The First Empires 31
Guangwu also moved the Han capital several hundred kilometers east
of the destroyed Chang’an to the city of Luoyang. Thus the period from
25 to 220 ce is known as the Later Han or Eastern Han.
Despite the political upheavals of the Wang Mang usurpation and
the relocation of the capital to Luoyang, the Han dynasty remained
strong and expansive for another century of economic prosperity and
cultural creativity. Luoyang became the second largest city in the world
(after Rome), and Han political control extended from Korea in the
northeast to the foothills of the Himalayan mountains in the southwest,
and from Vietnam in the southeast to the Silk Roads oasis towns of
central Asia in the northwest.
Han society was highly stratifi ed, especially by modern standards,
but it was also more fl uid than most preindustrial societies. No families
outside the imperial household could guarantee their high social posi-
tion by heredity alone. In the Confucian view, scholar-offi cials ranked
highest in the social hierarchy, followed by peasants and artisans (the
productive backbone of society), followed by merchants at the bottom
(seen by Confucians as nonproductive exploiters of the labors of oth-
ers). In reality, merchants often became quite wealthy, and when they
did they saw to it that their sons or grandsons received the classical
education that would allow them entrance into the highest status group
of scholar-offi cials.
For most of its history, the Han government achieved a workable
balance between central control and local autonomy. Offi cials were
recruited through a system of recommendation by people already work-
ing in the government, but all offi cials were required to study the texts
of Confucianism. Through government sponsorship, and the writings of
such scholars as Sima Qian and Dong Zhongshu, Confucian values came
to permeate the attitudes and lives of the educated elite, and to some
(limited) extent, to seep down to the lower levels of society including
illiterate peasants. At one point as many as 30,000 young men studied
the Confucian classics in the Imperial Academy at the capital. Education
in the Han was further facilitated by the invention of paper around 100
ce. This made the dissemination of writings much more effi cient than
the earlier method of writing on narrow strips of bamboo. The Han
government also had many Confucian works carved in stone, which was
seen as the appropriate way to preserve the sacred writings of the past.
Young scholars came from all over the empire to make stone rubbings
of these writings or to copy them by hand and thereby disseminate them
more widely. Much of what we know today about China before the Han
comes from the conscientious and meticulous efforts of Han scholars.