The Penguin History of the World

7 Classical China

One explanation of the striking continuity and independence of classical Chinese civilization is its relative remoteness; China seemed less accessible to alien influence, far from sources of direct disturbance in other great civilizations. Islamic rule made more difference to India than the advent of Buddhism did to China, perhaps because the latter was endowed with an even greater capacity to assimilate alien influence. This may have been because the tradition of civilization rested on different foundations in each country. In India the great stabilizers were provided by religion and a caste system inseparable from it. In China it rested on the culture of an administrative élite which survived dynasties and empires and kept China on the same course.

One thing we owe to this élite is the maintenance of written records from very early times. Thanks to them, Chinese historical accounts provide an incomparable documentation, crammed with often reliable facts, though the selection of them was dominated by the assumptions of a minority, whose preoccupations they reflect. The Confucian scholars who kept up the historical records had a utilitarian and didactic aim: they wanted to provide a body of examples and data which would make easier the maintenance of traditional ways and values. Their histories emphasize continuity and the smooth flow of events. Given the needs of administration in so huge a country this is perfectly understandable; uniformity and regularity were clearly to be desired. Yet such a record leaves much out. It remains very difficult even in historical times – and much more difficult than in the classical Mediterranean world – to recover the concerns and life of the vast majority. Moreover, official history may well give a false impression, both of the unchanging nature of Chinese administration and of the permeation of society by Confucian values. For a long time, the assumptions behind the Chinese administrative machine can only have been those of a minority, even if they came in the end to be shared by many Chinese and accepted, unthinkingly and even unknowingly, by most.

The official culture was extraordinarily self-sufficient. Such outside influences as played upon it did so with little effect and this remains impressive. The fundamental explanation, again, is geographic. For most of its history China has been turned east, towards its richest provinces along the great rivers and the coast. Of course, China was much further removed from the classical West than the Maurya and Gupta empires. She had limited intercourse with it even indirectly, although until the beginning of the seventh century AD Persia, Byzantium and the Mediterranean depended upon Chinese silk and valued her porcelain, transferred through the great trade routes that spanned Central Asia. China’s relations with classical India were of course much closer, not to mention those with the Central Asian empires and peoples, and with Korea and Vietnam. Still, what distinguishes China, especially under the Han dynasty, is that for a long time she had on her borders no great states with which relations had to be maintained. One has to be careful, though, with believing that China was isolated: although the relative distance from what was happening in the West was, if anything, to increase as the centre of gravity of western civilization moved westwards and northwards, China existed within an Asian world in which there was plenty of interaction of all forms going on during the classical period.

China’s history between the end of the era of Warring States and the beginning of the Tang dynasty in AD 618 has a chronological backbone of sorts in the waxing and waning of dynasties. Dates can be attached to these, but there is an element of the artificial, or at least a danger of being over-emphatic, in using them. It could take decades for a dynasty to make its power a reality over the whole empire, and even longer to lose it. With this reservation, the dynastic reckoning can still be useful. It gives us the major divisions of Chinese history down to the twentieth century, which are named after the imperial dynasties which reached their peaks during them. The first two which concern us are China’s great unifying dynasties of Qin and Han.

The Qin ascent to power marks a radical departure in Chinese history from many states to one big state. Although the territory we now see as China was to be disunited again, several times, the concept of a united empire goes back to the Qin and its great emperor Qin Shi Huangdi. It was a birth in revolution and blood, but its antecedents go much further back into Chinese history. Well before the Qin emperor ‘unified’ China in 221 BC, there were concepts of cultural and ideological unity developed at least over a thousand years. It would be ahistorical to say that from the third century BC China’s natural form was as a united polity – a lot of Roman historians believed that of their empire and some of them lived to be disappointed – but there is no denying that many Chinese have seen their history that way, and that this view has contributed significantly to China’s so far successful transition from an empire to a modern unified state.

