and 3 cash per year, respectively. Households in mar- quisates and kingdoms paid 200 cash to the overlord, but were relieved of the poll-tax and the tax on children. Farmers paid one-
34 SLAVERY IN THE FORMER HAN DYNASTY
thirtieth of their crops; merchants paid double poll-taxes, heavy market dues, and assessments on their capital; artisans paid income taxes. Furthermore, common people were subject to four kinds of forced labor or corvee duty. The most important was labor for the prefectural government on roads, canals, embankments, buildings, and tombs, one month a year. Military duty, frontier duty, and service at the capital were usually commuted by payment of money for a permanent force. These taxes and services were a heavy burden, and supplied considerably more revenue than the govern- ment normally required. This made it possible for the Emperor, in his magnanimity, frequently to pass up one or another of the taxes to win the people's gratitude, and also to hand out gifts to widows, the aged, and the poor. Such devices were only a palliative, and thoughtful statesmen regularly urged reduction of the burdens on the people.
Within the broad status group of commoners there were, of course, different economic and professional groups. Among these, merchants and the landed gentry were most important. Because of the pecul- iarly cellular structure of China's political and economic geography, in which each district or prefecture contained a walled city sur- rounded by tributary agricultural terrain, each prefecture fed itself and produced in its own trade center most of the goods needed for everyday life. Unification of north China in a single empire, abolition of most trade barriers, and the increasing use of coined money did, however, produce in Han times an inter-regional trade in certain essentials not everywhere produced, particularly salt and iron, and a luxury trade in fine silks, furs, bronze and gold, jade and pearls, lacquer, bamboo, exotic foods and spices, herbs and medi- cines. Besides merchandising, many fortunes of the Han period were based on mining, smelting, grain-dealing, and money-lending.
The chief evidence of the growth of commerce is contained in memorials of statesmen deploring the fact, and in laws penalizing and disfranchising merchants. The prevalent economic philosophy held merchants to be the enemies of farmers, and trade the natural rival of agriculture. Popular metaphor described farming as the root or trunk, and manufacturing and trade as the end branches of the national economy. Emphasis on agriculture maintained what was fundamental, while trade drew people away from the basic pursuit. Merchants imposed on farmers, fleecing them of their produce at low prices and selling them finished goods at exorbitant rates; they lived luxuriously in towns and cities, while farmers
HAN HISTORY AND SOCIETY 35
suffered privation and want on their land. This philosophy squared with the fact that a money economy, though not far advanced in Han times, was apparently upsetting the rural economy based on grain, and with the fact that many merchants also dealt in grain. They handled the farmer's surpluses in good years and advanced seed grain and food in bad. Organized, sophisticated, and in touch with crop conditions and prices elsewhere, local dealers had a tre- mendous advantage over the peasants, and there is little reason to doubt their depressing effect on rural economy, which many Han memorialists described. The government legislated against mer- chants and encouraged the agricultural class by pious edicts and fre- quent remission of taxes, because the financial structure of the state was built primarily upon taxes levied on produce. Furthermore, the policy-making bureaucracy came from the landed gentry, and the nobility acquired its principal revenue from taxes paid by the peasants. Thus, any group adversely affecting the taxpaying potential of the farmer imperiled both the state and the ruling class. Merchants were therefore heavily taxed, denied in theory the right to hold office, and above all forbidden to invest in farm land. In- directly, the government attacked commercial profits by monopoliz- ing salt and iron, experimenting with price-stabilizing granaries, and lending seed and food. The prohibition against merchants owning farm land, though never entirely effective, was crucial because there were no other important forms of capital investment. Land was the property to own. It brought security, influence, and regular income from tenants who paid — what seems to have been considered excessive — a half share of the harvests. Produce taxes fell lightly on landlords in comparison with their income. Money taxes, so heavy for poor peasants, were minuscule for the well-to-do, and anyone who could afford to pay the fee escaped corvee duty. Landed gentry and local officials naturally clung together. Officials were recruited partly from the landed gentry and when sent to the provinces to govern they found in the local landlords people of their own kind. The most important and most active line of cleavage in Han social structure was not that between the free and the slave, or between the nobleman and the commoner, but that between landlords, officials, and the nobility on the one hand, and small farmers, tenants, and laborers on the other.
THE BUREAUCRACY
Most government positions required a fair knowledge of the written language, and the better civil positions demanded a quoting
36 SLAVERY IN THE FORMER HAN DYNASTY
familiarity with the classics. To learn the written language and the contents of ancient books required leisure and security, and these were made possible by landholding. Several roads led to the lower and middling offices. People of wealth other than merchants could buy the honorary ranks, which made them eligible for selection. High officials were privileged to propose candidates, and they naturally promoted their relatives or fellow townsmen. Scholars and men of special ability might recommend themselves by some clever scheme for government, or be recommended by commandery or prefectural officials. The government was constantly searching for local worthies and students, astute interpreters of omens and portents, military strategists and border fighters, or loyal underlings who smelled out plots against the throne. For the top positions only two things counted: special distinction in administration, which usually meant a long, slow climb, or affinal relationship to the imperial house.
Salaries of important officials were generous. Men of the highest brackets received 9,000 cash and 72 hu (40 bushels) of grain monthly. From that figure the scale of payments descended by sixteen stages to junior clerks, who received only 8 hu (4.5 bushels) monthly. Higher officials and their families had special benefits aside from salaries, perquisites, and opportunities for graft : the right to introduce relatives for official position, and freedom from certain taxes. Families of some officials were exempted from implication in crimes committed by the official, and others could appeal directly to the Emperor for leniency, a favor otherwise reserved to members of the imperial clan.
THE NOBILITY
The aristocracy consisted of a titular nobility of eighteen ranks, and an enfeoffed nobility of several types. The first spanned the commoner and official classes. Lower honorary ranks were handed out rather liberally to officials and deserving plebeians, and all could be purchased. Imperial edicts celebrating enthronement, appoint- ment of an heir-apparent, selection of an empress, or some auspicious omen frequently also announced general grants of the first grade to heads of families or eldest sons. The principal advantage accorded those of the lower grades was reduction in sentence for crime; men in the ten higher brackets were exempt from taxes and corvee duty, and occasionally received money grants from the Emperor. This titular aristocracy, though appearing to be all-inclusive, probably comprised collateral descendants of noblemen, scholars, landed
HAN HISTORY AND SOCIETY 37
gentry, local worthies, lesser officials, and people of some financial pretensions. It was, in other words, the upper middle class surround- ing the throne and the enfeoffed nobility.
The enfeoffed nobility came from three sources: members of the imperial family by blood, the most valorous warriors and highest officials, and members of consort families or imperial favorites. Normally one son of each emperor was selected heir-apparent and the rest were appointed vassal kings. Ranking first in the nobility, they lived in their kingdoms away from the capital, and, during the early part of the dynasty, were rulers in fact, holding royal court, collecting taxes, controlling independent armies and civil administration. After the radical changes instituted by Emperor Wu, kings no longer ruled, and they only received the taxes from their fiefs; still, they were very wealthy, for they continued to own royal lands that brought rich income.
Early in the dynasty, when a king died one son inherited the kingdom while others received separate marquisates. Emperor Wen was the first to divide kingdoms among a number of heirs (in this case brothers), each of whom became a king. Later still, title to the kingdom was given to only one son, while others received marquisates carved from the kingdom. The appointment of "marquises who were sons of kings" paralleled that of vassal kings. Only one son of such a marquis inherited the title; others continued on the books of the imperial clan, and had special privileges, but had to make their own living as landlords or business men. Vassal kings and marquises who were sons of kings all had the surname Liu. Daughters of emperors became princesses, receiving estate-cities and mansions near the capital. The title was not hereditary. Princesses generally married marquises of other surnames than Liu and their daughters could marry emperors.
The second branch of the enfeoffed nobility came from generals who distinguished themselves in foreign or domestic wars, men who quelled revolts or uncovered plots against the throne, and enemy leaders who surrendered to China. At the beginning of the dynasty Kao-tsu and his followers had sworn a solemn oath that none but members of the imperial family would be made kings, and only men of valor would be given marquisates. The early marquises were men who helped Kao-tsu conquer the empire, and throughout the dynasty a good proportion of all marquises not sons of kings or members of consort families were military men. On the death of the title-holder, the marquisate was normally inherited by the
38 SLAVERY IN THE FORMER HAN DYNASTY
oldest son and thus the noble line continued, though the estate was reduced by an inheritance tax.
Originally the system of sending away from the capital all the male relatives of the Emperor seems to have been to hold important regions loyal to the dynasty, to compensate disappointed candidates for the throne, and to prevent their intriguing at court. The net result, after the vassal kings and their sons had been shorn of adminis- trative power, was that consanguineal relatives of the Emperor, his uncles, brothers, cousins, and nephews, had no part in ruling. The men of the Liu clan being disqualified, most of the high positions at court went to the Emperor's male relatives by marriage. It was men of the consort families who mostly comprised the third branch of the enfeoffed nobility. This phenomenon is one of the most interesting aspects of Han social structure, and it had far-reaching effects on the djmasty.
CONSORT FAMILIES
The ways in which various consort families rose to power differed in detail but appear to have followed a discernible pattern. The Emperor had in his palace many ladies of high rank and innumerable women of lowly status, as did the Heir-apparent also. Ladies were pushed into the seraglio by their powerful families, but lesser women were chosen from all parts of the empire in beauty contests. Some happened to be noticed and summoned by emperors on their travels. As various women bore children, especially sons, their male relatives were rewarded by positions at court. One son had to be chosen as Heir-apparent; it might be the oldest, the brightest, the Emperor's favorite child, or the son of the woman with the most powerful connections. When a boy became Heir-apparent his mother almost automatically became Empress, and then her family started its climb to power.
The first step was usually appointment of her father, and fre- quently her brothers, to marquisates, often kuan-nei marquisates, which were of low grade but had the advantage of estates located near the capital. The Empress's close relatives slowly acquired important positions and succeeded in placing their clansmen in the bureaucracy. As sons of the Emperor by other women grew up they were sent off to kingdoms, which meant that their maternal relatives lost their chief access to court. Not every boy chosen Heir-apparent actually achieved the throne, however; in several cases a new selection was made, and the first boy deposed. Five emperors died
HAN HISTORY AND SOCIETY 39
without living sons, so that collateral descendants had to be selected, giving great opportunity for intrigue by consort families.
When an Emperor died, the Heir-apparent ascended the throne, his mother was made Empress Dowager, and the new Emperor's maternal grandfather and some of his uncles or cousins were often granted full marquisates and high positions in the government. If the ne.w Emperor was young, his mother and uncles had control over him, and, through him, of the government. If he was already mature, with several wives and sons, the contest for selection of the next Heir-apparent began once more. Several consort families related to the Dowager Empress, the actual Empress, and the wives of the Heir-apparent, might simultaneously hold high positions and in- trigue to perpetuate their influence. Empresses were often much younger than their spouses, and several even outlived their sons, thus helping to protect the family power. For example, Emperor Yiian's Empress nee Wang entered the court in 54 B.C., bore the Heir- apparent's first son (later Emperor Ch'eng) in 51, became Empress in 49, lived through the reigns of Emperors Ch'eng, Ai, and P'ing, and died in a.d. 13 at the age of eighty-four.
Struggles of the consort families darken the inner political history of the dynasty, especially after the reign of Emperor Wen. Yet the system had its good points along with the bad. It constantly brought vigorous new blood into the nobility, and talent to high administrative positions. It prevented any one consort family from gaining enduring or exclusive control over the palace. The families currently in power had their whole stake in supporting the ruler. While for personal advantage they sought to manipulate him through his grandmother, his mother, or his consort, they had to maintain him in power. Few consort families attempted to over- turn the dynasty; it was members of the Liu clan who most often revolted, hoping to seize the throne.
On the other hand, the system led to bitter palace intrigues, sometimes culminating in the assassination of imperial sons or favored ladies. Women wielded great power at court and their rivalries embittered the palace. Some imperial sons were purposely debauched to make them pliable weaklings. The worst evil arose from the fact that most consort families could expect no more than two or three generations of power. Therefore they hastily amassed great fortunes and invested in farm land, hoping to give their descend- ants security — a vain hope, for many a family was tricked into crime, or accused of lese majesty and stripped of titles and holdings.
40 SLAVERY IN THE FORMER HAN DYNASTY
Among great names resounding through the dynastic history or echoing among the documents on slavery are many noble relatives of empresses or imperial concubines. Here are only a few: Lii Lu and Lii Ch'an, Tou Kuang-kuo and Tou Ying, T'ien Fen, Li Kuang-li and Li Yen-nien, Wei Ch'ing, Ho Ch'ii-ping and Ho Kuang, Shang- kuan Chieh and Shang-kuan An, Wang Shang, Shih Tan, Chang Fang, Wang Feng and Wang Yin and Wang Shang and Wang Ken, and, greatest of all, Wang Mang.
The catalogue of noblemen in the Han history classes together those from consort families and high official position, and places military men and their like in a section by themselves. Frequently, however, the distinction between these three paths to enfeoffment is dubious, for affinal relatives often proved to be great generals or excellent officials before they became noblemen. Conversely, im- portant military or civil officials frequently succeeded in placing women from their families in the imperial seraglio and thus became relatives of the house of Liu by marriage.
Sizes of estates given to marquises who were sons of kings are not recorded in terms of households. Marquisates of the other two sorts varied greatly in value. Some possessed less than a hundred households, while the greatest numbered twenty thousand. A sam- pling of one in ten shows 2,600 to be an average. From each household the marquis collected a fee of 200 cash annually.
In terms of purchasing power, noblemen and high officials received princely incomes from their estates, investments, salaries, perquisites, and imperial grants and graft. Vying with each other to imitate the life of the palace, they sometimes had princely mansions with private parks, slaves and servants dressed in fancy silks, and many ladies in their concubines' quarters. Singers and dancers, acrobats and musicians entertained at their banquets. They watched cock-fights and bear-baiting, and raced dogs and horses for sport. Riding out in their handsome carriages, they were escorted by mounted retainers who officiously cleared the highways. Some noblemen patronized scholarship and the arts, while many high officials were men of distinctive culture and learning. China possessed a rich and complex culture, and the upper classes doubtless matched their Western contemporaries in luxury and sophistication.
THE LOWEST SOCIAL CLASSES
In the recognized divisions of Han society people of plebeian status were by far the most numerous. Above them were the
HAN HISTORY AND SOCIETY 41
officials, numbering a hundred-odd thousand, and the real nobility, never more than a few hundreds, or a few thousands if their families be counted. Below the commoners were two large groups, convicts and slaves.
Though the Han law code no longer exists, and was indeed lost by the sixth century, some of it has been reconstructed from edicts, recorded cases, citations in commentaries, and later codes based upon the great code of the Former Han period. Apparently it was very detailed. Toward the end of the first century of our era more than six hundred listed crimes involved the death sentence, and there was an almost infinite number of ways people could be sentenced to criminal servitude. The Chou and Ch'in punishments of bodily mutilation were theoretically abolished early in the Han period, and thereafter convicts served sentences varying in length from one to five years. Clad in felons' dress, often shackled and with shaven heads, sometimes even tattooed on the face, convicts worked out their terms in frontier guard duty and in building the Great Wall, transporting army provisions, constructing imperial mausoleums, toiling in state mines or government iron bureaus, and in many other ways. Convicts, during sentence, were much like some govern- ment slaves, but after the term was completed they were freed and became commoners. The number of convicts controlled by the government at any one time cannot be estimated, but there were always myriads, and on occasions upward of a hundred thousand.
Slaves, both government and private, formed a distinct and recognized class in society; they are the principal subject of this study.
Fluidity of Social Position
Describing Chinese society according to the components recog- nized in Han times perhaps creates the impression of rigid stratifica- tion. This is the opposite of the facts. Not only was the commoner class so broad as to include most of the population, but also fluidity of social position, the negation of a caste system, was a prime charac- teristic of the times. Individuals and their whole families rose meteorically from the lowest rank to the highest, while others tumbled as precipitously to the bottom of the social scale.
The founding of the dynasty was itself a great upheaval which brought commoners and even convicts to the top and submerged finally the remnants of the feudal aristocracy. Liu Chi, the founder of the Han House, was an uneducated peasant who became a village official and then turned bandit; his principal followers, who later
42 SLAVERY IN THE FORMER HAN DYNASTY
became marquises, were nearly all commoners, many from his native district. During the whole dynasty, but particularly during the reign of Emperor Wu, men of ability rose from the lowliest origins to high official positions and entered the nobility. Many of the biographies of eminent people go back no farther than one generation to trace the family history or point out an illustrious ancestor. This is the more significant in a land where the cult of ancestors was of cardinal importance.
