Though the work of clawing back these enfeoffed kingdoms had begun immediately, they remained a threat, and the task would not be completed for the best part of a century. Gaozu’s efforts concentrated on a change of personnel. Erstwhile generals and other potential challengers were gradually replaced as kings by less bellicose members of his own family. Empress Lü continued the process by installing members of her own family. Wendi, in replacing them, took the opportunity to break up some kingdoms and reclaim others. The 154 BC revolt suppressed by Jingdi provided a further opportunity for undermining the kingdoms. All of this forestalled a relapse into the chaos of the ‘Warring States’ era, although so long as kingdoms rejoicing in illustrious names like Qi, Zhao, Yan and even Chu survived, the integrity of the empire remained compromised.
Dynastic history tends to portray these Han kingdoms, or ‘subkingdoms’, as recalcitrant satellites vainly contesting a manifest imperial destiny. Archaeology once again provides a corrective. Several royal tombs of the early Han period have been discovered; and until the day when Qin Shi Huangdi’s great mausolem is opened, they afford the most striking glimpse of ancient China’s material culture. Admittedly subterranean chambers are less exciting than Graeco-Roman colonnades. But stone was scarce in much of China. The population was concentrated on the alluvial flood-plains where construction meant hangtu footings and wooden superstructures. Buildings of several storeys slung with saddleback roofs and upcurled eaves are depicted in tomb paintings and described in texts. They look spectacular. But timber rots and brickwork crumbles. Save for extensive foundations, such as those traced at the new imperial capital of Chang’an, and a few glazed roof tiles, very little survives.
Yet if China’s landscape is short on ancient monuments, compensation lurks beneath. Courtesy of a mental outlook that avidly embraced the afterlife, ancestors were cherished not just as loved ones but as progenitors deserving of the Confucian respect due to all parents, and as intermediaries in any dealings with the spirit world. Their tombs were carefully prepared. The deceased were interred in as pristine a condition as possible (cremation would have been even more dishonourable than dismemberment or mutilation); and to meet their ongoing needs in terms of comfort, sustenance, status and diversion, they were provided with the accoutrements they had enjoyed in life. In this sense every tomb reflected its occupant’s lifestyle and became, like the First Emperor’s, a microcosm of the material world that he or she had relinquished.
The tombs of the Han kings were no exception; they may be taken as providing reliable evidence of the resources and tastes of their royal occupants. When in 1968 some soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army discovered what proved to be the tombs of the king and queen of Zhongshan (a Han kingdom in Shanxi), it was the royal couple’s jade suits which excited the most interest. A dazzling hoard of silks, lacquerware, figurines and inlaid bronzes also impressed the fatigues-clad militiamen; but for sheer extravagance the jade tailoring was in a class of its own. Discoveries elsewhere of Han-period jade suits in various stages of disintegration have since ensured pride of place in many of the country’s museums for what may be the world’s only stone clothing.
Each tight-fitting suit covered its corpse entirely, including face, feet and fingers, like a suit of armour. Jade was supposed to have preservative qualities, presumably more spiritual than chemical, that were effective only if no part of the body remained exposed. But though appearing to be a single garment, each outfit was typically a fourteen-piece suit including matching gloves, footwear, face-mask, separate sleeves and helmet. Like the armour of the ‘terracotta warriors’, all these items were made up of small and precisely butted rectangular plates, some two to three thousand jades per suit, each sewn to its neighbours using thread of either gold, silver or silk. Not even the pharaohs dressed their dead in jade-mail stitched with gold. Whether assessed in terms of craftsmanship, weight or value, such tailoring testifies to an opulence and patronage beyond the means of most ‘satellite kings’ – and possibly even emperors.
At Changsha, the capital of another kingdom created by Gaozu for one of his generals (but this time south of the Yangzi in Hunan), no royal tombs have been discovered. A mound excavated at Mawangdui in the city’s outskirts in the 1970s, however, was found to conceal comparable treasures within the gargantuan nested coffins of the kingdom’s chancellor, otherwise the marquis of Dai (d. 186 BC), of his wife the Lady Dai, and of a literary gentleman thought to be their son. Not being kings, none of the family merited a jade suit, although more mundane methods of preservation – such as carefully sealing the coffins against damp and bacteria – had served one of the deceased well. After 2,100 years, silk-wrapped and swaddled in her innermost coffin, the Lady Dai was found to be intact, albeit phenomenally aged and in dire need of a hairdresser. Unlike the Tarim Mummies, her corpse was not desiccated; her joints could be moved and her flesh was responsive to a gentle poke. A post-mortem revealed her medical history, plus ‘138 and a half seeds’ still lodged in her digestive system; the Lady Dai had last snacked on musk melon.
The furnishings of her tomb are known in some detail because among them were found bamboo slips containing a complete written inventory. This listed, for instance, not only the various receptacles that were unearthed in her dining area but the delicacies that once filled them; seven kinds of meat are mentioned, with cooking suggestions, and two of ale, one unfermented and the other perhaps a stout. Exquisitely painted silks decorated the walls of the chamber and a T-shaped silken banner was draped over the innermost coffin. Miraculously preserved, the banner appears to depict an elderly Lady Dai bent over the walking stick that was found among her grave goods. Below her a feast is in progress complete with some of the first chopsticks to be depicted; above, a celestial concourse awaits her spirit.
The tomb contained no manuscripts on silk. These came only from the supposed son’s tomb and included two uncorrupted versions of Laozi’s Daodejing, hitherto unknown works on medicine, astronomy and divination, a sex manual, and some historical fragments of which even Sima Qian seems to have been unaware; they must have been lost to scholarship in the decades between the burial and his writing the Shiji. Predating the textual hoards previously discovered along the Silk Road, the Mawangdui collection should indeed prove ‘of monumental importance to historians in their reconsideration of ancient Chinese history’.16 In the same tomb were also found three of the earliest scale maps yet known. Evidently the result of careful survey and intended for military reference, one presents a topography that is still recognisable provided it is inverted; the Chinese preference was for south at the top of a map and north at the bottom. It covers the sensitive border region comprising the southern half of Changsha kingdom and the northern half of Nanyue.
Nanyue (‘Southern Yue’) was a Han kingdom with a difference: it owed nothing to Han Gaozu and had imperial pretensions of its own. Corresponding roughly to Guangdong province plus neighbouring parts of Guangxi and northern Vietnam, its capital was at Panyu. This was the then name for the metropolis of Guangzhou (Canton), in the heart of whose international district were exacavated in 1983 yet another Han-period royal tomb and, in the 1990s, the remains of the royal palace gardens.
The tomb is that of King Wen, the second in the Nanyue succession and not to be confused with his contemporary Han Wendi, the emperor in Chang’an. In accordance with his rank, Nanyue’s King Wen was buried in a jade suit; it did nothing for the preservation of his corpse, although his many-chambered tomb is interesting. It represents in miniature the layout of his palace, with public rooms to the fore (banqueting hall in the east wing, treasure store in the west wing) and private apartments to the rear (including a chamber for those servants who accompanied him in death and another for concubines similarly ‘honoured’). Both Han and native Yue productions