The Qin dynasty that ended the disunity of the period of Warring States came from a western state still looked upon by some as barbarous as late as the fourth century BC. Nevertheless, the Qin had prospered, perhaps in part because of a radical reorganization carried out by a legalist-minded minister in about 356 BC; perhaps also because of their soldiers’ use of a new long iron sword. After swallowing eastern Sichuan, the Qin claimed the status of a kingdom in 325 BC. The climax of Qin success was the defeat of their last opponent in 221 BC and the unification of China for the first time under an emperor, and the dynasty which gives the country its European name.

The man whose given name was Ying Zheng, and whom all Chinese know as Qin Shi Huangdi (the first Qin emperor), was born in 259 BC and became king when he was thirteen years old. His kingdom of Qin was already in ascendance when he acceded, but it was internally divided. The young King Zheng, as he was known, believed that his own family conspired against him; he sentenced his mother to house-arrest and had her reputed lover torn to pieces by five chariots. His father’s prime minister was forced to commit suicide by drinking poison. Zheng was clearly not a very happy young man as he drove his troops into battle. By 230 he seems to have set out a plan for defeating all other states and he proceeded with it, even against the counsel of his advisers who were horrified by their master’s lack of measure. By 223 he had defeated the largest state of the Warring States era, the Chu in south central China. Two years later he conquered the state of Qi in the Shandong area, the last remaining independent state of the former era. Declaring a ‘new country’, Zheng invented new titles for himself (the First Emperor) and for his officials. Meanwhile he turned on the south, a region that no Chinese state had successfully penetrated. By 213 his empire stretched as far as what is now Guangdong province in the south, and his troops had entered Vietnam and other parts of the South-East Asian borderlands. All Chinese recognized that this was no ordinary king and no ordinary state.

Qin Shi Huangdi believed in a strong centralized empire in which the state was at the core of all things. He started large building programmes designed to knit the empire together: huge canals (such as the Lingqu canal in the south, linking the Yangzi to the Pearl River), and roads to send his armies quickly even to its further reaches. Like many men who have been recognized as great leaders, the first Qin emperor was a mix of unbalanced and cruel megalomania and profound understanding of his times (it is not surprising, perhaps, that Mao Zedong found in him the only emperor to admire). Having inherited a warrior state, Qin Shi Huangdi extended and strengthened it, making the essence of the Qin empire its ability to fight and to hold on to conquered ground. His basic instrument was the empire’s vast armies, created from the peasantry and commanded by officers who had been selected for their ability and their personal loyalty to the emperor. Even before his massive conquests, an observer noted that ‘Qin’s nature is strong. Its terrain is difficult. Its government is severe. Its rewards and punishments are reliable. Its people do not yield; they are all belligerent.’ These were the characteristics that the Qin emperor set out to engrave on all of China after 221 BC.

The Qin state was an absolute autocracy which attempted to regulate even the most minute details of its subjects’ lives. Those remnants of former élites who survived the Qin onslaught were brought to the capital to settle there under close surveillance. All forms of exchanges were standardized soon after the conquest – weights, measures, money and taxes. The Qin emperor had a special interest in scholars, whom he felt could be dangerous to his enterprise through forms of heterodoxy; they either had to conform to official ideology, or choose death or exile. The great libraries of ancient texts came under the direct control of the state, which stipulated that only licensed scholars could access them. Those who advanced in the service of the emperor did so mostly on merit – the Qin emperor was deeply sceptical of those seeking office simply because of noble birth. In an ultimate act of co-ordination, the state also regulated the language by simplifying characters and standardizing syntax, thereby creating a common written language for the empire. What this in reality meant was that élite subjects of the Qin would have to learn a standard written (but not necessarily spoken) language, which would be entirely distinct from the mutually unintelligible languages spoken across the empire.