The following biographical vignettes illustrate the ways in which people of lowly background rose without hindrance to the highest positions in government. Chi Yen, a descendant of the old aris- tocracy, was only an outrider for the Heir-apparent in the reign of Emperor Ching. He climbed through the ranks of the bureaucracy to be Administrator of part of the Capital District. He was a great champion of the common people, and Emperor Wu's most fearless critic. . . . Kung-sun Hung was a swineherd who first studied the classics at the age of forty, took top honors among a group of scholars examined by Emperor Wu, and rose because of his pliability to be Grandee Secretary, then Chancellor and a marquis. ... A vaga- bond, Chu-fu Yen, attracted the attention of General Wei Ch'ing about 134 B.C., became a Palace Grandee and was appointed Chan- cellor of Ch'i to keep his eye on the King. He successfully ex- pounded to Emperor Wu the clever scheme for weakening kingdoms by dividing them among all the royal sons. . . . Jen An was an orphan whose first positions were assistant thief -catcher, chief of a commune, and then San-lao. Entering the service of General Wei Ch'ing as a squire he met another squire, T'ien Jen. Both were poor and could not afford to buy the necessary paraphernalia for introduction to court, so the general grudgingly staked them and they distinguished themselves in the imperial audience. Jen An rose to be Inspector of a province, while T'ien Jen, because of his fearless denunciation of incompetent officials, became Assistant to the Chancellor. . . . Pu Shih, a shepherd, became successful enough to contribute liberally to Emperor Wu's war chest. In reward he was made an official and advanced to chancellorship of a kingdom and then to the position of Grandee Secretary. . . . Chu Mai-ch'en, coming from a poor family, cut firewood to support himself while studying. Because of his literary talents he became a Palace Grandee, then Administrator of a commandery in Chekiang. . . . Sang Hung-yang, the son of a shop-keeper, was drafted into the government because of his busi- ness acumen and given the job of provisioning Emperor Wu's
HAN HISTORY AND SOCIETY 43
armies. Later he was that Grandee Secretary who, having helped to estabhsh certain state monopolies, defended the government's economic policies in the great debate of 81 B.C., immortalized in the Discourses on salt and iron. . . . Another successful scholar was the poor farm boy K'uang Heng, who indentured himself in order to study. Passing through many official positions, he became Tutor for the Heir-apparent under Emperor Yiian, then Grandee Secretary, Chancellor, and a marquis. . . . Wang Tsun, starting his career as a petty jailer, became a commandery Administrator, Major in the army. Censor, and Chancellor of a kingdom. Demoted to the rank of a commoner, he rose again to become Inspector of Morals in 33 B.C.
All those men, and many others like them, climbed from obscurity mainly by personal ability. To round out the picture, here are longer sketches of two consort families that rose from the humblest origin.
Emperor Wu's first Empress nee Wei was the daughter of a slave woman in the household of his older sister. At a banquet given by her, the Emperor spotted the girl singing and dancing in a chorus, was infatuated, took her into his palace, and then forgot her for more than a year. Once when he noticed her weeping, he "pitied" her and granted her his "favors." When she conceived, the Emperor summoned her older brother and her younger half-brother, Wei Ch'ing, to serve in the palace. Wei Tzu-fu bore three daughters and finally a son who was chosen Heir-apparent, as a result of which she was made Empress.
By that time Wei Ch'ing had become a general. The next year he received a marquisate, and later saw his three sons ennobled. One of the greatest Han warriors, Wei Ch'ing was surpassed in his own day only by his brilliant nephew, Ho Ch'u-ping, the natural son of another of Wei Ch'ing's half-sisters. He, too, became a marquis in recognition of his military feats, and introduced to court his half- brother, Ho Kuang.
When Emperor Wu died Ho Kuang was one of the three regents for the minor. Emperor Chao, to whom he married his granddaughter and whose government he dominated. When Emperor Chao died without issue. Ho Kuang engineered the selection of a successor. Then he led the coalition of ministers who petitioned the Empress Dowager (his own granddaughter, age fourteen or fifteen) to depose his unwise selection, and he helped pick the next ruler. Emperor Hsiian. For his services to the state Ho Kuang was richly rewarded, held the chief military position, and was awarded the largest estate of any Han marquis. His son and two grandnephews also became
44 SLAVERY IN THE FORMER HAN DYNASTY
marquises and high officials, yet two years after his death the family was accused of intrigue and the poisoning of an empress and was stamped out.
The second family of humble origin was related to Emperor Hslian's mother. Wei Tzu-fu's son was Heir-apparent for thirty- seven years, and had a grown son. A retainer of the Heir-apparent, sent to find female entertainers for his patron's household, secured a quintet of singing and dancing girls, among whom was Wang Weng-hsii. The daughter of a simple village couple, she had been taught her trade in the household of the younger son of a marquis, and then sold by him to a merchant. Entering the Heir-apparent's household, she became the favorite of his son, to whom she bore a male child who much later became Emperor Hsiian.
In 91 B.C., when the child was only a few months old, there occurred a palace intrigue in which the Heir-apparent was accused of conspiring to kill Emperor Wu by black magic. The Emperor was sick and away from his capital, so the accusers were able to slay the Heir-apparent and his whole family. Only the infant son of Wang Weng-hsii was rescued by a loyal official and reared as a plebe- ian in the family of his grandmother, nee Shih. After Emperor Chao died without heir in 74 B.C., this forgotten great-grandson of Emperor Wu was raised to the throne at the age of seventeen. It then became essential to discover whether any relatives of the new Emperor's mother were still alive.
After many disappointments, the commission found an old lady. Dame Wang, and her two sons, Wu-ku and Wu, and brought them to the capital in 67. The people of Ch'ang-an roared with laughter when these rustics rode through the gate, but a careful judicial investigation proved that the woman was indeed the Emperor's grandmother, and the two men his uncles. Dame Wang was made a baroness with an estate of 11,000 households, while the men became marquises, each with 6,000. Wu-ku's son rose from that humble background to become Grand Minister of Agriculture and General of Cavalry and Chariots.
Wu's son, Wang Shang, inherited the marquisate in 52 B.C. and steadily advanced to the top position of Chancellor in 29. But Emperor Ch'eng was only his second cousin once removed, and already another Wang clan, related to Emperor Ch'eng's mother, was gaining power. Blaming an eclipse of the sun on Chancellor Wang Shang, and producing arguments to prove that his family wealth and power were so great as to menace the dynasty, the other
HAN HISTORY AND SOCIETY 45
Wang family secured his removal from office in 25. After three days he "fell sick, spat blood, and died."
Fall from glory was easier and often quicker than ascent. A characteristic of Han nobility was its impermanence of tenure. Convenient tables which assemble pertinent data about the nobility can be analyzed by rough statistics. Out of approximately 850 persons who were granted titles — vassal kings, marquises who were sons of kings, marquises of military merit and of consort families — the lines of more than a hundred are said specifically to have expired for lack of an heir, and at least as many more end suddenly for reasons no longer known. Lack of an heir can often be accounted for by death of the title-holder before he reached maturity, but since collateral descendants were appointed by imperial favor (and such cases were not included among the hundred) that does not explain the high figure. Such family dissolution is the more sur- prising in a polygamous society which put great emphasis on progeny. Almost half the titles, over four hundred, were lost because the holder committed some serious crime. Usually demotion was considered punishment enough; in some 230 cases the noblemen were dismissed and became commoners. In 45 cases, however, the guilty noblemen were sentenced to serve terms as convicts, and 99 others were executed, while a few committed suicide to escape that fate. Another 170 are simply said to have been dismissed, without mention of crime.
Impermanence of tenure is most graphically shown by calcula- tions based upon figures given by Wu Ching-ch'ao. The average period for all the nobility was only 2.31 generations. During the lifetime of the appointee or at the time of his death, 41 per cent of all titles were lost; nearly 63 per cent had been lost by the end of the second generation; and 79 per cent no longer existed after the death of the original nobleman's grandson, if he had one. These calcula- tions are, of course, weighted by the fact that all noble lines were terminated during Wang Mang's reign, so that titles granted toward the end of the dynasty had only a brief course. However, not a single direct or collateral descendant of Kao-tsu's original marquises, the men who helped found the dynasty, had noble title by 86 B.C.; and in 62 Emperor Hsiian bemoaned the fact that descendants of this early aristocracy had fallen to the position of indentured laborers.
If fluidity of social position typified the upper classes it also characterized the lower. Members of any societal group might become convicts at one stroke. Slaves were generally recruited from
46 SLAVERY IN THE FORMER HAN DYNASTY
the commoner class, but sometimes from the nobihty itself. Con- versely, descent to those classes was no bar to becoming a commoner and even a nobleman. Imperial amnesties of convicts were frequent, and theoretically all convicts became commoners within six years. There were several ways in which slaves could achieve freedom, thus becoming commoners automatically. Thus the upper and lower classes were not rigidly fixed, and their members were incessantly absorbed into the great commoner group.
To place this subject in proper perspective one adjusting observa- tion needs to be made. While there were no unsurmountable walls between the social classes, the number of commoners who ever left that class was trifling in proportion to the total group, which itself made up the bulk of the population.
The educated people of the Han period fell heir to a considerable literature of philosophy, classical texts, poetry, history, and romance belonging to the Chou epoch, and important intellectual activities of the age were discovery, investigation, and annotation of the books which had been driven from circulation by the First Ch'in Emperor. Privileged academicians had access to the imperial library where some of this early literature was preserved. Competing private schools expounded various classical texts and developed the concepts of different Chou philosophers. The period also produced an extensive literature of its own, in history, poetry, political phi- losophy, military science, arts, divination, belles-lettres, and many other branches. Just as the dynasty was nearing its close, Liu Hsiang and his son Hsin made digests of the extant literature and listed some 600 authors whose works numbered 13,000-odd fascicles,
Ssu-ma Ch'ien compiled the first general history of China, bring- ing the narrative well down into the reign of Emperor Wu. Other men extended Ssu-ma Ch'ien's chronicle, or wrote histories of par- ticular periods and subjects. Then, during the first century. Pan Ku picked up the research of his father and wrote a history of the dynasty just ended. Others treated special subjects relating to the Former Han period, while commentators, living only a century or two after Wang Mang, added bits of data here and there to explain facts and terms already growing obscure. Only a small part of Han literature remains. Some of it contains the information about slavery on which this book is based.
Only those sources which have been employed and found most useful in preparing this introductory chapter, both as to facts and concepts, are here listed by order of subjects.
HAN HISTORY AND SOCIETY 47
For decline of feudalism, unification, and the Ch'in empire see Henri Maspero, La Chine antique, Paris, 1927, pp. 361-425 (Book IV, The Warring States); J. J. L. Duyvendak, trans.. The book of Lord Shang, a classic of the Chinese school of law, Probsthain's Oriental Series, vol. 17, London, 1928, pp. 1-65 (introduction), and passim; Edouard Chavannes, trans., Les memoires historiques de Se-ma Ts'ien, 5 vols., Paris, 1895-1905 (cited as MH), vols. IV and V passim (sections on the hereditary houses after 400 B.C.), and II, pp. 58-246 (on Ch'in after 400, and Ch'in Shih-huang); Owen Lattimore, Inner Asian frontiers of China, American Geographical Society, Research Series, No. 21, New York, 1940, pp. 369-443 (on kingdom and empire in ancient China), and passim; Derk Bodde, China's first unifier, a study of the Ch'in dynasty as seen in the life of Li Ssu (2807-208 B.C.), Sinica Leidensia, vol. 3, Leiden, 1938.
From the founding of the Han dynasty, the principal source is the Ch'ien Han shu [History of the Former Han dynasty], by Pan Ku and others (originally titled Han shu; later the prefix Ch'ien was added to distinguish it from the Hon Han shu or History of the Latter Han dynasty). The edition used is the imperial Ch'ien-lung edition (1739-46) of the twenty-four dynastic histories, reprinted at Shanghai in 1908 by the Chi ch'eng t'u shu kung ssu, which has been checked with the monu- mental Han shu pu-chu by Wang Hsien-ch'ien, printed in Changsha in 1900. The Ch'ien Han shu is abbreviated throughout this book as CHS. Chilan ("chap- ters") are cited by Arabic numerals; parts of chiian that are separately paged are cited by capital letters, A, B, C, etc., in sequence; page numbers follow chapter numbers, and are cited by Arabic numerals, with a and b for recto and verso. (References to the Shih chi (SC), Hou Han shu (HHS), and other dynastic histories are to the same edition, and the system of notation is identical.) CHS deals with this period, in ch. 1-5 (emperors); 24A, la-6b, and B, la-3a (economics); 31-52 (important persons); and elsewhere. The first five chapters of CHS, covering the period 209-141 B.C., have been translated by Homer H. Dubs (Baltimore, 1938; hereafter cited as "HFHD, vol. I." Four other volumes are promised). This covers the "first phase" of my historical account, and the introductions by Dubs to separate chapters were exceedingly useful. Parallel information appears in the Shih chi by Ssu-ma Ch'ien, translated in MH, vols. II, pp. 246-510 (on Hsiang Yii, Kao-tsu, and other emperors to Wu), and III, pp. 538-544 (economics).
The reign of Emperor Wu, the "second phase," is covered in CHS, 6 (Emperor Wu); 24A, 6b, and B, 3a-8a (economics); 53-63 (important generals, statesmen, and literary figures); most of 94A, 95, and 96 (on foreign states); 97A, 5a-7b; and many other places. On the period in general, see MH, vol. I, introduction, pp. Ixii-cviii. On foreign wars see chapter IV, below, and CHS and SC references there cited; also Lattimore, op. cit., pp. 429-510. On the Hsiung-nu particularly, cf. J. J. M. de Groot, Die Hunnen der vorchristlichen Zeit (vol. 1 of his Chine- sische Urkujiden zur Geschichte Asiens), Berlin, 1921; A. Wylie, trans., "History of the Heung-noo in their relations with China," Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, vol. 3, 1873, pp. 401-451. On economic conditions, in addition to CHS, 24, cf. MH, vol. Ill, pp. 544-600, which translates SC, 30. On canal digging see Chi Ch'ao-ting, Key economic areas in Chinese history, London, 1936, pp. 80-86; MH, vol. Ill, pp. 520-537; M. S. Bates, "Problems of rivers and canals under Han Wu Ti (140-87 B.C.)," JAOS, vol. 55, 1935, pp. 303- 306.
Third phase, "economic decline": CHS, 7-11 (emperors); 24A, 7a-8a, and B, 8a-b (economics); 68-87 (statesmen); 93, 4b-7a (Tung Hsien); 97A, 7b ff. and all of B (consort families). On population-growth, landlordism, and famines see chapter IX, below, and CHS references there cited. Also, Ch'en Po-yin, Chung- kuo t'ien chih ts'ung k'ao [An investigation of the Chinese land system], rev. ed., Shanghai, 1936, pp. 51-55 (hereafter cited by translated title) ; Wan Kwoh-ting, Chung-kuo t'ien chih shih {An agrarian history of China), vol. I, Nanking, 1933, pp. 82-88 (hereafter cited by its English title); Wan Kwoh-ting, "Liang Han chih chiin ch'an yiin-tung (The movement for equal land holdings in the Han dynasty)," CLHP, vol. 1, 1931, pp. 1-25 (see pp. 14-16); T'ao Hsi-sheng, Hsi Han ching-chi shih [An economic history of Western Han], Shanghai, ed. of 1935, passim, esp. pp. 43-73 (hereafter cited by translated title). For contemporary Han descriptions of economic conditions see Esson M. Gale, trans., Discourses on salt and iron, a debate on state control of commerce and industry in ancient China, chapters I-XIX,
48 SLAVERY IN THE FORMER HAN DYNASTY
translated from the Chinese of Huan K'uan, Sinica Leidensia, vol. 2, Leiden, 1931; and Esson M. Gale, Peter A. Boodberg, and T. C. Lin, trans., "Discourses on salt and iron {Yen t'ieh lun: chaps. XX-XXVIII)," JNCBRAS, vol. 65, 1934, pp. 73-110.
Fourth phase: On Wang Mang, CHS, 98 and 99; 24A, 8a-9a, and B, 9a-llb; and many others. CHS, 99, has been translated by Hans O. H. Stange, Die Monographie iiber Wang Mang (Ts'ien-Han-shu Kap. 99), Abhandlungen fiir die Kunde des Morgenlandes, vol. XXIII, pt. 3, Leipzig, 1938; see also his Leben, Personlichkeit und Werk Wang Mang's dargestellt nach dem 99. Kapifel der Han- Annalen, Berlin, 1934. I have also read, in manuscript, a forthcoming translation of CHS, 99A, by Clyde Bailey Sargent, Wang Mang: A translation of the official account of his rise to power as given in the History of the Former Han dynasty. On details of Wang Mang's reforms, and widely conflicting appraisals, see Hu Shih, "Wang Mang, the socialist emperor of nineteen centuries ago," JNCBRAS, vol. 59, 1928, pp. 218-230; and Homer H. Dubs, "Wang Mang and his economic reforms," TP, vol. 35, 1940, pp. 219-265. The rebellion against Wang Mang and the establishment of the Latter Han are described in CHS, 99C, and HHS, lA, and 41 ff. See also L. Wieger, trans., Textes historiques (Rudiments, vols. 10-11), 2 vols., Ho-chien Fu, 1903-04, vol. 1, pp. 732-770. Population figures for a.d. 2 are in CHS, 28B, 9a; for Latter Han, in HHS, 33, 8a-b. See also Wan Kwoh- ting, "Han i ch'ien jen-k'ou chi t'u-ti li-yung chih i pan (Population and land utilization in China, 1400 B.C.-200 a.d.)," CLHP, vol. 1, 1931, pp. 133-150 (pp. 138-142) (hereafter cited by its English title).
