32 China in World History
The relative peace and stability of the Han dynasty over several
centuries produced a population of some sixty million people, an exten-
sive market economy that linked different regions into an integrated
whole, and a degree of prosperity that had seldom been seen in the
world before that time. Because the Han elite tended to bury their dead
in elaborate tombs, some of the most spectacular archeological dis-
coveries in the twentieth century have been made through the excava-
tions of Han tombs. Tombs often included miniature models of homes,
household goods, servants, entertainers, and offi cial retinues in formal
procession, giving us intimate glimpses into Chinese ways of life and
death in Han times.
One of the most famous excavations of a Han-era tomb came in
the 1960s in Mawangdui, a small village outside Changsha in Hunan
Province. This was the tomb of Li Cang, a high offi cial of a regional
king who had been an early supporter of the Han founder Liu Bang. Li
Cang’s own tomb was badly damaged, but the adjoining tombs of his
wife, Lady Dai, and their son, were well preserved. Lady Dai’s tomb
included 154 lacquer boxes, trays, cups and bowls, 51 ceramics, 48
bamboo cases of textiles and other household goods, and 40 baskets
of clay replicas of gold and bronze coins. Much to the amazement of
the archaeologists involved, they discovered Lady Dai’s corpse so well
preserved, in four interlocking coffi ns and wrapped in twenty layers of
silk, that her fl esh was soft and her muscles were still elastic. Her stom-
ach contained more than a hundred melon seeds, a 2,000-year-old testi-
mony to her last meal. On the top of the innermost coffi n lay a beautiful
painted silk funeral banner, which has become one of the most studied
archeological fi nds of the last half century.
Scholars are still debating the many possible symbolic mean-
ings of the banner, a task made more diffi cult by the wide variety of
practices and beliefs about the dead expressed in Han writings. Some
tombs included passports to the underworld for the deceased, to docu-
ment their possessions and prevent mistreatment from the underworld
bureaucracy. Others include “tomb-quelling texts” designed to ward
off evil from the newly deceased and to enforce the strict separation of
the living and the dead. Yet other Han documents speak of cultivating
long life or attaining immortality by transcending the normal confi nes
of biological death. There was clearly a concern among the Han Chi-
nese that if a person was wrongly killed or a deceased person was not
properly cared for, the person’s spirit might escape the tomb and seek
vengeance on the wrong-doers. Such a belief, along with the Confucian
admonition to treat one’s ancestors with utmost respect whether dead