The Qin empire was vast. While its cultural core remained in the Yellow River valley, where more than three-quarters of the population lived, it spread for great distances north, west and south. But these conquests did not create a unified country until much later. The Yangzi basin was still considered a frontier zone by some, and the lands further south and west were regarded as zones of military occupation of uncivilized tribes. In the north the Qin conquests brought its empire into contact with nomadic groups moving across Central Asia; groups with which the Qin and their successors wanted to regularize and limit contact, for both cultural and military reasons. The concept of a unified China in anything approximating its modern borders belongs to later centuries.

Although the Qin empire itself was to last only fifteen years, it was a great achievement. China from this time may be considered the seat of an expanding, self-conscious civilization. There had been earlier signs that such an outcome was likely. Given the potential of their own Neolithic cultures, the stimuli of cultural diffusion and some migration from the north, the first shoots of civilization had appeared in several parts of China before 1000 BC. By the end of the Warring States Period some of them showed marked similarities which offset the differences between them. The political unity achieved by Qin conquest over a century was in a sense the logical corollary of a cultural unification already well under way. Some have claimed that a sense of Chinese nationality can be discerned before 221 BC; if so, it must have made conquest itself somewhat easier. Fundamental administrative innovations by the Qin were to survive that dynasty’s displacement by the Han, who ruled for most of 400 years (206 BC–AD 220, with a brief interlude at the beginning of the Christian era).

The Han dynasty was founded by Liu Bang. Typically for the times, he was a leader of peasant origins who made use of the chaos that occurred when some former states tried to regain their independence after Qin Shi Huangdi’s death to first conquer the Qin capital and then resurrect the empire under his own dynamic control. Although the Han emperors continued much of the centralizing work begun by their predecessor, they attempted to show more moderation towards the established élites, at least at first (which is probably one of the reasons for their survival). But there is no doubt about the essence. The Han ruled for 400 years with one main purpose: the unification and centralization of China, with their own dynasty and the person of the emperor at the centre of it. The emperor was the embodiment of the government; all uncultivated land belonged to him, and all offices were in his gift. His imperial proclamations created law for the whole empire and for everyone who was in it.

Liu Bang, who called himself the Gaozu emperor of the Han dynasty, wanted to continue the Qin project, but without the lack of restraint that he and most of his contemporaries viewed the Qin emperor as being guilty of. Gaozu wanted to rule, energetically and powerfully, but without alienating his allies and their clans. He knew that his lack of education and his bad temper were drawbacks. But, as one of his trusted advisers put it to him bluntly, when explaining why he had defeated his main Chu rival: ‘Your Majesty is careless and insults others, while Xiang Yu was kind and loving. But when you sent someone to attack a city or occupy territory, you gave them what they conquered, sharing your gains with the whole world.’ Gaozu and his immediate successors up to the mid-second century BC attempted to mix some elements of the Zhou system into how the empire was administrated: in the east the old kingdoms were left in place as feudatories, into which the Liu family tried to insert their own kin as kings and nobles. Meanwhile, the western part was ruled directly by the emperor.

In 154 BC a major rebellion against Han rule broke out in eastern China, known in Chinese history as the Revolt of the Seven Kingdoms. The Jing emperor, Gaozu’s grandson, wavered at first, seeking to negotiate with the rebels. But after some of his generals began successful counter-attacks, Jing was able to break the power of the feudatories after some intense battles. The revolt only lasted three months, but its effects were to have a lasting impact on Chinese history. The Jing emperor and his son, Wu, began creating a centralized empire, with no limits on the emperor’s personal power. The Wu emperor, who ruled for fifty-three years (140–87 BC) put in place a system that emphasized the influence of directly appointed officials over local nobility or members of the imperial clan. In good times for the empire, this principle was to last for almost 2,000 years and become an integral part of China’s history.