Population distribution: idem, map, p. 142, based upon CHS, 28. Larger cities, Albert Herrmann, Historical and commercial atlas of China, Harvard- Yenching Institute, Monograph Series, vol. 1, Cambridge, 1935, pp. 20, 22 and 23; HFHD, vol. I, inset map; see also Map, this volume.
On political divisions: CHS, 28 (for totals, 28B, 8b). Local and central administration, CHS, 19A (abstracted, MH, vol. II, pp. 514-533); HFHD, vol. I, p. 27, footnote 2, and p. 75. Also for any details, Hsi Han huiyao, ch. 31-43. (The Hsi Han hui yao is a classified compendium of information in CHS, compiled by Hsii T'ien-lin and completed a.d. 1211. Hereafter cited by Chinese title; page references to Commercial Press edition [Kuo-hsileh chi-pen ts'u,ng-shn], Shanghai, 1935.)
The section on the commoner class draws on many parts of CHS; see references in chapter IX, below. See also Wu Ching-ch'ao, "Hsi Han ti chieh-chi chih-tu (The class system of the Western Han dynasty)," CHHP, vol. 10, 1935, pp. 587-629 (pp. 598-606) (hereafter referred to by English title). He assembles much useful informa- tion, as does the Hsi Han hui yao, ch. 47 and 52. On the attitude toward merchants see memorials of Chia Yi, Ch'ao Ts'o, and Tung Chung-shu in CHS, 24; and same, passim, for government action. Many modern Chinese writers have discussed merchandising and the Han attitude toward it, but T'ao Hsi-sheng, op. cit., has perhaps gone farthest in making it a central theme.
For the bureaucracy, same references as for local and central administration; see also Wu Ching-ch'ao, op. cit., pp. 613-614.
Concerning honorary ranks, cf. MH, vol. II, pp. 527-528; and Wu Ching- ch'ao, op. cit., pp. 614-615. The basic sources on the nobility are CHS, 14-18, which are Tables of noble houses, with important prefaces; see also SC, 17 (MH, vol. Ill, pp. 86-92). For vassal kings and marquises who were sons of kings cf. also individual biographies in CHS, 38, 44, 47, 53, 63, 80. CHS, 97, assembles important data on individual consort families and gives cross-references to separate biographies of more important ones such as Tou Ying and T'ien Fen (CHS, 52), Li Kuang-li and Li Yen-nien (61, 93), Wei Ch'ing and Ho Ch'u-ping (55), Ho Kuang (68), Wang Shang and Shih Tan (82), Chang Fang (59), and the relatives of the Empress of Emperor Yiian (98). These are only a few of many important affinal relatives. Sizes of estates were calculated from CHS, 16-18.
References to criminals are widely scattered; see citations to CHS in chapter X, below. On the Han law code, cf. Ch'eng Shu-te, Chiu ch'ao lii k'ao [An investi- gation of the legal codes of the nine dynasties {Han through Sni)], Commercial Press one volume ed., 2nd ed., Shanghai, 1935 (hereafter cited by Chinese title), intro-
HAN HISTORY AND SOCIETY 49
duction; and also references and citations in chapter III, below. On number of crimes involving death sentence see HHS, 76, 4b.
The section on fluidity of social position is more or less original. Biographical vignettes: Chi Yen (CHS, 50), Kung-sun Hung (58), Chu-fu Yen (64A), Jen An and T'ien Jen (my document 39), Pu Shih (58), Chu Mai-ch'en (64A), Sang Hung-yang (24B, 5a), K'uang Heng (81), Wang Tsun (76). The careers of most of them may also be traced in 19B; there are many others like them. Full abstracts of the CHS accounts of all important persons are to be published by Dr. Dubs in his final volumes of Glossary and Onomasticon. The accounts of the two consort families, Wei and Wang, are based upon material translated and annotated in my documents 26, 27, 29, 70, 72; and 55, 80, 98, in which the basic sources are cited. Calculations on loss of noble title are based on CHS, 14-18, while numbers of generations are figured from Wu Ching-ch'ao, op. cit., pp. 612- 613. Ssu-ma Ch'ien himself noted the impermanence of noble title when he pointed out that in his own day (specifically the period 104-101 B.C.) descendants of only five of Kao-tsu's original nobles still enjoyed the title. Cf. MH, vol. Ill, p. 124.
II. HISTORICAL SOURCES, AND DEFINITION OF TERMS
Source material has different degrees of value depending not only upon its nature and authenticity, but also upon the subjects to which it is applied. The subject here considered is a lowly social group in ancient China — slaves — and the essential problems are social and economic. The sources available, on the other hand, were primarily designed to recount the political history of an empire and the activities of the ruling class. This inconsistency between sources and subject fundamentally delimits the investigation. In what respects are the sources inadequate, wherein are they strong, and how do they restrict this study?
Historical Sources
Most of the slavery documents translated in Part II come from the Ch'ien Han shu [History of the Former Han dynasty] by Pan Ku (and others), who wrote near the end of the first century of our era. Of four principal divisions in the history in its present form, the first or "Imperial Annals" deals in strictly chronological fashion with the official acts of emperors and the political history of the empire from 209 B.C. to A.D. 6. A classificatory principle underlies the second division, or "Tables," each of which contains terse but pertinent facts about members of the various classes of enfeoffed nobility and about the holders of the highest positions in the bureaucracy. Within each Table noble houses are arranged chrono- logically by date of appointment, and the inheritors of each title are traced through the several generations; appointments to all higher offices are also treated chronologically. These Tables might be made appendices in Occidental history. Chapter 21 begins the third division, containing the ten "Treatises." Each is a general monograph on ritual and music, jurisprudence, economics, astronomy, geography, literature, and so forth, but only the "Treatise on Economics" is important for material on slavery.
The fourth division, the "Memoirs," is in seventy chapters and accounts for half the total work. It is by far the richest division in a history apparently conceived as a narrative of the deeds of great men. Starting with biographies of those who aided and opposed Kao-tsu, it proceeds chronologically to the end of the djmasty. Chapters 88 through 97 (58 through 68 in the division itself) depart from the chronological principle and give first place to classification. Thus, chapters 88 to 93, and 97, bring together important literati,
50
SOURCES AND DEFINITION 51
officials who were champions of the people, others excessively tyrannical, rich business men, wandering redressors of wrong, im- perial male favorites, imperial consorts and such of their relatives as were not granted individual biographies. Three important chapters, 94, 95, and 96, give historical accounts of China's relations with the Hsiung-nu, with the peoples of the southwest, southeast, and northeast, and with the peoples of the Western Regions, respec- tively. Logically following chapter 97, on consorts and their families, comes the biography of Wang Mang's aunt. Empress of Emperor Yiian, and her relatives; then the longest and penultimate chapter, on Wang Mang. Chapter 100 is the historian's "preface" and family history.
Because of the book's cyclopaedic character and classificatory arrangement, facts about any event are widely scattered; for ex- ample, to study the campaigns against the Hsiung-nu during Em- peror Wu's reign one must read back and forth through the Annals of the period, the biographies of leading generals and policy-making statesmen, the "Memoir on the Hsiung-nu," and the "Treatise on Economics." Scraps of information appear in the Table of those marquises who acquired titles for military merit, the "Table of the Bureaucracy," the "Treatise on Geography," and in many other places. Indeed it is impossible to be sure of covering a problem merely by reading through what appear to be relevant chapters. Passages dealing directly with slavery were found in sixty-eight of the hundred chapters, some in the most improbable places, others in sections having many long and significant items.
Only second to the Ch'ien Han shu is the Shih chi by Ssu-ma Ch'ien and his father Ssu-ma T'an, completed some time between 100 and 90 B.C., but containing important additions by Ch'u Shao- sun and others. For the first century of Han the two histories are parallel, each supplementing the other. Pan Ku was heavily in- debted to Ssu-ma Ch'ien for many of his chapters, while conversely the present text of the Shih chi contains sections which appear to have been copied back into it from the Ch'ien Han shu because they were lost in transmission. Nearly half the work deals with the pre- Han epoch, and since its references to slavery for the Han period are nearly all found in the Ch'ien Han shu, only its unique items have been translated, the rest being taken from Pan Ku's more comprehensive work, and textual variants noted.
These two works begin the series of twenty-five (or twenty-six) Standard Histories which together cover all recorded Chinese history
52 SLAVERY IN THE FORMER HAN DYNASTY
to 1912. The third of the series, the History of the Latter Han dynasty, written in major part by Fan Yeh of the fifth century (but based on many earher works), supphed a few of the documents, translated because they apphed to the Former Han period. The work also contained numerous data which have been used for comparison with and illustration of Former Han conditions. Later dynastic histories down to T'ang were also consulted for illustrative material, but they were used cautiously because of the increasing factors of elapsed time and historical change.
During the half century after Wang Mang, Wei Hung composed the Han chiu i to record the governmental system of the period just ended. This book contains some of the most revealing items on slavery included among the documents. Another important source was the long and semi-humorous essay by Wang Pao, dated 59 B.C. The Discourses on salt and iron or Yen t'ieh lun, compiled by Euan K'uan during the reign of Emperor Hsiian (74-49 B.C.), contained one important passage and a number of minor references to slavery. This work is part of the Han Wei ts'ung-shu [Collection of books on the Han and Wei periods] ; other Han texts there included were consulted and used as reference, but very little material on slavery was found that could be included among the reliable docu- ments upon which this study is primarily based.'
1 These are the basic sources. Problems of textual criticism are not in the province of this book. All the works have passed the exacting examination of Chinese scholarship and (save Wang Pao) of Sinological scrutiny. Historical criticism has been attempted in the footnotes to those documents which presented special problems concerning the type of source material on which they were based, probable accuracy of statements made, and evidences of special bias.
For the Ch'ien Han shu Dr. Dubs promises to supply in his introductory volume a translation of the historian's "Introductory Memoir," lives of the author and others who worked on the book, a discussion of the texts and their tradition, and a list of important commentators (HFHD, vol. I, p.ix). His introductions and appen- dices to the five chapters already published contain important historical criticism; see also items in my bibliography under Dubs. On Pan Ku and other members of the Pan family, the plan and sources of the Ch'ien Han shu, and a comparison between it and the Shih chi, see Lo Tchen-ying, Les formes et les methodes his- loriques en Chine: Une famille d'historiens ei son oeuvre, Paris, 1931. Another valuable work primarily concerned with Pan Ku's sister, who is supposed to have helped with the CHS, is that by Dr. Nancy Lee Swan, Pan Chao: Foremost woman scholar of China, New York, 1932. This also has some valuable notes (pp. 158- 161) on the composition of the History of the Latter Han dynasty. On the Shih chi the most authoritative Occidental textual and historical criticism is still that by Chavannes in his introduction to MH, vol. I, which contains chapters on the authors, the age in which they wrote, their sources, their critical method, and the later history of the text. For its precise discussion of Chinese historical method and native textual criticism, as well as for its convenience and wealth of reference, the work of Charles S. Gardner {Chinese traditional historiography, Cambridge, 1938) is unsurpassed.
sources and definition 53
Nature and Deficiency of Sources
"The Chinese," Gardner points out, ". . . conceive of the past as a series of concrete events and overt acts; and of history as a registration of them which should be exact and dispassionate, with- out any projection across the scene of the personaHty of the registrar, who must punctiliously refrain from garbling his presentation by his own perhaps imperfect appreciation of the true sequence of causation. It is the function of the Chinese historian to collect the facts and to subject them to a process of discreet filtering which may only suppress those of insignificant importance and present those of greater moment to speak for themselves without interference .... And accordingly, verbatim reproduction of the records of earlier historians, no matter how extensive, is to be regarded, not as plagiarism, but rather as the natural and reasonable process by which new histories of previously recorded events should be con- structed. [Chinese] historical writing ordinarily involves, not original composition of any considerable length, but compilation of choice selections from earlier works." ^
There is abundant evidence, internal and historical, that the authors of the History of the Former Han dynasty, adhering to the methods of Ssu-ma Ch'ien, used as their basic sources both state archives and existing books such as the Shih chi, themselves based upon archives. These sources were not employed merely as the foundation for a synthetic account, but many were copied in entirety or in large part. Thus, the Ch'ien Han shu is itself a vast storehouse of documents faithfully reproducing the selected originals, except in so far as errors have crept in through centuries of transmission. Em- bedded in it are imperial edicts and orders, long memorials on economic conditions, formal recommendations on state policy, reports of investigating commissions summarizing testimony of witnesses, records of trials and judicial verdicts, accusations pre- sented by individuals or groups against other officials, intra-bureau communications, records of administrative acts, memoranda on military campaigns, and other data, almost without end. This eclecticism gives the history a high degree of reliability in the fields it was intended by the historian to cover; the difficulty is that slavery was not one of the subjects considered of historical importance.
There are many references to slavery in the copied archives and in other passages whose sources are no longer evident. These references have a fortuitous character; they were included because
1 Gardner, op. cit., pp. 69-70.
54 SLAVERY IN THE FORMER HAN DYNASTY
they were integral parts of selected documents, or because they happened to be necessary elements of the larger narrative. As they are entirely unsystematic, they leave great gaps in the picture even when assembled and organized. For example, it is mere chance that we know that slaves could purchase their freedom. There would be no evidence of the practice in Former Han histories if one such case had not been mentioned in connection with the trial of a nobleman. Likewise, it is almost by accident that we know of the enslavement of a certain group of noble folk; we know because fourteen years later they were freed by an imperial edict which only happens to be recorded.
Most historians write for their contemporaries rather than for future generations, and accordingly take much common knowledge for granted. Even writing for the future, one cannot predict what parts of his own culture will change so radically as to need explana- tion. Most references to slavery in the previous dynasty were self- evident when set down; to explain them would have been pedantic. Yet many of them soon became so obscure as to arouse dispute among Chinese commentators only a few centuries later, while today uncertainties of meaning abound.
Two other general weaknesses arise from the nature of the sources. Because mention of slaves is incidental, the slaves appear chiefly in association with important people or events. The "important" people were those connected with the state (noblemen and high officials), or those who by their acts or accomplishments either influenced the course of national events or won some niche in the historian's hall of fame. About the slaves of these people we are comparatively well informed; but about slaves belonging to "unim- portant" people, those who were only somewhat wealthy, somewhat successful in business and scholarship, or somewhat important as administrators, there is little information. If the common folk had slaves, virtually nothing is known about them. This lack of information may greatly distort the picture of Han slavery, especially in regard to its extent and economic importance.
In the second place, where slaves happen to be mentioned in matters of state concern there is a conspicuous lack of detail about them; for example, we read an imperial order freeing government slaves, but nothing indicates whether, or to what extent, the order was carried out. Presuming that it was at least partially executed, there is no answer at all to such natural questions as the effect of the order upon the slaves, the mode of establishing them in plebeian life,
SOURCES AND DEFINITION 55
the requisite changes in records of bureau property, sorts of manu- mission papers, and the Hke. To give another example, there are numerous references to trials of noblemen who had ordered their slaves to murder people, or to do other unlawful acts, and in each case the verdict against the nobleman is reported. Not one of the cases, however, gives the slightest indication of what happened to the slave.
This is not a weakness of the material on slavery alone; it is a characteristic of Han history, and perhaps of all formal history. Throughout the annals of the Former Han period there is an exasper- ating lack of information on all the intimate details of administration and economics. When we read of thousands of prisoners captured in any particular war, we search in vain for clear-cut evidence of their disposition, of their having been brought into China, or even for proof of their having been captured. There is no eyewitness description of prison camps, no account of triumphal processions, no report by an official who had actually inspected or counted a batch of captives. Were they merely prisoners on paper? Are the reports fabrications? Only by devious means can we learn that they were not. The Former Han history remains a curious mixture : archives copied in extenso, unexpectedly revealing important facts about administration, law, and society; biographies recounting the most intimate matters in the lives of the great; and large state- ments serenely floating in a vacuum.
