Page 76 - The Arts of China, By Michael Sullivan Good Book

Yii committed suicide and Liu Pang, after the customary refusals,
accepted the title of Emperor of the Han with the reign name Kao-
tsu. He established his capital at Ch'ang-an, and there inaugurated
one of the longest dynasties in Chinese history.
So sharp was the popular reaction against the despotism of the
Ch'in that the Former, or Western, Han rulers were content to
adopt a policy of laissez-faire in domestic matters and even re-
stored the old feudal order in a limited way. At first there was
chaos and disunion, but Wen Ti (179-157) brought the scattered
empire together and began to revive classical learning and to re-
store to court life some of the dignity and order that had attended
it under the Chou. The early Han emperors were constantly cither
fighting or bribing the Hsiung-nu, who had taken advantage of
the fall of Ch'in to drive their arch-enemy the Yuch-chih west-
ward across the deserts of central Asia and invade North China.
Finally, in 138 B.C. the Emperor Wu (140-87) sent out a mission
under General Chang Ch'icn to make contact with the Yuch-chih
and form an alliance with them against the Hsiung-nu. The Yiieh-
chih were no longer interested in their old and now distant enemy
and the mission failed; but Chang Ch'ien spent twelve years in the
western regions, where he found Chinese silk and bamboo
brought there, he was told, by way of India. He returned to
Ch'ang-an with a report which must have stirred the public imag-
ination as did the travels of Marco Polo or Vasco da Gama. Hence-
forth, Chinas eyes were turned westward. Further expeditions,
sent into distant Ferghana to obtain the famous "blood-sweating"
horses for the imperial stables, opened up a trade route which was
to carry Chinese silk and lacquer to Rome, Egypt, and Bactria.
Travellers told of great snowcapped ranges reaching to the clouds,
of fierce nomadic tribes, and of the excitement of hunting wild
game among the mountains. Somewhere beyond the horizon lay
Mount K'un-lun, the axis of the world and home of Hsi Wang
Mu, Queen Mother of the West, and the counterpart of the foam-
washed P'eng-lai on which dwelt Tung Wang Kung, the immortal
King of the East.
During these first two centuries of the Han, the popular mind,
from the emperor down, was filled with fantastic lore, much of
which is preserved in pseudo-classical texts such as the Huai Nan
Tzu and Shan-hai-ching (Classic of Hills and Seas), which are useful
sources for the interpretation of the more fabulous themes in Han
art. With the unification of the empire, many of these cults and su-
perstitions found their way to the capital, where were to be found
shamans, magicians, and oracles from all over China. Meanwhile,
the Taoists were roaming the hillsides in search of the magical ling-
chih ("spirit fungus"), which, if properly gathered and prepared,
would guarantee one immortality, or at least a span of a few hun-
dred years. Yet, at the same time, Confucian ceremonies had been
reintroduced at court, scholars and encyclopaedists had reinstated
the classical texts, and Wu Ti, in spite of his private leanings to-
ward Taoism, deliberately gave Confucian scholars precedence in
his entourage.
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