The Wu emperor was the key figure of the first part of the Han era (often referred to as Western Han), which lasted up to AD 9. Already when he became emperor, aged fifteen, he had a clear notion that China needed centralized government and a central ideology or it would fall apart. His plans for territorial expansion developed gradually – there was no masterplan of what was to become the new China – but his concepts of administration and core beliefs stayed remarkably intact throughout his long reign. Wu wanted an empire that was centred on the emperor’s person as master of all military and civilian affairs. Just as the empire itself was in principle universal and limitless – encompassing all under heaven – there could be no restrictions of the emperor’s power. He was above all religion, all beliefs and all noble lineages. As long as he ruled well and according to Confucian principles, he could not be challenged by man or gods. In reality, of course, as the Roman example also showed, the soundness of concentrating so much power in one man depended entirely on who that man was. It also made certain that any established inner cabinet, when given a choice, always rooted for a very young man or a child to succeed, so as to preserve their own privileges.

During Han times China saw for the first time the making of a unified cultural élite. The dynasty’s founder Liu Bang had been sceptical of the influence of scholars; according to one historian, the irritable usurper once grabbed the tall cap worn by one of them and urinated into it. But his successors made their peace with the scribes and created a link between them, the latter serving the dynasty as teachers and advisers with their loyalty to the core Confucian ideas that Han emperors wanted to promote. It meant a narrowing, at least for a time, of China’s intellectual traditions, but it also led to the accumulation of a distinct body of knowledge, which was extended during the latter half of the dynasty’s time in power. It also meant the development of a system by which this knowledge was perpetuated, in training for examinations to enter imperial service or in regulations for issuing circulars and instructions (or, for that matter, the practical knowledge needed to maintain roads and canals).

The Wu emperor’s reforms ensured that the Han empire at its peak was run by an imperial bureaucracy, not by local nobles. Just as the emperor had received the Mandate of Heaven, given for righteous government, directly – not by unaccountable spirits acting on heaven’s behalf – officials received their offices from the emperor based on their skill and training. Vast academies were set up to train future officials in Confucian principles of government. Military training was also improved, and from the first century BC the emperor’s armies consisted of professional soldiers rather than peasant conscripts, something which undoubtedly increased stability at the core of the empire. The Han state became an expert at tax-collecting; its revenue was much bigger than anything seen elsewhere in the world for a long time, and, moreover, it was collected mainly in cash, giving the state an unprecedented control over how to spend its income (and over its own finances in general).

The ideology that the Wu emperor and his great-grandson Emperor Xuan (79–49 BC) put into a system of education and state rituals was a form of Confucianism amended and re-created to suit the Han empire’s purposes. It emphasized reverence for the emperor’s person, for the state and its hierarchies, for elders and ancestors. It established rituals that underlined the links between the cosmos, the earth and human lives. First and foremost the state established a canon of texts – not all of them in any meaningful sense Confucian in origin – that would set the parameters for Chinese élite rules of behaviour and, indirectly, for the state veneration that often went with them, up to the last dynasty, in the twentieth century AD. The ‘Five Classics’ comprised the Classic of Poetry, Classic of History and Classic of Changes (Yijing). To these were added the Record of Rites and the commented Chronicles of the Spring and Autumn Period, set to train officials in rectitude and in statesmanship. It was assumed that the commentaries were by Confucius himself, although it would take much longer for the master’s own sayings, the Analects, to be added to the official canon.

With the official establishment of Confucianism went a decline in religion (but not always in superstition – the Wu emperor feared witchcraft and drove his oldest son to death by accusing him of dabbling in it). While tolerant of regional cults, there could only be one central cult – the cult of the imperial ancestors – and one canon and commentary. Instead of religion, the Han empire put forward the systematic study of history, based on a ‘correct’ understanding of the canon and commentary. The accumulation of knowledge became a state enterprise, and was thought to form a crucial element in the construction of the state and in the creation of laws and regulations. The great Han dynasty historians – Sima Qian, whose Records of the Historian established the continuity of Chinese history up to the Han, and Ban Gu, who explored the Han dynasty’s own achievements from a first-century AD vantage point – created a sense of deep history, with China as a unified state at the centre of it.