Advantages of Sources
This deficiency, in the last analysis, should not be charged against the histories but against the attempt to use them for an end they were not designed to fill. Records of administrative routine, filled with passing references to government slaves, must have accumulated in piles and mountains in the archives of various bureaus. Clearly, they were too unimportant to encumber a grand history. Only archaeology normally reveals such inconsequential details. Already, for Han China, as for so many other ancient cultures, archaeology has unearthed a rich written record that fills some of the gaps left by native historians. Because of climatic conditions and the types of writing material used, documents of the Han and later periods have appeared most extensively at the periphery of the ancient empire, in the dry sands of Chinese Turkestan among ruined watch towers and settlements along the now desolate sections of the Great Wall. Mere scraps of inscribed wood and silk, bamboo and paper, these memoranda from the rubbish heaps reveal in fine detail the
56 SLAVERY IN THE FORMER HAN DYNASTY
ordinary affairs of life in military encampments. Some documents discovered by Stein and Hedin, translated by Chavannes and Conrady, do mention slaves, but so fragmentarily as to disclose only that slavery existed also along China's northwest frontier at a time roughly corresponding with the Former and Latter Han periods.^
In 1930 the Sino-Swedish Scientific Expedition to Northwest China, organized by Dr. Sven Hedin, discovered "more than ten thousand" inscribed wooden slips, reportedly of Han date, near Estingol (Chii-yen) in Ningsia, while later many others were found by the Chinese archaeologist, Huang Wen-pi, in the Lop-nor region already made famous by discoveries at the ancient Chinese military station of Lou-Ian. These documents are said to include many references to slavery, and one bit of information on prices has already been published by Lao Kan.- Unfortunately the Chii-yen and new Lop-nor documents are still unavailable. They may not in the end prove very enlightening on problems of Han slavery; or they may by lucky chance supply some of those minute and informal details
1 Aurel Stein, Serindia, detailed report of explorations in Central Asia and westernmost China, 5 vols., Oxford, 1921, vol. 2, pp. 722-790; Edouard Chavannes, Les documents chinois decouveris par Aurel Stein dans les sables du Turkestan oriental, Oxford, 1913 (English translation of introduction in the New China Review, vol. 4, 1922, pp. 341-359); August Conrady, Die chinesischen Handschriften und sonstigen Kleinfunde Sven Hedin's in Lou-Ian, Stockholm, 1920 (Conrady's tran- scriptions are reprinted and corrected in the Bulletin of the National Library of Peiping, vol. 5, No. 4, July-August, 1931, pp. 25-64).
Documents apparently mentioning slaves are the following: Chavannes, p. 81, No. 356; p. 94, No. 422; p. 95, No. 428 (might be of date 39 B.C.); p. Ill, No. 508(?) ; also a Chin dynasty document, p. 167, No. 770. See also Conrady, p. 81, No. 5.1; p. 97, No. 19.6; p. 107, No. 29.6. Conrady's documents are mostly later than Han. In several other of his documents the term "slave" seems to be part of a tribal name, as [Hsiung]-nu, p. 105, No. 27.2; or Shao-nu (of uncertain mean- ing), p. 104, No. 25.1; p. Ill, No. 33.1 (three times).
2 "Han tai nu-li chih-tu chi liieh (The system of slavery during the two Han dynasties)," Academia Sinica, Bulletin of the Institute of History and Philology, vol. 5, pt. 1, 1935, pp. 1-11 (hereafter cited by its English title), p. 2.
The vicissitudes of these documents after discovery is almost melodramatic. In 1937 the following statement appeared in the June issue of the Quarterly Bulletin of Chinese Bibliography: "After several years study, the thousands of manuscripts on wood discovered by the Sino-Swedish Scientific Expedition to the Northwest have been transcribed. The wooden strips are now in Shanghai, where they are being photographed with a view to publication.
"The manuscripts and other objects discovered by the expedition at Lob Nor have been studied by Huan Wen-pi, a member of the Expedition, whose study is ready for the press. It is reported that this study will be published by the Commercial Press, Shanghai." (English ed., vol. 4, No. 1, 1937, p. 66.)
Almost at the moment that Bulletin reached America, China was invaded by Japan. During August and September great parts of Shanghai were destroyed, including the Commercial Press. What happened to the "wooden strips now in Shanghai''^ Had they been preserved for two millenniums only to be burned on
SOURCES AND DEFINITION 57
which transmitted historical literature lacks so lamentably. At present the information on slavery in the Former Han period is much less than that for a period of equal length in Greece after the Persian Wars, and only a trifle of that for the contemporary period in Rome.
In spite of their deficiencies the available sources for this study have at least two advantages. In the first place, the fact that so much of the Shih chi and Ch'ien Han shu consists of archives copied direct and verbatim means that references to slavery in those passages enjoy nearly the independent validity of excavated records. The high standard of integrity shown by Ssu-ma Ch'ien and Pan Ku in their use of sources, together with the fact that matters concerning slavery were generally incidental, minimizes the dangers of original distortion. Errors in transmission cannot be controlled absolutely, but fortunately textual criticism is the Chinese forte. ^ Whereas records were often copied into the histories intact, and whereas bits on slavery are always intact, most of the excavated material is badly mutilated and in part undecipherable. Furthermore, though dates are rare on such material, most of which cannot be identified more precisely than within a century, the archival rem- nants in the histories can all be closely dated, usually within a year and sometimes even to the day.
This advantage of authenticity only slightly less than that of original records pertains to some 35 per cent of the texts, not counting many others obviously based on archives. When, for example, an
the eve of publication? In September, 1940, another note in the Bulletin finally answered these questions:
"In 1937, plans were well under way for their publication, but they were interrupted by the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese hostilities. All the plates were destroyed during the invasion of Shanghai in August, 1937.
"Through the financial assistance of the Board of Trustees of the Indemnity Funds remitted by the British Government, its publication is now assured. During 1938-40 much time has been spent in the difficult task of photographing these records. The work of photographing having been completed, the Commercial Press is commissioned to publish this book on behalf of the Scientific Mission to North- western China. The plates alone will occupy over 600 pages and the book will be bound in the traditional Chinese style." {Quarterly Bulletin of Chinese Bib- liography, English ed., n.s., vol. 1, No. 3, 1940, p. 284.)
No further report on this publication was received up to the time of the out- break of the war between the United States and Japan. The original Han documents, however, are known to be in safety.
For information on the discoveries at Lop-nor see Folke Bergman (BMFEA, vol. 7, 1935, pp. 76-77) and two items by Huang Wen-pi and Ma Heng cited in his bibliography (p. 143).
• See especially Gardner, op. cit., pp. 18-63, and references there cited. In the "Treatise on Economics," CHS, 24A, Pelliot discovered that one hundred characters differed as between a T'ang manuscript copy preserved in Japan and the modern text. Cf. BEFEO, vol. 2, 1902, p. 335 (also my J^5, footnote 4).
58 SLAVERY IN THE FORMER HAN DYNASTY
official noted for his integrity is commissioned by the Emperor to investigate a certain suspicious ex-king and sends back a written report of his personal investigation, and in this quoted report casually mentions the ex-king's 183 slaves, that item may be con- sidered accurate. It is even more likely to be true because the investigator's letter of transmission mentions an appended list of the slaves and an invoice of palace property. Again, one of the long- est translated passages is the official report of a judicial commission, appointed after Emperor Ch'eng died without leaving an heir, to investigate the previous suspicious deaths of his two imperial sons. This was a most serious dynastic matter, and the officials cross- examined all employees of the palace who knew of the details. Witnesses are mentioned by name and identified by office. Some of them were slaves, and some of the facts revealed happened to concern palace slaves and their work. This report, left in its original form, is the raw material of history, skilfully woven into the chronicle by a compiler who knew by long habit when to let official documents speak for themselves.
Nowhere is there any evidence that the historians themselves were interested in slavery as such. This is the second advantage of the sources. There is no abolitionist sentiment, no special plead- ing. Although the historians quote statements which show that some thinkers in the Han dynasty opposed slavery, the institution was apparently a matter of indifference to them historically. A subject of common knowledge (Pan Ku himself was a slave owner), slaves are mentioned only when entering naturally into the narrative. Reports are dry and matter of fact, and only occasionally show evidence of exaggeration. Thus, even in those numerous passages, particularly among the biographies, where we cannot determine the original sources, casual references to slaves have an exceptional reliability.
Method of Using Sources
How can transmitted literature possessing the inadequacies and advantages described be used most fruitfully in a study of slavery? To get the best results every reference from the basic texts pertaining to the period should be scrutinized, no matter how "inconsequential," and each should be placed in its historical setting. To counteract the Chinese categorical method of writing history, each reference should be dated (as it refers to slavery) and the whole group arranged chronologically. The result of using all references is a wider and surprisingly richer corpus than any other assembled; presentation
SOURCES AND DEFINITION 59
of background places most of the documents in the setting essential for understanding; strict chronological arrangement has obvious historical advantages, but strangely enough is a unique feature of the present work.^
In the matter of analysis as little as possible was taken for granted about the system of Chinese slavery, and the documents, being assembled topically and compared, were allowed to speak for them- selves. Analysis itself, however, involves preconceptions; the materials had to be arranged in some manner to disclose logically the "essential" aspects of Former Han slavery. Questions about the natui'e and function of this slavery demanded formulation and some attempt at solution. Wherever possible, analyses and conclusions were tested in two ways: by comparing the Former Han data with similar data from later periods (particularly that of the adjacent Latter Han); and by studying the conclusions of modern Chinese scholars — conclusions which conflict among themselves but which all arise from a conceptual background somewhat different from that of an Occidental.
The period studied intensively spans two and a quarter centuries, an elapsed time about equal to that between 1710 and 1940. It was approximately concurrent with the last two centuries of the Roman Republic, from the end of the Second Punic War through the founding of the Empire and part of the reign of Tiberius — a period, incidentally, of great development in the system of Roman slavery. In such a span of time great changes in the slavery system seem likely a priori. What justification is there, then, for taking items of information from various parts of the period and combining them in a description of slavery in the Former Han era? Does this not presuppose a static rather than an ever-changing situation, and does it not create a purely artificial something which never existed, as described, at any particular moment? - What reality would a des- cription of American slave-trading possess if it were synthesized from references dating: 1644 (a biography of a sometime slave), ca. 1646 (a description, in a geographical text, of an African slave port), 1669-72 (the description of slave markets in a speech in Parliament), 1691-1702 (a remark by a slave owner quoted in a physician's memoirs), 1726 (a biography of a slave owner), 1756-62 (the report
1 In the preparation of this book all discovered references to slaves were used, but about a quarter of them have now been placed in the appendix or used as footnotes of other documents.
^ No Chinese writer seems to have considered this deficiency in the method universally employed.
60 SLAVERY IN THE FORMER HAN DYNASTY
of an investigating commission), 1787 (a slave contract), 1839 (an economic report), 1842 (a petition from a bm-eau chief to the presi- dent about the sale of public bondsmen), 1855 (a president's inaugural address condemning the slave trade), 1860 (a presidential executive order forbidding the sale of slaves), supplemented by many other items showing merely that slave-selling was continuous in that period?
Because materials are too scanty for a detailed study decade by decade there is an obligation to try to detect and emphasize all evidences of historical change. Usually, therefore, references to each topic are treated chronologically, but the assumption of continuity is tested by noting whether the phenomena occur through- out later Chinese history, or better, in the dynasty immediately following the Former Han. When information on important topics is entirely lacking or quite inadequate the fact is pointed out. Unfortu- nately it is necessary to refer to a few of the documents repeatedly and ad nauseam.
Actually, the analogy just made between Han China and North America from 1644 to 1860 is unjustified except as a warning. In ancient China changes in society certainly did not occur with any- thing like the rapidity that has characterized the Occident shortly before and during the Industrial Revolution. Probably social and economic developments were very gradual, and I believe the Former Han period is not too long to treat as a unit for a description of slavery if evidences of development are conscientiously sought out.
Problems of Definition
The fundamental problem of semantics remains. What do we mean by "slave"; and is the Chinese meaning of the terms translated as "slave" close enough to our meaning to approach identity? Words usually connote much more than they denote. And even if the Chinese terms translated as "slave" can be shown to possess in fact essentially the same meaning as our word, used precisely, the Chinese conceptual background of their terms must differ radically from our own today, as well as from that of peoples who practiced enslavement at other times and in other parts of the world.
There is an overwhelming variety and dissimilarity in the aspects of that social institution which has been called "slavery," and which has been analyzed and described by ethnologists and historians. These disparities arise from differences in the social organization
SOURCES AND DEFINITION 61
and economic system of the various societies that practiced it. Assuming that some core of identity does exist among various systems, the task of defining "slave" is so to emphasize the core that the "universal" qualities — the characteristics — will stand out.
The extremes of difference are greatest among various primitive societies that have used the institution, and between slavery at a primitive cultural level and in more complex civilizations. In general, ethnologists have been much more interested than historians in defining the institution. H. J. Nieboer, who has concerned himself primarily with primitive slavery and has given the question of definition very shrewd analysis, first presents a definition of slave in the popular sense of the term as "a man who is the property of another, politically and socially at a lower level than the mass of the people, and performing compulsory labour." This he sharpens to "a man who is the property of another man, and forced to work for him." Finally he concludes that "slavery is the fact that one man is the property or possession of another." ^ Professor W. L. Wester- mann has given a somewhat similar definition: "Slavery is a system under which some human beings are chattels. Where this funda- mental legal and social fact does not exist another relationship between human groups has arisen which is not slavery." -
The following dictionary definitions of slave in the specific rather than derivative sense are still not very precise: "One who is the property of, and entirely subject to, another person, whether by capture, purchase, or birth; a servant completely divested of freedom and personal rights." ^ "A person who is the chattel or property of another and is wholly subject to his will; a bond-servant; a serf." ^ "A person held in bondage to another; one held as a chattel; one whose person and services are under the control of another as owner or master; a thrall; a bondsman." In distinguishing between slave and serf: "A slave is the absolute property of his master and may be sold at will." '"
1 H. J. Nieboer, Slavery as an industrial system: Ethnological researches. 2nd ed., The Hague, 1912, pp. 5-9.
- William Linn Westermann, "Athenaeus and the slaves of Athens," Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, Special Volume, Cambridge, 1941, p. 452, footnote 2.
' [The Oxford English dictionary], A new English dictionary on historical principles, vol. IX, pt. 1, Oxford, 1919, p. 182.
* The Century dictionary and cyclopedia, rev. ed.. New York, 1911 (vol. IX), p. 5687.
'" Webster's new international dictionary .... 2nd ed., Springfield, Mass., 1935, p. 2361.
62 SLAVERY IN THE FORMER HAN DYNASTY
Finally, it might be useful to note a recent definition formulated for international agreement. Article 1 of the Slavery Convention, Geneva, September 25, 1926, states:
"For the purpose of the present convention, the following defini- tions are agreed upon: (1) Slavery is the status or condition of a person over whom any or all of the powers attaching to the right of ownership are exercised." ^
Most definitions stress ownership of a human being, but some emphasize control of his services.- Ownership, however, is not necessarily vested in an individual, as some of these definitions imply. It may be vested variously in the state, in a group of individuals such as a family or tribe, or in some such organization or corporate body as a guild, lodge, temple, monastery, or stock company. Slaves must be in the category of property, however the society conceives it, and the abstract right to own humans must in some way be validated by that society. The right may be legally codified or simply recognized generally by customary usage. Individual owner- ship of individual slaves will be authorized in either way depending upon the society involved.
A pragmatic test of true ownership is the legally or socially recognized right of an owner to transfer his slaves to another owner outright, by sale, barter, gift, or in some other way. This right may be shown to exist by concrete evidences of such transfer openlj^ and legally performed. This is a positive test, but it cannot be applied universally because certain societies forbid transfer of certain types of slaves who are otherwise owned as property. The right to destroy (enjoyed in regard to some sorts of property) is not an essential characteristic of slave-owning, being a good example of those attributes of slavery in which cultures vary.
Control of services derives from ownership. It is secondary and less precise. Depending upon the culture involved it may be very
^ American journal of international law, vol. 21, Supplement: Official docu- ments, 1927, p. 174. Also International conciliation, Documents for the year 1928, No. 236, p. 13. The other definition is of the slave trade.
2 For example, Edward Westermark (The origin and development of the moral idea, 2 vols., London, 1906, vol. 1, pp. 670-671) takes the compulsory nature of the slave's relation to his master to be the chief characteristic. The nearest he comes to a definition is to say: "Slavery is essentially an industrial institution, which implies compulsory labour beyond the limits of family relations. The master has the right to avail himself of the working power of his slave, without previous agreement on the part of the latter." The weakness of this definition is that by emphasizing compulsory labor alone it does not exclude convict, corvee, or other types of forced labor which cannot be classed as slavery if that term is to have precision.
