Han Frontiers: Toward an Integrated View (Report‪)‬

The cornucopian flow of excavated materials in the past half century has made systematic analysis of material culture and other aspects of everyday life from religion to ritual and art a daunting task for any period of Chinese history, but in particular for one so dependent upon both material and textual sources as ancient China. (1) Archaeological work conducted on the peripheral regions of China has redefined issues of culture contact along the frontiers of the Han empire, but the sheer quantity of the excavated materials and the dominance of regional models have made systematic analysis beyond territorial or cultural boundaries problematic. (2) Moreover, theoretical approaches based on the interaction between competing socio-economic systems, and possibly subordinated to a late imperial and modern perspective that tends to see frontiers in terms of colonial policies stemming from a "civilizing mission," continue to dominate, resulting in attempts to inscribe frontier history within models based on binary oppositions: steppe and sown, Han and non-Han, natives and foreigners, and--usually wrapped in quotation marks--"barbarians" and "civilized." (3) In point of fact, while interest in frontier dynamics has been prominent in the works of archaeologists and historians alike, a holistic view of frontiers is still lacking in the panorama of China's early imperial history. A cursory comparison with a field such as Roman history, where the study of the frontiers of the Roman empire has become a central and fundamental part of the very conception of an imperial space and of its evolution in time, makes it evident that unless such an integrated approach is taken seriously we shall be limiting our comprehension of the Han empire. The political transition from the Warring States to the Qin, and from the Qin to the Han involves radically different conceptions not just of the relationship between the ruler and the ruled, but also between different types of subjects, not to mention debates over the circumstances, opportunity, and methods of military expansion. Geographic and ethnographic concepts changed in relation to the central government's reach beyond the original states of the Central Plain, and knowledge about the world was intimately connected with the Han dynasty's projection of its power into remote and unexplored areas.