Timelines Out Loud: From Confucius to the Han

Timelines Out Loud, Episode 7: Teachers, Emperors and Silk

1Welcome back to Timelines Out Loud. Today we cover about 700 years of ancient China, from a teacher in a small state to an empire whose silk reached Rome.

2Confucius lived during the Zhou dynasty, when Zhou kings had lost most of their power and rival states fought one another. He taught that order begins with people treating one another properly: rulers should be fair and kind, children should honor their parents, and friends should keep faith with each other. He believed a person became worthy to lead through study and good conduct, not through noble birth. He accepted students who could bring only a small gift, such as a bundle of dried meat. No ruler of his time put his ideas into practice.

3In 221 BCE the state of Qin conquered its rivals, and its king took the title First Emperor. He made one form of writing, one kind of coin and one set of weights and measures standard across China. According to the Han historian Sima Qian, a general named Meng Tian led about 300,000 men north to fight horse-riding peoples and to join older walls into a long barrier. Huge numbers of workers were forced to labor on walls, roads and the emperor's tomb. The First Emperor died in 210 BCE, revolts spread, and the Qin dynasty collapsed.

4The Han dynasty that followed kept much of the Qin system: one form of writing, standard weights and officials appointed by the emperor. Han rulers, however, softened some of the harshest Qin punishments. Emperor Wu chose Confucian teaching as the basis of government learning and founded an Imperial Academy, where future officials studied the Confucian classics. He also sent an official named Zhang Qian west to look for allies. Zhang Qian returned about 13 years later with reports of kingdoms and fine horses in Central Asia. Han armies then built walls and watchtowers far to the west, along a narrow corridor that new trade roads followed.

5Merchants carried Chinese silk west along these roads, passing it from trader to trader. By the first century CE it was sold in Rome, where the writer Pliny the Elder complained that trade with India, Arabia and the Seres, the Roman name for the silk-making people of the East, cost the empire about 100 million coins a year. Meanwhile, Han workers were making a new writing material: the oldest known scraps of paper date from the early Han. In 132 CE the court scholar Zhang Heng built a bronze device with eight dragons. When the ground shook, even far away, a ball dropped from one dragon's mouth into a bronze toad below, showing the direction of the quake.