SOURCES AND DEFINITION 63
mild or very strict. It involves the right of the owner to regulate the habits of his slave and to command performance of duties and separate acts, even against the slave's will, but only within the limits allowed by law or sanctioned by customary usage. This right to regulate and command implies the further right of enforcement by punishment or penalty imposed by the owner, or, for him, by some agency such as the state. Customary usage or law denies, however, the right of the owner to order the slave to do what is considered injurious to other people's property, other members of society, or society in general. Often the restriction extends also to acts injurious to the slave, and the right of punishment and penalty may be confined — but these latter limitations are not essential elements.
A second characteristic is inherent and may be mentioned as the clue to the distinction between slaves and other groups in each society. It is the recognition in custom and/or law of a particular and distinct status for an individual because he is property.^
Against the background of this discussion the following definition of "slave" is offered tentatively: A slave is a person who is owned as actual property hy another person, group, corporation, or the state, whose services are therefore controlled, and who is accorded a distinct status as one of a group so owned and controlled. From this definition, that of "slavery" in reference to the individual, follows as: The condition of a slave; the fact of being a slave; and in reference to the phenomenon : The fact of slaves existing as a class in the community.
There remains the second part of the question: Is the Chinese meaning of the terms translated as "slave" close enough to our meaning to approach identity? Chinese students of slavery in the Han period often give lists of the terms which they believe denote slavery, or rather, which fall within the Chinese expression nu-li
1 Certain discriminations, perhaps not adequately covered by this discussion, may be suggested. The term "serf" is usually distinguished from "slave" Ijy the fact that a master can require from his serf only legally specified services or dues, and by the fact that serfs are bound to the land and not to other men, and cannot be sold away from the land on which they work. Indentured ser- vants or bondsmen are distinguished by a closer definition of control, an agreed limit to period of service, and usually by restrictions on the right of transfer. Convicts for life should be distinguished even though they are completely subju- gated to the state, unless no distinction in status is made between them and slaves, or unless they may be transferred outright to another owner. In societies which conceive or formulate the relationship of parents to children (or of husbands to wives) as ownership, including right of transfer, the children would not be the slaves of their parents because the status group "children" is too broad, and because the status of an individual child would not derive from ownership but the other way around, ownership deriving from kinship. Other analogous situa- tions can be distinguished by some reflection. See, for example, "Slavery distin- guished from similar phenomena" in the article Slavery (Primitive), Encyclopedia of religion and ethics, vol. XI, p. 596. This is based upon Nieboer, op. cit., pp. 9 ff.
64 SLAVERY IN THE FORMER HAN DYNASTY
chih-tu '^'^MM'^ Usually these lists include several terms which do not prove on close inspection to mean "slaves" as opposed to other groups in society; indeed, Chinese \\Titers dispute among them- selves which terms are admissible.
There would appear to be two methods of establishing the basic terminology for the Former Han period: one, to consult Chinese dictionaries; the other, to observe the ways in which the terms are used contextually. The first has the disadvantage that the conceptions of dictionary compilers inter\'ene as extra, uncertain factors between the terms and the investigator. Furthermore, various senses are usually explained by use of synonyms which cannot be exactly identical, and which themselves have to be correlated with some imperfect English equivalent. Studying terms contextually, on the other hand, is comparable to the use of a simple algebraic formula in which the value of an unknown factor, X, is determined by its relation to several known factors. Terms suspected of being equivalent to the word "slave" are thus defined by their context. Neither method escapes the inherent uncertainties of translation, but the second involves fewer filtrations and allows us to search out Han period meanings from contemporary texts. Wherever possible, therefore, the second method has been employed.
Slave Termlnology of the Former Han Period NU&
Male Slave. — A few contextual evidences of males being sold and becoming 7iu, or of nu being sold, are as follows. Before 207 B.C.: "[Luan] Pu was kidnaped by someone and sold as a nu at Yen . . . ." (5.)- In 202 B.C.: "Chu Chia recognized him to be Chi Pu. He bought him and put him in a house among the fields. IThen he
1 The distinction is worth making although the expression may merely be a term coined to translate the Occidental concept. I do not know how early it appears in native literature. For examples of such lists see Liang Ch'i-ch'ao ("Chung-kuo nu-li chih-tu (System of slavery' in China)," CHHP, vol. 2, 1925, pp. 527-553 [hereafter cited by its English title,;, pp. 527-528), Ma Fei-pai ("Ch'in Han rhing-chi shih tzu liao [Source material on the economic history of Ch'in and Hani," pt. 6, "nu-li chih-tu [The slavery' system], " Shih Huo, vol. 3, No. 8, March 16, 1936, pp. 385-400 [hereafter cited by its translated title], pp. 585-586), Ma Ch'eng-feng (Chung-kuo ching-chi shih [An economic history of China], 2nd ed., vol. 2, Shanghai, 1939 [hereafter cited by translated title], pp. 246-247). See also Wu Ching-ch'ao, "Hsi Han nu-li chih-tu [The slavery system of the Western Han]," Shih Huo, vol. 2, No. 6, Aug. 16, 1935, pp. 264-270 (hereafter cited by translated title), p. 246.
= Hereafter numbers in itaUcs refer to the translated documents numbered consecutively in Part II. In most cases the whole text and the footnotes add considerably to the part cited or quoted.
SOURCES AND DEFINITION 65
enjoined his son, saying: 'In the field work be lenient with this nu; you must eat together.']" {8.) From a contract dated 59 B.C.: "... the gentleman Wang Tzu-yiian, of Tzu-chung, purchases from the lady Yang Hui of An-chih village in Chengtu, the bearded nu, Pien-liao, of her husband's household. The fLxed sale [price] is fifteen thousand [cash]. The nu shall obey orders about all kinds of work and may not argue." {83.) From an excavated fragment from Chii-yen, date uncertain: "Two young nu, price thirty thousand [cash]; a grown pei, price twenty thousand [cash]." * These items fulfill the pragmatic test of ownership.
Slave. — Ver>' rarely nu seems to have a generic sense of "slave" rather than the specific sense of "male slave." The generic sense is usually supplied by the combination nu-pei. One example is from the "Treatise on Jurisprudence," in its description of criminal laws of the Chou period, and is also found in the present Chou U, of uncertain date and authorship: "As to nu, males went into criminal ser\-itude; females went into pounding dried grain. Xo one who had noble title, or was seventy, or had not yet lost the milk teeth became a nu." (i.)'-
Other Uses. — Throughout Han texts, nu appears as part of the name of the people on China's northern frontier, the Hsiung-«?/. Sometimes nu clearly stands for them. Elsewhere it appears in place names, such as Lu-/^z/. and in the names or appellations of people, such as Chao Fo-nu, "Chao, the vanquisher of the [Hsiung]- nu." Such uses are, of course, not included in this study. I have found no other uses of nu in Han texts. Aside from these there is no evidence that nu signifies anything but "male slave" or "slave," actually or figuratively.
PEI W-
Female Slave. — Date 10-S B.C.: "[Wang Mang] once privately bought a serving pei. Some of his cousins heard rumors of it.
1 Cited by Lao Kan, op. cit., p. 2.
= The Shuo wen chieh tzu, the great etymological dictionary presented to the throne in a.d. 121, in its definition of nu, says, "Xu-pci were all criminals in antiquity (. . . ■^'6"^^A.)i" and then quotes this citation from the Chou li. Among the various editions of the Shuo wen assembled in the Shuo wen chieh tzu ku lin, the most important for information on the term nu (pp. 5554-56) is that cited in abbre\'iation as ^1^ (the Shuo wen chieh tzu i cheng), which has nineteen double columns of quotations from early dictionaries, histories, and encyclopaedias, including some passages quoted above. It is a mine of lore from the Chi chin p'ien, Feng ssu t'ung, Ch'u hsiieh chi, and other early works, and is recommended as an example of the definitions of key slaverj' terms in the numerous Chinese encyclopaedias.
66 SLAVERY IN THE FORMER HAN DYNASTY
[Wang] Mang thereupon said: 'The General of the Rear, Chu Tzu- yiian, has no sons . . . and so I bought her for him.' He immediately presented the pei to [Chu] Tzu-yua,n." (108.) 3 B.C.: "...the Empress Dowager [nee] Fu sent an internuncio to buy pei from various government bureaus, taking them at a low price; and she also took eight pei from the Bureau of the Chief of the Palace Guard. [Mu-chiang] Lung memorialized, saying: 'The price is too low. Please readjust it.' " (116.) Earlier evidences of sale are given below.
Other Uses.— There are no uses of pei in place names, personal names, or tribal names so far as I have discovered. Prior to Han times the term pei was also used figuratively by women in speaking of themselves, but this has not been noted in texts referring to the Former Han period.
NU-PEI
Male and Female Slaves. — References to the compound term are numerous; herewith are only a few dealing with sale. In 202 B.C., an edict of Emperor Kao: "Those common people who because of famine have sold themselves to be people's nu-pei are all to be freed and become commoners." (9.) Ca. 120 B.C.: "[Ho] Ch'ii- ping liberally bought fields, houses, and nu-pei for [Ho] Chung-ju, and then left." (J(.2.) Because of a law proposed in 7 B.C. to limit the amount of farm land and nu-pei that might be owned by people in various classes "the price of fields, residences, and nu-pei depre- ciated." (109.) Quoting the inaugural edict of Wang Mang, A.D. 9: "Furthermore, [the Ch'in dynasty] established markets for nu-pei [putting humans into] the same pens with cattle and horses." Wang Mang proclaimed that neither land nor nu-pei could be bought or sold. As a result, "the people went so far as to weep in the markets and highways. Moreover, those who were tried for selling and buying fields, residences, and nu-pei . . . were in- numerable." (122.)
Slaves. — There are no cases where a male is called a pei and only the one case quoted above (1) where females are called nu, in the generic sense. Wherever sex is shown males are nu, females pei. Therefore the term nu-pei is usually translated "male and female slaves." However, it probably has the generic meaning "slaves" in many instances where the reference is general.
The legal and customary status of nu, pei, and nu-pei is an involved problem dealt with in considerable detail later in this work.
SOURCES AND DEFINITION 67
T'UNG it or fti
Youths. — This term is frequently used in the sense of "slave," but also merely in the sense of "child," especially "young boy." Therefore, it is always translated "youth," though usually it is con- sidered to mean "slave" in the passages accepted. It has the generic sense of slaves, both male and female, and also a specific sense, male, and sometimes, female. Ca. 200 B.C. : "Some of the people of Pa and Shu went out clandestinely for trade, taking their horses from Tse, t'ung and yaks from P'o; and because of this [trade] the people of Pa and Shu became prosperous and wealthy." (10.) 177-174 B.C.: "Nowadays people who sell t'ung dress them up in embroidered clothes and silken shoes with the edges all embellished, and put them into pens." (16.) 113 B.C.: "With many attendants [she intends] to go to Ch'ang-an [where they] will be made captives and sold to become t'ung-nu . . . ." (50.) Wang Pao's essay on the purchase of a nu, dated 59 B.C. and using nu several times, is entitled "The Contract for a T'ung." (83.) Meng K'ang, who lived ca. A.D. 180-260, says, "T'ung are nu-pei." (53, footnote 5.)
Youth (male). — When Chi Pu was disguised as a slave he was sent to be sold with several tens of household t'ung, who were prob- ably males also (8). Likewise t'ung used as cavalry escorts were probably males (81, 112), this being a regular function of nu, as described in chapter VIII, below. When the expression "youth horsemen" arises. Yen Shih-ku, A.D. 581-645, explains it as "t'ung-nu horsemen" (112, footnote 7); again, "[They] made cavalry men of their t'ung-nu." (81, footnote 2.) Used thus in conjunction with nu, the term may be adjectival, or merely a compound. Shih Tan's wealth and extravagance during the period 33-15 B.C. are described: ". . . and t'ung-nu numbered by the hundred." (97.) The extrava- gance of Wang Mang's uncles is similarly noted: "In their women's quarters each had several tens of concubines, and their t'ung-nu were numbered by the thousand or hundred." (99.)-
1 The second form seems to be the original, and prior to Han times some distinction was made. In extant literature of the period the forms are used inter- changeably. The first occurs in fourteen of the translated documents, the second in six; in documents 2, lf.9, and 53, CHS uses the second while the equivalent SC passage uses the first. The Shuo wen makes only the second form correct in this sense. See footnote 2.
2 The Shuo wen (op. cit., pp. 1111-12), defining Vung in the second form (above), says: "Males who had undergone criminal punishment were called nu, nu were called t'ung, females were called ch'ieh j^^^'^H^^Hml^H^." Some commentators correct this: "Males who had undergone criminal punishment and become nu were called Vung |^^f|:^. ..." I have not found any Former Han dynasty cases of Vung specified as government slaves because of crime.
68 SLAVERY IN THE FORMER HAN DYNASTY
Youth (female). — Wei Ch'ing's mother was a fung, and Yen Shih-ku says, "The word fung is a general term for pei-concubines." (26, and footnote 5.) Wang Mang's wife dressed so simply that other women calling on her mother-in-law, in 8 B.C., thought she was a fung or a servant (A17).
TSANG ^ and HUO m
These terms have a variety of meanings, even in reference to slavery, and are not translated. The first more often refers to males and the second to females, but the terms can be a compound referring to males, or to slaves generically. The terms appear in only one document which assembles the various definitions (11, and foot- notes). Meanings are here listed without attempt to unravel their interrelationships.
(1) In southern and eastern China (of the Former Han period or earlier) "when cursing a nu, one says 'tsang'; when cursing a pei, one says 'huo.' "
(2) In the northeast, "all plebeian males who mate with pei are called tsang; [plebeian] females who become wives of nu are called huo," This use may not mean slave; the status of the plebeians is not made clear.
(3) Runaway nu are called tsang; runaway pei are called huo. The author of the Fang yen then summarizes by saying: "They are all abusive terms of diverse regions for cursing nu-pei."
(4) Chin Shao (fl. ca. a.d. 275) is quoted as having said: "Tsang- huo are those defeated enemy who have been captured and made nu-li."
(5) Wei Shao (a.d. 204-273) is quoted as having said: "When a good man takes a pei as wife and she bears a child, [the child] is called a huo; when a nu takes a good woman as wife and she bears a child, [the child] is called a tsang." This reverses the termi- nology for plebeians given in (2), but follows the sense of (1) and (3) that nu (here child of a nu) is a tsang, and pei (here child of a pei) is a huo.
(6) Finally the Feng su fung i, supposedly by Ying Shao (ca. A.D. 140-206), is quoted as having said: "In the ancient institutes there were originally no nu-pei, and then those who committed offenses were the origin of it. Tsang-che are those who have under- gone the punishment of tsang, being seized and becoming govern- ment nu [a variant here has a nu-pei]. Huo-che are runaways who
SOURCES AND DEFINITION 69
have been recaptured and become pei [variant, nu-pei]." The second part of this is a repetition of the second part of (3).
Several terms are used to refer to special kinds of nu or pei, but they do not occur frequently in the basic texts. Definition of these comes, in the main, from direct statements by writers of the Latter Han period, or from commentators, rather than from con- textual evidence.
TS'ANG-T'OU i^m
"Green-head." — Wei Hung, who was active between a.d. 25 and 57, and who wrote the Han chiu i, on governmental practices during the Former Han epoch, says: "Government nu were selected to give [service] as writers and accountants. Those of [the rank of] Attach^ and below were ts'ang-t'ou, [wearing] blue-green turbans." (92.) A memorial dated ca. 3 B.C. says: "That ts'ang-t'ou and lu-erh should all be employed [as officials] and become rich, is not Heaven's intention." (118.) On this, Meng K'ang remarks: ". . . [people of the] Han period named nu, 'ts'ang-t'ou,' not pure black, in order to differentiate them from good people." The term was also applied to private slaves, as indicated by the report that when Ho Ylin, grandnephew of Ho Kuang, should have been attend- ing court he preferred "sending a ts'ang-t'ou nu up to court to pay the visit [in his stead]." (72.)
The term ts'ang-t'ou was used shortly before Han times to desig- nate members of private armies who wore green kerchiefs or turbans around their heads. During Latter Han times it was apparently used quite specifically for male slaves.
LU-ERH it^
"Hut-dweller." — This term is met infrequently, and, like ts'ang- t'ou, is a sort of sobriquet. Lu were the houses for servants and minor attendants in the imperial palace. In the commentary just cited, Meng K'ang adds: "The place where all those who served in the halls [of a palace or residency] lived was a 'hut' (lu). Ts'ang-t'ou who were serving attendants were therefore called lu-erh." {118, footnote 4.)