The early Han dynasty also set new laws that regulated behaviour within the empire. The key element in its laws, as in much of Chinese law later, is the state’s responsibility for ensuring the moral conduct of its subjects by offering rewards and threatening punishments. There was a strict ranking of misdeeds: crimes within a clan were regarded as more serious than against members of other clans, and those against elders more serious than against younger people. The state depended on reports and informers, and took an interventionist approach to justice. Punishments were not all that varied, starting from fines and progressing, via banishment, hard labour and mutilation, to death and the ultimate punishment, the destruction of a lineage, when all of one’s male relatives would be killed. The usual form of capital punishment was beheading, but traitors, spies and patricides were punished by being sawed in two at the hip. The ultimate imperial reward for common people was the gift of a family name, which ordinary peasants did not have at the beginning of the dynasty. The fact that just three family names – Wang, Li and Zhang – today make up more than 22 per cent of the population is an indication of how this process spread.

What peasants could produce stood at the heart of the Han empire. Just like the Romans, at least in early days, the Han began a veritable cult of agriculture, which held that making the yields greater and the land more fertile were the ultimate gifts for the posterity of one’s family and the state. The only ‘whole man’, the Han dynasty Confucians claimed, was one who tilled the land, and large-scale public rituals presented the emperor as farmer-in-chief. Vast projects of land improvement and irrigation were started and new agricultural implements – such as the large iron plough – were developed. Most important to the massive improvement in yields was probably advances in fertilization, which used animal and human manure and other forms of organic material more intensely than anywhere else. The result was a very substantial increase in population, especially during the later or Eastern Hanera in the first two centuries AD.

The organization of village life was also geared to improve agricultural production. Local headmen were accountable to state officials for production, even if the most common sort of farm was a small freehold, and even the larger estates were only one-tenth of the Roman size on average. But while inheritance practices in which all sons were entitled to part of the land made certain that most farms remained small, they also forced clans to co-operate in production, made part-time labouring on larger farms more common, and led to some having their minuscule plots entirely bought up by others. Some historians see the Chinese penchant for wide, established relations between families and individuals as a practice developed from Han times. And while later eras may have contributed as significantly as the Han to these practices, there is no doubt that the need to connect, to communicate with other families, the procedures of gifts, meals and status established within and among human networks have a lot to do with extraordinary population increases 2,000 years ago.

The increases in population and the resulting reduction in the size of smallholdings may be one of the reasons why landlordism (and a renewed upsurge in regionalism that accompanied it) became more prevalent towards the end of the first century BC. Another reason may be that merchants and other rich families, including those who had become rich on salaries from the state, began to invest their money in land in order to avoid the stringent tax system that the first Han emperors had introduced. By the reign of the Yuan emperor, who died in 33 BC, these centrifugal forces had increased dramatically, and criticism of the Han social system was on the rise both in the provinces and at court. From AD 9 an imperial official named Wang Mang usurped power and founded a new dynasty, appropriately called the Xin (New) dynasty. But Wang’s reforms, among them the prohibition on the sale of land and the nationalization of trade in some commodities, soon backfired, and by AD 23 the Han were back, now under a distant relative of the last emperor.

The key emperor of the restored, Eastern Han dynasty (so-called since they moved their capital east to Luoyang) is Guangwu, who ruled from AD 25 to 57. After having battled to defeat Wang Mang and a host of other pretenders, Guangwu set up a reformed Han empire, giving more power to the provinces, but with new mechanisms – such as rotation of officials – to avoid them challenging the centre. He also abolished some of the more stringent laws of the former Han dynasty and began a policy of managing non-Chinese groups on the borders through a mixture of bribes and punitive expeditions. Aware of the need to concentrate on restoring a balance within the empire, Guangwu allowed some non-Chinese groups to settle inside the borders, in part to make up for a north to south movement of Chinese as a result of barbarian raids in the north, and in part to help defend the empire’s northern borders. For a long time these ‘inside barbarians’ fought well on behalf of the Han. But by the late second century AD they had become a power unto themselves, and their chiefs were crucial to Han politics.

