Forming the Early Chinese Court: Rituals, Spaces, Roles.

• Author: Pines, Yuri
• Position: Book review

Forming the Early Chinese Court: Rituals, Spaces, Roles. By LUKE HABBERSTAD. Seattle: UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON PRESS, 2016. Pp. xii + 240. $90 (cloth); $30 (paper).

Luke Habberstad starts his book with the promise to clarify "an important change in normative understandings of imperial order," which "occurred at some point during and after Western Han" (206/202 BCE-9 CE). "While people in later eras imagined government as a hierarchical collection of defined offices slotted into categories, early imperial subjects saw not categories but relationships, which were centered around the imperial court and regulated by rewards and punishments. How and when did this change occur?" (p. 9).

This is a most promising start. That the imperial Chinese political system evolved over centuries, and that its perceptions among the elite and populace at large changed too, are well known; but how and why this process occurred, especially in early imperial history, are still not sufficiently understood. Habberstad proposes a partial answer to this question in chapter five, "The Literary Invention of Bureaucracy." There he traces the changing mode of presenting officials' careers in their Shiji [phrase omitted] and Honshu [phrase omitted] biographies in the tables from these texts that summarize the Han-era occupants of high offices, and in late Western Han poems called "Admonitions of the Many Offices" (Baiguan zhen [phrase omitted]). The results are revealing. Whereas early presentations of officials focused on contingencies that shaped their careers, late Western Han offices are presented as "more clearly defined autonomous institutions" (p. 144), functioning according to "well-established and historically constant principles" (p. 166). This analysis, based as it is on an extraordinarily sensitive reading of texts that had been largely neglected by scholars of Han history, is the most interesting and valuable part of the entire book.

Four other chapters cover topics that are only loosely related to either the transformation of Han officialdom or the "formation of the early Chinese court" (the book's title). The first chapter depicts debates about sumptuary regulations that were supposed to govern conspicuous consumption by Han aristocrats and officials. It also analyzes the attempts of the Han court to correlate different coexisting hierarchical systems, such as the system of ranks of merit (jue [phrase omitted]) and official salary (zhi [phrase omitted]). The...