KUNG-JEN ^A
Palace-women.— Wei Hung twice speaks of kung-jen as a t5T)e of pei. "Kung-jen were selected from among palace pei in their eighth year or over. They waited upon [ladies of the palace from] the Empress on down." (91.) Also, "In the Inner Apartments [of the
70 SLAVERY IN THE FORMER HAN DYNASTY
palace], Maidservants and Orderlies were all government pei selected in their eighth year or over. They dressed in green and were called kung-jen." {92.) Chao Fei-yen, the Empress of Emperor Ch'eng, "was originally a kung-jen of Ch'ang-an." Yen Shih-ku remarks about her, "Originally a kung-jen, she was presented to the household of the Princess of Yang-a. 'Kung-jen' was the name for government pei who were servants in the forbidden parts of the palaces." {101, and footnote 3.) However, kung-jen were not exclusively slaves, and there is one reference, dated 113 B.C., to a kung-jen in a king's palace, who was a man. This was Luan Ta, the magician {91, footnote 1).
There is a group of words regularly used to modify the terms nu, pei, t'ung, and sometimes nu-pei. Kuan ^, "government"; ssu fi., "private"; kung ^, "palace"; chia ^, "household" or "family"; ta i^, "senior" or "elder"; chH t^x, "cavalry"; ts'ung ^, "attendant"; shih ^, "serving"; yii ^, "personal" ; /w #, "chamberlain"; t'u ^, "convict."
A few of these terms occasionally stand alone, in combination, or with suffixes, in place of the terms they regularly modify.
SHIH f#
Serving. — Shih is used to modify pei in documents 79, 82, 108, and A20, the last dated about a.d. 9. Yiian Ang's Attendant Secretary, some time between 165 and 157 B.C., "had secret relations with [Yiian] Ang's shih-child." Ylian Ang "then presented him with the shih-che." After the first reference the commentator Wen Ying (fi. ca. a.d. 196-220) says definitely that she was a pei {23, and footnote 3). Some time between 164 and 154 B.C. a King summoned a physician to examine "all his girls and shih-che." The King said, "... I bought them in the common people's [market] place." Be- cause the King did not believe the diagnosis of one girl's condition, "he did not sell her at the [market] place for nobles." {21.) About 142 B.C. Wei Ch'ing's sister, the daughter of a household t'ung, was a shih-che in the same household {29).
The following account equates shih-che with yii-che and yil-pei contextually. (The latter terms are discussed next.) About 125 B.C. the Queen of Heng-shan "had a shih-che, a fine dancer, to whom the King had granted his favors." She arranged for her step-son, named Hsiao, to have relations with the girl, and his brother told the King, "Hsiao had relations with the King's yii-che . . . ." Later, "Hsiao was tried for having had relations with the King's yil-pei," and was executed {37).
SOURCES AND DEFINITION 71
Personal. — Yii modifies pei in documents 37, Jl^-S, and 85. In 82 B.C. Shang-kuan An, when drunk, would "have incestuous relations with his stepmother and various of his father's Ladies and shih-yii." Yen Shih-ku here makes the important statement, "The shih-yii were at the same time pei." {59, and footnote 3.) In 115 B.C. a marquis "was tried for having had relations with his father's yii-pei, and killed himself." The terse account of this trial in the Table of Marquises, CHS, 16, 3a, uses exactly the same words, but drops the one word pei, as though it were unessential; it appears, however, in the equivalent SC, 18, 3b {^8, and footnote 2).
Chamberlain.— Fu occurs as a modifier of pei in documents 76 and 120, and much more frequently in the History of the Latter Han dynasty. Yen Shih-ku explains the term by saying, "Whenever it says fu-pei it means [one who] assists with the affairs of [her master's] clothes and bed." (120, footnote 2.) In only one instance has the term been found standing alone — in the quoted accusation that Wang Shang had "had intercourse with his father's /m." There Yen Shih-ku says "fu means fu-pei." (98, and footnote 5.)
Instances in which these modifying terms stand alone, with suffixes, or in combination, in place of the word they modify are relatively rare. There is no way of telling contextually that they always mean slave. Therefore a few indeterminate references which add nothing to the body of information are not included among the documents in Part II.
T'U^
Convict.— In several documents t'u precedes nu or nu-pei in such a way that it might be a modifier. T'u occurs innumerable times by itself. Several Chinese writers include it among component terms for their studies of Chinese (or Han period) slavery, while others use it without special comment. There appears to be no contextual evidence for the Former Han period that t'u were sold, bartered, given away, or in any other way transferred in a manner that would fulfill the pragmatic test of ownership. While t'u were indeed subjugated to the full extent of the word, there seems to have been a distinction in status between t'u, on the one hand, and nu, pei, or t'ung, on the other. This, however, is an involved subject, best treated in its appropriate place in the next chapter.
III. ENSLAVEMENT
When the Former Han period was at the height of its luxury- there were several hundred thousands to perhaps a million real slaves in China. Many of them passed in various ways from freedom into bondage. What were the methods by which free people became slaves? Which led to government slavery and which to private?
Free people were enslaved for crime, sold because of economic distress, forced into bondage illegally, and imported from foreign regions for sale. Some prisoners of war were perhaps enslaved, but this is a complex question reserved for special discussion in the next chapter. Crime led always to government slavery, while economic distress and illegal bondage produced private slaves by the first sale. Both the government and private individuals acquired im- ported slaves.
Enslavement of Criminals and Their Families
Enslavement of criminals and the families of men executed for treason and rebellion has a long history as a typical Chinese mode of punishment. Many writers of the Han period state that this form of punishment was in use during late Chou and Ch'in times. The famous scholar and legal authority Cheng Hsiian (A.D. 127-200) explains in his commentary to the Chou-li that in ancient times males and females drawn into trial (i.e. related to people tried) were seized^ by the government as slaves; also, that contemporary male and female slaves were the descendants of, or the same as criminals of antiquity. His contemporary, Kao Yu, remarked in a commentary to the Ch'in dynasty book, the Lm shih ch'un ch'iu, that fathers and older brothers of criminals were tried and seized as slaves. The great dictionary Shuo wen, produced around A.D. 121, says that males who underwent criminal punishment were called male slaves (nu), while females who underwent criminal punish- ment were called female slaves {pei).~
1 The term ^xA. literally "submerged into," is hereafter translated as "confiscated" when it refers to property, and as "seized" or "seized and enslaved" when it refers to people previously free.
2 There are several other similar references but these most definitely refer to pre-Han conditions, and illustrate the point that Han scholars believed criminals or members of their families were enslaved in pre-Han times. These commentators were men of real scholarship, having access to sources now lost, conversant with customs and laws which developed out of earlier ones, and using a language in
72
ENSLAVEMENT 73
From the end of the Han period until late into Ch'ing times laws specified enslavement as punishment for families of people guilty of crimes classed as treason and rebellion. Legal codes changed, the classes of crimes subject to this form of punishment varied, and occasional attempts to abrogate the system occurred. Perhaps it is impossible to prove for everj^ period that such laws were enforced, but the principle remained a basic feature of Chinese law during most of its recorded history. ^
A basic social and philosophic principle of family unity and mutual responsibility underlay this practice of enslaving a major criminal's relatives: the whole family was considered responsible for the acts of one of its members. The Chinese family was much larger than the simple marriage group of husband, wife, and children, and therefore it is hard to tell how many living generations and what degrees of relationship comprised the legally responsible family in each criminal situation. The gravity of the offense determined the number of family members and the classes of relatives held responsible.
which legal terminology was still fairly close to that of late Chou and Ch'in times. In the works which they studied certain passages appear to refer to enslavement of criminals, but contextual evidence alone does not prove that they do. Since it is necessary anyway to fall back upon the explanations of the commentators, it is more objective to quote what they said than to try independently to interpret ambiguous passages in works bristling with textual and historical problems.
The above quotations and others like them are conveniently assembled in Ch'eng Shu-te, Chiu ch'ao lii k'ao (Han lii k'ao, ch. 3), pp. 81-82. Cf. also Shen Chia-pen, Li-tai hsing-fa k'ao [An investigation into the history of the laws and punishments], "Fen k'ao," ch. 15, 3a-5b (hereafter cited by Chinese title); and YUan chien lei han, ch. 258 (Jen pu, ch. 17), 2a-b, and 16a.
1 For citations of the law, modifications of it, or examples of its practice during the period between Han and T'ang, cf. Ch'eng Shu-te, op. cit., pp. 239, 246, 271, 294, 305, 369, 406, 438, 471, and 520. For a discussion of the continuity of the law during T'ang and later periods, cf. Wang Shih-chieh, "Chung-kuo nu-pei chih-tu [The Chinese slavery system]," She-hui k'e-hsUeh chi-kan (Social Science Quarterly), vol. 3, 1925, pp. 303-328 (see pp. 307-308) (hereafter cited by translated title. This article has been translated by Toni Pippon, "Beitrag zum Chinesischen Sklavensystem," Mitteilungen der Deutschen Gesellschaft fiir Natur- und Volker- kujide Ostasiens, Bd. 29, Teil B, Tokyo, 1936, pp. 93-113).
The law on enslavement in the T'ang Hi su i, ch. 17, section on thieving and robbery, may be translated as follows: "Those plotting rebellion or major crimes shall all be beheaded. Fathers, and sons over sixteen years old, shall be strangled. [Sons] fifteen years old or younger, mothers, daughters, wives, concubines, sons' wives and concubines, grandfathers, grandsons, older and younger brothers, older and younger sisters, and such others as pu ch'il [shall be enslaved], and property, fields, and houses shall be confiscated by the government. Men over eighty or incurably sick, women over sixty or incurably sick, shall all be excused." (Cf . Pippon, p. 100.)
The T'ang lii su i is the earliest extant Chinese law code (or, more precisely, a commentary on a code now lost) and dates from a.d. 653-654 (cf. Paul Pelliot, "Notes de bibliography chinois II: Le droit chinois," BEFEO, vol. 9, 1909, pp. 123-152 [see pp. 124-125] and Jean Escarra: Le droit chinois, pp. 96-97). Various
74 SLAVERY IN THE FORMER HAN DYNASTY
Some crimes, for example, were punished by executing three sets of relatives. Commentators disagree in their explanations of "the three sets of relatives." Chang Yen of the third century says that they were the criminal's parents, brothers, wife, and children. Ju Shun (fl. ca. 189-265) says that they were the members of his father's clan, mother's clan, and wife's clan. Other suggestions give his father, sons, and grandsons; or his father and father's brothers (including male cousins?), his own brothers (including male cousins?), and his sons and their brothers (i.e., cousins).^
Theoretically this punishment was abolished by an imperial edict of the Dowager Empress nee Lii in 187 B.C., yet in 164 B.C. when Hsin-yiian P'ing plotted rebellion he was exterminated, to- gether with his three sets of relatives. Again in 104 B.C. the relatives of Wang Wen-shu were tried and executed, probably to the jive degrees of relationship. ^
It is not unusual to read that a punishment was abolished and then to learn that it was practiced only a short time later. Emperor Wen abrogated all statutes and orders for arresting wives and children of criminals and punishing them also. Yet an apparently contradictory event occurred under his successor some twenty-five years later, when Chi K'uei-yiieh conspired to revolt and kill his father, Chi T'ung-chia. This was pronounced to be "treason and inhumanity." Ju Shun says that according to the Code in cases of "treason and inhumanity" the father, mother, wife, children, brothers, and sisters of the criminal should all be publicly executed. In spite of Emperor Wen's abrogation. Emperor Ching especially pardoned the father, together with his wife and children, "who should have been con- demned with him," and ordered that Chi K'uei-ylieh, together with his wife and children, should be sentenced "according to the law." ^
parts of it have been translated by R. Deloustal in his "La justice dans I'ancien Annam," BEFEO, 1909-13, and 1919-20, passim, which translates an Annamite code based upon, and in many ways similar to, the T'ang code. It may be pointed out here that the T'ang lii su i contains scores, if not hundreds, of references to slaves, either in special laws applicable to them, or in modifications of laws for cases in which slaves are involved. It is invaluable for a legal study of slavery in T'ang times. This multipUcation of slave legislation is in marked contrast to the paucity of (extant) similar legislation before T'ang times, especially during the Han period.
1 Cf. Ch'eng Shu-te, op. cit., p. 59, and Tz'u yiian.
2 HFHD, vol. I, pp. 193 and 260; for Wang Wen-shu see CHS, 90, 4b. Ch'eng Shu-te (op. cit., p. 119) quotes the "Hsing fa chih" of the Chin shu as saying that Hsiao Ho abolished the punishment of three sets of relatives and those drawn into trial {lien tso) when he took over the Ch'in code.
3 CHS, 4, 2b; and 5, 2a. Cf. HFHD, vol. I, pp. 233 and 313, respectively.
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If whole families, including remote relatives of people guilty of particularly heinous crimes, might be executed, it is obvious that their enslavement was comparatively a mild form of punishment. The History of the Former Han dynasty records only a few instances of this form of enslavement, but they involved considerable numbers of people. Furthermore, they are probably typical of a constant series of criminal cases which were either not important enough to be reported, or were reported in such meager detail that the fate of the families was not specified beyond the ambiguous remark that they were punished "according to the law,"
The families of the leaders in the Rebellion of the Seven States in 154 B.C. were enslaved. This is the first case recorded for the Han period. It illustrates how the formal histories often lack crucial details for a study of slavery, for it is almost an accident that this instance is on record at all, though the rebellion was the most im- portant one that occurred during the dynasty proper. Although it was quickly suppressed, thousands died on both sides, one of the kings was beheaded, and the others committed suicide.^
The biographies of the seven rebellious kings do not indicate what happened to their families. The "Table of the Vassal Kings" shows in each case only that the ruler expired and that the royal line was terminated. Emperor Ching's edict in the "Annals" refers to the extermination of the kings, but also neglects to mention what happened to the families. It only tells that the Emperor "could not bear to apply the law" to Liu Yi (the son of a former King of Ch'u, and an uncle of the rebelling King) and some other imperial clansmen who had joined in the rebellion. Instead, he ordered all their names expunged from the register of the imperial house. He pardoned officials and people who had been coerced to join in the rebellion, although they should have been sentenced as accomplices. 2
Thus, no record of the events at that time tells what happened to the families of the leading rebels. Yet fourteen years later Emperor Wu "pardoned the families of [the leaders of the rebellion of] Wu, Ch'u, the Seven States, who had been condemned to the govern- ment." Ying Shao says explicitly in his commentary: "At the time of the rebellion . . . the wives and children of the leaders had been seized and made government slaves. Emperor Wu, pitying them, pardoned them and sent them all away." {30, and footnote 3.)
1 For a clear summary, cf. HFHD, vol. I, pp. 292-297.
=! Biographies: CHS, 35, 7a; 36, 2a; 38, 2a and 4b; also SC, 106. Tables: CHS, 14, 3b-8a, passim. Edict of Emperor Ching: CHS, 5, 2b; cf. HFHD, vol. I, pp. 314-315.
76 SLAVERY IN THE FORMER HAN DYNASTY
There is no reason to doubt that this amnesty occurred as recorded. Living in the century after the Ch'ien Han shu was written, Ying Shao simply amphfied and explained the statement. Chinese encyclopaedias and modern writers on slavery uniformly cite this early example of enslavement. For fourteen years these wives and children were government slaves, but if Emperor Wu had not pardoned them, or if the ten-word record had not been entered in his "Annals," it might not now be known at all that these people became government slaves. How often did the historians fail to record such enslavements in the appropriate places?
Chapters 14 through 18 of the Ch'ien Han shu list in tabular form all the important noble families of the Han dynasty, with brief records of succession to and termination of the lines. At least fifty- three of these noble families were abruptly cut off because the title- holder rebelled or plotted to rebel, and was executed or committed suicide. Eliminating the leaders of the Rebellion, and the members of the Empress nee Lii's clan, which was entirely exterminated "without consideration of youth or old age," there are still some thirty other cases of rebellion in which there is no hint about the fate of the rebels' wives and children. It is reasonable to suppose that in some of these cases also the families became government slaves.
A special case of enslavement of families occurred in 120 B.C. when Wang Wen-shu, one of Emperor Wu's most ruthless officials, was appointed Administrator of Ho-nei Commandery. On taking office he immediately arrested more than a thousand families among the tjrannical gentry of the commandery. "Tyrannical gentry" (^^f" or ^?^) usually means powerful plebeians who oppressed their neighbors, appropriated property, and accumulated large amounts of farm land which they rented. They were the economically powerful people who manipulated or defied the laws and were the actual bosses of their communities. Emperor Wu had a policy of suppressing these people. He quickly consented when Wang Wen- shu requested permission to execute the major criminals and their families and to enslave the families of the lesser offenders, who would be executed singly. Half the property was to be given to the victims of their oppression, while the government kept the rest. Here is a clear-cut example of enslavement as an alternative for execution, and a punishment one degree less severe. The passage closes with the grim sentence, "Blood flowed over ten or more li." US.)