At the end of the Han dynasty we see a return to the problems that Wang Mang and the Guangwu emperor had tried to deal with – first and foremost, how to keep increasingly powerful local leaders loyal to the empire. It was not just non-Chinese groups that provoked trouble in this respect. Warlords emerged within China itself, too, often as a result of military commanders fighting each other for territorial control. The weak Han emperors seemed incapable of stemming the rot and the rage of ordinary people against the injustices they were subjected to and the deterioration of their livelihoods gave rise to new kinds of rebellion. The Yellow Turbans – a millenarian Daoist sect which promised a redistribution of land, the execution of warlords and war against foreign intruders – came close to toppling the regime in AD 184, but were in the end beaten back by a combination of loyal Han officers and local strongmen, who were all horrified at the collective trances and magical procedures practised by the sect. But the respite for the dynasty was to be short-lived. By the early 200s the boy emperor was passed from the custody of one warlord to another as the empire fell to pieces in civil war. The unlucky emperor Xian was finally allowed to abdicate in 220 in favour of the son of his chief tormentor, the general Cao Cao, who set up the Wei dynasty – rulers of one of the three independent kingdoms that came to replace the Han empire.

Though they had their ups and downs, the Han emperors as a whole had shown unprecedented strength. Their sway extended over much of modern China, including southern Manchuria and parts of northern Korea and South-East Asia. At its peak, they ruled over an empire as big as that of their Roman contemporaries. They developed an increasing interaction with Central Asia and a greatly expanded trade network towards the south, handling both regions with skill, aided by the tactical superiority given their armies by the new crossbow. This weapon was probably invented soon after 200 BC and was both more powerful and more accurate than the bows of the barbarians, who for a long time did not have the ability to cast the bronze locks required. It was the last major achievement of Chinese military technology before the coming of gunpowder.

In Mongolia at the beginning of Han times lived the Xiongnu, the forerunners of the Huns. The Qin had sought to protect their domains on this frontier by unifying a number of existing earthworks into a new Great Wall, to be further elaborated by later dynasties. The Han emperors took the offensive, driving the Xiongnu north of the Gobi desert and then seizing control of the caravan routes of Central Asia, sending armies far west into Kashgaria in the first century BC. One general in AD 97 got very close to the Caspian Sea. They even won tribute from the Kusharas, whose own domains straddled the Pamir Mountains. To the south, they occupied the coasts as far as the Gulf of Tonkin; Annam accepted their suzerainty and Indochina has been regarded by Chinese statesmen as part of their proper sphere of influence ever since. To the north-east they penetrated Korea. No real settlement, though, followed these military successes.

Tentative diplomatic encounters with Rome in Han times suggest that expansion gave China much more contact with the rest of the world. Until the fifteenth century AD this was in the main by land, and besides the silk routes which linked her regularly with the Middle East (caravans were leaving westwards with silk from about 100 BC), Han China also gradually developed more elaborate exchanges with her nomadic neighbours. Sometimes this was within the fictional framework of tribute acknowledged in turn by gifts, sometimes within official monopolies which were the foundation of great merchant families. But not only trade flowed along the great caravan routes. Ideas, beliefs and artistic inspiration moved along the same trails and brought late Han China into regular contact with the Iranian and Indian worlds, through the states set up by Persian-speaking Sogdians around Samarkand and Bukhara and, especially, through the Kushan empire, which in the first and second centuries AD stretched from what is today Xinjiang to central India. Buddhism, one of China’s main faiths, travelled along the routes set up by the latter.