Only one document definitely reports enslavement of criminals themselves during the Former Han period. This was during the reign
ENSLAVEMENT 77
of the usurper Wang Mang, in connection with his currency "reforms." Several times during his regency and reign, Wang Mang altered the monetary system, greatly to the disadvantage of all people who owned money. Many new types of coins were introduced, and their metal content was reduced. People were ordered to adopt and circulate new issues whenever Wang Mang altered the cur- rency, and were supposed to turn in their old bronze coins in exchange for new coins containing much less metal. There was tremendous opposition and many traders refused to accept the new coins at their face value. Almost anyone could coin money, for it was cast rather than struck. Therefore many people melted down their old coins and made new and lighter Wang Mang coins instead of turning in their old coins for exchange at great loss. Widespread counterfeiting greatly reduced the profits Wang Mang expected to obtain by depreciating the metal content of his money. ^
To enforce circulation of the new coins and to stamp out counter- feiting Wang Mang altered the monetary laws several times. In A.D. 9 he decreed that anyone who clung to the old five-chu cash or talked against the new currency would be banished to distant frontiers (122). Counterfeiters were executed. ^ Possibly their families were enslaved, for the next year Wang Mang increased the severity of his laws to include the five mutually responsible families (see p. 78) who would be tried along with the counterfeiter and be enslaved by the government (123).
When these stringent measures did not stop the evil, he changed and lightened the law. Instead of being executed, those who privately coined money were to be seized with their wives and children and made government slaves; and officials or groups of mutually respon- sible five families who knew of such counterfeiting and failed to report it were to be punished with them. Instead of banishing people who opposed the new money, he sentenced plebeians to one year of punishment, and dismissed officials from office (131).
Leniency was less effective than severity. Offenders were even more numerous. In A.D. 21 a great frost destroyed crops, and in
1 For a clear and detailed summary of Wang Mang's currency reforms, their disastrous economic effects, and the resulting wide-scale counterfeiting, cf . Homer H. Dubs, "Wang Mang and his economic reforms," TP, vol. 35, 1940, pp. 233-237.
' I have not found a specific Wang Mang decree that condemned counter- feiters to execution, but CHS, 24B, 11a, reports that the people who died for counterfeiting and were cast to the four bounds of the empire for opposing Wang Mang's new money could not be counted. Emperor Ching's law of public execu- tion for coining cash or making alchemistic counterfeit gold (cf. HFHD, vol. I, p. 323) was presumably still in effect in Wang Mang's time.
78 SLAVERY IN THE FORMER HAN DYNASTY
consequence plebeians of eastern China resorted to counterfeiting. They and mutually responsible groups of families tried with them were seized and enslaved to the number of ten myriad. Males were transported in cage carts, while women and children walked with iron fetters dangling on their necks. When they arrived at Ch'ang-an these slaves were set to work in the Bureau of Mint {131, 132). An ironic touch, but thoroughly Chinese!
The number reported enslaved need not be taken too literally, nor even perhaps the historian's grim statement that 60 or 70 per cent died of grief and suffering. What is noteworthy is that in this instance criminals, that is, the counterfeiters, were enslaved.
Even more interesting are the references to enslavement of people not actually related to counterfeiters but held responsible for their crimes because they and the counterfeiters were members of the same groups of five families. Each family was held legally respon- sible for the conduct of four others — a great extension of the funda- mental principle whereby a family was responsible for the acts of its own members.
Wang Mang did not originate this system. It had been advocated by Shang Yang in the fourth century before Christ, and may have originated earlier.^ Not merely a harsh legal measure to extend the terror of the law, it was a far-reaching system of political organi- zation based upon conditions of small, self-contained peasant hamlets and close-knit villages within towns. Schematically this administra- tive system consisted of five families in a neighborhood, five neighbor- hoods to a hamlet, five or ten hamlets in a commune, and ten communes to a district. A headman or elder in charge of each division was the focal point of administration and responsibility. Exact quinary or decimal units could not have been followed rigidly, but the principle was applied for purposes of taxation, corvee labor, military levies and self-defense, and the administration of laws. The state of Ch'in, and later the djniasty, charged each family in a neighborhood to denounce crimes committed by members of any of the other families; if certain crimes occurred all five families were implicated and tried together.
The harsh application of that part of the system which made people responsible for the conduct of their neighbors was thoroughly repellent to the subjects of the Ch'in empire — intra-family respon- sibility was an integral part of Chinese social organization, but
1 Ch'eng Shu-te, op. cit., p. 82; J. J. L. Duyvendak, The hook of Lord Shang, p. 14 and footnote 7, pp. 57-59; Derk Bodde, China's first unifier, pp. 35, 166.
ENSLAVEMENT 79
extension of legal responsibility beyond the family was apparently an artificial system imposed from above. The Han dynasty seems to have abandoned the objectionable part of the system while main- taining most of it for administrative purposes.^ Wang Mang merely re-established mutual legal responsibility among groups of five families in order to enforce his currency reforms.
Thousands of people thereby became slaves in a.d. 21 because they or some of their neighbors were secretly coining money. Ten years later, after Wang Mang had been killed, the new Emperor Kuang-wu freed those who had survived the revolution and were still slaves. Writing finis to this mass enslavement, the imperial edict said: "Those officials and people who, during Wang Mang's time, were seized and became slaves not in accordance with the former laws, are all to be freed and made commoners." (135.)
Orthodox enslavement of families of executed criminals (and perhaps of some criminals themselves) continued, however, during the Latter Han dynasty. An edict of a.d. 106, prepared for the infant Emperor Shang, said that many members of the Imperial House had been enslaved since a.d. 25, and ordered the unfortunates all to be freed and made commoners. In 110 Emperor An decreed: "All those who have been tried and banished to the frontiers for monstrous talking and other crimes since the Chien-ch'u [reign period (76-83)] are to be returned each to his original commandery; those seized by the government as slaves are to be pardoned and become commoners." ^
These passages are evidence of enslavement of criminals' families throughout the Han period. Any assertion about the frequency of the practice, or estimate of the number of people thus enslaved during the dynasty, would be without documentary foundation. Considering the nature of the historical sources it seems certain that there were many unreported cases. Such enslavement was always to the government in the first instance.
1 In 179 B.C. Emperor Wen "completely abrogated all statutes and orders for arresting wives and children and punishing them with [the criminals]." (CHS, 4, 2b; HFHD, vol. I, p. 233.) This certainly indicates that the extension of responsi- bility beyond the family or clan was already obsolete.
^ HHS, 4, 9a; 5, 4a. The wording of the edict of A.D. 110 leaves some doubt today whether the slaves (1) had been enslaved, rather than banished, for "mon- strous talking" and other crimes; whether they were (2) families of people banished; or whether they were (3) all those people seized and enslaved since the Chien- ch'u period for any reason. On "monstrous talking" cf. HFHD, vol. I, p. 193, footnote 2.
80 SLAVERY IN THE FORMER HAN DYNASTY
Distinction Between Convicts and Slaves
Several modern Chinese writers on Han slavery treat convicts {i!u ^) as though they were slaves.^ It is true that convicts were sentenced to hard labor, that they worked side by side with certain types of government slaves, and that both sometimes wore similar clothes, shackles, and marks of identity. But unless convicts were slaves in a legal sense, unless they were property of the government in the same way that slaves were, only confusion results from calling them slaves. Even at the risk of "beating the dead tiger" it is imperative to clear up this point. What are the facts?
The earliest specific definition of t'u known to me is that by Wang Ch'ung, who lived a.d. 27 to ca. 97, and was a contemporary of Pan Ku, the author of the Ch'ien Han shu. He says: "[Those who] have undergone criminal punishment are called fu I^^JIi:^^." - This is so general that only equally general terms such as "convict" or "felon" convey the same meaning. The great etymological dictionary Shuo wen chieh tzu, presented to the throne in a.d. 121, offers no hint that t'u refers to enslavement, as indeed it would not unless that meaning were considered primary. However, none of the later commentators on the Shuo wen suggests the idea of enslave- ment or equates Vu with nuJ^ The only early writer who makes such an equation is Li Chi, who flourished ca. A.D. 200. He says: "A general term for male and female t'u was nu Ji:^^^^^^." {1, footnote 2.) However, Li Chi himself speaks (CHS, 8, la) of fu sentenced to one year. People sentenced to a single year of government servitude cannot be called slaves. If Li Chi is correct that nu was a general term for t'u — and the pre-Han context of
1 Liang Ch'i-ch'ao, "System of slavery in China," p. 532; Ma Fei-pai, "Source material on the economic history of Ch'in and Han," pt. 6, "The slavery system," p. 385; Wu Po-lun, "Hsi Han nu-li k'ao [An investigation of slavery in the Western Han]," ShihHuo, vol. 1, No. 7, March 1, 1935, pp. 275-285 (see p. 278) (hereafter cited by translated title) ; Lao Kan, "The system of slavery during the two Han dynasties," p. 8; Ma Ch'eng-feng, An economic history of China, vol. 2, p. 246. This usage is refuted by Wu Ching-ch'ao ("The slavery system of the Western Han," p. 246, footnote 1), who quotes in his support Wang Shih-chieh, who has made the most exhaustive study of Chinese slavery from the legal point of view. Wang points out that in enslavement for crime the basic principle seems to be that the slaves were the people mutually implicated, but not the criminals them- selves. It was a punishment for relatives of major criminals, arising from the Chinese family system (op. cit., p. 306; Pippon, p. 99).
^Lun heng, ch. 23 (sec. 3), 10b; cf. Alfred Forke, trans., Lun-Heng, 2 vols., London, 1907, Beriin, 1911, vol. 2, p. 378. The whole passage concerns t'u, yet gives no evidence of enslavement.
3 See Shuo wen chieh tzu ku lin, pp. 736-737.
ENSLAVEMENT 81
his commentary should be remembered — it tends rather to diffuse the meaning of nu than to sharpen the meaning of t'u.
Several passages contextually associate the terms t'Uy and 7m or nu-pei, but because of the nature of the language it is not always possible to tell whether they are separate items, or form a compound, or whether t'u is an adjective indicating a kind of nu. The first passage (3), referring to men working at Li Mountain who were freed in 209 B.C. to fight one of the rebelling armies, makes a clear distinction between two types of people: convicts, and born male slaves ^A'^M.-f'. In proposing the scheme Chang Han had only suggested freeing of t'u. The second passage, dated 197 B.C. and referring to a plan to free men willing to fight Kao-tsu's Empress and Heir-apparent, is indecisive (13). It simply says, "the various bureaus' t'u nu" ^li"^^. Here "convict" and "male slave" could be either two classes, or one special class of "convict-slaves." The third passage ^6), dated 119-113 B.C. and telling of the con- fiscation of property from merchants and others who infringed certain drastic emergency laws, points to an adjectival usage. It seems to distinguish between confiscated slaves il^AifZW, that is, slaves confiscated along with other property, on the one hand, and criminals seized and enslaved ^iN,W, on the other. However, this is only an assumption. The second reference may equally well be read "convicts and male and female slaves," as it is trans- lated in the document. There is an interesting undated passage in the Han chiu i (95), in which it is said that the government took twelve hundred t'u nu from bureaus within the capital city and subordinated them to (or put them under the control of) a single inspectorate. The passage itself could be translated either as "convicts and male slaves," or as "convict-slaves." The interesting point is that in the introductory section to the "Table on the Bureaucracy" in the Ch'ien Han shu, under the heading Ssu-li chiao-wei, a similar statement leaves out nu and mentions only the t'u,^ saying: "Carrying credentials, [the Colonel over the Retainers] was escorted by twelve hundred t'u from the bureaus of the capital city. He arrested [those who practiced] wu-ku, and judicially investigated major [cases of] licentiousness and treachery." Here t'u may be standing for t'u-nu; on the other hand there may be a scribal error, or a misunderstanding, or the meaning "foot soldier" may be indicated. This seems most likely in view of the fact that
1 CHS, 19A, 6a {Han shu pu-chu, 22a). The passage is translated in 95, foot- note 2. I
82 SLAVERY IN THE FORMER HAN DYNASTY
the next statement is: "Later his soldiers (^) were abohshed. . . ." Finally, there is a usage dated A.D. 19 which reports that Wang Mang made a great enlistment of imprisoned t'u and people's male slaves IS^A^X to fight as shock troops against the Hsiung-nu. As it makes a distinction between t'u and private slaves, it does not exactly fit the present discussion, but it is interesting because another report of the same event in the same source says Wang Mang enlisted prisoners sentenced to death, and male slaves of officials and plebeians i^EHH^K^X. The conjunction of the two passages shows that the imprisoned t'u in the first item were criminals sentenced to death, and not government slaves (130).
In summary, two of the passages show a clear distinction, one is indecisive, and two can be argued to mean "convict-slaves."
Now, granting that there is a term "convict-slave," does this mean that fu alone means slave? Obviously it does not. There are many meanings for t'u. Referring to citations in two Chinese dictionaries compiled on modern principles, the Chung-hua ta tzu- tien isolates twenty-four meanings, and the Tz'u yuan gives ten. Not all of these are Han usages, and only a few are nouns such as foot-soldier, commoner giving menial service in government bureaus, and sentenced criminals. But in both dictionaries under the defini- tion meaning a convict the reference to nu comes from the "Treatise on Jurisprudence" of the T'ang shu, or History of the T'ang dynasty (618-906). There are many pre-T'ang historical and legal texts, items from dictionaries, and commentaries, which in one or another way tell of government enslavement of the families or descendants of criminals, and perhaps even of criminals themselves (the distinction is not easy to draw in view of the Chinese family system), but while these employ nu or nu-pei as the term for such people, none earlier than this T'ang shu passage (except Li Chi) equates them with t'u.^
Liang Ch'i-ch'ao, the most scholarly of those who include t'u in their discussions of slavery, speaks of two types of enslavement for crime. He is not so much interested in the Former Han practice as in that throughout Chinese history, but the documents he quotes are the Chou li and Han chiu i.- The first of these dates only shortly
1 1 mean by this that I have not been able to find such references in various Chinese encyclopaedias, legal works, or the Shuo wen chieh tzu. ku lin, with its extensive quotations of Shuo wen commentaries. I may not have looked far enough, but considering that assembling of early references on all subjects is a passion with Chinese scholars, methodically driven to the point of a vice, the search has certainly passed the point of "diminishing returns."
2 Liang Ch'i-ch'ao, op. cit., pp. 532-533.
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before Han (probably edited, or "rediscovered" about the beginning of our era), while the second is an early Latter Han work. His first class of government slaves consists of lightly punished people, those sentenced to servitude for one to five years. Though his citations do not refer to these people as t'u, Liang says that they were called fu. Here it is not necessary to go into the types of work such criminals did, or the names of the various kinds of sentences.^ If, however, t'u were people serving criminal sentences from one to five years in length, then they were certainly not slaves any more than convicts in a southern chain-gang are slaves, no matter how slavish their treatment may be.
It must be admitted that a confusion between t'u and certain government nu or nu-pei is understandable, and there may indeed have been points of identity. Wang Mang's slaves were certainly given the treatment of convicts, for that is what they were, though they are called nu-pei. Two documents dating very early in the Former Han period describe free people disguising themselves as private slaves, and therefore having their heads shaved, putting on iron collars, and dressing in russet clothes. These were the identify- ing costume of t'u and people sentenced for limited periods.- It is probably significant that the only reported instances during the Former Han period of private or government slaves so treated (except for the Wang Mang case), come at the beginning of the dynasty. At this time private slavery was apparently not very extensive, and perhaps reflected the Ch'in and late Chou treatment of the enslaved families or descendants of executed criminals, who seem to have been the most common government slaves in the pre-Han age.
Tattooing the face was another way of distinguishing criminals. It was next to the least of five punishments involving bodily mutila- tion, Ch'ing Pu, a convict working on Li Mountain at the end of
1 See HFHD, vol. I, p. 177, footnote 1, for a translation of the Han chin i pas- sage. Ch'eng Shu-te (op. cit., pp. 51-55) assembles the Han material. He does not equate criminals of this sort with t'u, just as he does not equate t'u and nu, yet the passages he quotes when dealing with punishments of one and three year servitude use t'u contextually. Dubs does equate t'u with slaves and also ap- parently with people sentenced to servitude from one to five years. In his note on the t'u that Kao-tsu was escorting to Li Mountain, he says: "Enslavement or convict labor was a common punishment; a criminal could be sentenced to enslave- ment for a number of years." HFHD, vol. I, p. 34, footnote 1. (Italics mine.)
2 8 and 12. See Ch'eng Shu-te, op. cit., pp. 51-52, for shackling and shaving the heads of criminals; also HFHD, vol. I, p. 177, footnote 1, and Edouard Chavannes, Les documents chinois. . . , p. 63. Document 26 describes the meeting of the slave, Wei Ch'ing, with a convict in an iron collar.
84 SLAVERY IN THE FORMER HAN DYNASTY
the Ch'in period, had been tattooed, and took his name from that fact. The practice was theoretically abolished by an edict of Em- peror Wen in 167 B.C., but probably continued to be done at later times. ^ Evidence that enslaved relatives or descendants of executed criminals were tattooed appears in a citation of the Han law code, quoted by the Grand Judge, Chung Yu, toward the end of the Latter Han period. According to the Han code, said Chung Yu, "the wives and children of criminals [PA] are confiscated as male and female slaves, and tattooed on the face." Amplifying this citation he explained that "the punishment of tattooing the face as practiced by Han was preserved from ancient statutes. The genuine male and female slaves of today had ancestors who originally committed crimes. Even though a hundred generations have gone by, still they have tattooed faces [as a sign of] submission to the government." -
There seem to have been differences as well as similarities between fu and government nu or nu-pei. There is no evidence that t'u were sold, or given away, which is a useful pragmatic test of slave- ownership. An affirmative conclusion cannot be drawn from absence of evidence. Therefore, while it cannot be asseverated that t'u were not sold, it cannot be proved that they were. There is plenty of documentary proof, on the other hand, that slaves,
1 For example, about a.d. 150 Chu Mu offered to have his face tattooed in expatiation of a misdeed. Cf. HHS, 73, 5b. This could hardly have happened if the custom had been strictly abolished for more than 300 years.
2 San kuo chih, Wei chih, 12, 4a. The statement occurs in the biography of Mao Chieh (ibid., 3b-4b), an important official under T'ai-tsu (i.e., Wu-ti or Ts'ao Ts'ao) shortly before a.d. 220. Someone reported that Mao Chieh had interviewed some "rebels with tattooed faces, whose wives and children had been seized by the government as slaves." (The Chinese construction of the sentence makes it appear that the rebels were the ones whose faces were tattooed, but Chung Yu's statement quoted above, as well as what follows, indicates that it was the enslaved wives and children of former rebels who are meant.) Mao Chieh was thrown into prison because he was reported to have said that this sort of treat- ment was the cause of a current drought. In the trial Chung Yu quoted the Book of history and the Chou li to prove that such enslaving was an ancient practice, and then cited and explained the Han law code, as quoted above. He asked how many tattoo-faced people Mao Chieh had interviewed, and wanted to know how the ignorant "tattoo-faced male and female slaves" had been able to obtain an interview with Mao Chieh to present their grievances.
Cited by a Grand Judge in an official trial, this quotation of the Han code, and his explanation, constitute good evidence of the treatment of this type of govern- ment slave.
Chung Yu's citation is quoted as evidence of Han conditions by such Chinese students of law and slavery as Ch'eng Shu-te (op. cit., p. 81), Shen Chia-pen (op. cit., 5b, 6a-b), Wang Shih-Chieh (op. cit., p. 307), Liang Ch'i-ch'ao (op. cit., p. 532), Ma Fei-pai (op. cit., p. 389), and several others.
Since slaves were tattooed for purposes of identification, the face was the natural place for the marking. The kind of tattoo mark applied in Han times
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including government ones, were sold and given away. Many special pardons of t'u were recorded, but very few manumissions of government slaves during the Former Han period. T'u were often recruited to fight in China's frontier wars, but government slaves are not reported to have been. There were a number of revolts of t'u, but none reported for government slaves, which strongly suggests a fundamental difference in treatment.
Because there seems to be no contextual evidence that t'u were slaves; because many of those called t'u were merely criminals sentenced to labor from one to five years ;^ because the term has a number of other important meanings; and because t'u in the sense of criminal cannot be equated with any other Former Han term surely or exclusively meaning "slave" — for these reasons it is unjusti- fiable to translate the term as "slave." To treat t'u as slaves distorts the crucial problems of slave numbers, functions, and economic position. In this work the term is translated "convict."
Enslavement Because of Economic Distress
Famine and slavery in China are cause and effect, and the sale of women and children because of economic distress is a constant factor during all Chinese history when slavery was an established institution. Numerous instances of the sale of children from the beginning of Han times through the Ming period appear in the dismal record of famines spread out year by year in the pages of Chinese encyclopaedias, and many Occidental writers attest to the practice during the last dynasty. As late as 1920-21, women and children, and particularly young girls, were sold in large numbers in a north- China famine which cost 500,000 lives. Yet at that time slavery was already legally abolished in China. Sales during famines doubtless still occur.
Extensive warfare almost always causes famine. People flee their homes, trade and communications collapse, crops and grain- is not known, but a description of the practice in Chin times (a.d. 265-419) perhaps throws a little light on this minor point. An official order stated that male or female slaves who ran away were to be tattooed on both eyes with a copper- green substance like ink; if they ran away a second time they were to be tattooed on both cheeks; and if they ran away a third time they were to be tattooed under each eye with a horizontal mark one and a half (Chinese) inches long and half an inch wide (Ch'eng Shu-te, op. cit., p. 354, quoting the Yu yang tsa tsu and the T'ai p'ing yil Ian).
1 Instead of being executed, seriously mutilated, dismissed from office or title, or fined. These were the principal types of punishments; cf. Ch'eng Shu-te, op. cit., pp. 42-63.
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stores are seized or destroyed to weaken the enemy, able-bodied men forced into the army cannot attend to planting and harvesting, and brigands stalk and pillage in the wake of the troops. At the beginning of the Han period, after four years of rebellion and civil war, a great famine swept the Ch'in stronghold of Shensi, normally a rich and fertile region. Grain cost five thousand cash the picul, people ate human flesh, and over half the population died. In 205 B.C. Kao-tsu permitted people to sell their children and migrate to Szechwan for food (7).
Probably this order merely sanctioned a widespread practice. Famine does not wait for imperial decrees! Three years later, when the country was scarcely pacified, the Emperor decreed: "Those common people who because of famine have sold themselves to be people's slaves are all to be freed and become commoners." (9.) This edict shows that people had sold themselves as well as their children.
The cycle of warfare, famine, and slavery was repeated at the close of the Former Han period. The successful rebellion against Wang Mang degenerated into years of civil warfare. Famine devastated the land, and two edicts of Emperor Kuang-wu evidence the sale of victims. Three years after the murder of Wang Mang, the new Emperor proclaimed that plebeians' wives married and children sold could freely return to their parents {1SJ^). In a.d. 31 a more specific edict ordered that those officials and plebeians who had encountered famine and turmoil, thus becoming slaves and lesser wives, should all be allowed to return home if they wished. To put teeth into the edict the Emperor ordered that any master who dared to restrain them from leaving should be tried according to the "law for selling people." (136.)
Records of famine and widespread economic distress caused by droughts, untimely frosts, floods, and wars appear at least twenty times in the "Imperial Annals" of the Ch'ien Han shu during a period of 212 years. Each of these disasters was severe enough to demand government action, or at least imperial solicitude. Four notices report cannibalism. There is no indication in any but the first of these terse and stark records that people sold themselves or their children, but it is likely that every famine produced a new batch of slaves. Several leading statesmen referred to the practice in memorials on general economic conditions.
Thus, in 178 B.C. Chia Yi told Emperor Wen that even after several decades of peace public and private stores of grain were
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lamentably small. "When there is a lack of timely rains," he said, "the people cast wolfish glances; when the harvest is bad and is not harvested, pleadings to be allowed to sell titles and children have been heard." (A^.) Ch'ao Ts'o also addressed to Emperor Wen a long memorial on agriculture, in which he described the hardships of farmers, burdened with year-long labors, corvee duties, charitable obligations, excessive taxes, and ill-timed legislation. ^ When droughts and floods occur, "those who have [grain] sell at half price [sic!], and those who have none get respite by borrowing, to be repaid double; and therefore there are those who sell their lands and houses, and sell their children and grandchildren in order to repay their creditors." (18.)
Chia Chtian-chih attempted to dissuade Emperor Yiian from launching a military expedition against the people of Hai-nan Island in 46 B.C. A year before, a famine in Shantung was so severe that people there resorted to cannibalism. Chia Chtian-chih pictured the unhappy condition of the people in eastern China, who for years had suffered and been forced to leave their homes. Although in human nature no family relationship is closer than that between children and their parents, he said, and nothing is more joyous than the relationship of husbands and wives, still the people are driven to the extremity of marrying off their wives and selling their children. Neither laws nor the sense of righteousness could stop them. He argued that to send off a great military expedition at such a time was no way to cope with famine and to preserve the people (AlS). During Wang Mang's reign famine and warfare against the Hsiung- nu forced the people to flee into the central commanderies, where they were sold as slaves. To prevent this depopulation of the frontiers, Wang Mang ordered public execution for anyone, official or plebeian, who dared to traffic in frontier plebeians (126).
An interesting variant of child-selling was "pawning children." Liu An, better known as Huai-nan Tzu, referred to this custom in his letter to young Emperor Wu. He criticized a proposed campaign against the Kingdom of Yiieh because economic conditions were unfavorable. Two years before, a flood of the Yellow River had forced people to practice cannibalism. "For several years," he said, "the harvests have successively not been abundant, and people have had to depend upon selling their honorary ranks and pawning
1 The whole memorial is translated by Herbert A. Giles (Gems of Chinese literature, rev. ed., Shanghai, 1922, pp. 70-73) and Georges Margoulifes (Le Kou- wen chinois, Paris, 1926, pp. 68-73). The essential parts of the famous documents are translated by Duyvendak (op. cit., pp. 54-55).
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their children in order to continue to clothe and feed themselves." (33.) Ju Shun, a third century commentator, explains the practice of pawning children. In Huai-nan people sold children to do slave work. If, after three years, the parents could not redeem them, the children then became male and female slaves, A T'ang dynasty custom is quoted in support of Ju Shun's observation. It was the custom at one place in Kiangsi province to use boys and girls as collateral for borrowing money. If the loan was not repaid in the specified time, or if the interest due equaled the principal, the children were seized and enslaved (33, and footnote 5). Although there is no other evidence in the Han dynasty of this custom, or of debtor slavery specifically, it is plausible as a modified and mitigated form of the well-documented practice of selling children outright.
A poor family that could not afford to rear another child, or especially another girl, might allow the newborn child to die. In- fanticide may be used as a measure of economic distress. A destitute family might prefer to leave its baby girl on the doorstep of a wealthy family that could rear her as a slave. Formal histories do not give much precise information about infanticide, yet there are references to it in Han times. In one region so many poor people abandoned their children that Chia Piao announced that parents who let their children die would be punished for murder.^
Legality of Sale into Slavery
Two curious facts stand out in the documents regarding enslave- ment because of economic distress. The first is that the sale of free people was apparently extra-legal, justified only in special cases. Kao-tsu gave special permission for people to sell their children. Chia Yi speaks of people pleading to be allowed to sell their chil- dren. Chia Chiian-chih reports that laws could not prevent people from marrying off their wives and selling their children. The second fact is that in the early years of both dynasties people who had been sold into slavery because of famine were ordered to be freed, as though the enslavement were invalid. Emperor Kuang-wu even ordered that slave owners who refused to comply would be tried according to the "law for selling people."
These two facts raise an important question. Was the sale of free women and children, or voluntary self-sale, recognized by Han law as a valid transaction? Since Emperor Kuang-wu invoked a "law for selling people" almost at the beginning of his reign, it must
1 HHS, 97, lib; cf. also Ch'eng Shu-te, op. cit., p. 134, for other early cases.
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be assumed that it was an already existing law dating from the Former Han period. What was this law?
The Chin shu or History of the Chin dynasty (a.d. 265-419), compiled in the seventh century from eighteen earlier works, has a reference to this "law for selling people" in its "Hsing fa chih." It quotes the preface to the Hsin lii or New code, by Ch'en Ch'iin, who died in a.d. 236. He and others prepared this New code for the Wei dynasty of the Three Kingdoms period some time before 229, and the mention in Ch'en's preface of the "law for selling people" probably refers to the Han law; that is, the law invoked by Emperor Kuang-wu in A.D. 31. The preface said merely: "The law on robbery had items on kidnaping, terrorizing, and selling and buying people by persuasion." The heading "Law on Robbery" was one of the six divisions taken over by the Han dynasty from the Ch'in, and incorporated by Hsiao Ho into his "Law in nine sections," the basic Han code. The details of this law on robbery are mostly lost. But Wang Hsien-ch'ien quotes the eighteenth century commentator Hui Tung as writing that it said: "Those who kidnap people or kidnap and sell people or sell people by persuasion or buy people by persua- sion, and make them slaves, shall die." ^
The law of the Northern Wei dynasty (a.d. 386-534) had virtually the same provision in its section on robbery: "Those who kidnap people or kidnap and sell people or sell people by persuasion, and make them male and female slaves, shall die." This law was cited in the trial of a very interesting case in A.D. 502. A man sold his seven-year-old daughter to be the slave of a fellow townsman. The latter purposely bought her for resale, and did resell her in another region without revealing her background. She was thus in danger of losing her identity as a "good" person. Charged with buying by persuasion, he should, according to the law, have been strangled. The same case affords the earliest extant citation of a law against selling members of the family. It was invoked against the girl's
» Chin shu, ch. 31 ("Hsing fa chih"), 5a. I translate the word "item" in the plural, because in a.d. 37 Emperor Kuang-wu ordered that owners who dared to restrain plebeians kidnaped into slavery should be tried according to the "law on kidnaping people." Obviously the law on selling people was a separate item from the law on kidnaping people, and both were part of the law on robbery. Cf. Shen Chia-pen, op. cit., "Han lu chih i," ch. 2, 9b, ff. On the Hsin lii of Ch'en Ch'iin, cf. Ch'eng Shu-te, op. cit., p. 229 (preface to his ch. 2, on the Wei dynasty law). On the "Law in nine sections" of Hsiao Ho, cf. Jean Escarra, Le droit chinois, Peking, 1936, pp. 23 and 94. Wang Hsien-ch'ien's commentary is quoted in 136, footnote 2. Liang Ch'i-ch'ao (op. cit., p. 550) also quotes Hui Tung's statement, and locates it as a commentary to the Jih chih lu by the famous scholar Ku Yen-wu. He also points out that this law on robbery was part of "Law in nine sections" by Hsiao Ho.
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father, and read: "Those who sell their children shall be punished for one year. [Those who sell] relatives of the same surname, who are their superiors or elders within the five grades of mourning, shall die. Those who sell their near relatives, or their concubines, or their sons' wives, shall be banished. ^
These citations reflect obscurely the Han attitude toward sale of free people. To judge by later codes, the "law for selling people" — invoked by Emperor Kuang-wu in A.D. 31 against anyone who refused to free slaves who were victims of famine, turmoil, and kidnaping — was part of a law against sale into slavery by force or guile. This was, in turn, part of the larger law on robbery. It is not clear whether the Han code actually had any law against selling members of one's family. But it is evident that such transactions were precarious if brought on by famine and other untoward condi- tions. The slaves might be ordered to be freed even though permis- sion for sale had formerly been granted. Both Liang Ch'i-ch'ao and Wang Shih-chieh, generalizing from the continuity of Chinese law, assert that sale of free people has never been legally recognized in China, though it was regularly practiced. -
In Han times people compelled by starvation to sell themselves or their children had to find some private buyer. Purchase of famine victims is not reported among the various measures adopted by the government to relieve or forestall widespread economic distress, and there is no evidence that the government ever bought people who were free up to the time of purchase, or enslaved people for debt.
Illegal Forced Enslavement
Stringent laws during the Han period did not prevent kidnaping. This indicates that there was a market for slaves which made kidnaping profitable and worth the risk of the death penalty.
Shortly before the beginning of the Han period Luan Pu was kidnaped by someone and sold as a male slave in Yen to do a deed of revenge for his master (5). Luan Pu was not a child, but a homeless wanderer who had hired himself out several years before to serve a wineshop keeper. Perhaps it is an indication of the decadence of law and order in the closing years of the Ch'in rule that a young
1 Cf. Ch'eng Shu-te, op. cit. (ch. 5, "Hou Wei lii k'ao"), p. 415.
"Liang Ch'i-ch'ao, op. cit., p. 550; Wang Shih-chieh, op. cit., pp. 311-313. I may add, what is only an opinion, that it was probably the chief source of private slaves throughout the period here discussed, as it seems to have been in later times.
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man could be kidnaped in Ch'in, transported to Yen two hundred miles away, and sold there without interference. Since it is not known what kinds of legal papers were necessary for slave transactions it is only a guess that he was sold with the connivance of the civil authorities.
About the year 190 B.C. Tou Kuang-kuo, the four-year-old son of a poor famil}^ was kidnaped and sold by some one, and his family could not find him. Resold about ten times, and traveling several hundred miles from his home, he was finally bought a number of years later by a man living near Lo-yang. Tou Kuang-kuo's later importance explains why a history devoted primarily to matters of state concern reports the kidnaping of a poor boy. His older sister became the consort of Emperor Wen. About the same