Contacts with Central Asia may explain one of the most astonishing works of Chinese classical art, the great series of bronze horses found in tombs at Wuwei, in northern Gansu province, 750 miles west of the Han capital. These were only one among many fine works of Han bronzeworkers; they evidently broke more readily with tradition than the Han potters, who showed more antiquarian respect for past forms. At a different level, though, Han pottery provides some of the earliest exploitations in art of the subject-matter of the daily life of most Chinese in the form of collections of tiny figures of peasant families and their livestock.

The Han empire was a brilliant culture, centred on a court with huge, rich palaces built in the main of timber – unhappily, for the result is that they have disappeared, like the bulk of the Han collections of paintings on silk. The literature created during the dynasty gives us a good sense of what their cities looked like, however: Luoyang, the later capital, covered nearly 4 square miles and was organized around a north–south axis, on which central point were two gigantic palace complexes linked by a large covered pathway. Throughout the Han era urbanization continued apace, and with it came an intensification of art and highly skilled crafts. Chinese embroidered silk was admired as far as the caravans carrying it could reach, and even though the wood and cloth are gone now, we still have some of their imposing bronze sculpture and the remarkable burial suits made of jade, testifying to their artistic accomplishments.

Much of this cultural capital was dissipated or destroyed during the fourth and fifth centuries, when the barbarians returned to the frontiers. Failing at last to provide China’s defence from her own manpower, the successors of the Han emperors fell back on the policy of relying on some of the tribes who pressed on it from outside by deploying them for their own military purposes. This raised problems of relations between the newcomers and the many who now counted themselves as Chinese. With the collapse of the Han state and during the period of internal strife that followed, the power relationship between the groups in Central Asia and the Chinese changed, with the next centuries seeing the emergence of new political centres between Europe and East Asia. For many people who had lived in the Han empire, this was a period of sadness and despair. The poet Cao Zhi described the sacked Eastern Han capital:

Climbing to the ridge of Beimang Mountain

From afar I look down on Luoyang.

Luoyang, how lonesome and still.

Palaces and houses all burnt to ashes.

Walls and fences all broken and gaping,

Thorns and brambles rising to the sky.

But even in defeat there is observable for the first time China’s striking powers of cultural digestion. Gradually many barbarian peoples were swallowed by Chinese society, losing their own identity and becoming another kind of Chinese. The prestige which Chinese civilization enjoyed among the peoples of the region was already very great. There was a disposition among outsiders to see China as the centre of the world, a cultural pinnacle, somewhat similar to the way in which the Germanic peoples of the West had seen Rome. In South-East Asia, Korea and Japan, Chinese language, literature, customs and state organization had a profound impact towards the middle of the first millennium AD. Even deep into Central Asia rulers who had never seen the empire imposed Chinese customs and dress on their peoples by decree around AD 500. Chinese culture had become the focal point of its region and it would remain so in the period of disunity within China that followed the abdication of the last Han emperor.

Around Year 0 half the human population had been under the control of just two states, Rome and Han China, and it is impossible not to think about them in comparative terms. There is no doubt that given the scarcity of direct contact between them, the two empires showed remarkable similarities. Both were run by god-like emperors, who headed bureaucracies and military units spread thinly over territories of roughly similar size. Both regimes claimed to rule the whole known world (and the élites in both probably knew this claim to be fictitious). They were both inheritors of great traditions that they amended for their own purposes. Their processes of centralization, monetary systems, administrative principles and their procedures for handling outsiders resembled each other greatly. After surviving for a very long time, both succumbed as power became more diffused. There were of course big differences, too: in China, the increase in centralized bureaucracy was far bigger than in Rome. There were also important divergences in civil law and in principles of local governance. First and foremost, however, the degree of cultural and linguistic penetration of the core within the empire was far greater in Han China than in Rome. Still, it is worth reflecting on the fact that 2,000 years ago, the far east and the far west of Eurasia saw parallel worlds with much in common.